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The Estate

They call it bipolar now, but it was manic depression back then. Mum’s episodes meant my brother and I would be shipped out around foster carers and care homes a couple times every year, a few months here, six months there, but we always ended up back in the same place in south London: the Roupell Park estate.

Althea was nine years older than me. I’ll be honest, there were times that she got on my nerves, but sometimes she could be a cool sister to have. She didn’t take no shit. Her hair was always nice. She wore beehives, French plaits and Cain rows and had a nice boyfriend. She had a good job in WH Smith and went to work every day. When Mum was ill, she had our backs. She wasn’t afraid to cuss people off, tell them to mind their own business. But as Mum’s episodes became more frequent, Althea’s patience ran out. Then of course, there was the balcony incident.

Besides, she was pregnant. Did I mention that? Not heavily – can’t imagine Mum would have had the strength to dangle two – but it was enough to make her pack her bags. I couldn’t blame her for getting out when she did. She left home early, coming back to visit now and then.

We’d started fighting a lot by that point, so can’t say I missed her.

Now Melanie. She was a different story. Mel was seven years older, and a virtual stranger. Althea he could cope with, but my dad took a dislike to this younger child taking all Mum’s attention away from him, so she was sent to live with her dad. He had married this white lady in Clapham, so yeah, Mel got lucky.

When she walked back into our lives as a teenager, after a fight with her dad, it was like having Naomi Campbell coming to visit. I remember when I first set eyes on her I couldn’t believe it.

She was modelesque, man. She had long, glossy hair and pale skin. She was tall and slim and beautiful. Nothing like Althea in her WH Smith shirt with her silver name tag. I liked the swagger of this new person I was going to have to get to know.

At last, a breath of fresh air in our claustrophobic yard. Best of all, she worked in fashion. OK, so she was a sales assistant at an Army and Navy surplus store, but don’t matter if it’s camouflage gear. Clothes are fashion, innit?

She had her own money and her uniform, man, I’ll never forget it – she had sexy tops and pencil skirts that were cowled round the waist. I thought, wow, this looks exciting. She seemed like girly fun.

Boy, was I wrong. Melanie liked partying, she liked her freedom, and she didn’t have no time for irritating siblings. Most of all, she really didn’t appreciate taking orders from an unhinged reggae fan who liked to walk round the estate naked. Her rows with Mum were vicious. She might not have been dangled off a balcony, but soon Melanie too realised Roupell Park was not for her. She lasted about six months before storming out and slamming the door behind her, without so much as a goodbye.

“Two bulls cyaan’t live inna one pen.”

That was all I remember Mum saying about the matter of another lost daughter, and Mel was soon forgotten as quickly as she had appeared. Thankfully, she left behind at least one spangly top in the washing machine.

I’d pose in front of the mirror, with socks stuffed down my front, looking forward to the day I’d be able to get dressed, look fly and hit the dancehall scene.

“You was such a lovely-looking baby,” she used to tell us at least once a day.

I preferred Yusuf’s company to the girls’. He should have been a comedian, man. We would stay up and talk all goddamn night. When we got the car bed – all red wooden wheels and a spoiler instead of a headboard – we’d spend so long wrestling over the quilt, we’d end up falling asleep in it together. Eventually, we forgot about the nightly fight for the driver’s pillow, and just topped and tailed it together.

As all baby brothers should, he worshipped his big sister. Quite right too. Anything I did, he wanted to do too.

If I wanted to take conkers and throw them at passers-by from the balcony, he would join in.

Ice cubes, eggs, anything we could get our hands on. What’s the point of having a balcony, if you can’t throw shit at people walking by?

We’d wait for the distant explosion of rage to come from the kitchen – “Where’s my fucking eggs?” – then hightail it to the caged football pitch area we called the Pen.

Ivy, the old Jamaican lady who was our first foster carer, was a spiteful old witch. She lived in Peckham, and looked elderly and sweet like somebody’s nan, but truly was the meanest woman I’d ever met. She salted our food to stop us eating too much and keep the food bills down – even over-salted the Wotsits, the bitch.

Her house smelled medieval, like the scent of an old woman, with everything velvet. Velvet curtains, velvet tablecloth, velvet wallpaper. She beat up her grandson, poor kid. He could barely look you in the eye. Made him hoover the house every day, the mad old bat. Once he made the mistake of using the hoover to try and remove a stain from her precious velvet wallpaper, so she caught him and beat him with a stick.

I ain’t letting my little brother stay some place like this, I decided. So we packed our bags and got ready to escape. Her poor grandkid pleaded to come with us.

“Please,” he said. “I don’t have money now, but when I do, I’ll pay you, hand up to God.”

He held his right hand up to the wallpapered ceiling, just in case we didn’t believe him.

“We don’t want to leave you here, honest we don’t, but we can’t take you with us.”

I told him we had to think about ourselves. He didn’t argue much after that.

We must have told the social workers about it, because later we heard that Ivy had been shut down. Wonder what happened to that poor kid. I hope he strangled the old witch and buried her in a velvet coffin in the back garden.

The next time we were sent to Birmingham to stay with a nice Muslim family, that was much more like it.

The woman’s husband looked like a real-life gorilla, big and fat and hairy, but he was lovely. They had twin daughters who they treated real nice. It felt like the middle of nowhere, though, and we couldn’t understand a word anyone was saying, so we were glad to get back home, where we understood people. Still, I missed their garden and the pistachio cakes the mother made.

Yusuf liked the residential care home the best, well, until, that is, the others discovered he still sucked his thumb. It was just like the “Dumping Ground” in the Tracy Beaker books, but with a lot more toast. Toast, toast, toast – that was all there was to eat in between meals, but at least they let you make your own meals and do your own thing. Felt like a proper little adult.

It wasn’t perfect, but it was better than living on eggshells, waiting for that music to be cranked up.

Sure, there were other angry kids raging against the system and setting off the alarms, but mostly it was just peace and quiet, innit. I was disappointed the day they came to take us home from there, but like it or not all roads led back to Roupell Park.

Mum was standing in the front room waiting for us. On the glass table was a bumper pack of Squares, and steaming plates of chicken, rice and plantain. I could see she’d spent the day cleaning. The whole house was shining.

“My babies!” She put an arm round each of us and pulled us close. “De doctors say I’m better. Gonna take my medication and mi ago do much better this time.”

She hugged us tight, and pressed her face into our hair.

“What you smelling us for?”

“I missed your smell.”

It wasn’t long after we returned from the care home that Mum made her big announcement.

We were going to move. Our eyes lit up.

“For real?”

“For real.”

We spent the whole day packing up our stuff, asking questions about our new home.

“You’ll see,” said Mum, with a smile on her lips.

“How are we going to take the car bed? We can’t go without the car bed,” said Yusuf, sensibly.

“Don’t worry about dem things. Removal men will pick ’em up later.”

We took our bags outside.

“Please, please,” we begged. “Tell us where we’re going.”

“OK. You ready?”

She pointed across the Pen.

“Tird floor. Block D.”

Our hearts sank. So much for the Big Move. We weren’t even making it out of the estate. We carried our stuff in boxes 100 metres across the grass of the courtyard, to the opposite block on the other side of the estate. We were moving from the ground floor of Elmstead House to the third floor of Deepdene House. We were moving up in the world, if only literally.

No removal van ever did pick up the car bed.

Gangland

You see, gangland is a small, claustrophobic place. It exists in small, sealed bubbles, squatting in boarded-up worlds no bigger than a postcode. It doesn’t like big, wide battlefields. It’s the smallness it likes, lurking in the dead ends and shadows of shortened ambitions, conducting its business underneath stunted horizons.

No shit. They don’t call them “the endz” for nothing.

For me, gangland began in that third floor flat, flanked by the concrete blocks of Roupell Park estate.

Later, my mental map would expand along the south London bus routes to include the lawless walkways and basement garages of the Angell Town estate, and the bored evenings making trouble around Myatt’s Fields and Brockwell Park. Feuds would stretch to Peckham and Stockwell, New Cross and Brixton.

But as a young teenager, the meaning of those postcodes beyond Roupell Park simply didn’t exist. I had not yet learned that language. They were not yet “territories”. They were still simply postcodes.

I liked Roupell Park. It didn’t feel like complete poverty, not like some of the slums in Peckham and Stockwell, the ones with the dark, dismal feeling that you’re too scared to walk through.

In Roupell Park, there was still a mixture of cultures, black and white. Some people still took pride in their window boxes, spiking them with those windmill sticks and dangling chimes from their doors. A caretaker kept the Pen tidy, and the Quaker meeting house round the corner gave us a spiritual veneer.

Less than two miles away was the house where David Bowie was born. Half a mile further, Vincent Van Gogh (both ears still intact) fell in love with a South London girl, while living briefly in a house in SW9.

Even closer was Electric Avenue, the first market street to have the luxury of lighting. “Now in the street, there is violence.” That’s how the song starts. Sounds so upbeat, but listen to it properly next time. It’s about poverty and anger and taking to the street. People forget that. They think it’s about bloody lampposts.

I remember a poster campaign during the General Election, just as I was beginning life on the road. It must have been 1992. The posters showed a smiling John Major.

“What does the Conservative Party offer a working-class kid from Brixton?” they asked.

“They made him Prime Minister.”

Good for him, innit. But I couldn’t see anyone boasting about what they were offering a cute black girl, like me.

My parents had divorced in 1981, the same year Brixton went up in flames. A decade later, a new generation had grown up to hate the boydem.

Brixton had already been bombed and blasted and cleared of slums. By the time I was growing up, it was all about failed social housing and plain-clothes policemen and their hated campaign of stop and search.

Of course, I didn’t care about any of that. I had my mum to worry about.

I would learn three important lessons living on Roupell Park. First, Fireworks Night is always the best time to buss a ting in the air. Second, getting caught ain’t cool. And third, one day your luck is going to run out.

Everyone knew us as the madwoman’s kids.

There was the white kids, who lived in a smelly flat on the fifth floor. We felt sorry for them coz their place stank, man, but they was nice kids. Then there was lovely Peggy next door, always willing to lend a bag of sugar, and Shelley and Andrew, the mixed-race kids on the fifth floor. They were popular. Everyone liked Shelley and Axe, as he’d later be known. People knew each other and helped each other when they could.

There was one newsagent who served the estate. We’d go there for ice poles in the summer. We never stole from Jay. No need. He was a good guy. If you went in there and said you were a little bit short, he would say bring it in next time. There was no point defrauding him.

He got robbed once or twice. Soon after he got a big Alsatian. No one bothered Jay after that.

At night, we’d watch the flashing lights from our window. There was always running kids and commotion. It was usually Tiefing Timmy, an Irish boy with lips like a duck, who’d speed his stolen cars around the courtyard.

Datsuns, Nissans, motorbikes. There was nothing that guy couldn’t lift. When it was dark, that’s when Tiefing Timmy and his boys would come out to play. We’d watch the nightly blue light show as the boydem chased Tiefing Timmy round the Pen. We’d laugh when he got away, and we’d throw coins at the Feds when they hauled him out and handcuffed him over the battered front of whatever car he’d stolen this time.

Obviously, some of the neighbours didn’t like us. Mum took pride in her music system. The Abyssinians, Frankie Paul, Dennis Brown, Marcia Griffiths. Old skool Jamaican reggae. She played it loud and she played it proud.

It wasn’t all bad. There were the prison visits to look forward to. They were our holiday. As soon as a letter came through the post with HMPS on the envelope we got excited: it meant there was going to be a bus journey or coach trip and a fun day out to the Isle of Wight or Dartmoor or wherever Dad had been moved to this time. We’d always get a tray of cakes. Oh yeah, it was delightful.

Depending on how recently Mum had folded up the car, sometimes we would drive.

They lay waited him in the Upper Cuts barber shop in West Norwood. Yeah, people was real upset when Axe died.

They said it was a drugs connection but Axe wasn’t one of the naughty ones. Rafik Alleyne was the guy who did it. He was 21. Axe was 25. They knew each other. People saw them knocking knuckles outside before Andrew went into Upper Cuts on Norwood High Street to get his hair cut.

Guy pulled a gun from a takeaway box and shot him in the back of the head as he sat in the barber’s chair. He went running to a minicab office in a panic looking for a getaway car, begging a driver to take him to Stockwell. He got 22 years.

His mum wrote a really sad poem for the funeral. They said she stood up, wearing big dark sunglasses, to recite it.

Who is the one that took my son,

do you really know what you have done?

This is a wake-up call to all of you,

who wants to belong to the devil’s crew.

The devil’s crew indeed. I wished I had listened to her. It would be a long time before I truly understood what she meant.

One afternoon, I had been sitting by the Pen, probably not far from Shelley’s and Andrew’s flat. I’d bunked off school as usual, and had grown bored of hopscotch and the games we drew in chalk on the crumbling surface of the court. The goal nets and basketball rings were long gone – that is, if they’d ever been there in the first place – so we used to entertain ourselves inside the cage.

The only other kid kicking around that day was Jerome. He was just one of the kids around the way. I didn’t much like him, but beggars, choosers and all that.

Was it the first time I’d ever been stabbed? I honestly can’t remember. Getting stabbed is not like getting married or buying a new car, darling. It’s just not something that sticks in your mind. Shit happens.

What I do remember is that Jerome taught me an important lesson that day.

“Hey Sour!” he’d shouted over, spying me at a loose end. “Wanna play a game?”

I shrugged.

“It’s called Flick.”

He cast a quick look around and huddled me into a corner where he felt sure no one was watching. Now he had got my attention.

Then he pulled out two flick knives.

“Here, take it.”

I took it.

The handle fitted neatly into my palm. The chrome felt smooth and polished. It was still warm from his pocket.

“Look, do what I’m doing. Flick in, flick out.”

I smiled. The mechanism was quick and light.

“Let’s ramp,” he said. Let’s muck about.

We started making phantom jabs for each other’s fists.

Imagine fencing with flick knives and you’re getting close. Some kids play it with tennis racquets. Some kinds pretend they’re on Star Wars. And some kids in Tulse Hill fence with knives.

He was quicker than me to start, but I soon caught up, matching every flick of the wrist and jolt of the fist.

I wasn’t afraid.

“See? Good, isn’t it?”

I took my eye off his blade. He jabbed towards me. As he did, I went to block.

“What the fuck are you doing, you idiot?”

He had caught my hand, piercing the fleshy pad beneath my thumb.

“You folly?” he said. “S’just a flesh wound.”

“That’s how you lose.”

You’re not playing, are you, I thought. We carried on. I was angrier this time and he knew it.

It was just me and him. I started jabbing harder, more forcefully, but he was too practised, too quick.

My pride had been hurt. I needed to make a wound for a wound. The game had now extended beyond striking the other fist. Now, the whole body was in play. We pranced back and forth, dodging contact with ragged swipes of chrome.

A warm trickle of blood was streaming down my wrist. It wasn’t gushing. It was just a gash, but enough to catch Jerome’s eye.

I got him. In the hand. While he was flinching I got him again, by the knee.

“Ah, you fucking bitch! You stabbed me.”

“That’s the point, innit? You a batty boy?”

It was just a graze.

“It’s not even deep.”

This was getting boring. I put down the knife, stepped back and examined my wound. It was deeper that I thought. The rest of my hand felt tender to touch.

Jerome seemed agitated, but tried not to show it. He wiped both knives on the grass and put them back into his pocket.

“Call it quits, yeah?”

“Whatever. Next time, bring a better knife.”

I went home and told Mum some cock and bull story about cutting myself on the fence. I ended up having to get stitches.

I decided there and then I wouldn’t be play fighting again – it was annoying and inconvenient. We had only been mucking about, but if that had been a serious situation I’d have been in trouble.

But I was grateful to Jerome for teaching an important lesson. Next time, I learned, I’d better bring a bigger knife.

Islam

Islam and I didn’t get on. We were very young when Mum converted. By the time I got to primary school, Mum was no longer Eleanor Raynor. She was now Ruqqayah Anwar, Muslim convert. My brother Jermaine became Yusuf. My name became Salwa. Try saying that in a south London accent. That’s how Sour was born.

It was annoying at the time, but I hadn’t quite clocked, aged five, how useful two names can be when you get arrested. Later days, I’d thank my mum for it. Probably most useful thing she ever did. Get arrested, use one name; get arrested again, use the other. Keep getting arrested, just make ’em up. Boydem work it out eventually, but it buys you time.

Mum had been in one of her rare calm moods when she met the man on the bench.

She said she liked his aura. “Di man looked pious.”

He was slim and well-kempt. He said he’d show her a different way of life. So she thought she would give him a try.

Do you know how easy it is to convert to Islam? All you need is a front room, two witnesses, an imam and a few sentences and that’s it, you’re a Muslim. Eleanor Raynor was no more.

Now she was Ruqquyah, the pious. She hadn’t been the best Christian, granted. But God’s loss, Allah’s gain.

My brother and I watched from the hallway. He was giggling. I’d soon find out he had plenty to laugh about as a boy. I would be the one who suddenly had all the restrictions. No, as I say, me and Islam were not going to be friends.

Mum didn’t like covering her hair at first either. A wash before prayer, the rules about meat, all those things threw her off at first but she got used to it. She still allowed us to be kids and watch TV and listen to music.

I liked her in her white jilbab though. Better than some of the other outfits she used to wear. I thought she looked beautiful.

I didn’t even mind the mosque, at first. We went to Brixton Mosque. It was one of the oldest in South London. Got a bit of attention later days, when it was reported that that beardy lunatic, Richard Reid – remember him? The Shoe-Bomber? – had attended, but I liked it.

It had a quiet, happy vibe. It was somewhere to breathe beyond Roupell Park. Instead of being indoors, sitting all alone, Mum met all these new Muslim characters. They looked peaceful.

They would cook a lot together. I must say Mum looked at her happiest in the early days of Islam.

When they came round to the house, it had to be segregated. Men downstairs, women upstairs, no cross mixing. Even dinner would be brought separately.

That was the bit I hated the most. I didn’t like being apart from Yusuf. It wasn’t as much fun.

Thankfully, the Saturday madrasa was still communal.

We had to learn the Qur’an. It was lots of recitation, mainly. It sounded like a song. And so much memorising! We’d memorise whole chunks, reciting them over and over again without understanding what we were saying.

We learned the Arabic alphabet. We chanted the days of the week. Once you’ve got the alphabet, you see, what changes the sounds and meaning are the apostrophe and symbols.

I learned Arabic words for things like table, chair, but did I understand the meaty bits? No way.

Still, I picked it up quicker than Yusuf.

“We speak English, innit? What we having to learn this for?”

“C’mon, we’ve got to do what Mum said. It ain’t that bad.”

“But it’s just squiggles and dots.”

“What you complaining for? You don’t have to dress like some ninja. I’m the one who’s got to wear this.”

He looked at the headscarf framing my miserable face.

“You look bare nice,” he said, and burst out laughing.

Whatever Mum put on my bloody head for the mosque, it was horrible. I felt like a misfit on the bus. I wanted the ground to swallow me up. My friends used to tease me.

“What you got tucked under there, Sour? Is you a Rasta without the locks?”

Once I got to secondary school, Mum and I did a deal.

“Listen and listen to me good,” I said. “I ain’t wearing this headscarf shit no more.”

She started to protest.

“I ain’t playing, Mum.”

If she shouted, I shouted louder.

Eventually, she agreed on a compromise.

She bought a hat. It was like something the fucking queen mum would wear. It was brown and rectangular – with a brooch. I looked like a bat-shit crazy old Jamaican lady! Those early bus journeys did little for my brand-name, tell you that much. I was so upset.

Still, somehow I felt less guilty taking off the hat and leaving in the locker, than I did with the headscarf.

But there was no escaping the rest of my new “Islam-friendly” school uniform: MC Hammer trousers, brown sandals and an atrocious top. Lord have mercy, these clothes were taking the piss.

Although I was glad to see my mum happy, something didn’t sit well with me and her new obsession. There were other Jamaican families going to the mosque too. A surprising amount. But it felt oppressive. I was being forced to conform to a society that I didn’t understand, being forced to memorise words whose meaning I didn’t know. I hated the way Islam treated girls. I hated Mum for making me go, and eventually, for all its peaceful atmosphere, I began to hate that mosque. I knew as soon as I was old and strong enough, I would be outta there before you could say Insh’allah.

With Islam came stepdads. Yasim looked like frigging Moses, man. He walked with a big, old stick and smelled like a prophet. He was strong, strict and – like most people in our household – didn’t last long.

He had a strong emaan and he was strong in his faith. He was a nice guy deep down. Had a bit of a lisp. He was ginger and freckled, but of Caribbean descent. He remains the only man I’ve ever known to wear leather socks.

He didn’t work. Nowadays, you’d probably call him “a house husband”. Or maybe just “chronically unemployed”. But it was a home life, of sorts. It used to upset him that because of Mum’s unstable behaviour she couldn’t hold down a job. Never understood what his excuse was.

He tried to get me to go to school wearing a scarf again, but he realised pretty quick it was going to be a struggle making a family like ours stick to any rules, let alone his strict Islamic ones.

It wasn’t that we set out, deliberately, to get rid of him … Not exactly.

He wound Mum up too. When they got in an argument, she would pick up a baseball bat or go rifling through the knife drawer, just like she did when she was in one of her manic states and she caught wind of the fact they were coming to take her away again.

During one of her psychotic episodes, that kitchen drawer was always the first thing she went for.

Oh yeah, Muslim or not, my mum was a violent cookie. All the crazy demonic behaviours, I learned from her. I learned from an early age how quickly people scatter when you’re waving around a bread knife.

Poor Yasim was terrified. It must have been a relief to piss off to the mosque five times a day.

“We got to get rid of him, Sour,” whinged Yusuf one day after madrasa. “He won’t let me go to football no more.”

I agreed.

When we got home, Yasim was at the end of his tether, shouting to be heard over Mum’s music.

“Ruqqayah, these kids need discipline. They are a disgrace!”

“You’re not our dad,” we shouted after him. “Fuck off.”

The next week my brother and I came home to find the front room empty. His shoes were gone from the hallway.

“Where is he?”

“He’s been and gone,” Mum replied. “Me couldn’t take him nuh more. If rassclat make me choose between my pickney and him, di kids dem, dey haffi win every time.”

I was proud of her that day. But she could never be alone for long.

The first time we saw Derek he was fixing one of the curtain poles in the front room. “Alright, kids?” he said, noting our bewildered expressions. “Said to your mum I’d keep an eye on the place.” He seemed like a cool guy so we didn’t mind him helping himself to drinks in the fridge.

I noticed the spare house keys in his hand. Mum had been in and out of hospital. She must have asked him to come and check on us.

I recognised him. He lived in the same block. I’d seen him chatting to Mum on the stairwell a few times.

When Mum left hospital, she seemed happy – better than she had been in a long time. Derek soon started coming round the house a lot. He wasn’t strict like Yasim. He was like a breath of fresh air.

And yet, there was something about him I didn’t like. No reason. He just felt too familiar, too tactile. I’d catch him fixating on himself in the mirror, rearranging what was left of his sandy blond hair to cover a receding hairline.

I started wondering what was wrong with his flat. I think he had kids, grown-up ones, but if he did he never mentioned them. Soon he became a regular feature on the sofa.

Said his TV was on the blink, so Mum let him use ours to watch his endless hours of Formula One. That man could watch cars race around a track for hours.

I started focusing on him a little more closely.

Mum thought he was a kindly neighbour. I thought different.

He started taking liberties.

He used to draw penis pictures on Mum’s photographs. That’s it, I thought. He’s done it now. She’s got to realise this man’s an idiot soon. Instead, she walked in, saw the pictures and laughed. She found it comical.

Wasn’t long before he started trying to brush my thigh as we watched telly on the sofa, and began flashing himself at me on the landing as he came out of the bathroom.

Pretended his white robe just accidently fell open, to reveal his erection. In which case, why did he stick out his tongue at me at the same time? I would act like I didn’t see it and jump back to my bedroom, but my blood was boiling. How dare he come into my house and try to humiliate me!

He never physically touched me, not really, never anything more than a careful brush of the thigh, or pressing a little too close when we passed in the hallway. I didn’t say a word.

Althea might have moved out, but she still visited from time to time.

One evening, I passed her old room. The door was open just wide enough to see her comforting someone I recognised. It was her best friend, Suzanne. Suzanne’s cousin was the father to Althea’s little girl. She was crying.

I hung behind the door, and strained to listen.

“You need to tell my mum,” Althea was saying.

Suzanne was shaking her head, and wiped her nose with a tissue.

“No, I can’t. What am I going to say?”

“Just tell her the truth.”

She shook her head again.

“I knew I shouldn’t have told you. It’ll cause too many problems.”

I listened closer. Suzanne had met Derek a few times. They had exchanged a few words when she came up with Althea, that sort of thing. Later, he’d seen her at the bus stop and stopped to talk. She’s a chatty girl, Suzanne, thought nothing of it. It was only when he got on the bus too, she started feeling awkward. He hadn’t looked like he was waiting for the bus.

There weren’t many people sitting upstairs. Suzanne nodded a polite goodbye and went to sit at the back. He followed her. Sat down right beside her, even though the top deck was practically empty.