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is large and Manchester-tough and manages to crawl halfway up the wall of the builder’s yard, but the mob is relentless and suddenly the rat falls back on itself and surrenders to death in the rubble, whereupon the boys stroll off, itchy for the next amusement. Nannie is alarmed because, hearing a scuffle in the abandoned house next door, she has unwisely investigated and discovered a man standing naked before her – the sight of which delivers a knockout blow of senselessness, leaving Nannie tranquilized with gibberish for the rest of the day. Our lifeblood Alexandra Road is also now boarding itself up, so that we now rely exclusively on the gasping Off Licence – a beacon of bacon with the wonder of Wonderloaf. It is important never to walk by the forsaken houses lest a strong arm should pull you in and you become minced meat. When Nannie is offered a flat in Gorse Hill, it is Minnie, a mousy Victorian woman in her eighties who will now be the very last lone resident of Trafalgar Square.
    I, of course, stand alone with Nannie as she says her goodbyes, and it is too much to bear as the small and shrunken Minnie waves us off from her cramped corner-house, to return within as the last lit lightbulb of life in this already forgotten corner, where she will climb the darkened stairway to rest her head – not from the whirring day, but from a lifetime now closing, all the madcap marriages and births of Trafalgar Square now gone, the swirl of life now meaningless in the friendless dark. The only tap running is hers, and the awaiting move is to a new flat that time or fatigue will scarcely allow her to enjoy as history overtakes her. It is with the wave that she gives on that day to Nannie and I that her light fades, and even though I hardly know her, I am in tears at the pitifully wizened figure giving a salute of good luck, all life spent, with nothing remaining but the brusque knock of a stranger intruding with instructions of where to go, how to sit, and how to die. Absurdly, Nannie has placed Blackie the cat in a brown paper shopping bag with string handles in readiness for the bus journey to Gorse Hill, which is possibly thirty minutes away. I am explaining to Nannie that this idea will not work, but she looks away each time I protest. On Cornbrook Street, Blackie leaps from the bag and tears her way back down the street in the direction of the junkpile scrap heap of written-off Trafalgar Square. I am, once again, fraught with shock, but Nannie marches on. ‘No!’ she says, ‘ leave her. Minnie will feed her.’ I know this is not true, and that nothing and no one will look after either Minnie or the cat.
    Nannie’s cousin Jody Keating is a small huffing and puffing Irish woman of rasping tobacco-voice, who rolls in on a cloud of Embassy and reflects as only the Irish can in five parts curse and five parts prayer. It is kitchen-table mourning for time gone, and for people of hushed scandals half-forgotten. It is recognition that they, now, have shifted to the end of the queue, and are suddenly life’s trusted historians when once they were gadabout girls of slender means. The Sandymount of my mother’s birth, the Pearse Street of childhood, and over to North Great George’s Street where the half-told is tale enough. Jody and Nannie are the last of the old crowd, and guardians of morality. Inside, Jody is dark and unhappy. At 11 years old, her only son Billy had accidentally set fire to himself in the backyard of their doleful terraced house in Rye Street in Chorlton-on-Medlock. Moving slowly, Jody nonetheless manages good humor and charitable smiles, returning by bus to Rye Street’s ghosts and outcasts in a house of visitations and imaginary sobs of children. Crime historians would later name Rye Street as having been patrolled by Hindley and Brady, and although Billy had escaped them, his remains now lay in Southern Cemetery (close to those of Ernie and Grandad), beneath a featureless stone inscribed Our Billy.