Jason nodded and laughed at his brother. ‘He’s got a point, fam. Come on, let’s smoke sometin’.’ He spoke like a Caribbean Rasta star; it was the language of the street. They all did it, even Jackson. Even though he didn’t have black skin and he wasn’t from Jamaica. He had no idea where or when he’d begun to talk like that: it was around age ten, he guessed. He just did it because everyone did. They all looked up to the years above them in school and the vocab developed from there. It drove the teachers nuts, and they kept correcting their linguistic mistakes, to no avail.

‘Turn that music up,’ Jason ordered.

Jackson did so and went back to the bike he was working on. His palms were sweaty and his hands shook. He swallowed hard and turned the bike slightly so he had them all in his peripheral vision. He didn’t want to be caught off guard. For now, there was nothing more he could do. He’d defused a situation and he had to roll with it. He had to stay sober and alert.

Two of the men began undressing the sleeping girl and she stirred. They didn’t stop. Jackson went to the fridge in the corner for beers and tried to drown out the noises coming from the girl as she was toyed with by the two men. It was commonplace. Sometimes the girls resisted, sometimes they didn’t. This time, she wasn’t interested in sex, but that was of no concern to the two men on top of her. A third helped hold her. The other girls goaded them on, nervous shock spilling over into bravado. But all of them moved in slow motion, fried by drugs. Even their language was dopey.

It didn’t take long for Adam to lie down with two of the girls, stoned, and fall asleep. The girl who’d been degraded was toking on joints like they were going out of business, and was soon reduced to an unconscious mess. But she hadn’t tried to leave. She was resigned to her existence within this family, and that was probably the saddest realisation for Jackson.

He finished working on the Carrera and went to wash his hands. He walked past a coil of rope that he used to tie bikes up on his wall, and stopped. He went closer and examined the black twine. The weave and texture of the fibres looked just like the ones he’d been given by the coppers. Holy shit.

He calmed his nerves and pushed away panic. It gave him an idea.

‘I think you should really get your hands dirty, Guns,’ Jason said. Everybody else was high or unconscious. Jackson knew that Jason using his nickname meant he was forgiven for now.

‘You need somebody clean, man. They’d be on me, you know that. You need someone untouchable.’