The Middle Child Read Free Page B

tentatively.
         Alex felt a shiver trace the length of her spine.  The gentle voice sounded vaguely familiar, in a way that made her immediately uncomfortable.
         "Speaking."
         "Hi Alex, it’s Beth."
         Alex closed her eyes as guilt rolled over her.  The silence between them grew uncomfortable.  Alex had no clue what to say to a sister that she hadn’t seen in ten years.
         "Are you there?" the voice asked, softly.
         Alex searched for any trace of hostility or accusation in the few words but found none.  Inexplicably a lump formed in her throat.  Of course, there wasn’t.  This was Beth.
         "I’m here," she whispered.
         "I have some bad news for you," Beth continued.  Alex heard the catch in her voice.
         Alex held her breath, waiting for the words to come.
         "Mother died during the night."
         Alex exhaled the breath she’d been holding.  She briefly listened as Beth quietly gave her the details of the funeral.
         Alex said her goodbye’s and gently placed the handset back in the cradle.
         She turned to Jay but spoke more to herself. 
         "Thank God the bitch is dead."

Chapter 3 – Catherine
     
         Catherine pulled into the narrow street and felt her stomach lurch.  Regeneration appeared to have found other areas of the Black Country.  New housing estates had sprung up in the place of the foundries and steelworks that had once dominated the area.
         The old corner shops that she remembered had been turned into frozen mini markets or boarded up completely.  The once thriving market town of Cradley Heath had been annihilated by a shopping centre a mile up the road.  Once the hub of weekend retail it now boasted a Tesco Superstore and a string of charity shops.  An access road diverted traffic away leaving room for empty buses that rarely picked up or dropped off.
         But this street had barely changed at all.  She travelled slowly along a long flanked by long rows of terraced houses either side.  A couple of the houses were now boarded up. 
         A group of kids were gathered opposite her mother’s house; their faces caked in a mixture of jam and dirt.  Catherine felt no rush of fond memories as a boy aged eight or nine clad in only a vest and pants threw a smaller, weaker child to the ground to whoops of joy from onlookers.  It was a street where bruises went unnoticed as she knew only too well.
         She parked the car away from the front of the house, wishing for a few minutes alone with her thoughts before she saw Beth.  She had contemplated not coming to the funeral at all but Tim had insisted that she must. 
         What did he know? She wondered angrily.  He knew nothing of her past because she had never told him.  She had never told anyone.  As far as he was concerned it had been a childhood plagued with poverty and name-calling once their father had disappeared. 
         Christ, if only that was all it had been.
         She knew that she was avoiding knocking the door for a variety of reasons.  She genuinely wanted to enter that house with real emotions churning inside her but in the days since Beth’s phone call she had been unable to summon anything. 
         Within minutes of replacing the receiver she had smothered by a cloak of numbness that had extended beyond the feelings about her mother’s death.  She had functioned on remote control.  An automatic pilot had taken over her faculties and guided her through the normal daily routine.  She had cooked dinner, made lunch for the girls, cleaned the house and gone to work while all the time trying to work out how she was supposed to feel.
         She got out of the car and locked it behind her.  It was futile trying to harness genuine feelings in a few minutes when she had been unable to do so in just under a week.
         The front door had been painted dark blue since her last visit but