Busola lifted her head off the pillow in the dark to look at me from the other end of the bed. ‘Your fault,’ she said, just moving her lips.

‘Who says?’ I whispered.

‘Susan.’

Susan was a girl who lived in the house before us. She only spoke to Busola, so it was just Busola saying worse things than she normally said. I wasn’t frightened, but Manus got up on one arm, got out of bed and went over to the window. I knew it was Manus in the dark but I felt there was someone else in the room. I pulled the covers over my head and hid, but Busola farted and I had to come up for air. I couldn’t see Manus and the top of my head was cold.

‘When you saw that woman dead’ – it was Manus in the corner, twisting into the curtains and only his face showing – ‘was it like the girl who jumped?’ I shrugged but I don’t know if he saw me because he said, ‘Was it an accident?’

‘She jumped,’ Connor said.

‘The woman didn’t wake up,’ said Busola, putting her cold feet on me, ‘because she froze to death.’

I was gonna fight her off, but we heard the front door bang open and Marie come in crying downstairs, with her mum and dad arguing.

Manus span out the curtains and giggled. Busola got up and ran over to the door to listen. Connor sat up in bed.

It was too much for me. They argued all the time. I stayed where I was and tried not to listen to Marie’s dad shouting about the broken light bulb and the noise of the radio, and her mum telling him to keep his voice down. His voice swayed about anyway like he was at sea, but she told him he was drunk and legless, she was wasting her time. He said he should have been a – it sounded like honey-man – what was he doing married? She told him he was a ne’er-do-well, and she’d only herself to blame. He could go back to Guyana, he said, and get twenty of her for nothing. Who had the keys? Marie sobbed, they were waking everybody up, and she wanted to go to sleep. He had them when he opened the front door, her mum said, and if she had her time again she wouldn’t go anywhere near a West Indian fella, she shouldn’t have listened to him. The arguing moved into the room downstairs, the door closed so you couldn’t hear it, and everyone drifted back to bed.