stay for a night, or agreeing to perform services of which Krystal did not know the nature, but which took her mother out of the house for hours.
Krystal had had a nightmare, not long ago, in which her mother had become stretched, spread and tied on a kind of frame; she was mostly a vast, gaping hole, like a giant, raw, plucked chicken; and in the dream, Obbo was walking in and out of this cavernous interior, and fiddling with things in there, while Terri’s tiny head was frightened and grim. Krystal had woken up feeling sick and angry and disgusted.
‘’E’s a fucker,’ said Krystal.
‘Is he a tall bloke with a shaved head and tattoos all up the back of his neck?’ asked Fats, who had truanted for a second time that week, and sat on a wall for an hour in the Fields, watching. The bald man had interested him, fiddling around in the back of an old white van.
‘Nah, tha’s Pikey Pritchard,’ said Krystal, ‘if yeh saw him down Tarpen Road.’
‘What does he do?’
‘I dunno,’ said Krystal. ‘Ask Dane, ’e’s mates with Pikey’s brother.’
But she liked his genuine interest; he had never shown this much inclination to talk to her before.
‘Pikey’s on probation.’
‘What for?’
‘He glassed a bloke down the Cross Keys.’
‘Why?’
‘’Ow the fuck do I know? I weren’t there,’ said Krystal.
She was happy, which always made her cocky. Setting aside her worry about Nana Cath (who was, after all, still alive, so might yet recover), it had been a good couple of weeks. Terri was adhering to the Bellchapel regime again, and Krystal was making sure that Robbie went to nursery. His bottom had mostly healed over. The social worker seemed as pleased as her sort ever did. Krystal had been to school every day too, though she had not attended either her Monday or her Wednesday morning guidance sessions with Tessa. She did not know why. Sometimes you got out of the habit.
She glanced sideways at Fats again. She had never once thought of fancying him; not until he had targeted her at the disco in the drama hall. Everyone knew Fats; some of his jokes were passed around like funny stuff that happened on the telly. (Krystal pretended to everyone that they had a television at home. She watched enough at friends’ houses, and at Nana Cath’s, to be able to bluff her way through. ‘Yeah, it were shit, weren’t it?’ ‘I know, I nearly pissed meself,’ she would say, when the others talked about programmes they had seen.)
Fats was imagining how it would feel to be glassed, how the jagged shard would slice through the tender flesh on his face; he could feel the searing nerves and the sting of the air against his ripped skin; the warm wetness as blood gushed. He felt a tickly over-sensitivity in the skin around his mouth, as if it was already scarred.
‘Is he still carrying a blade, Dane?’ he asked.
‘’Ow d’you know ’e’s gotta blade?’ demanded Krystal.
‘He threatened Kevin Cooper with it.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Krystal conceded. ‘Cooper’s a twat, innee?’
‘Yeah, he is,’ said Fats.
‘Dane’s on’y carryin’ ’cos o’ the Riordon brothers,’ said Krystal.
Fats liked the matter-of-factness of Krystal’s tone; her acceptance of the need for a knife, because there was a grudge and a likelihood of violence. This was the raw reality of life; these were things that actually mattered… before Arf had arrived at the house that day, Cubby had been importuning Tessa to give him an opinion on whether his campaign leaflet should be printed on yellow or white paper…
‘What about in there?’ suggested Fats, after a while.
To their right was a long stone wall, its gates open to reveal a glimpse of green and stone.
‘Yeah, all righ’,’ said Krystal. She had been in the cemetery once before, with Nikki and Leanne; they had sat on a grave and split a couple of cans, a little self-conscious about what they were doing, until a woman had shouted at them and called them names. Leanne had lobbed an empty can back at the woman as they left.
But it was too exposed, Fats thought, as he and Krystal walked up the broad concreted walkway between the graves: green and flat, the headstones offering virtually no cover. Then he saw barberry hedges along the wall on the far side. He cut a path right across the cemetery, and Krystal followed, hands in her pockets, as they picked their way between rectangular gravel beds, headstones cracked and illegible. It was a large cemetery, wide and well tended. Gradually they reached the newer graves of highly polished black marble with gold lettering, places where fresh flowers had been laid for the recently dead.
‘Yeah, we’ll be all right in there,’ said Fats, eyeing the dark gap between the prickly, yellow-flowered bushes and the cemetery wall.
They crawled into the damp shadows, onto the earth, their backs against the cold wall. The headstones marched away from them between the bushes’ trunks, but there were no human forms among them. Fats skinned up expertly, hoping that Krystal was watching, and was impressed.
But she was gazing out under the canopy of glossy dark leaves, thinking about Anne-Marie, who (Aunt Cheryl had told her) had come to visit Nana Cath on Thursday. If only she had skipped school and gone at the same time, they could have met at last. She had fantasized, many times, about how she would meet Anne-Marie, and say to her, ‘I’m yer sister.’ Anne-Marie, in these fantasies, was always delighted, and they saw each other all the time after that, and eventually Anne-Marie suggested that Krystal move in. The imaginary Anne-Marie had a house like Nana Cath’s, neat and clean, except that it was much more modern. Lately, in her fantasies, Krystal had added a sweet little pink baby in a frilly crib.
‘There you go,’ said Fats, handing Krystal the joint. She inhaled, held the smoke in her lungs for a few seconds, and her expression softened into dreaminess as the cannabis worked its magic.
‘You ain’ got brothers an’ sisters,’ she asked, ‘’ave yeh?’
‘No,’ said Fats, checking his pocket for the condoms he had brought.
Krystal handed back the joint, her head swimming pleasantly. Fats took an enormous drag and blew smoke rings.
‘I’m adopted,’ he said, after a while.
Krystal goggled at Fats.
‘Are yeh adopted, are yeh?’
With the senses a little muffled and cushioned, confidences peeled easily away, everything became easy.
‘My sister wuz adopted,’ said Krystal, marvelling at the coincidence, delighted to talk about Anne- Marie.
‘Yeah, I probably come from a family like yours,’ said Fats.
But Krystal was not listening; she wanted to talk.
‘I gottan older sister an’ an older brother, Liam, but they wuz taken away before I wuz born.’
‘Why?’ asked Fats.
He was suddenly paying close attention.
‘Me mum was with Ritchie Adams then,’ said Krystal. She took a deep drag on the joint and blew out the smoke in a long thin jet. ‘He’s a proper psycho. He’s doin’ life. He killed a bloke. Proper violent to Mum an’ the kids, an’ then John an’ Sue came an’ took ’em, and the social got involved an’ it ended up John an’ Sue kept ’em.’
She drew on the joint again, considering this period of her pre-life, which was doused in blood, fury and darkness. She had heard things about Ritchie Adams, mainly from her aunt Cheryl. He had stubbed out cigarettes on one-year-old Anne-Marie’s arms, and kicked her until her ribs cracked. He had broken Terri’s face; her left cheekbone was still receded, compared to the right. Terri’s addiction had spiralled catastrophically. Aunt Cheryl was matter of fact about the decision to remove the two brutalized, neglected children from their parents.
‘It ’ad to ’appen,’ said Cheryl.
John and Sue were distant, childless relatives. Krystal had never known where or how they fitted in her
