I’d never been to any of their houses before. All I knew was that they lived on one of the worst estates in the town. Half the houses were derelict, windows boarded up with steel shutters, yobs running wild, causing chaos. The local paper was always full of stories about the place. I took the train from the station at the top of my street and two stops later I was in another world. I was a little afraid even venturing on to the platform.
‘Just wear a bulletproof vest and carry a gun and you should be OK,’ Wizzie had warned me on the phone, trying to be funny. I didn’t laugh. If I’d had a bulletproof vest it would have been on me. ‘That’s why everybody’s got a Rottweiler up here,’ she went on. ‘Or keeps a baseball bat behind the door. Safety precaution.’
But Lauren’s house was a total surprise. Set in a little cul-de-sac, it was a two-storey semi-detached council house that her parents had bought. The windows sparkled clean and the lights inside were warm and welcoming. The garden was tidy too and well kept, except for an army of garden gnomes. Erin would have laughed at that, called it ‘common’. I thought they were kind of cute.
Lauren’s mother opened the door and I could see right away where Lauren got her fashion sense from. Her mother’s hair was tied up on top of her head with a multi-coloured scarf, and she was wearing some kind of flowery top, tight jeans and orange slippers. She had a wooden spoon in her hand as if she was in the middle of cooking something. Lauren came hurrying downstairs as I came in.
Her mother swung round as Lauren tapped her on the shoulder. Then Lauren started signing to her.
‘I’m telling her if she’s cooking something we don’t want it,’ Lauren explained to me. ‘She always manages to drop in some strange ingredient – thinks it makes it taste better. It never does.’
Her mother hit her with the spoon. Lauren grabbed at her head as if she was in pain, and her mother began signing at such a speed I had to laugh. Lauren laughed too.
‘Oh, shut up, Mum. You talk such a load of rubbish!’ Her mother kept signing away. Lauren turned to me. ‘Honestly, see when she starts with those hands of hers, you can’t get her to shut up.’
Her dad appeared on the scene then, still in his working clothes. He was a plumber, Lauren had told me. ‘What’s all this noise?’ he said, though there was complete silence. It made me giggle. He winked at me. ‘Never marry a woman that talks as much as this! Get in that kitchen, woman, and make me a cup of tea!’
He grabbed Lauren’s mum by the shoulder and she started hitting him with the spoon. Tapping him really. He pretended to be mortally hurt, clutched at his arm and shouted, ‘Domestic abuse! Call the police!’
It was so crazy I couldn’t stop myself laughing.
‘They’re mad, Hannah. I should have warned you.’
We managed finally to escape to Lauren’s room. The rest had already arrived and were lolling about on Lauren’s bed. She shared the room with her sister – the one who had been the waitress at the wedding, Ellen. She was getting ready to go out, slipping on a coat. She smiled a greeting to me as I came in. If she knew I’d suspected her, she didn’t show it. She told us all to have a nice night, talking in that thick way that deaf people have. ‘She makes Mother Teresa look like Adolf Hitler,’ I remembered Wizzie telling me. I felt ashamed. How could I have suspected her?
Lauren’s room was a dream. The bedcovers and the curtains matched, pale green and cream.
‘Mum made them,’ she told me when I remarked on how nice they were. ‘She’s really handy. She made them for Grace as well.’
‘So your mother thinks we’re beneath you?’ Wizzie said, bouncing on the bed, not caring about how creamy the covers were.
‘Scum, I think she called you.’
‘So glad we’ve got a good reputation,’ she said.
Lauren’s mother popped her head in the door and started signing again. Lauren shook her head furiously.
‘What was that about?’ I asked.
‘She’s asking if we want some cheese on toast.’
Cheese on toast sounded nice to me. But the rest of them groaned. Wizzie pretended to be sick under the bed.
‘It can’t be that bad,’ I said.
‘The last time she made us cheese on toast, she sliced some oranges into it “to add flavour”, she said.’ Grace shivered at the memory. ‘It added something, but it certainly wasn’t flavour.’
The wind suddenly howled through the trees outside.
Lauren sat on the floor. ‘Who says we’ll play Light as a Feather? It’s a brilliant night for it.’