Michael laughed sarcastically. He had no intention of making excuses for his daughter. She was the one who had got herself pregnant, and it wasn’t even as if she had known who the culprit was. It could have been anyone. Josephine’s problems had been made worse by her daughter’s actions, and young Jessie was the main reason that Josephine couldn’t bring herself to leave her home any more. There was no way he was going to sit here tonight and pretend anything different. He had seen first-hand the toll his daughter’s lifestyle had had on his wife. Tonight he wasn’t in the mood to overlook it.
‘You listen to me, Josephine. I don’t care what anyone says – she might have had a fright that night, and I get that – but that wasn’t any reason to carry on the way she fucking did. She had never, ever in her life had anything other than love and care from us. There are kids in this world who are living in war zones, who have seen their families murdered, and they get over it. Our Jessie’s fucking problem is that she let one fucking night cancel out all the years of love we had given her beforehand. I tell you now, and I’m being honest with you, I think she would have gone to the bad anyway. Look at how she’s living now! How she’s been living for years. Drink, drugs, fucking men. That is a lifestyle, Josephine, a fucking choice she’s made. I was talking to Tommy Ambrose the other week, six kids he has, and one of his sons is a fucking heroin addict. It’s breaking his heart but, as he said, there’s nothing he can do about it. The kid’s a fucking waste of space, end of. Tommy said a very true thing to me; he reckons it’s a kink in the boy’s nature. Nothing could have prevented it from happening. The boy was destined to be a fucking junkie. I think that applies to our Jessie. She would have found her level, eventually, I honestly believe that. She looked like a fucking paraffin lamp last week, when she came to get her money. I was so ashamed of her. Her breath was so bad, I could smell it from six feet away. Her clothes were dirty – she had obviously slept in them – her legs were scabbed over, and covered in fresh bruises, so I knew she had fallen over at some point. Then she had the fucking nerve to snatch the money out of my hand as if she was doing me a favour by taking it. I tell you now, Josephine, it took all of my willpower to stop myself from telling her to fuck off, and aiming her out the door on the end of my fucking boot.’
Josephine had never once heard her husband talk like that about their daughter, and she knew, then and there, that he had been thinking like that for a long time.
‘Oh, Michael, I’m so sorry to hear you talking like that about our Jessie. But I do know what you’re saying and, as much as it pains me to say this, I think you’re right.’
Michael laughed in derision at his wife’s words; he was angrier than he had realised. Without thinking, he found himself shouting with temper, ‘Have a fucking day off, will you, Josephine? For Christ’s sake! She’s a fucking walking nightmare. If it wasn’t for you, I would have cut her off years ago.’
Josephine started to cry real tears then, her whole body shaking with her sobs. Michael was out of his seat and kneeling before his wife in seconds. Holding her to him tightly, he held her as she cried bitterly, knowing that this was something she should have done a long time ago. He hated himself for saying what he had. He knew that his Josephine didn’t want to hear the truth, but sometimes he really felt that she needed to hear it, needed to be dragged back into the real world, no matter how much that might hurt her.
Chapter Ninety-Four
Declan Costello was laughing loudly; he liked a good joke, and he also liked a drink in the afternoon. The new barmaid was a real comedienne. She could make a cat laugh. Shame she looked like a fucking Russian athlete – if she had the looks he would have been on her in nanoseconds. He was getting older now, and was still overweight but that didn’t bother him too much, he had never been what anyone would ever call a looker. Many girls had tried to tie him down, but he had never let himself get caught. After a few weeks they bored him, even the really good-looking ones. He didn’t want a life partner, never had.