‘Mind out!’ I was at the top of the street balancing on the kerb, and trying not to step on the cracks. I stopped on one leg, but I wasn’t sure she was talking to me. It was the old lady who watched everything from her doorstep, and spoke to people as they went past. She caught you off balance, leaning out with her arms folded. My mum didn’t like her and said she was common. In the summer she sat out on a chair in slippers, and always wore thick stockings on her legs and a scarf on her head, knotted at the back with stringy grey hair hanging down the sides. She used to work in a factory and still had the apron on under a cardigan with its sleeves rolled up so she could fold her arms up under her chest. She kept her arms up and just moved from her elbow to touch her scarf into place, or lift her hair back over her ear. Mostly she talked to the other women, but when she wanted to find out something she got you over with crisps and started, ‘The woman down there – red door – your mother – Irish girl – with the black fella. What’s that about?’

I kept away from her part of the pavement because even when she wasn’t there you felt she was, leaning out on her arms, or looking up from her chair and catching your eye as she chatted to someone with the cats on her lap. She had cats everywhere, on her windowsill and on the sills of her first-floor windows, round her feet and over her shoulders, coming in and out her house. They moved about looking mean and ugly and brown-striped and black and sometimes grey round their mouths. When they reached up and scratched her legs she’d slap them away, and when she wouldn’t they’d get interested, their eyes would go scary and they’d start to make a racket until she got up and grumbled about having to feed them. I was scared of her and kept away but Busola didn’t – she said the lady had brown stuff dripping off her teeth and wasn’t always nice about people. Busola made me go up close and look. I only did because I was trying to see in her house where she lived on her own and never let anybody in – through the door it looked like a black cave.

‘What’s that about? Such a lovely girl. How’s he treating her? Is he staying? You never see that in my day. Black fellas coming over. Getting everyone in trouble. Does he beat her? If he does, you come to me. I’ll listen to ya.’