‘And then she goes to that shithole school on the corner and the manners and good ways we’ve taught her make her an easy target because we should have taught her to be scum like the rest just to fit in. It’s easy being scum because they don’t have any ambitions or expectations, but we do. It’s just our bank account says otherwise. Our bank account says we’re as useless and hopeless as the filth we live beside. Ambition is a disease and money the only cure. With that money, we’re better people. With that money, she gets to live the life she deserves.’19

‘How do you put that kind of money into the bank without people noticing?’

‘We buy everything in cash.’

‘What, for ever? A house? School fees? Are you serious?’

‘I don’t know.’ She shrugged. ‘Yeah.’

‘We’d have to deposit it in dribs and drabs. Open up a few bank accounts.’

She squeezed his hands and he squeezed back.

‘We need to go,’ she said.

She got her phone from the living room windowsill and was putting it in her jacket pocket when the nightmare image of men in a van tracing her calls stopped her dead. She looked around the room and focused on the couch. The image hit again and she switched off the phone and set it under the middle seat and looked out the window. Nothing. Just wind, darkness.

Under the dull ochre wash of the street lights, they loaded their bags and the case into the loadspace of his old Transit van, the case wrapped in a bedsheet and stowed in the furthest corner. She got in the front with the baby while he went back to the house to lock up. A train thundered by over the high brick wall at the end of the street, a wall daubed in graffiti and topped with flakes of bottle glass embedded in cement.

A new world was unfolding in her skull. A world of immunity and choice. The dead weight of frustration and anxiety and pessimism rising, dispersing. Money worries that had run on for years now seemed trivial, easily solvable, hardly worth considering. Their baby’s future now looked a colourful and bright place with a surfeit of opportunity and choice. For the first time, she felt weightless. She tried not to think of the infernal machinations that must have gone into getting the money into the case, the intended transactions, the logistical planning, the underground 20meetings, the earnest promises, the smiling lies. She needed to focus on now, on their lives. Lives augmented.