A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [58]
‘You fuckin’ fat bitch,’ he yelled at her, for a moment tempted to hit her for real. ‘You’re a slag, a fuckin’ slag, and I’m gonna kill you.’
He had to admit Molly played a blinder. She screamed, shouted, swore, then got away from him and ran up and down the stairs. At one point she was clawing at the front door as if trying to get out. She was so good it would fool anyone into thinking she was being murdered. Yet the fact that no one came banging on the door spoke volumes. Mike reckoned the neighbours would love it if she was to be found dead.
‘No, Alfie, no,’ she yelled out in the kitchen, and threw a few dirty pans on the floor for good measure.
Mike could well imagine the effect it was having on their neighbours. Dozens of times in the past there had been real fights like this one, and he’d looked out of the window and seen people opening the windows, coming out on to the street, getting into little confabs about what they should do to stop it. As it was a hot night and everyone had their windows open, they’d all be getting steamed up about it by now.
Molly made Mike keep it up for a good three-quarters of an hour, then she signalled to him to turn off the music and go upstairs as if to bed. As he left the room, Molly slumped down on the couch and sobbed noisily.
Mike was well used to following Molly’s orders without question, but as he went upstairs he couldn’t help but wonder what his mother would have to say about this situation. She was no angel, she’d done her share of lying to the police to keep her husband and Mike out of the nick, yet she would never even think of staging something like this. But then, his parents didn’t hit each other, or argue that much; they certainly didn’t go in for sex with an audience. He could see now that his own childhood had been idyllic compared with that of his cousins.
He turned the light on in Molly and Alfie’s bedroom at the front of the house, then turned it off again as if he’d gone to bed. He stayed sitting in the dark, listening to Molly sobbing downstairs.
He wondered how she could do it so easily, it sounded exactly like the real thing. But then he supposed she’d had a lot of practice in acting over the years, and that was why she got benefits she wasn’t entitled to, and the coppers hardly ever managed to nick Alfie for anything.
The bedroom had a blanket over the window, and through a hole in it Mike could see the blonde girl opposite, staring out of the window. She wasn’t watching the Muckles’ house, but looking up the road. He supposed she was waiting for her husband to come home.
Mike felt sorry for himself then, wishing he had a girl like her waiting for him. She was so beautiful; he could see her profile with the light behind her, a neat little straight nose, a long slender neck, and her hair down over her shoulders.
He’d come in here once and caught Alfie wanking as he watched her cleaning her windows. Mike had been sickened by that, though he had to pretend he thought it was funny. It was all right to wank over women in magazines, but not someone real.
But Alfie had stopped drooling over the blonde since she took Angela in when she had a black eye. He seemed to think she or her husband had tried to grass him up.
All of a sudden, like a light switched on in a dark room, Mike put Alfie’s absence, the need for an alibi, and the girl watching out for her husband, together. To his horror he realized that Alfie had gone to fill in the bloke!
A year ago he would’ve loved it. He’d have been one hundred per cent behind Alfie, but not now. Molly and Alfie always went too far. It was going to come down on top of them one of these days, and Mike had a feeling that if he was still living here then, he’d cop it too.
Molly stopped her pretend crying suddenly, then he heard her speak. Curious, Mike went to the top of the stairs to listen. To his surprise he realized that Alfie was back – he must have climbed along the wall out the back and come in through the kitchen door.