She’d still had hopes back then.

The difference was she’d been young back then.

Her youngest son, who was two and looked like a tiny old man, was sitting in a playpen in a puddle of shit. Her daughter, who always seemed like a discarded scrap, was biting her fingernails while the oldest of her children, who was distinguished by a monstrous appetite for destruction, squatted contentedly in front of a pile of broken glass, which had previously been some household item or other. The open doors of the cabinet, the absence of male clothes, and the missing rainy-day jar gave away the fact that it had been too much for her boyfriend, the father of the children. He’d obviously been overwhelmed. One must understand. He was a musician, talented, still young and undiscovered, and couldn’t squander his life raising children with various defects.

Karen’s mother knew at that moment that the course set out for her life would have been easier to bear if she just let herself fall out a window. She was twenty-six then and had just started a continuing education program to become a surgical nurse, a program she quit the day after she realized she would be alone with three children.

Even if her husband hadn’t contributed much to the bottom line, actually nothing at all, at least he had looked after the children.

Karen’s mother began working as a night nurse; a retired woman next door looked in on the children every half an hour. Unfortunately she quickly gave up after she was repeatedly hit by thrown projectiles.

Karen’s mother paid a babysitter from then on, ended up in arrears on the rent, her hair fell out, she had panic attacks and lost her job. The unbelievable stroke of luck that came of this unpleasant situation was that she was allotted a flat in Rochdale by the social benefits office.

Which is where she was now standing.

In the entryway, years later. And no longer as an actual person. Karen’s mother no longer existed as a sexual being with dreams and hopes; she had become something devoted to just one task—keeping herself and her children alive, even if it wasn’t clear to her at times why this was a good thing.