Free Tony Hogan Bought Me an Ice-Cream Float Before He Stole My Ma by Kerry Hudson Page B

I’ve just got tae get home right now though.’
    We left the nursery in silence, Ma smoking a roll-up, looking like she hadn’t slept for a week or maybe like she had slept for a whole week. When the nursery was just a grubby finger smudge behind us Ma looked down at me and said, in her poshed-up telephone voice: ‘Will you speak to Janie about swearing? Fuckin’ busybody.’
    I laughed and swung our linked hands. ‘Aye, fuckin’ busybody!’
    Peals of laughter escaped us and spiralled up into the hot, blue Scottish sky. We laughed all the way home and that night Ma didn’t speak to me about swearing, but she didn’t ask me about Connect 4 either.
    *
    The rest of summer the kids at nursery watched me carefully. I could take their toy or steal half their chocolate biscuit but when we had to walk with partners I would always be left with Davey, the boy with dark circles under his eyes and hands thick with flaky eczema. With no one else to walk with I happily chattered away as he looked wide-eyed and interested and said nothing; though I pulled my jumper sleeve over my hand before I held his.
    Davey lived on the next terrace along from us. Above those dark shadows he had milky-blue eyes that made him look like he was waiting for a beating. His sister, Leanne, was six and went to proper school already. She had a skinny body and straight dark hair framing her hard face, narrow brown eyes and dusty skin that looked like it needed some rough treatment from a wet flannel.
    I attached myself to them and held on tightly as though I expected to be thrown off. Leanne was my best friend at home and we left Davey to trail silently behind, scratching his hands and taking the parts we didn’t want in our games.
    Leanne was brave and loud; she shouted a lot and broke rules. She also shat herself. We would be playing shopping or hairdressers and Leanne’s face would become serious as the smell washed over us. She never said a word, just carefully stood up and ran, bow-legged, back to her house. I still had my own shameful days of waking to sticky legs and an acrid smell and I never said a word either.
    Davey and Leanne’s parents liked a drink. That’s what Ma said when I asked her why they sometimes couldn’t walk. It was true; whether I called for Leanne morning or night there would be a sweating can of lager and a plastic bottle of cider on the table and her ma and da would be lounging on the sofa watching the one channel they could get with the help of a bent coat hanger.
    Ma called them Jack Sprat and wife because Leanne’s da was so skinny you could see his bones and her ma’s big arse spilled right over the sofa’s edge. They both had blurry sea-green tattoos up their arms and if you stared long enough you could make out the dragons and lions and words crawling up their skin and under their T-shirt sleeves. The only thing I ever heard Leanne’s da say was, ‘Leanne love, fix us a snakebite.’
    Us kids could do what we wanted, which normally meant taking our clothes off and chasing each other through the reeking dirty clothes and greasy plates in the bedrooms and jumping on the beds until something underneath snapped. I often stayed for tea at theirs though Ma didn’t like it. ‘They’ve enough on their plate, Janie, without another mouth tae feed.’
    But Leanne’s ma was organised too and on Mondays we would often bump into her in the booze aisle at Safeway with four big sacks of frozen chips thawing in her trolley. There was always a mouth-watering, fatty smell in the air at Leanne’s and at the beginning of the week there would be red sauce too.
    After enough visits to fetch me home for dinner or bed Ma gave in and said yes to ‘A cider and a plate of chips, Iris?’ After that she started joining them with her bottle of cider in front of the telly, on an armchair cleared of their crushed beer cans.
    When Ma