It was Sunday morning and everyone was having baths, only I hadn’t had mine because I’d been sweeping the top stairs down to the front room. Busola said I had to do that landing too, but that was her job, she had to do it along with the front room and the bedroom on that floor. My mum told her to jump in the bath because they were going to church and Busola dropped her brush and ran, so I had to do it when my dad came and shouted at me and I was fuming. By the time I finished, Marie and her dad were going to the bathroom and I felt sticky and dirty and had to wait as he waved his soap at me in the hall. He was tall and gangly and looked like a gangster in the films with hairy arms and shoulders in a white vest tucked in to high-waisted trousers. Even his toes were hairy in his flip-flops. Everyone thought he was handsome, my mum said it to Marie’s mum, but he had a lot of hair and it flopped over on one side of his head where he combed it to a point. It was thick and glossy and black, and made the smile of his teeth look really white as he waved at me with his head leaned over on the same side as his hair. I wasn’t sure if he kept his head down because he was shy or because he was too tall for the doors. But when he was drinking he lifted up his voice and his arms and told stories and argued with people who weren’t even there.

Marie said he was West Indian from Guyana and I knew her mum was Irish like mine, but he got on with my dad and my mum liked him except when she went down because he’d stormed out and left them, and my mum had to talk them out of packing up and going as well and not telling him. ‘He’ll rue the day he’ll look and ye’re out of his reach,’ she said, ‘but leave it to God.’ Marie’s mum cried a lot and so did Marie. Their room had boxes piled up against the walls and wardrobes and they sat on the bed crying because there wasn’t much room to move. My mum cried too when they killed Bobby Kennedy, sitting on the bed with Marie’s mum, but a man came round with framed photographs of the three Kennedy brothers smiling and one got hung up in the room in a gap between the boxes. We had one too, so it was always smiles and tears when I thought about Marie’s mum being married to Jimmy Singh and my mum talking about the sacrifices you had to make to be with a man you loved.