I had stopped mistaking it for wisdom sometime around month three.

Normality in Hellsborough was either resistance or camouflage, and the geraniums didn't know which they were.

Thomas Calver stopped sitting down in his own flat eight days ago, which is a strategy rather than a protest. Hellsborough residential accommodation learns its occupants — the flat had already corrected the damp patch he'd documented professionally in week one, revising the plaster to match his assessment criteria — and once it has learned your shape the contract classification shifts. Page fourteen, subsection (c): the box marked status: pending has been ticked. Thomas was not present for that meeting.

Tom Calver's housing assessments have taught him to categorise what he finds, but Hellsborough keeps producing categories he can't file — like the handprint in the damp of a back bedroom wall, warm-soft, five fingers spread, pressing from the other side, and slightly larger by the time he left than when he'd entered. His notebook says "non-standard damp pattern." The wobble in the pen line says something else.

Ellen Price described the damp handprint on the wall of the property not as water damage but as pressure: something that used to be a Resident, pressing outward from the other side, the plaster being the thinnest point. Thomas Calver — the council assessor sent to document Sunderlands' footpath deviations — sat down across from her and looked at the sketch on the table, which was not a sketch of a damp pattern but of a person inside the wall, pressing to get back into the room they used to live in.