A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [57]
His mum had always said Molly was a dirty slut. She used to say other stuff too, until his dad gave her a back-hander to shut her up. But his mum didn’t know the half of it and she’d have fifty fits if she was to find out.
Mike picked up the bottle of beer from the floor and filled Molly’s glass. He wondered if he dared just give it to her and then go on out.
As he hesitated, Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ suddenly blared out on the gramophone.
Molly’s usual taste in music when she was randy was Bobby Vee or Billy Fury. Bill Haley was Alfie’s favourite. Mike looked round the door to see what she was doing, and found she’d turned the sound down on the telly and was gyrating around to the music. She looked disgusting; he could see her belly and tits wobbling around under her tight yellow dress.
‘I’ve got to go and see me mate,’ he shouted over the music as he handed her the beer.
He was halfway to the front door when she caught hold of his arm. ‘You ain’t goin’ nowhere,’ she said. ‘We gotta make a lot of noise. Make out Alfie’s in ’ere too.’
Mike was confused now. ‘Why?’ he asked.
‘Cos he’s up to summat.’ She tapped her nose to imply it was a secret. ‘Come on, dance wiv me fer a bit, then we’ll start shouting and bawling. If them nosy bastards across the street look out their winders they’ll think you’re ’im.’
‘You mean like an alibi?’ Mike shouted over the deafening music. He had often looked at the window from outside, and knew that the thin cloth tacked up inside became opaque when the light was on. It wouldn’t give anyone a clear view, but they’d get a pretty good idea of what was going on inside. And he and Alfie were very close in size and height.
‘’E finally got it!’ she said sarcastically, and grabbing his hand she made him jive with her.
Alfie and Molly often danced together when they were drunk. When Mike first moved in he’d thought it was kind of nice. But he’d soon found out it was usually the first step towards a fight, and their fights were bloody ones, neither giving in till one of them went down.
In two years he’d seen them breaking bottles over each other’s heads, punching each other like heavyweight boxers. Alfie once pushed Molly’s head right through the glass in the window. But even more sickening was what came after. Violence turned them on, they could be bleeding like stuck pigs, then all of a sudden they’d be fucking. They didn’t care who else was there. Alfie would push Molly down over the back of the couch or doggy-fashion on the floor, and the noise they’d make was unbelievable.
So Mike was very apprehensive as he danced with Molly, assuming she would expect him to run through the usual ritual completely. As the first record finished and the second, Elvis’s ‘Jailhouse Rock’, fell down on to the turntable, she turned up the volume.
‘We’ll start fighting as this one ends,’ she said in his ear because the music was so loud. ‘You start pushing me about, I’ll scream and throw stuff at you, then you pick up the poker and make out you’re hitting me wiv it. We gotta make a lot of noise. We want everyone in the street to know we’re ’aving a ding-dong and we gotta make it look real.’
Mike sincerely hoped that a pretend fight wouldn’t have the same effect on her as a real one usually did, but he went along with it anyway. As the record ended he began pushing her, and she wrestled with him while shouting out obscenities.
‘What if Alan comes down?’ he asked, as he pushed her down on to the couch and rained punches down on to the cushion beside her.
‘’E won’t do that,’ she said between a couple of ear-piercing screams. ‘The kid’s a fuckin’ coward.’E’d be scared ’e’d cop it an’ all.’
Mike found there was something profoundly satisfying about whacking a poker down on the couch, yelling out the kind of insults he had always wanted to throw at Molly. He overturned the coffee table in just the way he’d seen Alfie do, hurled