AS JAN ATE HER tea on Friday, her fat square of a nana deflated beside her until her corners were curves and she was stooped over Jan, a pink arm tent-poled on the table as she cupped Jan’s chin, upturned Jan’s face, less to inspect the eye than to tut at it. Jan chewed food patiently, gob open, inciting.

Around her the pack hushed. Pathetic strays whose own pisshead mams need never make hot dinners since there was always plenty scran for their broods at this table. Need never applied to her mam too, who came downstairs now with it kipping on her shoulder, lemon cardi patchworked with dribble. Her nana switched off the cooker which cued Mam’s turn to paw Jan’s face, stare into the blackeye and say fuck all.

‘Was it Kelly?’ her nana said, soaking the chip pan.

‘Was it ’eck.’

‘See,’ her nana gloated.

Jan went to move her chin away, but her mam kept it.

‘Tryna eat me bloody tea here,’ Jan said.

‘Let the girl eat,’ her nana said.

Jan cast her good eye around the kitchen:

Joey hopped on the spot with his butty as he repeated Kelly’s name like it was a magic word; the Burton lads’ forks couldn’t find their gobs; Susie-Ann, the altar girl, cut food to chase it round her plate without ever catching it – her chest showing beneath a pilled-to-tissue forest-green pullover that was sticky with blackberry mush and had once been Jan’s and before hers Kelly’s.

Being older Jan had nowt to do with them but had begun to feel like another teatime stray.

She matched her mam’s cold surety until the thing in her mam’s arm hiccupped and by then she’d had enough and swatted her mam’s fingers off her face so hard her mam nearly dropped the thing and for this Jan got skelped which made her blackeye weep and she shot up, taking Susie-Ann with her by the wrist, maybe only because the altar girl was in reach, and towed her out the kitchen and upstairs, both girls running. Susie-Ann still had her table knife in her fist when Jan footed the bedroom door to behind them and made the girl undress.

But first the quiet. Louder with their breathing. Conscious of it, Jan held her breath and Susie-Ann noticed and held hers too. Jan tried winking with her good eye but it wasn’t enough to break the spell she had the girl under.

‘Does your mam wallop you?’ she said.

‘. . .Loads,’ Susie-Ann said, with a catch in her voice.

Jan could sense her excitement; her gulping the urge to escape. Jan wanted to smile but couldn’t. She stepped from her, letting Susie-Ann see the small room: the lamp left on and the drapes quarter pulled, the unmade bed and stale after-smoke of a dozen Sterlings chained from its pillow. Ash-heaped breakfast bowl on the window ledge. All Kell’s doing. Jan stalked backwards over his strewn garb till her knees bent and she was sitting on the end of the bed, not once taking her good eye off the girl.

‘Reeks in here,’ Jan said. ‘Guess who stunk up the place?’ She winged the bedspread smooth around her.

Susie-Ann tensed – maybe accepting Jan had brought her up here just to devil her.

‘Thinks he’s gunna be moving in with his bird but bet you she finishes with him quick now he’s out. Mam won’t care where he ends up. Will she fuck.’

Susie-Ann nodded but Jan knew the girl didn’t know why she was nodding only that she should be and now couldn’t stop until she shook off her blotched pullover and paused hiding her hands inside its reversed cuffs. Then she peeled them onto the floor, dropping the knife too.

‘He’s been taking me clubbing in town, you know,’ Jan said, appraising the girl’s body which wasn’t stocky or slim but as moon-grey and indelicate as her own or Alice’s; the blue blood mapped inside her, showing.

‘Has he?’ the girl said, so timid now there was more catch than voice.

Jan slid off the bed and groped underneath to retrieve an item long castoff, furry with dust. Reading its torn label which hung on a stitch: ‘Ee-ah. Try this on.’ She helped her with it, then guided her to the full mirror, preening and adjusting. Like Alice, that ungrateful backstabber, the younger girl seemed to fidget in slow-motion, but there was nowt sleepy or unreadable about her features which danced to Jan’s pulse.

‘You’ve got nice ones already.’ Jan left her at the mirror and got changed – removing folds of school bog roll, re-tucking their pink inside a louder bra which showed beneath an off-white crochet waistcoat.

But Susie-Ann wouldn’t look to compare. Instead the girl stood round-shouldered in the mirror, holding her hips as she swivelled left, right, her bellybutton outrageous. ‘Hi-Yo, Silver,’ Susie-Ann told herself in a Lone Ranger voice.

‘Ay, Suze, I’m your fairy godmother, me. Like Cinderbloodyrella’s bra, that is, I’m telling you. Whosever tits it fits keeps it. She’ll nab herself a dark prince what plays for City. Dead nice-looking.’

Just then, from the landing, little Joey Harvey began to murmur. Susie-Ann blinked at the sound and Jan hissed at the door. Little feet scampering away.

‘Me mam says am not ready for one yet.’ Susie-Ann spoke to the mirror.

‘She’s not the poor cow doing PE – you are.’

‘Says I’ve to start wrapping them up till I’m older so I don’t be giving lads ideas.’

‘No wonder you good as live here.’

Susie-Ann caught Jan’s reflection.

Jan said: ‘But that’s mams for you. Mams hate you just for having you, and just for being a girl. So they make you grow up round here, same way, sad as them, and then hate you even more once you do. But they don’t put girls in Rose Hill, do they? They can’t stop us from doing owt. They’re not arsed enough.’ While she wised her up, Jan exhumed her mini-boombox from under a mound of clothes and racked a cassette: ‘Spend the Night’ by the Cool Notes, Frankie Beverly’s ‘Back in Stride Again’. Stuff she’d taped off Piccadilly Radio for their Kell while he was inside. ‘Now, dads are different, right? Dads’ll fuck off down the Woodpecker or fuck off forever, and dead right I don’t blame them. State of this place. Keeping a missus and sprogs. I mean, would you?’

Susie-Ann wagged her head.

Jan cranked it up, then pranced over, to share the mirror. ‘Anyroad, forget mams and dads. It’s dickhead lads you wanna worry about, now you’ve got summat on offer.’

The girl stared. ‘Gene Harvey fancies you, Jan.’ The catch in her voice was gone.

‘Oh well. Bloody hell. He’ll have to marry us, then, won’t he?’ Jan danced daft while she rooted under Kelly’s clothes, cleared a shelf, emptied her satchel, gathering makeup to pile it at Susie-Ann’s socked feet. ‘Ee-ah.’ She found Susie-Ann a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt scissored to rags at one sleeve and big enough to wear as a dress with laddered tights, which was how Alice had worn it, and how Jan made Susie-Ann. She relaxed her by untying her church plaits and mimed snipping them with two fingers. Susie-Ann seemed to take to the new order of things, accepting the impossible since it was there in the mirror.

‘Question for you,’ Jan said, teasing out her hair. ‘What does me nana have you do at Sunday Mass?’

Susie-Ann looked at her blankly, as if Jan’s voice were just part of the music. ‘Bring out communion bowls, wear surplice, sometimes ring consecration bell. Once Father give us the thurible, just to hold.’

‘Father Culler’s a right bastard. And a poof. He’ll be the reason that young Joey lad can’t never keep still.’

Susie-Ann’s face twitched in shock – convincing enough to fool her until the girl cut new dimples and a grin. ‘If Missus Dodds heard you talk like that.’ Then, chewing her cheek: ‘Jan, how did you know you was. . .having a baby? And. . .how did it get coloured?’

‘I never had no baby. Think that thing’s mine downstairs? Is it fuck. Does it look like me?’

Susie-Ann wagged her head.

‘Well then?’

Lightning lit the corners of her good eye and if the forks met Jan knew they’d spark a migraine. She frowned at them both in the mirror. She scratched her elbow from habit: a permanent faint rash from years of lying on the rough brown dog-stinking carpet in Alice’s back bedroom while the pair of them defaced NMEs and scranned fistfuls of pic-n-mix stolen from every cornershop between Ringway and Sharston and kept stashed inside ancient shortbread tins Bev had once used for thread and yarn and which the girls emptied of sugar faster than they could fill them when their cycles were coincident which were not the only days of the month they lay on the rough carpet together marking up pull-out posters but became the only times they lay together with the tins open and stuffed their gobs just in case one girl were to officially put more weight on than the other. But by September the tins had gone unsplit for months. Jan checked her elbows: only two days and the carpet rash had nearly left her but she was back –

in Alice’s room, fourteen again, starting a new school year at Poundswick. Having too much of a laugh to notice. Too busy marching in place on Alice’s single bed, nose-to-nose with her, not even pissed-up, as they held the swirl ceiling for no reason, pressed the ragged stipples and danced to KFM. Taught each other the words to songs but now Jan couldn’t remember which; maybe ‘Ghosts’ by Japan. But for an afternoon it was all they truly loved. That same day they’d stripped off to that music to don stolen frocks and skirts which Bev had resewn for them in the box room by treadle. Bev came in after their fashion show asking if they wanted a brew and saw Jan half-undressed and said it. No note of surprise, accusation or disgust. Bev just said it. And it gave Alice permission to look at her too and then Alice looked at her mam, then looked again and said numbly: ‘I thought you was going fat but I didn’t dare say.’ Bev sniggered but it was fine for another few heartbeats because so did Jan. Because they were both wrong. Then she saw herself strike Alice across the face, Alice’s head snap back with the blow. Then Bev took Jan out the bedroom but it was no good; Jan was sobbing so hard it frightened her. Loose, Jan returned to the room where Alice was holding her slapped cheek but otherwise hadn’t moved. Jan got no sense of how the girl saw her or felt. Alice refused to demand. Alice was like a black sheep in a dream whose wool turned out to be a cloud. Before she could hit her again Jan was sick on the carpet. Her sobs heavier and heavier, making her whole body do strange things and there was no way to ask for help. Bev made her scotch broth, made her put on Alice’s old pyjamas, tried to soothe her with stories then mucky jokes then whispered advice from experience then gave her silence. But Jan couldn’t stop. Even hours later. Finally bedded with Alice inside a weightless hug that she slipped out of gone midnight, forgetting the Willows’ staffie would wake the whole street before she even made the stairs. . .

‘If I had a black baby,’ Jan said now to the terrified altar girl, ‘be God Almighty what grassed and told me mam’ – masking the memory of those tidal sobs and of the trapdoor to Hell. A wink from her good eye, refunded in the mirror.

Then she marked a clean canvas with a big sweep of kohl, erased it with a licked thumb and tried again.

‘Am not allowed to wear tutty,’ Susie-Ann said, tilting her face to better let Jan paint it.

‘Why’s that? Your mam waiting till you need a bra? You know you want your hair cutting as well.’

‘Jan, she’ll have a fit.’

Kohl stick dragging her lid: ‘Oi, I can only see out one eye. Keep squirming and you’ll be the same.’

Next the unplaited hair. Jan took bites out of it with card scissors. Jan cut it Alice-short to the girl’s horror:

‘Me mam told us mine came sooner cos I’d been misbehaving down there. Cos I’d confessed to Father Culler about what I’d dreamt. And he told me mam. She said it’s just as bad as interfering with yourself’ – her voice catching again.

Jan stalled a second, taking this in. Her hands hovering over the shoulders of a younger girl whom she’d ignored for half her life; but now Jan’s hands were ready to land, to comfort. They’d become kinned in ways primitive and profound. Ways distinct from the shared street and dinnertable, handmedowns, forgotten Sundays knelt at the same pew when Jan was small, before Jan knew any better, before Jan did as she pleased. But here was a girl who didn’t know better, joining her prematurely in womanhood by mistake. To be judged, cheated, punished, pariah’d, pursued, as she. To be taunted by playground songs. Sneering remarks from form teacher crones and baby-faced wankers and bus-stop jackals and cocky sons of Open Sunday-cornershop-keepers who would stop whenever they sighted her and change the tune of their whistle. Those summertime pub-garden-benched no-marks sinking Special Brew, no worse than the briefcased and necktied or the dog-collared. Or gorgeous Longsight heartbreakers who made you levitate with love.

This girl would soon be like her in others’ eyes, only without Jan’s gob or Alice’s fog to help survive Wythenshawe’s finest – stop the bastards from clipping her bee wings.

But Jan stopped her trembling hands from resting on the girl’s shoulders. Ten-inch cuttings fell to the floor. Then Jan turned her, to finish without the mirror. Shiny hairs covered her slashed T-shirt like she’d fought a stray cat.

‘Jan, was it your Kelly what give you that blackeye?’

‘Tony Kinsella done it.’

‘Did he? Why?’

‘Cos. . .’ How best to explain. ‘Cos his older cousin Cid wouldn’t need to.’

Susie-Ann seemed to understand, even though she didn’t know who or what the Kinsella cousins were; or about copping off or copping a feel, or doing dares and favours sometimes just for fags you’d never finish, after shags too quick to warm you or the seats of twoc’d motors parked across Sunbank Lane.

Done.

‘Hi-Yo, Silver,’ Jan sang to their reflections.

Susie-Ann sang it too and they both got giddy and fell on the floor that was all Kelly’s new clothes, which stank so much of lad they decided to fill his pockets with hair, then fling his garb across her room.

 

Day-blue evening. Good sun not set but powdered through the entry that cut adjacent to the semis. She cupped her good eye to see up into Alice’s grubby window. She pointed for Susie-Ann who followed her finger along to the next bare window where two bodies appeared smoky and colourless through the bright glass.

‘Jan, what’s he doing to her?’

‘Nowt special.’

Jan had them balanced on rainsoft ashbins to sken over the rotted fence. Standing tiptoe, dancing out cramp, the girl’s teeth shining:

‘Easter Monday, Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday, Sheer Thursday, Good Friday. Does it matter what you have for tea on Ash Wednesday? I mean if –’

Jan pressed her pointing finger to Susie-Ann’s lips. They hiccupped. Susie-Ann had stitched her a bracelet out of red liquorice and now bit it gently, on Jan’s wrist, chewing her closer so the bins wobbled.

She had Susie-Ann pissed-up on four swallows of discount Babycham that were traded for love on the cool weed-split slabs behind Simonsway offie with the stock-take lad on his fag break. Susie-Ann had sat knees tight, ringside, on a pallet by the open backdoor. Gesturing while the lad tried his luck, Jan mouthed to her but the girl was too absorbed in education to sneak in and grab the good stuff, like she’d been told.

Now the drunk bottle slipped through Susie-Ann’s hands and bounced off the bin lid. The din as it rolled away had them both bobbing behind the fence. They hid and waited with the cobbles and dandelions and flat tins of super lager. Rubbish shivered when a sharp gust shot through the entry and left their legs chilly and pushed the bottle on. Susie-Ann retrieved it with exaggerated care, plucking a long dandelion which she fed inside – its flowerhead big enough to rest over the mouth of the bottle. Then she re-climbed the bin with her new vase.

Wait.

Jan held her. They heard the top window squeak wide – seeping black music, summat Jan didn’t know but liked.

She whispered: ‘Bev must be down the Happy Man for them to be at it with their kit off.’

‘Are they in love?’

‘A’they fuck.’

‘Looks like love,’ Susie-Ann said, scared.

‘And you’d know, would you?’

‘Does she help herself to his chips at dinner?’

‘She did today. Greedy cow.’

‘And does they hold hands walking home? Cos then that means they love each other.’ Susie-Ann, glazed and hiccupping.

‘It’s you what should be teaching me.’ Jan rested her chin along the fence again. ‘She’s mad, though. He’ll be done with her by next week.’

‘Jan, have you been in love?’ Susie-Ann was too short to chin the fence but tried anyway.

‘Once. But we never said owt cos we would’ve felt daft. I never see him, even though I know where he lives and what bus he gets.’

Susie-Ann, waiting with her dandelion vase for more. When Jan didn’t give it Susie-Ann twirled the stem and put her ear to Alice’s fence as if to better hear what she couldn’t see. She plucked a petal.

‘Piss-the-beds,’ the girl hiccupped.

‘There’s an idea.’ Jan took the bottle, hitched her skirt and squatted. ‘Holy water,’ she said, blessing it.

Having kept the dandelion, Susie-Ann crossed herself, her eyes spooked and round:

‘Jan?’

‘What?’

‘Have you ever laughed till you was sick?’

‘Me and Alice did. Once, in her front room. Her dog ate mine. Dogs are disgusting.’ Jan tossed the refilled bottle over the Willows’ fence.

It Catherine-wheeled over the birdshat kennel, bleached and broken gnomes, and washing-line slack, to tag the shared brickwork between Alice’s bedroom and the lad’s bedroom.

Glass exploded –

and piss washed Alice’s side of the guttering.

Susie-Ann hopped quicker and higher to see what happened next. But this tipped the ash bins and they both fell off. Jan touched the entry’s earth foot-first and went with her weight. She stumbled to a stop along the fence.

When she turned Susie-Ann was lying down. Posed like a chalked body outline and with a stretched shadow that fit between the capsized bins and dark enough to be road tar. On her: Jan’s laddered tights, burst skin at the knee. They each saw the blood at the same time and the shock kept Susie-Ann there, too afraid to move.

‘Jan. . .? Get Missus Dodds. . . pleeeese.’ All creeping panic.

Daylight was skimming the entry. By now her nana would be in the pew for Friday Mass.

‘If you tell me nana or your mam or anyone what I done to your hair, I’ll do more than batter you.’

The words seemed a comfort to the younger girl, who lay gazing up at her against the sun. Shiny makeup. Bra lines. Joan of Arc hairdo. Breaths slowing to even.

Jan sensed then Susie-Ann really was another Alice and would always know things Jan didn’t and wouldn’t. ‘. . .You’re fine. Now fuck off.’

She gozzed on the cobble by her face and waited for Susie-Ann to pick herself up and limp out the entry. Jan turned the other way, went without seeing the girl at her kitchen table again.

 

‘Whose are them?’ Zuley asked with her foot dropping out of bed to sift the twists of clothes and hair and buried junk that could half-cripple if you misstrod, like Jan did on her way to the bed, to sit there slack-gobbed and tingling, after finding Zuley alone in her house in her room in her bed in the dusk. Jan had a rush of daunting happiness; she went giddy and young. Zuley seemed deracinated from somewhere magical but nearby that Jan had never found. But there Zuley was, and keen to talk to her and keener to listen, at least while their Kelly had his bath. It was a year and a bit since Jan had last seen her, but Zuley was the same: piss-funny, gorgeous and wise; doing everything and nowt; just teaching her how to be.

Until Zuley’s foot, having dived into the midden, had surfaced with the knickers from Mr Somerville’s flat hooped blue on her big toe: ‘Oi, Kell! Your uncle Mac already got you another bird, has he?’

And Jan swung her head as Kell came in, shirtless, rubbing his pits with Jan’s clean towel.

‘You what. . .?’ he said.

The toe twitched; blue fabric swayed.

‘. . .Bit saucy, them are.’

‘Glad you like em.’

‘Cost a penny, I bet. Sure they not yours?’

‘Guess again, Kell.’

‘Couldn’t tell you.’

‘Well, I’ve got a few ideas, me.’

‘What’s that mean?’

‘They’re mine,’ Jan said.

‘Bollocks,’ they both said.

Kelly flung the towel over her – knocking down cassette cases bricked by the stereo that was now on the window ledge. Songs rained on the bed. She could hear them. . .

When Jan had got home after seeing off Susie-Ann, she’d come in through the front door for no other reason than it was shut which was unusual before nine. It opened, was just on the latch. She rubbed off her manky-white tennis shoes while she climbed the stairs and flipped one over the stairwall before reaching the landing. She didn’t see it drop but heard it bomb a passing young head in the hall. A yelp. Then a slap as the shoe got chucked back.

‘Missed!’

Evelyn Champagne King’s ‘Love Come Down’ sweated through her bedroom door.

Jan paused, hand on wood.

The bog flushed at the end of the landing. A line of light under that door split by feet. The bath taps thundered.

Jan peeped inside her bedroom, clocked Zuley’s hair wedged big on her pillow. She waited for the song to finish and Zuley to notice her. Zuley lit up and sat up and called her closer with both arms. Jan stabbed her foot on summat sharp while crossing the room.

‘Hey you.’

‘Iya.’

Dressing quick, in bed: ‘That prick said you’re never in.’

‘I’m not. . . I can go.’

‘Let’s just pretend I’m decent.’

Jan felt this older light from her so warm and good that she hop-scotched the rest of the way and found herself hugging Zuley for too long and was so embarrassed that she went to the end of the bed where she could only hug herself – her boombox behind her, Cheryl Lynn starting ‘Instant Love’.

‘Feel bad about us pinching your room like this on a Friday night.’

‘You’re alright.’

Zuley listened with her whole face for answers before asking Jan any questions. ‘So. . .?’ she started.

‘So what?’

‘So what you been doing?’

Before she could stop, Jan had told her about Alice and that no-mark wet leaf of a lad she’d fallen for. It dawned on Jan that she could never get with Gene Harvey, even if she got bladdered, since then she’d only be copying Alice, collecting her own lad-next-door.

‘That won’t last,’ Zuley said.

‘But he must’ve said summat to her cos now she don’t wanna know me.’

‘She’ll skin her knees crawling back to you, tryna be best mates. What’s he got against you anyway, this lad?’

‘How should I know? Bet you he’s seen me having a laugh with some lads what took his dinner money. Honest to God, Zuley, he’s nowt.’

‘Aren’t they all. I’ve got mates telling us to chuck your Kell.’

‘Them’s right, though.’

Zuley grinned. ‘You’ll have to start coming out with us, Jan. Club it in town, ay?’

‘Yeah?’

‘D’you like to dance?’

‘If it’s to summat like this.’

Zuley’s eyes drifted to the midden. Kell’s and hers and Jan’s. ‘You’ve grown up, you know? Can I say that? Or do I sound like your uncle Mac?’

‘Who’s me uncle Mac?’

‘Don’t ask.’ Zuley shuffled down the bed to reach the boombox on the window ledge. She flipped the tape and pushed play. ‘Your Kell can be a right knob, can’t he?’

‘About the best you’ll get round here.’

‘He was dead keen to move in with me, you know? It was sorted. You were gunna get your room back. But this was before Uncle Mac shows out the blue and says there’s a job going. Now all of a sudden he’s not so sure.’

‘What job?’

‘Don’t ask, Jan; I’m not.’

Jan notched up the stereo.

Zuley notched it one more. ‘Kell wants you to say who give you that blackeye, so he can—’

‘Shake his hand?’

‘You two had a scrap after he come home, but he said most the bruises were ones you gave him.’

‘Tell you what, I’ll say about me eye if you say about your scar.’

Zuley stayed close, sat lotus, rolling her head with Melba Moore. ‘This? Just after Kelly got sent down some skinhead lobbed a tangerine with a razorblade as I got off the bus on Withington Road.’

‘Fuckers.’

‘He ran off, right, but these lads I was with caught him. I mean, they really battered him.’

‘Good.’

Zuley traced her thin silver scar from cheek almost to corner lip, slowly, maybe recalling the marks those lads had made on him in reply to hers.

The girls swayed for a chorus.

‘What?’ Jan said.

‘You mean who?’ Zuley said.

‘“Who”?’

‘Who give you that shiner?’

Jan smiled and prised the tuttied blackeye with her filthy thumbs but saw only water with it.

Zuley took her hand and kept it. ‘Kell’s hoping it was the father. So he can kill two birds with one stone.’

Jan went cold. Jan saw a dozen dandelions on a kitchen table in a vase full of piss. Jan slumped to the window, to the music. It was her blood that had stopped swilling round and made her bedroom cold.

Zuley turned the music down and rubbed Jan’s arms with hot hands but Jan wouldn’t warm. Too cold for that older light that reached her only as a faint glow. Jan jerked back and said with a Dodds man’s swagger:

‘I was at me English teacher’s flat yesterday. Been seeing him a month nearly.’

‘Jan, what’s his name?’

Zuley looked at the boombox but didn’t turn it off. Waiting and waiting.

‘Mr Somerville,’ Jan said.

‘Likes em young, does he, Mr Somerville? And he likes it rough?’

‘Swear you won’t say owt?’

Zuley just listened to the music and swayed softly, watching her. But then Zuley had gone and found the blue knickers.

And then Kell had come in towelled from his bath.

After Jan told half the truth and wasn’t believed she said: ‘Who’s our uncle Mac?’

‘Ask Mam.’

‘Did he ask her out?’

But he was rooting for his fags.

Zuley, up out of bed – fastening a lemon rah-rah skirt, then fixing her hair in the window reflection instead of the mirror. It was full-dark out.

Kell jumped into his 501s under the big light and chose a grey T-shirt from the heap but it was pasted in Susie-Ann’s hair. He tried another shirt, sniffed it, pulled it on. ‘Mac’s picking us up at ten for a drink.’

‘Since when?’ Zuley said.

‘You can either come with or get dropped off.’

‘Nah, Kell. You’re alright. Rather make me own way.’

‘Gone dark.’

‘Don’t worry; I won’t be smiling at anyone.’ She nodded ta-ra to Jan, then crossed the room without stabbing her feet.

‘Oi, well done, knobhead,’ Jan said.

‘Whose is this hair?’ He came near but it was only to spy Zuley from the window, shutting the gate on her way out. He kept on the glass, even after she’d gone, maybe fancying himself, fresh out the bath; maybe seeing only the street. He said: ‘You’re just miffed, our kid, cos you thought you had your room back.’

Jan said: ‘You know she’s took your cigs, don’t you?’