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#OutofOfficeQuotes 60: 'Taxing', the hoods call it: reparation for injustices inflicted upon their a
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?
My second novel, Out of Office (published by Legend Press in paperback), is now on Kindle for 99p.