The Shadows in the Street Read Free

many of them now. A couple of nights after that there were three more.
    The police had started moving them all on, no messing, whereas before they’d left you alone.
    She walked quickly, cutting across the car park and then along the main road to the grid of streets between the canal and the bypass, short cuts for motorists heading to Bevham. On one side, there were the posh apartments carved out of the Old Ribbon Factory, expensive but now with several For Sale boards cluttering up the front. Who could afford those? Yuppie couples, buy-to-lets, only the bottom had dropped out of all that. She could picture them, all the same, from glances up into the lighted windows and photos in old magazines, guess what they’d be like inside. Space. Lots of wood on the floor. No kids. You didn’t live here if you had kids. But why shouldn’t you? Why didn’t she have the right to live with her two in a place like this instead of in her dump of a room?
    She knew why.
    She reached the corner opposite the snooker club. There were a couple of girls nearby. The foreigners. Another two round the corner. Abi turned away, cut through a side alley, came out into the last street before the main road. It ran alongside the locked gates and high fence of the printworks, but it wasn’t bad – there was shelter and the Reachout van sometimes stopped in the works entrance. And the men knew this part, knew which girls were generally here. The police didn’t seem to bother either, not like they did in the town centre.
    She saw Marie leaning on the street lamp near the corner, smoking. Nobody else. Abi pulled the collar of her jacket up tighter. Her legs were cold, but they always were, you had to wear a short skirt and some of them wore low tops as well. But in winter it made sense to look after yourself a bit. If she got sick, she was no use. The collar of a fleece wasn’t a lot but it helped. It was quiet. There weren’t even many cars going down the main road. She walked up and down a couple of times, then went towards Marie.
    ‘Y’all right?’
    Marie shrugged and threw her cigarette butt onto the pavement.
    ‘Nobody else been around?’
    ‘I saw that van go by. Foreign girls. Think it was that one.’
    ‘They better not stop here.’
    Marie shook her head. ‘Going towards town.’
    ‘They’ll get moved on.’
    ‘Yeah, but there’s more people about in town, isn’t there? Dead here, I tell you.’
    ‘I’m sick of them.’
    ‘We never had any of that, you know. It was us. That was it. Maybe a new one now and again …’
    ‘That girl with the dead white face.’
    ‘Melissa.’
    ‘Right.’
    ‘She didn’t last.’
    ‘No. Them foreign girls just better not stop here,’ Abi said again.
    Marie looked at her. ‘British jobs for British workers.’
    They both cracked up.
    A car came round the corner and they separated, Marie crossing the road to wait by the warehouse. It didn’t stop. Ten minutes more and three girls came down the street, girls they knew. They separated too, one of them walking down towards the canal end, the others crossing over.
    It was colder. Abi banged her feet on the path. Then, two cars, and another, slowly round the corner and gliding up the street. Abi felt herself caught in the headlights of one, saw Marie go towards the kerb where another had stopped. Maybe it wasn’t going to be a dead night after all.
    But it was another twenty minutes before there was anyone else, this time on her side of the street. She moved forwards but it stopped a few yards away and doused the lights. Engine off. Driver’s door open.
    Bloody hell, it was only him. She moved quickly away. Marie was getting out of a car further up, pushing money into her inside pocket.
    ‘Keep walking, it’s Loopy Les down there.’
    Marie glanced. She looked young, Abi thought, young in the half-light, not like she looked under the street lamp. Like they all looked. She knew Marie lived in a caravan on a patch off the Starly Road. Her