Death Row - Mark Pearson [22]
She smoothed down the front of her short dark denim skirt and held her Doc Marten-booted foot up, looking at it along the line of her dark stocking leg, and felt like kicking it straight into the man sleeping on the sofa. His mouth was open, drool gumming the corner of his mouth, and Jennifer felt like slamming the boot straight into his head. Breaking his teeth. Stamping on his face so it looked like raw hamburger. He was twenty-eight years old, with long greasy hair, two days’ worth of stubble on his pockmarked chin and stains on his jeans where he’d pissed himself during the night. The sight of him made her almost physically sick.
A wet sigh escaped from the lips of the sleeping man and Jennifer curled the corner of her own lip again. The guy was a pig. She picked up a short-bladed knife which she had put on top of the sideboard moments earlier and not for the first time thought about slicing him from ear to ear across his scrawny throat. Slaughtering him like the hog he was.
She looked back across at him, the knuckles on her hand whitening as she gripped the knife, and a younger girl’s voice cut across her dark imaginings.
‘Jennifer?’
Smoother than a seaside conjuror, she palmed the knife into the side pocket of her skirt and turned to smile at her nine-year-old sister Angela.
‘Wassup, kidder?’
‘I’m hungry.’
‘Come on, then. Let’s get you breakfast.’
She put her arm around her sister’s shoulder and steered her towards the kitchen.
‘Are you coming to school today?’
‘No. I’ll take you there, then I’ve got some things to take care of.’
‘You going up Camden again?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you do up there?’
Jennifer looked down at her sister without replying, her gaze hardening and then softening again in a blink. She ruffled her fingers through Angela’s curly hair and smiled.
‘You want toast or cereal?’
‘Toast.’
Jennifer led her through to the kitchen and opened the fridge. Inside was a can of lager and half a pint of milk. She closed the door and smiled at her sister again. ‘How about an egg McMuffin? My birthday treat.’
*
Jennifer stood in the queue, looking at the menu to the side of the counter. Everything was so complicated – what about a simple list of burgers?
‘Help you?’
Jennifer looked at the bored eighteen-year-old who was addressing her. His face was slack, his eyes lifeless until she turned round and he saw her. Then they became mobile with interest. His dirty blond hair looked like it had been cut by his mother with a pair of garden shears and there was a faint whiff of body odour coming off him, almost but not quite disguised with cheap aftershave. He looked familiar somehow – Jennifer was sure she had seen him around the estate. Maybe she’d given him a hand job. He looked the type and the way he was shiftily looking at her, not meeting her gaze, made her suspect as much. Just another loser from the estate ending up in a dead-end job with no future, no life ahead of him. Shit, she thought, was this going to be her in three years’ time? Not if she could help it, she knew that much. But what options were there for her? If you were born on the Waterhill estate there weren’t a lot of prospects ahead. Drug dealing, petty crime, prostitution seemed to be the careers of choice for many. She’d had enough of two of them and had no intention of trying the other. She saw where it ended. Dead. One way or another.
‘Give me an egg McMuffin and a quarter-pounder with cheese and two large fries to go.’
‘You want to go for a meal deal and get a—’
Jennifer cut him off. ‘Just get me what I said!’
The youth nodded and scuttled away to fetch the food. Men, Jennifer thought. They were all arseholes. Every fucking one of them. She looked back at her sister, who was sitting quietly at a table. She remembered a time when Angela hadn’t been so quiet. She remembered her running