Among the relatively limited circle of objectophiles, Rochdale was known for its seven social housing towers. Consequently you’d see them creeping furtively around the towers, excitedly licking the peeling facades. There was always something happening at the Seven Sisters, which was the buildings’ unofficial name. And it usually had to do with the demise of a resident. Don envied the people who got to live there. They had more interesting lives. More interesting than hers, which took place in a totally ordinary social housing complex a few minutes away. In the Seven Sisters the drug trade was run on a grand scale, family members killed each other, and time and again people jumped or—let’s say—slipped out of upper-story windows. Don had never seen a dead body at that point and was convinced that the sight of one would reveal a great secret. Perhaps it would open its eyes, the corpse, and in the manner of a helmet-haired BBC reporter ask: “So, just what is it like for a young person”—pausing, considering the best way to phrase it—“to grow up in this city?” Don would act as if she were thinking the question over and then say: “You know, people all regard the life they know as normal. You just don’t know anything else. I was born here and never questioned the city or its shabbiness. It’s just the way it is, like the bad weather, like the boring school holidays, I never gave any thought to the fact that other places exist. Or put it this way: I know that it’s claimed online that other places supposedly exist.”

The corpse would persist—“Is your manner of speaking really appropriate for a child?”—before reverting to being dead again.

Don was no longer an extension of her parents but an autonomous person. She was no longer scared when her mother wasn’t around, no longer searched her face for signs of trouble, no longer asked herself how she could please her mother. In short, Don no longer asked herself what she could do in order to finally feel loved. Don did better without this total emotional dependency.

If she were older and more convinced of her own importance she would have mumbled things like: “I’m perfectly capable of being on my own.” But nobody asked her, because Don was so young that adults did not yet see her as a person. Despite the fact that everything was already there. The feelings, the thoughts, the loneliness. There just weren’t familiar compartments into which to sort the feelings.

Don didn’t regard the early years of her life as having been awful. Maybe a little bleak, though back then she didn’t know the right word to express that. Maybe a little dreary and dull, as is normal during the transition from childhood to youth, when you sense that something will change but you’re not sure what. Don had music.