Read Online Without Consent by Frances Fyfield - Free Book Online

kid.’
    Mother darted from her chair and produced a photo album, as if by magic. She placed it on Bailey’s lap with a smart thump and retreated to her own seat to sit with folded arms. Todd sensed a conversational hiatus, filled it blithely, looking at the bovine face of dad.
    â€˜What kind of animals?’
    â€˜Pardon?’
    â€˜She didn’t really like animals,’ mother interrupted, anxious to avoid anything which might suggest a lack of hygiene in any sense. ‘Only gerbils and things.’
    Bailey was suffering from a desperate desire to laugh, another to scream. He was turning the pages of the album, seeing Shelley as an overdressed baby, held aloft by her mother like a trophy; Shelley at school, earnest in socks; Shelley with her mates and cousins on her thirteenth birthday, a pretty child, refusing to smile for the camera. He felt only relief that these parents had never met the age of the camcorder, the better to depict in movement what was, tohis jaundiced view, that fleeting sly expression of their child. Did not like animals. Having reached the point where the photos tailed off, Shelley aged fifteen, he snapped the album shut and placed it back in Mrs P’s lap. She had the impression of a large pale ghost coming towards her and retreating, quailed slightly and blinked. By the time she looked again, he was back as he had been, legs crossed this time.
    â€˜When was she getting married?’ Todd asked, looking like an earnest bank manager, almost cocking his hand behind an ear for the reply.
    â€˜What do you mean,
was?
She still is, isn’t she? Next month, sometime. She isn’t dead, is she?’
    Oh, she lied, she lied. All mothers know the date of a daughter’s wedding. Did they? Bailey was getting married himself, sometime next month. When the weather was fine, whenever; month decided, date not fixed; a register office do. Left deliberately vague, God help them both. Summer, Helen had said. We’ll think about the arrangements two weeks before. It occurred to him, in this frozen room, just why they might both be so diffident. This daughter’s mother seemed to regard a wedding as a prize for winning a race.
    â€˜He’s a lovely lad, her fiancée,’ Mrs Pelmore said fondly. ‘Lovely. It was him reported it. Then, after the police came, he phoned me. He’s good to her. Steady.’
    â€˜Did you know about her other involvement with the police?’ Todd asked.
    â€˜She’s never been in trouble with the police,’ dad cut in.
    â€˜I know,’ Todd said easily. ‘But there was an occasion, not long ago, when she went out clubbing with a friend,and the friend had an accident on the way home. Shelley helped us with information. We think that’s how she met Mr Ryan.’
    Mrs Pelmore looked blank.
    â€˜How often do you see Shelley?’ Bailey asked.
    There was a long fidgeting pause. Mother opened her mouth to speak and closed it again. Father hauled himself upright, the bones of his elbows crunching on the uncomfortable chair. Mother put out a warning hand which he ignored.
    â€˜She never comes near us,’ he said flatly. ‘Not if she can help it. He comes, though, her boy. He comes to see us. That’s how we know how she is.’
    â€˜I know,’ said Anna Stirland, ‘about rape. Oh, I don’t mean in a legal sense, I mean I know about violation. I work with women, you see. It’s a kind of violation, having a baby you don’t want, by a man you don’t love. I don’t meet many men, though in my kind of environment there are a lot of them around. Men seem to like me well enough, but they don’t, well, look at me. I’m one of the lads, a good sport; they’ll put that on my gravestone. To tell the truth, I don’t do much looking either; no point in a great lump like me flirting, is there? Only when I look at these baby kids, I know how I’d like my life to go: in