Back on the estate, Simone wouldn’t have cared. She would have covered the bruise with make-up and got on with life and nobody would have said anything. But here, people were bound to spot the darkened patch of skin and concoct a conclusion about how it must have been formed, what sort of person she therefore is, and he is, and they are. They would look at Dominic then. And they would look at her. And they would judge. The idea of this makes Simone’s stomach turn – pity and condescension as sickening as each other. She can’t bear to picture her neighbours thinking those things. She can’t stand the idea of them looking at her that way. So maybe Terry’s right. Maybe she does care too much about the poshos. Maybe she has got carried away in this street, imagining she’s something she isn’t, or isn’t any longer. Maybe she is forgetting what’s important, forgetting him. Why does she need a job anyway?

It’s funny now to think that when they first met, she believed Terry liked her ‘poshness’. Of course, by then it had felt ridiculous to her that anyone would imagine she possessed even the faintest scrap of gentility. When she thought back to the clean flat she’d grown up in, and the grammar school she’d attended, and the academic parents who’d raised her, her overriding sensation was of an untouchable cleanliness, wholesome and unsoiled. And there was little left to suggest she could be either. But it was a mistaken notion in any case. She’d never felt wholesome really. She’d seen first-hand how toxic and tainted the lives of even the most ‘upright’ could be. She knew how false the lines of division were. Still, after all the passed years, she felt an unbridgeable separation from even that sullied existence. If an ‘us’ and ‘them’ did exist, she stood on the estate, walled in.

Still, Terry had told his friends: Know where she grew up? Posh flat on Croftdown Road. (It wasn’t posh, it just wasn’t an estate – a distinction her parents had always made clear too. They had both grown up in council housing, but had ‘worked hard’ and ‘had ambition’ and made the leap. There was a big difference, they said, between the aspirational working class – them – and those living off others.) Or he’d ask, with what she’d mistaken then for pride: How many GCSEs d’you think she’s got then? Eleven. And what d’you think – Ds, Cs? Bloody As and Bs mate, this one. He’d gently taken the piss out of the way she spoke and the clothes she wore, and she’d confused that with admiration. It was only later that she began to understand that Terry’s obsession with her grades was less to do with appreciation, and more because when she was stupid or needy or weak, it made him feel doubly strong. He, the one with no grades to speak of, better after all.