Free No Place For a Man by Judy Astley

make all our fortunes!’
    ‘And it’s down to my new best mate here!’ Eddy said, hauling the cat round to his lap and tickling his ears. ‘We’re going to make him a shareholder.’
    Jess moved Micky’s biker jacket from the back of a chair and sat down by her desk. ‘I can’t wait to hear, but whose is the baby? And is it all right out there in the hallway?’ she asked.
    ‘Oh that’s Eddy’s daughter’s littlest. He’s minding her while she fetches another one from the school. Go on, tell her the plan, Micky,’ Matt said. ‘I’ll make her a cup of tea. It’s what you do when the breadwinner comes home isn’t it?’
    ‘S’right, Matt,’ Eddy slurred, clearly the one on the outside of all the Budweiser. ‘You go and play the little house husband, put your pinny on.’
    ‘What have you done, hacked into the lottery systemand fixed it so you win?’ Jess was concerned about the sleeping baby, whether Eddy was fit to be in charge of her – could you be done for being drunk in charge of a child?
    ‘We invented something.’ Micky leaned forward and lowered his voice as if rival patentees were lurking outside the door. He looked so much smarter than the other two, in a sky blue linen shirt and elegant black trousers. Eddy wore a sweatshirt so ancient it was advertising a Cream concert. His jeans, inside which his plump thighs strained to get out, must have been bought in younger and leaner days too. Matt was heading the same unkempt way, she noticed, in a tee shirt that she was sure she’d given to Monica for the duster bag.
    ‘It’s a cat tracking system,’ Micky told her. ‘You know people are always losing their cats. And cats are always losing their collars. So what you want …’ Eddy leaned forward and cut in. ‘What you want is like you get in posh cars for when they’re nicked. You need a satellite tracking system. A sort of moggy GPS.’
    Matt came back in slopping a mug of tea which dripped on Jess’s jacket as he handed it to her. ‘Guess what we’re going to call it,’ he said eagerly. ‘Just guess. You’ll like this.’
    ‘It’s going to be called …’ Eddy started and the others joined in, ‘the Cat Sat!’ They laughed like children who’d just heard their first real joke.
    ‘The Cat Sat?’ Jess said. ‘As in …’
    ‘Yeah, you’ve got it, as in The Cat Sat on the Mat!’ The fact they seemed to find this so screamingly hilarious confirmed it was definitely more than tobacco they’d been inhaling. So they were spending the day smoking dope like students. No wonder all the biscuitshad gone, they’d got post-spliff munchies.
    ‘Everyone will want one. They’ll be really expensive so everyone will think they’re the thing to have.’
    ‘And for lions too. Or have they already got them?’ Micky looked solemn.
    ‘Lions have.’ Eddy nodded his head too hard and the cat clung on tight looking alarmed. ‘I saw it on that vet thing with the Norwegian woman, the fanciable one.’
    ‘Yeah I like her,’ Micky agreed. ‘But she was scared of the lions, a real wuss about the puss. We just need smaller ones than the lions have got. Kitten size.’
    ‘Lions?’ They’d completely lost Jess. She didn’t want to put a downer on things but it was obviously one of those situations where you’d had to be there . All she longed to do was to go upstairs, put on some shoes that were more comfortable, brush an irritating shard of prawn from between a couple of top molars and let the end of the day creep quietly closer. Matt was leaning back with his hands behind his head, grinning as if he’d completed more work in this one short day than in the previous twenty years. He couldn’t be serious, she thought, surely to God he couldn’t think there was real mileage in this.
    On her way home from school Zoe hesitated outside Angie’s house. It would be a huge betrayal to go in and inform her that her daughter was pregnant. Not that she’d do it quite like that, of course