She sniffily continued her defence of the better ‘alf of Kath and Kev. ‘That husband of hers doesn’t know how lucky he is.’
She stared at the top of her husband’s bent and balding head, pencil hard at work next to the newspaper. Taptaptap.
She wondered if he considered himself lucky. Being married to a woman who not only knew how to change a spare tyre, but who also knew how to recharge dead batteries, unplug a blocked toilet and clear out the u-bend under the kitchen sink. Perhaps not, seeing as Stu had been the one to teach her ‘just in case’. If ever anyone deserved a motto it was her Stu. She could almost picture the head stone: Here lies Stu … just in case.
And just like that she pictured that poor girl, Sue, looking utterly shell-shocked as her husband’s casket disappeared behind that scrappy old velvet curtain Flo had been seeing a bit too much of lately. Susan’s Derek had passed just before Christmas. Heart attack. Tom’s Deborah, just after. Cancer. Now this poor lad taking his own life. One worth saving if the brief eulogy was anything to go by. The pains she went through to find a reliable plumber.
She moved on to another thought with another click of her tongue, pulled on the bright red puffer jacket her daughter had mocked for being ‘too young’ and shouldered her handbag. She and Stu weren’t anywhere near death. Not yet anyway.
Chapter Three
‘It’s Sunita, isn’t it?’
Raven looked across at the boy around her age who’d rushed in from the latest onslaught of sleet and perched next to her at the bus station.
Weirdo.
People didn’t just talk to people at the bus station. Particularly when one of them was exuding back off vibes.
It was one of her finely honed crafts. Few, that they may be, but she could pull off ‘radiating with leave me alone’ at the drop of a hat. She hoped it looked cool rather than what it actually was: standard practice for a five foot nine, overweight, Indian goth who was rapidly losing control of her whole entire life and was too shy/friendless/insecure to talk to anyone about it.
She shot him a swift side eye.
He had on a striped slouchy beanie. It was artfully tugged down to meet his patchwork stubble and the collar of his thick puffer jacket. Tufts of blonde hair stuck out the front of his hat. Trendy kicks and dark, mud-splattered trousers completed his outfit. He looked familiar, but this was one of those out of context meets she was never very good at, seeing as avoiding eye contact factored high on her day to day survival skills. Judging by his age and the fact he knew her given name, it had to be college. No one called her Sunita apart from her family and her teachers. Strangely, they hadn’t taken to her new goth name. (It wasn’t strange at all. Her name actually was Sunita. Raven was a fairly new development, but she lacked the sulky panache with which Telisa Wadhurst had swiftly managed to get the entire universe to call her Twist. Perhaps one day she’d be able to deliver dark, dryly ironic bon mots without sounding angry and, as a result, get people to do whatever she wanted. A girl could dream).
Raven didn’t have the slightest clue what the boy’s name was.
If she was being brutally honest – something she generally avoided in life but not at the call centre because, hello, no one could actually see her – she tactically forgot people’s names in the hopes that it made her appear aloof rather than at risk of being ignored if she were to bounce up to someone she might actually want to talk to. Hey Twist. How’s tricks? Bleurgh. As if. Not popular by choice was always a better option than the achingly painful gratitude some of the other girls glowed with when popular looking boys like him deigned to speak to them. Which was why this was totes awkward. Sporty, popular looking boys like him did not talk to fat Indian goth girls like her.
Particularly if they were glowering.
She was proactively glowering.
It was what happened when one’s life was backed into a very small corner.
She shook her head. Her parents …
Her parents were crafty.
Of all the attributes she would’ve credited them with – punctiliousness, predictability, pernicketiness – crafty definitely wasn’t one of them.
‘Sunita, right?’ He tried again.
Not really good at reading invisible auras, this one.
‘Umm … It’s Raven, actually.’
He did the chin lift thing guys always did instead of answering back then pulled out his phone. Good. That was that done, then.
She’d started calling herself Raven at college some eight or nine months back to just about no effect. Not really having any friends had a way of making a name change less effective. The new name had more sticking power once she began her first gap year job at a now-defunct taco bar. It wasn’t her fault really. The name change. She’d been forced to reinvent herself. Take herself out of what had become an utterly toxic morass of teenaged hell and start afresh. With darkness.
Goth darkness, so there was some light (they could be funny, and not just Noel Fielding funny. So Goth I was born black? Brilliant. Discovering the goths of colour was like finding a promised land of dark humour and above par personal aesthetics). To be fair, it had been the dark clothes and back right the fuck off auras that had first drawn her to the gothic side. She’d needed it after that horrible, soul-destroying, nerve-wracking last year of college. Half of her peers had become the most vile versions of themselves (bullies, really) and the other half had realised their worst fears (anorexia, anxiety, depression, and in one particularly awful case that Raven was still struggling to absorb, a complete and utter reliance on self-harming). In the end it had been easier to keep herself to
