The Fall by Shari Low

Author:Shari Low [Low, Shari]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

18

MIRREN

‘Sign Of The Times’ – Harry Styles

After speaking to Sarah and Davie, Mirren hung up the phone and put it down on the cool cream quartz of Zander’s breakfast island. What. A. Clusterfuck.

There had been something in his voice earlier, when they were speaking on the phone, that had made her feel so uneasy that she couldn’t shake it off and had to come check on him. It was more than melancholy. It was… emptiness. The kind that she used to sense in Chloe, right before her daughter would get wasted or high.

She remembered the first time Zander took a drink. It was back in Glasgow, in the eighties, and they were about fourteen. Maybe fifteen. His father had taken a night off from screwing Mirren’s mother and gone home to his own house, just two doors along a five-home terraced row on a slum estate that Jono ruled with fear, intimidation, violence and swagger. Zander lived in the house at one end. Davie at the other end. And Mirren’s house was right in the middle. The three of them were inseparable, each other’s insulation against the poverty, the neglect and the bleak brutality of their world. Somehow, when they were together, it didn’t matter what else was going on.

Even then, Zander had been a guy of few words, but God, he was beautiful. Every single girl Mirren knew was enthralled by him. Not that she knew big words like that back then. And not that they actually told her either. Nope, the other girls kept their distance. Mirren had come to their school at twelve, when Jono had used his contacts to get them a house in his street because he wanted his wife and his mistress close to each other. Made life easier for him to go between them. Bastard. The girls at school already had their friendship groups and Mirren wasn’t interested in trying to be included, so for five years of high school, as far as her peers were concerned, she was the weird, sullen girl in the corner with her head in a book, who didn’t care what anyone said to her or about her.

But Zander Leith and Davie Johnston, the cheeky guy who had more energy than them all, were her friends. And she was theirs. The three of them against the world. No matter what.

The night Zander had started drinking, his father had come home with a couple of his sidekicks, and his mother had made a harmless comment that Jono decided to take offence to. He’d beaten her to a pulp – a regular occurrence – in front of them all. Then, without a care in the world, he’d gone to the pub and been the life and soul of the party. When he’d come out, Zander had been waiting, and when Jono had turned to face a wall to pee in the street, Zander had taken a baseball bat to the back of his head until it burst, then he went home and drank a bottle of straight whisky.

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