Two minutes later Jerome and RiRi stepped out into the muggy air. They walked around the estate. He had grown up here, him and his mum and a string of men who either wanted him to call them dad or just wanted him to stay the fuck away so they could fuck his mum. A friend of his, Leonard, had told Jerome how his cousin had been molested by one of his mum’s new boyfriends, and after that the eleven-year-old Jerome had slept with a knife under his pillow and a razorblade in his pants. Fortunately, none of his mum’s friends had ever tried it on with him but one of them, a bug-eyed motherfucker, literally, called John Johnson had murdered her, strangling her in her bed while the fifteen-year-old Jerome listened to the new Beyoncé album through his headphones in the next room.

In an alternative, fairy-tale version of Jerome’s tale, he had an aunt who lived out in the country and she would take him in and teach him about being a respectable citizen and engender him with a love of healthy pursuits and he’d end up at Oxford or some shit. But no, his Aunt Jacqui, who wasn’t really his aunt but someone his mum had gone to school with, lived in the flat next door, in the same stinking tower block, and she’d taken him in. On his second night with her he’d realized that she wanted to take him in literally and, although he’d already been with plenty of girls at school by this point, he soon understood what it meant to receive the love of a good woman – or rather, a woman who was really good at blow jobs.

At sixteen, when he left school, she kicked him out after she discovered he’d pawned an engagement ring she’d been given when she was eighteen, that she’d somehow managed to hold onto all these years. He’d moved into another flat in the block opposite.

He missed his mum sometimes, and even occasionally missed Jacqui and her pierced tongue, but since those days he had started to make something of himself. He was an entrepreneur. He liked watching The Apprentice and Dragons’ Den, all those shows about business, even though most of the people on those shows were sad fucking losers. Because Jerome had figured out long ago that there were only three ways to get rich quick in this city: be shit hot at music or football, become a banker or turn to crime. He couldn’t sing, was a mediocre football player and even though he’d always been the brightest kid in his class, his education wouldn’t get him a job in the tatty branch of Barclays round the corner, let alone in the City. Which left crime.