Free Looking for JJ by Anne Cassidy Page A

pictures. A trip out for three children that would live with Alice for the rest of her life. A hole dug in the ground, the skeletal face of the feral cat, the splashing of water, the sight of blood, like a shocking red rose blooming from a child’s head. How could she expect the press to forget when she never ever would? She sat there for a few moments gripping her mobile phone. Beneath her feet the carpet was threadbare. In places it was thin enough to see through.
    She found Frankie lying across the bare mattress on the bed that he used to use. Alice could see the tension in his face. He hadn’t always been like this. At the beginning he had made her laugh all the time.
    “What’s wrong?” she said, sitting beside him.
    He turned away from her, pushing his face into the mattress.
    “You’re seeing someone else,” he said, his words muffled by the mattress.
    “What? Of course I’m not!” she said, wearily.
    They’d had conversations like this before. Frankie quizzing her about who she was with and where she’d been on the evenings and days when she wasn’t with him. He didn’t understand that she liked time on her own, or was happy to just stay in with Rosie. Sometimes she had to lie, like when she was meeting Jill Newton. He didn’t trust her and she didn’t know what she could do about it.
    She lay down beside him and put her arm around his waist and began to kiss his shoulders.
    “I’m not seeing anyone else,” she said, between kisses. “It’s just you and me.”
    She felt him turning and waited until he was face to face with her.
    “I’ve never met anyone like you before,” she said, her voice husky.
    He was staring hard at her, his eyes dark, shifting slightly from side to side, as if he was scanning her for any sign of lies.
    “I’m sorry,” he said, after a minute, his big arms pulling her closely to him. “I just want you all for myself. I can’t help it.”
    She felt his mouth on her neck, his lips pushing hard into her skin, as though he might bruise it. She put her hands up, cupping his face, pulling him towards her and then lifted her head so that he would kiss her.
    Poor Frankie. It wasn’t possible to have people, to own them, as though they were possessions. Alice knew that. It was something that JJ had learned the hard way. A long time before.
     
    When the modelling work finished and her mum locked herself in her bedroom for days and weeks, Jennifer had to live with her gran. She slept in the sewing room, on a small camp bed in the corner. There wasn’t much room with her gran’s giant sewing machine and the various plastic stacking boxes that were full of her equipment; materials, patterns and threads.
    “Don’t you touch any of those, Jenny,” her gran said. “That’s my job, see, it’s what I get paid for.”
    Jennifer knew this already. Her gran made clothes for children’s shops. She’d seen the piles of trousers and tops, the skirts and tiny pairs of jeans that her gran sewed up. She’d even been given some of them to wear from time to time.
    During the day, she had to move out of the tiny room so that her gran could work. That meant she had to sit on the sofa in the living room changing Macy’s clothes, watching the television set that seemed to be on all day long whether her gran was in the room or not. Nelson had an armchair to himself and from time to time she caught him looking at her in a bad-tempered way. She tried to ignore him and spent her time chatting to Macy.
    After a week her gran told her that she’d have to stay for a while. They’d have to try and find her a new school because the old one was too far away.
    “When’s Mummy coming?” she said.
    “I don’t know, Jenny. I wish I knew,” her gran said, taking a cigarette out of a pack and lighting it up.
    There were lots of phone calls, mostly late at night. Jennifer heard her gran talking, her voice low and urgent, her words sharp and ugly. Once, she got out of bed and walked into the