Trick or Treat Read Online Free Page B

squashed against the roughness of his donkey jacket.
    â€˜Oh Rodney!’ Nell pulls away from him, pleased and cross, rearranging her hair with her fingers. ‘I expect you’re after a cup of tea? Well that’s all you’ll get this morning. I’m all upside-down. Won’t get to shops till after dinner if I stop now.’ She fills the kettle.
    Rodney sits down at the table, starts flicking through the Mail .
    â€˜Well take your coat off, our Rodney, if you’re staying for a bit,’ Nell says. Rodney is her pleasure and her shame. He is her own, her only flesh and blood and he isn’t a bad son. Since he’s been free he’s been coming to see her three or four times a week. He’s a good boy like that, not neglectful. And now that Jim has passed on she gets lonely. He is a dutiful boy. But he is not a boy. Perhaps it would be all right if he was, but he is nearing fifty and his hair is grey and thinning on top, and he has no job and never even seems to look. He lives in a hostel, a place for people like him who have been inside. Nell visited once, but only once. She found it a sordid, peeling place. She hardly liked to breathe the stale old-smoky air while she was there, let alone touch anything or sit on the greasy chair that was offered in the reception room. No, far better she stay away and Rodney visit her here where at least it is clean. Fancy Nell having a criminal for a son! She can never get used to the idea. But then that is all behind him now, touch wood. She presses her fingers fervently against the Formica front of the cutlery drawer. It is shameful to have a son with badness in him, and Nell has no illusions about him, no secret hope that none of it was true. She knows he was bad and simply hopes that he has learnt his lesson, that he is bad no more. And anyway, Rodney is God’s will, she thinks, puzzled and resigned, putting his cup of tea down in front of him.
    â€˜You didn’t call round last night?’ she asks. ‘Only I wouldn’t have answered.’
    â€˜Oh, what were you up to?’
    â€˜Nothing. I locked the door against … against Hallowe’en. You get all sorts round these days, knocking, begging, so I locked the door. Better safe than sorry I say, only it did occur to me that you might have called.’
    â€˜No. He stayed put last night. Skint. Watched a film on the box, about an ice skater.’
    Nell wipes her hands on her apron and sits down opposite him. It annoys her the way he does that, always an alibi on the tip of his tongue, slick as you like.
    â€˜You don’t have to explain yourself to me, our Rodney. A grown man.’
    Rodney slurps his tea. ‘Anything want doing now he’s here?’
    â€˜You can take the bins round the front, save the binmen coming down the passage in their filthy boots. What are you doing later?’
    â€˜He’s going up the post office to cash his giro and then he’s off to town. He’ll read the papers in the library. He’ll have a pint for his dinner.’
    Nell shakes her head. It seems such a terrible waste. He spends all his days like that since he’s been out: sitting in the reference library reading the papers; sitting in the pub; sitting in her kitchen drinking tea; sitting anywhere where he can soak up a bit of warmth for free. And he was such a bright lad, such an adorable boy. Now his face is dull and whiskery. His eyes, once so big and blue that women cooed into his pram and swore he’d be a stealer of hearts, are bloodshot now and shifty, hidden behind the thick and smeary lenses of his black-rimmed spectacles. He has a sour, unhealthy smell. He makes her kitchen reek of his filthy hostel. Hard to remember the milky sweetness of his baby self, and how she used to bury her nose in the soft skin at the back of his neck when he was warm and fragrant from his bath.
    â€˜Well it’s all right for some,’ she says. ‘I only wish