Faith - Lesley Pearse [10]
There were six policemen in all: three led their prisoners up the basement steps and the last three followed laden with boxes and a long object covered by a sack.
Laura could hardly believe what the police had done to the front room: furniture turned over, the mattress on the floor, drawers hanging open, cushions off the chairs. She picked Freddy up to comfort him and Meggie and Ivy came sidling in, both crying hard.
June had her old checked coat over her nightie, and her eye makeup was smeared down her cheeks. ‘Bill promised me he was going straight,’ she sobbed. ‘Haven’t I had enough grief over the years?’
‘What did they say Mark and Paul had done? Why did they have a gun?’ Laura asked. ‘Did they go out robbing with Dad?’
‘It weren’t them that had the gun, that was Bill. Looks like the little buggers had been thievin’ on their own,’ June wailed. ‘They had heaps of cigarettes in their room and never even gave me a couple of packets.’
That went some way to explain why her brothers had been so furtive when they came home earlier. But Laura was shocked that her mother was more upset that the boys hadn’t shared their spoils with her than by their becoming thieves too. ‘There was an awful lot of money in that box under our bed,’ she said hesitantly. ‘Did you know it was there?’
‘Do you think we’d have had egg and chips for our tea if I’d known there was money around?’ her mother wailed indignantly. ‘I’ll swing for that man! Fancy him not hiding it somewhere safe, and leaving the shotgun under our bed! What if the little ones had found it? The police said Bill robbed a post office. I just don’t know him any more!’
Laura had heard her mother claim she didn’t know Bill any more dozens of times in the past. The implication was that he’d once been very different to the man who only came home to sleep and took little interest in his family. But Laura had no recollection of him ever being any different. Even before the last three children were born, when she could remember going to the fair, to a circus or out for a day at the seaside with her mother, Mark and Paul, her father had never been with them. Sometimes she would look at the wedding photograph on the mantelpiece and try to equate that handsome, dark-haired man with the wide smile with the sullen, overweight man who bellowed at them to be quiet when he was in bed. He never ate with the family – his meals were kept hot over a saucepan of boiling water till he came home to eat them. When he spoke it was usually to bark out an order for one of them to get something for him, and on the rare occasions he stayed in for an evening it was clear by his morose manner that he didn’t want to be there. In truth Laura couldn’t once remember him asking how she was getting on at school, picking up Freddy or talking to Meggie and Ivy.
Laura made up her parents’ bed again and Ivy and Meggie climbed into it. Freddy calmed down after a nappy change and another bottle of milk and fell back asleep. Laura wanted to get into the bed too, but she felt unable to do so while her mother was white and tense, chain-smoking as she paced up and down the room.
‘They said the boys were seen tonight robbing the newsagent,’ she spat out. ‘I couldn’t even trust the buggers to stay in with you and the little ones for one night. As if it isn’t bad enough having my old man in the nick all the time, without the boys following him! How are we supposed to manage now? All I’ve got is a couple of quid.’
‘We’ll be all right, Mum,’ Laura said in an effort to reassure her. ‘We’ll go down the Assistance office on Monday, and maybe I can get a paper round.’
Going down to the National Assistance office had been a regular feature throughout Laura’s childhood because they had to go there