Hush Hush (16 page)

Angela brooded, reaching out to
stroke Binky as he loped into the room. As her fingers stroked
fluidly, she noticed Sadie’s, lying crabbed and still on the
duvet.
‘
Taken any
painkillers, Mum?’

‘A couple. I think I’ll
have a snooze now, Angela, if you wouldn’t mind buzzing off to
wash the dishes or whatever. I wish you’d go back to work this
afternoon. I don’t like you taking time off when you’re
new in the job.’

‘Oh,
they understand, Mum,’ sighed Angela, and squeezed the rough
warmth of Binky’s fur in lieu of reaching across to gently
squeeze Sadie’s gnarled hand. She was no good at that sort of
thing.

Angela turned up the driveway of 23 Pacelli Road,
mentally girding her loins for the afternoon ahead. A day out with
Problem Child. A few hours with Conor to probe his past life without
offending him. Extract the info, more like. And that was going to be
fiddlier than a scientist extracting DNA from prehistoric bone
marrow.

A stunning woman in tight jeans
opened the front door.

‘H-hello,’ blinked
Angela.
‘
I’ve
come ‒ I’m Angela.’

The woman didn’t shake
hands. She jerked a richly coiffed head of peroxide curls over her
shoulder and roared in purest Estuary,
‘
Shane!
Yer dad’s lady friend is here. Get your arse into gear.’

She held the door open for Angela
to come in, then sashayed across the floor, a yellow duster
fluttering out of a jeans back pocket. Angela blinked. Could this
vision be Mrs Turner? Bloody hell, what sort of cleaning lady was
this, for God’s sake? Where was the floral housecoat, the blue
rinse, the endless complaints about bunions?

Angela shut the door too hard and
sulked.

Mrs Turner turned round.
‘
Stand
on that rug, will ye?’ she barked.
‘
I’ve
just cleaned that floor with me own spit.’

‘Sorry!’ Angela
jumped obediently onto a little island of pastel rug. Mrs Turner
grunted and sashayed upstairs, passing Shane as he loped down.

Angela was too shaken by Mrs
Turner to remember immediately that Shane was her mortal enemy.

‘That’s Mrs Turner?’
she hissed at him in a conspiratorial whisper.

He frowned at Mrs Turner’s
receding, denim-puckered bum.
‘
Was
last time I checked.’

His tone reminded Angela where
she was and who Shane was.

‘Er ‒ don’t you
call her by her first name?’

‘Don’t think she’s
got one,’ snorted Shane, pushing his glasses up his nose.
‘
Reckon even her
husband calls her Mrs Turner. When he’s home from prison, that
is.’

‘Prison!’ goggled
Angela. The bloody woman certainly looked more gangster’s moll
than household treasure.

‘I s’pose you think
Dad’s giving her one,’ blurted Shane, with a crude
rudeness designed to shock. He watched Angela carefully for her
reaction. But she was too cagey for him, weaned on Sadie’s
wind-ups and follow-up looks.

‘It’s his business,’
she shrugged through gritted teeth.
‘
Where is he, anyway?’

‘Gone out.’

‘Out! Where?’

‘Dunno. He didn’t
say. International man of mystery, my dad.’

Angela held on to her temper by
scrabbling fingertips. He couldn’t do this to her! Drag her
over from Wilmesbury, then vanish before she arrived, leaving Problem
Child and Gangster’s Moll as her welcoming committee.

‘He must’ve left a
note or something,’ she murmured, aware she was giving Shane
the opportunity to deny any such meagre signs of consideration.

‘He left a message with me,
didn’t he?’ muttered Shane.
‘
That
he’s had to go out, urgently and unexpectedly. And we should go
on to the bleeding sports day, where he’ll try and turn up
later. If you don’t want to come, you’ll just make the
twelve-thirty train back to Wibblesbury.’

‘You’d like that,
wouldn’t you?’ snapped Angela tiredly.
‘
I
bet you’d give anything to skive off sports day.’

She paused to deliver her final
salvo.
‘
I know I did
when I was at school.’

Shane looked at her quickly. His
grey eyes gleamed briefly behind thick glasses.
‘
Not
sporty then, were you?’ he grunted.

‘I’m still infamous
in school history as the girl who skipped the hundred metres,’
confessed Angela proudly.

‘You skipped it. Jesus!’
Shane exhaled flutily down his nose, whether with derision or
admiration, she couldn’t tell.

She decided to go for broke.
‘
The
PE teacher was a Nazi. The only reason she entered me in the hundred
metres was to humiliate me. Why else would you enter a kid who ran
about as fast as a tortoise with lumbago? I’d crossed her once
too often with passive resistance, refusing to leap-frog over the
pommel horse, slither up ropes, whack ankles with hockey sticks. Only
it wasn’t resistance at all. I was too scared to do any of
those things, so I just froze and refused, reckoning the fall-out
couldn’t be any worse than breaking my neck in the attempt. But
PE teachers are pea-brained, you see.’ Angela tapped her head
passionately.
‘
If
they had any grey matter, they’d be teaching from proper books
in proper classrooms.’

Shane’s head bobbled
slightly. Almost a nod of agreement, thought Angela, careful not to
snatch too quickly at wimps’ solidarity.

True, Shane had a physique that
cried out for musclemen to kick sand in his face. On the other hand,
he could be fast and wiry, ideally suited to track and field.
Something in his reference to
‘
bleeding
sports day’ hinted otherwise, however.

‘You two still here?’
squawked the dulcet tones of Mrs Turner, reappearing at the top of
the stairs.
‘
Can’t
you just bugger off and let me hoover? Honestly, what’s the
point, with whole bleeding armies traipsing across the floor? Fucking
middle-classes with their fucking dado rails and distressed fucking
wood.’ She vanished again, muttering.

Now that was more like a cleaning
lady, Angela reckoned, albeit a cleaning lady out of a De
Niro/Scorsese film.

‘Charming woman,’ she
remarked to Shane as he got his coat.

‘Yeah, thank God she’s
only filling in until the real Mrs Turner gets over flu.’

‘The real Mrs Turner?’

Shane
stared at Angela as if she was retarded.
‘
You
know, her mother-in-law.’

‘You have got to be flaming joking!’
Angela ranted at Shane. They eyeballed each other in the
khaki-coloured school corridor. Shane stood defiantly in front of a
noticeboard listing events for sports day. One list contained
Angela’s name. She’d been entered in the mothers’
charity egg-and-spoon race.

‘I mean, are you sick in
the head or something?’ she yelled at Shane, prodding his
folded arms. Parents and teachers trickled past, frowning at her.

‘Careful now, you’ll
never get on the PTA with that attitude. More like the at-risk
register.’

‘I am not your flaming,
frigging mother!’

‘Language.’

‘Well, I’m not doing
it, so there!’

‘Ooh, the spirit of passive
resistance lives. I knew you wouldn’t do it, so it’s no
skin off my nose, like. I filled in a form for you, though, and got
loads of sponsors. I’ll just pay back the sponsorship money. I
entered Rosie last year, and she thought it was a right laugh. Even
won it. It is for charity.’

‘Rosie?’ Angela
blinked. She gazed down at Shane, a pigeon-chested weakling in a
singlet and shorts, his glasses Band-Aided to each ear to minimise
nose-bruising during the long jump. Like Angela in the past, he’d
whittled down the day’s ordeal to one event, invariably the
event reserved for the lazy, the lame and the uncoordinated who
couldn’t hack running in a straight line. In Shane’s
school, this was the long jump, a Cinderella spectacle relegated to a
wind-blown sandpit in a far-flung field. Under other circumstances,
Angela would’ve recognised a kindred spirit. Under these
circumstances, she was hostile, browbeaten and spitting with rage.

‘Your dad said you couldn’t
stand Rosie.’

‘I couldn’t, but she
was a good sport, like.’

‘Huh, falling over herself
to get in Master McGinlay’s good books, more like. That’s
not my way.’

‘What was the
tenner
for, then?’

Angela hesitated, wrong-footed.
‘
Actually, that was
my mother’s idea. The foolish woman thought you might be
grateful and even send me a thank-you note.’

‘How is your ma? Didn’t
she fall under a bus or something last week?’

‘She fell on the floor and
twisted her hip. It’s no laughing matter!’

‘Who’s laughing?’

‘You were smirking.’

‘Wasn’t!’

‘You really are a little
shit.’

She turned on her heel and
stormed towards the playing field, followed by the shocked
expressions of a few parents she hadn’t spotted, lurking within
earshot behind cloakroom pegs. Fuck the lot of them! It was a long
time since she’d felt such anger, a violent mish-mash of
resentments directed at Sadie, Robert, Rachel, the bloke who’d
tried (deliberately!) to wrong-change her in the sweet shop that
morning, and bloody, frigging, flaming Conor McGinlay, who’d
rudely buggered off on the very day she’d psyched herself up to
ask about Kate.

Outside, the cold air slapped her
with a brisk plea to cool it. She slowed down by the main playing
field, staked out with ribbons to create the lanes for a four by four
relay, currently in shrieking progress.

Angela skirted the excited knot
of parents and siblings, her anger gradually receding. Strangely
enough, she wasn’t angry at Shane at all. In fact, she felt a
little weepy. His horridness surely put the kibosh on any future with
Conor, whatever she learnt about Kate.

Dabbing her eyes, she looked
around and spotted the stony face of Shane, watching the race from
the opposite side of the field. He hadn’t seen her.

He stood a little apart from a
group of sniggering boys, singlets clinging to their over-developed
chests. They were clearly casting aspersions on Shane’s
athletic prowess, gawky mien and bottle-thick specs. Angela
compressed her lips. The locker-room jocks! How well she remembered
their female counterparts from her own days at school.

Her first instinct was to wade
across the field and drag Shane to safety. But her common sense won
out. He’d be appalled and he’d never live it down.

Might as well go with her second
idea, which was certainly not instinctive.

Sighing deeply, Angela obeyed the
crackly Tannoy summons and tip-toed towards the starting line for the
charity egg-and-spoon race.

Her rivals had come prepared in
sensibly tailored trousers ‒ and even shorts, despite a cutting
March wind. Equipped with a soup spoon and an egg that refused to sit
on it, Angela thanked God she wore low heels, left her raincoat with
an obliging teacher, and shivered on the starting line, her
ankle-length green shift dress flattened against her thighs by a
strong head-wind.

She glanced down the line,
proffering a comradely smile. Steely eyes glanced back, then looked
ahead with a take-no-prisoners determination. God, thought Angela. So
much for
‘
It’s
the taking part that matters.’

As the whistle went and her legs
turned helpfully to jelly, she was catapulted back to the hundred
metres at school where Mrs Jeffers, a Rottweiler in a shell-suit, had
stood on the touchline, yelling encouragingly,
‘
Where’s
your competitive spirit, you stupid, spineless girl?’

Her egg wobbled off the spoon
before she’d moved. She caught it with her other hand and spent
valuable seconds nesting it down again, while maternal bottoms
galloped past her.

‘Hey, lady, your dress!’
hollered a squeaky, sexless voice from the sidelines.
‘
Stuff
it in your knickers to run faster!’

There was method in this mad
suggestion. She didn’t stuff it in her knickers ‒ too
many sniggering kids around and smalls too baggy and grey ‒ but
she gathered up the front of her dress and twisted it into a knot
away from her knees, giving them room to propel unimpeded.

She lost the egg four more times,
but romped home a far-from-disgraced third last, nose-diving towards
the finishing line with as much grace as she could muster, bearing in
mind that Shane was watching.

Only he wasn’t. As Angela
got to her feet and wiped grass off her knees, she realised that
actually, few people had been watching her finest sporting hour.

The crowd had drifted away to
other pockets of activity. In the distance, a shower of sand grains
rose into the air. The long jump!

Reclaiming her raincoat and
relinquishing the spoon, Angela hurried towards the sand-pit. Drawing
closer, she saw it was an informal warm-up event for the actual long
jump.

A group of boys were standing on
the edge of the pit. In the centre, another boy sat astride a prone
figure, making him eat dirt ‒ or, literally, sand. Just in
front of the supine victim lay a pair of glasses, half-buried in sand
like the last remains of a Foreign Legionnaire.

Angela’s breath shortened
and her chest tightened. The bullying bastards! She tried to yell,
but her indignation trapped her voice in a bubble of wheezy air. She
curled her fist, which tightened on a smooth, warm surface.

She looked down, surprised to
find the egg still in her hand. She’d never been any cop at the
shot-putt either, but here went nothing.

Drawing back her arm, Angela
flung the egg with all her might, aiming for the bully astride Shane.
It hit the back of his bulldog head with a satisfying thunk,
exploding on impact into a runny mess.