Free Resolution Way by Carl Neville Page A

and time and persona, losses restored, the dead sprung to life, the past intensely and vividly present. Then sleep and muffled dreams backed by her son’s soft and continuous moaning.
    She hates to ask Penny to keep Lee for an extra hour or so but she is keen to talk about Vernon and surprised to find herself so keen to do so.
    This email message from Alex Hargreaves has come out of the blue, as so much does. Another sense of obligation, now, to the past, to those who have passed, remnants of what remains.
    Still, it might help to take her mind of things, to remember something, if not exactly positive, then at least a period of optimism, when they were young and radical and filled with ideas about how they would change the world, hadn’t yet run up against the sheer, monolithic weight of money and power. She feels that if she was ever angry with Vernon that all that has evaporated over the years. At the time she believed they had answers to everything, back when they thought that truth made a difference or that it only took someone to point out how unfair it all was for those who benefitted to step aside abashed.
    Pure innocence really, to believe that love and brotherhood would somehow sweep all the old world away. Will her daughter have any such moment of innocence now?
    No, and perhaps that’s for the best. Of course, her daughter will be poorer than she was, has already grown up in a tougher area, Deptford, as opposed to her own childhood in white and leafy Wimbledon. Some of her friends from back then, from school, who she doesn’t have much to do with anymore except for the occasional obligatory likes or positive comments about kids or domestic triumphs on Facebook, occasionally console her for having ended up in SE8 and she knows she could never explain to them that she wanted to live here, chose it, for her, for her kids. They see it as just one more tragic outcome in her broadly tragic life.
    And now they are getting kicked out anyway. Paula Adonor will be the last to leave, her situation a little more complicated than the rest, her resources, her grasp of how the system works a little better than most, and so she has forced them to find her something suitable before she ups and leaves her home of nearly twenty years. How she will cope once Penny isn’t around she has no idea. She can ask Sissy, Joolzy, but they have their own lives and once they are relocated, if Paula Adonor can’t find another job, then Louise will have to do the full time caring.
    Swish new riverside homes. Up and coming. Breath-taking river views. A short hop across the Thames to Canary Wharf. Ironic, really, she remembers Vernon, Rob, Howard hanging on in Hulme Crescent twenty plus years back now, shifting along block by block as the place got demolished. Here she is doing much the same.
    These thoughts are occupying her as she cuts out of the DLR and down Deptford Broadway to Greenwich High Road. She spots Alex Hargreaves immediately, his shining face and neat, Edwardian haircut, both slick and severe, and extends her hand.
    Coming back from the doctor, just a check-up, everything fine, Paula Adonor is tired, dead tired, eyes raw, limbs leaden. She doubts she will make it to the gym today for her spinning class. An early night is what she needs. As she crosses the courtyard to the block she nods a greeting to the girl from Wardens who is occupying a flat on the floor above, there to keep an eye out for squatters, people trying to break in and strip flats of anything saleable, report problems. A nice girl, ex-sociology student who understands her role in helping USG force everyone out of the estate, but needs a place to live as she does her internship at Greencorp. No mum and dad to bankroll her, rent sky high. I am sorry, the girl said when Paula and Penny questioned her one day on the stairs, struggling down with Lee as she came trotting up, the lift deliberately decommissioned to make their lives more difficult. I am sorry; I just