The secondary school across the gang-banged high street is half-term silent. There’s something desolate about an empty playground, Hook decides – a no-man’s land where warring postcodes meet to powwow. Shelley never speaks to the glowering hoods who loiter beneath the stairs of the main block but it doesn’t keep her safe: nothing does, apart from her father’s money, the same magnet that draws them close. ‘Taxing’, the hoods call it: reparation for injustices inflicted upon their ancestors by Shelley’s privileged bloodline. Hook has always found this notion shocking but now feels indignant; when are the Algerians paying up for our Cornish lassies, where should he post the invoice?
Commentaires