A righteous Goliath

Jeremiah is big, that’s the first thing and the main thing you notice; he says it’s why he can’t get normal work. The muscles and the jewellery don’t help either, I reckon, but the size is what matters: nearly seven feet of young man is a lot for a boss to swallow. He doesn’t try for normal work, anyway—he’s going to be an actor, a singer, a boxer.

His mum kicked him out when he was 17, and “I turned to the people I knew,” robbers and dealers. Things got better before they got worse: he won a basketball scholarship to university in America. But in America they gave him spending money, and he got himself a lifestyle; back in Britain for the summer holidays he had nothing.



So he went back on the pavement: robbing drug dealers, mostly, whom he regards as fair game. But in the end he got busted trying to smuggle four kilos of cocaine out of Grenada, and spent two years in a South American jail. He’s done a couple of stretches back home too, been shot twice.

Jeremiah hungers and thirsts after righteousness. Not in the Biblical sense: he thinks religion is an instrument of social control by the rich. But he is fired by the most passionate impulse to understand how things work—how exactly the Europeans got their hands on the wealth of the world.

He’s 30 now and back living with his mum. We’ve worked with him since he came out of prison last year; he does an awesome turn as a robber, chilling the souls of the youths we perform crime prevention plays for. Last week we went back to the prison and did a show for the prisoners; Jeremiah made a speech. “I’d feel a right idiot if I ended up back in there,” he said after.

Not long ago he met Lucinda, 17, at an FE college we did a workshop in. She’s his backing singer now, but he can’t pay her so when her mum kicked her out she turned to the people she knew. He got an excited call one day saying she’d got a job. It was in a brothel: a flat in a tower block in King’s Cross. She was on reception in the front room, lining up the punters for the girls.

My people don’t do pimping and prostitution, Jeremiah told her. If you want to be around me you’re not doing that. So she quit, and he spent a week sitting with her in council offices waiting for her turn to ask for housing. And he’s got her a part-time sales job, a benign echo of the last one: pulling punters into a gym.