AllFreeNovel
Share Us
FIFTY-FIVE
Unlike when he was in Ireland, Matty phoned constantly from prison. I’d come home after school to find my mother hunched up on the couch, the receiver lying in her lap like a dead puppy. More often than not, a wine glass in her hand, blistered pill packets strewn across the table.
I didn’t put it together straight away. The phone, the pills. Her red-rimmed eyes.
I was more focused on why she was in the living room rather than at work. It had been years since she’d got home before me.
A latch-key kid, my grandmother called me.
‘It’s a bad idea, Amelia-Rose. She’ll get up to no good if you’re not around. It’s a slippery slope. You remember what happened to. . .’
My mother was the one on the slippery slope, though Nanna G didn’t know that. My mother hadn’t told her anything of substance for years. I can’t say I blamed her. If Nanna G was my mum, I wouldn’t tell her anything either.
Tuesday afternoon was more of the same. I dumped my school bag inside the door. She was in her usual spot on the sofa, staring into her wine glass.
‘It’s not a crystal ball, you know.’
I was in a scratchy mood. Mr Osmond had talked about the murders in assembly, made a big deal about ‘innocent before proven guilty’. I recognised that he was trying to help, but also that it would only make things worse. For a man whose profession was all about managing kids, it seemed to me he might have understood them a little better.
‘Run crying to Oz have you?’ Sally jeered at breaktime.
‘I don’t know how you sleep at night,’ someone else muttered.
‘Do you ever think about the women he killed?’
‘Or their families?’
I didn’t have the energy to argue back, my hands hanging uselessly at my sides.
The end of school bell offered no relief. Going home was yet another gauntlet, one I had to negotiate alone since Bea no longer cared to walk with me. The media vans were double parked all the way along our street. The pavements swarming with journalists and looky-loos.
‘We’re on the front page,’ my mother told me not long after the arrest.
‘You mean Matty is?’
She shook her head, handed me the paper.
‘No. Us.’
Somehow our names had been leaked, our address too. There was a photo of my mother and me coming out of our building. Above it the headline:
Did They Know?
‘Guy from the papers said he’d give me a grand to dish the dirt on you,’ Linda informed us.
‘What did you say?’ my mother asked.
‘Go forth and multiply. Or words to that effect.’
That same evening there was a knock at our front door. A TV reporter had managed to get through the main door. My mother was sleeping. I looked through the peephole, saw a woman with an unflattering ginger perm and furry microphone standing poised next to a cameraman, his camcorder light already on.
The intercom buzzed constantly after that with other reporters trying to ‘Give you a chance to tell your side of the story’. My mother took herself to bed with a sedative. I located a screwdriver and disconnected the entry phone.
Now I stood where it had been, giving my mother disapproving looks.
‘I just need a bit of time to myself, that’s all,’ she slurred, her ‘s’s morphing into ‘sh’s.
I jush need a bit of time to myshelf. . .
