Jail Bird

and stood up.

‘Look, it’s been fun, but I have to go,’ she said, wanting only to get away now. ‘Got to see my probation officer–as you do. I s’pose I’m lucky they didn’t fit me with a Peckham Rolex.’ Lily gave Vanda a cold smile. ‘That’s an electronic tag, Vanda. Something they sometimes like to fit on us ex-cons, keep track of them. Otherwise I guess there’s no telling where us bastards’ll end up or what mischief we’ll get up to, is there?’

Vanda went red. ‘Really…’ she sniffed.

‘You look a bit hot, Vanda, allow me to cool you down.’ And Lily grabbed the water jug and dumped the contents over Vanda’s expensive hairdo.

Vanda shrieked and surged to her feet in fury.

Other diners turned and stared.

Water was dripping off Vanda’s couture suit, cascading in runnels over her heavily made-up face.

‘Oh Lils don’t…’ started Becks, but Lily was already striding off across the restaurant to the foyer, furious tears pricking her eyes.

God, she’d been such a bloody fool. You couldn’t reclaim the past, make it whole and clean again. Too much dirty water had washed under the bridge; it was no good trying to pretend it hadn’t. She didn’t fit into this– their world–any longer. She didn’t give a toss whether the rug in her hall matched her hair colour or whether the kitchen worktops were granite or marble or even fucking cardboard. She used to care. She didn’t now. She’d changed, moved on. They hadn’t.

She was at the door when Becks caught up with her, grabbed her arm.

‘Lils! I’m sorry, I didn’t know Vanda was going to come out with all that,’ she said.

Lily gulped down a calming breath and forced a smile. ‘Don’t worry, Becks. Not your fault.’

‘Are you all right?’

All right? Yeah. Dispossessed, hated, cast out into the wilderness for something I didn’t do, but all right.

‘I’m fine,’ said Lily. ‘Going to look up another old friend this afternoon.’

‘Oh. Who?’

‘Julia.’

‘Julia?’ Becks’s jaw actually dropped. ‘But you…ain’t you heard what happened to Julia?’

Lily was frowning. ‘I know she married Nick, and they divorced. I know she was humping Leo.’

‘Yeah, but wait. There’s something you don’t know,’ said Becks.

‘Oh yeah? What?’

Becks told her. Later Lily went off to see her probation officer, like the good little lifer out on licence that she was, but for hours afterwards she couldn’t get Becks’s words out of her head.

45

Lily was still feeling staggered by Becks’s revelations about Julia when Jack phoned her at home that afternoon. She felt safe at home, despite all the difficulties, despite Saz’s ongoing hostility. Here she was barricaded inside behind her state-of-the-art security system. Nowhere else felt truly secure now, not really. This was what the King brothers had reduced her to. Or would reduce her to, if she let them. Her thoughts strayed again to Julia, to what Becks had said.

‘She won’t see you. She don’t see anyone. Not now.’

And after that, the explanation. The dawning horror of it. And why, why in God’s name hadn’t Nick told her about this? Was this the reason he hadn’t wanted her to see Julia? Was he…oh God…was he in some way implicated in what had happened to Julia? Was that why he’d hidden these facts from Lily?

Maybe he was hiding more than that, she thought, and felt sick, and afraid.

Nick.

He’d been her first love. Once, she had believed they were meant to be together. But it hadn’t worked out that way. Leo had snatched her away from him, and worse, far worse than that, he had let Leo do it. And then Leo had snatched Julia. Lily tried but she could not stop herself from seeing all sorts of awful patterns emerging here, and they all converged on Nick. Nick her lover. Nick who might be her friend, but who could also be, in that covert and concealed way of his, her enemy.

She and poor bloody Julia had Nick and Leo in common. They had mixed, up close and personal, with these bad, hard men, and somehow it had destroyed them. Would she too become like that–shut away from the world because the world was too dangerous, too frightening to engage with? Already she felt it in herself, her reluctance to leave the safety of home again.

No.

They weren’t going to corral her with fear. They weren’t going to fence her in, make her mind her mouth. No way.

Then Nick phoned.

‘Hi,’ she said, feeling flustered at the sound of his voice, bewildered with all that was spinning around in her head about him.

‘Hi to you too,’ he said, and she could tell that he was smiling. ‘I want to see you.’

She felt a shiver of sheer lust rocket through her. But then…oh God, all these things in her mind, tormenting her. What Becks had told her about Julia. And Nick had been evasive, even angry, when she had raised the subject of Julia to him.

‘I…I’m really busy,’ she said lamely, unsure. Then, hearing the stony silence that greeted this she added: ‘Maybe in a few days…?’

‘A few days?’ There was a mixture of laughter and irritation in his voice. ‘Hey, lady. I can get women any day of the week, you know. I just have to click my fingers, and there they are.’

He was only teasing, she knew that, but still she felt annoyed. ‘Then why don’t you bugger off and do that?’ she snapped.

Silence. Then he said: ‘What’s going on, Lily? Has something happened?’

‘No. Nothing,’ she lied.

‘Only the last time I saw you, you were a lot warmer than this.’

‘Bad day,’ shrugged Lily.

‘Well…call me when you’re having a good one,’ he said, and hung up.

Shit, thought Lily, slamming the phone down, feeling sad and bewildered.

Immediately it rang again. She picked it up quickly, thinking it was him, apologizing, but it was Jack, who lost no time in adding his bit to the shit-storm that she already sensed was blowing her way.

‘It’s Alice Blunt,’ he said.

‘Alice? What about her?’

‘You sitting down?’

‘No.’

‘Well, do it.’

Lily sat down. Her heart was racing. Whatever this was, it wasn’t going to be good news.

‘Is she all right?’ she asked, dry-mouthed.

‘No. She ain’t. I’m sorry as fuck, Lily,’ said Jack on a heavy sigh, and then he told her the news.

They weren’t pleased to see Jack and Lily at the clinic, but no change there. They hadn’t been pleased last time, and this time when Lily asked to see the manager, she and Jack were ushered straight into a small office where a large, red-faced woman with a bad perm and a well-filled black twinset sat behind a desk. She didn’t waste a moment.

‘You’re Mrs King, you visited Alice?’ she rapped out.

‘Yeah, that’s me. Lily King.’

‘You told a member of my staff that you’d been in Australia, but that wasn’t true, was it? You’ve been in prison.’

‘Yeah,’ admitted Lily.