SEE, JAN KNEW THINGS.

How to climb the ashbins to use the side drain-brackets to reach the top window to squeeze headlong into Kell’s room or what was. How to accept that he had moved out a year ago and returned only to pay them four days’ visit and move on. How to save him (for now) from Strangeways (again) before he left her (behind). How to save him from that room, too, his old room, having given it away somehow, maybe partly to keep him gone. How now she’d be stuck, unliving, with two mad mothers who could only grow madder and sadder and fatter without him. How to end up the same: growing out and in, not up. Learning how to overburden the dead with love.

But Jan knew how many dead men they needed. How many living. Not just how many for her house, but for next door’s too, and for their street, and for the next and the next – counting up for all of Wythenshawe’s daughters beached between Southern Cemetery and Styal Women’s Prison.

See, Jan knew things after bussing it home solo from town under no penance. Sitting bottom-deck, middle-bench, by herself of a Saturday night, her temple to the window – its cold vibrations making her skull hum – her reflection in it like wet sand. Admiring herself so forlorn, so sullied. Till the bus swerved for summat and divided her from the glass. Then she saw a smeared face whole with teased petal hair bobbing like an evil flower. Jan was escaping town just as town began to buzz. From the streets she’d seen a hymenoptera of Manchester clubbers descend as one noise. Arrive on defiant wings. Piss-tinted, bow-shaped wings. Each buzzing set drawn to, drawing from, the same blood-rap. The night whispered it to her at first, then played it louder as more wings joined it while she trudged to Oxford Road from Hulme Crescents to catch her bus – only unfolding her arms to stop it before it missed her, and only then remembering she’d no spends left or clipper card rides. But when the bus stopped, just for her, outside Rotters, she got on and let the pale old whiskered driver look at her through his Mike Read goggle-specs. Then without looking he nodded her on but she stayed there seconds, waiting in stubborn hazy disbelief as if trying to summon abuse from one of them. Because every encounter demanded grief – grief-giving, grief-taking – even if right then she was fit for neither. But the doors clapped shut and the bus pulled away before she was ready, and Jan caught herself and swung to her seat without really taking in the other riders. A half-dozen shapes foreign and female, sitting separate and silent. Not one dickhead lad got on to mither her. A posse dressed like DeBarge, but with lours and brawl scars, got on at Withington. They skenned her together – chins north, nostrils flaring – then went and sat upstairs. They could smell she was on. Jan sniffed her wrist. Her perfume had blunted but she was still good for it. She still smelled like a brothel as her Nana Dodds would say if ever Jan had to slip out through the kitchen to collect her shoes from under the table after the kiddies had gone home. Like a bloody brothel. . . Jan Dodds, your dad would’ve shown you the door! / He don’t have to, Nana; I’ve seen it. That night Jan had smelled the inside of a brothel. She sniffed her wrist again. She didn’t.

See, Jan knew things. Even if she knew them as loneliness unshared. She knew them with a clarity that would be clouded and confabulated by time and talk and was wise enough not to tell herself she knew them. She knew them only as summat inside her that had neither chance of nor purpose in making the journey into words. And before the bus got her home this knowing had made her tired and gluey; voided her like a sick bug that had you spewing long after there was nowt left to bring up. She had filled Kell’s old room with summat big enough to keep him out and tiny enough to take up the whole house.

The window looked open a crack, maybe the width of a draught; it was tough to tell from below in the dark. It felt like robbing her own house. Both feet off the ground – a buzz of fear rid her head of owt else. But the higher she climbed the less afraid she got until the knowing began to return, first to her guts and toes; her jelly thighs and ticking temples; her shoulderblades winged but too weak to fly her to the sill.

With the backdoor bolted and the front deadlocked, Jan had known full well no one was there before hissing her invective into the letterbox. Call it speaking ill of the dead since there was more chance of her mam and nana having snuffed it than having bobbed out.

Mid-climb, a toe’s purchase on the drainpipe bracket, her hair in her eyes from the first-storey wind, Jan took a moment to conjure her mam stiff and blue in that spring-shot bed; her nana keeled over with the hob on – a burn stain scarring the bottom of an empty pan. Jan had it like summat off Tales of the Unexpected, which she’d caught the end of in Zuley’s flat. Cursed antiques and clueless husbands trying to off these posh clever bints. Always naff by the end, the final twist, even if it gave her dreams.

She longed for someone to see her hanging starfish from the drainpipe to the window, and she imagined him. A clueless husband.

So, she started singing Terri Wells’ ‘I’ll Be Around’, her voice feathery and cute, to make her wish true:

Ooooh noooo. . .

‘I’ll give you summat to sing about, girl.’

The next-door voice came from under her – not the Harveys’ side, but the Galvins’. Jan left a gap between her notes and heard Mr Galvin panting drunk behind the partition fence. The breeze went. She tried looking. Not even a figure. But his fag smoke reached her like pigeon post:

‘What the bleeding hell you up to, girl?’

. . .Baaaabyyy. . .

‘Can see all that and Heaven too from down here, you know?’ He shone a torch at her. Jan blinked at it blinded and screamed and held on and kept singing to stave off fear.

‘. . .’

‘What you been out doing, ay? Messing about with wog lads, I bet.’

‘. . .’

‘If the wife saw this she’d have a mind to ring dibble.’

‘. . .’

Jan knew Mrs Galvin had left him nine month after he got laid off from the Kellogg’s plant. After he’d been barred from the Happy Man for spending his temper with his giro, which cost Mrs Galvin her credit at the newsagents. Jan had heard Nana Dodds and Linda Harvey gossip about paschal candles going missing from church when it looked like the Galvins couldn’t pay the bills. Jan had also heard round school that Mr Galvin had a daughter from his previous missus. The daughter lived somewhere hot like Spain or Italy. She was summat: an actress or singer. Her picture had been in a magazine. . .

Jan belted Terri at him now, and all the while she felt him looking up her, choking on her, listening.

His torch went out. Other lights came on. Jan sang to her street. She knuckled the bricks trying to hook and widen the window gap; then she trapped the strings of her wrist on the inner sill, clasping most of her weight. The outersill splintered. She climbed in before it broke off, pulling the curtain down with her. As she fell in headlong she shinned the radiator and it gonged. She stayed prayer-knelt with her face a crushed can in the warm carpet, with her soiled skirt flipped over her waist.

The thing was there with her, skriking in the gloom.

Jan pushed off the carpet and swinging hair tunnelled around her face. She was in too much pain to decide where it hurt. And she was confused by the delicate patter of black blood. She cupped her wet chin and explored the hole her tooth had pierced in her lower lip. Then she laughed on the floor so hard it couldn’t escape. Laughter fluttered round her ribcage, pecking at her heart. It tired her of course, and she was hurting, bone and muscle, but at least afterwards she felt stoned. And had the sun-faded moon-grey carpet looking like the time Alice had sneezed on the bathroom mirror while brushing her teeth. Jan plugged her gob with a stinking flannel from a floor-stack of handmedown rags and quilts and bibs and nappies and baby-grows that gulped the room. Then Jan got up to turn on the light and admire her art.

Her laugh had stopped the thing skriking.

Jan leaned over the cot but the stench made her pull back. The thing rolled its eyes to study her with its arms already out, signing for her in tight circles – skin stretched over bunflesh.

Jan pulled out her flannel dyed and wringing.

Jan baptised it he –

as her blood fell a kiss

and bruises began to swell over her forehead, on her wrist and legs.

She gathered him up funny in his cot-blanket, then took him downstairs to find him a name.