LITMIR.BIZ

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could stop feeling guilty about leading Steve a dance she enjoyed herself immensely.

      When the two girls had first come to England and explained they were cousins, the office staff had tried to work it so their free time co-ordinated. As they had each other, they didn’t need to make deep friendships with the others, though they liked them well enough, and Lizzie knew that if she hadn’t had Steve she’d have been a lot lonelier.

      However, she didn’t think that was a good enough reason to go out with someone, but Steve seemed happy with it. What he wasn’t happy with was the way he’d got no further than a kiss on the lips, linking arms as they walked along the street and holding hands in the cinema.

      He knew Mike was getting much further with Tressa, because Mike had told him, boasted of it even. Lizzie knew it too, but she wasn’t going down that road with a man she was dating almost as a convenience. So, when Steve asked her to go again to tea, she hesitated. She had no desire to go near the place, but she pleased Steve in so very little and he was incredibly generous buying drinks, dinners and tickets for the threatre or cinema with money he near sweated blood for. ‘Won’t they think…I mean we’re not a committed couple, are we?’

      ‘Who gives a sod what they think?’

      ‘Well you must. They are your family and they don’t seem to have taken to me at all. Not that that matters, except that I don’t know why you want me there.’

      ‘I just do,’ Steve said obstinately. ‘And it would please me if you came. They will behave better this time, I guarantee it. I’ve warned them all.’

      Against her better judgement Lizzie went, and she found the atmosphere much as before. This time, in an attempt to stop Flo extolling the virtues of Steve, she tried to get to know his brother Neil. She didn’t like him much, for he’d been surly and barely polite at their first meeting and he hadn’t improved. But, she excused him. Surely such blatant favouritism of the first-born, who already had everything going for him, would affect anyone?

      She knew Neil hadn’t gone into the brass industry like his father and brother, but had been taken on as an apprentice in a bespoke tailors’ in the Bull Ring. Steve had told her that and said it was a bone of contention in the family, but after the tea, which had been eaten in almost total silence, Lizzie asked Neil about his job. ‘We can make up a suit, with a waistcoat thrown in, for thirty bob,’ Neil said with a hint of pride. ‘You wouldn’t get me near brass. Makes old men out of young ones. You should see the state of this pair when they gets in of a night.’

      ‘It’s a living, ain’t it?’ Rodney growled.

      ‘Some living.’

      ‘You ungrateful sod!’ Rodney exploded. ‘Many of the barefoot, bare-arsed and starving kids around these doors would have been glad of their fathers working any damned place, and most of the poor buggers out of work that cluster on the street corners would give their right arms to earn half as much as me. You don’t get that kind of money sitting on your arse stitching clothes for toffs.’

      ‘Yeah,’ Steve put in. ‘Just how much do you put into the house, our kid?’

      ‘I know I don’t earn much yet,’ Neil said, ‘but when I finish my apprenticeship in two years I’ll be on a good enough wack.’

      ‘You mind they don’t finish you then,’ Rodney warned. ‘Happens in the factories all the time, and the bloody shipyards.’

      ‘They won’t.’

      ‘You’re sure of yourself,’ Steve said. ‘I hope you’re right. Sometimes you haven’t money to bless yourself with, never mind give a woman a good time.’ He put his arm around Lizzie, who was by his side. She didn’t shake him off, she wouldn’t shame him that way before his family, but she did wish she’d never started the conversation that had developed into these heated words. In fact, if she was totally honest, she wished she’d never set eyes on Steve Gillespie and his dysfunctional family at all.

      ‘Give a woman a good time,’ Neil said sarcastically. ‘I know what manner of good time you like to give a woman. Maybe some of us are more choosy and like to keep it in their trousers more.’

      Flo clouted Neil on the side of the head. ‘Less of that dirty talk.’

      Neil looked across the room where Lizzie stood, her face crimson. ‘Dirty talk, Mom, dirty talk!’ he cried scornfully. ‘Why don’t you complain about the dirty deeds your sainted son gets up to.’

      ‘Shut your mouth!’ Lizzie felt the anger flooding through Steve, so even the arm he had around her shoulders trembled slightly and she saw the whitening of his fisted knuckles.

      Neil ignored his brother and, addressing himself to Lizzie, said, ‘See, our Steve here likes variety, goes down the streets like a dose of salts, sampling them all.’

      ‘I said, shut your gob, or by Christ I’ll shut it for you.’

      Lizzie put a hand on Steve’s arm and said gently, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ But Steve could tell by Neil’s sly eyes what he was going to say next unless he put a stop to it. He and Mike both had very high sex drives and when between girlfriends, or going out with girls that gave them little sexual satisfaction, or perhaps just for a change, they often frequented places where they could pick up a woman of the night. They never considered it a problem and it meant they didn’t have to force the girls they were dating to go further than they wanted to.

      Often, after Steve left Lizzie he’d be so worked up that he’d be forced to seek solace elsewhere. How had Neil found that out? Steve did not know, but he saw Neil knew all right: he could see it in the little shit’s eyes. He also knew that if Lizzie was made aware of it, he’d never get near her again.

      Neil smiled at his brother. It was good seeing him squirm for a change. ‘Lizzie has a right to know what she’s taking on,’ he said. ‘Does she know, for example, that some of the women…’

      Steve had dropped his arm from Lizzie’s shoulder and was across the room in an instant. He almost lifted Neil from the floor with his left arm, while his right fist powered into Neil’s face.

      Lizzie watched, horrified. No one seemed surprised or went to the aid of the boy, who slid down the wall as Steve released him. Neil’s mouth and nose spurted blood and Lizzie noticed that one of his teeth had been knocked clean out.

      Flo, with a sigh, crossed to the fire and filled a bowl from the kettle to the side of it, got a clean rag from the line above the hearth and carried it over to Neil. ‘You asked for that,’ she said as she handed it to him. ‘Why couldn’t you stay quiet when you had the chance?’

      ‘Why should I?’ Neil’s words were slurred because of his thick lips but his eyes still held contempt. ‘Just because big brother says so?’

      ‘If you want more of the same, I’m willing to oblige,’ Steve growled out. ‘Only this time I’ll not stop at one punch, you little shit. I’ll beat you to pulp.’

      Lizzie crossed to Steve. ‘Please, don’t fight any more.’

      She was totally shocked. The angry, hate-filled words had been bad enough, but fighting! And yet the family took it almost as a matter of course, so much so that Rodney hadn’t even raised his head from where he sat, staring into the fire.

      Steve looked at Lizzie and regretted she’d seen any of this. ‘Get your coat,’ he snapped.

      ‘What?’

      ‘Are you deaf? Get your coat!’

      Lizzie hurried to obey him. She knew it wasn’t her that Steve was so cross with, but she was still unnerved by the angry, curt way he had spoken.

      They walked side by side in silence, Lizzie knowing anything she said would be wrong. She didn’t care about Steve’s past, she didn’t really care about his future either, because she wasn’t going to figure in it. This had decided her. She’d dallied long enough and really had made a monkey of the man, and the sooner she came clean

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