frighten the horses, so what?
Eddie was looking at the gun in his brother’s hand.
‘You did it then,’ he said flatly.
Max paused and looked at Eddie square in the eye. Max’s eyes were suddenly a chilly blue, like arctic ice. ‘I did nothing.’
Eddie swallowed nervously. His lips quivered. ‘Holy Christ,’ he muttered.
Max replaced the gun in its oiled cloth and held it out to Eddie.
‘Take it out and bury it,’ he told him. ‘I don’t want to know where.’
Eddie did as he was told. Max went into the lounge and put Mozart on the radiogram. He sat down with a brandy, feeling like a weight had been lifted from his shoulders.
‘And where the fuck have you been?’ Connie Bailey demanded of her daughter as Annie let herself in the front door of her mother’s little terraced council house.
It was nearly dawn and one of Max’s boys had just dropped her off at the end of the road. Annie silently cursed her mother’s erratic sleeping habits. Connie was always trotting about in the night, making cups of tea and smoking fags, and that was in the quiet times. Now it was the day of the wedding, and with all the excitement Annie doubted that her mother had slept a wink.
Connie was perched on the bottom stair with a mug of tea and a cigarette. Annie looked at her with stark dislike and hoped it wasn’t true that daughters turned into their mothers.
Connie was dirt-poor skinny, with a smoker’s lined and yellowish skin. Her dry, dyed blonde hair was up in the sponge rollers she always wore at night, and her candlewick dressing gown, once peach-coloured, had faded to dirty beige.
Oh God, Annie thought, I could do without this. She was still smarting from the fact that Max had barely bothered to say goodbye to her. Annie wondered if he’d had Ruthie yet, but she doubted it. Ruthie was the Virgin Princess, the sort that men took home to meet their mums. Ruthie had been presented to Queenie Carter over tea at Christmas and, when she had met with Queenie’s approval, the marriage had been given the go-ahead.
Annie had never even met Queenie, although she had seen her about now and again with Max and his brothers. She’d never meet the imperious old woman now. She’d croaked back in the spring, heart attack or something.
There had been a lavish funeral on a rainy April day, a huge fleet of black Daimlers gliding through the East End behind the hearse. The pink carnations on either side of Queenie’s coffin had spelt out MUM. The streets had been lined with silent, respectful watchers.
All the men had removed their hats.
Some of the women had cried.
The Carter family were held in high regard around this manor, and that day was the proof.
‘I stopped at Kath’s,’ said Annie, closing the door behind her.
‘You’re a bloody liar,’ said Connie flatly, snorting smoke from her pinched little nose. ‘I spoke to Maureen two hours ago and she said that Kath was home by eleven and she didn’t have you with her. You’ve been up to no good.’
Annie let out an angry breath. ‘I’m twenty, Mum, not ten. What I do is my business.’
‘Not while you live under my roof,’ snapped Connie. ‘You’ve been out mucking around with some bloke or other.’
Annie stared at her mother. She ached to wipe that smug look off Connie’s face by telling her that the bloke was Max Carter, who was marrying good-as-gold Ruthie today.
It would be quite a laugh, standing behind them both at the altar in her role as bridesmaid, looking at Max’s broad, expensively suited shoulders and knowing that her scratch marks were still on them.
‘What’s going on?’
They both looked up. Ruthie was standing at the top of the stairs yawning as she shrugged into her red dressing gown. Her mousy hair was rumpled around her plain, placid face.
Ruthie wasn’t bad-looking, really.
There was a serenity about her.
But she didn’t have Annie’s incendiary beauty, and she didn’t have that flirtatious spark that made men lose their heads and sometimes their hearts. Connie always said that Ruthie was her good little girl. She also said that Annie was trouble just like her father, always had been, always would be.
Annie had been hurt by that when she was little. For a while she had tried to be good like Ruthie, to prove her mother wrong, but then Dad had left so it was clear that the good-behaviour policy had got her nowhere. Bad behaviour won her a lot more attention. All right, it was a clout around the ear or bed without supper, but it was attention nevertheless, and she had to claw a little back from perfect Ruthie now and again, or go mad.
‘Nothing’s going on, sweetheart,’ said Connie, and Annie’s lip curled because even Connie’s voice was different when she spoke to Ruthie. It was soft and gentle and soothing. When Connie spoke to Annie, her voice was harsh with dislike. ‘Just Annie out on the tiles, hooking her pearly about for any lad that wants it.’
Now that was unfair. Sure, she went down the pub with her mates and up West sometimes when she was flush, and she flirted and danced and teased, but she’d never come across for a man until last night, and she wanted to tell her mother that but she couldn’t. Pride wouldn’t let her.
‘Oh Annie,’ said Ruthie. ‘I don’t want you looking all washed-out for the big day.’
‘I won’t,’ said Annie tightly, pushing past Connie and running up the stairs. She paused in front of Ruthie. ‘What time did you say we had to be at the hairdresser’s?’
Ruthie rolled her eyes. ‘Nine o’clock. I told you.’
‘I forgot. I’ll get washed up,’ said Annie, and hurried into the bathroom.
She leaned on the sink and looked at her reflection. Her face was flushed, her dark eyes flashing with suppressed anger. She heard Ruthie go downstairs, heard their murmuring voices and knew what they were saying.
Poor Annie, Ruthie would say, she seems so lost.
Little tart, Connie would retort, if she isn’t knocked up before Christmas I’ll eat my hat.
Annie touched her belly thoughtfully. No, Max had been careful. An unplanned pregnancy would really put the cat among the pigeons. She thought back to how tender he had been at first, how sweet … and then how dismissive. Had and then forgotten, she thought. Her first time, a special time with a special man. That’s what it had been to her. To him, it had been nothing.
Nothing at all.
She felt tears prick her eyes again and blinked them back, hating the momentary weakness. Dig deep and stand alone, she told herself. She never cried. Even when her dad had left, she hadn’t cried, even though she had missed him like mad. She had
