No, she and Dominic, and Jasmine, lived separately, in the shadows, in invisible cracks. Though there were enough others who occupied those dark spaces with them. Equally unseen.

Like the family where the mum was always in jail for shoplifting. Or another family, two doors down, where the step-dad fiddled with the three daughters, and nobody blinked when one of the girls got pregnant. Then there were Terry’s brothers, two of them anyway, who everybody said for sure had a hand in things when their mum OD’d. And there was Dominic’s little friend Lacey, whose mum threw herself off a bridge.

These were the people that Simone knew, that Simone saw. More and more she saw them. Illuminated in Dominic’s gaze. Because these were the people he was growing up with – united not by money, or lack of it, not by ethnicity or religion, not by the estate, but by just one thing: the way they hurt each other, generation after generation, round and around. They kept each other bound by that, like an inescapable magnet. Hurt people hurt people, don’t they?

Veronica

George had already left for work when from the window of their new kitchen-come-living room, Veronica spotted a boy emerging from the house next door. It had been exactly two hours and six minutes since the music had finally stopped. She had been listening intently ever since, hoping for reassuring kitchen clatters or other proofs of life; but she had not yet heard the voice of the woman, nor the sound of a baby. Still, here was a boy. A scrawny thing like his mother, she would have guessed he was eight or nine from the height of him, but his gait suggested otherwise, all self-consciousness and measure, far more befitting of a pre-teen. Most adults blundered at attempts to estimate the age of children, forgetting, in the stretch between now and their own childhoods, the minute, invisible, colossal developments that separate a Reception child from a Year 1, and an eight-year-old from a boy knocking on eleven. But at her last school, Veronica had taught ten- and eleven-year-olds, so she was familiar with the gradual creep of adolescence into the frame. At her new school, the youngest in the class would still be six.

Veronica watched as, on the other side of the road now, the boy pulled a packet of crisps from his bag and ate the first few while staring up at the top floors of his house. Veronica wondered what he was looking for. A wave from his mother perhaps. A sign of something. She followed his line of sight, but didn’t have the angle, and after a moment, the boy turned and scurried along the road, a peculiar mixture of anxiety and machismo. Veronica wondered where he was going. Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was only seven-thirty – too early for school, and besides, no reason to make him so shifty – yet every few steps he glanced around. Nobody crossed his path, however, and soon, he was round the corner and gone. Veronica stopped munching her toast and listened again. The downstairs neighbour next door had left even earlier than George. He seemed to run some sort of roofing company and had loaded up his van a full thirteen minutes before their alarm was set to wake them. She had been watching the street, first from the bedroom and now from here, ever since. If the woman had left, it was improbable that she would have missed seeing her. But why then was the house next door so quiet? Even if the adults were asleep, surely the baby would have stirred. While pressing her head against the window for a better view, it occurred to Veronica that she need not be so invested. The neighbours had most likely existed at their abode long before she and George had arrived on the street, and for all she knew, the noises they had made were normal, or consensual at least. Perhaps then she should be less concerned with their internal dynamic and more with the impact of their noise upon them – her and George.