She had been to the estate often. She’d been staying at Noah’s, preferring his warmer smaller rooms, and his richer poorer parents. The estate was where they played, hanging off the wall outside the bet shop with a cig and a beer, waiting to score something better. She’d swished her arms with the pride of the enlightened as she walked the familiar route to his family flat, hauling her suitcase behind her. There was a garden on the east side, where she often paused to admire the carefully dotted colour of the bedding, and she stopped then. She chatted to the old woman pruning. The woman asked about school, about her friends, about her romance with Noah, as though they were not separated by walls, or five decades. Three floors above them, the confident smells of home cooking wafted out of the rooms of an Iranian family bustling in sing-song tones, and Simone glanced up, breathing it in. A little further along, there was a wall plastered with posters – for a church meeting, a bingo night, a local art exhibit. Simone had not yet attended any of these events, but they wrapped themselves around her, plumping the imaginary nest she was building.

Until that first evening in their real, own flat (blagged by way of her expanding belly), unpacking a suitcase of stuff she’d pulled from neat cupboards and squashing them into a single broken drawer, she saw everything differently, as if for the first time: the dirt and the darkness; the way the stairs smelled of piss; how rubbish littered doorways; how pairs of random, dishevelled people were always loitering.

After a while, months or maybe years, these were quirks she stopped noticing, or else she began to blend in with them, became like them too, even if some people still called her a posho.

Until Noah died, and she started giving out hand jobs in exchange for a hit, and then nobody thought her posh at all.

There were whole days, afterwards, when she sat on the wall in the Concourse and stared at the families unlike her own. The ones wrapped up tight in determination. Sometimes they were English, but as often Romanian, Syrian, Afghani, Somali, indiscernible from each other in the way they kept to themselves, focussed, and then moved on. She could not focus. She could not move on. She wasn’t sure she wanted to.

She clasped her cig and her beer, and something better.

Time blurred.

There were others. Some old granny banged with her shopping trolley up the stairwell every day at exactly 11am. Her hair was always immaculate, her shoes polished, and she would stop to tell loitering kids not to litter the corridors. They waited respectfully till she had reached her flat, till she had closed her door, then chucked their crisp wrappers on the floor.

Sometimes Simone was approached by the estate’s do-gooders, people intent on rallying, improving, starting up resident groups, handing out petitions, talking about the ‘community’. They made pains to notice her sitting there. They said hello, they asked how she was, they cooed at Dominic crying in his pram, or perhaps it was Jasmine. They invited her to things. And into their flats, only a floor up, or down, or across from her own. Often these people were local councillors, or teachers, or NHS workers, or churchgoers, professions of care, pretending they cared, pretending like they wanted to know. But they didn’t know her. Because in the daytime they went to work, and in the evenings they made dinner for their kids, and okay, maybe their salaries didn’t stretch to the end of the month, same as Simone’s benefits, and maybe the rubbish in their hallway wasn’t cleared either, and maybe their kids had been mugged too; but still they lived a world apart. They weren’t like the people Simone knew, the people she had come to know, since Noah. Since Terry. They didn’t even see them.