Blood Rush (Lilly Valentine) (23 page)

When the doors to the corridor opened with a creak, the sound ran towards him in the emptiness. It was Lilly, her
shoulders
slumped, her head down. Jack’s stomach contracted tighter.

She stopped a foot away, looked up and tried to smile. Jack gasped. Her mouth was bloody and swollen, the bottom lip split.

‘What the hell happened to you?’ He moved to her, his hand out.

As his fingers almost touched her mouth, she flinched and ducked backwards.

‘Let’s just say Tanisha was unimpressed with my performance,’ she said.

‘You should have her nicked.’

Lilly shook her head. ‘Don’t be such a copper.’

He didn’t know what to say. He
was
a copper.

‘I have to get Alice,’ Lilly said. ‘Look out for Tanisha for me.’

As Jack watched her head off, he turned and kicked the wall. Would there ever come a day when that woman didn’t tear him apart?

Jez peeped out from inside the courtroom. ‘The judge’s back in.’

Thank God. Anything to take Jack’s mind off himself and Lilly bloody Valentine.

They shuffled to their places, Lilly’s empty seat screaming for attention.

‘Can anyone tell me what’s going on?’ The judge raised one eyebrow.

Tanisha slumped down in her chair, refusing to meet anyone’s eye. Jez looked around the court as if Lilly might be hiding in a corner. Jack sighed.

‘You Honour, perhaps I can help here,’ he said.

The judge peered at him from her platform. ‘I’m all ears.’

‘I understand that Miss Valentine has been disinstructed.’

Jez and Kerry looked at one another and Kerry couldn’t hide a smirk of satisfaction.

‘Is that correct, Miss McKenzie?’ the judge asked Tanisha.

‘I don’t want her nowhere near me ever again,’ Tanisha replied.

‘She is a very capable and experienced solicitor,’ said the judge.

‘I don’t care.’

The judge nodded and began to write out the draft order. ‘No doubt someone will inform Miss Valentine that I am indeed
granting
her client’s application for bail.’

Tanisha sat up. ‘Serious?’

The judge stopped writing and leaned forward, her eyes
narrowed
. ‘Young lady, you need to know that there is one reason and one reason alone why I am not sending you back to prison, and that is the fact that you are carrying a child. You will remain at your current foster placement and you will sign on at your nearest police station every morning and evening. At seven pm, you will be subject to a curfew until seven am the next day. Do I make myself clear?’

Tanisha nodded, a smile stretched across her face.

‘Believe me when I tell you that if you put one foot out of line, I will revoke bail in an instant.’ The judge pointed at Jack. ‘And no doubt Officer McNally will be watching your every move.’

Another trickle of blood fell down Lilly’s chin as she rang Karol’s doorbell. She seemed to be re-opening the cut on her bottom lip every time she changed facial expression.

When Karol answered, his own mouth fell open.

‘You should have seen the other bloke,’ Lilly smiled.

‘A man did this to you?’

‘I’m joking.’ Lilly waved her hand. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘It most certainly is not.’

Karol showed her through his tiny house. It was a new build. One of the hundreds of rabbit hutches that the developers had thrown up five years earlier and now couldn’t sell. It was like toy town, with ceilings so low Karol’s head almost skimmed them.

‘How’s Alice?’ Lilly asked.

Karol gestured to the car seat in the corner where the baby was fast asleep. She was swaddled tightly in a towel, the tip of her nose, like a bud, peeping over. Her curls framed her face and she was daisy pretty.

‘Come.’ Karol led Lilly by the arm to the kitchen. ‘Let me look after your lip.’

‘Honestly, it’s not a problem,’ Lilly mumbled, but didn’t resist.

The kitchen couldn’t have been bigger than fifteen by ten. It housed very little. A cooker. The old-fashioned, free-standing sort with a grill hovering above the gas rings. Along one wall was a bar-cum-work surface with a high stool tucked underneath. Karol pulled it out and guided Lilly on to it.

‘How did the court hearing go?’ he asked, reaching into a small fridge and retrieving an ice cube tray. Expertly, he popped out two cubes with his thumb into a piece of kitchen roll and wrapped them.

‘Bloody awful,’ said Lilly.

Karol nodded, placed the cold compress against her mouth and pressed Lilly’s own hand against it.

‘As firmly as possible,’ he said.

‘It hurts.’

He rolled his eyes and opened a drawer. The contents put Lilly to shame. Every drawer in her kitchen was crammed with a miscellany of debris. The one nearest to the washing machine was notorious for providing a resting place for tea towels, not necessarily clean, an assortment of scented candles, a wooden implement her mother had called a meat tenderizer, but which Sam used to bang in tent pegs, and three pairs of broken sunglasses.

Karol’s drawer was a marvel of efficiency. Lined with old
wallpaper
, it contained only a first aid kit and a torch. He took out the green box marked with a red cross, flipped the lid and extracted cotton wool, antiseptic, surgical scissors and tape.

‘Quite the professional,’ said Lilly, who would struggle to put her hand to a plaster.

‘I trained to be a doctor.’ He smiled.

‘Really?’ Lilly hadn’t meant it to sound so rude. ‘I don’t mean that you don’t look like you could be a doctor, just, you know, you never said …’

Karol was still smiling as Lilly trailed off.

‘What you really mean,’ he removed the ice pack and dried her lip gently, ‘is why am I working for you?’

Lilly was glad she couldn’t speak.

‘I began my training back home.’ He squirted antiseptic on to a ball of cotton wool and dabbed the cut. It stung like hell. ‘But my father decided that I should finish my studies here, where the hospitals are the best in the world.’

He must have seen the doubt cross her face at the thought of the grubby Luton General with its outbreaks of MRS. ‘You British do not know what a gem you have in your NHS. Where I am from most of the people do not have access to medicines and doctors at all. The hospitals we do have are very primitive. Having an operation there is a dangerous thing to do.’

With the scissors, he snipped two thin slivers of tape and smoothed them on to Lilly’s lip. It felt much better, the throbbing almost gone.

‘So what happened?’ Lilly asked.

‘I still had eight more months of training to go when violence broke out in my home state.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Lilly said, softly.

‘My father had to take refuge with family in the south,’ he sighed. ‘He had to leave behind his home and the business he had spent thirty years building.’

‘That’s terrible.’

‘In many ways he is lucky. Our friends and neighbours are still being attacked. Most are dead. He is safe, as am I.’

His optimism brought a lump to Lilly’s throat. Her days were so often filled with worries and troubles but the not the life and death variety.

‘What will you do?’ she asked.

He replaced the first aid kit in the drawer. ‘I will work as hard as I can, send as much money to my father as I can, and one day, when I have enough, I will finish my training.’

Pink shame slipped around Lilly’s collar. Karol had such quiet dignity. She was glad she had taken his advice and revealed to the court that Tanisha was pregnant. It had caused a rift, but it had been the right thing to do.

She was about to tell him, when her mobile bleeped with an incoming text from Jack.

Solomon Street is on the edge of the Clayhill. A row of old
three-storey
houses with those big bay windows on the ground floor. It doesn’t look like it belongs with the concrete tower blocks of the estate, as if someone stuck it on afterwards. Or maybe it was there before the flats were built. Imagine that. You’re living in a nice-sized pad with a garden and everything, and someone from the council comes along and builds those monstrous fuckers behind you.

Demi wants to live in a house one day. Though nowhere near the Clayhill if she can help it. Maybe in the country, with trees and that.

She clutches the shoe box full of meth tightly under her arm and hopes Rocky was right, that she’ll be able to work out which house she needs.

The first one is completely burned out. No glass in any of the windows. The paintwork is charred and black. The front door has disintegrated and the hole yawns like a huge mouth. Demi
wonders
if anyone was inside when it happened.

Next door looks inhabited. There are bins outside anyway, fighting for space next to a tangled thorn bush that has rubbish trapped in it. A small face appears from behind a ragged piece of material hung as a makeshift curtain. It’s a girl, a bit younger than Demi, her hair covered by a headscarf. Some girls at Demi’s school wear one. She can’t remember what it’s called but it shows they’re good Muslims.

A lot of Africans don’t like Asians. They call them Pakis and say they’re dirty, or terrorists. Gran says you can’t generalize, that there’s good and bad everywhere. The next time Demi sees Chika, she’ll ask her what she thinks, find out for sure.

The next one along looks more promising. It’s boarded up. Then again, so’s the next one, and they’re both completely deserted. The way Rocky talked it was like she’s supposed to pick out the right one straight way. She pulls a face, unsure what to do, when at the far end she spots a man with a pit bull, sitting on a wall. The dog is straining against his lead, barking viciously at a group of kids trying to get past. The man yanks the dog back, but he’s soon
making
for the kids again. Demi can tell instantly from the slump in their shoulders and the way they dodge around the snarling dog, that the kids are junkies.

She makes her way up the street and when she can see the house with the dog outside, she understands what Rocky meant. The garden is ankle deep in crap, the windows are covered with frayed net curtains and the light of flickering candles leaks out. Someone else approaches the house. It’s a woman. Skinny and shaking. The dog goes for her. The man drags it back, swearing, and the girl slips past.

When Demi is alongside the man, the dog bares his teeth. Demi steps into the road.

‘I’m looking for JC,’ she says.

‘You Demi?’

She nods and the man stands. As the lead loosens, the dog takes his chance and lunges for Demi, his teeth snapping. She screams and nearly drops the shoe box.

‘For fuck’s sake.’ The man gives the dog a hard kick.

It yelps and the man kicks it again.

‘In the kitchen,’ he tells her.

As she tries to pass, the dog growls, but when the man pulls back his foot for a third time, it stops. Demi takes her chance and sprints up the path. Once inside the door, she skids to a halt. The stench is unbearable. Like a thousand public toilets. She puts her sleeve across her nose and mouth and coughs into it. The carpet in the hallway has been ripped away in clumps and the walls are covered in graffiti. The first door is on the right. It’s closed shut, but everything is so filthy, Demi doesn’t even want to touch it, so she taps it with her foot.

The smell inside the room is worse than the hall and Demi nearly throws up on the spot. She swallows hard. It’s been gutted, even the radiator ripped away from the wall, leaving only a ghostly imprint on the wall. A hole in the ceiling with a few loose wires dangling down is all that’s left of the light fitting.

The only furniture remaining is a dank mattress pitted by
cigarette
burns. A white girl lies across it, her head in the lap of a boy perched at the end. At his feet, three candles are burning, stuck to the floorboards with melted wax. Their flames illuminate a blanket of uncapped syringes, bloody cotton balls and blackened strips of tin foil. There are piles of discarded crack pipes: small plastic bottles, their bases sliced off, coke cans punched with holes. And two larger bottles, labelled blackcurrant squash, now full with yellow liquid that Demi is sure must be pee, lean precariously against the wall.

‘Either come in or fuck off.’ The boy’s voice is hoarse as he ties a length of rubber cable around his upper arm.

Demi stares. She knows about drugs. She’s met enough of the losers who get themselves into this state. But actually seeing it like this, a few feet away, in full colour, is different.

‘I told you to fuck off,’ the boy shouts, reaching for a syringe full of brown liquid.

Demi knows she should leave, but watching is hideously
fascinating
, like when cars slow down to check out a crash. The boy gives her a disgusted grunt but is too engrossed in getting his fix to take action. Instead he pulls at the cable with his teeth, until it’s tight enough to make a vein pop up. Then, the cable still clamped between his lips, he pushes the needle into his flesh. He peers intently into the barrel until he sees the scarlet plume of blood, then he plunges the gear into his body with a moan.

In the candlelight, the boy’s eyes roll back into his head until only the whites show. It reminds Demi of Danny and she shivers. Soon, he lolls forward, his chin touching his chest, his back
bending
, until his forehead meets the girl’s in his lap. They look like they could be kissing. The needle is still in his arm.

‘You Demi?’

Demi spins to the voice behind her. The figure is large, dressed in a nylon tracksuit, hair shaved close to the skull. The voice is low and as Nigerian as Gran. Only a swelling in the chest tells Demi this is a woman.

‘I’m JC.’

Demi holds out the shoe box in front of her like a gift.

JC nods but doesn’t take it. ‘Come to the kitchen.’

They make their way through to the end of the hall and through the far door. Surprisingly, it’s recognizably a kitchen with sink, fridge and a table. There are several camping lanterns dotted around the work surfaces.