Lost Angel (15 page)

The sudden ringing of his mobile phone broke the silence that had fallen over the kitchen. Frankie snatched it up off the table.

‘I’m on my way, Pat. Just give us ten.’ He ended the call and sighed. ‘Sorry, love, I’ve got to go. Will you be all right?’

‘Yeah, course.’ Ruth sniffed back her tears and gave Johnny a little push. ‘Go on, I’ll be fine.’

‘No, he can stop here.’ Frankie scraped his chair back and stood up. ‘Oh, and here . . .’ he said, taking a key out of his pocket and tossing it down on the table. ‘I wasn’t going to tell youse just yet, but I reckon you could both do with a lift.’

‘What’s that for?’ Ruth asked. She took a tissue out of her dressing-gown pocket and blew her nose.

‘Your new house,’ Frankie told her.

‘I beg your pardon?’ Rita snapped her head around and stared at him.

‘You heard,’ Frankie said offhandedly.

‘You can’t just go around buying houses without asking me first,’ Rita screeched, incensed that he’d gone behind her back.

‘It’s my money, I can buy what the fuck I want.’

‘I’m your
wife
.’

‘And she’s our daughter.’ Frankie pointed at Ruth. ‘And she’s just lost our grandchild, but you’re more bothered about the fucking money, so why don’t you just crawl back to your bed and your bottle, and keep your nose out, you cold bitch!’

Rita’s face went purple and she pursed her lips so tightly that Johnny thought she was going to burst. But she got up after a moment and, casting a glare of pure undisguised hatred at Ruth, flounced out, slamming the door behind her.

Ruth shivered. ‘You shouldn’t have done that, Dad. She’s really mad.’

‘Do I look like I care?’ Frankie scoffed. ‘Anyhow, I’m not as generous as she thinks, ’cos there’s a mortgage – and you’ll be paying it.’ He aimed this last at Johnny.

Johnny’s heart sank as he wondered how the hell he was supposed to afford a mortgage on his wages. He hadn’t even received his first pay packet yet.

‘In a year,’ Frankie added with a grin. ‘I’ll pay till the end of next March to give you a leg-up. After that, it’s down to you.’

‘Oh, Dad, thank you so much,’ Ruth sobbed, bursting into tears all over again. She’d been dreaming about having a home of her own since it had first been decided that she and Johnny were getting married, but she hadn’t dared to hope that it would ever actually happen. Now, after seventeen years under the guillotine of her mother’s tongue, she was finally going to be free.

Frankie gave Johnny a mock-pained look. ‘For fuck’s sake, get her back up to bed before she drowns the lot of us.’

‘Thanks, Frankie,’ Johnny said, helping her to her feet. ‘I’ll pay you back every penny – that’s a promise.’

‘Too right you will,’ Frankie chuckled, winking at him. ‘Make sure she’s ready when I get home and I’ll take youse round to see it.’

8

The house was in the middle of a run-down little terrace on the outskirts of Hulme. It had two windows, one up, one down, and the brown front door still bore the scars of where it had been kicked in by the police after the foul smell had been reported by the neighbours some months earlier.

‘It doesn’t look much, but it’s better inside,’ Frankie said. He double-checked that he’d locked the car as Johnny used the key he’d given them to open up the house. Casting a hooded glance around, to make sure there were no shady fuckers watching, Frankie followed the kids inside.

The living room was immediately behind the front door, and it was dark, even though there was only an old grey net curtain covering the narrow, filthy window. The walls were covered in wallpaper that had probably once been bright and cheerful but was now the colour of a heavy smoker’s lungs and teeth. An ancient dust-coated corporation gas fire hung at an angle off the wall, and the floorboards were heavily stained. But one big patch under the window was particularly ominous, because that was where the previous owner’s fluids had leaked through his chair before his badly decomposed body had been found a month after he’d died.

That was why the place had been so cheap – because nobody had wanted to touch it, knowing its history. But Frankie wasn’t superstitious about the death of a stranger. As far as he was concerned, the old man’s loss was Ruth and Johnny’s gain, and a lick of paint and a couple of bottles of bleach would soon shift the smell.

‘What do you think?’ He squeezed in behind Johnny and walked into the centre of the room.

‘I love it,’ Ruth said quietly as she gazed around, already picturing where she would put the furniture, and what colour she would paint the walls.

Frankie exchanged a surprised glance with Johnny. That wasn’t the reaction he’d expected. The house was poky and dirty, and he’d thought that she would turn her nose right up at it.

Johnny was thinking pretty much the same, and all he could see as he gazed around in despair was the mould in the corners of the ceiling, the numerous cobwebs, and the clusters of dog and cat hairs coating every visible surface. It was going to take months to bring it up to being anything like liveable.

‘Is that the kitchen?’ Ruth headed for the door at the rear of the room. She stepped through it, stopped and grinned back at Johnny. ‘We’ve got a dining room!’

Johnny smiled, but there was no joy in his expression. He already hated the house and was thinking back wistfully to his days in the flat, with its big windows, spacious rooms, fantastic central heating, and totally chilled atmosphere. This was a little shit-pit, and he didn’t want to live here. Hell, even the Hyneses’ house was preferable – Rita and all.

The kitchen was little bigger than a cupboard, and whoever had removed all of the old tenant’s junk from the other rooms had stopped short of coming in here: it was crammed with rubbish. The sink was hidden beneath a mound of mouldy plates, cups, and pans, and the ledges and floor were littered with pizza boxes, chip wrappers, newspapers, and empty cans of dog and cat food that stank to high heaven. And, amongst it all, every spare inch of space contained empty cider bottles, fag ends, and little dried heaps of what looked to Johnny like shit – and it was anybody’s guess as to whether it was human or animal.

‘I know it’s a tip,’ Frankie said brightly. ‘That’s why I wasn’t going to tell you about it just yet. I was going to send some of the lads over to clear it out first. Even bought some paint so they could give it a quick lick.’ He gestured towards some cans heaped in the corner of the dining room behind them. ‘I know how much you like your yellows, Ruthie, so I played safe and went for lemon, and that magnolia shite.’

Johnny’s hopes had soared at the thought of someone else doing the dirty work, but they quickly fell again when Frankie went on: ‘Now you’ve seen it, you might as well crack on with it yourselves, eh?’

‘When can we move in?’ Ruth asked, already itching to get at it.

‘Soon as it’s ready,’ Frankie told her. ‘Then I’ll sort a van to move your stuff over.’

‘Can you get it tonight?’

‘Tonight?’ Frankie pulled a face that almost matched Johnny’s look of horror.

‘Yes, tonight,’ said Ruth. ‘I can clean around us.’

Frankie laughed, and Johnny was so sure he was going to say yes that his heart dropped into his feet and on through the shit-caked lino beneath. But Frankie shook his head.

‘I know you’re keen, love, but it ain’t fit for a dog to live in right now, so I’m definitely not letting you move in in your condition.’

‘But I want to move in
now
,’ Ruth complained.

‘No.’ Frankie put his arm around her and led her back out into the living room. ‘You can start cleaning any time you want – so long as you promise to take it easy. But you’re not stopping here till it’s done. Now, come and have a quick look upstairs, then I’ll drop you back off at home.’

Ruth didn’t want to stay at home for one more second, never mind one more night, or week – or however long it was going to take to clean the filthy new house. But her dad was adamant, so she had no choice but to stay put until it was done.

Barely able to sleep for excitement, she was up at the crack of dawn the following morning. Kissing her dad and Johnny goodbye, she took a load of cleaning stuff out of the cupboard under the sink and sneaked out before her mum surfaced and demanded to go with her.

At the new house, she put on her rubber gloves and got cracking – and she was still hard at it when Johnny joined her later that afternoon.

Expecting her to have made barely a dent, he was shocked to see how much she had done. The living room was still dark, the wallpaper still a depressing reminder of the old tenant’s poor state of health, but the cobwebs were gone, as was the horrible net curtain, and Ruth had cleaned the window so it was now as sparkling as the gas fire – which she’d somehow managed to right so that it was no longer listing dangerously. And while the floorboards were still stained, the unpleasant smell that had been emanating from them had been replaced with the fresh scent of bleach from the numerous moppings she’d given them.

She’d done the same in the tiny dining room, and she’d not only scrubbed the minuscule kitchen, she’d also cleared most of the rubbish out into the back yard, so there was only the ancient cooker and fridge left for Johnny to remove.

‘You should have waited for me,’ he said guiltily. ‘You’re not supposed to be straining yourself, and you definitely shouldn’t have done all this by yourself.’

‘My mum’s still in a mood, so I didn’t want to ask her to help me,’ Ruth told him, refilling the mop bucket as she spoke and pouring in a hefty slug of bleach. ‘And I didn’t want to just sit in the bedroom all day waiting for you, so I thought I might as well get on with it. Don’t worry, I paced myself.’

Johnny gave her a disbelieving look and went upstairs, only to find that she’d blitzed those rooms as well.

‘Leave it,’ he said when she carried the mop bucket into the bathroom behind him.

‘Won’t take me a minute,’ she insisted, pushing up her sleeves to give the lino its third scrubbing of the day.

‘I said leave it,’ Johnny ordered, taking her firmly by the arm and walking her out onto the landing. ‘You’re going home and putting your feet up.’

‘But I need to carry on,’ Ruth complained. ‘There’s not much left to do, and the sooner it’s done, the sooner we can move in.’

‘Leave the rest to me.’ He ushered her down the stairs ahead of him. ‘I’ll come back after tea and make a start on stripping the wallpaper.’

‘I’ll come with you,’ she said. ‘Four hands are better than two.’

‘No.’ Johnny gave her a stern look. ‘Your dad will go mad if he finds out you’ve been at it on your own all day. I’ll do it.’

‘But, Johnny . . .’

‘Don’t argue.’ He snatched her coat off the back of the dining-room door and pushed it into her hands before herding her out of the front door.

Now that most of the mess had been cleaned up and it didn’t smell quite so much like an abattoir, Johnny didn’t mind going back. So, staying home just long enough to take a quick shower and eat the fish and chips they’d stopped off for on the way back, he tucked Ruth up in bed – and gave her strict orders to stay put. Then he took a bus back to Hulme, calling in at the flat on the way to enlist Dave’s help.

Several lines of speed and a few spliffs later, they whizzed through the wallpaper removal, and soon every wall in the house was bare and crying out for paint. It was one in the morning by then, and Johnny was starting to flag, having worked all day. But Dave wasn’t ready to call it a night just yet.

‘We might as well finish it now we’ve started,’ he insisted, using a screwdriver to pop the lid off a can of emulsion. ‘Won’t take long to slap a few coats on. But baggsy I do the walls, ’cos I can’t be arsed with all the fiddly woodwork shit.’

It was gone four by the time Johnny got home, and slashes of daylight were already breaking through the darkness of the sky. Conscious of Frankie’s car being parked on the path, he crept in and tiptoed up the stairs.

Ruth was still awake. She and Johnny might not have been married for overly long, but she was already used to the warmth of his back against hers and the soft sound of his snores, so the bed had felt too big and empty without him. She had fallen asleep for a short time at around eleven but her mum had soon woken her up again. Rita usually stayed in her parlour after sundown, only venturing out to get a fresh bottle if her alcohol ran out before she conked out. But tonight she’d decided to come upstairs and have another go at Ruth while they were alone.

‘Think you’re smart, don’t you?’ she’d hissed after bursting into the room and shaking her daughter awake. ‘Not good enough that you’ve got those idiots feeling sorry for you, you thought you’d dip your thieving hands into my retirement fund an’ all, didn’t you? Well, nothing good’ll come of it, I’ll tell you that for nowt. You got that house by dishonest means, and it’ll bring you nothing but tears and heartache.
God
knows what you’ve done, and He’ll punish you in kind – you watch if He doesn’t.’

Ruth had been terrified after her mum had staggered back down to her lair, and she’d tearfully begged God’s forgiveness, praying that He might understand her reasons for doing what she’d done and take pity on her. Taking comfort from the thought that at least she hadn’t killed a
real
baby, because that really would have been a sin too far, she’d eventually stopped crying. But her eyes were still raw and swollen when Johnny crept in.

‘I thought you’d be asleep,’ he whispered. ‘Did I wake you up?’

‘No, I couldn’t sleep,’ she told him, cuddling up to him when he climbed into bed. ‘I missed you too much.’

‘Sorry,’ he murmured, praying that she wasn’t expecting a shag, because there was no way he was going to get it up after the graft he’d done today.

‘Did you get much done?’

‘Finished it.’

‘Really?’ Ruth raised up onto her elbow and gazed down at him. ‘Everything?’

‘The whole lot,’ he affirmed with a grin. ‘You won’t believe it when you see it. It looks like a brand new house.’

‘How did you manage to do all of that on your own?’

‘Dave gave me a hand.’

‘What was he doing there?’ Ruth demanded.