The kiss might have been a step too far, but slouched on the sofa, breasts swollen, nether regions still faintly sore, eyelids rough as sandpaper, listening to my son gruntle awake again, meeting Beckett suddenly felt like the most perfect thing to have happened to me in a very long time.
I’d noticed Shay and Kieran from my first day at the new secondary school. Honestly, everyone had, they were impossible to ignore. However, due to their being the kind of kids who existed in an alternate universe to shy, deeply uncool and slightly posh girls, I never for one second dreamed they’d notice me.
That was until they plonked themselves down either side of me on the isolated bench I’d specifically selected to ensure the minimum number of people would see that I had no one to eat lunch with.
‘That science teacher was bang out of order.’ Shay Obasi rolled her eyes, lids heavy with purple fake lashes, and crossed her dark brown legs in a brisk motion that made me flinch. ‘You should complain to the head.’
‘I’m used to it,’ I said meekly. The teacher had made a joke during our physics lesson, comparing my politician dad to gamma radiation. It wasn’t the first time someone had made a derogatory remark about one of my parents. It certainly wouldn’t be the last – or the worst. ‘It didn’t even make sense.’
‘Still though. You shouldn’t tolerate your family being disrespected,’ Kieran said in his thick South Yorkshire accent. ‘If other kids sense weakness, they’ll chew you up and spit you out, just so they can chew you up again tomorrow.’
His ice-blue eyes met mine, and for a horrible moment I thought I was going to get chewed up, whatever that meant, there on that bench, on only my fourth day.
‘This is the crucial time,’ Shay added, turning to face me with a look of concern that made me dare to hope they were here to help, not hurt me. She folded her arms before uncrossing them to adjust an earring, pat one of her thick bunches, and fiddle with the cuff of her non-regulation blazer. In the years to come, Shay always made me think of a fish, her body in constant motion. Fluid and confident, like everything she did.
‘New school year, packs are reforming. It’s kill or be killed. Hunt or be hunted. Especially for the new girl.’
‘I don’t want to be in a pack,’ I stuttered.
‘Lone wolves won’t last ’til half-term,’ Shay said, as solemnly as a thirteen-year-old girl with Mis-Teeq nail stickers could. If I’d worn anything on my nails, let alone the lashes, lip gloss and skirt several inches above knee-length, I’d get a detention. In a school where teachers were resigned to choosing their battles, Shay was one of those girls who won far more than most.
‘You need us,’ Kieran said, raising white-blond eyebrows ominously. His appearance was equally rebellious for the first week of year nine. Hair bordering on a mohawk, stud in one earlobe, a red belt with silver studs holding up his skin-tight trousers.
‘And, luckily, we like the look of you,’ Shay added, staring me straight in the eye. ‘Forgetting that weird salad you’re eating, you seem like one of us. Plus, the joke you made in maths was so good Kieran almost wet himself. So, want to join our pack?’
‘Okay,’ I said, face flushing. I’d mumbled the joke, not intending anyone to hear, but it had been funny, and knowing that these mavericks liked the look of me was both bewildering and unbelievably awesome.
So from then on, we were a pack of three. While being the newest member of the group, and one with a very different homelife from the others, meant that I would often feel slightly on the edge, I could live with it.
My smug parents assumed that exposing these new friends to our enlightened lifestyle would provide the route out of their downtrodden, ignorant existence.
Kieran and Shay gave this notion the contempt it deserved.
They didn’t need anyone to tell them how to overcome the disadvantages of where they’d started from. By the time I joined their shambolic secondary school, life had already taken plenty from them. They were determined to take it back.
6
BECKETT
After caring for Marvin a couple of times a week since Tanya left, Sonali point-blank refused to come on Sunday, even for a few hours.
‘It’s a holy day of rest, my friend.’
‘You told me you’re not religious any more.’
‘Well, I’m beginning to see the light after spending yesterday with your grandfather. When he accused me of “feeling him up” when I tried to mop up the coffee he’d tipped down his shirt, I suddenly felt the urge to pray I didn’t face a sexual harassment investigation.’
‘Is he getting worse?’
Sonali carefully folded the tea towel in her hand before looking up at him. ‘Yes.’
Beckett could only nod. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t noticed himself, but hearing it from a professional felt like a punch in the abs.
‘You should take the day off, too. Try having some fun together while you still can.’
He gave a wry grimace. Gramps had never been fun, even before he’d got ill. Well, that might not be true. He might have been the life and soul of the party, prior to the pain of losing his daughter, when everything became about trying to keep their tiny family afloat, and then eventually helping support Beckett through five years of medical school. This included working well past the usual retirement age, barely scraping above minimum wage after being made redundant from his office job the day after his sixty-fifth birthday. He’d endured gruelling cleaning shifts, unsafe working conditions in a factory, useless co-workers at the local petrol station and a vindictive boss at the corner shop. He was probably too tired and miserable to remember fun existed.
Beckett knew how he felt.
