Stared out the window and suspected that her life would now pick back up right where it had stopped in Rochdale. The stupid house, the stupid brother and—no idea. No idea. No idea. Her head hurt. When she thought about seeing Hannah, Karen, and Peter again, her head hurt even more. My god, this country. Even tied up and dangling from ropes Don could identify what distinguished an English landscape from a non-English—that is, inferior—landscape. Everything here seemed to have been washed too many times at high temperature. Whites with colors. Where it was always just before or after rain. Before or after a natural disaster that had irradiated everyone. The animals, too. Not a landscape that touched people in such a way as to make them think: a little house here and a few sheep, I wouldn’t need anything else to be happy. Then, after half an hour, when the family was standing with their boxes in front of the house in Rochdale and Don’s mother tried to unlock the door, it was suddenly thrown open from within. A man (undershirt, unshaven, belly—to flesh out the scene) shoved Don’s mother away, whereupon Don’s mother kicked him in the shin. And so on. The fight, in which several neighbors lustily took part—nothing much happened around here—ended with the appearance of the police, who then figured out that the social services office had apparently made a mistake. Until it could be cleared up the family would be put up in a homeless shelter.

The homeless shelter

Represented the lowest point of self-inflicted failure even in Rochdale. There weren’t people who slept on the streets in Rochdale. Not yet. But. The homeless shelter was overflowing. Every day new people arrived from bigger cities. From all over, wherever elegant owner-occupied flats could be built in place of social housing units, the hardship cases were resettled in unattractive outlying districts. So they could die off there without any opportunities for anything.

The little family arrived at the shelter, which looked just as fucked up as all the buildings in the city, door made of steel and equipped with a camera that recorded everything that happened in front of it. The alcohol and drug-addled dregs who jiggled the door in winter because they wanted to sleep in a dry place. Crazy idea.

In the entry were fluorescent lights, a carpeted floor, a water dispenser. A sweet scent of disinfectant fought with the effluvium of poverty. Bad food, secret smoking, and alcohol made milder contributions to the bouquet. More difficult was the biting, sweet-sour smell of filthy people. Dirt under the nails, greasy matted hair, folds of skin, genitals. Some of the residents stood in front of their rooms. If they didn’t live here as families, they shared rooms with six beds in them. You looked forward to some quality time by yourself.