Free The Business by Martina Cole

time, she was not going to retreat with her tail between her legs. She was not going to give him a free pass, he was going to pay the price for his negligence.
    She had lived with this pregnancy and the fear it had engendered for weeks and he had not cared one iota about what she might have been going through. So, if she decided to get her revenge on him, then that was his fucking lookout. See how he felt now the boot was on the other foot and he was the one being harassed and accused. See if he liked being in the frame as the villain of the piece.
    Imelda looked at her mother then, saw the way her mother eyed her with distaste and disbelief and knew she had not conned her as easily as she had her father. So she shrieked with all the hate she could muster, ‘Oh, so what’s new, eh? You don’t believe me, do you? All this time I have kept me mouth shut to avoid all this.’ She gestured around her by holding her arms out wide. ‘To stop me father from killing someone, and as usual me own mother doesn’t believe me, doesn’t care about what happened to me. Then you wonder why I didn’t tell you about it. But I’ll tell you this now. There is a baby, Mum, and it got there somehow, didn’t it? I suppose you believe we all arrived with the stork. No dirty, sweaty sex for you, a woman who won’t even have the Sun newspaper in her house. A house that is so fucking clean and sterile it’s like a hospital, a fucking mental hospital. A nut-house and you’re the Queen Nutter.’
    Imelda was crying now, real tears; she was feeling genuine sorrow for herself and her situation. She was caught up in the lie she had caused, was already half believing it. She was the proud possessor of an audience, and that was all she had ever wanted, had ever needed. She threw herself into the part of the victim, milking it for all that it was worth, while at the same time passing on the blame.
    ‘You knew that I couldn’t tell me dad who was responsible without a fucking war starting, you saw what he’s done to me over the last weeks, how he’s treated me, and you wonder why I kept fucking stumm. Jason used me, and now he has to face the old man.’
    Imelda’s lovely face was the picture of innocence, her large blue eyes pleading for some kind of understanding. In her bedroom, the bedroom of a typical teenage girl, she looked so young and so vulnerable. To anyone else she would have looked believable but to Mary Dooley, who knew what a gifted liar her daughter was, she looked just how she had always looked to her. Like a vicious, vindictive little mare. It was hard to admit that to herself, but it was the truth. Imelda had always had a dark side to her, had always been capable of causing great disruption to those around her. Imelda lied about the littlest things, it was in her nature. She embellished everything for no other reason than it came naturally to her. She was devoid of any kind of morality. Even as a small child she had schemed and lied to get what she wanted. She would go to extraordinary lengths to get what she saw as revenge for slights real or imagined. Until now Mary had not seen anything sinister in that, but now, now she knew that this child of hers was without real emotions, real feelings. She knew that Imelda was prepared to offer up Jason Parks like a sacrificial lamb to ensure that she came out of this without a stain on her character, and to ensure that Jason Parks paid the price for not putting his hand up and taking the flak. A small part of her could understand her daughter’s hurt, her daughter’s need to make him pay for abandoning her. But another part of her, the sensible part of her, knew that this daughter of hers had accused him of rape. Not just of making her pregnant, because that would have insinuated that she was a party to it all, she had accused Jason Parks of the most heinous crime a man could be accused of. And, knowing her daughter like she did, she knew that it was all a fabrication, a lie. A lie