Free Motherlove by Thorne Moore Page A

window and huddled down, leaning on the rotten sill and watching the street for any sign of him. Gary Bagley, her man. Her family.
    A family was what Lindy Crowe wanted. A nest, safe from the hostile world, with someone she could wrap herself around. There had been a family once, six siblings and Mum and Dad, though she had been too young to remember the drunken screaming and shouting that ended with her father knifing her mother. Maybe she hungered to find a family again because she couldn’t remember. Foster homes hadn’t counted, even when fosterers had meant well. They had just been alien beings who had separated her from her brother Jimmy. He was the next youngest and they’d been real friends, but no one cared about that. The Home was nothing like a family. Staff too busy for anyone, and Wayne Price and his gang doing whatever they liked to the younger kids, especially the girls. Lindy had run away at ten, then at twelve, then fourteen, and had been on her own since, living rough or in squats, getting by with shoplifting and begging and tricks. Then Gary. He hadn’t made everything perfect, but she had never expected that. It was enough that he called her his girl and brought her here, to 128 Nelson Street, to a house that they could pretend was home.
    In some distant past, someone had turned it into bedsitters. Someone must still be paying someone rent, because the electricity meters worked, and the water was still connected, though the dozen residents treated it as a squat. She and Gary had this room. They shared the bathroom, though the bath had no plug, and the people in the basement used the bog out back, and Tyler on the ground floor usually just peed in the hall.
    It was all Lindy had ever hoped for. Nothing like spending a couple of winter weeks in a shop doorway down Almeida Lane without a penny in your pocket, with a broken heel and a black eye, to teach you that a roof, any roof, a bed, any bed, and something, anything to eat, is the best life has to offer.
    Something to eat. She realised she hadn’t eaten since the chocolate bar she’d nicked that morning. Must be the excitement of Gary coming back. She ought to eat. She took a couple of biscuits and one of the apples. Then she returned to her window perch to wait.
    Nelson Road in the twilight. Lamps coming on, shifting it into a different dimension. All through the day it rumbled with traffic taking the short cut away from the endless traffic lights on Moreton Road. Hardly any pedestrians, drab old houses silent. Then at night the residents awoke. Where were they during the day, she wondered. Some must have jobs because at night the pavements were blocked with parked cars. Others collected like moths around the laundrette, the betting shop and the two pubs. At night, vans came and went from the yard that was padlocked by day, with Alsatians growling behind the metal gates. At night, figures gathered on the corner with Heighton Street and exchanged money and packets. Lindy knew them by sight if not by name. Gary used to send her with a wad of notes to deal with them for him. He’d let her try stuff with him sometimes, though mostly he only gave her a bit of weed. She didn’t mind. It was just him she wanted.
    A figure was coming down the street in the gloom. Hands thrust into pockets, feet kicking at anything within reach. Hood up. Hope, then disappointment. He passed under a street lamp and she could see it wasn’t Gary.
    Should she have gone to meet him? Last time she’d seen him, she told him she’d be here waiting for him, and he’d grinned and said, ‘You’d better be.’
    An old battered Cortina screeched to a halt in the middle of the road. A bloke climbed out of the back and smacked the top before the car hurtled on down the road.
    It was Gary! Gary was home! She was up, leaning against the window, rapping on the glass, pleading for him to look up.
    He saw her, raised a finger to tell her to