‘You’re fucking mental, you know that, don’t you?’ Carl Morris throws me off him, a red handprint tattooed across his cheek where I have just whacked him one.
‘Louisa, please.’ Sandy turns her head from where she is busy cooking by the stove and rolls her eyes.
‘Tell him to give me my magazine back then.’
‘Here, you freak,’ he shouts, launching the rolled-up Just 17 magazine across the kitchen like a paper plane. ‘Don’t know why you buy them anyway, you can’t even read.’
He gives his cheek a quick rub before turning his attention back to the plate of sausage and peas in front of him, chomping loudly on a pork sausage until the juice slides down his chin.
‘You’re gross,’ I mutter. ‘You knock me ill.’
‘You want one or two sausages, Louisa?’ Sandy looks over her shoulder at me as she speaks, pointing a spatula towards the pan where more fatty sausages crackle and spit. Last week at school, Kayley Smith told me she watched a documentary where the manufacturers put snouts and testicles in cheap meat to bulk it out. It made me feel sick and I became a vegetarian but it only lasted until Thursday because Stacey had robbed a tenner from her youth worker and offered to buy me a Big Mac Meal.
‘I’m a vegetarian remember,’ I remind Sandy, who shakes her head and continues to roll the sausages around in the pan. An embroidered gingerbread man pokes his head out of the pouch on her apron, a place where she keeps a hair bobble, a spare pen and a panic alarm. She pretends she enjoys being here, that she loves us… but I can see in her eyes that she’s desperate for nine o’clock when another member of staff takes over and she can go home to her husband and son, her growing bump, which strains against the apron, a permanent reminder that she doesn’t, and never will, belong to us.
I’m now thirteen and it’s been nine years since I threw a pan of boiling water over my first foster carer. Esther still writes to me occasionally and Sandy assures me her letters are friendly and she has forgiven me for permanently disfiguring her. But I tear up the letters without reading them. I don’t deserve her forgiveness.
Bill and Bernie stopped being my foster carers three years ago. Bernie became ill with cervical cancer and it was decided I should be moved temporarily while she underwent treatment. At first I visited her but she changed so much that I had panic attacks before and after each visit. Gone was her beautiful blonde hair and permanent smile, and in its place sickly yellow skin and hollowed-out cheeks. Bernie decided that my visits were ‘doing me more harm than good’, and promised to contact me the moment she was ‘back on her feet’.
I lived with a single lady called Maureen during that period whose house stank of mince and onions. She cared more about her little shit of a dog, Buddy, than she ever did about me. One morning she called me down into the lounge where my social worker, whose name I’ve forgotten, casually broke the news to me that Bernie had died the previous day. That night, I slashed both my wrists and, well, Maureen didn’t much want me after that. I was quickly moved here, to Chatsworth Children’s Home, where I’ve been imprisoned ever since.
‘Just give me the beans and a piece of bread,’ I say to Sandy while looking at Carl, whose incessant chomping is managing to simultaneously spark every nerve in my body. ‘Will you give it a rest?’ I shout at him, only to be greeted by a tongue full of pulverised meat. ‘You’re a proper minger, you know that?’
‘Shut it, ginger minge,’ he laughs, showering me with pork-infused spittle. ‘You know you’d love a bit of meat up your rusty fanny flaps.’ He proceeds to fornicate against the wooden table.
‘Carl, no.’ Sandy speaks softly, as if telling off a toddler. ‘Remember how we speak to people.’
Billy suddenly appears at the kitchen door, the earphones of his Walkman stuffed into his ear holes. It’s a CD one which his auntie bought him for his twelfth birthday last week. He’s really proud of it and tells everybody about his cool, rich auntie who loves him and buys him ‘proper mint’ stuff. I want to tell him she doesn’t love him that much or she wouldn’t be leaving him to rot in this shit tip but I don’t because I like Billy.
‘There’s somebody new starting tomorrow,’ Sandy says while dishing up two sausages onto a plate. ‘You know I leave next month for maternity and so he’ll be taking over on the full-time shifts. He’ll be shadowing me for a few weeks.’
I know she’s speaking to me even though Billy and Carl are both present. She knows I hate change, the boys not giving two craps either way. Stacey lives here too but she goes out with her support worker on a Wednesday night to McDonald’s or Wimpy, the lucky cow. ‘He’s called Aiden,’ continues Sandy. ‘And he’s very nice and very experienced.’
‘I saw him when he came for his interview and he’s a faggot.’ Carl positions a bean on the end of his fork and flicks it at Billy’s head.
Ignoring him, Billy sits down at the table, pulling his earphones out from his ears. Billy’s hair is so blond it’s practically white, and his waif-like stature and effeminate mannerisms mean he’s a target for losers like Carl. Sandy places the plate of food down in front of Billy, taking out another raw sausage, presumably for me, despite my protests, and dumping it into the pan. I watch Billy as he toys with his food, the prongs of his fork stabbing at the sausage.
‘Here, let me listen to this.’ Carl reaches over and grabs Billy’s Walkman, his dark-brown eyes lighting up when he sees the distress on Billy’s face.
‘Stop being tight, Carl,’ I say, my scalp tingling. ‘He’s just a kid.’
‘Shut it, Tango fanny. What’s it to you? You wanna shag him or something? You fucking paedo!’
‘Carl!’ Sandy manages to raise her voice beyond a whisper, causing a rash to break out on her neck. ‘We are family. Nobody is a paedophile.’
I watch through wide eyes as Billy looks up at her, his lips twitching, his eyes clouding over. I know what’s coming before it even happens. ‘My dad was family,’ he says, seemingly in another place, in another moment in time. ‘That didn’t stop him abusing my sister, did it?’
Carl’s face creases into a grin, his teeth crooked and far too big for his mouth. I silently urge him to close his mouth but of course I know he won’t. ‘She was probably asking for it, the dirty bitch!’
There is a split second of silence where nothing happens. Then, everything happens at once. Sandy drops the spatula on the floor, sending hot oil flying up the back of my legs. Billy’s plate smashes into pieces against the tiled wall and Carl screams so loudly I fear my eardrum will burst.
It takes me a moment to realise that the prongs of Billy’s fork are wedged into Carl’s eye.
As Carl continues to scream, and Sandy’s panic alarm bounces off all four walls, and Billy howls on the kitchen floor, I can do nothing but stare at the wall, the bean juice sliding down the tiles… like blood-red tears.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Louisa
Now
‘I’m not taking antidepressants, James, so you can think again.’ I step out of the doctor’s surgery and gingerly push the pram back down the narrow ramp, the snow underfoot trampled down to hard ice like the inside of a freezer. The frosted handrail bites into my palm as I clutch hold of it tightly, my breath an extra layer of mist in the already clogged-up air. ‘She can shove her prescription up her arse, the backstabbing cow.’ I am furious and I can’t even begin to hide it. Tears stream down my face, the cold instantly drying them against my already chapped skin.