Blood Ties: Family is not always a place of safety. Julie Shaw

Should be a law against it, shouldn’t there?’

      ‘And I suppose she’s subbing you all week again to make up for it, is she?’ Kathleen demanded, shaking her head. She stabbed a finger towards the living-room door. ‘You cause all this shit, Darren. You. So how is it fair that it’s me that’s on the end of it all the time? I’m the one who has to work here, remember? You’re off doing your job, and Monica’s off doing hers. And I’m the one who has to deal with all the shit you create!’

      She could feel tears – angry, frustrated tears – threatening to spill over her cheeks. She sniffed hard to stop it happening. God, how sick she was of it.

      ‘Hey, them’s the breaks, our kid,’ Darren said before walking off, whistling, leaving Kathleen open-mouthed in his wake.

      An hour later, in the bar, Kathleen kept her ‘trap shut’, as always. That she must keep her trap shut was one of Irene’s most frequent orders, and, having no wish to heap even more attention on her excuse for a family, she was only ever happy to oblige.

      Not that she cared that Mary, their regular barmaid, would have already filled all the regulars in on what had gone off. Once perhaps, but she was way past that now. In fact, lately, she realised, she’d even stopped being embarrassed when the locals took the piss over their pints. It was as if they’d even developed a kind of camaraderie with her, complicit in their amusement that Irene could be so thick as to keep falling for all the lines Darren spun her.

      ‘I wish I had a mother like yours, Kathy,’ one of the estate lads was saying. ‘I’d get fucking robbed every week an’ all.’

      His mate burst out laughing, and handed an empty pint glass across for Kathleen to fill. ‘Nah, come on, Gez,’ he ribbed his mate. ‘Shame on you. You’re making out like Darren’s lying! Like he’s not in the bookies every single bleeding day backing anything that moves. Give the poor lad a chance. He’s been robbed blind. Again.’ He winked at Kathleen. ‘Any one of us could be as unlucky as he is.’

      Kathleen felt a smile twitch her lips, if only a small one. And for all their ribbing, they were just speaking the truth. She knew it, her dad knew it, Monica probably knew it too – well, if she could find the energy to think about anything other than herself for two minutes at a stretch. No, the fact was that Darren’s problems with gambling were common knowledge, and no one could believe that Irene didn’t know it.

      Kathleen pulled a nice top on the beer for him. ‘You’re right,’ she said mildly, glancing from one to the other. ‘My brother is the unluckiest lad in the world, he is. Take no notice of all the gossip. He hasn’t got the gambling fever at all. He’s just got big bloody holes in his pockets.’ She allowed her smile to widen. ‘That and a face that thieves like to punch …’

      The two lads roared with laughter and Kathleen laughed with them. This shift – the seven-till-nine one – was the one bright time in her day. With her dad and Irene upstairs having their tea (or tonight, perhaps, throwing it at each other) it was a port in the storm before her dad came down and joined her and Irene did likewise – though her version of work was slightly different; more waltzing around the tap room playing the big ‘I am’.

      But for these two hours, she felt free. She felt able to be herself. And it occurred to her that, actually, it was more than just that. For those two hours every day, people actually wanted to talk to her.

      For two hours a day she wasn’t invisible.

Chapter 2

      Kathleen always tried to wake up before the alarm went off in the mornings, but given how late she’d had to work the previous evening, she was still surprised to find herself staring at the ceiling a full quarter hour before it did.

      Not that she couldn’t have predicted it. It was always the same when her dad and stepmum had one of their rows: Irene having one of her convenient migraines come on (because of all the shouting, obviously) then demanding that her dad stay up in the flat with her for the evening, leaving Kathleen to pick up the resultant slack.

      Silly old cow, she thought. Pathetic. Though even more pathetic was the way her dad ran around after her all the time. Always had. She lay still a little longer, contemplating the unfairness of it all, then reached across to the brass alarm clock that sat on the chest of drawers that separated her bed from Monica’s, and clicked it off before it started ringing.

      The air in the bedroom was cold, despite it supposedly being summer, and the lino beneath her bare feet felt icy. This was her dominion, being first up, braving the cold and – for half the year, at least – the dark, but Kathleen had learned to find a grim satisfaction in her Cinderella status. Always the first up. Always the one brewing the tea, opening the curtains and, in the winter, stoking the fire. Only then would she dare to get her stepbrother and stepsister out of bed – then clean the pub. Only then would her dad and Irene get out of bed.

      As she tiptoed out of the bedroom, Kathleen glanced back at her sleeping stepsister and smiled to herself. It was funny, because today and for the next two whole months, they would be the same age. Both seventeen. Two months during which Monica couldn’t drone on about Kathleen being only sixteen. Come her own birthday, of course, Kathleen would start being only seventeen. But she’d enjoy the hiatus while it lasted.

      Not that today would be much different to any other day. Yes, it was Kathleen’s birthday, and yes, her dad had promised her he might take her to the pictures to see The Sound of Music, but if past birthdays were anything to go by, she wasn’t going to hold her breath. Instead, she clung to memories of happier times, when her real mother had still been alive. Before she’d died in the car crash, Kathleen’s mum had made every birthday special. Trips out and parties, fancy dresses and visits to family – these were always on the agenda, sometimes all on the same birthday, but that was all a long time ago. Since she was eight – that was the last one, still bright in her memory – a birthday was really no different from any other day. Well, except in so much as they served to remind her of the distance that was growing, and would carry on growing, between her childhood and the place she was now. How much she yearned to grow up, have it gone.

      Her arms mottling from the cold, Kathleen pulled a thick cardigan over her nightie and ran downstairs to the bar. It wasn’t time to start the cleaning yet, but this was another of her rituals; to make a rough assessment of how bad it was so she could work out how long it was going to take.

      She had to factor in extra time today, as well, it being Saturday, because on Saturdays, as well as cleaning the tap room and toilets, the foyer and back of bar, there was also the best room to give a proper clean. That was a particularly long job because in order to vacuum the enormous expanse of carpet, all the chairs had first to be lifted onto the tables.

      She completed her inspection. Two hours, she reckoned, heading back into the foyer to go upstairs again, then she’d have some time to herself for a bit. She was just at the foot of the stairs when the letterbox rattled behind her, as Eddie the postie fed a clutch of letters through the slot. ‘Morning!’ she called out, waving to him through the frosted glass. She liked Eddie. He was a habitually smiling presence in a day often lacking them. He’d also, it seemed, delivered something for her.

      Kathleen never got post. After all, who would write to her? Even on this day, her birthday, such cards as she might get would be delivered by hand. She’d had a pen friend once – a wild-looking girl called Ingrid, who lived somewhere in Germany, and would write to Kathleen in halting, sometimes comic English, but once she went to secondary school, it had all fizzled out. Since then, there’d been hardly anything, the only moment of excitement being when she’d written to a nature organisation, as part of a school project about wildlife conservation, and had received several leaflets, a letter and a poster of a tiger, which adorned her part of the bedroom wall for a good two years.

      Funny to realise that she actually felt wistful about school now, despite counting the days till she’d left. But perhaps her eagerness