Aysha hadn’t seen the red flag flying for two months now. Soon, she was going to have to tell her mother, and that was going to be hard. Even harder? Her father. He was going to be mad as hell and even more disappointed in her than he normally seemed to be. She was the one who was going to have to face the music on this, and here was Joey, acting like a twat, like it was all about him.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ said Joey, and kicked a tin can across the road in fury. ‘Then bloody do the test, will you? Hurry up, this is fucking killing me.’

Aysha went to the chemist. Hoping against hope, she did the test. It was positive.

‘I’m sorry, Joey,’ she said when she told him later in the day that it was confirmed. Then wondered why the fuck she was apologizing, because he was responsible for this, not her. She felt tears fill her eyes.

‘No, hey . . .’ He was patting her shoulder, alarmed by the onset of tears. ‘This is my fault. I should have taken better care of you, I see that.’

This would be one in the eye for fucking Connor Flynn, thought Joey.

In fact – now he’d had the chance to cool down a little, to just take it all in – he thought that this could all work out just fine.

‘What are we going to do?’ asked Aysha.

‘Simple,’ said Joey with the dazzling grin that always melted her heart. ‘We’ll get married.’

81

81

The job fell into Suki’s lap. She was amazed – she’d seen the calibre of women working at Sylvester’s – and she felt at once triumphant and anxious as she stared at the letter of acceptance that came not a week after she’d gone to the club.

For days she’d chewed over what Donna had told her, about Claire owning the joint. Maybe Claire came from a wealthy family, and the business was in their blood. Maybe she’d got pregnant outside wedlock and her well-to-do folks had been appalled and prompted her to give the baby away. Suki wondered what she would do, in the same situation. But really she already knew the answer to that. She would keep her baby, if it took her last breath to do so. No way would she ever abandon her child, like Claire had done to her.

Or maybe Claire was a hard-faced career woman. She ran the club, after all. Maybe that was it. She’d got herself pregnant and that had been inconvenient, not part of her plan, so she’d jettisoned her daughter like so much flotsam.

Christ, who knows?

Suki was wearing herself out playing guessing games, and in the end she just had to shut down. When she actually met the bitch, when she confronted her, then she would get her answers.