‘When can you get in to see him?’ Shelley asked.
Good question. I didn’t have a Visiting Order nor any immediate prospect of getting one. Once upon a time, I’d have rung up and pretended to be a legal executive from his firm of solicitors and asked for an appointment the next day. But security had grown tighter recently. Too many prisoners had been going walkabout from jails that weren’t supposed to be open prisons. Now, when you booked a brief’s appointment at Strangeways, they took the details then rang back the firm you allegedly represented to confirm the name of the person attending and to give them a code consisting of two letters and four numbers. Without the code, you couldn’t get in. ‘I thought about asking Ruth to let me pose as one of her legal execs,’ I said.
Shelley snorted. ‘After the last time? I don’t think so!’
The last time I’d pretended to be one of Ruth Hunter’s junior employees it had strained our friendship so severely it had to wear a truss for months afterwards. Shelley was right. Ruth wasn’t going to play.
‘I don’t mean to teach you to suck eggs,’ Shelley said without a trace of humility or apology. ‘And I know this goes against the grain. But had you thought about doing it the straight way?’
Chapter 5
I pivoted on the ball of my right foot, bending the knee as I straightened my left leg, using the momentum to drive me forward and round in a quarter-circle. The well-muscled leg whistled past me, just grazing the hip that moments before had been right in its path. I grunted with effort as I sidestepped and jabbed a short kick at the knee of my assailant.
I was too slow. Next thing I knew, my right leg was swept from under me and I was lying on my back, lungs screaming for anything to replace the air that had been slammed out of them. Christie O’Brien stood above me, grinning. ‘You’re slowing down,’ she observed with the casual cruelty of adolescence. Of course I was slow compared to her; she was, after all, a former British under-fourteen championship finalist. But Christie — Christine until she discovered fashion and lads — was above all her father’s daughter. She’d learned at an early age that nothing succeeds like kicking them when they’re down.
One of the other things I’d learned thanks to Dennis was Thai kick boxing, a sport he insisted every woman should know. The theory goes, a woman as small as I am is never going to beat a guy in a fair fight, so the key to personal safety is to land one good kick either in the shins or the gonads. Then it’s ‘legs, don’t let me down’ time. Kick boxing teaches you how to land the kick and keeps you fit enough to leg it afterwards.
When he’d been sent down, Dennis had asked me to keep an eye on Christie. She’d inherited her mother’s gleaming blonde hair and wide blue eyes, but her brains had come from a father who knew only too well the damage a teenage girl can wreak when the only adult around to keep an eye on things has a generous spirit and fewer brain cells than the average goldfish. Because she’d always been accustomed to seeing me around the gym, Christie had either failed to notice or decided not to resent the fact that I’d been spending a lot more time with her recently.
She filled me in on the latest school dramas of who was hanging out with whom and why as we showered next to each other — our club’s strictly breeze block. You want cubicles, go somewhere else and pay four times as much to join. By the time we were towelling ourselves dry, I’d managed to swing the conversation round to Dennis. ‘You told your dad about this Jason, then,’ I asked her casually. She’d mentioned the lad’s name once too often.
‘You’ve got to be joking,’ she said. ‘Tell him about somebody he can’t check out for himself and have the heavy mob kicking Jason’s door in for a reference? No way. When he comes out’ll be well soon enough.’
‘When you seeing him next?’ I asked.
‘Mum’s got a VO for Thursday afternoon. I’m supposed to be going with her, but I’ve got cross-country trials and I don’t want to miss them,’ she grumbled as she pulled a sweatshirt over her head. ‘Dad wouldn’t mind. He’ll be the one giving me a go-along if I miss getting on the team. But Mum gets really depressed going to Strangeways on her own, so I feel like I’ve got to go with her.’
‘I could go instead of you,’ I suggested.
Christie’s face lit up. ‘Would you? You don’t mind? I’m warning you, it’s a three-hankie job coming home.’
‘I don’t mind,’ I said. ‘I’d like to see your dad. I miss him.’
Christie sighed and stared at her trainers. ‘Me too.’ She looked up at me, her eyes candid. ‘I’m really angry with him, you know? After he came out last time, he promised me he’d never do anything that would get him banged up again.’
I leaned over and gave her a hug. ‘He knows he’s let you down. It’s hard, recognizing that your dad’s not perfect, but he’s just like the rest of us. He needs you to forgive him, Christie.’
‘Yeah, well,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell Mum you’ll pick her up dinner time Thursday, then.’ She got to her feet and stuffed her sweaty sports clothes into one of the counterfeit Head holdalls Dennis had been turning out the previous spring. ‘See ya, Kate,’ she said on her way out the door.
Knowing I was doing her a favour made me feel less like the exploitation queen of South Manchester. But not a lot less. So much for doing it the straight way.
When I emerged from the gym, I decided to swing round by Gizmo’s to see if he’d got anywhere with my earlier request. If the old axiom, ‘If I was going there, I wouldn’t start from here,’ didn’t exist, they’d have to invent it for the journey from Sale to Levenshulme in mid-morning traffic. I knew before I started it was going to be hell on wheels, but for once, I didn’t care. Me, reluctant to face Bill?
I crawled along in second while Cyndi Lauper reminded me that girls just wanna have fun. I growled at the cassette deck and swapped Cyndi for Tanita Tikaram’s more gloomy take on the world. I knew exactly what she meant when she accused someone of making the whole world cry. I sat in the queue of traffic at the lights where Wilbraham Road meets Oxford Road in the heart of undergraduate city, watching them going about their student lives, backpacked and badly barbered. I couldn’t believe it when the fashion world created a whole industry round grunge as if it was something that had just happened. The rest of us knew it wasn’t anything new: students have been wearing layers against the cold, and workmen’s heavy-duty checked shirts for cheapness, ever since I was a student a dozen years ago. Shaking my head, I glanced at the wall alongside the car. Plastered along it were posters for bands appearing at the local clubs. Some of the venues I recognized from razzing with Richard; others I knew nothing about. I hadn’t realized quite how many live music venues there were in the city these days. I looked more closely at the posters, noticing one that had peeled away on the top right corner. Underneath, I could see, in large red letters, ‘UFF’. It looked like Dan and Lice hadn’t been making it up as they went along.
The impatient horn of the suit in the company car behind me dragged my attention away from the posters and back to the road. After the lights, the traffic eased up, and I actually managed to get into fourth gear before I reached Gizmo’s. This time, I reckoned it would be cheaper to take my chances with the traffic wardens than the locals, so I left the car illegally parked on the main drag. Judging by the other drivers doing the same thing, the wardens were about as fond of hanging out in Levenshulme as I was. I hit the hole in the wall for some cash for Gizmo, then I crossed the road and rang his bell.