He was the fourth son, the only one not to at least get a few GCSEs. His eldest brother had gone the whole hog through university, and the others went straight to the trading floor – not in a bank like their father, but on the street where the money grew faster and, they said, was only equally dirty. They all dangled these achievements over him. But even when they were younger, there was a pecking order, and he was right at the bottom of it, a fact exacerbated because of what Simone suspects is a severe, undiagnosed dyslexia, preventing his academic achievements from ever matching what to her is clear cleverness, and because he never grew bigger than anyone, not even his mother whose expanding width made up for what she was lacking in height. Simone would never use a word like ‘exacerbated’ to Terry. He took complicated vocabulary as a jab, a book word, another way in which people tried to keep him there at the bottom. Like when his mother had locked him in his room when he asked for help with homework, throwing the book at his head, her patience gone, her fancy friends too, drained away with her gin. Or like the time he wet his bed and so the following night was strapped naked to a toilet. Or the way his father, before he left, had never called him Terry, but Runt, accompanied often by an unpredictable blow from the back of his hand that would send him across the room, to prove it. Or the way that later, with his dad gone, his mother had been too intoxicated to get up and notice when older, bigger brothers working out their own demons, pushed him around with that same ease and amusement as their father had done, frequently holding his face for too long against a pillow and, once, forcing him to eat on his knees out of the dog’s bowl. As adults, they still punch him too hard on the arm when they see him, though his years boxing have set the limit there, and they tell these stories about their childhood, with a jocular hilarity that disgusts Simone, and that Terry takes as a joke, because it is the only way not to sink even lower. Still, his brothers think they are hard done by too. Many years earlier their father had flashed his cash at their young, once-beautiful mother, lifting her off her estate and into a Marylebone apartment where he adorned her with designer clothes, and jewels, and fake friends, and alcohol, and impregnated her four times in seven years, and got the boys believing they would live that life and be like him; but in the end took off with his cash just as fast as he had flashed it. Terry was six then. There was an article in the paper, and rumours of dodgy dealings. And their dad was long gone out of the country before anybody realised he’d left them all with nothing. Whose fault is that, the brothers often demanded, two out of the three of them back on the estate in the flat their mother had been forced to return to, the third stuck at an entry level marketing job, none of them, including Terry, mentioning the wads of money that turn up occasionally, unpredictably, in their accounts from somewhere offshore. The big lawyers and the big bankers and the big politicians making the decisions, that’s whose fault. The Eton boys, like their father, in their ivory towers. The neighbours Simone spent too long watching as they unloaded boxes into the house next door.