The Power(37)


Allie says, ‘I killed someone, too. A long way away now. I was a different person.’

‘Probably deserved it, if you did it.’

‘He did.’

They sit with that.

Roxy says, companionably and as if it has nothing to do with anything, ‘There was a bloke who stuck his hand down my pants when I was seven. Piano teacher. My mum thought it’d be nice for me to learn piano. There I was, on the stool, doing “Every Good Boy Deserves Fun” and, suddenly, hand in my knickers. “Don’t say anything,” he goes. “Just carry on playing.” So I told my dad the next night when he came to take me out to the park and, bloody hell, he went mental. Screaming at my mum, how could she; she said she didn’t know, did she, or she wouldn’t have let him. My dad took some of the boys round to that piano teacher’s house.’

Allie says, ‘What happened?’

Roxy laughs. ‘They beat the shit out of him. He ended the night with one less nut than he started it, for one thing.’

‘Really?’

‘Yeah, course. My dad said if he had one more pupil round that house, and he meant ever, he’d come back for the other veg, and the meat, too. And not to think about leaving town and starting up again somewhere else because Bernie Monke is bloody everywhere.’ Roxy chuckles to herself. ‘Yeah, I saw him in the street once and he ran away. Saw me, right, turned, and actually ran. Bloody right, mate.’

Allie says, ‘That’s good. That sounds good.’ She makes a little sigh.

Roxy says, ‘I know you don’t trust them. It’s all right. You don’t have to trust them, babe.’

She reaches over and puts her hand on top of Allie’s, and they sit there like that for a long time.

After a while, Allie says, ‘One of the girls has a dad in the police force. He telephoned her two days ago to tell her she can’t be in this building on Friday.’

Roxy laughs. ‘Dads. They like keeping their daughters safe. They can’t keep secrets.’

‘Will you help us?’ says Allie.

‘What do you think is coming?’ says Roxy. ‘SWAT team?’

‘Not so much. We’re only a few girls in a convent. Practising our religion like law-abiding citizens.’

‘I can’t kill anyone else,’ says Roxy.

‘I don’t think we’ll have to,’ says Allie. ‘I’ve got an idea.’

They mopped up the rest of Primrose’s gang after he died. Wasn’t any bother; they all fell apart after he was gone. Two weeks after Terry’s funeral Bernie called Roxy on her mobile at 5 a.m., and told her to come to a lock-up garage in Dagenham. There, he fished the big bunch of keys out of his pocket, opened it up and showed her two bodies laid out, killed cold and clean and about to go into the acid, and that’d be the end of that.

She looked them in the face.

‘That them?’ said Bernie.

‘Yeah,’ she said. She snaked her arm around her dad’s waist. ‘Thanks.’

‘Anything for my girl,’ he said.

Big bloke, little bloke, the two who killed her mum. One of them with her mark still on his arm, livid and branching.

‘All done, then, sweetheart?’ he said.

‘All done, Dad.’

He kissed her on the top of the head.

They went for a walk that morning round Eastbrookend Cemetery. Slow walking, chatting, while a couple of cleaners did the necessary in the garage.

‘You know the day you was born was the day we got Jack Conaghan?’ said Bernie.

Roxy does know this. Still, she likes to hear the story again.

‘He’d been on us for years,’ said Bernie. ‘Killed Micky’s dad – you never knew him – him and the Irish boys. We got him in the end, though. Fishing in the canal. We waited all night for him, and when he got there early, we did him, chucked him in. That was that. When we was done and home and dry I checked my phone – fifteen messages from your mum! Fifteen! She’d gone into labour overnight, hadn’t she?’

Roxy felt her fingertips around the edges of this story. It always seemed slippery, something fighting its way out of her grasp. She was born in the darkness, and with people waiting for someone: her dad waiting for Jack Conaghan, her mum waiting for her dad, and Jack Conaghan, though he never knew it, waiting for Death. It’s a story about the stuff that happens just exactly when you weren’t expecting it; just on that night you thought nothing was going to happen, everything happens.

‘I picked you up – a girl! After three boys, never thought I’d have a girl. And you looked me dead in the eye, and widdled all down my trousers. And that’s how I knew you’d be good luck.’

She is good luck. Barring a few things, she’s always had good luck.

How many miracles does it take? Not too many. One, two, three is plenty. Four is a great multitude, more than enough.

There are twelve armed police officers advancing across the gardens at the back of the convent. It’s been raining. The ground is waterlogged, and more than waterlogged. There are open taps running at both sides of the garden. The girls have run a pump to bring seawater up to the top of the steps, and it’s a waterfall now, water gushing down the stone stairs. The officers aren’t wearing rubber boots; they didn’t know it’d be muddy like this. All they know is that a lady from the convent had come to tell them that girls were holed up in here and had been threatening and violent. So there are twelve trained men in body armour coming for them. It should be enough to finish this.

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