Tarnished by Julia Crouch Read Free Book Online Page B

so sure how much of an asset she’d be to Loz’s restaurant. She didn’t think she was really a front-of-house type, what with the wall that stood between her and everyone else.
    It seemed harmless to humour her girlfriend’s dreams, though.
    ‘Here we are!’ Loz said, finally returning to the living room with two enormous silver earrings. ‘I got them when I was in India. Put them on.’
    Peg did as she was told.
    ‘You look perfect!’ Loz said, clapping her hands together. ‘Look!’ She held the mirror up.
    Peg watched herself in the glass, with her sharp-smooth head and the dangling jewellery. Her eyes looked bigger. She almost looked like she knew what she was doing.
    She hardly recognised herself.
    Peg wasn’t due in at work until after lunch, so, after Loz had set off for Seed, she thought she’d have another go at tracing her father.
    She switched on the ancient jelly-coloured iMac she and Loz had found in a skip and which to their amazement worked when they plugged it in. It was the first home computer either of them had ever had: Loz’s parents hadn’t allowed them in the house, because Naomi said they encouraged insularity and undermined family interaction, and of course there had been no way that Doll and Jean could have either afforded or wanted such a thing.
    Peg had inherited the family lack of interest in technology. At school, she was the kind of girl who escaped social purdah by curling up on her bed with a real book rather than the sort who hid in the impressively equipped IT suite. Under duress, she used computers at work, but she didn’t really know what to do with one at home or why, indeed, everyone else seemed to find it necessary to own one. In the same way as she favoured her pen and notebook over the voice recorder, she preferred looking things up in real books and sending proper letters.
    The old computer finally completed its elaborate and long-winded firing-up process and Peg scanned the available networks for PARTYBOYZ, the sporadically available and appropriately named unsecured wi-fi belonging to Sandy, the nocturnal boy downstairs. She was in luck, so turned immediately to the Facebook account Gemma from Seed had helped her to set up. Or, as Loz had put it, the Raymond Bait .
    ‘If you can’t find him, perhaps you could reel him in,’ she said.
    The account was in the full name she detested: Margaret Thwaites. It carried no information but her date and place of birth. The profile picture was a smiling, gap-toothed school picture taken when she was about ten which she had borrowed from its place on Doll’s bookshelves and which Gemma had scanned for her.
    Peg was entirely sceptical – and her argument about her father already knowing how to find her if he wanted to still held true – but, with few other options, she thought she might as well just go along with it.
    The downside was that, over the two weeks since she set the account up, she had acquired lots of friendship requests with messages from old schoolmates – she couldn’t really call them friends – asking how she was doing and telling her at length how brilliantly their lives were going in their entitled, graduate world – the world from which Peg had excluded herself.
    Despite the vocal disappointment of her teachers and her straight-A A level results, Peg hadn’t taken the expected path of going to university. Instead she set off in search of the low-paid, low-stress jobs she felt she was more suited to.
    These Facebook messages unsettled her. She thought she had done with those girls: despite a lack of specific early memories, she knew from a lingering rotten taste in her mouth that her schooldays had been harshly unhappy, and it was doing her no good at all to see these faces and hear these names again. This led her to wonder if perhaps Loz was right – if perhaps her lack of memory was some sort of defence mechanism masking a hideous lurking truth too horrible for her conscious mind to deal with.
    She