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glad to get out of the home. She and Dad had always got along all right.
    Joanne and Dave had moved there because of his job. The garage had been his dad’s business, on the borders of Hockley. She found she liked Handsworth: the old Victorian buildings, the park with its boating lake, and the sari shops displaying bright-coloured garments shot through with gold thread and scattered with sequins. And she liked the grocers crammed with oranges and mangoes, tomatoes and coriander and things she’d never heard of before, all spilling out over the pavement in their boxes, and music blaring out and the general bustle of things.
    She also relished the fact that although the road was teeming with people, they would leave her alone, were not interested in her. In Kings Heath she was always bumping into people who’d known her since she was knee-high and seemed to have an opinion about anything she was doing. She felt freer living on the other side of town.
    With difficulty she pushed the buggy through the narrow entrance to a grocer’s.
    ‘Leave here,’ the shop owner, a neat middle-aged Muslim man in a little white hat, pointed to a space by the till. Joanne was a regular customer and there was no room to push the buggy round the shop. His wife, who could just see out above the counter’s piled slope of confectionery, looked benignly at Amy.
    ‘Hello, pretty girl,’ she said.
    Joanne already had bananas and spinach in her basket. Going to the back of the shop with its spicy smells, she added milk, a tin of baked beans and fish fingers from the little freezer cabinet, before going to pay.
    ‘Lovely weather,’ the woman said, adding, ‘See you!’ cheerfully as Joanne left.
    Sooky had told her that she was not Muslim, as Joanne had assumed, but Sikh. She thought about Sooky as she ambled back along the Soho Road, with Amy busy with half a banana and looking round at all the sights. There had not been much more time for chat, but after Tess left the kitchen, Joanne had asked Sooky what it was like living back at home again.
    ‘Oh, not too bad,’ she had said. ‘It’s quite nice for Priya. My sister-in-law’s not very easy . . .’ The side of her mouth twisted down for a second. ‘I’m in disgrace, you see.’
    ‘What about your mom?’ Joanne asked.
    Sooky hesitated. ‘She doesn’t speak to me.’
    ‘What – never?’
    Sooky lowered her head, and for just a moment there was something other than the tough, mischievous young woman.
    ‘Not once. Not since I first came home.’ She swallowed hard, then looked up again. ‘It’s upset her badly. But I expect she’ll get over it, eventually.’
    When she reached home, Joanne realized that for the first time in months she had not spent the walk home thinking about Dave, and getting more and more uptight with each step she took closer to the door.
    Margaret had been allowed home from hospital on the Sunday. Until then they’d been back and forth visiting. Joanne had been once with her dad, pleased that Karen couldn’t make it. Dad spoke more when no one else was there. Then on Saturday they’d all gone together.
    ‘It’s hard to get any sense out of anyone about what’s going on,’ Fred complained as they drove to Selly Oak.
    ‘No, it’s not – they told you,’ Karen said. She picked a fleck of something off her smart navy trousers. ‘They’ve put her back on the Valium again. She’s to come off it slowly, instead of rushing it.’
    ‘Have they told her how to do it?’ Joanne asked. She’d left Amy with Dave. It would be all right, surely it would? For a moment she thought of Sooky: that she had been frightened for her daughter. But Dave never seemed to get angry with Amy – only her. And things were better now, weren’t they? She tried not to think about it.
    ‘They said to go to the doctor when she gets out,’ Fred said. ‘But what I want to know is, if it’s the same doctor who has been giving her the stuff all this time, what bloody use is