‘Hello, Mrs P. You all right today?’ Ruby spoke politely but slightly more accentuated and slowly than was usual. Just in case. Sometimes Harry’s mum had trouble concentrating.

Looking at her always made Ruby a bit uncomfortable. She knew she shouldn’t stare at the shaking, the dribbling, the slurring words, but it was easier said than done.

Mrs Porter nodded at her, head trembling and bouncing like one of those nodding dogs people had in cars and claimed were ironic.

‘Why aren’t you in school?’

Harry jumped in. ‘I told you earlier, Mum, remember? We’ve finished for Christmas.’

‘Oh, I thought that was tomorrow.’

‘No, it’s today. The twins finish tomorrow cos it’s a different school,’ Harry assured her. Chucked a quick look Ruby’s way to make sure she didn’t say anything she shouldn’t. She and Harry had walked the boys to junior school together before deciding to bunk off again themselves.

‘Almost Christmas already, eh, Mrs P. You all set?’ she said, to change the subject.

‘Aw, Harry’s a good boy, he’s put the decorations up.’

A plastic tree, so small it was more a twig, was sagging arthritically under the weight of cheap baubles, and home-made decorations clearly made by Harry and his brothers when they were younger. It was swathed, mummy-like, in tinsel, presumably to support it. At the top was a glitter-ridden fairy with a torn wing and a surprised expression as she gazed at her pink fluffy wand. The present pile beneath was tragically small, and the bright wrapping paper was the cut-price kind that was see-through unless you used twenty layers, and even then it tore if you looked at it too hard. Ruby thought of the huge amount of presents beneath the gargantuan tree in her own home, and shifted uncomfortably. All those expensive trinkets she would receive, which she didn’t even give a stuff about.

‘Do you fancy going for a walk? We could take you,’ Ruby offered.

‘No, no, I’d rather stay here,’ Mrs Porter replied. Her voice was slurring with the effort, and her hands trembled.

With a nod, Ruby and Harry left his mum to it. She was already starting to slide down the sofa as they left the room, and Harry nipped back to lift her a little higher and arrange the cushions as makeshift scaffolding.

Although Harry only lived a bus ride away from Ruby’s Blackheath home, it felt like a different world. He lived between Charlton and Woolwich, in an area of high unemployment, and headline-grabbing crimes. Low points included the racially motivated murder of teenager, Stephen Lawrence, a murder so well known that even though it happened before Ruby was born, she knew all about it. Another was that the town had been a major flare point during the 2011 riots – several buildings had been attacked, and the landmark Great Harry pub left a burnt-out shell. More recently, that soldier, Lee Rigby, had been run over then stabbed to death by Islamic extremists near Woolwich barracks in 2013. Her father would have had a blue fit if he knew she was in Woolwich; he thought it was far too dangerous. But it wasn’t that bad, you just had to know where to avoid – and who.

‘Woolwich boys don’t mess about when it comes to business,’ Harry had told her the first time she had visited him. ‘Most people raised here end up in gangs. I know a few people in them, so I’m safe. Which means you’re safe. Drug dealers hang around on the estates and sell cocaine and heroin, but they reckon they give money to the families that the government has forgotten. Woolwich’s only problem is poverty, man. Get rid of the poverty and you get rid of the problem. They don’t call it Britain’s poorest postcode for nothing.’

Harry’s home was a flat in a high-rise near a busy road, where the rumbling roar of traffic never seemed to cease, and the exhaust fumes choked even when the windows were closed. The living room was reasonably warm, thanks to an electric heater which only ever had one bar lit. The rest of the flat was chilled, as though haunted, but this particular ghost’s name was ‘being skint’.

She and Harry spent most of the day holed up in his bedroom, listening to music and talking, cuddled up to one another to keep the cold at bay. Every now and again Ruby huffed a breath into the air, and watched it cloud faintly in front of her.

‘I’ve never seen that happen inside before,’ she said, fascinated.

‘Well, I know how we can warm up,’ Harry said, giving that wonky smile of his that always made her heart hurt in a good way.

Kissing Harry seemed to open up a wormhole in space and time so that hours flashed by in the blink of an eye. But the persistent buzzing of her phone made her pull away finally, curious and full of dread, all at once.

Harry wrapped his hand around hers and the mobile it clutched. ‘Leave it,’ he urged.

She could feel the tears balancing on the bottom rim of her eyes as she looked up at him and shook her head. ‘You know I can’t.’

Looking was an addiction, a compulsion she was too weak to resist. She had to know what people were saying about her, then she could be prepared, and harden herself to the insults.

Harry sighed. In frustration, in sympathy, all of the above, she wasn’t sure, but he prised the phone from her fingers firmly but gently. ‘Then we look together. All right?’

She nodded, making one of the tears lose its balance. Harry wiped it from her cheek with his thumb pad.

‘Ready? Three.’

She felt sick. Maybe she should just leave it.

‘Two.’

If she left it, she’d only imagine the worst anyway. But the toast she had eaten for breakfast was threatening to reappear.

‘One.’

Harry unlocked her phone. Alert after alert scrolled across the screen. Her eyes ran over them. They didn’t make sense.

A couple of clicks, and all was made clear. There was Ruby, lying on a bed, naked, legs wide open, clutching her breasts together.

‘Bloody hell.’ Harry sprang up, dropped the phone. Glared down at it and then at her. His eyes burned. She’d never seen an expression like that on his face before.

‘I – I don’t understand… It’s not me,’ she begged.

He glared at her again, fists balled. Was he going to hit her?

‘Do you think I don’t know that, Rubes? I’ll bloody kill Jayne and her crew for this.’

She snatched up her phone, had to look closer. The picture had been cobbled together badly. Her head, taken from the video of her being hit, was clearly pasted onto the top of a body nicked from a porn site. Angle and skin tone were all wrong.

The words typed under the image were brief but to the point:

Below was Ruby’s mobile number and email address.

There were already over fifty comments on it, and her phone was buzzing as if possessed with more notifications.

‘They’re never going to leave me alone,’ she whispered. ‘I wish I were dead. Honest, Harry, I just want to die and this all to be over.’