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That was true. Roberta didn’t like to inconvenience her elder daughter who was always very busy. She only felt safe to ask her younger one for help, the one who didn’t pick apart for mistakes everything she said.
‘Have you been to see her this morning?’ Shay asked.
‘No. I’ve had work to catch up with.’
‘On a Sunday?’
‘Yes on a Sunday, Shay, so there’s only so far I can stretch myself.’
A concrete block had more stretch in it than Paula. Shay, however, was expected to stretch herself to her limits and then beyond. Breaking was not an option.
‘Besides, it’s you she wants with her, not me,’ Paula went on. ‘And actually I did ring this morning to see if she needed me and she told me her neighbour was going round and they were having a cinema day.’
Dagmara Mitic should have been bottled and given out on prescription. There was no one, apart from Shay, that Roberta would rather have sit with her in a crisis than Dagmara.
‘I’m back early, so you don’t have to go round tonight if you don’t want,’ said Shay. She’d better find out first-hand what was going on with the neighbours.
‘Oh, well, that’s good,’ said Paula. She didn’t fight it, but then Shay never expected her to anyway.
Shay unpacked her suitcase, putting her new satin pants in her drawer, the one she kept all the things in that were special or out of season, like woolly winter tights, Spanx and fleecy PJs. She put the cheese in the fridge and wondered who on earth was going it eat it all because Bruce didn’t even like crumbly cheese. Courtney would have scoffedthe lot in a single sitting. Like Shay herself, her long coltish daughter had always been able to eat what she wanted and not put any weight on, something that had always infuriated Les and Tanya about her. Did she know how lucky she was? The pair of them put on a pound watching Shay wolf down a doughnut. Shay batted back that maybe it was a payoff for all the flack she took from the school playground bullies who called her skinny, sticky names; Theresa Briggs being the worst culprit. There was a lot that Shay could have said back to her, but she knew, as young as she was, that Theresa was just trying to make herself look big and clever because she didn’t have that great a home life. If it wasn’t one brother in the local paper for drug-dealing, it was another for shoplifting or her dad for affray. She’d often wondered what Theresa Briggs was doing now, though she’d probably intimidated someone into marrying her and giving her ten kids. She didn’t think about Theresa Briggs that often, because then she’d think about Jonah Wells jumping in to tell her to sod off and do one. And she’d think about Denny who made her feel better by buying her some chocolate in the shop. And she didn’t want to think about Denny because her heart grew a new crack in it every time she did.
Chapter 7
After loading up the washing machine, Shay drove around to her mother’s house and couldn’t quite believe her eyes when she saw what had been going on next door since she’d last seen her mum on Friday night. The garage door to 1A had been removed and was leaning heavily on the hedge that her dad had planted, which annoyed her for a start-off. A breeze-block wall was half-built where the aperture had been, while lots of large white bags and more bricks on pallets had been delivered and were sitting patiently at the side of the Sharif’s Skip.
She called ahead of her as she walked in to the bungalow, pushing open the lounge door to find Dagmara sitting in the armchair, newspaper on her lap, finger against her lip and her mother fast asleep on the sofa.
‘She didn’t have very good night,’ whispered Dagmara. ‘She just dropped off about ten minutes ago. We were watching a film together.’
There on the TV was a paused frame: three conjoined people kneeling on the floor.
‘What on earth…?’
‘The Human Centipede,’ said Dagmara. ‘I’ve always wanted to see it and Derrick at number five found me copy in a car boot sale. We’ve had quite a cinema day. First we watchedFrom Russia with Loveand then this. I can’t wait to see how it ends.’
‘I’ll give you a clue: not well,’ returned Shay.
Dagmara pushed herself up from the chair. ‘Let’s go into the kitchen and I’ll tell you what’s been going on,’ she said and so Shay followed her in and they both sat at the table there.
‘Derrick says maybe you need to speak to the planning department at the council,’ said Dagmara, thumbing towards next door. ‘That’s a party wall. They can’t touch it without permission.’
‘I’d better go round and speak to Mr Balls tonight and—’
‘No point, they’re out. They’re always out on Sundays. Nagraj went to ask them yesterday what they were doing, on behalf of your mama and that… that horrible man pushed him off the doorstep and he fell backwards on the ground.’
‘You’re joking,’ said Shay, although Dagmara obviously wasn’t.
‘He’s going to have a big bruise on hisdibens,’ Dagmara went on, rubbing the side of her bottom. Nagraj lived at number three and was a retired plant machinery driver, a gentle, quiet Indian man in his mid-seventies.
‘That’s assault, surely,’ said Shay. ‘Isn’t there any CCTV around?’
‘No CCTV, no witness, only Mrs Balls who would say accident of course,’ said Dagmara with a lift and drop of her shoulders.
‘I’ll ring the council first thing in the morning,’ said Shay with conviction, then her eye caught sight of something out of the kitchen window.
‘What the hell is that?’ she said, standing at speed.
‘They’re also building at the back, Shay. Look, extension. With hole for a window that will let them see straight into your mama’s garden.’
