Karen’s big brother had pumped iron like all his friends. They’d done pull-ups at the playground until the loser passed out. They threw rocks and did sit-ups in such numbers that it meant they couldn’t move the next day. Now, though, he had nothing he wanted to do with this perfectly defined body. To go to a club in Manchester on the weekend you needed money. Lots of money if you wanted to take girls with you. Where would you get that kind of money? You could deal drugs, but that didn’t bring in much because practically every second person was a dealer. Stickups? What were you supposed to steal? The cash from a charity shop? A system was really finished if it couldn’t even offer its criminals a future. Karen’s brother was pissed off. He got no goddamned respect for his muscles and his physical presence. Everyone around him was a loser just like him. Children who sat bored on the metal fences whistling at girls. Who exposed their Calvin Klein underwear with their low-slung jeans and who greeted each other with complicated handshakes.

Karen’s brother first became acquainted with adults when his friends got into a scrap with a Muslim gang. At first they fought each other, then they bled together, that was the homoerotic code among young men who could no longer even go off to war to get more physically intimate and cleanse themselves of all things feminine. They got to talking to the Muslims and it turned out that the Muslims were more powerful and more lucid. They didn’t have so many questions like Karen’s brother and his peers. They were simply the coolest gangsters. Karen’s brother grew a beard. And finally had a plan for his life.

Which

KAREN

Didn’t care about at all. She barely slept, ate next to nothing. She stopped reading. She didn’t know who was at war with whom, which injustice was taking place where; she wasn’t informed about the Nazis’ activities; she had no idea of what the new, hot shit was that had just been invented and would change everyone’s life for the better. (It was neuromorphic chips, which in a best-case scenario can be implanted and replace parts of the retina. But soon enough they’d be used for biometric face recognition and so forth.)

Karen wasn’t interested.