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forth to the hospital all weekend. She’s back at home now, but it’s been really hard, with Amy and everything.’
    ‘Was it serious?’ Sooky’s voice was sympathetic.
    ‘She just had a bit of a turn.’ Joanne had no intention of explaining, so she made light of it. ‘They think she’ll be all right. Oh!’ she smiled, pointing. ‘Look at them!’
    The two little girls were bent over the same sheet of sugar paper, making big strokes with their brushes and giggling, faces lit up with delight. Priya did a thick daub of blue, then Amy added bright yellow and they roared with laughter, as if this was the funniest thing in the world. They sloshed more and more colours on, both swirling their brushes round until there was a sludgy brown mess all over the soaked paper and they were cackling with joy in a way that made their mothers join in too.
    ‘They’re friends!’ Sooky said. She sounded pleased.
    ‘I’ll give them some more paper,’ Mavis the helper said, laughing too. ‘They’re thick as thieves, aren’t they? If you want to go and get a drink . . . ?’
    ‘She always seems to be trying to get rid of us, doesn’t she?’ Joanne whispered as they crossed the obstacle course of toys to the kitchen.
    ‘Who’s complaining?’ Sooky said, and they got the giggles too.
    ‘So d’you live near?’ Joanne asked hopefully, as they made cups of tea.
    ‘Somerset Road,’ Sooky said.
    ‘Up in Handsworth Wood?’
    ‘Yes, but the thing is . . .’ Sooky hesitated, stirring sugar into her tea. ‘I live back with my family. I’m divorced – well, nearly anyway.’
    Joanne looked up from pouring milk. ‘Divorced? What about your religion? I thought you weren’t allowed that sort of thing?’
    Sooky shrugged gently. ‘Well, no. But I am. I was married at seventeen, you see . . .’
    ‘God, that’s young.’
    ‘Not according to my mom and dad. But we made a deal that I’d be allowed to finish my A-levels. He was from Derby, so I was living there until six months ago and then . . . I came back to Birmingham.’
    ‘Oh.’ Joanne didn’t know what to say. ‘Did you do your A-levels then?’
    ‘Yeah. English, politics and sociology.’ She sounded proud. ‘I got married, and I was expecting her towards the end, but I finished them. But I had to leave: my marriage, I mean.’ Sooky stared ahead sadly as she talked. ‘I was worried for – my daughter.’
    Joanne had even less idea what to say now. What exactly did that mean?
    ‘That’s awful,’ she ventured.
    ‘Oh, it’s not too bad. I didn’t like him anyway.’
    She looked at Joanne, and for some reason her frankness set them both off laughing again, even though Joanne found that it made her chest tight and she suddenly had to swallow down tears. She never seemed to know what her emotions might do, from minute to minute.
    Tess appeared at the kitchen door and grinned at them both. ‘It’s all very jolly in here I see,’ she said.
    Joanne pushed Amy’s buggy along the Soho Road, with plastic bags dangling on each side. She liked shopping in the Soho Road. Instead of going into one big shiny supermarket she could go into lots of little shops, though she wasn’t sure about the whole halal thing or what to ask for, so usually she went to the one remaining old-fashioned English butcher right up near the top. But she liked buying bread and fruit and veg from all the small shops.
    ‘I don’t know how you can stand living over there,’ her mother sometimes said. ‘You might as well be living in India. All those people – none of them speak English. It’s not right. I remember when Handsworth used to be a nice area.’ And ‘Ooh, no,’ she’d say with a shudder if Joanne suggested her visiting them. ‘I’m not going over there.’
    So she’d only ever been once, just so that she could set eyes on their house. Dad had been a few more times, was more ‘live and let live’ about people who were different. And, Joanne knew, he missed her and was