The Charmer

by Mandasue Heller

  ‘Pack it in!’ Maria hissed.

  Reaching Didsbury, Beth swivelled her head as they drove past a Chinese takeaway in a row of shops not too far from the house.

  ‘Hey, we haven’t eaten yet. Shall we drop this off and go back for something?’

  ‘Let’s just phone and get it delivered,’ Maria said, yawning. ‘I just want to get home.’

  ‘Excuse me?’ Beth turned and looked at her. ‘Did I hear that right? Did you just call it home?’

  Maria frowned. ‘I suppose I did, yeah.’

  ‘Ha!’ Beth smiled smugly. ‘Now tell me Auntie Beth doesn’t know best!’

  ‘All right, calm down,’ Maria said. ‘It’s only a figure of speech.’

  ‘No need to explain,’ Beth said, holding up a hand. ‘I was thinking much the same myself . . . Can’t wait to get home and snuggle up under the lovely new duvet, watching telly in bed, and stuffing ourselves with sweet and sour chicken. Heaven! Do you think they deliver wine?’

  ‘Probably not,’ Maria said, taking her purse out to pay the driver when they pulled up at the gate. Handing him a tenner, she flapped her hand when he said he didn’t have change. ‘You can give us a hand getting the bags to the door if you feel bad about it.’

  ‘You’re going to work your way through that money in no time if you carry on like that,’ Beth reprimanded her when they were inside. ‘That was four quid you just gave him for carrying a pillow up the path!’

  ‘Don’t worry, I won’t make a habit of splashing out,’ Maria assured her, dragging the bags and herself up the stairs. ‘As soon as I’ve got everything I need, it’ll be save, save, save. And don’t forget how much I’ll make when I sell the furniture. I’ll be loaded all over again.’

  ‘Aw, please don’t sell it all,’ Beth moaned, coming up behind her. ‘The nasty sofas can go – and the dining-room table, ’cos that’s skanky. But the rest is gorgeous. And you definitely can’t lose this.’ Dropping her bags on the bedroom floor, she sat down on the big old bed and ran a hand over the carved walnut footboard.

  ‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’ Maria said, flopping down beside her. ‘So bouncy and soft.’

  ‘Aw, don’t jump around,’ Beth begged, lying back and closing her eyes. ‘I could just go to sleep right here and now.’

  ‘Right, up!’ Maria said, jumping to her feet. ‘Come on, we can’t afford to fall asleep. We’ve got a bed to make, and dinner to order.’ Grabbing one of the bags, she tipped it out onto the bed, saying bossily, ‘You call the takeaway while I shove the sheets on. Come on – chop chop!’

  ‘Slave-driver,’ Beth complained, dragging herself up. ‘Where’s the phone book?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Maria shrugged as she tore the wrapping from one of the sheets. ‘Try in that cupboard under the phone.’

  Looking to where she was pointing, Beth saw a low dark-wood cupboard against the far wall. Going to it, she pulled the door open, coughing when a cloud of dust billowed out.

  ‘Aw, there’s all kinds of crap in here,’ she said, jumping when a large folder slid out and spewed a load of papers out at her feet. ‘Oh, bloody hell!’ she snapped, kneeling down. ‘It’ll take me a year to pick this lot up.’

  ‘Oi, don’t start reading it,’ Maria said, shaking the sheet out and floating it out over the mattress. ‘Just shove it back in and get on with looking for the phone book.’

  ‘Oh, wow, you’ve got to see this,’ Beth murmured, glancing up from the paper she was holding. ‘It’s a letter about you.’

  ‘Saying what?’ Dropping the sheet into place, Maria started tucking the edge under the mattress.

  ‘Saying that you’ve been located to a social-services children’s home in Devon.’

  ‘Let’s have a look.’ Reaching for the letter, Maria read it quickly. It was weird to see herself referred to as the subject, as if she was part of some top-secret spy game.

  Beth was busy rooting through the rest of the letters. ‘Look at this one,’ she said, holding another out. ‘It’s got a photo of Belmarsh paper-clipped to it.’

  Taking it, Maria got a weird feeling in her stomach when she looked at the picture. Belmarsh Heights was the first home they had sent her to in Devon. It was a huge, flat-faced house, with slate-grey walls and tall windows. It had been a mental asylum once upon a time, and felt just as eerie and chillingly desperate on the inside as it looked on the outside. Maria had hated it there, and had been overjoyed when they’d moved her to the less stately but far more homely King House on the rise overlooking Lyme Bay. That had been heaven by comparison, and she’d been more than happy to spend her remaining care-years there.

  ‘Hey, this one’s got my name in it!’ Beth squawked indignantly. ‘Listen to this . . . “Upon commencement of the 2002 session, it was apparent that Maria had dissociated herself from the girls with whom she had been mixing throughout the previous two sessions. She seems to have struck up a friendship with a close-knit, less troublesome group of girls, her main connection being to a Bethany Louise Murray.”’ Open-mouthed, Beth looked up. ‘Jesus, who wrote this?’

  ‘The private detective I told you about,’ Maria murmured, sitting down on the edge of the bed. ‘Feels freaky, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Freaky?’ Beth repeated incredulously. ‘It’s . . .’ Lost for a word to describe how she felt, she shrugged, then settled for, ‘Creepy. Were they following us about, or what? Did they see everything we did?’

  ‘I don’t think they went that far,’ Maria said, hoping that she sounded reassuring, because Beth was probably feeling as bad as she had when Nigel had first told her.

  It was a peculiar sensation to know that someone had been watching you go about your business – taking pictures and reporting all your movements to somebody else. It was how Maria imagined being stalked would feel, only without the fear, because it wasn’t happening right now.

  Shell-shocked, Beth shook her head slowly. ‘God, Maria, these must be the reports she commissioned. She paid for this. And look at all the photos. There’s one here of you at the library. And one of me, you and Sharon in the arcade. School one here – year ten, judging by your hair. And, oh, my God . . .’ she exclaimed, looking up. ‘You’ve got to see this.’

  ‘What is it?’ Maria asked, not sure that she wanted to know. This was horrible – like she had never had a private moment in her entire life.

  Reaching for it, Maria felt the room close in around her head. The man in the picture was young and handsome, with a nice, gentle smile, and the exact same eyes as her own – same shape, same shade. And the likeness didn’t end there. He had the same blond hair, the same slightly pointy chin and high cheekbones, and even the same tiny uneven bit under the nose.

  ‘It’s your dad, isn’t it?’ Beth said quietly. ‘You look just like him. What’s it say on the back?’

  Turning it over, Maria inhaled sharply.

  Derek, aged 19, Colwyn Bay.

  So it was true. Derek Davidson really was her father. There was no mistaking it now.

  Gazing into the smiling eyes, Maria thought he looked perfectly nice and normal, but her mother must have seen something more sinister in him to make her cut him out of her own and Maria’s lives so completely.

  But whatever it was, Maria would never know for sure. And she wasn’t sure she even wanted to think about it. There was no point. Nothing could come of it. She wouldn’t suddenly gain a family; she’d just lose what was left of her mum. And she wasn’t willing to give up those memories for anything. They were the only real things she had ever had in her life.

  ‘You all right?’ Beth asked.

  ‘Yeah, fine,’ Maria said, nodding determinedly. ‘Shove that back in with that lot and shut the door.’ She flipped the photo to her. ‘I can’t deal with it just now.’

  ‘What about the phone book?’

  ‘Forget it.’ Taking a cigarette out of her bag, Maria lit it with shaking hands. ‘We’ll walk, if you’re still up to it – see if we can find an off-licence on the way
. I need a drink.’

  ‘Do you want me to go through this lot with you later?’ Beth asked, closing the cupboard door and dusting her jeans off when she stood up. ‘It’ll probably take all night, but I don’t mind.’

  ‘No.’ Maria shook her head adamantly. ‘We’re supposed to be snuggling up with a good film and a Chinese, not depressing ourselves with that crap. Anyway, you’re going home tomorrow and I might not see you again for ages, so there’s no way we’re wasting our last night together. Help me finish this bed and let’s get out of here. I’ll go through that lot when I’m ready.’

  Not.

  12

  Keith Gallagher was an overgrown lump of a man, with crude prison-art tattoos covering his flabby white flesh. He had bad teeth and mean little eyes. Joel despised him, but he was the brawn to his brother Lance’s brain, and you didn’t get one without the other.

  Following him into the lounge of the scruffy semi he and Lance shared with their bad-tempered old git of a dad, Joel’s eyes almost crossed at the rank stench of dogs and unwashed feet. It never ceased to amaze him that they could earn so much money but still live like untrained pigs.

  Lance was the boss, despite being a good foot shorter and several stones lighter than Keith. They both caned far too much of their own merchandise for their own good, but while it had affected Keith to the extent that you could actually see the brain damage in his eyes, Lance was as sharp as ever.

  Lance was perched on the edge of a white-leather recliner in front of an enormous plasma-screen TV when Joel walked in. He was playing a gory slash-’em-up video game on a state-of-the-art console.

  ‘How’d it go?’ he asked without taking his eyes off the action.

  ‘Okay,’ Joel said, wincing as the all-too-real-looking man on the screen brought a blood-dripping machete down through the head of a woman with enormous tits and glossy suck-dick lips. ‘Jeezus, that’s gross,’ he muttered, sitting down on the settee.

  ‘That’s what I said,’ Keith agreed, flopping down on a battered swivel chair and snatching a bottle of vodka off the table. ‘What’s the point of offing a decent-looking bird like that without waiting for her to get her kit off?’

  ‘She ain’t real, you dense twat,’ Lance muttered irritably. ‘She’s fuckin’ plasmatronic!’

  ‘Nowt wrong with plastic tits,’ Keith said, swigging his drink. ‘I wouldn’t kick that Jordan one off me dick, and she’s got more stuffing in her jubblies than her on telly.’

  Glancing at Joel, Lance rolled his eyes and shook his head. ‘That’s the dangerous thing about this advanced graphics shit – morons like him think they’re watching a proper film. You watch – he’ll be trying to find out where she lives so he can fuckin’ stalk her.’

  ‘Up yours!’ Keith grunted, shoving a hand down his jeans to scratch his balls. ‘I’m no fuckin’ pervert.’

  ‘So, what you got f’ me?’ Lance asked Joel, still staring at the screen, his wiry shoulders jerking with each hack his man executed.

  Taking a folded wad of money out of his pocket, Joel leaned forward and put it on the small table beside Lance’s chair.

  ‘Two and a half gees. The bloke said he’d had a word with you about the rest.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s right,’ Lance grunted, his brows joining above his nose as his man started whacking the woman with a brick. ‘For fuck’s sake die, you cunt!’

  Joel frowned. If he were braver he’d question why Lance had sent him to do a pick-up without bothering to mention that he’d okayed the guy to only give half of the money. He’d spent nearly half an hour arguing the toss, almost getting into a fight over it.

  But he couldn’t afford to tell the Gallaghers to fuck off and do their own dirty work, because the mugging had left him in debt to them for three grand. He was paying it off at one-fifty a time, but he owed almost as much as he had at the start, what with the interest Lance shoved on, and he felt like it was never going to end. If he’d been dealing with Keith, it would have been forgotten by now. But Lance was a different kettle of fish. He could be off his face from morning to night, but his brain was like a calculator with a long-life memory. Joel just needed one shit-hot deal and he’d be laughing. But until then, he was stuck sucking up to the Chuckle Brothers.

  Freezing when he heard a low growling beside him, he swivelled his eyes to the left and saw Lance’s crazy Dobermann bitch, Dotty, with her teeth bared.

  ‘Lance,’ he whimpered. ‘The dog . . .’

  ‘Yo, bruv,’ Keith sniggered. ‘Looks like Dots is after summat to eat. Shall I tell her to GO FOR IT!’ Yelling the last three words, he cackled like the madman he was when Dotty barked and lurched forward an inch.

  Fortunately for Joel, she was waiting for her real master to give the word, and Lance was too engrossed in his game to be bothered joining in with Keith’s malicious idea of fun.

  ‘Get t’ bed, Dotty!’ he bellowed. ‘And you grow the fuck up and pass him that gear before I wrap that fuckin’ bottle round your head, you mental twat!’

  Pulling a face, Keith got up and lumbered across to the sideboard in the back room. Snatching a bag from among a stack of trainer boxes on the top, he tossed it to Joel, growling at him under his breath – which unnerved Joel even more than Dotty had, because he had a feeling that Keith would do more damage if he decided to bite.

  ‘There’s two ounces there,’ Lance said, sparking up a fat spliff and filling the room with a pungent cloud of skunk smoke. ‘Drop one off with Hanson, and you have the other. Pay me nine ton by Friday next – and don’t forget the one-five.’

  ‘Right,’ Joel said, despondently slipping the bag into his inside pocket.

  ‘Fuck off, then,’ Lance said, jerking his head doorward. ‘And tell that cunt Hanson that the other shit’s coming in next week, so he’d best give us a bell if he wants in.’

  ‘That it?’ Standing up, Joel cast a nervous glance around for Dotty. He was relieved to see that she was out of the way behind Keith’s chair.

  ‘What the fuck else d’y’ want?’ Lance snapped. ‘A fuckin’ marriage proposal? Piss off, you plank.’

  Letting himself out, Joel inhaled the fresh air as if it was pure oxygen and set off in search of a cab. No way was he in the mood for trekking up to Longsight. He hated the place almost as much as he hated Lenny Hanson – and he resented Lance for sending him there like some kind of lackey.

  His safe mobile rang just as he reached the taxi rank at the end of the road. The only person who had the number was Mack – his one remaining friend from back home.

  He was immediately irritated. The only reason Mack ever rang these days was to tap Joel for money, but he’d had a couple of hundred just a few weeks back so he was out of luck if he was after more already. Joel was skint.

  Sighing heavily, he answered the call.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Mack grunted without so much as a hello. ‘I’ve been trying to reach you for the past half-hour.’

  ‘I was in someone’s gaff,’ Joel told him patiently. ‘Must have lost the signal. What’s up?’

  ‘I’m up your way,’ Mack said. ‘I need to see you.’

  ‘You’re here?’ Joel said, surprised because he hadn’t expected that. ‘How come?’

  ‘I’ll tell you when I see you. I’m behind a boarded-up pub called The Fox and Hounds off the end of the M6. D’y’ know it?’

  ‘No, but I’ll find it.’

  ‘How long?’

  ‘About half an hour,’ Joel said, checking the time. ‘I’ve just got to go and drop something off somewhere first. Hang tight.’

  Tossing his mobile onto the passenger seat, Mack rolled himself a single-skinner and turned the radio on. Twiddling with the knob to find a station playing anything but the shite they called dance music, he settled back in his seat when he came across an old Scorpions track. Now, that was what you called music.

  Seeing a movement at the upstairs window of one of the houses behind the overhanging trees a few minutes later, he sat fo
rward and shielded his eyes to peer out of the bug-spattered windscreen. He hoped it wasn’t some nosy resident spying on him. The last thing he needed was for some twitchy do-gooder to get suspicious and bell the police.

  Mack couldn’t believe his luck when he saw a woman standing at the window with her tits out, rubbing herself with a towel, her hair wet on her shoulders like she’d just got out of the bath.

  His dick stirred in his pants.

  Yeah, go on, baby, he leered. You rub them nice big titties for Uncle Mack. Yeah . . . that’s it . . . that’s the way I like—

  No, don’t do that! . . . Nooo! Aw, shit!

  Sucking his teeth in disgust when the showgirl drew the curtains, he slumped back in his seat.

  Great!

  Now he had a stiffie, and there was nothing he could do about it but wait for it to droop. He’d never get it wanked off before Joel got here – he’d snorted too much wakey-wakey powder for the drive.

  Doing his damnedest to ignore his throbbing cock, Mack glanced at the dashboard clock and tapped his fingers agitatedly on the steering wheel. His stomach was churning now. It was probably just the soldiers being called back to barracks, because he’d heard that unreleased spunk made you ill, but it could be a paranoia coming on. He hoped not. He’d rather have bollock-rot than head-fuck any day.

  Come on, Jay . . . Come on . . .

  Joel was the closest thing Mack had to a brother. They’d been mates since Joel was seven and the battered women’s brigade had moved him and his mum, Diane, into the flat next door to Mack’s. One of Diane’s so-called ‘sisters in crisis’ must have had it in for her for looking like Marilyn Monroe, though, ’cos of all the places they could have sent her, they’d stuck her in the Gordons – one of the worst estates in the world.

  Not that ten-year-old Mack had been complaining. He’d fancied the arse off Diane, and had taken her precious little boy under his wing as a means of getting near her. But he’d had his work cut out, because Joel had been a right pretty fucker, with blond curls, and baby-blue eyes with long black lashes. All the other kids went into attack mode when they saw him – like wild dogs with a wounded kitten. But Mack hadn’t minded protecting him, because it earned him some wicked hugs off Diane – proper tits-in-face stuff.