The Longing: A bestselling psychological thriller you won’t be able to put down. Jane Asher

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СКАЧАТЬ it now, sweetheart. Stop the noise. Mummy’s here.’

      Juliet had reached her parked Volvo with an increasingly complaining baby and having placed him in a large shopping basket on the back seat was driving quickly out of Streatham in the opposite direction to the supermarket. His persistent wailing was disturbing her in a way that was more unsettling than anything she had felt for a long time and she couldn’t understand why the stomach-wrenching sensation it produced in her was so familiar. She had been through this before, but in an altered form, in a world the mirror image of this one, darker and more closed in. Where was she when she had felt this, many, many years ago? As she drove on, carefully following her planned route, she remembered: it wasn’t a child’s crying that this terrible sound was dragging up from her past – it was her own. She could hear again the sound of her wailing as she had heard it echoing round her head while they had held her arms and legs in the hospital to stop her running. The more she had wriggled and screamed, the tighter they had gripped her emaciated body, bringing the spoon with its unacceptable contents time and time again to her mouth, pressing it against her lips until she could taste it, or tipping its load into her open, sobbing jaws until she gagged, choked and swallowed in spite of herself.

      She turned around to look at the baby on the back seat, but could see only the brown wicker ordinariness of the basket, showing no sign of its extraordinary contents. It was comforting, and she shook her head a little to rid herself of the unwelcome memories that had broken through, unbidden, into the present. She would leave these thoughts till later, until she had reached safety for herself and the baby. Then she would have time to unpack her brain and slowly pick over the contents until she could face them properly and exorcise them; for the time being she would let them hover harmlessly in the pending section of her mind.

      Anna had lapsed into a defeated, miserable calm, and was doing her best to give the policeman the information he needed. She was a girl of innate intelligence and a natural toughness which had stood her in good stead through a life that had not been easy. Had she been dealt better cards originally, she would have played them well and avoided the traps set for her by others who appeared to hold all the aces. She had been born into an area of Glasgow that had rid itself of the slums of the fifties and sixties, only to find itself inhabited by an even greater threat. A new, insidious culture was breeding and spreading in the perfect medium of unemployment and poverty, filling the dish that was this small pocket of crowded, inner city life with spores that were ready to break loose and find new areas to infect and ultimately destroy. The figures huddled in corners of Hyatt’s estate no longer discussed the buying and selling of watches or gold jewellery, but of cocaine, crack and heroin. The drug scene had become a way of life: the added threat of HIV had brought a new edge of despair and hopelessness to its victims and even those on the fringes of this miserable, pervasive trade – such as Anna and her family – were touched by its contaminating effects.

      She sometimes wondered if her early memories of her father, Ian, were imaginary. She was uncertain whether she had invented the times when the house felt happy; when he didn’t shout at her mother, when she and her younger brother, Peter, were given hugs from him at bedtime and treats at weekends. Years of watching perfect families in her favourite television series – when she had wanted to be like them so much that she had sat in front of the set, screwed her eyes tightly closed and prayed and prayed to be taken into the screen and into their lives – had confused her.

      But her memories were right. It was only after years of being unemployed since the closure of the tobacco factory where he had worked for over two decades that the morose, defeatist side to Ian Watkins’ nature was released, producing a bitterness that resulted in a lack of kindness and affection to his wife and two children that amounted to cruelty. The bitterness had infected his children: Anna made no real friends at school, and alienated her teachers with the harsh cynicism she expressed with sharp intelligence.

      She had always known she would get out of the family home at the earliest opportunity, and the continued daily diet of television for her and Peter had helped to instil in her the illusion that if she could only get herself ‘down South’ she would be able to make something of her life, and even return in glory after a few years, bringing back fame and fortune as in the fairy tales she had read to herself as a young girl.

      At the age of fourteen she began to plan her escape. She took on an early morning paper round and started to save the small amount of money that it brought in, and in spite of her father’s insistence that it was to be given to her mother to help with the bills, she managed to lie sufficiently well about exactly how much she was making to be able to put tiny amounts aside in a tin on top of the old-fashioned wardrobe in the bedroom she shared with her brother.

      At sixteen she packed her few belongings into a carrier bag in the middle of the night, emptied the tin into her purse and left, making her way down to London by hitching lifts and buying just enough food to survive. Her family made rather half-hearted attempts to find her, but deep down her mother recognised in herself an envy at Anna’s freedom, and knew that even if they did succeed in tracking her down, they had nothing to offer which could persuade her to return. Only Peter was truly sad at losing her, and cried himself to sleep for many nights in their room. For months he waited for some news of her – a letter or call – but gradually began to face the fact that she was gone from his life for ever.

      It didn’t take long for Anna to discover the reality of trying to survive in a large city where jobs are impossible to find unless you have a permanent address, and where a permanent address is impossible to find unless you have the job to pay for it. Having no family or friends to turn to, she found that the helping hands she was offered tended to come with invisible and insidious strings attached. Not that she was sexually inexperienced, having had several rushed and unfulfilling encounters after originally losing her virginity at fifteen in the back of a van, but she was streetwise enough to be suspicious of every stranger she met.

      She inevitably found herself clinging to the first person who spoke to her with what appeared to be genuine warmth and kindness, knowing that his motives might not be entirely altruistic, but unable to resist basking in the gentleness of his tone and the comfort of his arms around her at night. This was Dave, an eighteen-year-old from Brighton. Having made his way, like Anna, to the streets of London, he had found them paved not with gold but with crumbling, unwelcoming concrete. They met in Piccadilly Circus, where many of the homeless gathered to watch the world go by or to intoxicate themselves into a senseless, or at least differently sensed, stupor in which they could then see it through the comforting haze of drugs or alcohol. Anna, having run away from Glasgow partly to escape the effects of the drug culture, found herself straight back in it, and it soon became clear that Dave himself survived by pushing relatively small amounts of crack and ecstasy around Wardour Street and Soho Square. She added to their meagre finances by begging, something she could only allow herself to do by telling herself, in a piece of tortuous logic, that at least she was going out and finding the money herself, and that it was better than living off the state.

      When every penny is a struggle to find, even the smallest expenses become difficult. Anna soon convinced herself that as Dave was sleeping only with her, and as she believed his tales of relative monogamy prior to their relationship, condoms were a luxury that could be dispensed with. She had a vague idea that they were being handed out free somewhere locally, but never got it together to find out where or to bother to do anything more constructive about protecting herself. As a girl who had grown up knowing several friends who’d either had full-blown Aids or were HIV positive, she knew she was taking a calculated risk, but strangely enough the more obvious, and more likely, outcome of a pregnancy never seriously occurred to her.

      She put off confronting her condition for months. Somehow in the mess of her life, the lack of periods and the sickness assumed an insignificance they would never have had if other more pressing physical problems hadn’t had to be faced. Anna’s priorities were finding her next meal and a place to sleep without compromising herself with what she saw as the ‘system’, and the momentous change taking place in her own body almost appeared to СКАЧАТЬ