They were always set in places like this. Poor flats, poor buildings, blah blah blah. Sometimes with a yard, sometimes with clotheslines, sometimes with Staffordshire terriers, American pit bulls. You could train the animals very effectively for dogfighting, you just had to smear a rope with meat, let the dog bite it, pull up on it, and then beat it with an iron rod. The four-legged friends wouldn’t let go. Amazing!

There were some social dramas that showed the owners of such dogs—chronically unemployed, totally bored, pathetic, angry men. Some of them had had their faces chewed off by this or that dog during an alcohol-induced stupor. Most of the dramas, though, were about honest women who had their honest children taken away. Honest workers who had lost their honest jobs and then landed in a room where a bare lightbulb always hung from the ceiling, swinging from side to side.

It was out of the question, said the chain-smoking woman, and left the building where Don’s family now lived and which wasn’t shabby enough for the social drama even though it could have effortlessly won any Olympics competition for shabbiness. The place consisted of a kitchen which at the time the family moved in was full of moldy food, empty beer cans, and insects. A broken cabinet, a stove that used gas cylinders. A narrow hallway led to the master bedroom, with grates over the window. The ceiling of the children’s room, upstairs, had water stains. In this room the previous tenants had lived out their propensity to hoard bizarre items like rags, pizza boxes, and streamers. There was one more room, for which you had to pay the so-called bed tax. It was one room too many for the number of family members, and the state assumed that the residents could rent it out. Which is why Don’s mother had to sacrifice twenty of her weekly seventy pounds. Most residents in social housing units solved the problem by growing marijuana in the empty room. Every few days the police came through the area and conducted raids to remove the hemp operations, and some overburdened parent landed in jail and the children in a facility. So much for drug prevention.

The support Don’s family received was enough to eat potatoes three times a day. To be able to eat potatoes three times a day Don’s mother had to go the agency, wait for hours, but—there was always something that made disbursement of the payment impossible; for instance, you’d missed some course because somebody had been ill, or you had no bank account where money could be wired. Ten million people in the country had no bank account because the banks wouldn’t accept them as customers. But the banks had problems, too, such as the aforementioned crisis. Don wouldn’t have wanted herself as a customer, either.