Free Born Under Punches by Martyn Waites Page A

Louise. ‘And where are you going, looking like that, anyway?’
    But she was speaking to thin air. Suzanne was already on her way to the front door. ‘Got to go. Bye.’
    The door slammed, followed by the car door, then the decreasing thump as the mobile sound system receded into the distance. It left the silence in the family dining room even louder and heavier than before.
    Louise sighed. ‘That girl,’ she said, almost unaware she was thinking aloud. ‘I don’t know what to do with her.’
    Another hard snort from the other side of the table. Louise looked across. Keith was chewing his lips, eyes shining in malicious triumph. He waited until he had her full attention before he spoke.
    â€˜Well, Louise,’ he said. ‘She is your daughter.’
    He sat back, pleased to have had the last word.
    Louise picked up her glass of red wine, knuckles clenched and white around the stem, lifted it to her mouth and, hand trembling, drained it. She quickly refilled it, drained it again, then spoke.
    â€˜Are you finished?’
    Keith sat back, nodded.
    â€˜Then I’ll fetch the pudding.’
    She got up, gathered the plates together and went into the kitchen. Once alone inside, she put the dishes down, pushed her back hard against the units and, her breathing ragged and trembling, willed the tears that were gathering at the corners of her eyes not to fall.
    â€˜Oh, God, oh, God,’ she whispered to herself, a plea and a prayer. For her life, her loss, her love.
    â€˜Oh, God.’
    With an effort she willed the tears away, the turbulence from her heart. She picked up the pudding dish and walked back into the dining room wishing, not for the first time, that her husband was dead.
    Davva and Skegs were bored. The chocolate was long gone, they had smoked as much as they could without throwing up, the Bacardi bottle was empty. Even the can of gas they had saved until last as a treat was used up. They had relived their dash through Coldwell in minute comic and heroic detail, but now the moment could be postponed no longer: they had nothing to do.
    Dusk was settling, what workers there were returning home. Davva and Skegs stared at them as they poured from the buses, walking past in their suits and working clothes, tired and unemotional. Some cast glances down at the two boys as they sat by the wall with the debris of their day around them, and the boys returned the looks with hard, flinty ones of their-own; a two-way passage of non-comprehension and fear of others. But not hatred as such. Not specifically.
    Heads fogged and stomachs swimming from what they had consumed, they listed the possibilities for the night ahead. They could go home. For various reasons, neither wanted to do that. They could wander around, try to score some weed or speed, twoc a car. Maybe later. They could go to Davva’s sister Tanya’s flat.
    â€˜I’m starvin’,’ Skegs said. The booze, fags and chocolate had given him an appetite.
    â€˜We’ll go round our Tanya’s then,’ Davva replied. He stood up, reeled and steadied himself. The matter was settled.
    As they walked off, Davva picked up the empty Bacardi bottle and threw it as hard as he could at a lamppost. It connected and shattered, showering the now-empty pavement and road with small, glistening shards that caught the streetlight and, glinting like tiny prisms, fell into the gutter, tinkling gently as they went. In the boys’ fogged minds, the whole thing was in blurred, cinematic slo-mo. Beautiful, like diamonds. Streetlight like gold. Skegs smiled, Davva wanted to but wouldn’t allow himself. They turned and walked away.
    Past the red-brick council semis and three-storey blocks of flats lay the T. Dan Smith Estate. Entry was marked by the Magpie pub and the strip of shops with the gunmetal siege fronts. Police, ambulances or pizza deliverers rarely ventured there. Cut off, it was starving, dying.
    When Tanya