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believes in true love, in the lottery, in self-help books, in boosting your word power, in magazine columns and agony aunts and TV advertisements in which the floors are always clean and women always worth it –
    Of course, she was neither imaginative nor particularly bright – she left school with only five CSEs – but Gloria Green was determined enough to compensate for her failings, and instead turned all of her considerable willpower and energy towards finding a means of escape from the grime and small-mindedness of Red City into that TV world of clean babies and shiny floors and numbers that can change your life.
    It wasn’t easy, keeping the faith. Red City was all she had ever known. A rat trap, that lures you in, but seldom lets you out again. Her friends all married in their teens; found jobs, had kids. Gloria stayed with her parents, helping her mother keep house and waiting day after tedious day for a prince who never came.
    Finally she gave in. Chris Moxon was a friend of her dad’s; he ran a fish-and-chip shop and lived on the edge of White City. He wasn’t exactly Catch of the Day – being older and balder than she’d planned – but he was kind and attentive, and by then she was getting desperate. She married him at All Saints’ Church in white tulle and carnations, and for a while she almost believed that she had somehow escaped the rat trap –
    But she found that the smell of frying fat crept into everything she owned – her dresses, her stockings, even her shoes. And however many Marlboros she smoked, however much scent she dabbed on to her skin, there was always that stink – his stink – underlying everything; and she realized that she hadn’t escaped the rat trap, she had simply fallen deeper inside.
    Then she met Peter Winter at a Christmas party later that year. He worked at a local car dealership and drove a BMW. Heady stuff for Gloria Green, embarking on her first affair with the coolness of a professional poker player. Certainly, the stakes were high. Gloria’s Pa thought the world of Chris. But Peter Winter looked promising: he was solvent, ambitious, untroubled, unwed. He spoke of moving out of White City; of finding a house in the Village, perhaps –
    It was good enough for Gloria. She made him her personal project. Within twelve months she was divorced, and pregnant with her first child. She swore that the boy was Peter’s, of course, and when she was able, she married him, in spite of her family’s protests.
    This time, there was no fanfare. Gloria had shamed them all. No one attended the ceremony, which was held on a dismal November day at the local Register Office. And when things started to fall apart – when Peter started drinking, when the dealership went broke – Gloria’s parents refused to back down, or even to see the little boy that she’d named after her father –
    But Gloria was undaunted. She took an evening job in town, as well as her daily cleaning shift; and when she became pregnant again she hid it, wearing a girdle right up until the eighth month, so that she could keep earning money. When her second son was born she took in mending work and ironing too, so that the house was always filled with the steam and the smell of other people’s washing. The dream of a house in the Village had become increasingly remote; but at least in White City there were schools, and a park for the kids, and a job at the local laundrette. Things looked good for Gloria, and she faced her new life with optimism.
    But two years of unemployment had wrought a change in Peter Winter. Once a charmer, now he’d grown fat, spending his days in front of the TV, smoking Camels and drinking beer. Gloria was carrying him, much to her resentment; and unbeknownst to her, by then she was pregnant once again.
    I never knew my real father. Ma seldom spoke of him. He was handsome, though. I have his eyes. I think Gloria secretly thought that he might turn out to be her ticket out of White City.