The left-behind ironed their shirts, lifted weights, peeked at the penises of men next to them, thought about all those penises in action. If you’d strung them together you could have fucked the world back into order. Linking up around the globe they created a massive shitpile of healthy, armed, radically right-wing fascists hopped up on a fear of fading into insignificance.

In

DON’S

surroundings, there were no Nazi groups or Nazi parties. The men around her were too lazy to gang up together. The sensation of uselessness the third generation had allowed them to become flaccid, the once proud fishermen, construction workers, proud—whatever shit it was—meaning they’d done honest work with their honest hands on some honest bullshit or other that made some other man rich. Whose descendants, now holding government offices, decided on the unemployment benefits for honest workers. That a person who doesn’t—let’s just say—manufacture wire, is no longer of any value, and will get angry as a result, is understandable. And is, in fact, considered a mitigating circumstance if a man from the area lands in front of a court for beating his wife or child completely or only nearly to death.

When women survived the morbidly predictable, socialized rage, they patched each other’s wounds once the sporadically appearing, humiliated men had lost control. Subsequently the men withdrew, confused about the mess they’d created. Then there was peace, the wounds healed, then the men returned and everything started over again: women lost themselves in rapture to the appearance of a toothless man who spent the entire day sitting in front of the TV with his hand on his crotch, until he went to the pub in the evening and sat there instead. Almost all women felt incomplete without a man. Or to put it in formal aesthetic terms: men livened up the scene inside the horrid apartments and in front of the houses.

Speaking of

Don’s surroundings.

Eighteen row houses, two stories, brick, fences, nobody expected any trees or plants of the concrete. Here lived: refugees, unemployed, people with missing limbs, bad eyes, alcoholics, junkies, ever more of them arriving from London because their social housing units had been transformed into private owner-occupied flats. Just not owned or occupied by them.

Don had never seen buildings surrounded by whispering treetops, had no experience of high-performance heaters, windows without drafts, clean bathrooms, or fountains, as Rochdale was a very equitable city, where things were equally shitty wherever you went.