About fifteen years ago, back when I lived on Grindle Row, there was this lad who used to give me newspapers. Specky Alex. Most days we’d kick about in the car park, rifle balls off kerbs, and sit on manky south-facing sofas outside Cowboy John’s bin shed. He’d read the news to me, and I’d just listen, mush shushed. Boo to a goose, my Nan used to say, hence the nickname – Goosey. Funny how those labels stick around like summat on your molars, innit?

Anyway. When he’d finished the paper, he’d offer it to me, and I’d nod all wobbling-crossbar because Nan taught me to always look grateful, even if you think a present is shite. Would hold the paper up to him and walk off smiling. Then on the way home, secretly, after a few swivels of my head, I’d chuck it in the first bin I saw.

Bit ashamed looking back, to be honest.

But my Nan would have gone on and on about where I’d gotten it from, that I shouldn’t talk to strangers, especially men. She was like that. Snapped more often than Charlie Seagrave’s banjo. She’d suck her dentures between her gums and the veins would pop on her massive hands, and she’d go on and on about my dad and what he did to my mum. Those rants would always end with me branded as a nuisance, a needy sod, or a puzzle that Nan was forced to put back together despite her Arthur, which was the name she’d given her arthritis. She’d wag her finger and say I owed her all the cuppas and Werther’s in the world when I was older. And you know what? Didn’t get to buy her a single pack.

I’d love to say that the newspapers were enough to stop me from becoming another statistic. Trust me, I would. But by the time I was 13, I was riding around in a balaclava with Charlie Seagrave and KB, doing stuff that’s probably best not put to paper. We were some roughuns. Fine. But not ‘rotten’ or ‘scroungers’ or ‘everything wrong with this country’. Well, Charlie got close. But if you’d been through what he had, with his brother and his dad and that Crazy Fenton, then you’d be the same.

I packed up hanging around with them lot during COVID, shoved my bally under the bed. Won’t lie – I did miss knocking about on my Carrera and having spliffs under Iron Bridge. I think you just outgrow some things whether you want to or not, like a girl you fancy, or Sean Paul, or a sick pair of footie boots (still miss my T90s with the side laces).

I had a shedload of time to rethink my life after leaving Charlie and KB behind. I searched for unis and that, but I hated having to sit still for hours at school, and I’ve only ever been good with my hands. My proudest fixes: bunch of Hot Wheels, radios, the fridge the sink the bog, a Raleigh Lizard, and my Nan’s walker. So I did a bit more thinking. I’d take my bike out and just follow the river path through the geese and pigeons towards the manor, and one day it was pissing it down and there was this old woman under Spider Bridge, tiny as owt, struggling with a puncture. She started pumping like a mad woman when I dropped my bike beside her. Poor gal, having this lanky lad in his tracksuit pull up two foot away. I just laughed. Said these days I’d be more likely to buy her a pint than rob her, that I just couldn’t afford any other clothes, that hoodies were all I had.

She chuckled an apology and I looked for the puncture – a snake bite. Easy fix. Quick blow on the glue, chinwagging while it dried matte, and I left butyl crumb fingerprints on the fiver she gave me for “saving a lickle old sod from a sad walk home”. Paid for the best curry mix I’ve ever had, that fiver did.

 When all you grow up with is a ball and some walls to kick it at, it don’t take much to get you excited, stuff only the scrapman would notice. And everyone used to flytip on Grindle Row. I’d seen a kettle lobbed from the eighth floor, a microwave from the sixth. And whenever I got bored of the thud of ball against concrete, I’d go wander among the scrap, nosying around. I’d take the elements out of kettles, put wrestling figurines back together. Did this until I was about twelve, when someone dumped this nasty BMX. Chain snapped and tyres flat and handlebars stuck. I fixed it with some zip ties and superglue and sunflower oil, then rode that shitwagon till the wheels fell off. Well, they were nicked outside Grindles Off-Licence, technically. I didn’t get a bike for years after that, and when I did? Well I wasn’t exactly being a good boy.

I was on UC after the lockdowns, applying for owt or nowt on Indeed and getting pestered by my work coach Janet. What about Sales Assistant at The Range? Ever thought about joining the army? Tall lad like you could work security – why not ask at The Wonky Leg? She was lovely, really, but a right pain in the arse. I gave in to her nagging after four months, and joined some warehousing course taught by Danny Drinkwater who took cig breaks every twenty minutes and reeked of Lynx.

Everyone on the course was sound, but they all had kids to feed, and foreheads that needed ironing. We’d go Mega Kitchen on our lunch break and every one of them would tell me I was too clever to be stuck in a warehouse squirming under some cunt’s thumb. I remember being sat by the window with Big Pete, watching a JCB scrape through the scrapyard, when he flicked my ear and gravelled at me:

“You’ve got fifty-sixty years on this shithole. Sort your bloody life out while you can. Fuck’s sake. We all wish we could.”

I laughed it off, told him he shoulda put a johnny on, or summat daft like that.

So course I felt like a right twat when a few weeks later I’m ringing him up because outside Grindles, dumped against a sodden sofa, was a pink Raleigh – a pink Raleigh just asking to be fixed, asking to be sold. I had the phone tucked so tight it bruised my collarbone, wheeling the bike back to my flat. Pete answered like he’d just missed the bus, all snappy. I asked him if he knew anyone who’d started their own business.

“Besides selling ganja?” he replied, finding himself funny.

I told him to be serious, said “like fixing bikes?” while steering the front wheel around three drain covers.

“Not a scooby,” he said. “But if you fancy running a business, then chat to Roey. He ran Right Hooks.”

“The fuck is Right Hooks?”

Pete scoffed, said “The old boxing gym. Christ. You kids don’t know you’re born.”

I had to end the call to get the bike up the stairs, because in all four years I’d been in Gainsborough House, the lift hadn’t worked once. And the moment I got in, I found the adjustable, and rolled my sleeves up.

Wayne Roe, or Roey as everyone calls him, lives in a maisonette on Crest Hill Avenue. First time I went to see him he had a massive chain on and a little Psalms book out – you know like they give you at school? He let us in and went straight to the kettle, asked me only if I wanted my cuppa strong, if I wanted it sweet. The sofa was missing an arm, the coffee table had rings all across it, and there wasn’t an inch spare on the walls full of certificates and photos and medals: him in a ring with half of the estate, him shaking the mayor’s hands, him cracking a right hook into a heavy bag.

We knocked our cuppas back on that amputee sofa, and he sat with his elbows on his knees, proper nodding at my idea like the CAMHS lot did when they pretended to care. Roey was different, though. He’d ask questions that made me think a bit more, but not all aggressive like Mr Foster did. Just gently. And once I’d said all I could, he let us know about Right Hooks, how it got started in the back garden of his mate’s house, how it became a full gym once they got some council funding. Said he knew someone who worked there, promised he’d look into it for me.

I joked, on the way out, that he didn’t seem like the hardest lad on Crest Hill. He just laughed and said that people will cling to whatever idea of you they want to have, not what’s true. I nodded goodbye, climbed down the stairs that stank of piss and Impulse deodorant, and on the way home I kept going over the chat in my head. How weird to hear deep stuff coming from this gob of gold caps, from this man who was known across the estates for sparking out Micky Calladine and sending him down Hereford Hill in a wheelie bin.

Was a few weeks of back and forth, of Roey popping round to check where I’d got with the forms for all these Community Action grants, these Local Redevelopment funds. Same time I was riding around on a Carrera I’d done up, looking for a unit that’d work. Roey said I’d need footfall, safety, and other stuff I only pretended to understand. The old phone exchange off Stetson Ave fit the bill, as did the old Worker’s Co-operative on the corner of Peel Street.

The first unit was perfect. Was right on a cycle path, round the corner from old Nixon’s Jeans, and course it was nice that Birds was two units down. Scoffing cobs between bikes sounded alright. Only problem was the landlord had a list longer than my Nan’s prescription for all the requirements. Walls could not be drilled (he had tenants renting the two-bed next door), only one of three parking spots would be available (he had tenants renting the…), and there could be no scratches on the floor. That one – not a clue. But we were starting a bloody bike shop, fuck’s sake. Better off asking Danny Drinkwater to put the Superkings down.

The Worker’s Co-operative, to headlock the truth, was a shithole. The bog wouldn’t flush owt bigger than a roll-up, the shutter howled like Charlie’s lame Staffy, and all you could see from the door was the crumbling cinema where the methadone queue shivered towards Pam’s 24/7 Pharmacy. But the floor? Scratch it all you like, the landlord said, elbows locked with his missus, who was so far out of his league she was playing a different sport.

So in that rattling unit I signed the lease with Roey, and there we stayed long after the blacked SUV had grumbled out the courtyard. We paced about, creating blueprints in our heads until Roey took out a bookies’ pen and put ink to paper. After an hour of arguing, we had a floor plan, a shopping list, and a stack of tattooed envelopes at our feet. Just had to get started on building it all, the workbenches and shelves, somewhere to make a brew. Roey had a few power tools, he promised, and he knew someone who did kitchens so we could get a sink in. Said we’d be done within a fortnight, starting the morning after. Eight in the morning, he promised. We rifled the shutter down, had a proper hug just before the rain started, and I wheelied through the downpour, teeth flashed to the sky, rehearsing what I’d have told Nan if she was still around.

After a night of fidgety sleep, I set off. ETA: 7:45am. The rolling slope of the city tickled the Carrera towards the unit where I fumbled the keys, wrestled the shutter, and waited. I rocked on the doorstep, drew shapes in the asphalt with my foot, spat a few bars to the local pigeons. By nine, I’d rang four times, triple-texted. Nothing. Pete hadn’t heard a word from him either. At ten, I locked up and pedalled over with a taste like citrus Calpol in my mouth.

When I made it to Crest Hill Avenue, I clattered the bike down and leapt up the creaking steel stairs to his door. My knock echoed beyond the wood. I tried the handle. I shouted through the letterbox. I even asked his neighbours: an elderly lady with a hearing aid like a brake calliper, and a tiny shivering man who spoke at my feet, and neither had seen him, had only heard shouting in the middle of the night.

After sitting there slumped, clanging my head against the door, I shuffled into a lunge and prepared to leave. I lifted the brass eyelid of the letterbox, wormed my wrist in to part the bristles, and squinted. Through the fibres I could just about make out a cuppa, still and lifeless, on the table beside the Psalms book, left open with its golden bookmark dangling loose.