Dalston is a working-class immigrant neighborhood that is just beginning to get a kind of arty mix. Zoran is hoping to capitalize on the fact that most people who live there are still too poor to have their own Internet access. Once the neighborhood gets trendy enough, he’ll unload the computers—which he got super-cheap from a guy who was planning to donate them to charity—and turn it into a proper café with real food.

Rat had hoped to improve her English working at the High Life. But in fact, everybody at the High Life comes from somewhere else. Mirko, the manager who runs the computers and fixes the espresso machine when it backs up, is a Bosnian Serb; Sophie, Rat’s fellow server, is Dutch. The customers are mostly mustachioed Kurds who come to read the Kurdish newspapers online, Ghanaians searching the Internet for a secondhand car or a room to rent. But since the only language they have in common is English, they do all speak it, in some weird variant. When she tells the McKanes about the kind of English spoken at the High Life, Kate says sociologists call it “Globish.” It’s the language of the future, she says.

Rat’s never had much sense of the future—certainly not in the demographic sense. All her life, she’s lived in some kind of fairytale time—a blend of her mother’s stories of the past and her own projections of those stories onto an equally improbable future—so now it’s quite bracing for a change to be part of some collective reality that’s about to happen.

Zoran is rarely at the High Life, which is just as well, since he’s actually kind of a megalomaniac. But Rat’s coworkers are jolly, and the clientele easygoing.

Sometimes Rat brings along Morgan and lets him play on one of the older computers. And if business is slow, Mirko will play war games with him. On their way home, they’ll stop for a kebab by the train station. Although she works daytimes, it’s usually evening before they get back to Hawkridge Road.

Rat likes her new life. She likes kidding around with Sophie and Mirko; she likes getting to know the regular customers. She likes having money in her pocket, even though Zoran’s paying her less—and less regularly—than he’d promised. It makes her feel on a more equal footing with the McKanes, coming home in the evenings from her own job, however part-time and illegal. It almost makes her able to overlook how angry she still is at Gillem.

With her first paycheck, she buys Artemio a Pokémon game for his Game Boy, after which his relations with Morgan are considerably calmer.