Bad Blood (Tales of the Notorious Hudson Family, Book 5)

by Julie Shaw

  Christine snorted and waved a languid arm. ‘Not him again,’ she drawled. ‘Can’t we just forget that black fucker for five minutes? Can’t we? Just for today, eh. This is nice …’ She giggled. ‘Look at him, Nick,’ she said, pointing to Mally. ‘Look at his face, Nicky boy – he’s fucked and he’s only had a bit.’

  She was right. He was slumped on the carpet, in front of one of the armchairs, his eyes rolled back, his body slumped, a stupid grin across his face.

  Christine was right. Out for the count. He could be dealt with tomorrow. In the meantime they would do what they’d set out to do to welcome Brian home. Get completely and enjoyably fucked.

  Nicky got up again, and turned the record player up to the max, then grabbed Brian and swept him into a mock-waltz position. ‘Do you believe in sex before marriage, darling?’ he crooned, leaning Brian back across his arm.

  ‘Only if it doesn’t make us late for the church, dear!’ Brian sang, as they swept around the room together, the Ramones, and the booze, and the H, and the warmth, all melting together into a happy heady nothingness.

  Chapter 23

  It was all very strange. That’s what struck Christine first. Strange and impossible, when you thought about it. How could you feel as if your whole body was made of lead, on the one hand, and on the other, as if it was composed of jelly?

  She pondered this conundrum for some considerable time. Or so she assumed. She had no sense of how fast it was moving. Had moved, for that matter, as there wasn’t a clock in the room. It was fully dark, but that meant nothing. It could be seven o’clock in the evening or four in the morning. There was nothing to guide her but her own physical state – which was shaky – and, since she’d never done heroin (or would do again? Jury out) she had absolutely no idea how she should feel.

  She was slumped in one of the armchairs, though with no idea when or how she’d moved there, and for a long while the sickly throbbing of her head made it clear that the armchair was where she should stay.

  All the men were on the floor, sprawled in various degrees of abandon and dishevelment, looking a little like they were part of some weird children’s party – the one where you had to play dead – sleeping lions, was it?

  A thought came to mind then, and she fixed her gaze on Mally. The big lump whose hospitality they’d enjoyed. A wave of nausea made her clammy and she breathed it under control again, more because she didn’t think she could walk anywhere where she might politely vomit than out of any reluctance to do so. In fact she needed to vomit. Her body screamed out for it. She felt poisoned and pickled; as if her gut were filled with swamp water. Just thinking that made her gorge rise again.

  But it was Mally who fixated her. She remembered what Nick had said now. That he’d gone upstairs to his bedroom and the things he had seen there. And his absolute conviction that this benign-seeming lump was actually a paedophile; a man who sexually abused children.

  He lay there like a dead man. A dead, supine weight. His body fat had kind of spread, and seemed almost to pool around him. He lay flat on his back, snoring lightly and rhythmically, a thin stream of drool inching stickily from the side of his mouth.

  She needed to vomit, badly. She needed to pee. She needed to move. Placing a hand on each chair arm, she eased herself upright, then, confident her legs could hold her, stood unsupported for a minute, before walking gingerly out of the living room and, tread by careful tread, up the stairs.

  The bathroom light was on, which made things easier. The toilet seat was up, too. And in no time at all it had come up, the lot of it, after which she felt purged and lightheaded. Her head thrummed now, and the sick stung and scoured her throat and nostrils. She felt she might faint. She needed to lie down now. Perhaps to sleep. She made her way into the bedroom.

  And as soon as she walked in there, she knew. All thoughts of sleep left her as she gazed on Mally’s kingdom. Teddy bears. The row of teddy bears, all looking up at her so innocently. And the dolls, looking more sinister – looking appropriately sinister, their eyes seeming to follow her as she made her way around the bed.

  They’d been partying with a fucking beast. She felt sure of it. With a child molester. Like that Mucky Melvin, who, if the rumours were true, had been tortured and burned alive by Josie’s Vinnie. Josie never spoke of it, ever. But there was no fucking justice in this world. Because Melvin might be gone – and whatever Vinnie had done to him had been too good for him – but Christine knew Josie would carry the scars of what he’d done to her for the rest of her life.

  And here was another of them. An animal. A predatory animal, who clearly lured children here – young children, if the toys he had were a clue. Lured them to his bedroom and did God knew what to them. She’d felt sorry for him. Felt bad that Bri and Nicky had taken advantage of his well-stuffed pockets. Felt bad that they’d taken the piss out of him, because he was too slow to notice. Was too much the innocent.

  Except he wasn’t. He was evil.

  She sat down on the bed, heavily, conscious that her nausea was already returning. She needed to lay her head down, even if it was on the bed of a filthy child abuser. And that was when she saw it – a tiny Eeyore, nestled among the bigger teddies. A tiny version of the Eeyore that Nicky had bought for Joey. That was with him now. Or perhaps not. Would his foster family even know how much it meant to him? Might it no longer mean much to him? Might he have forgotten it? Forgotten her?

  Her eyes filled and misted, and her throat rasped as she choked. She lay down, her whole world disintegrating into pieces, ambushed by a searing, awful pain.

  Sick and desolate, Christine pulled her knees up to her chest and cried her heart out. She cried for her Joey, her little boy, so cruelly ripped from her arms. She cried for all the babies that this man must have harmed. She cried at her own blind stupidity. Maybe she’d never deserved to be a mum in the first place. Maybe that was it. Maybe she’d no right to even think she could make a life for Joey. What had she come to? Lying on the bed of a fucking sicko, sick herself, from booze and drugs, sick inside – so sick inside – for what she’d come to.

  When she woke up again, having slept long and dreamlessly, her first sensation was the taste in her mouth. She drew her tongue across her lips, gagging at the foulness of her breath, conscious that she’d made an impression on the thick, tweedy bedspread, and of the impression it had made on the side of her face.

  She listened hard, gathering her senses, but the house was still silent, and a crushing sense of loneliness made the tears start again. This was no good. She had to move. Had to get herself together. She felt strange and disorientated, as if she was skittering on the edge of panic. She had to leave this place. Wake the boys up and free herself of it, even if it was the middle of the night.

  With the nausea still present, she got up very slowly, and made her way gingerly down the stairs. Ignoring the living room, where, from the door, she could see her brother, prostrate, she headed to the kitchen, and more specifically to the sink where, despite the mug and bowl that were sitting in the bowl there, she vomited again, spewing water and bile.

  Raising her head, she could see her reflection in the kitchen window, and it shocked her. She looked like a zombie, as if raised from the dead, incongruous against the sill which held a row of little plant pots, each home to an African violet. And between them, she noticed, more evidence of Mally’s twisted mind, in the form of a second row, of plastic toys, this time more modest – the kind you’d get in Jamboree Bags, or Happy Meals – happy meals for children. A tiny aeroplane, a helicopter, a police car. Joey filled her head again. Memories of their first trip to McDonald’s. First and, as it turned out, their only.

  The toys seemed to mock her. Seemed to swim before her eyes. She closed her lids, trying to still the spinning universe inside them. Fucking heroin. She was never doing heroin again, ever. She hung her head, and was just trying to breathe her way to stillness, when a scraping noise behind her made her spin around.

  It was Mally,
blocking the light from the hall with his huge frame, and trying to steady himself by holding on to one of his flimsy, wooden kitchen chairs.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Mally,’ she said, raking her hands through her knotty hair. She realised she didn’t even like the taste of his name on her tongue now.

  He lurched towards Christine, grinning stupidly at her. ‘Mally’s a drunken sailor,’ he said, clapping his hands now and trying to sing. ‘What shall we do with the drunken sailor? Er-lye in the mornnnning!’

  He almost fell then, but managed to grab the edge of the sink, effectively trapping Christine where she stood. He raised his other arm and reached past her to pull the blind down on the window. Gusts of body odour mushroomed up from his armpits. ‘Mally is a very drunken sailor, Chrissy,’ he told her, and then, without warning, reached a hand out towards her neck. ‘Take this off,’ he said.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Christine glanced down at her jumper.

  ‘Take it off. You don’t need it. Mally wants it.’

  He’d pulled the blind down. And now he was asking her to strip? She batted his hand away. ‘Get the fuck off,’ she snapped at him.

  ‘But you don’t need it,’ he persisted. And this time his fingers made contact. ‘This,’ he said, tugging gently on the thin loop of satin ribbon that, one of two, was sewn into the shoulders of the jumper so it could be looped over a coat hanger to stop the jumper sliding off.

  ‘Mally,’ she said, ‘what the fuck are you doing? Leave me alone. I want to go find Nicky.’

  His expression hardened slightly. ‘But I want it. You don’t need it. But I save them.’ He was the most articulate she’d so far seen him. ‘I got loads in my box. Please, Chrissy. Let me.’

  Still he held it, and his proximity was making her gorge rise again. What the fuck would he want a silky piece of ribbon for? A new wave of disgust hit her. First the toys and now this. Did he tie ponytails for little girls with them? He was truly, truly bonkers. And dangerous. And far, far too close.

  ‘Mally, move!’ she yelled, right into his face. ‘Fucking move! No, you can’t have it, okay? What the hell do you even want it for, you retard?’

  As soon as she’d said it, she devoutly wished she hadn’t. It was like a spark to a touch paper – he gripped the ribbon even tighter, yanking so sharply on it that the jumper was pulled off her shoulder. She tried to duck under his arm, but his grip was too strong – all she did was yank the jumper even further to the side, causing the other to cut painfully into her neck. ‘Christ, will you get off me!’ she screamed, trying to push him backwards.

  Which made him properly angry now. ‘You’re not nice!’ he yelled back, spittle hitting her. ‘You’re bad!’

  And then he lunged again, but this time in an entirely different direction. Twisting around awkwardly, because she was still pinned by her jumper, she saw a flash of metal and realised with a bolt of pure terror that he was reaching round her to the worktop, on which sat a loaf of bread and, beside it, a knife – a fucking bread knife!

  ‘Fuck!’ she screamed. ‘No!’ But his grip was like iron. ‘You’re bad and your horrible! You’re mean and you’re horrid!’

  Their hands met the knife almost together. But Christine had it first and as she swept it up from the counter he jerked his own hand away from it as if stung.

  ‘Keep away,’ she said. ‘I mean it.’

  But he took absolutely no notice. ‘Give it me,’ he barked. ‘Mine.’ He was still crowding and coming at her. With his foul, evil stench and his wild, staring eyes.

  ‘I will,’ she said. ‘I will, Mally. Just you try it and I will!’

  Still – even then – he made a grab for the knife. And suddenly it seemed quite the most natural thing ever. To avenge Joey. To avenge every kid he’d fucked up. To make things simple. To simply give him what he had coming to him. Now. She plunged the knife into his fat gut.

  The cold of the kitchen floor seeped into Christine’s bones. Weary bones, they were. So weary. She thought she could curl up and sleep for a year. She felt calm now, and watched him in only mild fascination. He was like a tree, she decided. A tree she’d now felled. Gone down like the sacks of potatoes he lugged around. His hands were round the knife, that still stuck, grotesquely, into his stomach, the body fat, just as she’d noticed before, spreading out from his sides on the lino. And the seeping, the red pool of blood that had appeared, and was now spreading inexorably across the floor. She shuffled away a bit, lest it creep out and touch her. She would hate that. Shuffled over into the corner, beside the big plastic swing bin, curled up into a ball. She could sleep for a year.

  Chapter 24

  Nicky needed something to drink and fast. He had woken up on the floor, twisted up and aching, and with a tongue like Gandhi’s fucking flip-flop.

  He turned over, awkwardly, to come face to face with Brian, who was also on the carpet, spark out. Of his sister there was no sign, however. And none of Mally either. Nicky grunted as he levered himself up to a sitting position. Probably taken himself off up to his creepy orange bedroom.

  He stretched tentatively. What a day and a half that had been. But on the whole a good day, even with the Mally developments swirling at the edge of his mind, like the remains of a bad smell. Not his problemo, he decided, as he got on to all fours and finally stood. If Mo already knew, and he put it around and about, too, people would wise up to it. And after that – well, Canterbury people took care of their own. And those who were not deemed their own, for that matter.

  No, they’d walk out of Mally’s and not come back. That was a given. He scratched again. He was keen to get back to the flat now. Strip off. Have a cuppa. Go to bed. Even if he did have to go back to the ratty old futon. He’d sleep like the dead anyway, deffo.

  Coming out into the hall he worked out what the time was. It was coming light now, so maybe six in the morning? He rubbed his eyes as he stumbled into the kitchen, vaguely registering the human form lying on its side on the floor as Mally’s, then looking past him to the left where his sister was lying. He smiled – well, not so much lying as scrunched into a tight ball between a chair and the rubbish bin, like an alley cat after a bit of a bender.

  Then the double-take. The terrible, rub-your-eyes-you-can’t-be-seeing-this, horrified double-take, as he felt his foot slip – just a little, enough for him to grab the edge of the worktop to steady himself – and then looking down and seeing what he’d slipped on was blood.

  Seeing the knife was like a stab in his own gut. Shit, he thought, immediately recoiling at the unmistakable truth it was telling him. You did not stick a bread knife in your own gut. Shit, he thought, Chrissy! He took a long careful stride towards her, then squatted down and checked her over for wounds. She seemed fine. No blood, no stab wounds. Sleeping like a baby.

  He then turned to Mally, moving carefully so’s not to dislodge the knife, put two shaking fingers to his neck to feel for a pulse.

  He thought he felt something so put his head very carefully on Mally’s chest. He was alive, but his breathing was laboured. He needed medical attention, and he needed it fast. Gather your thoughts, he instructed himself sternly. Try and think this through. So your sister has stabbed Mally. Why the fuck? Why?

  He sat back on his haunches and considered. Then swung his legs around from under him and pulled his knees up close to his body, wrapping them with his arms and resting his chin on his knee caps, trying to recall what might have compelled her to do what she’d done.

  It was all too much of a blur, though, and his head was really hammering. Time. That was the problem. That time was so much of the essence. He wasn’t panicked, not quite yet, because the position of Mally’s wound reassured him. He wasn’t a doctor but he’d done first aid in his teens – ironically, given the run of his thoughts, when he was locked up in a pissing detention centre – and he had enough sense to know it couldn’t have pierced any major organs.

  But he’d lost a lot of blood and he needed an ambulance. Scrambling back across
the floor, he started to shake his sister awake. He needed to know exactly what had happened.

  ‘Chrissy!’ He hissed. ‘Christine, wake up!’ Her eyes flickered open and she half-smiled when she saw him, and his gut flipped at the thought of what was to come. He felt so fucking sorry for her. She looked so young and pale and helpless. ‘Chrissy, mate,’ he asked softly. ‘What the fuck have you done?’

  She sat up then, stiffly, and her eyes began to focus. He watched them widen in disbelief as she took in the scene. She started shaking then, violently, scraping her feet back towards her body, circling her arms around her knees, just as he had done, as if to ward it all off.

  ‘What did I do?’ she whispered. ‘What did I do, Nicky?’ Her words came out in bits, as she trembled. ‘Did I do that?’ She glanced again at Mally, and shuddered. ‘I stabbed him, didn’t I?’ She put her hands over her face and moaned. ‘Christ. I did, didn’t I? I stabbed him …’ She started plucking at her jumper. ‘He was trying to cut it … he wouldn’t let go of me … he was going to get me … he just looked so angry … And then he went for the knife. Oh my God, Nick, what have I done?’

  Nicky pulled her towards him and held her tightly. So that was it. The fucking monster. So it wasn’t just the kids, then. He had been trying to grope his fucking sister too? And at knifepoint?

  He was just helping her to her feet when Brian shuffled in.

  ‘What the fuck?’ he asked, his mouth agape. ‘Jesus, Nick, what’s happened?’

  A calmness came over Nicky then. He held his sister close against him, cupping her head, and letting her face burrow against his chest. ‘Never mind that for now,’ he said, his voice suddenly level. ‘But here’s what has to happen right now, okay? I’m going to get our Chrissy sorted in the living room and you’re going to run to the phone box and phone for an ambulance. You got that? You tell them that you don’t know what’s gone on. That you’ve just woken up. But that there’s a man stabbed and he needs medical treatment right away.’