The Wicked Girls by Alex Marwood Page A

be a doctor one day,’ says Blessed firmly.
    ‘I’m sure.’
    ‘And he’s good with computers.’
    ‘Is he?’ She’s not surprised. Benedick is just the sort of solitary child you’d expect to spend his free hours indoors. ‘Likes
     the internet, does he?’
    ‘Yes,’ says Blessed. ‘I suppose it’s a good thing we don’t have it at home, or I’d never see him.’
    ‘You don’t have the internet? I thought they all used it for their homework these days.’
    ‘He goes to the library for that. They have computers there.’
    ‘You don’t have a
computer
?’
    Blessed shakes her head. ‘He had one, but something called the motherboard died. That’s what they said. Anyway, something
     that can’t be mended, and only one week after the guarantee ran out.’
    ‘Oh, Blessed,’ says Amber, ‘that’s a bummer.’
    ‘I’m saving for a new one,’ says Blessed. ‘Maybe for Christmas. They’re so expensive.’
    ‘Oh, wow,’ says Amber. ‘I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me?’
    Blessed shrugs. Takes up her knitting again.
    ‘Well, it’ll keep him off the porn sites anyway,’ says Maria. ‘My Jordan’s a bugger for those. I can’t go into his room most
     nights, I’m so scared of what I’ll find.’
    Behind her, Jason Murphy punts the ball as it flies towards the goal. It’s a wild shot, and hard. The women watch as it flies
     high and wide over the beach and bounces on the surface of the water.
    ‘Aah,’ says Jackie, and opens another can. ‘Showtime.’

Chapter Eight
    Kirsty looks up at the rusting network of struts and pillars that supports the walkway from the turnstile on the seafront
     to the pier’s end. It’s dark here, dank and smelly – not just the brine-and-fish tang of rotting seaweed, but the fug of generations
     caught short, of picnics half eaten and discarded, of a leaking something pooling beneath the rocks.
    It’s not the nicest town she’s ever been in. But in terms of why she’s been sent here, that’s no bad thing. Her job is to
     find fifteen hundred words of the sort of Sunday feature that makes readers feel better about their own lives. To skim over
     the rides and the ices and the bright animal-shaped inflatables, the exquisite pleasure of chips hot and salty from the packet
     in a stiff sea breeze, the joyous shock of Channel water on naked skin, and show instead the mile upon mile of grey post-war
     prefabs blotched back into the marshland around the estuary, the crumbling plastic fast-food shopfronts, the stressed lives
     of a largely itinerant population whose employment prospects are seasonal, the Georgian façades peering out between plastic
     and neon. To make Balham look balmy in comparison. No town where a killer is on the loose is allowed to be a nice town: it’s
     an unwritten law. If things like this happened in nice towns – the places where people buy Sunday papers and read them – then
     who would be safe?
    And yet, she can’t help liking it. Despite the run-down, ill-stocked shops. Despite the pallor of skins that should be brownfrom seaside living, the fact that there’s not a colour that occurs in nature to be seen on the Corniche. Despite the tears
     on the faces of Hannah Hardy’s hungover friends when they discovered why she’d never made her way back to their static caravan
     last night, despite the fact that everyone here who is over fifteen looks closer to forty, there’s a gaudy, gutsy bravery
     to Whitmouth that she finds surprisingly charming. Part of her, despite the grim nature of the work that brought her here,
     feels like it’s on holiday. She likes Whitmouth and she thinks she likes its people.
    Like the big group fifty feet from where she stands: one of those working-class parties where the women sit together while
     the men play a rough, elbowing game of football with frequent breaks to drink fizzy lager from the can and pass a fat, rough-rolled
     joint between them. The sort of gathering, she reflects, that I