Curtain Call at the Lantern

The Slack Lane estate stood in the shadow of the old shipyard, where cranes hung against the sky like folded herons. Kestrel Court was a low block, chip-shop light spilling into the wet, and under the lamp outside it, a dozen lads in tracksuits, hoods up, phones out.

You'd read the type before you got there. Chapters of it: retributive masculinity, the "New Lad", a life built on birds, booze and the beautiful game, borrowing the shape of a manhood that had been quietly sold off with the shipyard. Behind the posture, you knew, were fathers made redundant and futures made narrow.

Kez Doyle was nineteen, wiry, hostile, already halfway through a very old stare. He'd done eight months in a youth custody unit at seventeen; he'd told the story so often it had the polish of a well-worn coin. The uniform. The number. The lights out. The rule about only speaking when spoken to. Goffman had a word for what that place had tried to do to him: mortification. Kill off the man you were, and replace him.

The peer group was his other school. They dressed alike, spoke alike, and watched anyone who didn't with the calm of a jury. Nobody here was going to talk to you unless you passed the test.

If you have already noted that Kez won't talk to you, turn to 16. Otherwise: