Mr Purley had arrived when Alice was eight. He appeared one Sunday afternoon, a large man in big boots and an oily cap with thinning hair and a strange smell. Mr Purley slept in the bed with the widowed Mrs Nimrod and in the daytime he sat in the public bar of the Brickfields Hotel. Often when he returned late from the Brickfields Hotel he shouted at everyone for no very good reason and occasionally he took a swing at Mrs Nimrod and once he knocked her down the stairs and they all thought she was dead.

It was soon after this that Milli had left.

Milli was fourteen. The night she left she had woken the sleeping Alice and explained her plan—which was no plan at all really—just to leave at once and go someplace else. When he notices you, Milli had warned, meaning Mr Purley, you must leave too, Alice. And Alice, who had been nine at the time, had not understood.

After Milli had gone things got much worse. The only times Mr Purley had not been angry was when he was asleep, and Mrs Nimrod had bruises and cuts that never quite disappeared.

Sometimes Alice hid under the stairs. ‘I will not let him hurt you, Alice, I will not!’ Milli had used to say when she found Alice there. But Milli had gone and now when Alice hid under the stairs no one came to find her.

One night when Mr Purley returned from the pub her mother had picked up the iron and swung at him with it. The iron had got him squarely on the forehead and they had both watched as Mr Purley reeled away then stumbled off down the stairs. The next morning they found him, stone dead, in the hallway, in a little pool of dried blood and a cut on his head. The constables had come and taken him away, and that was the last they saw or heard of Mr Purley. They had gone back up to their room and her mother had closed the door behind her and dusted off her hands just as though she had disposed of a particularly large cockroach.