I’m not a slag. It’s just that there’s not a lot to do round here. You can walk through Bank Top in fifteen minutes, a small dull village hunching along the ridge of a hill and sprawling down the sides in two big estates. From the highest point it affords panoramic views of industrial Lancashire; factories, warehouses and rows and rows of red-brick terraces, and on the horizon the faint grey-green line of millstone-grit moorland. To the south there’s the television mast where a German plane is supposed to have come down fifty years ago; to the north there’s Blackpool Tower, just visible on the skyline. I used to spend hours squinting to see the illuminations, but they’re too far away.
There are three types of housing on Bank Top. Victorian two-up two-downs line the main street, while on the fringes of the village it’s all modern boxes with garages and uniform front lawns. None of the people in these Prestige Developments talk to each other but you can hear everything your neighbour’s doing through the cardboard walls, apparently. Beneath these shiny new houses the foundations shift and grumble over defunct mine shafts – the last pit closed forty years ago – making Bank Top a sink village in every sense.
Then there’s the council estate, thirties semis, where dogs roam free and shit on the pavement with impunity. This is where we live. We bought our house in the boom of ’84 (also Divorce Year) and my mother celebrated by having a Georgian front door fitted and mock leaded lights on the windows. The front box room, which is mine and minute, looks out over the Working Men’s Club car park; some rum things go on there of a Saturday night, I can tell you.
In the centre of the village is the church and the community centre and a rubbish row of shops, a newsagent, a launderette, a Spar. Two pubs, more or less opposite each other, battle it out but one is for old people and families off the new estates with quiz nites and chicken tikka pizza, and the other’s rough as rats. I don’t go in either. For kick I get the bus to Wigan from a bus shelter smelling of pee. Fuck off, it says over the lintel, so I generally do.
I don’t belong in this village at all. Actually, I don’t know where I do belong. Another planet, maybe.

So there I was, on my back, entirely naked and rigid as a corpse, when Nan totters into my bedroom and says to Paul, ‘A horse has just gone past the landing window.’
‘ Which way did it go?’ asks Paul.
‘ Which way did it go?’ I said later. ‘What are you, mad as her?’
‘ I was only trying to make conversation.’ He shrugged his bony shoulders under the sheets. ‘What’s up with her? Is she mental, like?’
‘No more than a lot of people,’ I said, a bit sharply. I get defensive about her, even though she is a bloody nuisance. ‘Some days she’s more with it than me. She’s just old. You might be like that when you’re old.’
‘ I’d shoot myself first.’
‘No you wouldn’t. That’s what everyone says, but they wouldn’t.’
Part of the problem in this house is hormones. There are too many undiluted women for one small ex-council house. Huge clouds of supercharged oestrogen drift about and react sending showers of sparks into the atmosphere; the air prickles with it. Nan hasn’t got any left, of course, although she hung onto hers longer than most (had my mum at forty-six! Didn’t realize people even had sex at that age), but I’ve got more than I know what to do with. Certainly more than my mother knows what to do with. She suspects I have tart DNA (passé on from her, presumably.) If she finds out I’ve been having sex she will kill me. Really.