After Amberley comes Ashley. Business people and comfortable professionals. Electric gates, no cameras. Then it’s downhill all the way, geographically and economically. At the very bottom, where my dad puts his money, Clarinda Park is for students and people with JobBridge internships and immigrants. My dad specialises in skangers. His business model is heavily dependent on Rent Supplement and the Household Benefits Package and the Student Assistance Fund. It was a new trend he spotted right at the beginning of The Crash. He was an early adopter.

Clarinda Park was two lines of twenty houses, four of them empty and boarded up. The road was bad, like so many potholes, mostly stones as white as bone. There was only one functioning streetlight and a few places where they planned to put more before The Crash. Like poles with no lights, or holes with no poles. There were also eight houses that were not boarded up that had no furniture in them. I said to Holly, This is what they call a ghost estate. Like we did that ‘Ghost Estate’ poem in Fifth. If you lived here you’d be home by now idk I’m not sure I got it. She said this place was too young to have ghosts. And I said, You can have ghosts at any age. My dad’s car wasn’t there but he would finish at the office in an hour, except I was in the office twice looking for him and they said he wasn’t in. So he wasn’t going to the office. Which is like The Nuclear Option. It was a warm day with a blue sky. We went round the back. There were patio chairs and a table. The garden was all ratty grass. No plants. There was a timber fence about a metre high. His washing was on the clothes line, three underpants, two vests, four shirts and a pair of pants. No socks. Idk it was sad. At home my dad was always complaining that my brother stole his socks, but it was usually just one of a pair that was missing so idk. I wondered if they went missing in Clarinda Park too.