by Jason Ayres
Not only did she have brains and looks, she had an easygoing, bubbly personality, too. It was rare for people to have all three of these things in abundance and it didn’t go unnoticed. She was popular among the girls at school, all of whom wanted to hang out with her, but never abused that popularity by acting like some sort of queen bee.
As for the boys, they were swarming all over her in her later years of school. Most would have walked over hot coals if it had given them a chance to be her boyfriend. She resisted all offers, though, wanting to wait for the right one.
With offers from both Oxford and Cambridge she seemingly had a glittering future ahead of her, but she wasn’t in any hurry. Before leaving school she had already decided to put off going to university for a year to fulfil a desire to go travelling. Not only was this going to be an amazing adventure that would broaden her horizons, it also fitted in nicely with her long-term plans. Unlike many her age, she had very clear ideas about what she wanted to do with her life and how she was going to make it happen.
She was going to travel the world, then return to do a degree in media studies. That wasn’t something Oxford or Cambridge specialised in, but she had no qualms about going elsewhere in order to get the degree she wanted, even if those other universities didn’t quite have the same prestige. She wasn’t one for standing on ceremony.
She planned to work hard and make sure she graduated with the top honours. Afterwards, she would forge a career in television, making and presenting travel documentaries around the world.
She could have undoubtedly achieved all of this had it not been for one fatal flaw in her character. Despite her high intellect, common sense and clear ambitions, she had a blind spot when it came to men. Waiting for the right one to come along had not worked out for her, and eventually her hormones overcame those good intentions. From that point onwards her judgement in that area had been terrible, and she knew it.
Looking back, she could pinpoint the precise moment it had all started to go wrong. A bad choice of date for her end-of-term school ball had set in place a chain of events that had led to her being married with a baby by the time she was twenty-three.
Even that she could have overcome and still forged that career later if she had married the right man, but she hadn’t. Her choice of ball date had been unwise, but she didn’t learn from that mistake. Her subsequent choice of husband had been nothing short of disastrous.
Dark, despairing thoughts swirled around in her mind as she struggled up the street, just like the few final, stray autumn leaves blowing around her ankles. The wind was from the east and directly in her face as she battled on through the bitter cold. Her attire of short, red skirt and skimpy leopard skin top provided scant protection against the elements. She had bought both cheaply in a charity shop, items that less than a year ago she would never have dreamt of wearing. They made her look like a slag and she knew it, but then everyone thought she was one anyway, so why bother to hide it?
The plastic advertising board for the local paper outside the newsagent’s was being severely buffeted in the wind and looked like it might blow over at any moment. “CHRISTMAS KILLER STRIKES AGAIN” screamed out at her from the board.
She passed a police van, the occupants uneasily keeping an eye on the noisy crowds emerging from Ye Olde Chapel, a chain pub at the other end of the town. From there it was only another couple of hundred yards, past a rockers’ pub and an old men’s pub, to the chip shop, above which lay her home of the past nine months.
The thought of yet another night ahead in the grubby little flat with its yellow-stained walls and constant stench of fish filled her with gloom. The flat had been intended as a temporary stopgap. but there didn’t seem to be any hope of her finding anywhere better anytime soon. Not with the way her estranged husband was deliberately dragging his heels over the divorce.
Although she had long reverted to her maiden name and referred to herself as a divorcee to anyone who might ask, she was technically still married. Her ex was making things as difficult for her as he possibly could, even by his standards.
The divorce proceedings which she had instigated several months before were dragging on and on. He had painted a very convincing picture of her being an unfit mother during the negotiations, not only to his brief, but also to their daughter. He had even gone to the extent of having a private detective follow her to rake up mud. Despite their separation, he was still making her life just as much a misery as he had when they had lived together.
Her heart sank when she saw how busy the chip shop was. There must have been at least twenty people packed into the relatively narrow customer area. There was no external entry to her flat – she had to go through to the back of the shop to a door marked “Private”, the very door that her enraged assailant had kicked in before removing Kay’s teeth.
Thankfully there was no sign of the owner, her hideous, obese and sluglike landlord, Mr McVie. His fish and chip empire stretched to two shops in the town and three others between here and Oxford. Mercifully he must be at one of the others tonight.
She had no desire to run into him. On top of her other woes, she was suffering serious financial problems, made worse by the extortionate amount of rent he charged her. She knew for a fact that there hadn’t been enough money in her account this month to pay it and it had been due three days ago.
She entered the brightly lit shop, relieved to be out of the cold, and started to make her way through the groups of revellers who were eagerly clamouring for fat-laden protein and carbohydrates to soak up the alcohol they had drunk.
From the front door she had to go all the way to the far end of the customer area, which took up the whole of the right-hand side of the shop. There were two doors at the end – the right-hand one of which led up to her flat.
The counter ran the whole length of the left-hand side of the shop. Kay herself felt hungry after her nightly skinful of booze, but the food in the glass displays didn’t look particularly appetising. There were a couple of dried-up fish cakes that had probably been there for hours, a couple of battered sausages, and a single crusty, old pie.
Behind the counter, two or three young men busied themselves serving the drunken customers with their orders. Most were ordering kebabs which were always popular at this time of night. One of the men was busy slicing meat off what Kay always thought looked like a slowly rotating giraffe’s neck. Another was taking a Hawaiian out of the pizza oven. It wasn’t just a fish and chips shop. You could get almost every sort of fast food you could ever want in McVie’s.
She had almost made it across to the back of the shop when she stumbled slightly, right in front of a group of rough-looking lads. Fearful of falling, she grabbed one of them for support but, far from being helpful, the lads cheered at her clumsiness. There were five or six of them, all in their mid-twenties. As she looked up at the face of the one she had grabbed hold of, she recognised the face. She had spoken to him earlier at the bar in The Red Lion.
One of his mates, a tall lad with spiky, blond hair and an earring, laughed and said, “Hey, Dave, isn’t this that old slapper you were trying to chat up in the pub earlier?”
Dave, a fit, muscular guy who looked as if he seriously worked out, looked embarrassed. “Er, no, I don’t think so…” he said.
His denial didn’t do a lot for Kay’s self-esteem.
“Don’t fancy yours much, Dave!” shouted another one of the group.
The others all chortled, as Kay fumbled in her bag for the key to the newly installed Yale lock on the door. There was no way she wanted to get any food now; she just needed to get out of here. But the lads were blocking her way.
“Do you mind?” protested Kay. “I’m trying to get to my flat.”
“So that’s what the fishy smell was in the pub earlier,” said the blond man. “Dave here said he thought it was your fanny.”
“Go on, Dave, give her one,” shouted another of the horrible men. “Maybe you’ll get crabs – this is a fish and chi
ps shop after all.”
“Why don’t you get her to give you a blowie, Dave?” shouted out yet another. “She’ll probably be really good at it with no teeth to get in the way. I can’t stand a woman that bites, can you?”
Laughter rang out all around, and not just from the men. The other customers were joining in, too. Her humiliation was well and truly complete. Finally locating her key, she forced her way through them and with relief managed to get the key to turn in the lock.
“The dentist isn’t that way, love,” said the blond man. “They’re two doors down.”
Everyone was laughing now, even the workers behind the counter. Not a single person in the shop had stood up for her. They had been like a baying pack of wolves, picking on the weakest.
She opened the door and rapidly closed it behind her. Then she staggered up the stairs, desperate to put distance between her and the sound of the men’s laughter, still ringing in her ears. Entering the one-room bedsit, Kay sank down on her bed and wept. How could the men have been so cruel? How could her life have gone so wrong? She had never felt so alone.
She reached for the half-empty vodka bottle by her bed and took a swig. It was the only way she knew to blot out the misery.
Later, drugged by the massive amount of alcohol she had consumed, she slept. It was poor-quality sleep that would only leave her feeling worse in the morning.
She may have felt alone, but she was not unobserved. As she slept, there was a presence in the room, unseen and undetected by her. A spirit, one that another of the town’s residents had once called an angel, had been watching over her.
Kay needed help, and the following day her angel would be waiting to start her on the road to recovery.
Chapter Two
December 2018
When she awoke she was cold from having kicked off the quilt. Her dreams had been vivid, haunted by the injustices of her past life. The last moments before she had woken up remained briefly imprinted on her mind. Her ex-husband and his dizzy, raven-headed girlfriend were laughing at her, just as the horrible men had done in the shop the previous evening.
“What did you ever see in her?” said Lucy, her hated ginger curls, which framed a pale, youthful complexion, cascading down around her shoulders.
“Stupid cow,” said Alan, putting his arm around the girl who had replaced Kay, laughing as he did so.
It took a couple of seconds of consciousness for Kay to realise it was only a dream as her mind clicked back into the real world. A dream it may have been, but its origins were very much grounded in reality.
The last time she had seen Alan with Lucy had been in the street some weeks before. As soon as they had clocked her they had crossed the road, pretending they hadn’t seen her. It was obvious that they had, as they made a big show of the fact they were holding hands, also turning to give each other an affectionate peck on the lips which they knew Kay couldn’t fail to spot. Once they were past her, they burst into giggles, no doubt sharing some cruel joke at her expense.
The hurt Kay felt from her dream merely compounded the misery of the events of the previous evening. Thankfully, as her eyes adjusted to the dim light of the room and her hangover began to kick in, the memories, so vivid just a few moments before, swiftly burnt themselves out.
A grey light filtered through the partially closed curtains, illuminating her sad and dismal little room. She pulled the dirty and stained quilt back over herself in a forlorn attempt to get warm, but it was to no avail. She was still wearing the leopard skin top and knickers she had been dressed in the previous night, but even with them and the quilt she felt much colder than usual. She looked across at her cheap digital clock radio, recently bought off the market. It was nearly half past eight and she was due in work at nine.
The flat she lived in consisted of one average-sized room and not a lot more. Her bed doubled as her sofa, and the remainder of her small living space was taken up by the kitchen, if it could be called that. The cooking facilities amounted to two single electric rings with about a square metre of surface space on either side. There were two small cupboards above these two spaces, one of which was missing its door.
There was also a small sink taking up the space below the filthy window. It was so tiny, she couldn’t even fit a washing-up bowl into it. When she had complained to Mr McVie about it, he had just laughed.
“What do you need to cook for when you’ve got a perfectly good chip shop downstairs?” he had said in his broad Glaswegian accent.
That was pretty much par for the course where McVie was concerned. She had quickly learnt that it was pointless complaining to him about anything. He never fixed anything.
The only other notable piece of furniture was an aging MFI chest of drawers that she had bought second-hand from a charity shop. All of her clothes were stuffed into the three small drawers, two of which were sagging as the wafer-thin pieces of baseboard collapsed under the weight. She had tried supergluing the boards back in place, but they soon came unstuck again. Most of the fake wood veneer had peeled off the top. It was amazing it had lasted as long as it had, which was more than could be said for the company that had made it.
As for washing her clothes, that was out of the question. Her flat hadn’t come equipped with a washing machine, and even if she had been able to afford one, there was nowhere to fit it. So she had to go to the launderette, up on one of the rough estates in the older part of town.
She was forever running out of clean clothes and had lowered her standards considerably. Now she wore underwear two days in a row, tops for three or four, and jeans for up to two weeks at a time. She figured the longer she could eke her clothes out, the less money and time she would have to spend in the launderette which doubled as the town’s main drug-dealing hub. She hated going there.
For someone who had once taken such pride in her appearance, it was a shocking state of affairs. It was all down to one simple problem: lack of money.
She knew she was in a mess but with the current financial situation she just didn’t know how she was going to drag herself out of it. If she could have weaned herself off the fags and booze it would have made a significant difference to her finances, but she just didn’t have the willpower or the inclination to break those habits at present. Life had become so intolerable she needed to drown her sorrows in the pub every night just to keep going.
As she lay in bed this Saturday morning, wrapping the quilt around her in a tight cocoon, she thought about the situation she was in and what had led her there. Should she be trying to work out where she had gone wrong and what she could do to change things, or was she being harsh blaming it all on herself? Should she instead be focusing her thoughts on who else had played a part?
She didn’t think of herself as a bitter and twisted woman, blaming everyone else for her own shortcomings, but it was hard not to point the finger when she thought about her ex-husband, Alan Phipps. How she wished she had never met him. How much different would her life have been without him? Much better, undoubtedly.
But wishing she had never met him was a double-edged sword. If she hadn’t, then she wouldn’t have her daughter. She may have married someone else and had other children, but they wouldn’t be Maddie. Other children were an abstract concept: doubtless she would have loved them, but they weren’t real. Maddie was: she was flesh and blood, made uniquely out of bits of her, and Alan and she couldn’t bear the thought of being without her.
But the sad reality of the current situation was that she was without her. It was less than a week until Christmas and Kay hadn’t heard from Maddie since late-September when term had started at Durham University.
Durham: one of the places where I could have gone, thought Kay. It was an opportunity long gone, a ship that had sailed without her in the long-lost world that was her past.
Why hadn’t she heard from Maddie? For the same reason she hadn’t heard from many other people in the family. Alan had poisoned her mind against her. He was very good at doing that.
Kay had seen domestic violence portrayed on television, but Alan was far more subtle than that. He had never laid a finger on her, but bit by bit over time he had ground her down into submission. A little put-down there, a little bit of freedom taken away there: gradually and almost imperceptibly, he had whittled away her personality and her strength.
Eventually, when he had no more use for her, he had tossed her aside like half an orange, every last drop of juice sucked out of her. She hadn’t even realised it was happening until it was too late. It was only now, in hindsight, that she could see exactly what he had done to her.
If she had been the victim of domestic violence, at least she could have done something about it. She could have gone to the police and got him locked up. But the types of wounds Alan inflicted left no scars – none that could be seen, anyway. Nobody else could see what he had done to her, which quickly became apparent during the break-up.
After he had kicked her out of the marital home, she had tried to confide in one of her friends, the wife of another couple that the two of them sometimes socialised with. It was quickly obvious that the woman was only paying lip-service to her grievances. She clearly didn’t believe what Kay was saying, and why would she? Alan was always so charming and so reasonable with everyone he met. He dressed smartly and always said and did the right thing. It was an act he put on for the world and one he had long ago perfected. No one saw what really went on behind closed doors.
Kay was determined to try and make sense of it all in her mind. She was never going to sort herself out until she could come to terms with how she had ended up in this situation in the first place. She thought back, far back into the past, to the time just before she had met Alan. What had led her to be so easily taken in by him?
