‘Right, are we done yapping yet?’ he said. ‘You’re starting to annoy me.’

‘Yeah,’ she managed. ‘Sorry. I’ll go down and fetch it now.’

‘Good. Same time tomorrow, then.’

‘OK.’

A loud click in her ear and he was gone.

*

For a short time, she’d convinced herself that she was free of him. Those first six months in borstal, not a letter, not a word, had given her the notion that he wasn’t thinking of her – perhaps he didn’t even know where she’d been sent. She hadn’t written to a soul except her brother, who kept writing back with cheerful news of books he’d read and friendships he was making with the other boys. Meanwhile, she’d slogged through her duties in the ordinary grade: cleaning floors and ironing and laundering, drills on the parade ground after dawn, cooking lessons and arithmetic. Hobby hours spent watercolour painting and embroidering – stuff they reckoned would prepare a woman for an honest life outside and make her happy. It seemed to her they’d got it backwards. They were training her for service as a wife, a housekeeper, a factory hand, which was everything that girls like her went thieving to avoid. What they should’ve done was teach her what her brother got to learn at Huntercombe: carpentry, mechanics, bricklaying and such. If they’d given her a chance to take a draughtsman’s class like him, she’d would’ve understood the proper way to use a T-square long before she got to working for the Mayhoods and she wouldn’t be the only person in the house who couldn’t get a simple elevation right. She’d been good at watercolour painting in those hobby hours, which she put down to an inheritance from her father, given how he’d made his living with a brush – there were shopfronts all round Kent that bore his careful handiwork. Cartoons of the trees and birds and flowers, little scenes with people in them – she’d do these for fun sometimes. But architecture was so technical and stuffy and she couldn’t get accustomed to it.

Anyway, the longer that Mal’s silence had continued, the more she’d hoped that he’d forgotten her. Perhaps he’d got in bother with the law himself, or somebody he owed. She’d passed the hours in her dormitory at night, imagining his ending. Throat slit in a doorway by a fence he’d cheated. Body thrown into the Medway by some young girl’s father. Skull crushed by the hooves of a police horse. But then, one morning of her seventh month at Aylesbury, she’d received an envelope addressed in a dull scribble. Mal had written very little:

Dear Joy

I bet your sick of borstal grub allready arent you but you got off easy as I see it. Keep your chin up and your mouth shut youll do fine. Dont be a stranger.

M

Once that old connection was restored, the charge it carried was as strong as ever. She couldn’t say that she was cursed with an obedient nature, but, for Mal, she had a heart of putty.