The Girls Read Online Free PDF Page B

coming. Please!’
    ‘It doesn’t sound like it.’
    ‘Oh. Jesus Christ. Why not!’
    ‘I don’t know. He didn’t say. There were tannoys going off in the background and I just wanted to get him off the phone before he asked me to come and pick him up.’
    It was six forty-eight. The girls were in the living room with their new friends from the garden, the tall sisters with the curly hair. Dinner was almost ready. She’d intended to invite the two sisters to stay. The five girls seemed to be getting on so well together and it was the first night of the May half-term and the evening air was warm around the edges and the sky was still blue and she’d been going to suggest they could put on a movie after dinner and have a kind of sleepover without the sleepover. But now she’d have to ask the sisters to leave, they’d all have to scoff down their supper and then be on best behaviour for the arrival of the man the girls called Puppy, although he was far from adorable. She’d have to clear out the spare room of all her teaching stuff and find fresh towels and, oh God , send someone out for cows’ milk because he wouldn’t countenance the almond milk they drank at home, and some white bread because he claimed bread with bits in it was a pneumonia risk.
    Gordon Howes.
    Horrible old pervert.
    His first words to her had been, ‘Your cups runneth over, young lady,’ as he peered down her dress and into her cleavage. He was a handsome man, taller then than Leo with the same head of thick dark hair and chocolatey eyes. But even back then, when he was still only in his fifties, he’d had the porous red nose and rheumy eyes of the heavy spirit drinker and the swollen overhanging belly of a man who enjoyed rich late-night suppers in fabled London restaurants where the staff knew him by name. He had diabetes now and apparently his feet looked like rotten cauliflowers. But in his time he had been a force of nature, a sex-fuelled party animal and carouser. His reputation still lived on in the garden. ‘Oh, Gordon ,’ people would say and then regale her with some terrible tale of breast-fumbling or skirt-lifting or bum-cupping. And according to this reportage, age hadn’t been much of a barrier to Gordon’s attentions. Fifteen or fifty. It didn’t seem to matter as long as there was something to grab hold of.
    And now here was Adele, forcing a five-pound note into her eldest daughter’s hand, saying, ‘Go, quickly, you need to get Puppy some milk and some bread. And, oh’ – even though he didn’t need it, did not deserve it – ‘one of those Mr Kipling chocolate-cake things he likes, you know, with all the layers.’ She’d seen him devour a whole one of those in an evening last time he was here. Every ten minutes or so, stretching himself from the sofa, as if about to go somewhere; Adele or Leo saying, ‘Everything OK? Can I get you something?’ And Gordon, crumbs of cake still embedded in the cracks around his mouth, saying, ‘Thought I might just sneak another bit of that delicious cake.’
    ‘We’re killing him,’ Adele had whispered loudly to Leo in the kitchen as they slid the last slice of cake off its cardboard bottom and on to Gordon’s plate.
    ‘Yes,’ Leo had whispered back. ‘I know.’
    A taxi drew up on the kerb beyond their front door exactly an hour from Gordon’s phone call. They all glanced at each other in panic, all apart from Willow who had no truck with her Puppy and couldn’t understand why everyone else was getting so worked up. The taxi’s engine rattled and banged, matching Adele’s heart rate, then there was the sound of the taxi door being slammed shut, a cheery farewell from the taxi driver (for all his many faults Gordon was an excellent tipper) and the ominous rumble of suitcase wheels up the front path. Nobody moved until the doorbell rang.
    ‘Hello, Dad.’
    ‘Hello, hello. Christ. Hello.’
    Adele pasted on a smile and popped her head around the kitchen door into