He’d begun writing his own raps when he was fourteen years old. He never told anyone. Only recently, after a gig where he met the artist, had he been encouraged to send his work to studios. He didn’t receive many replies, but those he did advised him not to give up, and let him down gently by saying the time wasn’t right. The singer he’d met at that gig inspired him to keep going and he sent more and more work to agents and talent scouts every month. He worked on a rap in his head now, drumming his feet into the kitchen lino and tapping on his leg as his stomach rumbled.

He was hungry and looked in his fridge. There was half a tin of beans and some slices of bread. He toasted the bread, threw a wedge of Cheddar on top, heated it under the grill, topped it with the beans and slathered brown sauce over the whole lot. As he sat down to eat, he looked at his watch. He had a package to collect soon. He never asked what was inside them, but he didn’t need to; he had a pretty good idea. Everyone knew that if the plods came asking, no one knew nothing.

Say nuffin’…

The worst thing anybody could ever do was be a grass. Snitches died. Everyone knew that. They bled out in dark alleyways, with a home-made knife sticking out of their femoral artery. It was the quickest way to kill and if you were associated with a gang, you knew it. Man, it was going crazy at the minute, with sometimes fifteen stabbings reported up and down the country every weekend, from Manchester to London. There’d even been shootings. The newspapers were creaming themselves over the headlines, the stories making it to the front page every day, overshadowing even Brexit negotiations.

Fucking Brexit: who cared, man?