Playing Around Read Online Free

poxy, Bethnal Green backstreet he’d been born in for the rest of his natural. He’d like to see their faces now. He’d rub their sneering, bastard noses right in it.
    ‘Don’t you drive that thing too fast, will you, love?’ Tilly Murray and her daughter Jackie stood on the Cardinal-red doorstep, watching Martin and Angie standing on the other side of the privet hedge, preparing to set off on the Lambretta.
    Jackie was grinning at them in bemusement. Did her big brother actually fancy Angie? She was her best friend, had been ever since she could remember, but
Angie
? Nobody could ever rate her as fanciable, and, as much as she teased her brother, Jackie had to admit Martin was considered something of a catch. It was all very strange.
    While Jackie grinned, Tilly frowned: the concerned mother hen. Rotten scooters, why ever had she let Stan talk her into letting their boy get one in the first place? Bloody deathtraps. You heard such stories.
    ‘Don’t worry, Mum, I’ll take care of her.’ Martin handed Angie a crash helmet, a rarity amongst image conscious mods, with a dramatic flourish. ‘See, look how responsible I am.’
    Tilly flapped her tea towel at her son in surrender and went back indoors to work her way through the mounds of clearing and washing-up that cooking a decent Sunday dinner for her family inevitably seemed to result in.
    Jackie stayed where she was, watching her brother’s every move with a confused fascination, but had she been close enough to notice how Angie was quivering as Martin bent forward to fasten the helmet under her chin, she would have been genuinely amazed.
    Misreading Angie’s excitement for resistance, Martin whispered to her, ‘Don’t worry, Squirt, I know it’s a bit big, but I’ll stop round the corner and you can take it off again.’ He winked conspiratorially. ‘Don’t want to mess up your hair, now, do we?’
    Angie suddenly visualized what a shocking state her greasy brown hair, only partly dragged back in an elastic band, was in and what it must look like poking out from under the helmet. She snatched a crafty look at herself in one of Martin’s long-stemmed side mirrors.
    She looked ridiculous.
    Why hadn’t she washed it this morning?
    Why? Because her mum never had any change for the gas meter, that’s why, and any change Angie might have had in her purse would have disappeared, as usual, and boiling up kettles and saucepans to fill the plastic washing-up bowl in the sink took time, and all Angie could think of that morning was getting out of the house as soon as she could, and then—
    ‘You all right?’
    ‘Sorry?’
    Martin zipped up his parka. ‘You looked like you were about to pass out. Not that frightening, am I?’
    As she shook her head, vigorously denying such a preposterous idea, the loose helmet slipped round.
    Stopped only by her nose from covering her entire face, it still managed to completely cover one eye. Forget frightened, he must think she was a moron.
    Why couldn’t the ground just swallow her up and let her disappear?
    ‘Here, you daft doughnut, come here.’ Gently, he put the helmet back in place, then threw his leg across the scooter, and twisted round to help her on behind him. ‘Good job you don’t wear miniskirts, eh, Squirt?’
    This was getting worse. Not only did her hair look a complete mess, she was now all too aware that she was wearing her old, brown, corduroy slacks, the ones her mum said made her look like a refugee from the Land Army – whatever that was – and here she was about to get a lift from Martin. Martin! With his scooter, with all the chrome, the big, waving aerial with its foxtail flying out behind, the latest, long-stemmed, shiny mirrors, and, most of all, him, with his brains, his mod haircut, and looking just completely, totally, gorgeous in his parka. What was she – what was he – thinking of?
    ‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
    ‘Too much roly-poly, Ange?’ shouted Jackie with an