Probably due to her chronic fatigue, she had the sensation that nothing was real. The family lived in one of the seven residential towers that looked out over nothing. At her job, she tended to the consequences of boredom in the area. Young men with gunshot and knife wounds, boys whose hands had been blown off by fireworks or whose eyes had been damaged as a result of some dare. Men who’d stuck their genitals in vacuums and doorjambs, in animals or freezer compartments. Men who’d inserted bottles and fruit, drills and hammers into their assholes. Men who’d drunkenly fallen over, run into walls, or plunged into water. Men who’d sawn into a body part or been pinned beneath cars. Children who’d been fucked or beaten half to death or worse. And women after aborted suicide attempts. With half their faces blown off, quadriplegic after jumping from an inadequate height, organs burned after drinking drain cleaner. Sometimes when she came home from the night shift to the apartment she didn’t even recognize the three people waiting there. Karen’s mother didn’t have the time to imagine how her life might look. She just wanted to sleep. And forget.

Everything

Is what

HANNAH

Wanted to do.

She had survived her mother. She would manage the rest. Possibly. Hannah had been born at the seaside. Well. Sort of seaside. In Liverpool, we already mentioned it, proud city of longshoremen, blah, blah, blah. Automated cranes had long since displaced the longshoremen, business was negligible anyway; after the textile and steel mills disappeared people hadn’t had work in years and drank, children founded gangs. That’s what the city had become known for in the interim: for being an assembly line for armed child criminals who murdered each other in order to bring a bit of intrigue into their boring lives among radical right-wing, nationalist, or just helpless parents. Weapons are infernal things. Though they make it easier to realize the fundamental human desire to eliminate other people. It used to be that children worked as mules for drug kingpins. They flew to Holland or Spain on easyJet, bought drugs, smuggled them in container ships. But. At some point the children realized the only thing keeping the big dealers on top were the weapons. So they got their own—you could get a nice 8mm Luger for just £350. Small fully automatic machine guns cost £500. Whoa, fully automatic machine guns. A dream come true. The children began to shoot people. First the big dealers, then the rest of the adult criminals. Then they terrorized their neighborhoods, shot kids from other gangs, and finally themselves.

Hannah’s parents were Indian Jews, the third generation in England. People loved to ask, What, there are Jews in India? when they felt the need to have a conversation to demonstrate their openness, because people loved to show openness in England—at least they did before the situation escalated.