If you left her block and went out into the city, which Don often did with Karen, for lack of anything better to do, you found a main thoroughfare. The attractions of this main road were thrift shops, where items donated or found on the side of the road were sold to residents of the thriving community. Aside from various bet shops and one-pound shops there was a shopping center, where half the storefronts were empty, and a Costa Café, where they liked to stand out front and watch the tourists. That is, the three per month who mistakenly strayed into Rochdale because they’d read in a bad online guide about some food-and-drink festival or about Dippy, the dinosaur in the natural history museum. Okay. Those three people who then hustled down the main road petrified and, in desperation, visited the parking garage at the shopping center—they loved to watch those people. The tourists gave off a luster like gold. They could. Just leave after they’d downed their overpriced Costa Café and had a sufficient fright from the pregnant minors and all the young Pakistani men tromping through the shopping center.

They could disappear to places that were definitely better.

On days when there were no tourists to be observed, Don and Karen checked out the old clothes and morbidly sad people trying on old clothes in the thrift shops. Three-quarters of the residents of this city of eternal rain were unemployed. So they had a lot of time to examine the trash their neighbors dragged to the thrift stores and pawn shops in order to put the proceeds toward a bit of lager. Once, it was said, this had been a city bursting with prosperous workers. The empty shells of the formerly grand, bombastic, prosperity-giving factories stood all around, evidence of this distant, wonderful era. They’d been closed because nobody needed the crap they produced. In the new millennium you needed banks, financial services, and IT workers. They called it evolution.