I couldn’t sit up on the stairs because Florence would have to come past in her towel when they let her out. Connor was shouting down out the front window to his mates that he couldn’t get out, Danny had a ball, go and knock on his house, and Manus was peeking down through the curtain in the bedroom to see what was going on. He didn’t want me there in case I saw what else he was doing, so I went back down the half-stairs and sat on my own in the upstairs kitchen. The tap was running like someone had been waiting for it to turn cold. I knelt up on the stool and turned it off. The voices came up from the backyard of Mr Lawal and my dad trying to talk Tunde out the toilet. I couldn’t hear Marie any more, even though the window was open at the bottom and I could feel a draught on my face when I put my ear up against it. There was a shuffle of feet and Mr Babalola said, ‘It’s a bad business.’ Jimmy Singh made a puffing sound and said, ‘It have de devil in de boy?’ I shut the window and sat away from it round the far corner of the table where it was dark. The room looked long back to the closed door with the gas cooker beside it and the blue cabinet with plates and glasses squeezed into the corner. Stacked along the side from that corner to the sink and the window, the knife and fork drawer, pots and pans and the food cupboard were all in the dark too, with the white side of the sink catching light from outside. The ceiling folded over and sloped down to the window on that side so it felt the kitchen was getting smaller. I checked the door that it wasn’t closing in and felt like I was in a tunnel. All the chairs were squashed in round the table and it was only me there. It felt lonely and crowded at the same time. The picture of the Kennedys was up on the wall above me, smiling down. I couldn’t imagine me and Manus and Connor like that, we never played together. And then without knowing how it happened, I was outside myself looking down at the crowded table with the breakfast things still on it and me sitting there, and I thought this was something I should remember if I could just grab hold of something that could tell me why looking down at myself in the kitchen was important and how come the ceiling was folding over so my shoulders were having to hunch round. Marie didn’t like being squashed and I didn’t want Tunde to have to go back to Nigeria even though the room was getting cramped. And then I told myself, I had nowhere else to go.

The Thames