He had absolutely no intention of telling Becky any nightmare fairy stories about eating a dead god’s flesh, and she wouldn’t believe it anyway – no sane person would – especially not with spontaneous remission as an alternative. David didn’t know how this first flesh business worked – whether it was permanent, whether it required regular consumption, or whether, as the doctor had said, the leukaemia would come back. If it did then they’d be no worse off than they were before. For the moment, Alice was cured, and that was the end of it.
‘I can’t believe it. I just can’t believe it,’ Becky kept saying as they left the office. She took his hand and gripped it tightly. ‘Do you think there actually might be something up there looking out for us?’
‘I really think there might,’ he answered.
* * *
Lauren Jeffries would not normally have walked home through the park after work, but it was nearly midsummer and would be daylight for hours yet. It had been another unseasonably hot day and there were families all over the place – in the playground on the swings and slides, picnicking on the grass, queuing at the ice-cream kiosk, riding bikes and scooters, throwing bread to the ducks and splashing in the Pent Brook that fed into it. This was Dodbury, not some inner-city shithole. She’d played on exactly those swings and slides when she’d been that age, and when most of her friends couldn’t wait to escape the village that they called the most boring zit on the arsehole of the country, she had got herself a nice little flat and a job in Free Range Travel on the High Street. Which was ironic, when you thought about it: helping other people find exotic locations to jet off to when she was perfectly happy here, thank you very much. Hopefully one day she would take a daughter of her own to play on those swings and slides, and the thought of it made her feel solid and centred and happy; her feet were on the earth, her head was in the summer breeze, and she was on her way home to a tuna salad and Bake Off on the telly. Maybe a drink with Pauline down in the beer garden of the Golden Cross if she was up for it.
She didn’t notice the lads on the bikes until she was nearly at the point where Pent Brook exited the park over a short bridge onto Cathcart Road, because the park crowds had thinned but that tight little knot of a dozen or so figures on bikes with their hoods pulled up was still there, not exactly following her, but too close to be just minding their own business. When she had been little her dad had told her the story of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, and for years afterwards whenever she’d had to cross the bridge she’d always checked underneath it carefully for trolls first.
Lauren picked up her pace. Cathcart Road led onto Osier Road, which was just around the corner from her block of flats. Ten more minutes at most.
‘Hey, love!’ shouted one of the lads from behind. ‘Where ya goin’?’
She heard sniggers from the others, but didn’t turn around. Put her head down, and walked. They weren’t going to do anything; this was Dodbury. They were just being a bit cheeky. It was what lads did.
Two of them whizzed past her on their bikes, one on either side, one of them close enough to brush the material of her skirt with his handlebars. They powered up to the bridge and parked right in the centre of its span. Now they were ahead of her and behind.
‘Come on, love!’ he shouted again. ‘We just want to have a chat!’ More sniggers.
This time she turned around and got a good look at them. They must have been about fourteen or fifteen, mostly white but there were a couple of black lads too. Nobody she recognised, but they were bound to be the younger brothers of the friends she’d grown up with, so not exactly strangers either. They all had their hoods up and one or two had buffs covering their faces, which meant that they had come for trouble because you didn’t wear that kind of thing in this weather.
‘Going skiing, are you then?’ she shouted back, even though her heart was pounding. One thing she did know was that lads like this were brave when they were mob-handed, but they were maddened by your fear like sharks smelling blood.
The one who had yelled at her – red-faced and acne-ridden, with a scrappy little weasel’s arse of a moustache – frowned in confusion. ‘What?’
‘Or are you just too ugly to show your faces in public?’
‘Why you being so nasty, love, ay? We’re just trying to be friendly.’
‘Oh, just fuck off and go wank each other, why don’t you?’ she shouted, turned and marched towards the bridge. The two that were there had left just enough space for her to squeeze between them, and their unwashed clothes reeked of body odour and musky deodorant. The trolls are on the bridge! she thought, and in her head it sounded like an alarm.
‘You’ve got a bit of a mouth on you, darling, haven’t you?’ shouted the Scarlet Pimpleface. ‘A real rude bit of a mouth!’
The troll on her left leaned in and said, in breath that stank, ‘Why don’t you use that rude mouth on me?’
‘Fuck off!’ she spat, and scurried past, but not before he’d grabbed her bum, laughing.
She made it over the bridge and started running, and as if that were their cue they all started jeering and catcalling, pursuing her
