Pacifier

🥀 Van ⚡

I thought about her the whole walk home. My little girl.

She would be waiting for me, sleepy and hazy eyed, her lashes heavy as she blinked back the morning sun which speckled her skin like dew droplets and diamonds.
She was all that was on my mind. All that I wanted to see and for that reason my walk dragged and every short cut I took seemed to delay my return a little more. 

Every other corner, every snicket I cut down, every wall I jumped seemed to reveal yet another obstacle, one of my fathers friends I hadn't seen in a good few years, one of the women from King Street who hung around all day talking about seemingly nothing but who, when talking to me, could tell me a thousand things none of my lads had picked up. I'd never understood how they did it, where they heard it, who they were listening in on and how they knew who to follow, and whenever I asked they'd smile, shrug me off, they'd tell me it was their mothers intuition and then I'd feel their sympathy twinge and I'd nod my head, crack a grin, laugh them off. Understand it was time for me to leave. 

I ran into three of the women from King Street that morning when I was so desperate to get back to Izzy who I thought was waiting for me. Perhaps if I'd have known that she wouldn't be, I'd have made up some excuse as to why I had to cut Shirley from the offy short, or Mary a bar made from the pub up the top of the road off a little sooner than I had. Perhaps I'd have raced home, burst through the doors all ragged breaths because if you'd given me one guess who Izzy would be with, I'd have been right. Regrettably right. 

But I didn't know so I stopped and I caught up on the towns gossip, though I despised the trivial details, the opinions and the oh well if you ask me's. Still I understood that those mothers had their hearts in the right place and their children on their minds when they gave me the gossip from the school buses. I knew that between the bitching and the tittering, the harsher words they had for one another, the true stories were tucked away, the important bits. The crucial life or death tit bits. Often they didn't really know what they were telling me, most of the time when they let something life changing slip, they were too buys worrying about someone elses teenage pregnancy to realise what they'd told me, or the significance of it. 

That particular morning was no different and somewhere between, "They're saying Ruby Thorne was down the feds this morning, floods of tears she was," and, "you know if you ask me I'd say it was those Lewis boys, I've seen them hanging round the school gates looking at the little lasses like theyre somet eat, disgusting, they make me feel sick they do," Nancy Smith dropped the penny and set a few crucial details into place. 

"Which lads are them, our Isabelles started hanging around with a group of older lads," 

"Vile the lot of them I'm sure little Izzy wouldn't look twice at them Van," 

"Cant be too careful these days can you love," I'd shrugged and just like that, as if she couldn't help herself, as if she'd been desperate to give me their names all along she let them slip one by one. She hardly even stopped for breath, hardly even noticed anything at all. 

"Course she could have run away poor lass..." 

"You never know," I'd nodded along, thinking of Adella, thinking of her best friend who was almost entirely convinced she was dead. And now Nancy Smith was giving me that same look, fearful, almost wounded. 

"I heard you cut her..."

"Adella was never a bottleman," I'd said softly, gently, firmly, "Ruby always made sure of that," 

And then I'd left her and I'd walked the rest of my journey with a tainted cloud hanging over my head, my hands shoved in my pockets as I thought about everything I'd learned. The meetings I had mad, the plans which were now, all slowly falling into place.