gravel sticking in the soft palms of her ’ands. Genie forced her into the pushchair and ran on, its wheels skittering, snagging, while the baby didn’t know wevver to laugh or cry . . — On the tube Genie sat, stunned: it was a Sunday afternoon and the carriage was nearly empty, but even the few passengers there were ghosts to me. They changed at Victoria — on the Circle Line Genie thought, This is fucking purgatory — purgatory. She could feel the methadone ebbing from her cells — and picture the bottle of linctus in the fridge back at Jebb House. . glowing like a radioactive pile. They would go on like this, round annaround . . the CircleLine. . from ’ere to fucking eternity. And wasn’t that the truth about all her relationships: if they’d endured at all, it was only because I went round annaround, because the second she got too close to anyone. . Boom! It blew up in my stupid face. Genie skidded Pippa along Spring Street, past the costers’ skeletal barrows — there was a rotting peach, a crushed banana, a scurrying mouse. . a dying man. The lifts never worked so she folded down the pushchair and dragged Pippa up the stairs of Gargery House. So many houses, she’d thought: Jebb and Gargery — Aziz House, where she went to get her benefits. Geale House, the health centre — Ventris House for the DDU. All these houses — but no fucking home. — Long after that, when she began working with Meria Amal and the other Bengali women, they translated for her the song they sang as they pulled up the summer-softened chunks of tarmac from the car park behind St Olav’s. . and even strips they rolled like turf: How can I accept that my husband has gone to London? I’ll fill up my suitcase with dried fish, All the mullahs — ev-ery-one has gone to Lon-don, The land will be empty — what’ll I do? We sang this in Sylhet, said Priya. . who’s all of four-foot, but a live one . . When we were desh — at home in northern Bangladesh. Then we thought bidesh — here — would be a paradise. How could it not be, when the probashis sent back all this money? We sat down by the Surma and sang: When my brother goes to Lon-don, he’ll give orders at the tailor’s, He’ll make a blouse for me. Then there’s the bit from the beginning again. The refrain, Genie said. Yes, the refrain: How can I accept that my husband has gone to London. . Now you’re ’ere, Genie had said, picking the asphalt from her callused palms, and is it the paradise what you thought it was gonna be? Shamila, who had a wall-eye and screwy teeth, laughed bitterly. It’d be some kind of para dise, she said, if my husband stopped fucking all the crack whores in Banglatown, went back to desh and left me and the kids to get on with our lives. — This time, because they didn’t ’ave a live one, it took the Old Bill ages to come. Pippa sucked Ronald’s head — Genie cadged a fag from the bloke who lived next door, an old Irishman in string vest and slippers who said, no, he hadn’t seen Cutty in days, and yes, Genie had probably done the right thing by calling the guards. — When they did finally pitch up, it was a solo woodentop and couple of paramedic types. Was it possible to be shocked. . inside of being shocked? Because, although she’d been expecting it, I was still shocked when the copper kicked the door in and there it was: a single magpie lying on the floor on its side, not looking peaceful or anything much — only very dead. Genie had been so shocked she forgot for a long time to take Pippa away, and the little girl was stood there seeing what no kid oughta see — her dead dad. — Quint says: Well, girl, you going, then? Are you gonna get me that f-f-felt-tip? I tellya, girl, the sacred orbs can’t wait — the letters can’t wait. There’ll be a hullabaloo if’n we don’t tell Lulu. — Genie opens the cupboard at last and finds a few coins in the pockets of the dirty old trousers hanging there. The empty hangers tinkle airily — and suddenly she’s striding along the corridor, her thoughts tinkling airily as she anticipates the sunny streets and the holiday atmosphere. . a landslide victory, that’s what everyone was saying. — That’s what Genie’s recovery had been as welclass="underline" a landslide victory . . All that summer, two years before, she and the others had shifted tons of tarmac and earth and rubble off the site — sliding the land by fucking ’and, because Geoffrey, the vicar, being a decent bloke and no perv, had offered it to the Bangladeshi women for nothing, so they could build a community centre. They crawled about on our ’ands an’ fucking knees, until at last the council was shamed into sending a digger and a couple of hardhats, who mostly sat in their corrugated-steel hut, smoking fags and. . doing fuck all. Meria Amal, Priya, Shamila and Genie — all the women took it in turns to look after Pippa together with their own children. Pippa began speaking a few words of Sylheti — which was. . sorta cool. Genie went every day to badger them at Ventris House, ’cause you don’t get nuffink in this world unless you make a stink. Walking along the Mile End Road on hot summer afternoons, all the Bangladeshi girls coming from school in their dark robes and their white head-scarves. . button-bloody mushrooms sprouting up all over. Genie’s drug worker was a drowned rat with a brown beard and a lazy eye that knocked off altogether when he was stoned — and that was a laugh: a drug worker who was. . working at ’is own ’abit. He was called Dermot, and seemed to have no sense of his own ridiculousness. Genie said to him: You’re gonna open your door and find me sitting out here, on this chair, reading this claptrap about clap every fucking day ’til you get me my detox. Eventually Dermot did better than that — he got DSS funding for residential treatment. Meria Amal said: I’m happy to have her, Genie, but Faisal will be unhappy if she doesn’t cover her hair in the street. — The last thing she saw before she got into the car with Geoffrey, who’d agreed to drive her there, was Pippa, another button mushroom sprouting from the balcony of Jebb House. — The treatment centre was a big slab of sandy stoniness dumped down in sodden Wiltshire fields: the summer had gone off, and curtain after curtain of rain swished in drenching succession between the dining-room windows and the hills that rose up two or three miles away. The other junkies were either Bristolian DSS types who burbled a load of bollocks or posh totty whose mumsies and dadsies brought them cashmere woollies when they came to visit — woollies the cuffs of which they chewed as they lounged on broken-down sofas and. . uneasy chairs, twirling the ends of their luscious hair and negatively ya-ya-yaaing. No one came to visit Genie — no one but Meria, Geoffrey and Dermot knew she was there. In the gloomy dining room, where portraits. . someone dead’s ancestors . . looked grimly down on the human wreckage drifting about the Formica tables. Genie ate with the alcoholics, who were either red-faced salesmen types. . quarter-bottle of voddie an’ extra-strong mints in the glovvie, or genteel old ladies. . walnuts pickled in gin. The old ladies remained pickled even after their detoxes, and behaved as if they were on a fucking P&O cruise, gossiping about all the amusing things said in the therapy groups, like they was some sorta entertainment. They were kind enough to Genie. .