“Who is that?” she demands, her voice sounding smoky and broken.
The worst of the bad lads, Steve, tosses his head at her and says, “Who have we got here?”
While Liz takes up their attention, Craig crouches over Donna, rolls her up and over like someone bedridden and tells her to flee.
Then they are all around the older woman, the newcomer. The lads seem to sense there is more fun to be had from her. She is more nervy and excitable, she has more fight. And her glamour, too, attracts and repels them. They think her ridiculous and long to drag her down. Liz is being baited. Her fur coat is plucked at, her cigarettes are taken from her, passed around. The boys surround her in a ring she can’t escape and she remembers this from years ago, at school, when they played piggy-in-the-middle. She wishes she’d gone into the house in the first place, with the taxi driver. And where has he got to anyway? Why can’t she ever do things the right way? She starts yelling out threats and this panics the lads, but doesn’t make them let her go. When they panic they start to do worse things. Someone holds her chin and looks into her eyes. “Give us a kiss, then.”
“She’s old enough to be your mam!”
And before any of them know it, her wig comes off in their hands. She drops to the ground, clearing an angel-space of snow a few yards away from Donna’s. The boy with her wig in his hands gives a yell and drops it. It falls, as if drawn, back onto Liz’s head, but looks dislodged and crazy. Steve kicks her in the stomach.
“It’s not even her real hair!”
Someone stands on her hand, crushing rings into the flesh of her fingers. “Pick her up,” Steve commands in that easy way he has. Craig hates himself even as he finds that he does what Steve tells him.
“Did you hear that, Craig?” Steve snickers. “Did you hear what she called you? Under her breath?”
Craig is confused. “What?” Did Liz call him something? Her head is down.
“She did!” Steve crows. “That bitch called you a pegleg. She said you’re a spacker. She called you a fucking spacker!”
A rushing fills Craig’s ears. He can’t believe this. He gulps down his breath. His pulse races.
They brace the frail weight of Liz between them, her wig slipped askance. “Smack her one,” Steve shouts. “Fucking smack her one!” He shouts it in Craig’s face. “She called you a fucking cripple, didn’t you hear?”
“What?” Craig whimpers this, but his body is tensed against them all, he can see nothing but Steve’s face and Liz’s face and all he can hear is Steve’s voice screaming at him.
“You! Fuck’n spacker! Crack her one!”
Craig shouts and lashes out. Next thing they all know, Liz has toppled once more to the ground.
Craig lurches forward to do something and, in that instant, there is a resounding crack as Liz’s head hits the pavement. Her body jolts, convulses and lies still.
It was a sickening drop. He wants to tell the others the sound it made. He looks, although he doesn’t want to, and there is something dark and oily coming out from under her head, from under the wig.
Craig grabs Steve’s arm. Holding the crook of his arm as if for support, he points at the blood and says, “We’ve cracked her head open. She’s fucking dead.”
“Yeah, yeah.” Steve backs off.
“We’ve fucking killed her.”
Steve backs further off, then turns and runs. The others run with him. Craig shouts, “We can’t leave her! We can’t leave her lying like this!”
Steve comes back. “We can. You’re coming with us. If you stay, they’ll know you did it.”
“I did it,” Craig echoes.
“Right. Come back. Get indoors. Just look what you’ve done.”
Craig takes one last, frantic look at Liz’s body, on which snow has already started to settle. Then he turns and runs after the others to the Forsyth house.
Will this ever happen again? is the first thing Andy wants to ask him.
Mark slides back and rests there.
Will we ever do this again? is what Andy was thinking even in the moments before either of them came, because he realised he wasn’t making the most of this time. They were in the thick of things, it was all going on, but somehow, he couldn’t quite grasp the situation. It wasn’t real enough. He wanted to see Mark’s tattoos, see the designs he had come to know in recent weeks, flexing and working, shifting their outlines as the two of them had sex. It wasn’t enough, just this, it might be anyone.
He hears Mark rustling about, thoughtfully silent and then frozen, as if he has found something. Andy shrugs off his quiet. “What’s up?”
Like a footballer, Mark has his hand cupped over his cock. “Condom’s split.” He hoists himself up. “It split.”
“When?” Now Andy is sitting up. They are both staring at each other, the sheets, the mattress, as if one of them has lost a contact lens. “Inside of me?” asks Andy. “Did it split inside of me?”
In the hallway Penny bangs hard on Andy’s door. “She’s back! Andy! She’s back! My mam’s back!”
By then it is midnight.
FIVE
The Fantastic Four had a skyscraper all to themselves. What did they call it? The Baxter Building, that was. And there was the Batcave, of course. And the Avengers had the Avengers Mansion, and the Justice League of America had a satellite station floating around the world. It was like a staff room, a futuristic staff room they could all adjourn to from their separate cities. The Justice League of America would beam themselves up to the JLA satellite and have meetings about what they had to do to save the world.
Who was in the JLA? Superman of course, who just flew up to the satellite. It was no bother
