A Nice Place to Die by Jane Mcloughlin Page B

intend to fall for that. I’ll have a ball while I’m young, and to hell with what happens after that, the bloody state can provide. It’s like Nicky Byrne says: ‘better dead than decrepit’.
    Jess was sitting on the wall outside the house texting Mark Pearson on her mobile phone. There was no point trying to talk to him, she wouldn’t hear what he was saying because her brother Kevin had turned up the volume on the radio in Alan’s car, which was parked on the drive.
    Jess glared defiantly at Kevin, who was lying on his back next to the car working on the underside of his motorbike. He’d messed up her life. He was her half-brother, for God’s sake, they were family. All he’d ever done for her was make her pregnant with the child she’d never wanted.
    He caught her one night about a year and a half ago when she was drunk in a local disco. She’d had far too many vodkas and a few too many pills and she’d been throwing up in a dark corner, but she was ready for love. He’d taken her round the back of the supermarket and pushed her down on a heap of black plastic bags full of refuse and she wouldn’t have been able to stop him even if she’d wanted to. Afterwards she thought better of it. He was almost her brother, he was supposed to look out for her.
    She was thirteen and a half then. It wasn’t the first time she’d done it with a boy, but Kevin was family and it was different with someone nearly eighteen and your own half-brother. Of course, that made it more exciting. She hadn’t thought much about it at the time, apart from it being different because they were sort of blood. She never thought she could fall pregnant when it was between family.
    Some time later her best friend at school started on about her getting so fat she looked like she was going to have a baby. Jess told her to piss off but she went to a doctor to get some pills to help her lose weight. He told her she was already six months gone. He also told her it was far too late to do anything about it.
    â€˜Bastard,’ she said aloud, meaning Kevin but not quite daring to say it to his face. If Kevin knew she was texting Mark he’d break her mobile for her. She put the phone in her pocket and scowled at Kevin, or rather at the soles of his trainers where he was lying flat on his back messing about with his motorbike. Maybe he was family but that didn’t stop her being scared of him. It was all right if he was in a good mood but when he wasn’t he was a right bastard.
    He never actually said the kid wasn’t his, but that was it. Jess wasn’t even sure if he knew the child’s name; if he did he never called her by it. Jess’s mother was the one who’d called her Kylie. Jess couldn’t be bothered deciding on a name. There wasn’t much point trying to talk to Kylie anyway, all she did was cry. What pissed Jess off was the way Kevin could get away with having nothing to do with the kid, but she couldn’t. That one stupid exciting night had spoiled everything for her forever, and for him it was as though it’d never happened. He’d never touched her after that, either, even though for quite a long time she wouldn’t have minded.
    At least Mark couldn’t get enough of her. That was fine, but for her it wasn’t like it had been with Kevin. The most exciting thing about sex with Mark was knowing how angry their two families would be if they knew what was going on. Jess didn’t understand or care why the toffee-nosed people from the old village hated the Catcombe Mead incomers so much. But she knew why the people from the new housing estate hated the original villagers. She hated them too, as did Donna and Alan and Kevin and everyone else.
    They were almost all old, for one thing. They lived differently, they looked and talked differently. They always had really dirty hands from doing primitive things with them. They