Angie paused with a bottle halfway to her mouth. ‘What? He got your job?’
‘Temporarily.’
‘Mmm.’
Diane began to get irritated. She’d told herself she wouldn’t, but her sister had an uncanny knack of getting under her skin.
‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Things will be right back to normal the minute I get away from here.’
‘If you get away.’
‘Well, I’m certainly not staying in Birmingham for the rest of my natural life.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because you’re here for a start.’
She regretted the words as soon as they were out of her mouth. But her sister looked smug, as if she’d scored some kind of success.
‘Cheers,’ said Angie, raising her bottle in a toast. ‘Here’s to sisterly love.’
Her sister’s attitude made Diane reluctant to think about all the things she’d planned to say. All those questions she’d wanted to ask. We’re going to be all right, you and me? The moment didn’t seem right. Perhaps the time would never be right.
She’d told Rachel Murchison only half the story of their lives. It was true that they’d both been taken into care when Diane was nine and Angie was eleven. And there had been a whole series of foster homes before they landed with the Bowskills. Angie had been trouble wherever she went, though Diane had idolized her in that blind fashion younger siblings sometimes did.
It all went off the rails when Angie began using heroin and left home, not to be seen again by her sister for fifteen years.
Diane was conscious that she and her sister were hardly unique cases. There were sixty thousand children in foster care or local authority homes. Half of those sixty thousand wouldn’t get a single GCSE, and would leave school with no qualifications, barely able to read or write, destined for deadend jobs, if not a permanent place on the dole queue. She was one of the measly two per cent who made it to university. Many were consigned to a life on the street, holed up in a filthy squat or crack house, pissing away their existence. Some care-home children felt unwanted and unvalued for the whole of their lives. Many never formed a normal relationship, because they didn’t know how. They’d never been shown.
It was hard for her to think of herself as part of a huge, anonymous mass. But that’s exactly what she’d once been — just another statistic in a depressing flow of unwanted children, shuttling to and fro through the back alleys of society. Kids destined never to have a real family, or a real home.
At least for a while it had been Angie and Diane together. That had made fostering a bit more tolerable. But even that had come to an abrupt end.
Fry shut her eyes against the sudden stab of pain. It was a memory that tormented her, even now. That moment she’d realized the unbelievable: Angie had left for good, walked out of their foster home in Warley and disappeared. Ever since then, Diane had thought that she’d make things right by finding Angie. But perhaps the truth was that she had never forgiven her sister for that betrayal, and never could.
‘Let’s have another drink,’ said Angie. ‘You’re being slow, Sis.’
Diane studied her sister. Yes, Angie herself had changed a lot in fifteen years, yet there was still the familiar rhythm in her speech, the faint buzz of a Black Country accent under the studied flatness. And Diane couldn’t avoid noticing a characteristic gesture, a tense lifting of the shoulders that she knew very well because she was aware of doing it herself.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve ever kept in contact with Mum and Dad?’ she said.
Angie’s mouth became a tight line.
‘You mean Jim and Alice Bowskill? No, why should I?’
‘They were very good to us.’
‘They were good to you.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I was always the disappointment, didn’t you notice? I couldn’t do anything right in their eyes. You were the one they loved.’
‘Angie, you were a nightmare. You made their lives a misery. Just like you did with all our previous foster parents. That was why we moved on so often.’
‘Is it? Lucky for you that I left when I did, then. I bet Jim and Alice put everything into you then, didn’t they? Of course. They got you through your A-levels, and into university. That must have been the high point of their lives. Little Diane, their great success story.’
‘I worked hard for anything I achieved.’
‘Right. I bet you were really studious.’
‘I was. Angie, I gave you all fifteen years of it. I told you what I did at school, how I managed to scrape through to do my degree. I wanted to get an education. I needed it. And I told you about our parents coming to the graduation ceremony.’
‘Our foster parents.’
‘And how they got lost in Birmingham, so they arrived late.’
‘And you didn’t think anyone was coming, I know. I liked the bit about you getting drunk at a student party and being sick into somebody’s window box. I can’t imagine you doing that, Sis. You were always so prim and proper. A right stuck-up little prig.’
Diane was beginning to get upset. This wasn’t the way she’d pictured it going. The hostility from her sister was growing with every mouthful of alcohol. She wondered if Angie had been drinking before she came, or whether she was high on something else.
‘Do you regret making contact with me again?’ she asked.
‘If you remember, I didn’t have much choice,’ said Angie.
‘Thanks to your Constable Cooper.’
With an effort, Diane controlled herself. She found she was gritting her teeth so hard that it hurt.
‘You do know what I’m doing here, don’t you?’ she said.
Angie took a swig of her drink. ‘Oh, yes. I know. It’s all about you again, isn’t it?’
They went out into Broad Street to look for somewhere to eat. For Diane, it was a relief to get out on to the busy pavement. Angie was getting a little too loud for comfort.
‘Hey, have you noticed how Broad Street seems to have become the place for a chavs’ night out?’ she said.
Diane wouldn’t have put it quite like that herself. But, yes — she had noticed.
‘I remember Broad Street mostly for the theatres,’ she said. ‘It used to be where you came for a bit of culture.’
‘Nothing cultural about this lot,’ said Angie. ‘If you dropped a small nuclear device on a Saturday night and took out four or five of these clubs, you’d exterminate the entire chav population from Longbridge to Erdington.’
Young men were hanging out of car windows as they crawled up the road, a youth in white trainers carrying a bottle of Magners cider was throwing up in the gutter. Further up the street, a group were arguing with bouncers in front of a club, others were shouting abuse at police officers in a riot van. An Asian taxi driver wound up his windows to shut out the racial insults.
Birmingham hadn’t seen much excitement since the Eurovision Song Contest and the G8 Summit had come to town in the same week. Back in May 1998, that was. No sooner had Terry Wogan and Ulrika Jonsson left the National Indoor Arena with an army of cheesy pop acts, than Tony Blair was arriving to rub shoulders with Bill Clinton and Boris Yeltsin next door at the ICC.
The International Convention Centre was in use now. That meant convention fodder, hundreds of black-suited sales people filling up the bars and restaurants on Broad Street.
On the pavement, Fry saw a man with a thin, angular face and long grey hair prowling between the streetlights like a wolf. Sharp eyes watching her. Hungry eyes, full of desire for the next fix.
‘My God, I bet this is something you don’t have in Edendale,’ said Angie. ‘The range of bars and restaurants in Birmingham is amazing now. We can eat anything we fancy. What do you say to Thai? Caribbean? Mexican?’
