Uphill All the Way by Sue Moorcroft Page B

the rain was soaking her hair and bouncing up from the pavement and onto her bare ankles.
    She changed direction rapidly into her old neighbourhood - Leicester Road, the shop on the corner of Senwick Street, The Wells, where the May trees would have been decked with deep pink blossom a couple of months ago - and then Lavender Row. Her jeans were sticking coldly to her thighs as she turned the corner.
    She knew that Adam was away for the weekend, but she had her key. Thunder rolled, lightning flashed, and rain hissed from a smoke-grey sky, stinging her scalp and her face. Adam surely wouldn't mind if she sheltered from the storm.
    From this direction number 18 was out of sight around an elbow. As she neared, she frowned over the clamour of noise riding over even the noise of the rain. It sounded almost like a fairground with pounding music, shrieks, bellows, howls of laughter, girlish cries. A woman under a golf umbrella stopped and shook her head. 'It's been going on all night. All night! My husband wanted to call the police, but you don't want any retribution, do you? It might be our windows, next.' Pulling her thin blue mac more tightly around her, she scurried on her way.
    Judith listened. Thump-thump-thump-roar. Squeal.
    She rounded the bend.
    Almost every sliding sash window was open at number 18, and several had been smashed, letting curtains flutter out into the rain. Empty cans and bottles lay in the tiny frontage and glass was spattered in with the gravel.
    'My house !' she breathed.
    Dispensing with the formality of ringing the bell, she flew through the front door, pulling up short at a pool of vomit and a plump girl sprawled at the bottom of the stairs who looked suspiciously as if the vomit might belong to her.
    To avoid the mess, she picked her way past the girl and stamped upstairs. The house seemed to be shaking with the beat of the music and people bellowing to be heard over it. Cigarettes had been ground out on the carpet and the mixture of stenches made her want to gag.
    The bathroom door was locked. In the smallest bedroom two young men smoked joints and examined one of Adam's silver cases of camera equipment, clumsily, cans of beer between their feet.
    She moved swiftly on to the second room, evidently now Caleb's and decorated with posters and a litter of dropped clothes. There, a girl cried blue mascara noisily down her face while a lad slept crosswise on the bed. The room at the front that used to be hers - presumably now Adam's - hosted at least three couples on the bed or the floor, one of which was awake and naked. 'For God's sake !' she protested, as she backed out hastily. 'This is my bloody bedroom !'
    Then a shock of splintering glass. She whirled and ran downstairs again, hurdling the vomit to get down the hall.
    In the kitchen, eyes wide, hair tumbled around his face, Caleb's lips were moving as he gazed from the broken glass in the back door to the broken glass in the door to the hall. Judith was almost upon him before she could distinguish the words over the music.
    'My old man will go mental. My old man will go mental.' Joint in one hand, vodka bottle in the other, he chanted the words like a mantra, shock stretching his face. Behind him, a lad with a short, square haircut was thumping on the cupboard doors with a fist, globs of blood flying from his lacerated arms. Presumably it was a similar action on the glass panels that had destroyed them.
    'Stop that!' Judith bellowed through the broken pane, fury coursing hotter and hotter through her body. 'That glass was original!'
    Swaying, Caleb turned his gaze and frowned as if trying to place her.
    A new sound broke through the music from the sitting room, sharp, staccato, metallic. Judith hurried in to find a bare-chested youth hitting the cast iron fire surround with a poker, and giggling as the inset tiles starred and shattered. A girl was retching into the seat of an armchair. Two men were having a beer-spitting competition, roaring with