Begin at the beginning, they say, and work your way through to the end. What they never tell you, those smart arses, is where the beginning actually is.

Time: 1976. Simon at Yvonne's door. Kofi answers.
KNOCK KNOCK. WHO'S THERE? IT'S A MAN MAM. WHAT'S HE WANT?
YOU MAM, HE WANTS YOU

She's wearing dark red velvet trousers with gold stars, sleek as skin. A white cheesecloth shirt shows her small breasts, and he can plainly see the neat pink nipples, although he looks away. He's wearing the coat. The hatches are not yet battened down, so Yvonne's next door neighbours come out to have a look. Olive on one side, fat Danny on the other. Olive pretends she's sweeping the front, and flaps her immaculate doormat against the balcony wall. Danny, long past respectable, stares without shame. The centre of his body is three times as wide as his shoulders so that his belly swings like a clown's hoop over his fat little feet. He wears a tight vest, [tight clothes are all he has], and the slopes of his flesh are sharply outlined, fold on fold. Tomorrow he's off to Manchester Royal to have his teeth wired up, so today he eats what he likes. He smiles at Simon.
- I can eat what I like, he says a Mars bar in each hand.
Olive is wearing a bin bag overall and green rubber gloves. This is not quite what Simon had imagined.

Yvonne ignores Olive and Danny.
- Yes?
The rain's stopped for a minute and the sun's in her eyes.

Place: Charles Barry Crescent, Hulme. Sweet curve of balconies, huge white ships drifting on a sea of grass. The kitchens and walkways face south. The plan was that morning light would fall onto the housewives as they swept and chatted; and onto the children as they ran down the stairs to play. In one of the architect’s drawings a woman leans over the balcony, her blond hair flying as she waves at a boy and girl skipping under the full-leafed trees below. Another holds an infant in a bright doorway. She stretches out her arm, points: look! Raises the child, shows him his inheritance, this radiant city.

Dialogue:
- Are you Yvonne?
She puts a hand over her eyes, to see him better. A long narrow hand, he notices, bird bones with bitten fingernails
- Who's asking?
- I'm Simon Mallon. John sent me. He said you needed help with the rubbish campaign.
- You'd better come in.

The Journey: To get here, he walks across half a mile of dogcrap grass, then up steps crowded with bin bags. Black bellies split, they ooze their half-digested guts down the stairwell. He catches himself sniffing guiltily, eagerly, as if smelling his own shit.
- You'd better come in.
He steps over the threshold, crosses an invisible line into the maisonette, and notes the moment with a particular thrill.

Archaeology: There was once a farm here. The map in the Central library has that one black word: Newhulme, and beside it a tiny square mark floating in papery space. Under the cobbles and brickdust, below the rebuild and demolition strata, are dead fields and hedges, goosebones, sheepbones, farmer and farmer's wife bones: skulls, knuckles, tibia and fibia. She sends the child to watch television and they sit in the kitchen. Olive and Danny are still out there, flapping and chomping, beyond the edges of the window frame.
- Go on, then.
- What?
- You said you'd come to help. What with?
- Ah. Well, John at community action said you'd signed a petition about the rubbish, you wrote your name and address on it, so we thought . . . we don't want to impose our views on the tenants, but, on the other hand, if there was any way we can help with . . . He is losing her interest, babbling away like a fool.
- Perhaps there might be some kind of meeting, I could ...
As he talks, the coat behind him, resting in the corner where he'd left it, bends forward at the neck, and slowly slides down the wall like a well behaved drunk.
- Where d'you pick him up?
- Sorry?
- Your mate over there.
- Who?
- The coat. The inside out sheep. It’s fell over.
- Oh god, I know it’s stupid. I got it in London
- Carnaby Street?
- Well, that kind of thing. Portobello Road actually.
- Is that where you come from?
- Where, London?
- Yes.
- Well, sometimes, although Gloucestershire actually, I used to go between places ...
Hard to explain his childhood, two houses, his mother in one, his father in the other, not separated, nothing so crude. No darling, Daddy and I get on fine. Bloody bourgeois hypocrisy.
The white Afghan coat was one of those first year sod everything extravagances, completely naff now he sees it in this little room - Sorry, do you want me to pick it up?
- No, leave it, it’s like a bloody big dog guarding the door. I like it. I bet it’s heavy on you though. D’you want a fag?
She holds out the packet to him across the table, eyebrows raised, sardonic but smiling, and he takes one, smiling back. The heating is on full blast and the windows are steaming over. They talk more about the petition, how to get the other tenants to do something, the state of the place. She gets up to make a cup of tea and he leans back in his chair, looking out at the view over the curved space to the back of the other block. He loves it all, the hopeless view, these hard chairs, the scuffed,
pictureless walls.
- D'you want sugar?
- Two please.
She stirs it for him, as she's used to doing for Kofi, a gesture that neither of them notices.
- Thanks.
- Do you think he wants a cup?
She nods towards the coat which is on the floor now, arms folded across its lap, and he laughs. This is the other thing. This way of talking to you as if you were a human being instead of a machine. People are in touch with things more here, he thinks to himself. There's him coming in like a bureaucrat, and here she is making tea, and joking about the bloody coat. There's more heart to this kind of language, he thinks, none of that polite bullshit. Smoke slowly fills the small space over their heads.

Her point of view: Can you fancy a coat? From that first sight on the doorstep, she wants to touch it, to get a proper grip, inside and out. Just having it in the room makes things different. I opened the door and there it was. This is your life, Yvonne. Before and after the coat.

A hidden agenda: In one of the pockets, next to the Golden Virginia tin, and the A-Z, is Simon's other guidebook: The Condition of the Working Class in England, by Friedrich Engels.

History: Friedrich was scornful of many of the others: visitors, urban tourists, dilettantes. Most do-gooders were a particular waste of time, he ranted to Mary, writing their huge and useless reports, which gathered dust on government shelves. They came, they moaned, they mourned for the poor, the unemployed, disease, the moral decline. And then off they went to sit down at the dinner table of some factory master, my dear Mr Greg, my dear Mrs Gaskell, will you take soup, beef, cake. None of them truly crossed the line as he had into those terrible regions where working men lived for all of their lives. That deep inner place, the warrens and calamitous hutches where he had been. He was a seeker not just of facts, but of reasons, fundaments. Beneath that chaotic surface there were intricate human mechanisms that he planned to lay bare.

There must have been one moment of doubt, surely, sitting at his desk, in the tiny bedroom in Dial street, his careful notebook beside him. An afternoon perhaps, late, the light already fading, his anger burning steadily, yet contained like the small flames in the grate. A moment when he could not find a way through. He got up, agitated, fists clenched in frustration, glared about the room in which he could hardly move, his and Mary’s bed almost filling the rest of the space. And she, reading below, caught the creak of the floorboard, a sound she knew well, looked up for a moment, then lowered her head to the book again. Friedrich gazed down at his own words and instead of the plain and obvious tower that he had hoped he was building, suddenly saw only the heart of a Babel, undecipherable, ruinous. Ach! He threw down the pen.

What Mary did not do: She did not get up out of her chair by the fire when he came into the room, his hair sticking up in spikes, his face as pale as ashes. She did not go over to the sink and fill a kettle, nor did she get out a jar of biscuits, which she had baked in the difficult but interestingly old bread oven that morning. She had not blackleaded the oven before he was awake, nor donkey stoned the step, nor carefully and tenderly smoothed down his jacket, after picking it up from where he had thrown it down. She did not think to herself now or ever, that perhaps such a clever man might tire of her, simple mill girl that she was. This is certain, but the rest is vague: her hands, the colour of her eyes, the exact angle of her head as she read on by the whickering fire until the day was almost gone. She sat for a while in the dark, then rose and lit the candles. So much unwritten, laid down in the dust.

Friedrich dashed out onto the street, hatless, despite the ubiquitous rain and strode off into an area he had been warned not to enter alone. After a while he slowed down from his furious striding and looked around to see where exactly he was. Whole blocks of interlocked terraces, back to back, yardless and waterless, built without plan except that of speed and profit, the side wall of one the front of another. There were pumps, privies and middens at intervals, side by side and stinking. He made notes, he wrote, he recorded. There are long narrow lanes, between which run contracted, crooked courts and passages, the entrances to which are so irregular that the explorer is caught in a blind alley at every few steps, or comes out where he least expects to, unless he knows every court and alley, exactly and separately. Friedrich the mapmaker, Friedrich the guide. He imagined the city laid out before him, its intricate spaces, both hidden and thrillingly open. His plan was to enter, not as the others did - overlooking, God-like, but from within. Sometimes, as they lay together in the dark, he said to Mary that it must be sweet to be nameless and faceless, without weight in the world. She could smell the smoke of foreign cities on his body: London; Bremen; Paris.

Simon knows that it is impossible to exactly retrace Friedrich's steps. There are no landmarks, no signs. Streets lie on streets, houses on houses. Even the old roads have gone, even their traces, the surface of the world scraped clean. How many layers down to the farmbones?
He's back the next day with his pockets full of leaflets. Yvonne wears a T-shirt now, but even so, he can see that she's wearing a bra. He tries not to think of her like that, but going along the balconies together, posting leaflets, he can't stop watching her, the tilt of her head as she turns to look out for him, her thin face, her long straight hair.
They go back for a tea break at her flat.
- Where's your little boy?
- Kofi, his name is. He's at my mam's. Thank god for a bit of peace. Do you want to come in here?
First the bra, now the best room. The more front she puts on, the closer he gets.

Each word is a turning, a possible path. Friedrich tramped for miles through the little streets, leant over Ducie Bridge, stared down into the filthy Irwell. ‘Oh working men’, he wrote ‘I saw you in your own homes, in your hateful and repulsive rookeries. I was an explorer, a traveller, yet I knew you intimately.’

What Yvonne thinks: That the coat has turned up just in time. Here it is at last, as if she'd been waiting years, flapping its hairy cuffs and its crack-creased elbows. Hiya girl, better late than never. She thinks that now there's just a small chance she might not have to be who she's turning into. That this coat is an opening, a possible door.

The balcony scene: They go up to the top floor. It's windy and they have to hold onto the leaflets, but still a few get loose. She runs after them, and he thinks how like a kid she is, the way she runs, the way she pulls silly faces. It starts raining again.
- We'd better go back, he says.
- Just a minute.
They've reached the far end of the block, and she stops to lean over.
- What?
- Look at the hills.
The cloud-thick light brings the Pennines into sharp relief, low dark walls round the edge of the city.
- I never knew about them until I came here.
He can't think of anything to say.
She shivers, Bloody hell, I'm freezing.
He moves around to get between her and the wind.
- We'd better go.
- No. Let's stop a minute longer, it's nice up here. Go on, give us a bit of your coat.
He opens it wide and she walks straight in.
She tells him to put it on the bed and lies down, naked, wrapping herself in its arms, burying her face into the fur, and he feels ludicrously jealous. He gets onto it with her, the two of them snuggling down like babies. Two little lambs, she says, suck suck.

What the coat promised Yvonne as she lay in its arms: Stick with me, girl and I'll get you out of this shit. It lied.

How the story went: Danny has his teeth wired, eats nothing but liquids and loses twelve stones in six months. As his body shrinks, his skin falls into flaps and loops. He makes his way down the stairs for the first time in a year, is caught interfering with a small girl in one of the useless garages, and is put away, where he gets even thinner. Olive after sweeping and dusting the whole of the balcony from one end to the other, starts on the garages which is how she finds Danny. Mary died and Karl wrote with only the briefest of sympathies, mixed in with his usual request for money. My poor Mary, how she did love me, eulogised Friedrich, stung and reproachful. This suggestion of insult almost caused a rift between the two comrades, but was soon patched up. The class struggle continued. Karl died.
Friedrich died.
They are awkward, of course. Legs and arms in the wrong positions. He's too rushed, she pretends to like it more than she actually does. The bedroom's like a den, an inner room, he thinks, with dirty windows.
- I've fastened them shut to keep Kofi from falling out. You can't clean the outsides.
- I don't mind.
- Well I do, I'm sick of the sight of them. I'd like to see out, if there was anything worth looking at.
- What would you like to see?
He has his eyes shut, traversing her body, feeling his way.
- I don't know, somewhere with a better view.
She runs her hands over the coat's skin.
- Afghan-land. How about that?
He laughs, and they start again, slower this time. Better.

How it ends: He moves in. Margaret Thatcher says we must do something about those inner cities. He moves out. The Berlin wall and then the crescents are pulled down on top of bricks, cobbles, and cowpats. A local committee thinks about putting up a plaque in the place where Friedrich and Mary lived, but can't decide on the exact spot. Yvonne doesn't go to Afghanistan. The coat stays, rotten but faithful.