Bad Blood Read Online Free Page B

bad movie, all night. It was the curse she couldn’t escape, the curse that even the shrink she’d been referred to couldn’t lift. She’d stormed out, feeling like a freak show when he told her eagerly that she was going to be the subject of a paper he was writing.
    Marnie walked on, with purpose now, but still glancing at the windows as she passed. A travel agent’s display stopped her short.
    A VisitScotland poster: she recognised that picture, knew the soaring arches and the intricate trefoil windows. The Chapter House, Glenluce Abbey, it said under the picture. It took her back, and for a few minutes she wrestled pointlessly with the intrusive memory.
    They walk in, giggling and pushing. It’s a day out of school, so that’s cool, but Miss Purdy their class teacher is seriously uncool so they’re mucking about. The teaching assistant is taking charge now, though, and Gemma nudges her to shut up.
    He’s got a squint but she’s not going to mention it because her friend fancies him and she doesn’t want to argue with Gemma. He’s boring on now about how there were monks and stuff and it’s mostly a ruin. But then they go into this building, and she’s blown away.
    He uses the word ‘elegant’. She’s only heard it about people before,
and not very often, but she takes it in. It’s like cool, only more. And this place is so elegant it makes her hurt inside when she looks at it: the white walls and the cleanness and the emptiness and the arches that spring upwards and cross each other and then fall like a sort of stone fountain.
    That’s how she wants everything to be and when she gets home she yells at Mum because somehow she can’t bear that everything is messy, but when Mum yells back that she could tidy her room, somehow the beautiful whiteness splinters and disappears and she just sort of forgets about it.
    Until now, when it had been prompted to reappear in high definition. Enough! Sometimes, if she pinched her arm really hard … Yes, success, this time.
    The photograph prompted an odd sort of hunger, a feeling that her senses had been starved for years living in the city. Here in the damp murk she remembered clear fresh air, sparkling water and low green hills under a wide, wide sky – should she go back there, back to Scotland?
    She had left the place as soon as she could. London is the answer for a million runaway Scots kids, and she’d had a bit of luck for once. The man who spotted her at Euston wasn’t a pimp, he was a decent man with daughters of his own. He’d got her a job in a café and she’d never been out of work since.
    After a while there had been Gary, but she couldn’t even hope now that he’d come back because she knew he wouldn’t. The future was a blank sheet and no one could fill it in but herself.
    Maybe it was time to confront the demons whose presence she had long ago taught herself to ignore. She could be in Scotland by tomorrow, ask the questions she’d suppressed all her life, since that night …
    She’s going to have to keep well out of her mother’s way, just stick her head round the sitting-room door to say she’s home—
    No, no, no! She began to run, in the direction of Euston, London’sScottish gateway. Sometimes physical effort helped, but this time it was inexorable, flooding back in its relentless, pointless detail.
    …
She and Gemma had necked a couple of lagers and with Mum like she was, anyway, she could go mental. Mum’s not in the sitting room, though, and so she drops her hat and mask onto one of the chairs
…

    The big kitchen, fitted out in the sort of farmhouse style which no genuine farmhouse has ever aspired to, was ringing with excited squeals as a heavily treacled scone swung from the pulley, with dramatic effect on the eager small boy’s face, T-shirt and ultimately hands as he made increasingly frantic efforts to snatch a bite.
    ‘No, no! We told you, Mikey – no hands!’ his grandfather instructed, holding them behind the