‘Yes,’ said Angel, wondering why the hell she was giving him the time of day. He was part of the enemy, the ones who had left Dora to rot. ‘He’s a very nice man,’ she lied.

Uncle Donny was handsome but cold. He made all the right moves, but it was as if he had learned them by rote. To Angel’s mind, he kept Dora on a tight leash. He kept her poor – Angel knew damned well that Dora had never seen a penny she earned from the stripping – and he humiliated her for fun. He was a bastard. But none of that was Tommy’s business.

‘Been with her a long time, we heard.’

‘Yes.’ Since I was little. Uncle Donny had been part of Angel’s life for so long that he was a fixture. And wasn’t that an insult to her mother? Any decent man would surely have married Dora by now, steadied her down. Raised a proper family with her. Instead, Donny came in at all hours and stayed when he wanted, vanished when he didn’t. He dragged Dora off to the cemetery every Sunday to lay flowers on his family’s graves, and Dora hated cemeteries, she cried and asked not to go every week, but he always made her. Angel didn’t like that. She didn’t like him.

‘She doesn’t know, then,’ said Tommy.

Angel stopped in her tracks. ‘Look, can you take the hint and bugger off?’ she snapped.

Tommy was looking at her face. ‘She doesn’t know. Does she?’

‘Know what?’ Angel demanded, beyond irritated now.

‘The copper. She don’t know he’s a married man.’

79

Angel fretted about what Tommy had said all the way home and when she got indoors there Dora was, dead to the world as usual. A lit cigarette had fallen from her mouth and burned a hole in the couch before sputtering out. One of these days Dora was going to do that and the damned cigarette wasn’t going to go out, it was going to keep right on burning, Dora would set light to herself and the whole place would go up in a blaze of glory.

Carefully Angel picked up the cigarette, the tumbler, the half-empty bottle of vodka and took them into the kitchen. Donny kept her mum – and her – short of money, but somehow Dora always found enough in the drawer to get pissy-arsed drunk a lot of the time.

‘That you, Angel?’ Dora’s quavering voice drifted through after her.

‘Yeah, Mum,’ said Angel, running water into the sink and splashing in washing-up liquid. The draining board was still piled high with this morning’s breakfast things. What the hell had her mother been doing all day? But she knew the answer to that. Drowning in misery. Drinking. Lying there until she passed out and nearly burned herself to death.

Christ, I can’t tell her – can I?

‘All right then, darlin’?’ Dora came unsteadily into the tiny kitchenette and hugged Angel. Angel recoiled from Dora’s booze-laden breath. She started rinsing plates and slapping them onto the draining board.