Free The Sick Rose by Erin Kelly Page A

neck still bore the visible traces of the oil he had anointed himself with earlier. It was a faint dark green. Below this, on his clavicle, she had marked him for herself, a vivid red circle, half-kiss, half-bite. She felt intensely female and powerful, like a witch.

Chapter 9
    July 2002
    They couldn’t stay in their house. Dad’s life insurance policy was invalid because Mum had secretly cancelled the direct debit six weeks before his death, along with the Sky, the Christmas Club, Slimming World and all her magazine subscriptions. She had been saving up for fertility treatment. No one told Paul this: he found out by listening at doors when she was on the telephone and thought that he was asleep. ‘There’s no way I can cover this mortgage,’ she told an unidentified friend. ‘On what I earn? Are you having a laugh? If I sell up here and rent somewhere crappy I can live off the equity until Paul finishes school. It’s not like I’ve got a choice, is it?’ Paul would have looked up the word ‘equity’ on the internet, but that had been cancelled, too.
    ‘Are you sure you don’t mind leaving?’ she asked him as they were packing up his room. His books never had been put on shelves.
    ‘I promise you I don’t mind.’ He would have had to say this whatever his feelings because he knew she didn’t have a choice, but it was not a lie. In fact, he couldn’t wait to get away. His bedroom window looked out onto the garden and he had nightmares where blood-soaked wires were thrashing at the glass like the tentacles of some terrible alien octopus.
    Mum had always looked down on the Grays Reach Estate, even though Dad had grown up there and she hadn’t exactly been born in a stately home herself. When they argued, he used to call her a snob and Lady Muck. Grays Reach was literally a sink estate, the grey buildings scattered like dregs in the shallow bowl of an old quarry in the part of the estuary where the tunnels and the suspension bridge loosely stitch Essex to Kent and the river starts to smell of the sea. The town planners who had commissioned the estate in the middle of the last century had had an uncanny prescience of, and sympathy for, the requirements of petty drug dealers in the twenty-first century; it was almost entirely pedestrianised, with no conventional streets but clusters of houses that backed onto little courtyards which were in turn linked by paths and alleyways. An offshoot of the A13 divided Grays Reach from its flanking towns of Grays and Tilbury, and an underpass beneath the railway line that carried the trains between London and Southend led to the High School and the shopping precinct. The precinct housed the estate’s only pub, the Warrant Officer, bracketed by two burnt-out shop shells. Paul’s new home was in the heart of the estate, the end of a staggered terrace that faced another and backed onto a concrete quad. The day they moved in, Natalie said to herself, ‘How the mighty have fallen,’ and looked out of the window that faced a brick wall. She was acting as though they were living in a shanty town.
    That first summer, Paul quite liked Grays Reach. Being miles from the main road meant that his mother was happy for him to spend all day on his bike. On two wheels he mapped the place for himself. There was plenty of land, wasteland and wild fields, to explore. Unlike most of the estuary estates, which had become absorbed into the surrounding towns, Grays Reach remained surrounded by its own scrubby green belt, like the kid at school who can’t shake off rumours of fleas and who no one ever comes close enough to touch. Although the new house was only five miles from the old one it was in a different catchment area, which meant that he wouldn’t be going to St Neot’s but to the Grays Reach High School. His mother was worried that he wouldn’t know anyone there. As far as Paul was concerned, this was good. He was sick of being the boy with the dead dad; sick of the staring; sick of