Jog On Fat Barry by Kevin Cotter Read Free Book Online

does it.”

    Róisín O’Shea lived in one of those big houses on Lady Somerset Road in Kentish Town and was in the 5th year at Parliament Hill School for girls when I first saw her smoking a cigarette outside the San Siro cafe looking more Spanish or Italian than Irish with her raven coloured hair and cloudy blue eyes. I took her to the Vale of Health Fair on Hampstead Heath. Later we sat on a bench at the top of Parliament Hill and watched the city light up as the sun went down. She was a year older than me and had already done it. She wouldn’t say whom it was with though. We did it the first time under The Viaduct Bridge, beside the hole Dick Turpin was said to have hidden in. I found out a month later she was up the spout. It was a Friday night and I was sparring when she walked into the gym and shouted, “I’m pregnant!” across the hall. I turned to look at her and caught one on the button. I dropped to the ground; tried to catch my breath while the sweat rolled. I liked the smell of the gym, some people said it smelt like a shit-hole, but what did they know? Rosy walked over and knelt down beside me. She looked into my eyes; asked if I’d do the right thing by her. I said there was nothing I wouldn’t do. She smiled and held her hand against my face, and my insides began to do that thing they always did whenever Rosy touched me that way: those odd upside-down sensations that only she could ever make me feel.
    My mum and dad did all they could to talk me out of it, but Rosy was in the family way and Irish catholic to boot. We were getting married as soon as I turned sixteen, and we were going to live in her house on Lady Somerset Road so her mum could help with the baby. To be honest, I was looking forward to it. I was going to do things differently with my kid. It wouldn’t be like it was with my mum and dad. Rosy and me had plans. The career advisor at school said he’d get me apprenticed at the Gas Board as a pipe fitter. Rosy was going to be a nurse. We’d start with the one baby, and keep on going until we had enough.
    I can still remember Rosy and me sitting beside the bandstand on Parliament Hill Fields. Our whole lives lay ahead of us. I was saying that maybe sometime after she had the baby, we might leave it with her mum and go off to Majorca, for like, you know, our honeymoon. I told her I’d been saving. It wasn’t much, but it would get us there. Rosy said she wanted to tell me something but I wasn’t listening. I was too excited. She finally pressed her fingers against my lips and said what it was she’d been trying to say.
    “Not mine?” I said. “Not fucking mine?”
    I can still remember the way she looked at me when I asked her who the father was. Can still remember her saying that if she could have one wish in the world, it would be never having to answer that. But she did answer, because no one was handing out wishes that day. And what she said floored me. Because there I was thinking I knew everything about her, when, truth be told, I never had a bloody clue.
    Róisín said her dad used to stroke her hair when she was little: used to pinch her bum and tease her when her tits began to grow. Said later, he’d slip his hand down the back of her knickers, and laugh, saying what a big girl she was getting. They had one of these funny old bathrooms with an Ascot water heater on the wall, and a pipe that fed the hot water into the bath, and if you had a bath in winter, the whole room would fill with steam until you couldn’t see anything. Róisín told me the first time it happened, she’d just got out of the bath and was drying herself off when she saw her dad through the steam. He was standing in the corner staring at her. She never said why she didn’t try to struggle or cry out when he came up to her and pushed her to the floor. I suppose she was hoping I’d understand, why she didn’t, but you don’t, not unless that sort of thing like has happened to you. Róisín said her mum