This Little Piggy (21 page)

Amy’s face was a little pink. “It was quite a quiet shout.”

Clare chewed the inside of her lip.

Margaret sighed. “You can’t shout quietly, though, can you? If it was quiet, how did you hear it, all that way up?”

“Maybe it was the man on the balcony who sweared, then. But I heard it. Then he picked Jamie up and ran off with him.”

“Right.” Margaret’s voice didn’t disguise the fact that she no longer believed Amy’s story. “Could you see where he went?”

Amy shook her head. “Just that he went towards the bins.”

Margaret paused as she skimmed back over her notes. “I still don’t understand why you didn’t do something. Why didn’t you tell Jamie’s mum? Or phone the police?”

“She was scared,” Clare interrupted.

The officer glared. “Let Amy tell her story in her own words, please.”

“But that’s right.” Amy gave Clare a grateful smile. “I was scared. I thought I might get into trouble.”

“Why would you get into trouble?”

“Because I never saved Jamie.”

“That doesn’t make sense, does it?”

Amy blinked.

“Actually, it does make sense, if you’re ten,” Clare interrupted again. “Can’t you remember what it’s like to be a kid? You do think things are your fault, when actually you’re not at all to blame. And sometimes you do get into trouble for things that you couldn’t help. You don’t think rationally, like an adult would.”

“The thing is,” Margaret said, ignoring Clare and directing her stare at Amy. “First you say one thing and then you say another. You told the police a while ago that the men who threw baby Jamie were miners and that it was all because Mr Donnelly was a… because he went back to work. Now you say it was these teenagers who’re bothering you at nights. It’s hard to believe a story that keeps changing.”

“If you’re upset by something,” Clare interrupted, “you don’t always remember it properly. I don’t think turning this into an interrogation is helping. It’s not like Amy killed the poor baby. She’s trying to help you, so stop treating her like she’s the one in the dock.” Clare put a hand on Amy’s arm. The girl was trembling.

Margaret said nothing for a moment. Then she made Amy tell her more about the gang of young people who were hanging around the estate. Amy said she thought she knew who some of the young lads might be. The whole thing took almost an hour and, at the end of it, Clare’s head was aching. Amy slipped her hand into hers as they stood up to leave. It was hot and clammy. Clare could still feel the little girl shaking as they headed out to the car. “Well done,” she whispered to her. “Brave girl.”

“The police woman never believed me,” Amy pointed out.

“She didn’t say that,” said Clare, although she knew it was true.

“She looked like she didn’t believe me,” Amy sniffed.

“You did your best. Sometimes the police forget that you’re just a kid, or that you might not remember every bit in perfect detail. But it’s over now, okay?”

At the newspaper office, only the duty weekend staff was in. Most of the desks in the long newsroom were empty. Nicki was one of the duty reporters. “Can you not stay away, Clare? Oh, hello, who’s this?”

“Nicki, this is my friend Amy. She’s come to watch the newspaper being printed.”

“Oh, you’ll love it. The first time I saw that I was really excited. I nearly wet myself when I saw my name in print.”

Amy sniggered. Clare gave Nicki a mock-glare. “Come on, let’s leave this very rude person behind and go down to the printing presses.”

As Clare had expected, Amy went wide-eyed when she saw the huge reels of paper being loaded in. She stuck her fingers in her ears, laughing, when the machines started to whirr into action and watched with bright eyes and an open mouth as the newspaper pages rolled across the high rails and clattered off the presses, packaged up by the machines. The familiar smell of oil and ink made Clare smile. Nicki was right – you never got tired of watching the papers print.

One of the printers brought out a pile of early editions to take up to the newsroom. “Want the first one, then?” He handed a paper to Amy, who looked at it as if someone had handed her some newly-minted bank notes.

“Wow. I just saw that get made. That was amazing. Are you in here today, Clare?”

“Let’s see.” Clare leafed through the pages. “Yes, look. There’s my name on this piece about the women raising funds to support the miners’ strike.” She was pleased with the show, which went across two pages towards the middle of the paper.

“I would love it. My name in the paper like that. It must feel amazing.”

Clare was about to say the novelty had worn off. But she looked at Amy’s eager face and said, “Yes, it is pretty amazing. Maybe that’ll be you one day, eh?”

Amy nodded, with a child’s confidence that nothing would stop her doing whatever she wanted when she was older. Clare hoped it wouldn’t be knocked out of her too quickly. She remembered the teachers at her own school telling her to give up her dreams of being a journalist. ‘Surely,’ the careers teacher had said, looking down her nose, as if Clare had said she wanted to be a stripper. ‘Surely you can think of a loftier ambition than that? You want to spend your days sticking your foot in someone’s door?’

It was the wrong thing to say to Clare, who quite liked the idea of sticking her foot in someone’s door. Imagine being paid to get up people’s noses. It sounded like it might be fun. And it was, for a long while. She couldn’t tell Amy that she’d reached a point where it felt like something of a grind. That nothing was really new, in news, any more; that in local papers, the same sorts of stories came around again and again like fairground horses. And meanwhile many of the national papers seemed to be writing about worlds that she didn’t even recognise, with a ruthlessness and an agenda she hadn’t been trained to expect.

Back in the newsroom, Nicki told Clare a long version of how Catt had made her cry. “She was just shouting at me. I couldn’t get a word in. I was trying to stop the paper printing a mistake and she wouldn’t listen, she just shouted me down.”

“She’s a bully,” Clare said.

Amy nodded wisely. “You should smash her face in.”

“I should.” Nicki let Amy sit at her desk and clack out some words on her typewriter. Clare grinned at Nicki as Amy’s grubby index finger pressed down hard on the keys.

“Why are the letters all mixed up, I mean why isn’t A at the start of the line? What happens if you make a mistake? How d’you rub it out? What do you do when you get to the end of your piece of paper?”

She liked the bicycle-bell pinging sound when the carriage lever was pressed and eventually, after taking several painfully long minutes to type ‘By Amy Hedley’, she lost patience and clattered her fingers all over the keys at random and laughed as she pulled the paper out.

“Ah well. Makes about as much sense as some of the stories that get written in here,” Nicki said. “It just takes practice, Amy.”

“Like Teeline. So you get faster and faster?”

“That’s right. Although some of us still only use two fingers.”

“I would love a typewriter. Then people would stop saying my writing was messy. It would be brilliant. I’d practise and practise till I got super-fast.”

Clare took Amy to a bakery for her lunch, where she tucked away an impressive amount of pastries, then drove her back to the estate. She resisted Amy’s pleas to be allowed to stay with Clare for another night.

“Your mum will think you’ve left home,” Clare said, as she stopped the car.

“She won’t care.”

“Don’t be silly. Of course she will. She might’ve been ringing my home number while we’ve been out. Go on, off you go. I’ll see you soon.”

“When, though?”

“I don’t know. Next week sometime, I promise.”

Slowly, Amy got out of the car and turned to give Clare a mournful look.

“I said, I’ll see you soon.” Clare gave Amy a wave. “Remember to tell your mum about the police station.”

Back at her flat, Clare put her head around the door of the little spare room. On the bed was a piece of paper with a drawing in felt tip pen. It looked a bit like a newspaper’s front page, done in Amy’s scrawl, and the mock-headline read:
Clare Is The Best!!! From Amy!!!

Clare picked it up and took it through to her kitchen, where she pinned it onto her cork notice board. She was just wondering how to spend her evening when the phone rang. It was Finn.

“You’re not going to knock me back two nights in a row,” he said.

Clare smiled, surprised at how her insides felt full of bubbles when she heard his voice. “You’re right. I’m not. What do you want to do?”

They met in one of the quieter pubs just outside the town centre.

“You look great,” Finn said, giving Clare a quick kiss on the cheek. “Tell you what, I was seriously grilled by my mother after you’d gone. You’d think I’d proposed to you, the way she carried on.”

Clare folded her arms. “Really? When I was there I got the distinct impression they thought I was leading you astray. There was some reference to a girlfriend of yours?”

Finn nodded. “Jackie. We’d been going out for a long time. But it wasn’t going anywhere.”

“How come?” Clare kept her arms crossed.

“We’d known each other since we were at school. We’d drifted a bit, that’s all.”

“Why, though?”

“Honestly? I think she thought she was seeing someone with prospects. She’s a lot less impressed with a striking trade union leader who hasn’t had any money coming in for four months.”

“That’s a shame. Especially if you’ve known her so long.”

“It was for the best. She’ll see that, in the end.”

Clare liked listening to him getting passionate about the strike, and the way he was more angry and raw about the subject than Joe, who looked at everything with a journalist’s detachment. She noticed that sometimes Finn avoided answering the odd question about simple things such as his last job, but decided not to press him. I have to stop talking to everyone like I’m grilling them, she thought. This isn’t an interview. I have to stop being so paranoid.

At the end of the evening, Clare found herself outside her flat with Finn enveloping her in a tight hug. “I should go,” Clare said, freeing one hand to rummage inside her bag for her keys.

“Make me a coffee?”

Clare shook her head. “I’m done in. I’ve had a long day.”

“It’s Sunday tomorrow, no reason to get up early.”

“There is for me. I’ve got some stuff to write up,” Clare lied. “Honestly, Finn. Not tonight. Sorry.”

Finn stepped back and shrugged. For a moment, he looked like he might be about to punch the wall. Then he shook his head and smiled.

Clare opened the front door as narrowly as she could and slid into it, closing it quickly behind her. That must have looked really weird, she thought. But having a kid in the flat is one thing: they don’t really care about piles of rubbish and mess. Finn, on the other hand, would think she was some sort of mad hoarder who couldn’t look after herself. Maybe that was true, to an extent. She stumbled into a pile of carrier bags lying in the hallway. She liked Finn. Part of her wanted to take the next step and ask him inside. The strange combination of her attraction to Finn and her urge to help Amy was having an unexpected effect, on her body and her head. For two months now, she’d felt like rock: cold, numb, unable to move. Now she could felt herself shifting, softening, giving way. It was good and it was terrifying, at once.

She ran the tap in the kitchen for a long time, waiting for the water to cool. Then she took a series of long gulps. She’d hardly had anything to drink over the course of the evening and she felt bone-tired. It had to be the heat.

The jangling, persistent phone ringing was the last sound Clare wanted to hear. She sat up slowly, clutching her head, and looked at the bedside clock. It was one in the morning. She swore as she threw herself out of bed and shuffled to the living room.

It was Amy. “Clare, Clare, you have to come over,” she gabbled on the other end of the line. She sounded breathless and tearful.

Inwardly, Clare groaned. “What is it, Amy? Do you know what time it is?”

“No. Midnight or something. But you have to get here quick. Horrible things are happening. Please.”

“What sort of things? What do you mean?”

“There are fires. And people are running round and smashing things up. I’m scared. Clare, please hurry up.”

“Are you on your own again?”

“Max is here. But he’s scared too. He keeps crying.”

“Where’s your mum?”

“How should I know? Clare, please?”

Somewhere behind Amy’s voice, Clare could hear the sound of sirens.

“Okay then. Hang in there. I’ll be as quick as I can.”

She flung on some clothes and trainers. Then she picked up the phone and called the duty police desk. “Hi, it’s Clare Jackson from the
Post
. Can you tell me what’s happening on the Sweetmeadows estate? I’ve heard there’s some trouble.”

“Working late, aren’t you?”

Clare swallowed back the urge to shout at the officer. “Yes, I am. Can you just give me an idea about what’s going on?”

“Hold on.” The phone went quiet for a few moments. Then the officer came back. “We’re not making any media comments on Sweetmeadows at the moment.”

“What do you mean, you’re not making any comments? That’s ridiculous.”

“It’s what I’ve been told to say to you. It’s an ongoing situation.”

“Fair enough. I’ll go and find out for myself. Thanks a lot.”

Clare dropped the phone with a growl. She was about to run out to the car, when a thought struck her. She didn’t usually do this, as a matter of principle, but she decided to let someone know where she was going. She dialled Joe’s number.

It took him what felt like many minutes to answer.

“I’m sorry to wake you up.”

“This better be bloody good, Clare.”

“It’s going to sound daft but I’m about to drive out to Sweetmeadows, and…”

“Tell me you are kidding. Do you realise it’s… Jesus, it’s quarter-past one in the morning. Have you finally lost the plot?”

“No, the thing is, I’ve heard there’s some trouble going on. It sounds bad.”