Faith - Lesley Pearse [155]
Laura had spent all day filming in a seedy flat in Glasgow that they’d rented for a week. There had been countless problems with lights, props and the actors, and they finally finished filming around seven. But she didn’t go straight home, even though she knew Barney was alone; she had to have a drink first.
She was tipsy when she got home about half past ten, and perhaps that was why she didn’t notice Jackie’s car parked in the street. But she did notice the smell of cleaning fluid as she walked into the flat, and her first thought was that Barney must have attempted to wash the kitchen floor to please her.
As she walked into the lounge Jackie jumped up from the settee, shocking Laura to the core.
‘Where have you been?’ she asked in a cold, angry voice. ‘How could you leave Barney alone for so long?’
If Laura had been given some warning she might have come up with some good excuse. But her mind went blank. ‘I got caught up with a client,’ she said wildly. ‘And the traffic was bad.’
‘Why didn’t you phone Barney to tell him?’ Jackie asked. ‘And I can smell the drink on your breath from here, so you might as well admit you’ve been in a pub.’
Laura couldn’t remember much of what she said to that, some lame excuse she supposed, yet she could remember clearly how Jackie looked that night in an emerald-green mohair sweater and jeans tucked into long suede high-heeled boots that matched the sweater perfectly. With a table lamp behind her, her hair looked like a coppery halo, but her expression was anything but angelic; she looked angry enough to attack Laura.
‘This flat was a pigsty when I got here, with no food anywhere,’ Jackie raged. ‘Barney was sitting here eating dry cornflakes, embarrassed that I’d caught you out. How often do you leave him alone like this?’
‘I don’t,’ Laura insisted, but she was sobering up fast and she could see that Jackie had cleaned the room, and had probably been through the entire flat.
‘Don’t lie to me! Fortunately Barney doesn’t seem to take after you, he’s a hopeless liar. And before we go any further I’ve poked around in your room and I know now what kind of “agency” you are really running. Are you selling the blue movies or making them?’
She didn’t wait for a reply, instead went into a rant about the filthy kitchen floor, the unwashed dishes, the lack of clean clothes for Barney and his sheets which clearly hadn’t been changed in weeks.
‘If you lived alone I wouldn’t care if you lived like a pig,’ she said. ‘It would have surprised me, seeing as you were once so fussy about cleanliness, but I wouldn’t care. But drugs and porn! When you’ve got a nine-year-old?’ She pointed out that she’d found some coke along with the videos in the bedroom. ‘And don’t try and tell me those videos are just borrowed from a friend, I know they are part of your business. What if Barney was to put one of them in the video machine? Or try the coke you left lying about so casually? Don’t you care about him?’
‘Of course I do,’ Laura insisted, and knowing there was no point in trying to wriggle out of it all, she tried to explain that making films was all she could do to make enough money to keep herself and Barney.
Jackie waved her hands to silence her. ‘There is absolutely nothing you can say to justify it,’ she raged. ‘It is wrong and you know it. Obviously you’ve got so far into all this filth that you’ve forgotten your duty as a mother, which is to keep Barney from harm. You don’t deserve to have that beautiful child, leaving him all alone without a proper meal in a flat full of stuff that could corrupt his mind or actually kill him. What would you have done if you’d got back here tonight and found him dead from trying that stuff?’
Laura began crying and tried to gain her friend’s sympathy by making out she couldn’t help herself. But Jackie would have none of that; she was furious that Laura had lied to her about what she wanted a loan for.
‘And you lied when you said you were working in a dress shop,’ she spat out. ‘I suspected all along that you were up to something seedy too, because