Half Broken Things by Morag Joss

they wouldn’t let me.
    And so what’s different now? You’ve not even got a place to bring it up, have you?
    She remembered, it was called Tommy. Tommy the tortoise. Steph began to cry noisily. He had got run over by a teacher’s car in the playground. That was the kind of thing that upset her now, silly things. Important things, like Stacey, upset her even more. Stacey would be nearly seven now. Seven, and somebody else’s. Steph’s sobs grew louder and more desperate. She had been too young and scared not to go along with what everybody told her to do.
    That’s not my fault, is it? You said you’d get us a flat! And we’re not too young, I’m twenty-three and you’re twenty-one, there’s loads of people our age with kids! Loads! You were meant to be moving out of your mum’s and getting us a place. You said.
    Jace was looking at her crumpled weeping face with scorn, but there was no let-up in the poke-poke of his head nor in the volume of sound. He shouted, ‘You do my head in, you do! Shut up, can’t you!’
    And Steph did, because Jace’s voice was at a dangerous pitch and a whack might follow, even though he was driving. Jace stubbed out his cigarette. He had won that round easily and planned to win the next by changing the subject. ‘I’m out of fucking fags.’
    Steph sniffed and blew her nose. ‘You shouldn’t smoke in front of me, it’s bad for the baby. And I’m not giving this one up, we’re keeping it. You said we’d keep it. You said.’
    Jace turned off the music. The sudden silence rang round the car. He said, ‘Yeah, well, that was a bloody while ago.’
    Steph pulled down her T-shirt again and squirmed as the baby trapped under the too-tight seatbelt wriggled and kicked.
    Â 
    He should not have done it. Michael was perching on the edge of the driver’s seat as lightly as he dared to while driving, as if in some way this would make him less of a load for the afflicted van. He leaned forward, trying to squeeze a little more speed out of it, but actually speed was out of the question. Keeping going, even at twenty miles an hour, was as much as he hoped for now. He should not have done it.
    Maybe it was because of the latest bad time he had just gone through, maybe he had not been thinking straight, but he just had not been ready. In fact, it had been mad to go and do a job like this, the first time he had been out of the flat in weeks, and without thinking about the state of the van, without its even crossing his mind that the vicar would see it and might remember it. In fact he might even have got the number if he had been quick. Michael was not sure. He had been too petrified getting the van started to dare look up the churchyard path to see if the vicar was coming after him. If he had been, Michael thought he would have died of fright, or worse, got out of the van and done something silly to him. Without defining to himself quite what might have lain on the other side, he knew that doing something silly to the vicar would have constituted the irreversible crossing of some line. It was not that he had decided not to cross it, it was just that he had not dared look up the churchyard path. And then the van had started.
    He should not have done it. As he chugged hopelessly along, Michael’s mind raced and churned with self-reproach. That bloody sprint down the path with the stuff bumping up and down in the backpack, that too had been mad. Not classy, like he took a pride in being. The smart, the
classy
bit was the impersonation, the getting-to-know-you thing, then lifting the stuff carefully, perhaps coming back later for it, not grabbing it then and there like some cheap little shoplifter.
Later,
when nobody was likely to be around, when it wouldn’t have mattered even if anybody was because he would be just that visiting curate, popping back again.
That
was classy, if not easy, so why