Jackson Akers returned to his flat on the Beacon Estate in Penrith. He’d been at a friend’s all night and he needed to sleep off the party. His normal routine consisted of fixing bikes during the day, for a modest income, and running errands at night, a more lucrative but risky trade. Sometimes the two overlapped. He gave little thought to either occupation, apart from the fact that he preferred fixing bikes. He’d been told at school, a long time ago, that he had a flair for taking stuff apart and putting it back together. He reckoned he got it from being locked in his room with radios, CD players, TVs and other hot kit, nicked by his dad and stored at their two-bedroom apartment in Wordsworth Towers. The same block of flats where he lived now.

At least he’d thought the bloke was his dad, until he never came home one day and his mum told him the truth. He was seven when he found out that his real father was in prison, with no possibility of parole until 2031. The man he’d thought was his dad, the man who’d locked him in the room with the stolen goods, beaten him, spat at him and generally treated him like shit, was some arsehole she’d shacked up with because she was lonely and he brought in cash.

He never saw that bitch no more.

They said at school that he was wilfully disruptive. They said he never showed a desire to learn. They said he was angry and violent. And they said he’d never amount to anything.

The thing was, though, that Jackson found it hard to see what school was all about. It seemed to him like you just got herded into a classroom, told stupid shit about stuff that didn’t matter, ordered to do shit that got you nowhere, and given a piece of paper saying you could add up or write an essay at the end of it. He never saw any essay about fixing bikes, nor any mathematical equation for staying alive on the streets at 3 a.m. School bore no resemblance whatsoever to the values and skills he needed to survive. And until it did, boys like him would keep turning down a different road and travelling their own way.

One of his favourite artists played from a Bluetooth speaker. It was drill and rap music: something else you didn’t learn in school. The language of kids on the street was unrepresented by the mainstream, and they had to express themselves any way they knew. The words – mainly banned on conventional digital outlets – were different to those used by ‘normal’ people, but that was the point. Those on the fringes of society, put there by those running that society, needed their own language to stay safe.