“Would you mind if we came in, Miss Kilbride?” the bloke said, politely enough. He was tall, rangy, bald as an egg. “It might be better to talk about this inside.” He cast a beady eye at the kitchen window, which she’d boarded up, badly.
Laura was already shaking her head. “I don’t think so, no. I don’t think so. I need an appropriate adult, you see, you can’t question me. . . . What’s this about anyway? Is this the guy in the bar because that’s already, you know, in the system. I’ve got a court summons, it’s stuck to my fridge with a magnet. You can see for yourself if you want—no, no, no, hang on. Hang on. That wasn’t an invitation to come in, it’s a figure of speech.”
“Why would you need an appropriate adult, Miss Kilbride?” The other one—about a foot shorter than her colleague, wiry dark hair, small features all crowded together in the middle of her big moon face—raised her monobrow. “You’re not a minor, are you?”
“I’m twenty-five, as well you know,” Laura snapped.
She couldn’t stop them—Egg was already halfway down the hallway, Eyebrow pushing past, saying, “How on earth would we know that?”
“Who started what, Miss Kilbride?” Egg called out. She followed his voice into her kitchen, where he was bent over, hands clasped behind his back, peering at the summons. Laura huffed, loudly, and shuffled over to the sink to get some water. She needed to compose herself. Think. When she turned back to face him he was looking first at her and then over her shoulder, at the window. “Had some trouble?” He raised his eyebrows, innocent-like.
“Not exactly.”
The other one appeared, beetling her brow. “Have you hurt yourself, Laura?” she asked.
Laura drank her water too quickly, coughed, scowled at the woman. “What happened to Miss Kilbride? Eh? We’re mates, now, are we? BFFs?”
“Your leg, Laura.” He was at it too. “How did you hurt it?”
“I was hit by a car when I was a kid. Compound break to the femur. Got a wicked scar,” she said, moving her fingers to the fly of her jeans. She held his eye. “You wanna see it?”
“Not particularly,” he said mildly. “What about your arm?” He indicated with a finger the bandage wrapped around her right wrist. “That didn’t happen when you were a kid.”
Laura bit her lip. “Lost my key, didn’t I? Friday night. Had to break in when I got back.” She jerked her head backward, indicating the kitchen window, which gave onto the exterior walkway running the length of the apartment block. “Didn’t do a very good job.”
“Stitches?”
Laura shook her head. “Wasn’t that bad.”
“Did you find it?” He turned away from her, wandering through the alcove connecting the kitchen to the living room, casting about like he was considering making an offer on the place. Not likely; the flat was a tip. She knew she ought to be ashamed of it, of the cheap furniture and the blank walls and the ashtray on the floor that someone had kicked over, so now there was ash in the carpet and fuck knows how long that had been there because she didn’t even smoke and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d had someone over, but she couldn’t bring herself to care enough.
“Well? Did you?” Eyebrow wrinkled her nose as she took Laura in, head to toe and back again, her baggy jeans, stained T-shirt, chipped nail polish, greasy hair. Sometimes Laura forgot to shower, sometimes for days; sometimes the water was scalding and sometimes it wasn’t hot at all, like now, because the boiler had packed up again and she’d no money to get it fixed and no matter how many times she called the council they still did fuck all.
“Did I what?”
“Find your key,” Eyebrow said, hint of a smile on her lips like she’d caught her out, caught her in a lie. “Did you find your key?”
Laura took a last gulp of water, swallowed, sucked her teeth. Chose to ignore the question. “Do you mind?” she called out to Egg, elbowing her way past Eyebrow in order to follow him.
“Not a bit,” he replied. He was standing in the middle of her living room now, looking at the room’s sole adornment, a framed photograph of a family, parents and a young girl. Someone had gone to the trouble of defacing it, drawing horns on the father’s head and a forked tongue emerging from the mother’s mouth; they’d put x’s over the child’s eyes, colored her lips blood red, before framing it and hanging it. Egg raised his eyebrows and turned to look at her. “Family portrait?” he asked. Laura shrugged. “Dad’s a devil, is he?”