I don’t know what kind of planet he lives on—can’t remember where Superman comes from now—but hey, like I’ve said before, he’s not an easy bloke to argue with, so in the end I gave it up. I don’t want him to stop coming (wouldn’t tell him that) and he could be right that I do want to tell you, though it beats me why I would. Or why you’d want to hear it.

Let me warn you right off that mine is not a good story, and I’ve got no skill as a writer, but I guess you’ve got that picture already.

So here goes: I already told you my mother’s a nutjob and that we lived with my grandparents until one croaked and the other got carted off to the whacky shack. Before that happened it was their job to keep me out of the hands of social services when my ma was away. Everyone knew Ma would go mental if she came back and found I was gone, and I promise you really don’t want my ma going mental. Where did she go when she was gone? Depends. Sometimes she was in the nick for not paying her council tax, or shoplifting, disturbing the peace, that sort of thing. Other times she was taken away to places I didn’t know anything about until I was older. BJ would turn up when he felt like it, give her a beating, then stuff her in his car and drive off. Sometimes we didn’t see her for weeks and when she came back she’d be in a right state, shaking and crying and needing a fix so bad we had to give it to her. (Shit is never difficult to get hold of on our estate.)

When she wasn’t in the nick or off doing stuff for BJ—what I really mean is when she was sober and not feeling shit-scared of the world or mouthing off at it the way she sometimes did (complex woman, my ma)—she’d have a go at taking care of me. She’d buy me clothes, cook my food (terrible cook), and tell me to get on with my homework like she even knew what it was. My mates all thought she was weird, but they kind of respected her because she never got in my face about stuff and would let them treat our house like it was theirs.