Dalmar walks down Gladstone Street. All is quiet at this hour of the morning. The houses have bay windows with peeling paintwork – a lot of them have bright white PVC doors and old satellite dishes. Dalmar passes a house with boarded front windows, pieces of glass in a crazed and jagged pattern still in evidence, and notices the door, which has a metal grille screwed over it. He is thinking how that house will get its own shiny white PVC door eventually, the sort that is hard to kick in. There’s a lot of drug dealing in this area so you’re more likely to get your door kicked in than to be attacked on the street – it’s houses that get mugged, not people, which is a bit unfortunate when the residents of the house are just a normal Indian or Romanian or Sierra Leonean family trying to raise their children. At the end of the road, he passes the only attractive building in this grid of streets, the mosque, with its red and golden brick facade and large green windows. Dalmar lowers his head as he passes, and in his gesture I read something like shame, as if he believes it is not for him, that place, that community. Why does he believe that about himself?

Past the mosque, he turns right, then left at the intersection and a few houses down, lets himself into one of the bright white PVC doors with a small brass key that has a piece of string tied round it attaching another key, coloured silver. It’s poignant that he can’t afford a key ring – or perhaps he can, but regards a key ring as an unnecessary extravagance, when a piece of string he found in the office at work does just as well to thread through the holes in his keys and tie in a knot.

The hallway is small and square, an artificial hallway, I’m guessing, created so as to turn this tiny two-up two-down into four rentable rooms. There is a small stairwell ahead and two doors to the right. Dalmar turns to the right and uses the smaller, silver key to open the door of what would have once been the sitting room or parlour.