Scene V: Avarice

Light shines from the floors above and everything starts to get a lot louder and busier as Dante and Virgil ascend from the dark lower levels of the tower block.

Men and women carrying those large, brown wholesale boxes of clothes bustle past them and into flats on all levels, some of them struggling and sweating to squeeze through their own front doors, their narrow hallways laden with more boxes overflowing with clothes and other goods.

Dante is like a kid in a sweet shop looking at all this bling around him, new trainers, jackets, gold chains, watches, TVs, Playstations, computers, no end of new stuff everywhere.

He makes to chat to one guy who's part jammed in his own front door, trying to squeeze a massive box of clothes into his flat but before he can utter "hello" the man has seen Dante approaching and swings viciously round, hissing and spitting, eyes rolled with hatred, screaming "miiiinnneee, miiiinnneee, miiiinnneee". He smashes the box through the tiny gap races after it and slams the front door in Dante's face, leaving him alone on the landing. All the other people who were busy rushing about with goods have also gone and the landing is tumbleweeds.

The letterbox in the apartment opens up, Dante bemused, bends down and peers through it to see a pair of darting, panicked eyes staring back at him beneath a sweaty forehead.

The twitchy man behind his front door starts to speak, telling the story of his greed and avarice, hoarding and miserly behaviour, his aesthetic culture of must-have ownership and greed, fuelled by self-centred vanity.

The people on this floor, he says, live with their every last possession but they've all got so much stuff that there's never any room to open anything. So they just exist in squeezed and narrow spaces surrounded by brown boxes of rotting, unopened goods.  

A front door further down the landing creaks open to reveal another beady eye and sweating forehead scanning the landing for danger. The eye suddenly spies Dante and Virgil, widens to the point of bursting, and the door slams shut.

They move on up and away from the garish light and into a darker place driven onwards by the sounds of a girl crying...