The two who’d been left behind could have helped each other alleviate the feeling of being alone against the world, but they weren’t up to it. Hannah didn’t realize that the photo business would be definitively closed now or that her father was at first stoned every day and then moved on to other drugs because he still felt too much when he smoked marijuana; she didn’t notice that money got tight, that an eviction notice arrived, and that the remnants of the family were allotted transitional accommodation in Rochdale. “It’ll be nice,” said the father in this new voice that always sounded as if he were under water. “It’s a peaceful little city, and there’s a lake nearby. They have a Victorian city hall, a dinosaur, and a very good football team. Rochdale AFC.” Said Father. Then he cried. Hannah thought it hit her father harder to leave his football team than to leave the house where Hannah had spent her entire life. Hannah hunched over her mother’s old clothes, which she had laid out on the bed. In a new city there wouldn’t be any places she had been with her mother. She would lose all the paths they had ever followed together. If her mother was still around somewhere, she’d be unhappy because she wouldn’t be able to find Hannah anywhere.

The last memory of what Hannah would stash away for many years under the heading of “Home” was a fat woman from the charity shop who looked at the clothes laid out on the floor with slight disgust. Her mother’s clothes. That still smelled of her. That she could still see her in. That then disappeared into boxes and were carried out by two men.

Then they moved. They squatted in the bus with two duffel bags and two backpacks, surrounded by people in threadbare suits, who rubbed their dirty plastic shoes on their pant legs as they gave updates via their phones about their location and condition. Almost every single one of them had on a fitness tracker. Almost every single one had a guilty conscience because he or she had invested too little effort into the regeneration and expansion of their own resources. But they were so tired, the people, after long rides to their places of work or to two or three places of work, and the teeth of so many of them were rotted, as bad teeth were the calling card of the losers back then. Everyone on the bus ground their jaws as they sat in the bus. Except for Hannah’s father. He was dead. Or looked dead.

Hannah had had enough of adults.

She’d had enough of bus rides through shithole landscapes, enough of situations she’d like to simply disappear from. For the first time Hannah felt how humiliating it was to be a child, and dependent.