She felt Ronnie’s clammy hold on her hand release. When she glanced up at him through blurred vision, she saw that he’d gone pale.
“So… you know for sure then?” he asked faintly.
The two hadn’t seen each other since Scribbles’ insightful observation at the flat. At the time, they’d laughed it off. Teenage pregnancy was the kind of thing that happened to other people. Not them.
But, then again, so was murder, attempted rape, and being on the run from the law.
Through her tears, Minnie nodded. Her throat felt swollen. “Ron, they were going to make me have an abortion. I couldn’t stay there.”
Quietly, he nodded, but his shocked expression remained unchanged. Minnie got the awful feeling that Ronnie was quickly starting to regret his noble decision to take the wrap for her. Now they were both stuck in the same shitty position, on the run, and now with a bastard child in tow.
Her tears transitioned into loud, uncontrollable howls that Ronnie attempted to muffle by holding her tightly to him so that she wept into the shoulder of his t-shirt.
“W-w-w-what are we g-g-g-going to d-d-d-do?” she moaned.
Ronnie sighed, “fuck knows, Min.”
Furiously, she pushed him away, stood up, and ripped open the backpack she had brought with her. Inside, more wads of cash lay inside a cheap bin liner, wedged in beside a few pairs of socks, knickers, and a toothbrush. “I can’t believe I stole all of this,” she groaned, staring down at the cash in dismay.
“Stole it? From who?”
“Nana,” replied Minnie miserably, unable to look him in the eye. “I told you I did another bad thing.”
“Nana?” repeated Ronnie disbelievingly. “Your Nana?!”
She nodded, then sank back down onto the bed, burying her blotchy, tear-stained face in her hands. “That’s where I got the money I gave you. You know she’s loaded… and she never leaves her bed these days. I went down her purse, withdrew as much cash as I could… wrote out some cheques. It wasn’t difficult to trace her signature.”
“Fucking hell, Minnie,” Ronnie shook his head. “This just gets better and better, doesn’t it?”
“I’m the worst person in the world,” she sobbed. “What the hell have I done, Ron? What will we do? This is all such a mess…”
Ronnie Garnet paused and chewed thoughtfully on his lower lip, as he often did when faced with a dilemma. The young man rubbed his girlfriend’s back and was silent for an entire ten minutes, which truthfully felt more like an eternity. When he finally spoke again, his tone had softened. He took her firmly but gently, by both shoulders, and forced her to look at him.
“You need to stop feeling bad,” he said. “Don’t feel bad. We have enough on our plate without added self-loathing.”
Minnie blinked at him.
“Your nan won’t notice the money has gone missing,” he said confidently. “She’s a vegetable. She’s also entirely isolated apart from carers. She no longer speaks to your parents for unknown reasons, and I think that it’s fair to say it’s the old woman’s own fault.”
Minnie’s mouth fell open. “You can’t know that.”
He reached over and placed his hand on her flat abdomen. “Could you ever go for years without speaking to our baby? No matter what their age? No matter what they did, where they went, or what they said?” the intensity of his gaze surged deeply into hers. Her eyes pricked with fresh tears, and her heart swelled with love. All of a sudden, the beard, and the cigarette, and the other less-than-desirable circumstances surrounding their situation no longer seemed to matter.
Wordlessly, she shook her head.
“Exactly,” he said. “So stop thinking of her as dear old Nana and start thinking of her as a heartless old bag that didn’t love her own daughter. Think of the money as compensation for her absence over the last decade.”
Before Minnie could say anything else, he lifted his finger and pressed it lightly to her lips. She took a deep, nervous breath.
“Now. You’ve put your cards on the table. Now it’s time for me to show you mine,” he told her with a tight, uncomfortable grimace.
Chapter Twenty-six
2019
Stella’s head swum, more so than she had intended to let it.
In the dingy, dark space of Neil’s caravan, she sat slumped in one corner of the saggy couch; her pupils fixed tightly on the throbbing vibrations of a single speaker that stood pathetically by itself on the bitty, crumb-covered carpet.
She just couldn’t help it.
She loved to be stoned.
Once she started smoking, she didn’t stop until nothing seemed to matter anymore, and the world just became one big fluffy haze of cotton wool forming a halo around her head. She smiled at nothing in particular.
“You okay, princess?”
At the sound of Neil’s voice, she lazily let her pupils drift diagonally upwards until the freckly-faced young man with the shit haircut and cheap-looking gold chain came into view.
Like a cat, she purred leisurely and let out a long, low sigh before slinking onto her side to face him. Batting her eyelashes, she stared up at him, referring back to the many hours of practise she had had in various hotel bathroom mirrors.
“More than okay,” she confirmed with a suggestive smile. “But…” she continued, forcing herself closer to him, “maybe I’d feel better if we had a bit more privacy.” Without moving, she gestured to the group of other boys congregated in the smoky, haze-filled caravan and traced a slender finger over his knee.
And just like that, with one gruff turn of the head and a stern bark, the other young men grumbled and groused as they reluctantly got up and bumbled out of the murky motor home. Stella smiled. Their instant compliance was a sure-fire sign that her gut instincts had been correct. Neil was the ringleader. The brains of the operation. And, most importantly, the one sitting on the goods and the cash.
She refused another puff of the joint that Neil offered her
