Born Bad: A gritty gangster thriller with a darkly funny heart. Marnie Riches

contemplated the option.

      She shook him loose. Glared at him, as though this was somehow all his fault. As though he had wished this fate on his son or brought some terrible curse on little Jay by walking out and not coming back. Her voice was husky with cigarettes and too many late nights smoking weed. Harder highs, when she succumbed to the pull of the brown, leaving those ugly red pinpricks tracking up her limbs.

      She was avoiding eye contact. Covering her ears as Jay started to wail again in the back bedroom. ‘Fucking hell. He does my head in when he goes off on one like this.’ She stumbled away from the boy’s noise, towards the top of the uncarpeted stairs.

      ‘Hey!’ Lev shouted, half-wishing he were the sort of man who could just hit a woman and feel more in control. ‘I asked you a question. What do you mean, it’s inoperable?’

      ‘The tumour’s in a funny place.’ She started to descend, turning her ankle sideways in those heeled mules she always wore. White thong visible through her too tight yellow miniskirt. ‘If you’d come to the scan, Le-viti-carse, you’d know that, wouldn’t you? Dick.’

      ‘Spare me the lecture, yeah?’ He glanced back towards the source of the woe – the door to his son’s bedroom was ajar. Confront her or comfort the boy? She was already in the hall, dragging those skanky, ramshackle heels into the skanky, ramshackle lounge.

      Lev marched into Jay’s room, the sharp tang of damp in his nostrils as he lifted his son gently out of a cot he had long outgrown.

      ‘Jesus. She’s still not bought you a big boy bed,’ he whispered. ‘I don’t know why I bloody bother.’

      He had been put to bed in his jeans and a jumper. Sweating like a pig, the poor little bastard.

      ‘Come on, big man. Shhh, Daddy’s here. Daddy’s here.’ He held Jay’s small, hot body close, hoping that his voice and physical presence would be soothing. But the boy was beside himself, screaming now, tearing at his tight blond curls, clamping his chubby palms to his temples. Snot was plastered over his honey-brown skin in a shining, viscous film. With some struggle, Lev managed to remove his jumper. Changed his nappy. Cleaned his face with a cool wet-wipe and brought his son downstairs, holding him over the excruciating ache in his own heart. Rocking him gently, though the child arched his back, testing his father’s strength to the limit.

      ‘I couldn’t get to the scan, Tiff. I’ve had to lie low,’ he said, sitting among the crumbs and empty wrappers on the sofa. Jay’s screams reverted to crying, slowed to a hiccough and intermittent whinge. ‘I had a run-in with the O’Briens in M1 House. Had to keep a low profile. You know the sort of people I’m involved with. If I piss the wrong man off and I don’t watch my back, I’m dead. And I pissed the wrong man right off, good style.’

      ‘Oh, shut the fuck up, will you?’ Tiffany said, flicking the television on, absently. She lit a cigarette. ‘I don’t wanna hear your excuses. You should have been there. He’s your son too.’

      ‘Do you think I don’t know that?’ Lev asked, keeping his voice deliberately low, though his instinct was to bawl her out. With his free hand, he switched off the television. Grabbed the cigarette from her and stubbed it out in the overflowing chipped glass ashtray. ‘You shouldn’t smoke in the house. Is it any wonder he’s ill?’

      ‘Stuff it up your arse, you tosser.’ Tiffany defiantly lit another cigarette, filling the room with acrid yellow-blue smoke that only barely masked the smells of cooking grease and the stale wine that stood at the bottom of three bottles on the laminate coffee table. More empties on the telly table. She clearly still fancied herself as the molten core of every party that erupted from the pub after closing.

      ‘Where’s the money I give you for his big boy bed? Why’s he still in the frigging cot? He’s got a brain tumour, Tiff! And you’re letting him bang his head on the bars every five fucking minutes. You’re not on. Where’s the money?’

      Tiffany narrowed her eyes and blew smoke in his and Jay’s faces. Chewed on her bottom lip.

      ‘You blew it on gear, didn’t you?’ Lev said, shaking his head in disgust. ‘I sell my soul to the devil to look after yous, and you just burn through it on shit. Selfish cow.’

      Jay had fallen asleep in Lev’s arms. Passed out through sheer exhaustion, or maybe it was the tumour that caused him to swing from apoplectic one minute to comatose the next. Perhaps Lev just had the magic touch, whereas his babymother merely had the conviction that she somehow deserved better than to be a single mother to a dying child in a shitty damp terrace on the Sweeney Hall estate.

      Silence between them put a temporary sticking plaster over the acrimony.

      ‘So, what are we gonna do?’ Lev asked, trying to be calm. He stroked his son’s hair, wishing he could somehow draw the tumour out through his hand and take it on himself. ‘We can go private. Get a second opinion. I’ll ask my bosses for some money.’

      Resignation in Tiffany’s voice. She turned to him, treating him to a dead-eyed stare. ‘All they can do is try to shrink it. Radiothingy. They said it’s grown into his nose and around the optic nerves. He’s going blind. Doc said there’s not a surgeon in England has got the savvy to get it out. He’s shafted …’

      Lev looked down at Jay and felt tears leak onto his cheeks. Imagining the tumour within his son, wrapping itself around the boy’s beautiful green eyes, suffocating the healthy tissue, eating into space that his brain should by rights fill, replacing thoughts of Postman Pat and Chuggington and whatever other shit the kid watched on CBeebies with pain. Somehow, he had failed the boy. Somehow, it was his fault. There had to be a way to make it better. His mother had always told him the Lord was merciful.

      ‘… Unless we can get him to the States.’ Tiffany inhaled her cigarette deeply and blew the smoke over Lev’s closely shorn hair.

      A glimmer of hope. ‘You what?’

      She nodded slowly. Flicked her fingernails with her thumb. ‘There’s this brain surgeon in Baltimore. The place is called John Hopkins Brain Centre or summat.’

      ‘Right,’ Lev said, wiping the tears from his cheeks determinedly. ‘He’s going. We’ll take him.’

      ‘It’s a hundred and fifty grand. Maybe more. Where you gonna find that kind of cash, smart arse? Flogging baggies of coke in town on a Saturday night? Get a grip!’

      Lev’s heart, buoyed instantly by the thought of a cure that glittered with promise on the other side of the Atlantic, took a slow trip back down to the soles of his Nike Air-Max trainers. He mentally rifled through the hiding places he had for cash in the Sweeney Hall high-rise he called home. The toilet cistern contained £2,500 and a gun that was worth a few quid, wrapped up in plastic bags. There was another £1,900 at the back of the gas meter in an old Brillo box. £5,000 in a carrier bag, gaffer-taped to the underside of his wardrobe. He couldn’t even make ten grand.

      ‘We’ll find it,’ he said. ‘I’ll ask Tariq and Jonny for more work. Maybe I can help out as muscle. The Fish Man gets paid a mint.’

      Tiffany snorted. ‘You? Muscle? Where, in your pants? That’s the only place you ever had muscle, Le-viti-carse.’

      His hours spent at the gym every week were clearly lost on that cheeky, head-wiggling cow. Or maybe she was bitching because she wasn’t getting it any more. Yes, that was it. The jibe stung less when he looked at it that way. But this was no time for hurt sensibilities over the quality of his six-pack.

      ‘I’ll have it saved, borrowed or stolen inside six months. I promise. The full whack.’ The words came out as a half-whisper, bound for his sleeping son’s ears.

      ‘Six months? You are joking,’ Tiffany said, picking her cigarette dimp out of the ashtray. She put it back inside her cigarette packet, stood and grabbed the empties from the table. No trace of emotion in her indifferent face. ‘The doctor reckons he’ll be dead in three, even with radiowhatsit. We need a miracle. How about you talk to that