“Oh, chill out, Kate; it’s just a bit of coke, nothing to get so het up about.” Her friend laughed at her.

              Kate was furious; since when did Emma start using coke, if she had seen her in a nightclub dabbling in it, she still wouldn’t have been happy about it, but it would have made more sense. Emma was easily influenced and would have tried whatever her mates were doing; Kate would have put it down to being a one off while she was out drinking and not thinking straight. It was two o’clock in the afternoon, and Emma was sitting in her dirty flat alone and clearly she was off her face.

              “Emma, what the hell is going on? Since when did you start doing coke?”

              Emma was bored of Kate’s tone: she may be her friend but she wasn’t her mother, and Emma in no way had to explain herself to her. “Kate, I don’t know if you’re aware of this or not but I’m a fucking adult and I don’t need to explain myself to anyone, I’m having a shit day so I’ve done a bit of coke, no big deal. Okay, Miss Goody-Two-Shoes?”

              Kate couldn’t believe it: what had got into her friend? Emma hadn’t seemed herself at the beginning of the week when she had come around either, she realised; what was she doing? “Emma, I came to speak to you about Jay.” Kate spoke quietly.

“Jay got attacked last night, he’s in hospital.” Kate fought back tears as she spoke, then she felt anger bubble inside her as her friend had no reaction to the news.

              Emma sat there quietly, tapping her foot whilst focusing on the picture frame on the window ledge; she wanted to ask how he was, what had happened, but she knew if she spoke about him now she would give the game up. She knew that she had started to fall for Jay herself, and right now Kate didn’t feature in the bigger picture. She was sure Jay felt the same way about her, but giving the game away to Kate would fuck things up for them before they had even started. She continued to stare ahead blankly, and didn’t appear to react to the news.

              “Don’t you give a shit, Emma? My boyfriend is lying in hospital as we speak. He’s black and blue, he could have been killed. Don’t you even care?”

              Emma stared at Kate. She was feeling higher than a kite, which was the only thing allowing her to keep herself together. She had only just snorted a couple of lines five minutes before Kate had knocked on her door. She had been looking forward to the feeling of complete oblivion that she was craving more and more as the days passed. She hadn’t realised how addictive the stuff she was taking was, but she knew that when she wanted to she could give it up easily: it was only coke. Jay had given her a few lines the night he had stayed, and they had had the most amazing sex. Emma was hooked. She had always been good in bed, it was her thing, and she wanted so badly to be wanted, needed in fact, that she would pretty much do anything. Jay had been persuasive, told her a few lines would loosen her up, and even though she knew that she would do almost anything to please him regardless, she took it anyway. She had never felt such a high, and they had fucked all night. He had been nice enough to leave her a few bags when he left the next day, but this was her last one and Kate was putting a real dampener on her high now; she wished her friend would just go.

Emma was staring at the floor once again, looking as if she were in a trance. Kate knew she had to get out of there before she grabbed her friend and shook some sense into her. She had taken one last look of disgust at the squalor Emma was living in then made her excuses and left. Not that she had needed to make any excuses; Emma had acted as if she couldn’t wait for her to leave, quickly showing her the door and slamming it almost off its hinges behind her. She could have really done with a friend today, she thought sadly, as she put the key in her own front door. For the first time ever, her friend wasn’t there for her.

Kate breathed a huge sigh of relief as she looked around the lounge and kitchen once she was home, thank God Billy was still out. She went upstairs to her bedroom, picking up a large bag from the landing cupboard on her way.

Her bedroom was bright pink, as it had been since she was a little girl. Her mum had painted it after she had begged and pleaded to have a ‘princess’s bedroom’. Her room was the smallest of the three in the house, but neither she nor Billy could bring themselves to sleep in their mother’s room after her death; they had left it exactly as it was, although Kate had washed the bedding and made the bed neatly, as her mum would have. Often, she would go in there and sit on the edge of the bed. Sometimes it almost felt like her mum was there, she felt closer to her. The room still felt as though it belonged to her mum. Kate wasn’t ready to disrupt that, so she stayed put in her pink bedroom. It had always made her feel safe. Some mornings, she would wake up here and forget, and for a few minutes she would feel that nothing had changed, that her mum would be downstairs making tea and toast, grilling Billy at the breakfast table about whatever trouble he’d been in the night before. It only lasted a couple of minutes, and then it hit her: her mum was gone.

When it had happened, her mum had been walking back from the market. It was her Friday morning ritual, Kate and Billy used to joke about it; they had stopped offering to go with her on the basis that she was so shameless with her haggling, they had both been embarrassed. She would go down there first thing every Friday morning and barter with all the stall holders for the best prices she could get. She always came home with bags full to the brim of every bit of fruit and veg imaginable, and generous cuts of meat at probably half the going rate. She was well liked, being a regular, but due to having hardly a penny to her name, she would try to get the stall holders to give her the cheapest deals possible, sometimes verging on begging.

That morning had been different. She didn’t come home with her bright smile and her arms full of groceries. Kate remembered it like it was yesterday, although it had been just over a year. Her mum had been coming back from another of her “shopping sprees” and had keeled over: gone, just like that! Heart attack, they said later. She was only fifty four: too young to die.

Kate wondered what her mum would think of her pregnancy. She would have been a brilliant grandma, she thought sadly. If ever there was a time when Kate needed her mum the most it was now; she knew having this baby was going to be the toughest thing she had ever done. She didn’t have a clue. Nappies, feeding, the constant care a baby required, sometimes if she dwelled on it too much the fear overwhelmed her. Kate glanced around the room. It was purely due to Billy that they were able to stay here. He had taken over the mortgage long before their mum had died. He continued to after too, trying to keep them together as a family, but she knew they could never be that now, not after what he had done to Jay.

Kate opened her wardrobe and started filling her holdall with clothes and shoes. She wasn’t sticking around here for Billy anymore. Jay and this baby were her family now, she was sure that Sonia wouldn’t see them on the streets.

Taking one last look around the house, she closed the front door behind her and picking up her pace in case she bumped into anyone she knew, she made her way to Sonia’s house.