To Kill For by Phillip Hunter Page B

gasp at a dress or piece of jewellery in some posh shop window, dragging me by the arm and saying things like ‘Look, Joe, isn’t it beautiful’ and ‘Look how expensive it is’ and stuff like that.
    When she saw Liberty’s, she pulled me towards it.
    â€˜I came here once, years ago. They have such lovely cloth. You should see it.’
    I saw it. It was cloth, alright. The place was still open so we went inside. It smelled sweet with all the soaps and scents. It made my nose itch. Brenda was wide-eyed with it all, stroking silks, sniffing candles, hefting cotton, and showing it all to me.
    â€˜Isn’t it beautiful?’ she kept saying.
    She saw some handbags and went off to look at them. My back was bad by this time, so I found one of their small chairs and took a seat. After a while I couldn’t see Brenda and I knew I was in for the long haul. It didn’t matter. I sat and watched the people, tourists gaping at the colourful cloth and looking awkwardly about, city blokes buying silk ties, dusty old women trying on scarves, thin women dabbing perfume on their wrists, all of them like they were in some kind of wonderland. I suppose it was an escape for them, for Brenda too.
    Every now and then, one of the security guards would walk slowly past, looking at me directly. I got the message. After a while, I had an idea. I remembered all the cheap creams that Brenda had bought at the market that time.
    I got up and wandered over to the cosmetics section. The woman at the counter was polite, but I could see she wanted to be rid of me as quickly as possible. I couldn’t blame her for that. I must have been a bad advertisement for them. I asked her for a gift box of some kind, something a beautician might like. She brought out a few. I paid eighty quid for some purple thing with an Italian name. I got the woman to wrap it up for me.
    I went back to my seat and waited. A half hour later, the lift doors opened and Brenda came out. She stopped short when she saw me. She looked at the bag at my feet. She said, ‘What on earth have you got there?’
    â€˜Beauty stuff.’
    She looked from the bag to my face and burst out laughing.
    â€˜You’re gonna to need a bigger bag,’ she said.
    Then she burst out laughing again.
    I stood and gave her the bag and she said she’d open it when we got back. She reached up and kissed my cheek. I think she was happy then, at that exact moment. We went home.
    She was quiet on the tube back, gazing at nothing, thinking, I thought, about those dresses and necklaces and handbags, dreaming, like people do, about how one day she’d buy one of them for herself. Every now and then she’d look down at the bag or lift it up and weigh it.
    It was when we were walking down the Caledonian Road, back towards her flat, she tottering by my side in her high heels, one arm in mine, the other swinging the Liberty bag, that she asked me if I believed in a god. I said, ‘No.’
    She said, ‘I mean, don’t you think it’s even slightly possible?’
    She’d asked me all this before. I’d told her I thought it was all bollocks and she’d told me the same thing. Now she was asking me again and I wondered why. What did she want me to say?
    â€˜You didn’t go to church when you were young?’ she said.
    â€˜I went sometimes, while I was too small to do anything about it.’
    â€˜Why did you go?’
    â€˜My parents took me.’
    â€˜But they didn’t give you religion.’
    â€˜They gave it to me till I was black and blue.’
    â€˜They beat you?’
    â€˜My old man did. My mum didn’t do anything to stop him.’
    â€˜Why’d he hit you?’
    â€˜Drunk,’ I said, ‘or full of hatred for everything. Himself, mostly.’
    â€˜But he was a Christian.’
    â€˜He said he was. Lots of people do.’
    â€˜And your brothers and sisters?’
    â€˜They got