Gangsters Wives Read Free Page B

She never saw the baby. Later, after her mum had been summoned from home, the attending doctor came to Poppy’s bedside and explained that it had been touch and go whether Poppy lived. ‘You were losing a lot of blood,’ he said. ‘Too much to survive, unless I did something drastic.’
    The two women listened intently.
    â€˜I had to perform an emergency sterilisation,’ he continued. ‘I’m afraid you won’t be able to have more children. I’m terribly sorry.’
    Poppy didn’t care. The short pregnancy had been a nightmare as far as she was concerned. Mum didn’t say much. In fact, later she often wished that the same thing had happened to her. At least then she could have made a career, made some money, had a life. Not scratching from day to day in a thin-walled flat where every sound of the neighbour’s lives could be heard through the partitions. But she would never say as much to Poppy, and felt guilty even thinking about it. She loved her, even though she was a wild girl.
    Poppy didn’t change much. She left school early and drifted from job to job. It wasn’t that she was stupid. It just seemed that nothing much mattered except getting a couple of quid for spliff and CDs, and a few vodka and cokes at the weekends.
    And then along came Joseph Barlow.
    Tall, handsome, from the same Caribbean stock as her father whom she’d never known. His skin was the colour of chocolate, and the white teeth in his handsome face flashed each time he smiled, which he did often. His hair was sculpted in a high fade, and razored into strange, geometric patterns at the back of his head. He drove a black BMW with dark windows, carried a wad of cash big enough to choke a horse, dressed as if he’d just stepped out of the pages of GQ and wore just enough bling to be noticed without going over the top.
    From the moment Poppy saw him holding court in a local pub, she was his. She didn’t care that he was a gangster. If she was honest it made him all the more attractive.
    They were married within a month and he paid the deposit on a luxury flat, just close enough to her mum’s to keep in touch, but not close enough that she was always round.
    Poppy had never been so happy. She quickly made friends with Sadie, Kate and Niki. They often lunched together, although Niki was a rare companion in the early days, before Connie relented and allowed her a little more freedom. Poppy loved it when they did. The four beautiful women out on the town together almost stopped the traffic, and they revelled in the attention they got. Those were happy times. Until one day, out of the blue Joseph told her he wanted kids. Lots of them. Poppy told him the truth about herself, and that was when things began to go wrong.
    Their sex life, which had been so passionate that they used to fuck at least twice a day, began to dwindle. One day a helpful neighbour of her mum’s told Poppy over a cup of tea that she’d seen Joseph with a young girl down at Sainsbury’s, buying groceries. A young, pregnant girl. Poppy didn’t believe a word. Joseph, food shopping? No chance. That was her job. But once the seeds of doubt had been sown, they soon began to grow into ugly weeds. She started noticing how often he was away from home lately, and how sex had become almost non-existent. So Poppy began to follow him. She borrowed a car from a friend and tagged after him in his Beemer. It didn’t take many days before he turned up at a council flat in Bow, where a pretty black girl in the later stages of pregnancy met him at the door with a passionate kiss.
    After that Poppy haunted the building. She saw the girl getting bigger every day, and later, she saw the pair of them coming back from hospital in Joseph’s car, complete with baby carrier. She saw the way he proudly handled the child. Bastard, she thought, as his absences became longer. She checked his credit card receipts. Fortunes