Wasted Years Read Online Free Page A

Hawaiian a speciality. Darren had made the mistake of having one once. Pineapple chunks that stuck in your throat like gobbets of vomit: ground beef and gristle a dog wouldn’t cock its leg to piss on.
    Before that, what? A Chinese chippy. Paki sweet shop. When he was a kid, one of them bakers where they sold stale cobs in bags of three, half price, the morning after—cheese and onion or turkey breast or haslet with a touch of Branston pickle.
    Across the street the Co-op offices had been bulldozed flat to make way for a spanking new DIY superstore—three floors of wallpaper, fake Formica, and self-assembly kitchen units that fell apart faster than you could screw them together. Darren had got a job there once, sixteen, humping great boxes about the back, ten quid and callouses at the end of the day, no tax, no questions asked. That had been before he had the good fortune to get himself nicked and sent away: before he had learned there were easier ways to make a living.
    Now there were signs plastered across the superstore windows— Everything at Half-Price — Must Go — Closing Down. The pizza place was boarded up: fly posters for Soul II Soul and Springsteen and The Fabulous Supremes LIVE at Ritzy’s torn and graffitied over. In the doorway, cardboard boxes and a nest of rags: somebody’s home.
    Out of the remaining six shops set back from the street, only three were still in business. A newsagent’s with metal grilles at its windows, a sign— No More Than Two Schoolchildren At Any One Time —taped to its door. A factory textile shop, direct from the makers to you, cut out the middle man, sold tea towels and shirts with little to tell the difference between them. Between those two, a sub-office of the Amber Valley Building Society, closed for lunch between twelve forty-five and two.
    It was now almost a quarter past.
    Darren looked across at the door, open sign hanging down; half a mind to go in on his own, get the business done. But then what? Legging it down the main road, sack on his back?
    He was flexing the fingers of his right hand when the blue Orion slipped into sight and eased towards the curb, Keith’s face just visible in the lower half of the windscreen.
    “What happened to you? Go by McDonald’s for a Big Mac and a chocolate shake?”
    “Chicken McNuggets.”
    Darren had hold of the front of Keith’s T-shirt, like to choke him, before he realized it was a joke.
    “Anyone go in yet?” Keith asked, once Darren had let him go.
    Darren shook his head. They had watched the office carefully the past three days; not once had they had a customer between reopening after lunch and twenty minutes past the hour. It was now two seventeen.
    “Why don’t I dump the car?” Keith suggested. “Try again tomorrow.”
    “Like fuck we will!”
    Keith shrugged, not about to argue. He knew that tone in Darren’s voice all too well; had seen him break a glass in a youth’s face once, just for asking him was he sure he didn’t have a light?
    “The talking,” Darren said. They were crossing the patch of bricked-off earth in front of the shops, stepping between the dog turds.
    “What about it?”
    “Leave it to me.”
    Keith nodded: as if he needed telling.
    Lorna willed herself not to turn her head towards the clock, up there on the wall between the aerial photograph of the High Peak and a poster advertising High-Yield Tessa returns. This was the part of the day that always dragged, right from when she got back after having her packet of Slimma Chicken and Vegetable soup for lunch, two pieces of Swedish crispbread with just a scraping of extra lowfat margarine, from there through to tea, four or four fifteen, Marjorie fretting over the kettle, leaving the tea bag in too long, shaking a tin of custard creams under her nose no matter how many times Lorna pursed her lips and waved them away.
    Marjorie back there now with Becca, practically fawning over her, turned Lorna’s stomach, that’s what it did. Becca