Page 7 of Dead Vengeance

My heart beats more wildly than it probably should, but I’m excited to tell her. “Fish pie!”

“Fish pie?”

“Fish pie!”

Her eyes sweep the bench—potato peels, onion paper, empty packaging. Her brow has already fallen.

“I’ll clean it up,” I rush to tell her. “In a minute. Or after tea. I was busy because—”

“You made fish pie?” She blinks at me.

“Yeah.”

“From scratch?”

My mum loves fish pie. I love fish pie. We always used to eat it on Saturdays, especially when it was cold out.

“Yeah. I did. It should be ready soon—”

“Where’d you get the money, Liam?”

Despite the warmth of the oven, the room turns cold. Her voice is quiet, but it’s like it’s the only sound in all of London.

It’s the implication that rings loudest of all.

‘You’ll come to no good.’ ‘You’ll end up just like your brother.’

“I got a job, Ma.”

But she doesn’t break into a smile like I’d hoped she would. Doesn’t celebrate this with me like I’d daydreamed about.

“Doing what?” she asks, lips tight.

And I don’t even know what to tell her. Catching ghosts? For random old people in posh parts of England? Expenses paid because I lied to the cops for my new boss?

Fuck. Even I know this is too good to be true.

But I’m going to push on anyway, because I have to make something of something at some point in my life.

“It’s kind of… it’s… a sort of social work thing?”

She slicks back a strand of dark, greying hair that’s escaped from her tight ponytail, tilting her head as she does in a way that says, ‘I raised you smarter than this.’

What she actually says is, “Since when did you have experience in social work?”

It’s a twist in the gut. So I start moving about the kitchen, cleaning the scraps I should have cleaned up earlier, before I got distracted by that ghost-catching manual. “It’s on-the-job training. All expenses paid to travel. It’s…” And I’ve turned to self-deprecating in the instant, mumbling out excuses for why they might hire me. “It’s not hard work. Just going for tea with some old people who are a bit lonely and all that. And it’s not well paid. And you know, it’s an area it’s hard to find people to work in. But it’s better than nothing, right?”

She’s quiet for a moment, grabbing some rubbish off the bench, dropping it in the bin. “Okay. And when did you start?”

Pushing down the flaring irritation, “I start tomorrow. I have a job in the Cots—”

“Tomorrow?”

“Yeah, tomorrow.”

“If it’s tomorrow, then why do you have money now?”

“Because he gave me…” Ah, fuck. How do mums always manage to catch you in a trap in thirty seconds flat? “It’s travel money. For tomorrow.”