We moved in with my grandmother when I was six. My mother took her old childhood bedroom, at the front of the house. She told my grandmother, too, that she wanted the front room downstairs, which was never used, to be her private, “own” living room. My grandmother agreed. They bought a second television.

When my mother was in her living room, she was not to be disturbed, she used to say, unless it was “an emergency.” She would stand in the doorway and call out, “Right, that’s it. I’m shutting up shop now. I don’t want to hear from anybody unless it’s an absolute emergency.”

She did a lot of shouting up those stairs. If she was going to go to Asda after work: “Anyone need anything? Now is the last call!” she’d shout. “Speak now or forever hold your peace!”

“Going once!” she’d shout. “Going twice! No?”

I was often only half-awake. I didn’t, as a rule, have urgent requests for things from Asda. Sometimes, when she got no answer, my mother would call out hopelessly, and in a strange accent, “Speak-a to Charlie! ” I didn’t know what that was; I haven’t heard it since. I imagine now that it must have come from a seventies sitcom, or an old advert, perhaps: the catchphrase of a hapless and quailing Johnny Foreigner type. “Speak-a to Charlie! ” my mother cried out. She seemed to enjoy it. She went for it with the accent, which may have been Spanish, or Middle Eastern. My grandmother didn’t reply. She and I seemed to have reached the same conclusion: that this show ran regardless.

If she was going out in the evening, my mother would stand in the hallway and shout, “So you’re on your own, okay! You’re fending for yourselves tonight!”

What she meant by that wasn’t clear. We none of us ate together; we each took a tray up or through. But my mother was very brisk, very efficient. She liked to describe herself as “outward-facing”: a funny phrase, but accurate when I think about it.

She quickly found a job, for instance, after we moved. She was going to work with payrolls, at Cammell Laird. She arranged a school place for me. She even outfitted herself with a friend for her Friday-night drinks. That was Sally Graves. My mother remembered the name from school and looked her up and that was that. Sally was divorced, too. They went over to Liverpool on Fridays. They liked a pub quiz or bars with live music.

Occasionally my mother went for a drink with a man. Afterwards, on the phone to Sally, she would lament those evenings. Out in the hallway, she would sit on the bottom step with the phone. The calls could last an hour. They’d pick over Sally’s prospects, too. I remember stepping over my mother’s stretched-out leg to get up to my room.

“Oh yes, he’s sniffing around again, is he?” she might say. Or she might say, “Oh yes, he’s done his usual disappearing act, has he?”

“I think they’re all gay,” she said, one night, about the men in her office. “They are! They’re more interested in each other than they are in any women. Oh, and football. Maybe if I was a center forward, hey!”

“It’s how drunk they got and how drunk they’re going to get. Bor-ing,” she said.

She usually had a mug of Nescafé on the go: her red Nescafé mug would be on the telephone table or on the stairs next to her.

“Mind out!” she’d say as I stepped over her leg.

In the summer we went away.

I remember sitting outside cafés, under parasols, with my pint of Coke and my yellow visor hat. I remember hotel dining rooms, and the three of us moving hopefully towards “our” table. My grandmother would be beaming. Before dinner on the first night she used to lift her gin and tonic and tinkle the ice, as if she were on one of those TV travel shows they used to have back then.

“Well, cheers, everybody!” she’d say, and I’d lift my Coke, and my mother her Pernod.

“Cheers!” I’d say.

“Little apéritif,” my mother would say.

When I was fourteen, we went to Dubrovnik. If we were told about that city’s recent history, then I didn’t take it in. Would the travel agent have talked about that? Or the rep? I wasn’t completely ignorant—I’d read a lot about World War Two⁠—but I knew nothing about after the war; nothing about communism, or the Cold War, or Yugoslavia, or Tito. Nothing about the civil war.

After the coach from the airport dropped us at our hotel, my mother had to join a queue at reception to check in. My grandmother went in too, to use the ladies’. I stayed outside with our two suitcases and my rucksack. I put my sunglasses on for the first time, and found my reflection in the brown-tinted glass sliding doors of the hotel.

There were other people waiting: children running about; mothers minding the bags. We stood in the sunshine in our traveling clothes. At the front of the hotel there were thorny shrubs with pink flowers in flower beds spread with wood chips. There was a waiting white minicab. I remember one little boy coming back excitedly from a cedar copse he’d been exploring on the other side of the car park. He had his hands full of colorful crumpled banknotes and seemed excited to show his mum. She, in turn, seemed interested, at first; she looked closer, lifted her sunglasses. Then came revulsion.

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” she said.

“Oh Christ, get away,” she said. “Bin. Bin. Bin. Where’s a bin? Put them in the bin, now.”

The boy flinched. He ran to the bin, then walked back, head down. He was passed bunch after bunch of wet wipes from his mother’s bag, thick clumps of wet wipes, pulled from a tub, then told to go and put them in the bin—he did, again running—then was told not to touch anything, not to come near her, not to touch his face, not to do anything, until they’d got to the room and he’d washed his hands properly. Crying now, he stood a little way away from her, with his hands loosely clenched and held out from his sides.

“Why don’t you think?” his mother said. “Why don’t you look? Why don’t you look before picking things up?”

At the welcome meeting that night the rep mentioned that the currency had recently switched. What the boy had found, I imagined, must have been the old, worthless money. Less than worthless.

We’d been there for a week when my mother remarked, over lunch, on the fact that all of the hotel maids, and the waitresses in the hotel, and some of the women we saw in town, too, working in those cafés, were wearing the same distinctive style of shoe. These were lace-up fabric boots, with a low wedge heel and an open toe. They were either navy blue or white.

“Oh yes,” said my grandmother. “Yes, I’ve noticed that, you’re right.”

Alive to the phenomenon now, in the following days we all three of us were on the lookout. We discerned that the cleaners’ were blue and the waitresses’ white. It became a daily thing. Each of us, I think, felt a little charge when we saw another pair in the wild, so to speak. If we went to a new café and saw that this waitress too was wearing the shoes, then looks were exchanged.

“They must be part of a uniform,” my mother said. “Strange that everybody wears them, though …”

“Well, hm … like nurses’ shoes maybe,” she said.

“They’re unusual, aren’t they?” my grandmother said.

There was some talk of asking the rep.

“She must know,” my grandmother said.

Before that could happen, though, one morning, on our walk down to the beach, through the narrow, cobbled streets of the old town, one of us—was it me?—spotted a shop that was selling the shoes: not a souvenir shop, although there were the usual rattling carousels of key rings and postcards outside, but a shop selling uniforms. Just inside the deep, arched doorway there were dozens of these shoes, hanging from a rail, tied on by their laces.

“Ooh,” said my grandmother.

My mother, too, was shyly interested. They had the blue and the white; we looked at the blue. My grandmother lifted one pair, read the sticker on the sole, did the calculation; she had a special currency converter gadget.

“They aren’t dear,” she said.

Soon she’d persuaded my mother to try some on. My mother sat down on a leather stool while my grandmother and the shopkeeper looked on, smiling.