Free Kate and Emma by Monica Dickens Page B

beaten her child to death. She provokes me, was all she said, both then and in court. She gets on my box. She kept talking about her as if she was alive and she’d do it all over again. Her other kids were fine though.’
    Most people are less talkative after food. He was more so, or perhaps it was because I had been to his house, and his wife and I had liked each other. He wasn’t so shy with me.
    ‘Perhaps you thought you were going to see horrors like that, coming out with me?’
    I didn’t answer, because naturally the beast in me had, but the non-beast had hoped not. So he went on, talking to the car ahead - he doesn’t, at least, turn his head from the road to look at you when he speaks - ‘It’s not anything remarkable, where we’re going. The girl all the trouble was about, she’s gone, but, after what came out in court, I was asked to keep an eye on the rest of the family for a while. Your father’s court, as a matter of fact.’
    ‘Why was she there?’
    ‘She ran away when she was about sixteen. Found with a man, the usual story.’
    ‘I know. My father says he sees them in a recurring pattern, like wallpaper.’
    ‘I wish I had your father’s tongue.’
    ‘He wishes he had your ideals.’ That wasn’t exactly what my father had meant when he called Johnny Jordan an optimist, but near enough, and it delighted him, although he pretended not to hear, for want of a reply.
    As we turned a corner into one of the nastiest streets in this peculiarly nasty district, he still had the pleased smile on his face. The sign on the dirty brick of the end house said Butt Street. The car stopped with a crunch of broken glass in the gutter half-way down the flat sick terrace outside a house whose front room hadbeen converted badly, long ago, into a little shop. A sweet-shop, I suppose. Or not. Rat poison and firewood in the cluttered window. A cardboard ice-cream cornet. Steamed jars of peppermint and fruit balls.
    I got out and followed Johnny Jordan in, like his dog, sapped of initiative. Would I have asked him to leave me at the station if I had known? I should have known. When he talked, in the car, I should have known where we would end. I could stay in the car now, say I was tired, bored, anything. I was spying on Kate, ransacking the secret drawers of her life, but I could not stop myself. I had to know. I followed him into the shop.
    When he opened the door, a small buzzer sounded, sourly. There was no one in the tiny shop, and we could have stolen a bar of chocolate, or a plastic bucket and spade with the colour bleaching out, or a card of pins from the wall.
    There was an ice-cream freezer in one corner, the chipped enamel spotted with black fingermarks. When I opened the lid to look inside, the door beyond the counter opened instantly, as if the woman who came through had been watching us behind the curtained glass.
    ‘Oh hullo,’ she said to Mr Jordan. ‘It’s you,’ although she might have been watching us for a good two minutes as we waited there, he stamping his feet discreetly among the little wads of grey gum on the floor to attract attention, since he was in one of his silent spells where he couldn’t call out.
    ‘Just dropped in to see how everything is going.’
    ‘Not too bad.’ Either from habit, or for security, she had moved to stand behind the narrow counter while she talked to us, hands on the broken linoleum top, flanked by the glass cases of toy soldiers and cigarettes and chocolate bars.
    I nodded when Johnny Jordan identified me, and stood against the sticky ice-cream freezer, wishing I was older, so that I could look properly at new people without myself getting in the way. I am like a mother with an awkward child, wondering what they will think. The woman stared at me while she talked listlessly to Mr Jordan. Who’s that girl leaning clumsily on my choc bars and lollies? Her ankles are too bony for tights. Why doesn’t she say something?
    I wished that I could see people