AllFreeNovel
Share Us
‘She pitted you against me.’
‘No, she didn’t.’
‘I can see you now, drip-dripping poison into each other’s ears about me,’ said Paula with quiet, measured menace as she stood there, faint smile playing on her lips.
‘That didn’t happen,’ replied Shay. ‘Why would it? Mum loved us both and she wanted to be fair.’
‘I have a right to half.’ Paula screamed. But she wasn’t facing a flimsy office junior now who would cower and sweat.
‘And that’s exactly what you have got,’ Shay returned, calmer on the surface than she was below it.
Paula snatched up the jewellery and her handbag. ‘Well you’d better get ready for when Dad dies. You’ll see.’
Shay shook her head, ‘Why would you even say that? Just stop, Paula.’
But Paula was on a roll now. ‘Spoilt little brat daughter. There were never any arguments between them before you came along, did you know that?’
‘You really can’t be suggesting that’s my fault.’
‘Mum went away from home for six months. I bet you didn’t know that either?’
‘What?’
‘Seven months after she came back, you were born. You were enormous for aprematurebaby. Everything changed when you arrived. Mum and Dad were never the same. And I was supposed to love you like that’ – she clicked her fingers, a hard bitter sound. ‘I hated you. They pushed me to one side for you, both of them, if that isn’t ironic.’
There was glee on Paula’s face now, as if she was sucking a sweet and had found the runny, flavour-rich centre.
‘What are you getting at, Paula? If you have something to say then please just say it.’
‘Oh, I will, don’t you worry,’ Paula went on. ‘Dad wouldn’t have started playing around if it wasn’t for you. They wouldn’t have had to pack up and leave a place they loved if it wasn’t for you. Dad wouldn’t have been lying there stressed into a coma if it wasn’t—’
Shay had had enough now. ‘How – really – can you blame me for any of this?’
Paula smiled then, a slow smile that spread across her face like black poison in a bloodstream. ‘Don’t you get it, Shay. HE’S. NOT. YOUR. DAD. I always wondered. You with your darker skin and your brown eyes. Italian throwback my arse. As if.’
She really was spoiling for a fight, thought Shay. Well she wasn’t going to get one.
‘Paula, stop, really. Mum wouldn’t want this—’
‘I don’t give a fuck what Mum would want,’ said Paula, spittle flying from her mouth. ‘She’s dead, gone and if she weren’t living in this house she wouldn’t have had problems with neighbours would she? She wouldn’t have fallen over and died, so that’s also your fault as well, isn’t it? Everything had a knock-on effect. You destroyed the whole shebang.’
This was Paula all over, scattergunning spite when she didn’t get her own way. She’d always been the same; but here, the day after their mother’s funeral, it was too much. ‘Don’t you dare—’
‘Oh, I dare.’ Paula’s face was screwed-up and ugly. ‘I always knew there was something cuckoo’s egg about you. Always. So a couple of months ago, I took some hair from your brush in the bedroom, and from Dad in the hospital. I had a DNA test done. Illegal I know, but I’ll just say that I thought the hair was mine. It was more than worth the risk, especially seeing the look on your face right now. You’re not a match, by the way. Who’d have guessed? All that shit about you looking like Auntie Stella, who was never off the sunbeds and the hair dye, which idiot would have fallen for that? Christ knows whose kid you are, but now Mum’s gone, we have nothing in common except her money. I want everything totally accounted for or I’ll take you to the fucking cleaners.’
Then Paula flounced out, wearing her best victory smile because detonating that blast had been almost as good as an inheritance.
Chapter 22
Shay didn’t so much sit down as collapse into the chair which her sister had just vacated. Oddly, the plastic cushion was cold, as if her sister was incapable of giving out any warmth. A portion of her brain was working frantically to rationalise Paula’s words, dismiss them as nonsense; they had been said to wound, bullets of pique. But Paula was thorough, she would have done her homework, on that there was no doubt. She wasn’t the type to randomly fling mud; instead, she’d moulded her evidence into a grenade full of acid so it would blister and scald and cause as much damage as possible, to be hurled at the right time for maximum effect. Knowing her sister, that would most likely be when their father died, but then this delicious opportune moment had landed in her lap.
Her father.
She thought of Harry lying in the nursing home, of her fingers entwined with his. She thought of him bringing her a Mars bar at exam time and holding her tightly when she thought she was going to fall into an abyss. Never once had she felt that he wasn’t her dad, hewasher dad. She had his name, he was her children’s grandfather. He’d taken themto the park to feed the ducks and play on the swings, he’d bought them little lawnmowers so they could follow him around the garden pretending to cut the grass.
The clock in the lounge sounded the hour with its customary bing-bongs that sounded too loud in the silence. This time yesterday, she was just putting on her black dress for the funeral. And now her mum was gone, and with her all the answers to the questions spinning around inside her.
She heard a knock on the front door, but ignored it. She didn’t want to speak to anyone, she didn’t want any well-meaning neighbour dropping off flowers or a cake or a ‘sorry for your loss’ verbal message or written card that they hadn’t managed to deliver at the funeral. She was, at that moment, like a building, rocked from a seismic shock, hardly daring to breathe because she wasn’t sure if she would still be standing if she did.
