They were everywhere. I held a hand up against the glare of the headlamps and saw that they were inside as well as out, small silhouettes pulling out stuff and dumping it into trolleys: raiding the car. Their scuffling footsteps consolidated, and I gathered there were about eight of them, a couple inside the cabin, the others clustered around the boot. A box came flying out of a side door, and round shapes the size of hand grenades rolled away: avocados. “Gross!” said a shrill voice, and another one giggled. One trolley left the scene, pushed down the slope by someone who jumped on and rode it as it picked up speed and jangled off.
They were children, boys. Behaving like a pack of wild things. Like the dogs back in the city. They were taller than mine, older than Charlie, not little ones; old enough to know better. Injustice burnt in me, and I fought an urge to run forward and grab my stuff, fight for our supplies. Our lifeline. I stood upright and stepped out into the light.
“That’s my food.”
The scuffling stopped, as if a bunch of mice had been caught in the glare of a cat. There was a beat, and then one of them shouted, “Leg it!” The shapes streamed away from the car and scattered, some pushing a second trolley away, while others vaulted the railings and dropped the few feet to the pavement below, where they had bikes. I chased the closest figures, but they separated, so I headed down the slope after the trolley, but it was already turning into the dark alley of another side road. I stopped after a few steps, too slow to stand a chance.
“Little shits,” I yelled after them. “I’m coming after you.” I turned back up the slope toward the car. Ahead of me: a quick footstep and the scrape of the axe as it was lifted from the paving stones. A taller boy, the one who had closed the shutters, swung the axe into the air.
He darted through the headlights, the beam bleaching out his electric mop of hair so it blazed for a second like a filament. His face fell again into darkness and he swung at the wheel. “No!” I screamed as the axe landed with a muted thud in the tire. The breath left my body with the same dull rush as air through rubber. The Beast sagged like a wounded bull. The axe clattered to the ground, its clang echoing down the now-empty street, as the boy leapt onto the pavement below. I ran after him and teetered over the railing, pivoting on my hips and flailing at the air through which he’d fallen. I leaned out and screeched a long cry of pure fury into the night—the sound of outfoxed prey. Below me, the boy made a running jump onto a bike.
“Witch!” he shouted back, his voice cracking. “Get a broomstick!”
Chapter Eight
“Fucking feral scouts,” I ranted. “Shitting little Wild Things got the car battery and the Special K. It was the last bloody box.”
“At least you got this.” Joni topped up my red wine, which was medicinal because I’d managed to slice open my shin while changing the tire on the car. Now, I lay flat on my back next to the campfire, while Joni shone the Maglite into the wound to pick out any bits before disinfecting it. I’d gotten disinfectant, too; the thieving little buggers had gone, predictably enough, for the least practical items.
“Ow!”
“Man up, Marlene, keep still.”
“Man up?”
She just laughed.
“Speak for yourself.” I craned my neck to slug some wine, dribbled most of it down my chin.
The night was still. High strips of cloud were lit up by the moon like a giant X-ray of a sick lung.
“Julian was having an affair with Aurora,” I said. “I found an e-mail on his laptop earlier.”
Joni picked up the disinfectant and poured a lid full over my cut. I sucked in a breath and blew out the pain through pursed lips. Joni dabbed away the runoff and started opening a bandage. She didn’t say a word.
I came up onto my elbows to confront her. “Did you know?”
“Course not, I would have said something. But I guess I’m not surprised. She was kind of a bitch.”
“She funded my start-up, back in the day,” I said.
“She was a total princess. And Julian was—” She floundered a beat too long.
“Emasculated by his wife?” I saved her from saying it.
“Jeez, go easy on yourself. I was going to say weak. Or lazy. Weak and lazy. Hold this; the cut’s not deep, but I don’t want it getting infected. No clue where we’d find antibiotics.” She placed a line of gauze pads along the length of the cut and started cutting off strips of tape. “But, yeah. I guess your success humiliated him. He never found his thing.”
“That’s what she said—”
Joni snorted. “True, maybe it was nothing more than sex. Hold still.”
I scrunched forward to keep the gauze in place. “We went to marriage counseling.” My voice came out cramped from the position.
“I remember.”
“He told the shrink my anger was traumatizing the kids. She made me sit in a chair, while my anger sat in another chair, and I had to tell it—myself—how I was hurting my kids.”
Joni nodded.
“He said he had to leave so I could take responsibility for my own negativity.”
She nodded.
“But he couldn’t care less about me or the kids. He was just upgrading. To a first-class bitch.”
Joni nodded again.
“Stop fucking nodding!”
“He was a prick.”
“Prick!” I slammed my hand into the dirt, pulling the bandage out of Joni’s grasp. She pushed me firmly back down, adjusted the Maglite, and carried on wrapping.
“You didn’t deserve to be treated that way, Marlene. You work harder than anyone I know. And even if it hasn’t always been easy at home—”
“For him or me?”
Joni snapped the sharp teeth of an elastic clip into the bandage. “For all of us. But you work hard for those kids. You made a life for them, a home, security. You did that. That’s what he should have told the counselor.”
While she packed the first-aid box, I rolled over to sit with my back against a log. Turned my face away from the light of the fire and blotted the tears with my sleeve.
“You okay?” Joni looked at me intently.
“It hurts,” I said.
“Sure it hurts. However much he wronged you, you’re still going to mourn for him—”
“I meant my leg hurts.”
Joni snorted. “Right, of course. And we’re done discussing it.”
She topped up our wine again. I slugged mine more successfully this time. Joni unraveled the remaining bandage into a pile at her feet, and then set about wrapping it into a neater roll around two fingers.
“I cheated on David once,” she said, just as I drew a hit of rioja into my mouth. I dribbled it back into the cup, and she laughed into the canopy. “Bet you weren’t expecting that.”
“Do tell me all the details so I can live vicariously. Who was it?”
“Lola’s father.” Joni pulled the bandage tight and tucked in the end.
“No!”
“When I went home to see my mom a couple of years ago.”
“No!” I watched the firelight warm her cheekbones; it lit up her eyes as she downed the last of her wine. “Don’t tell me,” I said, “you go home to your girlie-pink bedroom, slip on the old prom dress, and when he came a-calling in his Dodge”—I carried on talking even as she groaned at my Southern American accent—“all those loving feelings came flooding back . . .”
“Less romantic,” she said. “More hormonal. I thought he might get me pregnant again. Like, maybe we’re just compatible that way. I’d gotten pregnant with Lola the first time I slept with him—only time I slept with him—and you know how long I’ve tried with David, but no one can tell us why it doesn’t work. So, I thought this was worth a try. It was kind of stupid.”