She swallowed. She couldn’t keep pulling the wool over his eyes like this. She’d have happily worked there twenty-four seven if she could, but not like this. Not when her wages were coming straight out of his back pocket and he was struggling to get by as it was.
Not that he’d said that, but Si knew. She’d grown up poor enough to recognise poverty when she saw it. Max was a big man; the kind of man whose eyes lit up when someone told him about a good steak dinner they’d had. He didn’t eat white bread sandwiches with chicken paste for lunch every day for the love of it.
Even so, the words she wanted to say wouldn’t come.
She closed her eyes. How was she any different from her leech of a stepfather if she kept taking advantage of Max like this?
Say it. Tell him you’ll go home because there’s nothing left to do here.
She shuffled over to the sink to wash her hands, still stalling. Always stalling. They’d had two customers that day, and both had been minor, cheap jobs. Si didn’t know much about business, but she’d learned a few things from working at the garage over the past two years. One was that people with battered old cars wanted to wring every last penny of value out of what they were forced to spend. They’d push for anything they could get—free wiper blades, free oil changes.
She used the blade of her hand to press down on the soap dispenser.
“Max?” Her heart hammered.
“What?”
Graham’s face floated into her mind and Si gritted her teeth.
Graham. Even thinking about him made her want to be sick. It had been just the two of them ever since her mother… she closed her eyes. It had been more than a year and she still couldn’t allow herself to think about it.
He’d been alright for a while. They’d even found common ground in their shared grief.
She squeezed her eyes tighter. God, she hated that word.
It had been bad lately. Some new manager woman had started at the jobcentre and she’d been on Graham’s case to get a job. Others had tried in the past, but they’d soon given up after realising it was pointless. Not this woman. Sue Langham, her name was. Si hadn’t ever been to the jobcentre, but she knew all about Sue Langham. She’d had to listen to Graham effing and blinding about the woman for hours on end. He’d smashed a whisky bottle against the fireplace and snarled that she was a stuck-up bitch who had no business trying to take his dole away.
She couldn’t face it; couldn’t face the thought of having to watch him stumbling around the house slurring about whoever he felt had wronged him this time.
Si had begun to hate Sue Langham, even though she’d never met her and in her gut she knew the woman was right.
“What is it, love?”
Si blinked. Max was talking to her and she had been too busy daydreaming to hear him.
“Sorry, what?”
“You were going to ask me something. Is everything all right, Simone? You don’t seem yourself.”
She nodded. “Yeah, fine.”
She hated herself. She couldn’t say it. Just being here was a break from being in that house.
“Right. Good.” He grabbed a rag and rubbed it between huge hands. “Why don’t you start work on those drawers. They haven’t been cleared out in I don’t know how long. It’d be good to get them in order now we’re in a quiet spell.”
She pursed her lips. The ‘quiet spell’ he was talking about had been going on for almost a year. It didn’t help that a national chain had set up just outside the town, running specials and soaking up the business that hadn’t already moved away to new vehicles. It wasn’t seasonal and it wasn’t temporary. Plus, Max had a memory like a computer. He knew exactly how much he had left of every component in the garage, which was why he didn’t need to keep detailed records: they were all in his head.
She closed her eyes and tried to count up her hours for the week so far. The way she was going, she’d just about make the rent Graham charged her, with about twenty pounds left over for food. She would have moved out, but there wasn’t really a rental market locally since it wasn’t close enough to a train line to make it a commuter town for London. Even if she’d had the money, she couldn’t face the thought of moving far away. She’d grown up here. This area was all she had left of her mother. She’d given serious thought to moving into one of the wrecked vans out in the scrapyard, but that was just a step too far away from normality that she feared she might never recover from.
“Maybe I’ll clock off and go work on my project,” she said, not meeting his eyes. She wouldn’t earn any money, but at least she wouldn’t have to go home.
Max considered this and shook his head. “No. There’s no need.”
“But it’s not work! It’s just tinkering about.”
“Well it’s part of your training, isn’t it? You’re learning from it.” He looked around. “Why don’t you tow it around and we’ll both work on it. You can move it back out again if someone comes.”
She winced. “But it’s a mess. I don’t want it driving customers away. Especially someone coming in about your ad in Classic Cars.”
“Driving customers away? It’s not like they’re beating down our door as it is. Come on, I insist.”
She shook her head. Maybe he was starting to lose it. Max was a sharp man. He’d laughed at her when she’d set her sights on the beat up old Renault 5. She’d only given herself the challenge to keep her mind off everything that was going on with her mum. He’d told her several times that he had more chance of getting to the moon in a bathtub than she did of getting the old Renault to work again.
“But why? What was it you told me before? That it was a fool’s errand but that if it kept me out of trouble what was the harm?”
He smiled and shook his head. “You have a good memory, love. Maybe I was wrong. I feel like getting my hands dirty and tinkering with an engine that looks like an engine, not a spaceship.” He sighed. “These modern cars. All diagnostics and computers. Let’s get out there. Where’d you put the keys?”
She went to fetch them from their hiding place behind one of the desk drawers. No-one in their right mind would bother stealing the old wreck, but she always made sure to hide the keys anyway. It may not be worth anything to anyone else—it might not ever run again—but that wasn’t the point. To her, it was a lifeline. Sometimes it seemed like the only thing that kept her sane.
I owe you, Max, she thought. Maybe I’ll never amount to anything. How can I when I’m too weak to quit and stop draining you of cash? But if I ever end up with money, I won’t forget how good you were to me.
“Hurry on,” he said gruffly. “And pop the kettle on while you’re at it.”
3. Annie
Annie Greene wrapped herself in a towel and hurried on tiptoes from the bathroom to the bedroom. She was still warm, but that was more to do with how hard she’d pushed herself at training than the tepid shower she’d just had.
She threw on her pyjamas and swaddled herself in her bathrobe before the winter chill had a chance to bite. She had set the heating to come on at six—it was almost ten now and it didn’t feel much warmer inside than it had outside.
Annie shook her head. She had no right to complain. She should have known this place was too good to be true. A bohemian paradise in the middle of London with bikes to cycle along the canal and a chef’s kitchen to whip up meals worthy of a Michelin star or two. No mention of the fact that the canal was miles away and the only knives in the kitchen wouldn’t cut butter.