Moderate Violence Read Online Free Page A

kitchen door.
She looked pale, the mark on her cheekbone showing dark. Her hair was
separating into strands and her shoulders were hunched. “Sit up straight ,” Tess was forever saying, with
that funny ‘r’ sound that came from speaking French when she was a child, “or
you’ll grow up to be uglier than the Hunchback of Notre Dame, and he was ugly .”
    “Actually,” she said, cradling her mug, “it’s that or
begging on Victoria Station.”
    Trevor had stopped listening. He’d taken his feet off
the table and picked up Blod, the tortoiseshell cat Tess had rescued then
neglected. “Come on, let’s get you fed, shall we?” He opened a can and put some
food in Blod’s bowl. Then he picked up his keys and jingled them on his palm. “You
know, love, I was bloody angry yesterday. I thought the world had come to a
freakin’ end, losing my job. They think I’ve got a drink problem, see. But then
I was on the phone to Granny Probert last night and she said Mord was still
open to offers, and it would be great if I could come back to Wales and be near
her and Dad, and I thought, why not? So things aren’t so bad after all.” He
gave Jo the lopsided look he thought was charming, and jingled the keys again. “Think
I’ll have a walk and buy the newspaper. What are you going to do with your
Saturday?”
    Jo began to clear the table. Granny Probert, she
thought, should keep her mouth shut. “My interview’s today,” she said.
    They looked at each other. Trevor’s face was blank.
    “I told you,” said Jo. “It’s in a shop. They want
someone for the summer, then maybe permanently.”
    “What sort of shop?”
    “I told you. A clothes shop.”
    “What about your exams?”
    “It’ll only be on Saturdays until afterthe exams. Then all week during the
summer. But the interviews are today.”
    He opened the kitchen door.
    “What time’s your interview?”
    “Eleven thirty.” Jo looked at the clock on the cooker. It
was already five past ten.
    Trevor took his jacket off the rack in the hall. “Well,
good luck, then.” Unexpectedly, he squinted at her. “What have you done to your
face?”
    “Walked into a rose bush.”
    “A rose bush ?”
    Jo was ready for this. Trevor hadn’t consciously seen
her yesterday. “It was sticking out from someone’s stupid garden, and scratched
me as I walked past on the way back from the bus stop. It bloody hurt, I can
tell you.”
    Trevor grinned. “Try not to get tetanus.”
    “Thanks for the sympathy.”
    “See you later, then.”
    The front door crashed behind him. Jo topped up her mug
of tea and took it upstairs. After her shower she dried her hair, trying to
push it up a bit so that it looked like there was some air between it and her
scalp. But it just wrapped itself round her head and neck as flatly as a scarf.
Whoever interviewed her would wonder whether that branch of Rose and Reed could
risk giving a job to a girl with a scab on her cheek and such disappointingly
dull hair. Dull hair, dull brain, dull personality.
    At least her jeans were clean, and she had one unworn
top left in the drawer. Once it was on and she’d done her eyeliner and put
concealer on her cheek she felt better. She even dug out a pair of earrings and
a belt that roughly matched the top, and put on her jacket with the stand-up
collar that kind of pushed the bottom of her hair up. The top of her hair just
sat there as usual, though.
    On the bus she re-read the letter. It wasn’t very
businesslike, even though it had the shop’s familiar Rose and Reed logo at the
top, with the two capital Rs entwined. It was printed in bright blue ink except
for ‘Dear Miss Probert’, which was in untidy round handwriting. It was
obviously a standard letter sent to all the candidates, of which there would be
hundreds. Five pounds an hour. For a Saturday, forty pounds. For six weeks in
the summer, over two hundred pounds a week. It was more money than Jo could
envisage.
    She thought about how long an