After the sports shop there was a small wooden building with ‘Upton Street Gospel Hall—I Am The Word’ etched in flowery writing across a frosted glass window, and next to that a narrow park with palm trees and a sprinkler system maintaining a lawn. Seymour avoided the park—alarming, loud-voiced kids always hung around parks—and came to five adjoining shops under one long awning that made them look like a sliced log cake. They sold small multiple items—health food, baby clothes, wool, embroidery cottons. His mother was besotted with embroidery: ‘fancywork’ she called it—fussy little mats scattered with rosebuds and garlands. He had a fleeting, melancholy vision of his mum stitching away at her fancywork in the evenings. Heard her voice, carping monotonously about the troublesome life she’d had to lead ever since she’d become entangled with his father, the sacrifices she’d made. How she could barely afford that last dental bill, how his father never put himself out to get a proper job or hang on to one when he did, the promised maintenance payments that never arrived. Why, she could have married anyone! Given her time all over again, by now she could have a nice house and not have to work. Yes, she knew it was an old-fashioned viewpoint these days, but in her opinion women were happiest at full-time home-making. Only here she was in this miserable situation not of her own making, married to a no-good wastrel…

Seymour went very quickly past that particular shop window and came to a long stretch of ugly jerry-built flats riddled with little metal balconies. No one in their right mind would sit on balconies like that, he thought, even if there’d been room for a chair. Not unless they wanted to be asphyxiated by car fumes and deafened by traffic.

He crossed the street at the lights and began working his way back along the shops on the other side. There was a place where leadlight doors and windows were made, and a jovial man looked up and waved a soldering iron but Seymour moved on, too shy to wave back. An antique shop where a lady seated at a carved desk just inside the door gave him a hard, appraising stare when he peered in. A supermarket with howling toddlers and frazzled young mothers. An extension of the park which ran on this side also, cut in two by the busy main road.