The Wicked Girls

Chapter One

2011

Martin checks his watch. It’s nearly ten o’clock. She’ll be going to work soon. The neon lights on the roller coaster at Funnland have been switched off, the halogen arc lights they flood the park with after hours – as much to drive stragglers away as to help the cleaners see the globs of gum and the sticky soft-drink splashes, the careless smears of ketchup – have come blazing on. She’ll be in the changing rooms. Like a lot of punch-card people, she is punctilious about arriving, more leisurely about actually starting work. She’ll be shucking her civilian garb and replacing it with trackies and overalls.

He feels a swell of familiar rage at the way she has just cut him off. No response, no contact; just empty silence, day after day. Is she even thinking about him? He’s left it three hours, but he can’t stand the waiting any longer. He picks up the silent, baleful telephone and pulls up her number. Types in a text: please answer me. do not ignore me. Watches the screen as it thinks and sends.

A hen party pauses in the street below. He knows it’s a group of hens because they’re bellowing ‘Going to the Chapel’ at the tops of their voices. It’s always that, or ‘Nice Day for a White Wedding’, just the chorus, over and over, or ‘Here comes the bride, short fat and wide.’ There are millions of songs, but hen parties never stray beyond this narrow selection.

A shriek in the street, then a chorus of cackling. Someone’s fallen over. Martin pushes himself off the bed and goes to the window. Cracks open the curtain and looks out. Eight young women, in various stages of inebriation. The bride – shortie veil and L-plates – is on the ground, felled by six-inch heels and a portly backside. She flumps about on the pavement in her tubular mini-skirt, stomach flopping over waistband and tits overspilling her décolletage, while two of her friends haul at a pale and dimpled arm. The other friends are scattered across the pavement, pointing and staggering as they howl with laughter. One of them – hot pants, giant hoop earrings and a horizontal-striped boob tube – is pestering men for a light as they weave their way past the flailing bride.

Boob Tube strikes gold. A stag group – the town is overrun with them everyweekend, the sort of stags who can’t afford, or who lack the passports or the probationary permission, to spread sangria vomit over warm Spanish concrete – pause, light her up, fall into conversation. Well, mutual shouting. No one communicates under Martin’s window at anything less than a roar, ears destroyed by thumping basslines, sense of other people destroyed by the alcohol and ecstasy and cocaine that seem to cost less than a packet of smokes these days. And you don’t have to go outside to take them.

The bride finally regains her feet. She is limping, or pretending to, and uses the shoulder of a stag for support. Martin watches as the man’s hand creeps down over the tube skirt, inches its way in from behind. The bride cackles, slaps him off half-heartedly and bats her lashes encouragingly. The hand goes back. They set off up the street, heading towards the nightclub quarter.

Boob Tube lags back, leaning against a shop window, talking to the man with the lighter. She sways from side to side, doesn’t seem to notice as her friends disappear round the corner. She tugs at her top, pulling the droop from squashed bosoms, and flicks lacquered hair out of her eyes. Smiles at the man coquettishly, pushes lightly at his upper arm. So goes the business of modern mating. You don’t even need to buy a girl a drink any more. Just lend her your lighter and she’s yours for the taking.

Dropping the curtain, Martin shambles back into the darkened room, depression seeping into his pores. He doesn’t understand the world. Sometimes he feels like they pick the road outside his flat just to taunt him. To remind him of the fun he’s not having; of the fact that these spangled, dancing creatures would scutter over to the other side of the pavement if he tried to join in. Whitmouth is a disappointment to him. He thought, once his mother died and he was able to choose his destiny, that the world would be his oyster, life would roll his way at last, but instead he finds himself observing other people’s fun as though he’s watching it on television.

I thought it was Fairyland, he thinks, as he switches on the unshaded ceiling light. When I was a kid. When we used to come down here from Bromwich. It was families, then: cream teas, and the helter-skelter on the pier the tallest building for miles. That was why I came back here: all those good times, all those memories, all that hope. Now I hardly dare to look in shop doorways as I pass them, in case I see Linzi-Dawn’s knees hitched up and Keifer’s low-slung jeans humping away between them, and me excluded, never wanted, always looking in.

She still hasn’t replied. Martin’s skin prickles as he stares at the blank display. Who does she think she is?

Throwing the phone down on the bed, he turns on the television, watches the bad news scroll out on the BBC. Dammit, Jackie. You have no right to treat me like this. If you were going to turn out like the rest of them, why did you pretend to be something else?

Another shriek in the street. Martin presses the volume control, turns it up to full. The rage of rejection crawls beneath his skin; invisible, unscratchable. All she needs to do is text him back. He doesn’t want to go out, but if she refuses to respond he’s going to have to. As his mother was always assuring him, persistence is the most important quality in life. And he knows that he is the most persistent of all.