“Okay, what else have we got?” the location scout asked her crew. There was a practice pitch in the area that had been financed by Manchester United. The young millionaires trained there, watched by lice-covered blond children. Who dreamed in turn of becoming football players, which of course wouldn’t happen. For them, life had other surprises in store. Like a movie shoot, for instance. That was the hot thing in the neighborhood for the following few weeks. “Great, just like that,” called the director, an old man, whenever he encountered a teenage mother in a bathrobe in front of her place. Soon all the girls in the area changed and stood by their doors with their siblings to get into the movie. The men walked around in undershirts with beers; people had quickly figured out how to make the film crew happy and perhaps snag some free beer.

The children dressed themselves extra wretchedly, they hustled around the neighborhood in dirty clothes, their eyes darkened with makeup, and coughed when they found themselves near the director. The director would buy them a Coke—and talk about the injustice done to the Palestinians by the Israelis. The children didn’t care, but they took the cola and nodded at the old man who as thanks for their head nods let them walk through the background of a film scene. Not all of them. Don wasn’t allowed. She would have undermined the concept with her pigmentation. It was about the left-behind white working class, who in their colorlessness came across as so pitiable. People whose skin tone looked as if they just came back from holiday tended to be the stars of social dramas about drug dealers.

The white children passed through the picture while in the foreground young child actors from the neighborhood played. Nobody here would be so idiotic as to run around in old track suits. Others wore underwear and slurred their speech. Presumably to properly depict the misery and show that the people here were honest and didn’t even have clothes. In some families’ apartments, the ones without marijuana growing in the spare room, they shot inside the place, for which they pulled down wallpaper to give an authentic image.

When the film crews left again, boys threw rocks at their cars as they drove off. They felt dirty without being able to say why. Then things in the neighborhood went back to the normal routine.

Don

No longer thought

After a few weeks

Of her friends in Rochdale every day. The WhatsApp messages became ever less frequent, since what had connected them were the trivial details, chitchat, shared places, shared enemies. Now without a daily life for them to share, there wasn’t much left to say.