You see, when you win the Lottery, suddenly everybody wants something from you. Your family. Your friends. Your neighbours. The kid who lives somewhere near the top of Grace Tower and who’s used to whacking people in the face to get what he wants.

Grace Tower is its own ecosystem, to be honest.

I had nearly two decades to get to know it, and as far as I can tell it never changed in those years. I, the intrepid explorer, encountered the old ladies who live on the first floor, the ones who told me off when I tramped in too loudly but also gave me plasters when I got scraped. There were the dealers on the third floor, who smoked out on their balcony when they had some good stuff so everyone above them could get a whiff and maybe think about making a purchase. There was the dog on the west side who wouldn’t shut up at the weekends, and there were our next-door neighbours on the fifth floor who blared their TV until 11 p.m. on the dot.

And there was the angry boy on the eighth floor.

I’d always seen him around. Heard him too, yelling down the stairwells as soon as he was old enough to know that he shouldn’t; saw him stomping out on to the concrete outside and shouting at his friends and lighting up cigarettes when we were fourteen.

“That angry boy is out there again, Nicky,” Mum used to say, twitching at the net curtains. “Watch how you go.” And I would scuttle out of the front door of the tower to go to school, and I’d feel his eyes on me as I passed, his friends’ too, and I’d think, Please don’t say anything, please don’t say anything.

He went to a different school but I knew the type from my own. Like my classmates who also hung out in packs outside buildings, they were only ever a second or so from calling me some name or other, and not much further from getting violent.

The angry boy and his friends only ever stared, though. For years. It should have made it easier to pass them but it didn’t, it just raised my heart rate in an ever faster tick tick ticktickticktick because I knew they were a time bomb waiting to go off.

The first time he spoke to me was the worst possible time, in the most humiliating place he could have found me.

Town. Shopping centre. Sixteen years old. Alone, because my friends had left and I was wandering around killing time.

Instead I found myself in Boots, in the make-up section, with my head angled so my hair masked my face. They have samples, I learned that day. I hadn’t realized that. You can just walk into a Boots and pick up an item of make-up with a TEST sticker on it, and use it. And no one will stop you, because it’s allowed.

Peering into the tiny sliver of a mirror, I’d carefully drawn around my eyes with a kohl pencil. It was tougher than I thought it would be. The black kept smudging and I couldn’t match the two sides up. I managed though, and I took a step back so I could see my whole face.