The newcomers had not removed the net curtains. Not the Bangladeshis who had first moved in, and not the East Europeans who came later, and not the most recent arrivals, who had brought their food and their faith to the street but left the net curtains in place, even as they turned yellow and frayed with age.

‘My nan’s net curtains are cleaner, of course,’ Edie said.

I remembered a book from school, and the fifty-year-old wedding dress of a woman who had been left alone at the altar on her wedding day. That’s what all those rotting net curtains looked like. Miss Havisham’s wedding dress in Great Expectations.

It was a street of modest terraced houses built after the war, the places that went up when the slums were bombed out or torn down, with probably two bedrooms and what they used to call a box room and not one place in the house where you could not hear everybody else going about their business.

There would be a garden out back and there had once been smaller patches of grass out front but these token gardens had long been concreted over, converted into parking spaces for the cars and vans that crowded the road as if they were the true owners.

It was late afternoon and the hazy winter sun was already calling it quits for the day. My stomach rumbled and I was suddenly aware that I had not eaten since I had breakfast with Scout that morning.

Towards the former pub end of the street there was a sad-looking strip of shops, some of them with graffiti-stained shutters down for the day or possibly forever, some with TO LET in the dusty windows and hills of junk mail piled under the letter box. But some were still open for business. Halal butchers. Polish supermarket. A chicken joint where a little crew of apprentice bad boys idled on their bikes, giving us the evil eye. There was a betting shop and I couldn’t tell if it was open or closed. And there was a Chinese takeaway, Double Fortune.

‘We could get some noodles from the Chinese,’ I said. ‘Double Fortune. Sounds good.’

Edie took a breath and shook her head. She placed the palm of her hand on her midriff and slowly exhaled.

And suddenly I got it.

I stared out at the street, letting it sink in.

‘Edie,’ I said. ‘How far gone are you?’

Silence.

I looked at her. The pale face, the untidy red hair tucked inside a beanie, the bluest eyes I had ever seen. How old was she now? Her mid-twenties? Still young.

I kept looking at her. I was waiting.

‘Ten weeks or so,’ she said.

I nodded, winded and wordless.