clucking?’
Grace rubbed her arms, their skin barely able to support the scars that ran like the rungs of a ladder from shoulder to wrist. ‘Not really.’
‘I thought you’d be back on the gear.’
‘Sorry to disappoint you.’
‘I don’t really care one way or the other.’
Grace sighed and picked up her cigarettes. When this was over she’d have that hit, get completely out of it. She clamped a cigarette between her lips and turned to the cooker. In one sweeping and familiar action she bent over the front gas ring, one hand holding back her hair, the other reaching for the ignition. But before her finger pressed the button she felt the back of her head explode.
Grace was confused. Had she finally got her hit? Funny, she couldn’t remember cooking up. She anticipated the melting sensation that the drugs would bring when they moved through her bloodstream.
Instead, the back of her neck felt warm and wet. As dazed as she was, she knew it was blood.
‘Why did you …’
There was another explosion and everything went black.
Monday, 7 September
Lilly Valentine thumped the photocopier. ‘Stupid piece of shit.’
‘You’ll break that.’
She yanked at the tray where her document was stuck.
Her boss floated to Lilly’s side. ‘I said you’ll …’
‘It’s already sodding broken.’
Rupinder’s deft fingers removed the tray in a tinkle of bangles and dislodged the offending piece of paper. ‘You’re late,’ she said.
‘I operate on Indian standard time,’ Lilly said. ‘As you’re so fond of telling me.’
Rupinder opened the front door. ‘Which is fine in Delhi …’
Lilly struggled outside, balancing three files, a mobile phone and her bag. She tossed her head to move the curtain of curls that had fallen into her eyes.
Rupinder shook her head and tucked the loose tendrils behind Lilly’s ears.‘… but this is Hertfordshire.’
Lilly winked at her boss and stumbled towards her car.
She sped through Harpenden towards Luton. Bespoke shoe shops and upmarket gastro pubs soon gave way to pawnbrokers and kebab shops. The women on the streets no longer carried designer handbags and all-white floral arrangements, instead they pushed double buggies laden with bumper packs of nappies. Further still into the sprawling housing estates of Ring Farm and windows were boarded, overgrown gardens housed old sofas, and cars stood on bricks.
Eventually she pulled into a cul-de-sac overshadowed on three sides by granite tower blocks. Even on glorious days like today, at the height of a summer stretching into autumn, scarcely any sunlight fed through and The Bushes Residential Unit for Young People existed in permanent gloom.
Lilly parked in the shadows and pulled out the relevant file from the pile stacked beside her on the passenger seat.
BRAND, K. – CARE PROCEEDINGS
Kelsey Brand, eldest of four girls. Their mother, a heroin addict who funded her habit by prostitution, and was unable or unwilling to clean up, had finally given up the distracting charade of parenting and placed all four girls in care.
So far so familiar.
Lilly reached for some chocolate. She’d sworn to restrain herself to a bar a day, two in dire emergencies, in an attempt to stop the slide from sexy size twelve to pleasantly plump. As she bit into her first Twix of the day she smoothed her hands over her hips. Still the right side of curvy. Just.
She skimmed the pages in search of the ETF. Every case had one. An especially awful aspect that lawyers like Lilly looked for. Something to set their client apart, to prevent them from becoming ‘just another kid in care’. Something to remind the professionals that although they dealt with these stories every day of the week they weren’t commonplace.
She found it on the last page – her search made easier by the lack of detailed notes – and it was tremendous. An all-singing, all-dancing Extra Tragedy Factor. Kelsey Brand, at fourteen years of age, had tried to kill herself by drinking a bottle of bleach.
Lilly closed her eyes and swallowed the chocolate. It stuck in her throat with a peppery sting as she tried not to imagine how Domestos might taste. She pictured herself instead as a corporate lawyer in a smart office overlooking St Paul’s Cathedral in the heart of the city. Dressed in a black Armani suit, which fitted snugly but not tightly over her hips, she crossed a plant-filled atrium, her high heels clicking on the marble floor. Tap, tap, tap.
The heels dissolved as Lilly focused on the doughy twelve-year-old who was rapping day-glo talons against the car window.
‘You on drugs?’
Lilly ignored her and got out.
‘Got any fags?’
‘Not for you,’ answered Lilly.
The girl spat on the ground, inches from Lilly’s feet.
Lilly appraised her with practised cool and nodded at the silver boob tube which threatened to release a small pair of spotty breasts. ‘Been auditioning for a porn movie, Charlene?’
‘You’ve got a big mouth.’
‘All the better to eat you with, my dear.’
When Lilly got to the door she tossed a packet of Marlboro Lights to the girl.
‘You ain’t so tough,’ Charlene said.
‘Wanna bet?’
Lilly stepped inside the unit. It was buzzing. Most of its residents had just returned from their ‘morning education session’, along with all the pupils that had been excluded from every school in the area. Nearly all the kids in The Bushes went there for a couple of hours a day – if they learned anything it was a bonus. Lilly, who had represented at least half of the young people in The Bushes, was greeted with waves and requests for cash or cigarettes.
‘Who’re you here for, Miss?’
‘Kelsey Brand,’ said Lilly.
‘Nutter,’ came the chorus, and several boys pretended to drink from imaginary bottles.
‘Enough of that.’
‘She’s well weird,’ a boy in a baseball cap shouted, his left eye quivering in its socket.
Lilly rubbed his shoulder in long strokes to soothe away both the twitch and the habitual beatings he had suffered at the hands of an alcoholic stepfather, now serving life for setting the boy’s mother on fire while she fed their six-week-old baby.
‘We’re all weird here, Jermaine, it’s why we get on so well.’
Despite her bravado Lilly felt trepidation as she passed along the corridor to room twelve. Self-abusers didn’t usually threaten Lilly’s equanimity. Headbangers, cutters, anorexics, Lilly had worked with them all, but drinking bleach was so extreme. The girl must have been in the depths of wretchedness to punish herself like that.
The last kid in room twelve had been Irina, the daughter of a deported asylum-seeker. Attractive and well-educated, she had been easy to place with a middle- class foster family. Lilly fingered the soapstone pin she wore at the back of her lapel. It was smooth and cool to the touch. Irina had given it to Lilly on the final day of the court hearing when she learned she was not being sent back to a village torn apart by civil war.
Would