“What did you ever see in her?” said Lucy, her hated gingercurls, which framed a pale, youthful complexion, cascading down around hershoulders.
“Stupid cow,” said Alan, putting his arm around the girl whohad replaced Kay, laughing as he did so.
It took a couple of seconds of consciousness for Kay torealise it was only a dream as her mind clicked back into the real world. Adream it may have been, but its origins were very much grounded in reality.
The last time she had seen Alan with Lucy had been in thestreet some weeks before. As soon as they had clocked her they had crossed theroad, pretending they hadn’t seen her. It was obvious that they had, as theymade a big show of the fact they were holding hands, also turning to give eachother an affectionate peck on the lips which they knew Kay couldn’t fail tospot. Once they were past her, they burst into giggles, no doubt sharing somecruel joke at her expense.
The hurt Kay felt from her dream merely compounded themisery of the events of the previous evening. Thankfully, as her eyes adjustedto the dim light of the room and her hangover began to kick in, the memories,so vivid just a few moments before, swiftly burnt themselves out.
A grey light filtered through the partially closed curtains,illuminating her sad and dismal little room. She pulled the dirty and stainedquilt back over herself in a forlorn attempt to get warm, but it was to noavail. She was still wearing the leopard skin top and knickers she had beendressed in the previous night, but even with them and the quilt she felt muchcolder than usual. She looked across at her cheap digital clock radio, recentlybought off the market. It was nearly half past eight and she was due in work atnine.
The flat she lived in consisted of one average-sized roomand not a lot more. Her bed doubled as her sofa, and the remainder of her smallliving space was taken up by the kitchen, if it could be called that. Thecooking facilities amounted to two single electric rings with about a squaremetre of surface space on either side. There were two small cupboards abovethese two spaces, one of which was missing its door.
There was also a small sink taking up the space below thefilthy window. It was so tiny, she couldn’t even fit a washing-up bowl into it.When she had complained to Mr McVie about it, he had just laughed.
“What do you need to cook for when you’ve got a perfectlygood chip shop downstairs?” he had said in his broad Glaswegian accent.
That was pretty much par for the course where McVie wasconcerned. She had quickly learnt that it was pointless complaining to himabout anything. He never fixed anything.
The only other notable piece of furniture was an aging MFIchest of drawers that she had bought second-hand from a charity shop. All ofher clothes were stuffed into the three small drawers, two of which weresagging as the wafer-thin pieces of baseboard collapsed under the weight. Shehad tried supergluing the boards back in place, but they soon came unstuckagain. Most of the fake wood veneer had peeled off the top. It was amazing ithad lasted as long as it had, which was more than could be said for the companythat had made it.
As for washing her clothes, that was out of the question. Herflat hadn’t come equipped with a washing machine, and even if she had been ableto afford one, there was nowhere to fit it. So she had to go to thelaunderette, up on one of the rough estates in the older part of town.
She was forever running out of clean clothes and had loweredher standards considerably. Now she wore underwear two days in a row, tops forthree or four, and jeans for up to two weeks at a time. She figured the longershe could eke her clothes out, the less money and time she would have to spendin the launderette which doubled as the town’s main drug-dealing hub. She hatedgoing there.
For someone who had once taken such pride in her appearance,it was a shocking state of affairs. It was all down to one simple problem: lackof money.
She knew she was in a mess but with the current financialsituation she just didn’t know how she was going to drag herself out of it. Ifshe could have weaned herself off the fags and booze it would have made asignificant difference to her finances, but she just didn’t have the willpoweror the inclination to break those habits at present. Life had become sointolerable she needed to drown her sorrows in the pub every night just to keepgoing.
As she lay in bed this Saturday morning, wrapping the quiltaround her in a tight cocoon, she thought about the situation she was in andwhat had led her there. Should she be trying to work out where she had gonewrong and what she could do to change things, or was she being harsh blaming itall on herself? Should she instead be focusing her thoughts on who else hadplayed a part?
She didn’t think of herself as a bitter and twisted woman,blaming everyone else for her own shortcomings, but it was hard not to pointthe finger when she thought about her ex-husband, Alan Phipps. How she wishedshe had never met him. How much different would her life have been without him?Much better, undoubtedly.
But wishing she had never met him was a double-edged sword.If she hadn’t, then she wouldn’t have her daughter. She may have marriedsomeone else and had other children, but they wouldn’t be Maddie. Otherchildren were an abstract concept: doubtless she would have loved them, butthey weren’t real. Maddie was: she was flesh and blood, made uniquely out ofbits of her, and Alan and she couldn’t bear the thought of being without
