Faith - Lesley Pearse [139]
‘You bastard,’ Katy yelled, jumping to claw Craig’s face with her nails. ‘She didn’t mean any harm.’
Pete intervened, trying to get Katy off Craig, who in turn was trying to get to Laura to hit her again. Laura glanced around for Don, expecting him to put a stop to it, but to her further shock he was clicking away, clearly thinking a fight scene with naked people might be interesting and saleable.
Craig continued to scream obscenities as Pete dragged him struggling out of the room.
‘Guess that’s it for the day,’ Don said with an air of disappointment. ‘You’d better get some cold water on your face, Laura; you’ll have a shiner tomorrow.’
They heard Don ordering Craig to leave the building as Katy bathed Laura’s face in the toilet.
‘Do you think he’ll lie in wait for me?’ Laura asked, afraid now, for her face was throbbing and fiery.
‘Don will have told him you’re too valuable to Robbie to mess with,’ Katy reassured her. ‘But we’ll get Pete to come and have a drink with us. Just in case.’
Laura fully intended to have just one drink and then go home. Her face hurt and she felt weepy. But Pete and Katy both wanted her to stay, and by the time she’d had a couple of drinks they were all laughing about Craig and discussing whether Don would ever use him again.
Before Laura knew it, the pub was closing for the afternoon and she was too drunk to drive, but still wanted more.
When she came to the next morning and found herself on Katy’s settee, she couldn’t remember anything more than that they had gone on to a drinking club in central Glasgow. She knew it was a rough place, the carpet sticky with spilled drink, but they were playing soul music from the sixties and she and Katy danced. After that it was all a blank.
Katy’s flat was squalid. It was on the third floor of a high-rise block built in the sixties. The four rooms were all small, her children were cramped up in bunk beds and they could barely get into bed for the toys and clothes strewn everywhere. The living room was larger, but with no order, and a vast three-piece suite which had seen better days meant there was no room to move. The carpet was worn and stained; Katy never cleaned the windows, and makeup, used plates and overloaded ashtrays filled every available surface. Amazingly Katy was always well groomed. How she managed it living in such conditions Laura didn’t know.
It was another hot day, as it had been since the start of June, but whereas the house in Albany Street was built of thick stone and remained cool in the summer, Katy’s flat was not well insulated, and with such large windows it was already like an inferno.
Laura’s head was throbbing and her mouth felt like the bottom of a bird cage, but Cheryl, Katy’s daughter, came in to the room with a cup of coffee and some painkillers.
‘You didn’t come in till two,’ she said, passing over the coffee. ‘Mum was really sick, but you just fell on the settee and passed out.’
Cheryl was only thirteen, a pretty girl with her mother’s sharp cheekbones and dusky skin, and when Laura realized that she’d been left alone with the two younger children for so long, it reminded her about Barney and that she’d given Fiona no warning she might not be coming home.
Pausing only to splash some water on her face in the kitchen and gulp down the coffee and painkillers, she rushed out, leaving Cheryl to say goodbye to Katy for her.
Fiona lived just two streets away from her old home in Caledonian Crescent, and Laura drove straight there without going home first to change or put some makeup over her bruised cheek.
A big burly man in a checked work shirt came to the door, and just the way he glowered at her was enough to tell her this was Roy, Fiona’s husband, and he hadn’t been pleased to come home and find another child in his house.
Laura tried the charm offensive, apologized profusely for not coming to collect Barney, but said she was on an assignment and hadn’t been able to get home.
‘What sort