Roxy's Baby by Cathy MacPhail Read Free Book Online Page A

name!’
    â€˜Doesn’t matter here, Roxy. No one’s going to send you back if you don’t want to go.’
    There was an echo of greetings from the girls, waves from the ones in the kitchen.
    â€˜My! You’re a young one!’ A brash blonde who had been sitting at the table came across to her. Roxy was a bit annoyed by that. It seemed to her that they were all young. None looked older than eighteen, except perhaps this blonde.
    Anne Marie put an arm around Roxy’s shoulders. ‘That’s why we have to look out for her. She’s scared. It’s her first day here.’
    Roxy resented that. She wasn’t scared. There wereother words for what she was feeling – apprehensive, suspicious, wary – but she didn’t say any of this. All she said was, ‘You do your own cooking?’
    â€˜On a rota system.’ Anne Marie led her to a table and pulled out a chair for her. The blonde stood watching her. ‘Three are assigned to making a meal each day, and the next day’s team does the washing up. It’s a good system,’ Anne Marie said, as if it was her idea. ‘A very fair system.’
    â€˜And there’s no getting out of it,’ the blonde snapped. Then she laughed loudly. ‘I should know. I tried everything. Nothing works. Not even the old “I’m having a baby” routine. Unfortunately, everybody’s having a baby in here.’
    â€˜That’s Babs, by the way.’ Then Anne Marie whispered, just loud enough so all the girls could hear, ‘But we call her Boobs. You can see why.’
    â€˜Boobs’ went into a raucous fit of laughter at that, and by the time they were all eating Roxy was laughing too.
    â€˜We have to do the cleaning too,’ Babs told her.
    So that was it. Cheap labour. Roxy tried to imagine them all on their knees scrubbing all the rooms in this massive house.
    â€˜Oh, don’t listen to a word she says,’ Anne Marie said. ‘We keep our own rooms clean, make up our own beds, and take our turn of the bathrooms and the kitchen.’
    A small voice piped up from the end of the table. ‘Anyway, they don’t use the whole of this house. Only this one small part for us.’ The small voice belonged to a girl who had a big horsey face that didn’t suit that small voice at all. ‘They really do look after us in here, Roxy.’
    â€˜That’s Agnes,’ Anne Marie whispered, softly this time. ‘She’s a bit of a bad ’un, as they say. I’ll be glad when she goes.’
    Roxy giggled into her tea. ‘Agnes?’ she whispered back. ‘You’d think she’d have enough problems with a name like that.’
    â€˜Sssh!’ Anne Marie tried to shut her up, but she was giggling too.
    â€˜I mean,’ Roxy went on, ‘bad girls don’t have names like Agnes. Bad girls have names like –’
    Anne Marie interrupted her. ‘Like Roxy?’
    â€˜Yeah, like Roxy.’ Roxy laughed so loud Agnes turned to look at her. ‘Are you two going to let us in on the joke?’
    Anne Marie didn’t answer her, instead she indicated a dark girl sitting beside Agnes. ‘Have I introduced you to Sula, Roxy? She doesn’t speak very much English. She’s Albanian.’
    Roxy nodded to Sula and she nodded back. Sula had the loveliest brown eyes Roxy had ever seen. But Roxy’s eyes were drawn to the tattoo on her arm – a cobra wound round her upper arm as if it was crawling towards her neck. It gave Roxy the creeps.
    â€˜Love her tattoo,’ Roxy said sarcastically.
    Anne Marie laughed. ‘I think it’s supposed to ward off evil or something. Blinking awful, isn’t it?’ But still she smiled at Sula.
    Ward off evil. Well, so far it hadn’t brought much luck to Sula, Roxy thought, pregnant and alone in a strange land, and she wondered what her story was. Everyone had a story here, she