‘Do I need to call the police?’

‘I don’t think you should. I’ll go, don’t worry. I’m mad busy; really close to getting a food voucher.’

‘Good. Go.’

‘Yeah, I’m at step five, about. I rang the Bru and they said to ask my family, but as you know I have no family, so they said to ask my mates and I finally managed to track down Christopher Senior at Kelly-Marie’s but he’d been sanctioned the fuck out of, and was on a bender with his mate and his mate’s wife Marcie-Anne, as well as her stepdad and Stacey who was going into labour. Pure mayhem, man. So I attended the job centre again and after two hours got a note saying I needed to try the food bank, so I walked three miles to the food bank, and they asked me to get a note off housing or social work saying I’d tried everything and was still hungry, so I walked back to your office in Grange Road and after twenty minutes with the social worker – she was mean, Mary, not like you, fucking cruel, had these tiny little lips, thin and tiny, and this habit of sniffing and at the same time her tongue kinda slithers out and up, a lizard with a cold, but give the lass her dues, after an hour she came back with a note confirming I’m still hungry. So I’m heading to the food bank with that now, in fact I better get a move on.’

‘Fuck’s sake, come in.’ She sat John Paul at the kitchen table and gathered together a care package, which included three of the six main courses of linguine carbonara she’d been forced to buy, as many canned goods as he could carry, and a list of direct telephone numbers, which she was not allowed to give out, including Jo at the job centre, Harry at housing and Bess at RDS. She also gave him all the cash she had – £120.80.

‘I promise I won’t buy coke with it, and I’ll repay you.’ John Paul paused. ‘Maybe I could start by doing some jobs. Dishes? Or I could take the rubbish out?’

‘It’s not in my bin, John Paul. And the money’s yours. It’s none of my business what you do with it.’