The Wicked Girls (3 page)

Tadeusz pushes back from the table and folds his arms, gratified.

The phone vibrates again. Jackie reads the text out. ‘“Testing”.’ She starts to key.

Amber checks her watch. It’s knocking three. There’s a lot to get through before dawn. ‘Come on, guys,’ she says. Stands up
to show she means business. ‘Time’s getting on. We need to get back to work or we’ll be here all night.’

All round them, the staff are taking her cue and beginning to move. By the window, Moses ostentatiously rolls a cigarette
to smoke in the open air. They push themselves to their feet. Tadeusz is on café duty tonight. He takes the others’ mugs and
ambles off to the kitchen bins.

‘Right,’ says Jackie. ‘No rest for the wicked.’

The girl is dead. She doesn’t need to go near her to see that. Chinless, sightless, rag-doll dead. Wearing a striped tank
top and a tube skirt; both have gathered around her waist, puppy-fat breasts and white thighs reflected in the mirrors, back,
back, back to infinity.

Amber is not looking directly at the body. She’s nowhere near, in fact. She’s cleaned the mirror maze so often that she knows
its tricks and turns, the way a figure at the far end of the building can seem, when you enter, to be standing right in front
of you.

Or – in the case of the dead girl – half lying, her head and shoulders pressed against the wall.

Amber grips the door frame, struggles to breathe. Oh shit, she thinks. Why did I have to find her?

She can’t be more than seventeen. The mottled face – the mouth half open as though she is trying, one more time, to take a
breath – still has traces of unformed childhood around the jaw. Blonde hair, blown and flicked up. Giant hoop earrings. Eyes
made huge by half a pot of electric-blue eyeshadow, glitter gel spangling the naked
décolletage
. Platform boots, improbable in the angles they form with the mirrored floor.

She’s been at Stardust, thinks Amber. Saturday. It’s Seventies night at Stardust.

She feels sick. Glances behind her through the open door and
sees that the concourse is empty. As though all her colleagues have dropped off the edge of the world.

She steps inside and closes the door to block out the light. Doesn’t want anyone else to see. Not yet. Not while shock has
ripped her mask away.

Thank God I’m wearing rubber gloves, she thinks nonsensically. She has cleaned the place every night for the past three years
and, however careful she is, her fingerprints will be all over it. Let alone the prints of half the visitors who’ve passed
through since this time last night. They try to keep the smudges down by handing out disposable plastic gloves on the door,
but you can’t actually force someone to wear them; can’t police the interior 24/7.

Innfinnityland is the only attraction Amber cleans herself, since her promotion. The place makes everyone uneasy, as though
they are afraid that they will get lost and never find their way back, or that the mirrors themselves are infected with ghosts.
Too many times the work, which needs to be autistically methodical, has been rushed and skimped, and smears have remained;
and in a place like this, a single smear becomes an infinite number, the original hard to track down if you’re not working
your way through, fingertip by fingertip, glass by glass. She decided long ago that it was easiest simply to do it herself.
Wishes fervently now that she hadn’t.

The girl has green eyes, like Amber’s own. Her handbag – mock-croc – has fallen open and scattered poignant remnants of plans
made, hopes cherished. A lipstick, a bottle of JLo, a pink phone with a metallic charm shaped like a stiletto court shoe …
breezy statements of identity, turned tawdry beneath their owner’s glassy stare.

There is no blood. Just the impression of squeezing fingers livid on her neck. This is the third one this year, Amber thinks.
It can’t be a coincidence. Two is coincidence; three is … oh, you poor child.

Amber is cold to the bone, though the night is warm. She
edges her way forward slowly, like an old person, one shaking hand supporting her against the mirrors as she moves. As she
advances, new reflections cross her sight line: a million corpses strewn across a hall of infinite size.

Then suddenly, herself. Face white, eyes large, mouth a thin line. Standing above the body like Lady Macbeth.

What were you going to do? Touch her?

The thought freezes her to the spot. She’s not been thinking. Shock has turned her into a creature of instinct, an automaton.
Has made her forgetful.

What are you doing? You can’t be involved. You can’t. Anonymous. You’re meant to be anonymous. Get involved, they’ll work
it out. Who you are. And once they know who you are …

She feels panic start up inside. The edgy tingle, the queasy itch. Familiar, never far from the surface. She needs to decide
quickly.

I can’t be the one to find her.

She begins to back away. Feels her way back to the entrance.

The dead girl gazes at infinity. Damn you, Amber thinks, suddenly angry. Why did you have to get yourself killed here? What
are you even doing here, anyway? It’s been closed for hours. The park’s been closed for hours.

She catches her own thoughts and lets out a barking, ironic laugh. ‘Shit,’ she says out loud. ‘Oh God, what am I meant to
do?’

Go and find help. Do what anyone would do, Amber. Go out there and act the way you feel: shocked and scared. No one’s going
to ask questions. There’s someone killing girls in this town, but it doesn’t mean they’ll recognise who
you
are.

But they’ll take your photo. You know what the press are like. Anything to fill their pages; details to make up for lack of
facts. You’ll be all over the papers as the woman who found the body.

I can’t do this
.

Someone tries the entrance door, the sudden noise of the handle turning uselessly making her jump. She hears Jackie and
Moses: Jackie chattering and flirting, Moses responding in monosyllables, but the smile clear in his voice.

‘She’s always in here,’ says Jackie. ‘After tea break. Amber? You in there? The door’s locked!’

Amber holds her breath, afraid that even the sound of her exhalation will call to them. Oh God, what do I do? I’ve got to
get out of here.

‘C’mon,’ says Jackie. ‘Let’s try the back. Maybe she’s taking a break.’

‘Sure,’ says Moses.

That’s it, there’s no escape now. She hears their footsteps recede down the steps as they walk off towards the entrance to
the service alley. Two minutes before they get here, maybe. She can’t get away, can’t undo the moment of discovery.

She straightens up, steps over the girl’s marionette legs and hurries to the emergency exit hidden behind the black curtain
beyond. Best they find her out on the steps, out in the fresh air, throwing up.

9 a.m.

Her parents’ bedroom door is open, and the cheesy tang of unwashed skin and bedcovers hangs over the landing like marsh gas.
Her mother’s not up yet: she can see her formless mass pooled beneath grey blankets. She hovers in the doorway, tries her
voice:

‘Mum?’

Her mother doesn’t answer. But she sees slight movement in the ham-hock arm that pins the blankets down, and knows she’s awake
.

‘Mum?’

Lorraine Walker takes one of her grunting breaths and turns on her back; stranded, like an upturned turtle. She turns a blank,
defeated face and looks at her daughter. ‘What?’

The voice is damp, sweaty, indistinct; she’s not got her teeth in yet. It’s a hot day already, though it’s not yet ten o’clock,
and Lorraine’s twenty-five stones will be suffocating her beneath the covers. Jade can see that she’s got her dress-up nightie
on: knee-length flower print in brushed nylon, big enough to cover an armchair. Her skin is white against it, her elbows poking
out between mounds of blubber
.

‘There’s nothing for breakfast.’

‘Chrissake.’ Mrs Walker heaves herself upright. Jade looks at her mother’s molten face. She isn’t involved enough to feel
disgust. ‘Ask your dad.’

Yeah, right. That’ll work
.

Jade turns away and descends the staircase. Zig zags along the downstairs corridor. Ever since she can remember, her home
life has consisted of picking her way from one place to another. Her father fancies himself a scrap-metal merchant, but really
he’s a
hoarder of crap other people have thrown away; and a lot of it has made it into the house because he’s afraid someone else
will covet his collection of hubcaps and hinges, rust and rubber, as much as he does
.

In the kitchen she tries, half-heartedly, to find something to kill her hunger. But there’s nothing on the shelves. Six empty
cereal boxes, the plastic wrapper that once held a Wonderloaf, a pint and a half of milk that has solidified and separated
.

It could be evening before someone notices and does something. He mother, despite her bulk, seems capable of lasting all day
without anything passing her lips. Both her parents keep themselves going on a diet of Nescafé and Old Holborn, with the odd
rabbit for variety when the snares work. I suppose she can live off her reserves for a while, Jade thinks – the furthest down
the road to judgement she ever goes
.

She can hear the old man swearing and hammering out in the yard. I’m not going anywhere near him when he’s in that mood. I’ll
get a broken lip, and I’ll still be hungry
.

She spots her father’s jacket hanging over the back of a chair. The summer really must have heated up if he’s not wearing
it. She never sees him without it; can often tell when he’s coming without hearing him, from the combined aromas of tobacco,
sweat and pig shit woven into the fibres. She glances into the yard to make sure he’s really as far away as he sounds, then
tiptoes over and puts a hand in a pocket. His tobacco tin, some bits of formless metal, a penknife. And – yes! – her fingers
close over the reassuring, joyful warmth of a twenty-pence piece. Twenty p. He probably won’t even remember he had it. That’s
enough for a Kit Kat, at least. Or a Mars Bar even. It’s not much, but if she eats it slowly, it should get her through the
day
.

‘Because I said so,’ says Jim.

That one’s not going to work for much longer, thinks Kirsty. Another fourteen months and she’s officially a teenager.

‘“Because I said so”? Seriously?’ sneers Sophie. ‘Can’t you do better than that?’

The toaster pops up. Kirsty puts another couple of slices in, spreads olive-oil margarine on the done ones. Ooh, she thinks,
I wish we had one of those four-slice jobs. I must have spent three weeks waiting for toast over the course of this marriage.

Jim puts the
Tribune
down and slides his spectacles to the top of his head. He’s recently accepted that his hairline is never going to magically
move forwards, and has adopted one of those ultra-short cuts. Kirsty likes it. It’s a bit metrosexual, and has brought back
his cheekbones; makes him look leaner and more intense. I like the fact that I still fancy my husband after thirteen years,
she thinks, and smiles to herself as she brings the toast to the table. But he’s going to have to grow it in soon, if he’s
ever going to get to second-interview stage. No one wears their hair like that in the world of finance.

‘Because,’ says Jim, ‘it looks awful, that’s why. Little girls with pierced ears look awful, and I’m not having you go to
upper school wearing earrings.’

‘But why?’ she whines again. Adds: ‘I’m not a little girl.’

‘Because,’ says Jim.

‘But Mum got her ears pierced when she was a baby!’ protests Sophie.

Jim shoots Kirsty a look. Too much information, it says. What did you want to tell her that for?

‘Your mother is a wonderful woman,’ he says. ‘But trust me. She’s who she is
despite
her upbringing, not because of it. You’d like to end up in care too, would you?’

The toast pops up again. Kirsty turns back. Yeah, it was the earrings, she thinks. That’s what did it.

Luke tears his eyes from his Nintendo. He only ever looks up from his screen when he sees an opportunity for mischief. ‘Are
we snobs?’ he asks.

‘No,’ Jim says firmly. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘Well …’ He scratches his head. Oh God, has he got nits again? wonders Kirsty. I’m going to have to shave his head to match
his dad’s. ‘Lots of things.’

‘Like?’

Luke prods at his toast. ‘We eat bread with bits in,’ he says.

‘So does the entire population of Eastern Europe,’ replies Jim.

‘And we never go to McDonald’s,’ says Luke reproachfully.

‘I don’t want you to end up with diabetes and hurty hips. And anyway, we’re economising. Use your knife, Luke. Don’t just
chew your way round the edges like that.’

Sophie examines her reflection in the back of a spoon, flips her hair at it. Adolescence is inches away.

‘Eat your toast, Sophie,’ Kirsty says. ‘What do you want? Marmite or marmalade?’

‘Nutella.’

Kirsty and Jim’s eyes meet over their children’s heads.

‘I
know
,’ groans Sophie. ‘We’re
economising
. How long are we going to be economising
for
?’

There’s a tiny silence, then Jim answers: ‘Until I get a job. Come on, you guys. It’s time we got out of here.’

The ritual response: ‘Uuuh, Dad!’

Jim stands up. ‘Do you want a lift or not? Seriously. I’m not in the mood for any nonsense today. I’ve got a lot to do.’

‘Nonsense’? You would have said ‘bollocks’ when we first met, reflects Kirsty. Parenthood has turned us into pussycats.

‘I’m not finished,’ protests Sophie.

Jim pauses briefly. ‘Well, you can eat it in the car, or walk. Your choice.’

‘I don’t see why I have to go to stupid summer camp anyway,’ grumbles Sophie. ‘Holidays are meant to be holidays, aren’t they?’

‘Yes,’ says Jim. ‘But sadly there’s a rest of the world that has to go on while you’re not at school.’