‘Man, I know what you’re saying. And I appreciate it. But you don’t know – the worst thing, man, the worst thing – is that they can make you so fucking scared. Scared, man. Scared.’

‘I don’t know if I was ever any kind of father to him – any kind of real father – and now he’s in jail and it ain’t his fault and I don’t even know how I’m going to get him out. I’m sure one hell of a man.’

Entire families appear to have been squatting there for weeks, with all their earthly possessions piled around them – not, Sharon notes, that these possessions tower very high.

It is absolutely hideous, so loud, so blatant, so impervious and cruel, that facing it causes mere vulgarity to seem an irrecoverable state of grace.

She is confronting the age of sorrow. She is confronting torment.