in anticipation of the usual crack around the head. But it seemed Irene hadn’t finished ranting yet.
‘If he didn’t have you to support,’ she railed, almost as if she’d known what Kathleen was thinking, ‘we wouldn’t be in this sorry position in the first place! Fucking leeching off us all the time, never out of our frigging sight, then maybe your father wouldn’t begrudge my frigging kids a bit of something when they need it!’
‘Irene!’ John shouted finally. ‘For God’s sake, let the girl go. She’s got to get ready for work, hasn’t she? And there’s no point giving her a bollocking, is there?’
With Irene letting go of her, so she could return to the assault on her husband, Kathleen took the opportunity to slip out of the door. And she would have legged it, had she not almost fallen arse over tit over Darren himself, who’d clearly been squatting down, earwigging at the keyhole. He was twenty. A grown man. But he looked like a ten-year-old, sneaking around, looking like the shifty sod that he was.
He stood up. And then he grinned at her. ‘Steady on, kidda,’ he whispered. ‘You’ll do yourself an injury.’ He gave Kathleen a friendly slap on the back. ‘Everything alright in there?’
Kathleen didn’t even reward him with a dirty look. ‘You know damn well it isn’t, Darren,’ she hissed. ‘Have you gambled all your wages away again?’
‘Tut, tut, tut, our young ’un,’ Darren said, managing to mock her even as he’d caused so much shit. ‘I was robbed on me way home again. Two black ’uns it was. Big as houses and bold as brass, the pair of them. It’s called “demanding with menaces”, it is. Should be a law against it, shouldn’t there?’
‘And I suppose she’s subbing you all week again to make up for it, is she?’ Kathleen demanded, shaking her head. She stabbed a finger towards the living-room door. ‘You cause all this shit, Darren. You. So how is it fair that it’s me that’s on the end of it all the time? I’m the one who has to work here, remember? You’re off doing your job, and Monica’s off doing hers. And I’m the one who has to deal with all the shit you create!’
She could feel tears – angry, frustrated tears – threatening to spill over her cheeks. She sniffed hard to stop it happening. God, how sick she was of it.
‘Hey, them’s the breaks, our kid,’ Darren said before walking off, whistling, leaving Kathleen open-mouthed in his wake.
An hour later, in the bar, Kathleen kept her ‘trap shut’, as always. That she must keep her trap shut was one of Irene’s most frequent orders, and, having no wish to heap even more attention on her excuse for a family, she was only ever happy to oblige.
Not that she cared that Mary, their regular barmaid, would have already filled all the regulars in on what had gone off. Once perhaps, but she was way past that now. In fact, lately, she realised, she’d even stopped being embarrassed when the locals took the piss over their pints. It was as if they’d even developed a kind of camaraderie with her, complicit in their amusement that Irene could be so thick as to keep falling for all the lines Darren spun her.
‘I wish I had a mother like yours, Kathy,’ one of the estate lads was saying. ‘I’d get fucking robbed every week an’ all.’
His mate burst out laughing, and handed an empty pint glass across for Kathleen to fill. ‘Nah, come on, Gez,’ he ribbed his mate. ‘Shame on you. You’re making out like Darren’s lying! Like he’s not in the bookies every single bleeding day backing anything that moves. Give the poor lad a chance. He’s been robbed blind. Again.’ He winked at Kathleen. ‘Any one of us could be as unlucky as he is.’
Kathleen felt a smile twitch her lips, if only a small one. And for all their ribbing, they were just speaking the truth. She knew it, her dad knew it, Monica probably knew it too – well, if she could find the energy to think about anything other than herself for two minutes at a stretch. No, the fact was that Darren’s problems with gambling were common knowledge, and no one could believe that Irene didn’t know it.
Kathleen pulled a nice top on the beer for him. ‘You’re right,’ she said mildly, glancing from one to the other. ‘My brother is the unluckiest lad in the world, he is. Take no notice of all the gossip. He hasn’t got the gambling fever at all. He’s just got big bloody holes in his pockets.’ She allowed her smile to widen. ‘That and a face that thieves like to punch …’
The two lads roared with laughter and Kathleen laughed with them. This shift – the seven-till-nine one – was the one bright time in her day. With her dad and Irene upstairs having their tea (or tonight, perhaps, throwing it at each other) it was a port in the storm before her dad came down and joined her and Irene did likewise – though her version of work was slightly different; more waltzing around the tap room playing the big ‘I am’.
But for these two hours, she felt free. She felt able to be herself. And it occurred to her that, actually, it was more than just that. For those two hours every day, people actually wanted to talk to her.
For two hours a day she wasn’t invisible.
Kathleen always tried to wake up before the alarm went off in the mornings, but given how late she’d had to work the previous evening, she was still surprised to find herself staring at the ceiling a full quarter hour before it did.
Not that she couldn’t have predicted it. It was always the same when her dad and stepmum had one of their rows: Irene having one of her convenient migraines come on (because of all the shouting, obviously) then demanding that her dad stay up in the flat with her for the evening, leaving Kathleen to pick up the resultant slack.
Silly old cow, she thought. Pathetic. Though even more pathetic was the way her dad ran around after her all the time. Always had. She lay still a little longer, contemplating the unfairness of it all, then reached across to the brass alarm clock that sat on the chest of drawers that separated her bed from Monica’s, and clicked it off before it started ringing.
The air in the bedroom was cold, despite it supposedly being summer, and the lino beneath her bare feet felt icy. This was her dominion, being first up, braving the cold and – for half the year, at least – the dark, but Kathleen had learned to find a grim satisfaction in her Cinderella status. Always the first up. Always the one brewing the tea, opening the curtains and, in the winter, stoking the fire. Only then would she dare to get her stepbrother and stepsister out of bed – then clean the pub. Only then would her dad and Irene get out of bed.
As she tiptoed out of the bedroom, Kathleen glanced back at her sleeping stepsister and smiled to herself. It was funny, because today and for the next two whole months, they would be the same age. Both seventeen. Two months during which Monica couldn’t drone on about Kathleen being only sixteen. Come her own birthday, of course, Kathleen would start being only seventeen. But she’d enjoy the hiatus while it lasted.
Not that today would be much different to any other day. Yes, it was Kathleen’s birthday, and yes, her dad had promised her he might take her to the pictures to see The Sound of Music, but if past birthdays were anything to go by, she wasn’t going to hold her breath. Instead, she clung to memories of happier times, when her real mother had still been alive. Before she’d died in the car crash, Kathleen’s mum had made every birthday special. Trips out and parties, fancy dresses and visits to family – these were always on the agenda, sometimes all on the same birthday, but
