I wipe my nose with the back of my hand and look at my bandmates. They all know my story, they know my mum was murdered and that my brother was killed, the whole fucking world knows that story. Every newspaper and magazine ran with it when we first made it big. They all jumped on the bad boy, Conner Reed bandwagon. ‘Con the Con’ being their favourite headline when they found out I’d been banged up. All the money they made reporting on other people’s misery and they couldn’t come up with a better headline than that? Fucktards, the fucking lot of them. It had snowballed from there. Once they found out how my brother was killed and that I was in the car with him, the sympathy lasted for all of twenty seconds before they started reporting on the fact that I was locked up while the accident was investigated. Then the fuckers found out I’d been in trouble as a kid and that’s when the ‘Conner the Convicted’ and ‘Con the Con’, headlines began.
It was the local corner shop. Me and two mates found the back doors to the local corner shop open one night and we nicked some cigarettes and some bars of fucking galaxy. We were kids, we had the opportunity to nick some fags and make some money; it wasn’t an armed robbery. We didn’t hurt anyone. We didn’t realise we’d been caught on CCTV, and it didn’t take long for the shopkeeper to recognise us and for the police to come knocking on our door. I was fourteen, I’d never been in trouble with the police before so they gave me a caution, and my dad gave me a black eye and a split lip. I think he cracked a few of my ribs too, but I wasn’t allowed to go to the hospital to find out. My only other offence was a caution I got for fighting. Once those stories were reported, some nosey young journalist decided to dig even deeper into my past and found out the details of my mum’s murder. Then everything changed again and I was ‘Poor Reed’ or ‘Broken Bad Boy Conner Reed’s Heart Breaking Past Revealed.’ Or some other bullshit, piss poor headline.
And suddenly, at this moment, it all becomes clear. They all died because of me. I was four-years-old when I unknowingly opened the front door to my mum’s drug dealer. He choked her to death. Strangled her while I hid between the sofa and the wall. My brothers came home from school and found her dead and me still hiding. We were all sent back to live with my dad after that.
My mum had left him and moved us off of the army base six months before. But being back in London, back to the old estate she grew up on, she’d soon fallen into all her old habits. She was just out of rehab when my dad met her and had stayed clean for ten years, but as soon as she returned to London and her old friends, that all changed.