Jamie yawned. “I won’t be. I don’t need to. I’m going to be a rock star.”
I laughed and he glared at me and Dad said, “That’s a bit unlikely don’t you think?” I could hear him trying to keep his temper. “What’s wrong with having a back up with some training for a proper job and then doing your music for a hobby like Adam does?”
“I’m not going to need a back-up,” Jamie said, leaning back in his seat, “I’m going to make it big from Day One.” I couldn’t tell if he really believed it or if he was just saying it to wind Dad up. Well if that’s what he intended, it was having the desired effect.
“What’s wrong with auditioning for a band after you’ve finished your training to be a plumber or an electrician?” Dad persisted, attempting to sound reasonable.
“God you’re so old fashioned,” Jamie sneered.
“Well if that doesn’t grab your fancy – you’re always on the computer,” Dad pointed out persuasively, “how about you go into IT? Nasim’s fella seems to be doing pretty well for himself in that line of work and you’d never be out of a job if the music thing didn’t work out and you needed something to fall back on.”
“How many times do I have to tell you that I’m not going to need anything to fall back on?” Jamie’s tone was insolent and Dad was verging on losing it and I could see we were teetering on the brink of another shouting match. I resisted the temptation to join in on the guitar hero slagging by sarcastically challenging Jamie to name three famous bassists and said to Dad, “Let’s not argue shall we? Haven’t you got something to tell Jamie?”
Dad looked less than enthusiastic, but I couldn’t see how he could sit there and not tell Jamie about our prospective step-mother. I wasn’t going to let him get away with palming the responsibility of telling Jamie onto me. I got up and went to the sink and began to run the water to wash up, expecting a bit of a man to man to take place with Dad getting all awkward and Jamie going all silent. But instead Jamie looked Dad straight in the eye and his expression all twisted up and he said quite deliberately, “Yes I heard you’d brought some evil old whore back with you yesterday.”
Dad slowly got to his feet, his expression menacing. “If I ever hear you call her anything like that again-” He left the threat hanging.
Jamie didn’t stand up. He looked mockingly at Dad. “How does sex-starved old witch sound?” He taunted.
Bloody hell, I didn’t know Jamie had it in him! As Dad went for him and the plates on the table went flying, Jamie ducked out from under and in less than a split second was out the kitchen door. Dad stopped short at the hastily slammed door then started to take his fury out on it by swearing and smashing his fist into it. Everything shook and the door groaned and rattled on its hinges and there was an ominous splintering sound.
“For God’s sake, Dad,” I said. “We don’t want to have to get a glazier and a joiner round!” Job listing seemed to be in the air right now.
With one last expletive Dad threw himself out of the room. I closed the kitchen door after him and turned Radio One up loud for the second time today and examined the damage done to the door. The hole hadn’t gone all the way through just through the inside panel, and the glass, though it had rattled alarmingly turned out to be still intact, so I set about briskly clearing up the kitchen. I wasn’t sure why I felt almost on a high. Surely I should be feeling all upset right now? But in a weird way I was feeling justified. Dad had always made out that I never inherited my temper from him, that my mother had been an angel and I was a changeling. But now it was all coming out. Jamie wasn’t as cherubic as we’d all assumed and Dad could no longer disown the bits of me he didn’t like. And I wasn’t on my own now in resisting the evil Pauline. I wasn’t the only one behaving badly over her. I felt strangely jubilant.
Eventually I’d done every job I could think of to keep me safely hidden away in the kitchen, and I finally ventured out. This time it was Dad I found sitting in the dark on the settee. He was hunched over with his head in his hands and I had a horrid feeling he might be crying. Now I felt really shitty. I hadn’t seen him cry since the year after Mum died and maybe momentarily on a couple of her anniversaries after that. I walked over and stood silently beside him looking down at the top of his head. I found I couldn’t speak to him. I couldn’t ask him what was up, because I just didn’t want to hear the answer. I couldn’t bear for him to say he loved Pauline and he was desperate for us to love her too. I didn’t want to hear him going on about what a crap Dad he must be and how he shouldn’t have left us alone so much to go off working. And most of all I couldn’t bear it if he started going on about Mum and feeling guilty about betraying her memory. So instead I just reached out and put my hand on his head, my hand sinking into the short crisp grey curls. He gave a sort of strangled sob and grabbed me around the upper thighs pulling me to him, his head resting hard into my stomach, in a way that seemed more like an adult man and woman in a relationship, rather than a father and daughter. I felt really uncomfortable. ‘You’re getting muddled, Dad,’ I thought. I found myself patting his back in a rather bracing ‘buck up’ sort of way, more man to man than a female cuddle and then I pulled away.
“Night Dad,” I said.
“Night Eve,” he said without looking at me.
I escaped upstairs.
I went straight to the bathroom and spent ages in the shower to avoid Nasim. Dad wasn’t our Dad anymore. We just weren’t going to be able to rely on him. He was someone else’s partner now and he’d made that change of allegiance clear to us. I wondered how Dad had felt when I took up with Quinn. Had it seemed that I was no longer his daughter and was now the property of another male? Is that what had triggered his feeling free now to take up with that woman?
My pyjamas and the hairdryer were in my room, so finally I had to wrap myself tightly in a towel and go in. Nasim was lying silently on the bed, fully dressed on top of the covers. When I’d got some pyjamas on and dried my hair, I finally turned my attention to her.
She was in a self condemnatory ‘I’m such a wicked daughter’ mode.
“No you’re not,” I said.
Then she was in an ‘I’m so stupid’ phase.
“No you’re not,” I said.
Then she was in a repetitive rut of ‘What am I going to do? I’m completely ruined! I’ll never be allowed in the mosque again!’
I sat there promising that we’d sort it all out. That I’d get us a flat together and support her going to school to finish her ‘A’ levels. But I knew that I wouldn’t be able to afford it on my current wage. I could get a second job in the evening, I proposed, and so could she. As long as Tariq didn’t keep all this honour killing rubbish up.
At the mention of Tariq she began to cry again.
“What did you say to Rajesh when he told you?” I asked both out of curiosity and to divert her.
“I behaved with extreme dignity,” she choked out, the tears flowing down her swollen face. “I told him I felt disappointed at the way he’d led me on.”
“That’s no good!” I berated her. “You mustn’t let them get off the hook that easily. You should have made a scene! You should have screamed and shouted and at least slapped him! They hate scenes and you need to make the most of that to punish them. And if you don’t tell them what you think of them straight away then weeks later you’ll be mulling obsessively over all those things that you’re hacked off about and writing long aggrieved good-bye letters to them that you’ll never have the satisfaction of knowing they’ve read.”
Finally she fell into an exhausted sleep and I listened to Dad shooting the bolts across the doors and coming upstairs with slow heavy tread. I wondered how much extreme emotion one human being can stand in twenty-four hours and eventually I fell asleep myself.
I was awakened by a sharp noise and sat up with a start, my heart thumping. Then it came again. A shower of gravel at the glass. I went to the window and looked out. It was Jamie. He signalled a twisting key sign to me and I realis
ed that he’d run out without even his coat, so he probably wouldn’t have his key and even if he had, Dad had locked up including the bolts. I yawned and padded downstairs to let him in. The parents of Sally and of Dylan must have put their foot down about him staying over on a school night.
He came in shivering with cold.
“Shall I make us hot chocolate?” I offered.
He shook his head. “Might wake Dad up,” he whispered, “and I’d rather not face him.”
He crept straight off to bed and I ran myself a glass of water, and went back up to have a pee and go back to bed. Lying back down on my mattress I found I couldn’t drop off again. I tossed and turned but it wasn’t that comfortable and my mind was on overdrive. I tensed for a moment as I hallucinated the sound of some footsteps passing over the gravel outside. But all was silent when I strained my ears. The car that had driven along the road a couple of minutes ago and appeared to draw up nearby no longer had its engine ticking over. So I stopped worrying about the fact that I hadn’t re-bolted the door after I let Jamie in, and tried to force myself to drift off to sleep. It was then that there was a huge bang from downstairs, inside the house, like the sound of an explosion.
I leapt up and ran out of the bedroom door, bashing on Dad’s door and yelling as I passed and hurtling down the stairs. There were flames hitting the ceiling of the living room right in front of the door and a roaring sound and I could smell a strong stench of petrol. For a split second I just stood there staring at it then I rushed into the kitchen and grabbed up the fire extinguisher. Being a welder, Dad was a bit funny about fire and what with having to leave us alone a lot he’d always kept an extinguisher and a fire blanket in the kitchen just in case. It was just a small hand held one but it was still bloody heavy. I hauled it through, pulled out the pin and just as Dad legged it down the stairs in his boxers I was aiming it at the fire and pulling the trigger. The foam jetted out and Dad grabbed it out my hands.
“Aim it at the base,” he yelled. He charged the fire like a marine holding a machine gun, blasting the fire systematically from its lowest point, raking from side to side and from the edges in. “Ring 999!” He shouted at me.
Blimey, this was getting to be a habit!
I dialled the number. “Police and Fire Brigade,” I stated in answer to their question.
By the time the fire engine turned up an impressive short few minutes later, lights flashing and siren blaring, the fire was out and Dad and I were standing in our bare feet in a pool of gently hissing foam while Nasim and Jamie sat in their nightwear shoulder to shoulder on the stairs looking shell-shocked.
The broad shouldered firemen in all their gear paddled through to check the fire was completely out and congratulated us on our quick action. “What happened?” The craggy old one asked.
“Petrol fire bomb through the letter-box,” I informed him succinctly.
Dad turned his head sharply to look at me. I don’t think he’d stopped to think what had caused it.
The fireman’s eyes narrowed. “Arson? Have you called the Police?”
“Yes,” I said.
Dad looked at me again. He’d been too busy fighting the flames to take any notice of what I’d been saying on the phone.
“Well you mustn’t start clearing up until after they’ve been,” the fireman instructed us. “It’s now a crime scene.”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nasim get up and run back upstairs. The door to my room slammed. And through the still half open front door I saw another blue flashing light arrive. “They’re here already,” I said. I nudged Dad. “Go and get some clothes on.” He’d been known to reveal a bit more than he meant to when he sat down in those loose boxers and more than once I’d had to nudge Jamie to warn Dad that his ballbearings were running about on the loose.
Dad took my advice and disappeared off upstairs and the firemen greeted the police and ushered them in. And surprise, surprise, guess who it was? Though on reflection I guess that it wasn’t that odd, they were obviously teamed up on the rota for the late night shift for a bit.
John Holt avoided my accusing gaze and jotted down all the info the firemen could give him about signs of petrol and arson. Then Dad came down in a more decent guise and this time I learned the name of the other copper, PC Bruce.
Once the fire team had left we could close the front door against the cold blast of the night air and Holty got to question us about what happened.
“Tariq and his cronies shoved a petrol bomb through our letter box,” I told him.
“So did you see him do this?”
“No, but it was obviously him as that’s what he said he’d do last time he was here!”
“But you never saw anyone?” Holt was at his most official.
“No but it’s obvious it was him. I mean only yesterday he and that cousin of his and some other bloke were chasing me and Nasim’s boyfriend down the street threatening us with goodness knows what!”
Dad stared at me. “You never told me that.”
“Well none of us were exactly in the mood for rational conversation last night were we?” I snapped.
“So what exactly did they do yesterday?” PC Bruce was following up.
I fudged it a bit, well a lot actually. I figured that if the police were true to their previous form, the only result of telling them the full story would be them arresting me for dangerous driving instead of Tariq for threatening behaviour.
“Do we need to speak to the girl?” Bruce looked at Holt.
“No,” I intervened. “She doesn’t know anything about anything. She wasn’t there yesterday afternoon and she was asleep when they came tonight. I heard a car draw up and then I heard some footsteps and then I heard the bang.”
“Anything else?”
“The car they arrived in was petrol not diesel,” I informed them.
“How do you know that?” Bruce looked cynical.
“Note of the engine,” I replied. Since Holty knew what line of work I was in, I was gratified to see him promptly jotting it down.
Dad was mainly silent. He looked a bit grey. “Cup of tea?” He said suddenly.
Holt and Bruce both shook their heads, but while they went outside to examine the ground with torches for footprints or other clues, Dad put the kettle on. I stood in the doorway looking at him. He turned round and met my eyes.
“She’ll have to go,” he said inflexibly.
I nodded glumly. “But give me a couple of days Dad, please,” I pleaded. I couldn’t just chuck her out on the street. I really didn’t know what I was going to do.
The coppers came round to just outside the kitchen door their torches sweeping round. Dad let them back in that way. Holt glanced down at the damage to the panelling. “Did they do that too?” He queried.
Dad looked embarrassed.
“No that was me and Jamie mucking around the other night – we fell into it,” I said quickly.
Dad gave me a swift grateful glance and said, “Kid’s eh?” in genial tones to Holt who gave a slight acknowledging smile.
Once we’d finally shut the front door on them, Dad sent me to bed. Jamie accosted me outside my room.
“Did you get to let off the fire extinguisher?” He said enviously.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Cool,” he breathed.
“But then Dad snatched it off me and took over the action…”
“Bummer,” Jamie commiserated.
Back in my room I found three texts from Quinn on my phone asking why the hell there were blue flashing lights all over and firemen rushing into our house.
I texted him back. Tariq jus firebombd us.
Bloody hell! Came promptly back, so he was obviously sitting up waiting for a reply.
CU 2moro, I finished off because I’d really had enough now.
But I’d reckoned without Nasim. She was blubbing again. “I don’t believe my Dad would try to kill me!”
“It’s not your dad, Nasim, I’m sure your dad loves
you. It’s your brother and that bloody cousin of yours, what’s his name?”
“Karim, it means ‘kind’.”
I snorted my disgust at the irony. Then I added brutally, “Brothers are a pain in the arse. Too much testosterone washing around if you ask me. Now let’s go to sleep shall we?”
Next morning I could barely winch my eyes open at the repeated sound of the alarm clock and Nasim was refusing to get up and go to school. She couldn’t face it. She was worried they’d be lying in wait for her. And all she wanted to do was hide away in a hole and lick her wounds. In the end I had to leave her to it.
When I walked into work Steve Bolton turned round and greeted me with, “What’s happened? You look like shite!”
“Ta very much,” I responded sarcastically. That’s great, I thought. If the mainly unobservant men at work thought I looked shite then I must look truly appalling. And dammit I’d forgotten to bring that lip gloss with me. On the other hand, if I suddenly turned up dressed up to the nines they’d be sure to guess the reason and tease me ragged. I’d just have to not care what he thought of me. “Someone firebombed our house in the middle of the night,” I informed them.
“Why’s that then?” The stud was right behind me. I refused to turn round.
The men were tapping their noses and grimacing and hyping things up. “You want to watch Ginty,” Dewhurst was teasing. “She hangs out with a right dodgy crowd. You better not mess with her…”
“Still serving your sentence aren’t you?” Bowker said morosely.
“Yeah, right, thanks for the reminder,” I drawled coolly.
“What’s she done?” Trevelyn was asking curiously as I walked away.
I could hear the men really winding him up. They were going to leave him hanging on tenterhooks for days, I could tell. Well that suited me fine.
“Right vicious bitch if you ask me,” Bowker was saying. I could really have done without this new guy having such a long induction under Bowker. By the time the grumpy git had gone, he’d have infected Trevelyn with his antipathy to me.
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