Fighting Back by Cathy MacPhail

to Ming.
    He only giggled. ‘Och, he’s not so bad, Tommy. He’s good with the pocket money.’
    ‘Where is your mother?’ Sandra asked for the third time. I think she was getting a wee bit fed up waiting for her. She and Mum were now on talking terms. But friendly? I don’t think they would ever stretch to that.
    ‘She’ll be here in a minute, Mrs Ramsay.’ I had been saying the same thing for the past fifteen minutes. What was keeping my mum?
    ‘Maybe she’s changing into something more comfortable,’ Ming suggested in a whisper. He laughed. ‘A human being, for instance.’
    In spite of everything that had happened, Mum wasstill getting on everybody’s nerves. Ali had given her a job in his shop, though how long it would last was anybody’s guess. She would refuse to serve anyone who didn’t ask for what they wanted in perfect English.
    ‘I think I was sent here for a purpose, Kerry,’ she told me, as if she was Mother Teresa of Calcutta.
    Everybody else thought the purpose was to drive people up the wall.
    I still had high hopes that Ali fancied her. Half the estate hoped so too. They saw it as a way of getting rid of her.
    Because we weren’t moving. Not yet, anyway.
    Just when everyone on the estate was ready to bring out the banners and wave us goodbye, Mum had discovered that someone had died in the other flat too.
    ‘I mean, Kerry!’ she had told me, disgusted. ‘Is that all they ever offer us?’
    Funny. I didn’t mind staying. Not now. Not with the Laffertys gone.
    And gone for good.
    The Laffertys were finished.
    For a while, I had thought Ma Lafferty would come back and begin her reign of terror again. However, at the same time as she had been holding my mother inthe laundrette, others on the estate had taken advantage of her empty house and ransacked it. The stack of benefits books she had taken from people who owed her had been left for the police to find, and had led to more charges against her. But, more important, Ma Lafferty’s little black book, the one with all the names of the people who owed her money, had disappeared, and along with it her power on the estate.
    She was gone, her and Tess, all of them. And it was as if the estate breathed again.
    While she awaited trial, Ma Lafferty was being temporarily rehoused far from here. Soon Tess Lafferty would be like me, a young girl moving to a new area with her mother. I hoped she fared better than I had.
    ‘What on earth is keeping her!’ Sandra brought me back to reality.
    ‘You did say she could bring a friend,’ I reminded her.
    Ming nudged me. ‘I didn’t think your mother had any.’
    At last the doorbell chimed. ‘She’s here.’ I leapt to my feet. I wondered who her friend was too. She had refused to tell me.
    I would never have guessed who it was. Not in a million years.
    Mum looked really pretty. She’d had her hair highlighted and she was wearing a new dress.
    And with her … ?
    Sergeant Maitland!
    It was the first time I’d seen him out of uniform and he looked rather handsome.
    ‘Hi, Kerry, Ming,’ he said, quite casually.
    Mum was looking up at him in a way I’d only ever seen her looking at Dad, or a photo of Harrison Ford. And they brushed past us and went into the living-room.
    I was amazed. I didn’t even think he liked Mum.
    ‘Bet you’re glad it wasn’t the other one,’ Ming said.
    ‘What other one?’ I snapped.
    ‘You fancied the blond.’
    ‘I did not!’
    ‘You did so! See that stupid expression your mother’s got? Well, that’s the expression you had on your face every time he appeared!’
    ‘Take that back!’
    He put his hands on his hips. ‘Make me. ’Mon, just make me!’
    ‘Think I couldn’t?’
    Suddenly a voice bellowed from the living-room.
    ‘Are you two ever going to stop fighting?’
    I looked at Ming and grinned. And together we shouted back.
    ‘Never!’

Also by Cathy MacPhail
    Run, Zan, Run
    Missing
    Bad Company
    Dark Waters
    Another Me
    Underworld
    Roxy’s