She gets up and checks herself in the mirror. Her eye make-up has smudged slightly, but the colour is rapidly returning to her face. She rinses her mouth out using the mouthwash that lives behind the curtain, fills the air with the aerosol scent of freesias. Puts on a new layer of lipstick, smacks her lips together. OK, she thinks. That’s better. I can face the world.
She goes back to the kitchen, finds it empty, the pork and its dish gone from the work surfaces, the vegetables dished out and waiting. She grabs them up and goes into the dining room, smiling brightly.
‘I’ll tell you what, Kirsty,’ says Penny, once everyone’s served and settled, ‘I was wondering if I could ask a favour.’
‘Fire away,’ says Kirsty. Favours done by her must put Jim in pole position for favours in return. ‘What can I do?’
‘Well, we like to have people come and give careers talks at the school. What do you think? Would you think about coming in and talking about journalism at some point?’
‘I…’ she says doubtfully. She’s not comfortable on stages, in front of crowds.
‘I know you’re busy,’ says Penny. ‘But we’d give you plenty of notice. Everything needs plenty of notice now, because it takes months for the CRB checks to go through.’
Instantly she’s blushing and stammering. She’s on a lifetime licence. A disclosure form won’t reveal who she is, but it will certainly show that she’s got a record. And Jim knows nothing. Not about her past, not about the reality of her present.
Penny smiles. ‘I know. It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? Lots of people feel offended, but honestly, it’s just another piece of bureaucratic form-filling.’
‘Another job-creation scheme,’ says Jim.
Lionel takes a drink. ‘That’s exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about,’ he says. ‘It’s all upside-down nowadays. The government squandering millions of pounds of our money making out that innocent people like you are suspects when we all know where the problem actually lies.’
‘Well, you don’t actually know for sure,’ jokes Jim. ‘My wife could have a long criminal history, for all you know.’
Lionel gives him the patient look of someone with no sense of humour. ‘I’m just saying,’ he says slowly, ‘that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.’
Kirsty rises to the bait. Grabs the chance to take the focus away from school visits.
‘Seriously? You’d just chuck them on the scrapheap?’
‘Well, let’s face it. You can pretty much predict which kids are going to turn out feral, just from looking at their parents.’
‘Wow,’ she says. ‘Wow.’
‘Come on,’ he says. ‘You can’t deny it. I bet you’ve got apartheid at your own school gates. Don’t try and pretend you haven’t.’
‘I…’ she says.
‘It’s hardly a new phenomenon. Generation after generation like that. Where there’s a fat slattern mother feeding her kids McDonald’s and shouting at the school staff, you can guarantee there’s a fat slattern grandmother necking cider and fighting with the neighbours.’
‘Gosh,’ Kirsty says again. Remembers her maternal grandmother’s neat cottage: ceramic dancing ladies lined up on the windowsill, not a speck of dust anywhere. She probably thinks – thought? Kirsty has no idea, even, which members of her family are still alive – that the problem stemmed from her daughter having taken up with a gyppo. She certainly wouldn’t have seen that there was a connection between her respectable chapel-going rigidity and the unwashed, thieving grandchildren who swarmed off Ben Walker’s pig farm. ‘So you’re saying it’s genetic, then?’
‘Well, you can’t deny it runs in families.’
Kirsty suddenly remembers that there’s mustard in the kitchen; excuses herself to go and fetch it. She can’t hear any more for the time being.
11 a.m.
‘No! Out!’
Bel looks up, expecting to see that a dog has wandered into the shop. A girl her own age stands in the doorway. Shorter than she is, with a pinched look of resentment on her face.
Mrs Stroud comes out from behind the counter and advances on her, waving one hand ceilingwards. ‘Out!’ she barks.
‘Oh, come on,’ says the girl. ‘I only wanted a Kit Kat.’
‘I’ll bet you did,’ says Mrs Stroud. ‘Out!’
The girl is plump, in a malnourished sort of way. A faded red polka-dot ra-ra skirt, frills above the knees, and an overtight striped halter top. Pierced ears, from which dangle a pair of lowcarat gold hoops. Her brown hair, slightly greasy, has been given a rough kitchen-scissor cut at chin level. Bel carries on selecting her pick-’n’-mix as the scene unfolds. Tries not to look like she’s watching, but doesn’t manage well.
‘No, look.’ The girl opens her palm to show a twenty-pence piece. Certainly enough for a Kit Kat, and probably a few Fruit Salads as well. ‘I’ve got money.’
‘Oh yes?’ The woman has reached the door and is holding it open. ‘And where did you nick that from?’
The girl looks livid.
‘Come on. Out. You know there’s no Walkers allowed in here.’
Ah. Bel understands now. She’s a Walker. She’s not actually seen one close-up before, apart from the straggle-haired, enormously fat mother who occasionally pushes an empty pram up to the bus stop. But the whole village knows who the Walkers are.
‘Ah, c’mon!’ The girl tries again.
‘No! Out!’
The Walker girl turns on her heel and trudges from the shop. Mrs Stroud slams the door behind her hard enough that the bell clangs for three full seconds. Then she squeezes back in behind the counter, perches on her stool and returns to leafing through a subscription copy of True Life Stories that’s not been collected yet.
‘How’s your mum and dad?’ she asks suddenly.
‘Stepfather,’ corrects Bel.
‘Whatever,’ says Mrs Stroud. She’s a shrewish woman, even without the irritation of a Walker in her shop. She likes to describe the place as ‘the heart of the village’. Which means that it’s the place where most of the local malice and rumour is collected and disseminated. And she knows that, as the owner of the only shop in the village, she has an audience that needs to keep on her good side and tolerate her mark-ups and nasty tongue, for convenience’s sake.
‘In Malaysia,’ says Bel.
‘Malaysia, eh? What’s that then? A holiday?’
Bel grunts.
‘So, what? Taken your sister, have they?’
Bel sighs. ‘Yes,’ she replies. ‘Half-sister,’ she adds.
‘I’m surprised they didn’t take you then?’ The question is pointed, sharp. How she loves an opportunity to get a dig in at a child.
Bel feels a twinge of irritation. ‘Yeah, well,’ she says. ‘I don’t suppose they did it with you in mind.’
Mrs Stroud takes offence. Offence is her default position. ‘Well!’ she says. ‘No need to speak like that!’
Bel says nothing. Mrs Stroud licks the tip of her tongue and flips a couple of pages, noisily.
‘I can ban you just as easily as I can ban a Walker,’ she bursts out. ‘Don’t think just because you come from the manor that that’ll make a difference.’
Her back turned, Bel rolls her eyes. She turns back to face the shop and gives the old bat a broad smile. ‘Sorry, Mrs Stroud,’ she says, her voice full of oil and honey.