‘Hello?’ Beth called as she entered the house. Beth often knew whether or not someone was in a house when she entered it. This house, nominally her family home, felt empty though the smoke hanging in the air suggested otherwise.
The house had not been redecorated in more than twenty years. It looked like it had not been cleaned in almost as long. In some ways the cramped little house on the Undercliff Road was a microcosm of Bradford. The city had been dealt a death blow in the 80s that it had not managed to recover from.
Beth found her father in the lounge in his chair, smoking, the ashtray next to him overflowing. He had the pipe from the oxygen tank next to the chair up his nose but Beth hoped that it was turned off. She watched the cherry glow as he inhaled shallowly. The resulting cough sounded wet.
‘Dad? It’s me.’
‘Talia?’ It was the sound of pathetic hope in his voice that hurt the most.
‘No, Dad, it’s Beth.’ She moved through the smoke. The curtains were closed in the filthy room. He was living in darkness. The little band of pale sunlight that shone through a gap in the curtains illuminated her father like a corpse. He looked awful and he looked disappointed.
‘When did you get out?’ he asked. Despite the wheezing he still managed to sound disappointed too.
‘Yesterday.’ She had slept in a hedgerow last night. It had been a very long walk. She had taken a bus when she had got to the outskirts of Leeds.
‘Are you staying long?’ he asked.
‘I was hoping to stay until I can get some work and afford a place of my own,’ she said.
‘Not much work for a jailbird. Not much work…’
‘I’ll get something.’
He just nodded. Beth waited, looking for something more – anything. They let the awkward silence grow, then she headed for the door. She turned back.
‘When’s Talia back?’ she asked. It was like watching his face crumple. Tears appeared on his cheek.
‘She’s gone. Left me,’ he said, his voice a wailing rasp.
Beth was by his side, reaching for his hand, but he flinched away from her.
‘You! You did this. You drove her away when you killed her man. What were you thinking?’
Beth stood up slowly. I was thinking that maybe if I left it this time he would beat her so hard he’d finally kill her, Beth thought. Talia, the pretty one, Talia the popular one, Talia the feminine one, Talia the fucking trouble-magnet. Beth took after her dad and Talia took after some lost dark beauty from their family’s genetic past. They had never got on, but Talia was her younger sister so she had looked out for her. Not the easiest of jobs for someone that self-destructive. Beth had lost count of the number of times that someone had come to find her to peel Talia, messed up on drugs or alcohol, off the floor and take her home, or pull her out of some other scrape. Not that she had ever been thanked.
Talia had found Davey with her unerring ability to get involved with the worst guy possible. He was a minor-league dealer with a history of violence against his partners. None of this had mattered to Talia. It had been true love through the bruises. Beth had been pretty sure that Davey was going to kill her that final time. That said, she knew she had lost control. She had not needed to go as far as she did. Even then it had still hurt to see Talia in court testifying against her. Had it not been for that, the sentence might have been suspended.
‘How long?’ Beth asked.
‘Six months.’
‘Where?’
‘Down south somewhere, where they all go.’
This was the way it went in this house, Beth thought: Talia broke her parents’ hearts, back when her mum was alive, and Beth got blamed for it.
‘She was going to leave home eventually anyway,’ she told the old man. She left it unsaid that Talia had never had anything but contempt for them all anyway. She could not wait to get out of there. Talia had just been waiting for a way to sustain her lifestyle with the minimum of actual effort on her behalf.
Beth stood and headed up the stairs.
Beth had the music on too loud. She knew that, but what was he going to do? He couldn’t even shout at her after all. She was doing press-ups, carefully so she didn’t make the needle jump on the old vinyl. She was exercising out of sheer boredom. She had done a lot of this in prison.
Beth heard him making his agonising way up the stairs but she did not go to help and did not turn the music down. Eventually the door to her room opened, and her father, coated in sweat, stood gasping for breath in the doorway. His look expressed what he thought of her activity. This was clearly another thing that good girls were not supposed to do. Like beating her younger sister’s boyfriend to death, she guessed.
He made his way to her bed and sat down. He used the time he needed to recover the ability to speak to gaze around her bedroom disapprovingly at the posters of the various bands she liked on the walls.
‘Go and find her for me,’ he finally rasped.
‘Dad, she’s just moved out. A lot of people do it.’ She had known he wanted her to do this downstairs.
‘No word, nothing,’ he told her. That’s because she doesn’t give a shit about any of us, Beth thought but said nothing. ‘She would have phoned – she’s a good girl.’ He might as well have added ‘and you’re not’, Beth thought. She had heard it anyway.
‘Have you tried phoning her?’ Beth asked.
He shook his head. ‘No number,’ he managed. ‘She said she would call when she got a phone.’
Beth knew for a fact that Talia couldn’t live without her phone. There was no chance she didn’t have one. It just wasn’t important for her to call her father. After all, what use was a poor, broken-down, dying old man?
‘Look, Dad. London’s a big place. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.’
Beth was surprised when her father reached forward and grabbed her arm. It felt like a skeleton had grabbed her, but for all that his grip was still strong.
‘What is it with you? Why can you only hurt this family? And believe me, you have no idea how true that is!’ Beth closed her eyes, wondering if this was when her father was going to blame her for her mother’s death, but he let go. She opened her eyes and he was struggling to his feet. He brushed away her attempts at help.
‘Look, I’m not going to London but I’ll phone a few people, okay?’ she told him. He just nodded as he made his way towards the door.
Beth was angry with herself. She was angry because she was concerned despite herself. When she had seen Talia’s pale, spite-filled pretty face from the dock, she had sworn she was never going to help her again. Let her die choking on her own blood and vomit face down in the street somewhere. But after calling around she was starting to share her father’s worries.
Talia had not gone to London; she had gone to Portsmouth. That was good. It was a smaller city and she should be easier to find. She had been in semi-regular contact with her remaining friends in Bradford, those she had not used up, until a few weeks ago. Talia had gone down to meet some goth, or whatever they were called now, a pretty boy called Clark who Beth vaguely knew. She had managed to get his number out of one of Talia’s friends and called him. He had given her a mouthful of abuse and hung up, refusing to answer any more of her calls.
However, another of Beth’s friends, Billy, who also worked the doors, had said that there had been some Internet porn clip doing the rounds recently. He was not alone in thinking that the girl in it looked a lot like Talia. He had not gone into details and Beth had not asked, but he had said awkwardly it was some pretty raw stuff. Billy had been one of those guys more than a little bit in love with her sister but was too nice for Talia to be interested. Billy had gone round to see some more of Talia’s friends in person. It sounded like he had been not quite so nice this time. Two hours later he had phoned Beth back with an address in Portsmouth.