Читать книгу: «Blood Sisters: Part 2 of 3: Can a pledge made for life endure beyond death?»

Chapter 11

Vicky looked down at the blue line on the stick in her hand and stared. It was a busy Thursday, and she was already a good ten minutes late for work. But, though she knew that, she couldn’t move: she was transfixed.

In the fairy-tale scenario she’d fashioned for herself, the baby had been conceived on a Monday. The Monday night before Paddy had been led away and taken off to prison, which made it a child that would be born of love. Of commitment, and passion, and also of promises. That they would love one another always. That they would always be together. That she would wait for him, like a wife torn from her husband by war. That he would do right by her. Return to her. Stay with her.

She had walked home on the Sunday morning, carrying her slingbacks by their straps, having borrowed a pair of Lucy’s old pumps. And despite her assurances to her friend that she was done with him completely, she’d still felt a pang when Lucy told her he’d come to find her, and a similar rush of unwelcome emotion as she rounded her corner to see his Capri parked outside.

She tried to steel herself, even so, calling to mind – which wasn’t hard – what she’d seen in the nightclub, with Lacey. And, as she approached, she was heartened to see that he’d not ventured into the house. It would make it all the easier to tell him to sling his hook.

She saw him first, walking silently in the old Dunlop plimsolls, and, as always happened (and perhaps always would, more was the pity), she felt the fluttering of butterflies in her gut.

He was half-sitting, half-standing on their gate, smoking a cigarette in the watery sunshine. He was so beautiful, she thought, even though she didn’t want to think it. And she wondered just how he would cope if – when – he got incarcerated. She’d heard the stories. And she’d seen documentaries on the telly, too. He was a good-looking man – but only just a man, really. In prison terms, eighteen was no age at all, was it? Yes, a world away from sixteen – to Vicky, Paddy was a man through and through. But in prison … She shuddered. There would be men in prison – older, harder, stronger men in prison – who’d feel the same attraction to Paddy as she did.

And when he saw her – when he turned to flick his spent cigarette into the kerb – that sense of his vulnerability was even stronger. Just his face, his swollen cheek, his look of shame, his look of love, were sufficient to make her completely rethink her decision, and consider going with her feelings after all.

But she held firm. There was too much pain and anguish to bear. She stopped on the pavement, and nodded towards the car. ‘I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to see you. So, please, just go away, Paddy, and leave me alone.’

She was surprised by the calm way she’d managed to get the words out. And mindful, which made her resolve that bit stronger, that what Lucy had said about her naivety wasn’t true. She had been here before. She might be here again. Probably would be, if she didn’t end it now.

‘Vic, babe, please,’ he began, opening his walnut-brown arms out to her.

She walked around them, eyes down, and started up her path.

‘Please, Vic. I love you. Vic, please hear me out.’

She ignored this as well, and reached into her handbag for her key.

But it was her mother who opened the front door.

She heard Paddy mouth ‘Fuck’.

Vicky took in the sight. The haystack hair. The old trackies. The frayed jumper. But her mam looked reasonably sober, which was something, at least. But she shouted at Paddy, even so.

‘Just piss off, you little pipsqueak! You hear me? Bugger off!’ Then she yanked Vicky roughly over the threshold and slammed the door.

‘Spoke to Lucy,’ she explained. ‘Once you’d left.’

That had been that. Even Paddy – local bad boy and hard man that he was – wouldn’t want to get embroiled in a set-to with Vicky’s mum. Not because he couldn’t pulverise her, either mentally or physically, but because he had a reputation to protect. An old lady? You just didn’t go there.

So he called. She never answered. But the phone rang incessantly. Till, by teatime, her mam – Vicky had pleaded that she didn’t – picked up the receiver and roared down that at him as well.

And then silence. Till around eleven, when Vicky went to put a note in one of the milk bottles, and found the most enormous bunch of deep, blood-red roses. A couple of dozen, at least. And on a Sunday. Where on earth had he found them?

Her mother, half way down her second bottle of cider, squinted at them through her cigarette smoke.

‘Undying love?’ she slurred. ‘Yeah, and I’m the bloody pope.’

He’d called again then – had he been waiting somewhere, watching to see she’d got them? And every inch of her, angry and full of hurt though she still was, wanted to rush into the hall again and answer the phone.

‘I mean it, girl,’ her mother said, though Vicky had made no actual move to pick the receiver up. ‘You do that and I’ll cut the fucking cord.’

So it was Monday before Paddy was able to pin her down finally. After work. And on a day when – surprise, surprise, surprise – Lacey had called in sick. There’d been flowers there, too, another big blowsy bunch of them – this time gerberas and chrysanthemums and tiny pearls of gypsophila, driving Leanne into a frenzy of speculation.

‘Come on, spill,’ she kept saying, knowing nothing about Lacey apart from her apparent illness. ‘What’s he done? Come on, tell me – he must have done something.’ But, determined not to air the whole humiliating episode in public, Vicky held her line – that it was just because he might, almost certainly would, be going away tomorrow, and wanted to send her flowers while he still could.

The irony of her fiction wasn’t lost on her. Because Paddy only made such gestures when he’d wronged her in some way. ‘You got me. I’m your gift,’ he’d always joke. ‘What other presents do you need?’

And then, eventually, it was Lucy who did for her. She called in her lunch break, as any caring best friend would, to check she was okay, to check she’d stayed firm. To check she hadn’t ‘caved in, like you know you always do, in the face of his pathetic floral offerings’.

It might have been the words she’d used. It might have been the looming court case. But, either way, when Leanne found her later, after Lucy’d left, and between clients, she was sobbing her heart out in the back room.

And of course, Vicky told her what had happened.

‘The fucking tart,’ was Leanne’s considered opinion of Lacey. Then she shook her head. ‘So that’ll mean we’re an apprentice short again, won’t it? I doubt she’ll show her face again here, will she?’ She grinned, and clapped Vicky on the back while she snivelled. ‘Still,’ she added, ‘you can do lots of overtime, can’t you? You’ll have a bit of time on your hands after all …’

She grinned at Vicky. ‘That’s a joke. To make you laugh. You dozy mare! But seriously, Vic, you want my honest opinion?’

Vicky nodded.

‘Well – and don’t hate me, but if the poor sod’s being carted off to the nick in the morning, shouldn’t you at least give him the benefit of the doubt? He’s clearly sorry. Bloody hell – and that’s my kind of sorry!’ Vicky had already told her about the roses. ‘And he obviously loves you. Why else would he go to such lengths? And it’s not like you have to do anything other than listen. That’s what I’d do,’ she finished, crossing her arms across her chest. ‘Though chance would be a fine thing, of course.’

So Vicky did give him the benefit of the doubt, even though there had never been any, when he arrived at the salon ten minutes before closing, exactly as she’d always known he would.

And there was a certain power in being so desperately needed, so she not only listened, she let him take her back to his house where – his mam and dad being up to their elbows in flour down at the bakery – she allowed him to apologise, and apologise, and apologise, and then, because no one understood him like she did, she allowed him to make love to her, as only he could.

And forgave him, as only she would.

But that night of passion ten days back, though she’d love it to have been so, had not been the one that had resulted in this fairy-tale conception. She knew it hadn’t. Well, it might have, but that was academic now anyway. She’d known she might be pregnant for a good three or four weeks before that, because she’d already missed one period and the next one hadn’t happened yet, hence the realisation. And the purchase of the test.

She’d still kept her fingers crossed, of course, and a part of her, albeit a tiny one, had still believed she might not be. Not just because Paddy was always so careful, but also because she knew periods didn’t always happen when they were supposed to. Specially when you’d not been having them that long. Her mam’s didn’t settle down till her twenties, she’d said. God, her mam. Having to tell her mam she was pregnant … She couldn’t even think about that right now.

Then there was Lucy. Lucy’s periods were all over the place and always had been. She never knew when to expect them, and she missed them loads, too. It had gone on so long that she was even under the doctor about it. They were trying her on the pill now – about which Vicky had been pretty jealous – just to see if they could get them sorted out.

God, how she wished she could talk to Lucy about it. But she couldn’t – well, couldn’t have up to now, at any rate, since she’d decided not to tell Lucy about her reconciliation with Paddy. What would be the point in getting her all cross again, after all? Because the following morning (they’d said their goodbyes that night) he’d been sent to Armley Prison, as promised. And Gurdy had since reported (Gurdy had been at the magistrates’ court, giving evidence) that he was expected to serve nine of the eighteen-month sentence he’d been given.

Nine whole months. The time it took to make a baby. Which was apparently already growing inside her. Vicky wiped the stick with some loo roll and shoved it in her handbag.

She felt sick. Though she now had a reason for all that. But most of all, heady, intoxicated, strangely brave.

Now she would have to tell Lucy. It felt like a relief.

There was a client already in and having a hood dryer lowered over her rollers when Vicky flew in. Leanne looked across, her expression first one of predictable irritability – Vicky was rarely late, but with only the two of them in the salon today, Leanne was obviously cross.