The thing the two mothers couldn’t control was the deep connection between all their children. Jocelyn and Noor adored each other, not once allowing their mothers’ rivalry to get in the way of their friendship. When their younger siblings were born within the same month, the girls believed it cemented something special. They were doting older sisters, Jocelyn the more maternal, Noor the more practical.

But what turned out to be even less controllable was the bond between Jimmy and Layla. They were raised mostly by their semi-mad mothers and adoring older sisters, and not a day went by without them seeing each other. Until Jimmy went up north to stay with his uncle and visit with scouts. Three months later, when Layla stood on the platform at Euston Station watching her best friend get off the train, she hadn’t expected the strange rush of weirdness. All their lives, Jimmy had looked younger than her, but now there was such confidence in his walk. And that look on his face. Despite his newfound maturity, he still managed to blurt out, ‘Fuck, you’re hot,’ in a way that had them both flushed and refusing to look at each other the rest of the way home. From that day on, everyone knew that Jimmy and Layla were forever.

When Jimmy was finally released after the Brackenham bombing, Layla was there waiting for him outside Belmarsh prison. He didn’t walk towards her with a swagger and he didn’t have that ‘Fuck, you’re hot’ look on his face. She should have turned and walked away then, because he wasn’t the Jimmy she’d known all her life. But after he travelled with his uncle to Alexandria and they wouldn’t let him back into England, Layla made the trip across the Channel every weekend.

‘My shrink says that you and I probably romanticise who we were when we were kids,’ she told him on the last night they were together, in the shoe closet he called home down by the Calais port. The sex was rough and Layla hadn’t signed up for rough. ‘She says most people romanticise the first person they sleep with, and that we do because we’ve never coped with the reality of who we are now.’

‘Why the fuck do you need a shrink, Layla?’

He’d lose it over anything those days.

‘You need to speak to someone, Jimmy,’ she said, getting out of bed.

‘And tell them what?’ he shouted. ‘That I spent my eighteenth birthday in jail and got fucked up the arse? You think talking to a shrink’s going to make it all go away?’

Back home, she went off the rails for a while. Got herself a reputation with the local boys. Everyone knew she’d been with Jamal Sarraf after he got out of prison. By the time she was nineteen she felt as though she had lived a lifetime.

‘Shame on you, Layla,’ her sister said one day while they were sitting in the park watching her niece play. ‘For wasting your brain. Noor’s stuck in that prison wasting hers, but she doesn’t have a choice. You’ve got all the choice in the world.’