His mother spends all day Sunday cooking Nigerian food that she stores in Tupperware and produces throughout the week. Simone regards the way that together the family sit to eat it. Between bites, they exchange stories, they offer ideas, they try out parts of themselves. Safely. Attentively. For weeks Simone watches it all with fascination, until finally she articulates something first to herself and then to Noah – her longing to be part of a family like that, an insider. Noah welcomes her into their close unit, understanding how much she needs it, putting his questions to one side. He doesn’t drink, but he sees that, for now, she needs that too.

She wraps his estate around herself. They hang out on the Concourse. Noah steers her away from the guys who try to sell her drugs harder than weed, and the girls who sneer at her Zara jacket. They stay amongst his friends, who are fun and interesting and fiery and ambitious, feeding off each other like lit flames. They all want to change things. They all want to make an impact. They do things like writing spoken word, or training at athletics clubs, or joining political parties. They understand about being seen, being heard. Simone practises talking like they do – straight, blunt. Her parents would be shocked if they saw her. But they do not see her.

One night, returning from the estate, she trips over the top step to her flat and starts wailing in the street. Wailing as though she is a toddler and needs to be picked up, hands brushed, knee kissed. They leave their beds, come to the door, and this is the first time they pass comment on her behaviour. They didn’t think she’d be so stupid, they tell her. She is seventeen, it’s not even legal for her to be drinking. The next time, they put the chain on the door and lock her out until she can come home sober. Her mother starts slipping into the sacred space of her father’s office and she hears them muttering. They don’t know what’s going on, they say to each other. They don’t know what’s going on, they say to her. They don’t know where this has come from.

A week later she finds out she is pregnant. By a black guy from the estate, she tells them. And she is locked out until she can sober herself out of that one too.

It is then that she notices the grime. And the firmness of the walls around her.

Still, she tells herself, she is free. Free from the oppressive silence. Free from the stranglehold of invisibility. Free from the hypocrisy of a flat with a proudly decreasing mortgage, and balanced meals, and civic engagement, and nothingness.

Noah is real. He makes her feel part of something.

She drops out of school. Noah’s mother, Lewa, tries to talk her out of this. It is not necessary, she says. They can help with the baby, studies are important, and her GCSEs were so good. But Simone wants only what they have, not the toxic veneer of letters after her name, false validations of worth. She washes down this decision with wine, beer, schnapps, gin, waiting for her parents to come after her and pull her from the filth.