The Wicked Girls (30 page)

‘What can I do?’

‘Take this lot out and throw sticks for them,’ she says. She hasn’t got the will for tact any more.

Luke huffs and throws his Nintendo on to the table.

‘Luke!’ bellows Jim. Kirsty slaps her hands over her ears, chokes back a matching howl. ‘Don’t you
dare
treat your toys like that! Have you any idea how much that cost?’

‘Well, it’s not
my
fault!’ Luke shouts back. ‘She
made
me do it!’

‘We’re not buying you another if you break that one!’

Sophie unplugs an earphone, looks imperiously at her family. ‘Hello?
Listening
,’ she says. Kirsty feels a vein in her forehead begin to pulse. That’s all I need. I’ll have a stroke right here at this
table,
then
see where your Nintendo money comes from.

‘We’re going for a walk,’ Jim tells her.

The phone rings. God save us from children. No wonder people have chihuahuas instead. ‘I can’t answer that,’ she tells her
husband. ‘If it’s work, tell them I’m stuck in traffic.’

Jim picks up. ‘Walk?’ whines Sophie. ‘Who said anything about a
walk
?’

‘Hello?’ says Jim. Kirsty’s brain begins to throb. ‘Oh, hello, Lionel. Thanks for calling me back. No, no problem. It’s always
hard to get much work done in the summer holidays. I guess that’s why we have offices. No, hang on. I’ll just take this somewhere
quiet.’

He leaves the room. ‘I don’t see why I should have to go out just because you can’t do your work in time,’ says Luke, and
glares at her.

Kirsty slams the computer shut and stamps upstairs to her bedroom, slamming the door pointedly.

She gets into bed and starts to write again.

I can’t, she thinks. I can’t encourage people to go there. I’m the hypocrite of hypocrites: writing disapprovingly about a
phenomenon I’m helping to foster. It’s not safe. Every time they read statistics like this, see how many people are there,
calculate the odds in their heads, they’ll think it’s safe. But he’s still out there. Still mingling in amongst them, and
they’ve no idea who he is.

She checks her watch. She can string the features desk along for another hour, and after that every ten minutes is another
year off her career. But, she thinks, I can’t do this ‘balance’ thing. They’re all so obsessed with balance that they forget
that, sometimes, there is such a thing as simple, black-and-white truth. Whitmouth’s a horrible place. It’s dangerous and
seedy and people should know. I can’t let them fool themselves that they can wander around it half-cut. I’ve got a story here.

And a small voice says: yeah, and if I tell it properly, they won’t spike it and I’ll earn actual wordage. And I’ve
got
to find the cash for that car insurance.
Got
to. There’s two days left to run, and after that I won’t be able to earn a bloody penny. Sod
Whitmouth. Sod balance. I got scared to stupidity last night, and I’m bloody well letting people know. And if that weasel-man
reads about himself and doesn’t like it, then maybe he’ll learn a lesson he needs to understand.

She highlights again, cuts until the page is blank. Then she begins:

The lower half of Ashok’s face is smeared with mayonnaise. He speaks as he chews, and bits of lettuce spray into the night
air. ‘I can’t believe they went in without us.’

‘Course they did,’ says Tony. ‘Couldn’t wait to get away from you, you wanker.’

Rav and Jez laugh while Ash flicks him a V. None of them is steady on his feet, and Rav slips off the pavement into Brighton
Road, narrowly missing a passing car. It blasts its horn and carries on as they bawl and shake their fists at its receding
tail-lights.

‘God, it’s bloody dead around here,’ says Jez.

‘It’s two in the morning,’ says Tony. ‘What did you expect?’

Ash picks the last of the chicken out of his kebab, balls up the paper and drops it on the pavement. ‘Bloody no bloody trainers,’
he says. ‘These cost over a hundred quid.’

‘What?’ says Rav. ‘You got ripped off, mate.’

‘’Koff,’ says Ash, and cuffs him round the back of the head. They stumble on. It’s another mile to the B&B. Other knots of
stragglers wander past: people who’ve blown all their money and can’t afford a taxi, people who’ve been turned away from the
clubs or got bored in the queues, and others, heading in the opposite direction, who are still hoping that they’ll get in.
Tony finishes off the last of his falafel and balls up the bag. Puts it in his pocket. ‘That’s what you’re meant to do with
rubbish,’ he tells Ashok.

‘Bollocks,’ says Ash. ‘If they hadn’t got rid of all the waste-bins I’d’ve thrown it away.’

‘Hah,’ says Jez. ‘If your lot didn’t keep blowing things up, they wouldn’t have got rid of them in the first place.’

‘Yeah,’ says Rav around a lager burp. ‘Those Diwali bombings were a bugger, weren’t they?’

The familiar press of booze on bladder is getting beyond a joke. Ashok wishes he’d made use of the filthy bog in the amusement
arcade, but the lure of getting those 10ps to drop on the cascade machine had been too great at the time. He glances at Tony
and Jez, feels a twinge of jealousy that their heathen upbringing has left them free of inhibitions about letting fly by the
empty cashpoint a few hundred yards back. He’s going to need to relieve himself before they get to the B&B. Lager doesn’t
agree with him, but you don’t drink vodka-tonic on a stag night if you want to get out unscathed.

They start to pass the boarded-up frontage of a bankrupt ironmonger’s, and he remembers noticing on the way into town that
the next lot, before the job centre, is derelict: a mass of builders’ rubble, elder and stinging nettles behind a loose wire
fence. That’ll do, he thinks. They can just bloody wait for me.

‘I need a wazz,’ he announces as they reach the fence. Grabs at the wire and gives it a shake. It’s come free of the concrete
post to which it was once moored, at this end. He’s obviously not the first home-bound reveller to have this idea. ‘Keep a
look-out,’ he says.

‘What for?’ asks Tony. He’s already lighting a Marlboro, smoke hanging in the air above his head. ‘Ladyboy to send in after
you?’

Ashok ducks down and squeezes through the gap. The waste-ground is dark, and stinks. It’s clearly functioned as a makeshift
toilet for the clubbers of Whitmouth for years. I’m going to have to give my trainers a wash when we get in, he thinks. Just
hope I don’t tread in anything solid.

Five yards in, a large elder bush blocks off the light from the street. This’ll do. He picks his way carefully over piles
of bricks and broken glass – the last thing he wants to do is lose his footing in this foetid jungle – and steps in behind
it. Feels relief simply from unbuttoning his jeans, lets out a groan of pleasure when the beer-scented stream steams out into
the night air.

‘Thought you were having a wazz, not a wank!’ shouts Rav. ‘Can’t you wait till we get home?’

The piss seems to last for ever. Ashok shifts his balance, waits as his bladder pumps and pumps. Now the initial stress has
gone, he wishes he could stop and hold on to the rest until he’s back in the bathroom at Seaview. He doesn’t like standing
with his back to the dark like this, can’t shake the feeling that he’s not alone. He tries clenching his internal muscles,
but it’s no good. The stream slows but doesn’t stop and it’ll just take him longer to get done, if he tries.

Street-side, he hears the sound of the fence shifting, then the slide and rattle of careless feet on the rubble he’s just
crossed.

‘Where are you?’ Tony’s voice, slurred and overloud.

‘In here,’ he says.

‘Right,’ says Tony. Ashok sees him against the light, then he is standing beside him. ‘Shift over,’ he says.

‘I can’t,’ says Ash.

‘All right then. Don’t complain if your feet get splashed.’

‘Didn’t you just go in the street?’ asks Ashok.

‘Lager,’ says Tony.

The sound of Tony’s zip going down, then suddenly, behind them, something thrashes in the dark, among the bushes against the
blank wall of the ironmongery.

Ashok and Tony peer at each other in the dark, sobriety immediate and shocking.

‘What was that?’ asks Tony. His eyes are huge in the shadows.

‘Dunno,’ says Ashok.

‘Just a fox or summat,’ says Tony.

‘Dunno,’ repeats Ashok. ‘Sounded bigger, didn’t it?’

Tony nods, his bladder forgotten. They can hear the others out on the street, laughing and joking about. ‘Come on, you two!’
Rav’s voice drifts through the foliage.

‘Shhh!’ hisses Tony redundantly. They turn, peer into the wasteland. ‘Hello?’ he calls tentatively.

Silence. They stand side by side, straining their ears for a sound. It feels weird, thinks Ashok. Like it did before, when
I was alone: like someone’s out there, listening.

Tony shakes his head. ‘Badger.’

‘Badger?’ asks Ashok, incredulously. ‘Do you
get
badgers in towns?’

‘Well
I
dunno, do I?’ says Tony. Looks down at his trousers, hoicks his zip. ‘C’mon.’ He turns away, starts back towards the fence.

Ash waits a couple of seconds, listens some more. There’s nothing out there now: just the sound of shuffling on the pavement
and the rustle of the leaves by his shoulder. It’s nothing, he thinks. Just the sounds you hear sometimes. Things moving and
settling, stuff slipping off roofs.

A cry, from the darkness: frightened, gurgling, cut off. That wasn’t a badger. A girl. That was a woman’s voice. Out there
somewhere.

He hears Tony swear; hears the others, their voices suddenly alert. In the bushes something thrashes, bucks, falls still.

‘Shit,’ says Tony again. ‘Fuck. That was … Jesus.’

Rav and Jez crash through the fence, shove the last bolt from its mooring. ‘What was that?’ asks Jez.

‘I don’t …’ says Ash. ‘I think it was a …’

Tony’s running clumsily over the piled-up bricks in the middle of the yard, always the leader. ‘Hello?’ he shouts. ‘Where
are you?’

In the far corner, they hear a struggle, another gasp cut short. The three laggards set off in pursuit of their friend, spread
out,
run towards the noise. I’m scared, thinks Ash. I’m not a hero. I don’t do this sort of thing. He catches a trainer on the
corner of something sharp, stumbles, bangs his shoulder into Jez’s arm. Feels a hand shoot out and push him upright.

Tony scrambles up the slope towards the bushes. He can see something behind now: something unnaturally white, something that
doesn’t fit. It moves. Christ. It’s a man. There’s a man in there.

‘Over here!’ he shouts. Isn’t thinking now, is just doing: pushes aside the branches as he hears the others’ footsteps veer
towards him.

A body plunges outward, catches him round the knees, sends him tumbling. Tony screams, with shock, then with anger as he hits
the ground and feels the sharp crack and slice of glass entering his skin. The guy’s on top, but he’s not staying there. He’s
struggling to disentangle himself, using Tony’s crotch as traction as he prepares to make another run.

‘Fuck!’ howls Tony. This hurts. The fucker’s got his knee on his hip, is sliding about. Tony grabs at his white shirt, pitches
and rolls. Gets on top as the others arrive, pins the man down. He sees a flash of dark hair, a gold earring. Then Jez is
there, pushing the man over, pinning him down.

The woman struggles for air behind the bushes. Ash and Rav push past. Tony can hear their voices: aggressive with alarm, trying
to sound calm, self-assured. ‘It’s OK. It’s all right. We’ve got you. It’s all right.’

She’s pale and plump and barely conscious; huddles with her dress rucked up over her hips and her hands in front of her face.
‘It’s OK,’ says Ash, and tries to reach out to her. She sees his hands and starts to scream – a hoarse, shattered sound, as
though her throat is damaged – as she swipes at them with broken fingernails. He has to grab her wrists to stop her, kneels
in front of her, his knee between her naked thighs.

‘Aaah,’ she yelps. ‘Aaah no, aaah!’

Pale light casts through the shadow and he sees her face, a
foot from his own. It is pulped, bloody: her nose leaking, an eye so swollen he’s not sure if there’s anything behind the
lid. ‘It’s OK,’ he says again, helplessly. ‘You’re safe now. It’s OK. We’ve got you.’

Behind him, he hears the swish of boots through air as his friends begin to kick the fallen man.

Martin knows he needs to do something, but he doesn’t know what. The shock was too great last night: the discovery of the
links within links, the awful plots he doesn’t understand, left him reeling helplessly, whirling in rage and impotence. His
anger was so fierce, so near-erotic, that he almost went up Mare Street again to see if anyone had taken over Tina’s patch,
but at the last moment self-preservation held him back. He got lucky last Saturday. Can’t expect for a moment that such dumb
luck will hold again. If he’s going to repeat the experience, he needs to be a lot more careful.

So he plans and he thinks, and in the meantime he sticks to his usual routine. Which, on a Sunday morning, is to treat himself
to a sausage roll and a bar of chocolate while he does his washing.