Shaz had scrambled onto her knees, then she had quickly removed Tom’s iPad and a calculator from his briefcase. She shoved them into her green denim knapsack. Rifling through the remaining crumpled papers again, she’d located his digital camera—state-of-the-art and worth over seven hundred quid. Tom had groaned as he’d watched her turn it over in her hands before slipping it into the pocket of her grubby brown hoodie. Then she’d turned to him, and, holding her hands protectively across her swollen abdomen, she’d approached Tom cautiously to kneel beside him.
He was no expert in this stuff but Tom had estimated her at about six months gone. Presumably the charming Kenny was to be congratulated. And the poor sprog to be pitied—talk about having no chance at life from the day you were born. With those two as parents the baby would be lucky to survive its first year. She’d grabbed his wrist with all the apparent enthusiasm she might have shown for handling a turd, then Shaz had quickly unbuckled his watch—not an especially good or expensive one, but still, he resented the further indignity and had made that particularly clear by observing in a low tone what a fucking little bitch she was, promising to break her neck if he ever got his hands on her. Not his normal attitude toward females, especially small, pregnant ones, but he was making an exception in this case. He’d felt justified as another wave of pain had encircled his ribs.
The girl had winced, and her lips had moved. She might have mumbled some sort of apology, but Tom had dismissed that as wishful thinking on his part. And, in any case, it made no difference. She had still been participating in this bloody robbery and he had still been losing his favorite jacket, his watch, and he’d have lost his car too if she’d managed to find the keys in his jeans pocket.
Sure enough, she’d patted his front hip pockets and had located the telltale bulge. Well, two telltale bulges, actually. Shit, he didn’t know which of them had been most surprised. Who’d have thought that being frisked by a pregnant teenage mugger would have given him a hard-on? He obviously needed to get laid more. And Shaz had obviously fancied getting laid by him as much as she liked handling turds. Wrenching her hand sharply away as though she’d been burnt, the skinny kid had struggled to her feet and backed away from him, one hand splayed across her belly, the other—the one still clutching his watch—clenched underneath her bump.
“That’s it, he’s not got anything else, Kenny.” The girl had turned, her pregnant profile obvious. She’d held out the watch to her boyfriend, who had calmly backhanded her across the face. The blow had not been especially hard—maybe Kenny was making allowances for her pregnancy—but it had still been enough to send her flying off balance and crumpling to her knees, her fall broken only by Tom’s own body as she’d sprawled over him in the mud, his hands coming up by instinct to catch her. Again, it wasn’t clear which of them had been most surprised.
“I told you, no fucking names.” Kenny’s harsh tone rang across the girl’s prone body, and once more Tom had heard her mutter “Sorry” as she’d struggled to right herself. He wasn’t sure who the apology was aimed at this time, but he’d taken advantage of her proximity to grab her wrist, intending to reclaim his watch at least. The girl had yelped with pain and fear, and Tom had instinctively loosened his grip. At the same time Kenny had grabbed her by the hair and hauled her to her feet. Out of patience and obviously ready to be off he’d kicked the denim bag at his feet. “Pick that fucking bag up, you stupid cow. And shut your mouth before the fucking cops hear you shrieking. Come on.”
And as suddenly as he’d appeared he’d marched away, belligerent and cocky, still preening in his new jacket, his little thug friends scurrying to keep up. Shaz had had no chance of matching their pace, but she’d done her best. Limping and clearly holding her wrist, she’d hauled the strap of the bag over her shoulder and awkwardly followed the other three. She hesitated briefly at the bottom of the steps, casting a hurried glance back at Tom, who was by then weaving to his feet. They both heard the voices at the same time, her startled glance shooting up the steps as the newcomers approached, clattering down the steps toward the river. Clutching the bag containing Tom’s possessions, she darted up the stone staircase, squeezing past the laughing bunch of late-night strollers. Tom’s rescue party.
In a desperate attempt to raise their suspicions before his assailants got clean away Tom tried to stand, to shout. He succeeded in attracting their attention, but they hardly even noticed the escaping girl as she shot past them and away.
“Hey, you okay, mate?” A middle-aged man was hurrying along the riverside path toward him, breathless and red-faced. He was closely followed by a plump woman, equally out of breath, also probably in her fifties—his wife?—and a younger couple. Son? Daughter?
“Looks like he’s been in a fight. Call the police, Marjorie. And an ambulance.”
And he was safe, swept along by the fussy concern of Joe Public, solicitous, caring and suitably outraged, desperate to mop at him with handkerchiefs and wet wipes. In no time he was taken into the efficient care of paramedics and the police. But he was still missing one irreplaceable jacket and his prized camera.
Shit. Holy fucking shit!
Chapter One
I pulled it off. Mary, Joseph and all the saints, I only fucking did it! Months of planning, sacrifice, sheer desperation and soul-deep tragedy have brought me here. So here’s where I am. At last. Free. Free to start over.
The monotonous asphalt of the M6 heading north rolls in front of me, miles and miles of it. And every mile taking me farther away from—before. Away from ‘Shaz’, away from poverty and violence and doing without, leaving behind my old life jam-packed with nothing much but drudgery, fear, humiliation.
Not that the future looks particularly certain. But at least there’s only me in it.
* * * *
I remember with absolute clarity the moment I knew I was going to be rid of Kenny. It was July thirteenth 2011 at nine sixteen p.m., the moment when the radiologist at Southmead Hospital’s maternity unit at last finished clicking away at her keyboard, swirling her chilly probe through the gunk on my abdomen, looking again at her monitor and once more for good measure before she finally turned to me. She had on her well-trained sad and sympathetic face as she calmly announced that my baby had no heartbeat. No heartbeat! How can a baby have no heartbeat? He’d be dead if he…
The maternity unit staff were kind, caring, but they couldn’t put it right. Nothing, no one could put this right. My baby was dead. Dead because my thug of a boyfriend couldn’t keep his fists to himself. One shove too many, one punch too many, one heavy fall too many, and it was done. My baby, gone. I sobbed. I screamed and kicked and refused to accept. Refused to accept a life lost, wasted through thoughtless cruelty and callousness.
It’s not as though Kenny had even meant to kill my baby. His baby. He just simply hadn’t cared one way or the other. But it was real, this was all real—really happening to me, and eventually my body took over and expelled my tiny, tiny baby son, out onto a cool, clean rubber sheet. Months too early. Dead before his life had even started. Before I’d even looked into his face to say ‘hello’ it was already too late to say ‘goodbye’. The midwife taking care of me—her name was Ann-Marie I think but it’s all something of a blur—scooped him up and out of the way while the young doctor dealt with the afterbirth, and other nurses cleaned me up, made me sanitary and ‘normal’ again.
Ann-Marie brought my baby back, beautifully laid out in a tiny basket, on a pale blue satin cushion. He was so small, his little limbs matchstick thin, and he was a very deep pink, like a little pixie. Not quite human, yet not quite anything else either. Even though I never asked her to—it never even occurred to me—Ann-Marie took a photo of him with a little digital pocket camera they must keep in the maternity unit for this sort of thing. She also took his tiny little handprints and footprints. And she put all those mementos into a little white memorial card that she gave to me.
I have it still. I’ll have it forever. That’s all there is left to show my baby was ever here.
* * * *
And my mother came, rushing down from Gloucester when they phoned her, even though she hadn’t seen me for a year and had had no idea that I was even pregnant. But she came, she hugged me and she wept with me for her lost grandson. We agreed to call him David, after an ‘uncle’ who’d stayed with us for a few years and I’d particularly liked when I was little. And when I was well enough to leave hospital two days later, my mother piled me into her little white Renault Clio and took me back to Gloucester with her.
When we got there we both cried some more and planned David’s funeral. It took place exactly two weeks after he’d died, in a chilly cemetery in Gloucester. There was no vicar. I don’t recall a time I ever believed in God and this latest demonstration of the general cack-handedness of fate certainly wasn’t about to change my mind about the benign intervention of some higher power. No, as far as I could see life was just shit, and only marginally better than the alternative. You accepted that and you got on with it. Or not.
So it was just me and my mother, and a silent, sympathetic undertaker who retrieved David’s little body from Southmead and brought it here in a tiny white coffin. Not even a hearse—he just pulled up at the stillborn babies plot in the cemetery in a black Volvo estate with David’s shoebox of a coffin in the back. He carried the miniature white casket down the stone steps to the pre-dug hole, where two cemetery staff carefully lowered it into the ground. Then the undertaker and the gravediggers stood tactfully back, waiting, patient and respectful and perhaps rather bored, while my mother and I stood, each of us lost in our own thoughts, and we said our silent farewells to the baby I’d known so briefly and my mother not at all.
The following morning Kenny turned up at my mother’s house, demanding to know what the fuck I was doing in bloody Gloucester. Why wasn’t I in Bristol where I belonged? He needed me and all I could do was bloody cry over a kid I hadn’t even really had. And what the fuck did any of it have to do with my mother? She had been nowhere around when we’d needed a bit of cash last year to stop us getting evicted, so we sure as hell didn’t need her now.
I told him I wanted to stay in Gloucester a bit longer. Maybe even stay here for good now. He smashed my mother’s greenhouse windows and threatened to boot her twelve-year-old cat to death. I packed my stuff and left an hour later with him.
Two days later Kenny was arrested for burglary. Apparently an anonymous tip-off through Crimestoppers linked him to a series of ram raids at Co-op stores around the South West. Naturally he denied it, and naturally I provided him with a rock-solid alibi for all the nights in question. The police were struggling to stack up the case, but as luck would have it another anonymous call to Crimestoppers led them to a lock-up where a load of stolen cigarettes and booze was stored. Unfortunately for him, Kenny was never the brightest or tidiest of thieves and his prints were all over the stuff. So that was it. He went down for three years. I stuck to my alibi story, determined not to give him any reason at all to doubt my loyalty. I knew the jury wouldn’t believe me anyway with all the forensic evidence proving Kenny’s guilt so it didn’t really matter what I said.
In the event, though, it did matter, up to a point. I was convicted of attempting to pervert the course of justice and sentenced to eighteen months in prison, a year of it to be suspended for two years. But I had to serve six months. I was shocked, stunned even. I think the jury were too. I suppose I caught the judge on a bad day, a day when he was minded to make an example of someone and it turned out to be me. I hadn’t ever considered the prospect of prison, but I gritted my teeth again like I always do and I got on with it. As I knew with absolute certainty by then, worse things could happen. So I set my mind to being a model prisoner.
Three years isn’t long. Kenny would probably be out again within two years. Then he’d come looking for me, expecting to just carry on where we’d left off. And no way was that happening. I’d gone to a lot of trouble and even put up with the inconvenience of time in jail to be rid of him. I wasn’t having him back, not at any price. No way was I returning to that old life. I knew it was no good just going home to my mum’s again. I’d tried that already and I knew he’d react as he had before. He’d come after me to Gloucester and terrorize us both until I gave in. So I needed to get away. Clean away. Somewhere new, somewhere he had no links, no ties. Somewhere he wouldn’t be able to find me.
My mum came to visit me as often as she could while I was locked up, and we talked and planned. While I was growing up it had mostly been just the two of us, with occasional ‘uncles’ coming and going. Nothing too promiscuous, but my mum liked to enjoy herself and really didn’t care what anyone else thought. I was proof of that, the product of a heated summer romance with a Turkish hotel deputy manager during a holiday in Bodrum in 1990.
My mother had fallen for Bajram in a big way, negotiated a sabbatical from her job and stayed on the rest of the season to live with him in his tiny little apartment in the back of the hotel. They’d enjoyed mindless sex and Mediterranean sunshine until the end of the season, and my mother had even stayed with him over the winter. But by the start of the next holiday season the magic had apparently worn thin. Maybe she’d been homesick. Anyway, by May 1991 my mother had decided to come back to the UK. And she’d had an extra passenger on board by then. Just a very tiny one. She’d been eight weeks pregnant, and I’d come screaming into the world in January 1992.