We switched off the light and sat up on chairs at the window with blankets over our knees, watching the storm change and the streetlights go orange. Gusts were whipping along the street, spreading in ripples where rain was flooding over on to the pavement. There were dark surges of water rushing into the drains. My mum told us a story about all the people who didn’t have a roof over their heads, who were lost and had to be out there in the rain, turning cold.

Manus was yawning and Busola was leaning back on my mum’s lap, her thumb in her mouth and her eyes closing.

‘How could anyone be out in that and not drown?’ Connor said.

My mum was rocking Busola to sleep. ‘Just spare a thought,’ she said. ‘Every one of them had a mother.’

I looked back at the water and imagined the people floating face up along the gutter and folding, like pieces of soggy paper, down into the drains.

The family were loading their things on to a lorry. We could see the women had these dresses Marie said were saris. She said her mum had some because her dad, Jimmy Singh, was West Indian.

‘They float, don’t they?’ Sandra said.

‘Maybe she thought it would work like a parachute,’ Danny said.

‘It didn’t though, did it?’ Connor didn’t even look up, and we all went quiet thinking about it. We were sitting on Sky’s wall after school because the streets felt different after all the rain and our dad was gone again to Liverpool so we could stay out.

Sky’s mum called her in, but she said her name in Portuguese so it sounded like Say Who! We all laughed and pointed at Sky, saying ‘Who? You!’ Her mum was nice and didn’t tell us to get off the wall, but she kept Sky away from us most of the time. ‘Boa noite,’she said firmly, and shut the door.

The only thing we had left to look at was the people moving out. ‘Look, there he is,’ Julie said. The boy with the round face came out with a bird cage and was getting into a car.

‘Why wasn’t he in school?’ Sandra said. We didn’t know. They hadn’t been there very long. Some people moved in and then didn’t feel they were in the right place and moved out again. But there were lots of people living in the houses and even more in the flats around the school, so it was just interesting to watch people come and go and not join in. Only this was different.