To herself. At night, when she’s on watch, she likes to talk to herself. At night, when she stands guard over an imaginary fire. If a social worker were to show up, one of those single women about forty years old, with good intentions and bad hair, she would say: “It’s delightful here.” Like at a children’s overnight camp. “You know, I used to be in one, too. Oh, good old Bath—how I loved it there.” And then she’d look at Don as if she, a member of the white former middle class, and Don, a descendant of the various waves of guest workers, were somehow comrades because of her memories of youth, which were guaranteed to be about bad sex. As if she knew what was going on here. As if she’d suddenly developed pigmentation that would release her from her pink existence and bestow upon her an agreeable physique. “I have lots of friends who are foreigners,” she’d say, because she wouldn’t be sure which shade of nonwhite to classify Don as. And the social worker would hang about, as if she were expecting an award for it, as if she wanted to show that in a pinch she, too, would eat vomit. Then she’d enter the factory building expectantly. Images in her head. If you said to someone, “Listen, we live in a commune of neglected children in an old factory building,” it conjures up images from American movies. Large windows, plank floors, wood stove, cashmere blankets, and dogs. Not something that looks like an art installation put up as a critique by some student from St. Andrews looking to grapple with social ills. Aha, the social worker would mumble helplessly while using all her might to conceal her disgust. Despite the efforts of the children to make the place into a home, to adult outsiders it still seemed a bit. Jarring. It was damp and smelled of unwashed children, there were things lying and hanging all over the place, old clothes, jam jars, pots stuck with spaghetti, broken windows, drugs. Okay, not drugs. Next, in the dusky light, the social worker would take the mattresses on the floor for beds and the candles for a romantic quirk rather than the result of the fact that the children could steal electricity only sparingly. And the solar panels—yeah, well. It rained a lot. And it was hot. And very cold. And these extremes alternated maddeningly. Strange weather, thanks to the failing gulf stream. But—

“Don’t the kiddies look cute? The way they cling to their pillows,” she’d say while patting one of the children, who would then bite her hand. “Oops,” she would say. Looking at the bones laid bare in her hand. “Like a sailboat, don’t you think, the bones,” Don would say, smiling at the bones.