She looked at her watch, a gold Rolex that had been a birthday present from her loving parents. If anything, it had been a bribe. Her mum and dad had tried to make her feel they loved her and cared about her, but it was a crock of shit. As long as her son was in her mum and dad’s care, she could do what she liked and, in return for her son, her old man would happily bankroll her and her lifestyle. Jake was her parents’ second chance at parenthood. He was the son they could never have, the golden boy, the heir apparent. Her dad had forced her to have her baby. The big Catholic, who saw abortion as tantamount to murder – and who would know more about that than her dad? But what they couldn’t do was make her settle down, embrace her role as mother and pretend that she had learnt her lesson.

She closed her eyes tightly; she mustn’t think about any of that now. It was pointless. She didn’t want to look after her little lad anyway, so why did she let it bother her so much? She had handed him over to them willingly, glad to have someone else take the responsibility for her. It had been a fair exchange.

It was just after eleven, and she wasn’t going to waste the rest of the night thinking about things she couldn’t change. Flagging down a black cab, she climbed inside its warmth eagerly, making herself comfortable on the leather seat as she travelled back to East London, glad that the cab driver wasn’t the usual fucking chatterbox. There was nothing worse than a cab driver with a loose mouth and too many stories to tell. It was irritating, especially when they tried to tell her how they knew all the Faces in London, particularly her dad. She saw the way they watched her in the mirror and knew they couldn’t understand for the life of them how her father could let her live the way she did.

She jumped out of the cab at a pub she frequented in Upney, pleased that she had made it there in such good time. All she wanted to do was score and, if nothing interesting was going on, she would go home and sleep.