Hannah’s parents had run a photo business in Liverpool. Photo business? Yep, that’s right. It wasn’t a particularly big earner; to be precise, it didn’t earn anything at all anymore, and Hannah’s father made a little money working by the hour for the Liverpool Jewish council. At least they lived in a house. Well, sort of a house. A cramped, drafty thing. Two stories, downstairs the shopfront and the kitchen, upstairs two little rooms, creaky stairs, tiny dark backyard.

At least they had enough food to eat. Well, sort of food. Hannah didn’t care that it consisted almost every day of some form of potatoes or noodles with tomato sauce. She was a kid and loved noodles with tomato sauce, and like most kids she appreciated the predictability. Hannah’s parents were very friendly, and so, until the day she would henceforth always think of simply as “THE day,” her childhood was perfect. That was not a given. Not a week went by when a new kiddie porn ring wasn’t exposed, the corpses of children weren’t found in flower beds or freezers, badly abused children weren’t discovered. Children were the future, it was said. Not many believed in the future anymore. QED.

Hannah had no idea what future meant, but in this term which was meaningless to her, she would always experience pain whenever she thought of “THE day,” pain as if someone had stuck a hand into her body and ripped out an organ.

“THE day” consisted of what you could call a confluence of unlucky coincidences.

Hannah’s father had taken her to a football match. Like all the male residents of the city, he was crazy about football. Football was an important means of mass distraction to stave off revolution. Almost as important as conspiracy theory websites, filter bubbles, Nazi sites, falsified reports, manipulation, porno sites, and the hobby of flooding the internet with stupid faces and shitty commentary. Alongside all of that, it was football that kept the mass of socially weak, the current and future losers, the second generation of educationally deprived, and the older generation, the rejects of capitalism, from hanging themselves or looting or thinking. The stadium had cost a few hundred million. It floated above the sagging roofs of Norris Green like the wing of a guardian angel. The football club donated tickets to little gangsters or let them practice there some afternoons to keep them off the streets. In a very manly but also authentic display, players hugged kiddie murderers for photos. How sweet. Everyone in the entire country was crazy about football. They could be junkies, homeless, sick; as long as their club won, the world was just fine. The euphoria lasted for a week. Until the next match.