She said: “Because the lights don’t come back on till Mum gets in.”
They are on a prepayment meter. The key kind, that you top up at the shop.
Her mother is called Seren and she is thirty-one and she works two jobs, and the second one is a Thursday night shift at a packing warehouse out by the motorway that pays thirteen dollars twenty an hour.
The money lands in the account on a Friday morning.
So Thursday is the day the meter runs out. Every week. Not sometimes. Every single week, because the gap between the top-up and the pay is one day long and it has been one day long for years.
Thursday evening, in that flat, there is no light, no heating, and no television, from about half past five until her mother gets in at ten past eleven and puts the key in on the way home.
Five hours and forty minutes of a dark flat on the fourth floor of the Tannery.
And a ten-year-old sat down with a bus timetable, which I have seen, because she kept it, folded into eight, in the front pocket of her bag.
She worked out that the 42 does two full loops between six eighteen and ten past eleven. Two hours forty each. Five hours twenty, plus the walk.
