Page 9 of Play Our Song

“Right,” Gio said.

Sophie shook her head and picked her fork up again. There was no point in this conversation, nothing was going to change.

“IT’S ALRIGHT FOR you,” she said to Jules an hour later, perched on a bar stool with a coke in front of her. “You’re all moved out and everything.”

“Whatever makes you think that grandpa Jim was any better than your dad?” Jules asked. She and her sister had grown up with their grandfather, a formidable and slightly dodgy man who now resided in the Whitebridge Residential Center, which was a posh way of saying an old folk’s home.

“What did you and Amelia do about it, then?” asked Sophie.

Jules shrugged. “We got about. Grand-dad doesn’t have eyes in the back of his head.”

“And he doesn’t have a minion to do his bidding,” Sophie said.

Jules laughed. “Gio looks nothing like a minion. Besides, he’s not here now, is he?”

“He doesn’t need to be,” said Sophie. She nodded toward a pair of men in the corner. “Stu and Del are there. If I do anything, word’ll get back to Gio soon enough.”

“Well, you are sitting in a public place,” said Jules.

“Who’s sitting in a public place?” Amelia, Jules’s older sister, appeared. “And I’ll have a half, please.”

“I am,” Sophie said.

“And what’s so wrong with that?” asked Amelia. Sophie sighed and explained her woes to Amelia, who laughed. “You’re just not doing things right,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Amelia looked at Jules and winked. “Remember the youth club?” she asked.

“What youth club?” asked Sophie.

“Exactly,” said Amelia. “Whenever grand-dad Jim used to ask where we were off out to, we told him the youth club. He was always dead satisfied with that. Thought it was good for us to socialize, didn’t he, Jules?”

“He did,” agreed Jules.

“But… we never had a youth club, did we?” Sophie said.

“Depends on how you look at things,” said Amelia. “I mean, technically, maybe not. But what’s a youth club? A group of young people getting together to socialize, right?”

“In other words, the two of you going out with your friends,” Sophie said, finally cottoning on.

“It wasn’t exactly lying,” said Jules.

“Plus, it was one place where he definitely wasn’t going to follow us,” said Amelia. “I mean, me and Cass went to the cinema once and half-way through the film I heard crunching and turned around to see grand-dad Jim sitting there trying to get popcorn out of his false teeth.”

“I think what Am’s saying is that if you want a bit more privacy, maybe you should be planning things in places whereyour dad and brother aren’t going to be watching you,” said Jules.

“Don’t forget all of Gio’s friends in that equation,” Sophie said. She took a drink of her coke. “Dunno. Short of having a gynecologist appointment once a week, I can’t think of anywhere that they won’t be to keep an eye on me.”

Jules frowned for a minute and then beamed, throwing her bar towel over her shoulder. “Can you not?” she asked.

“I just said I couldn’t,” said Sophie.

“Me neither,” said Amelia, accepting her beer from Jules.

“Seriously? Do neither of you listen to a word I say?” grumbled Jules. “Do you not go on the Whitebridge website? Read the ads on the board outside the school? Honestly, how do either of you ever know what’s going on around here?”

“Dunno,” said Amelia cheerfully. “Cass usually tells me anything I need to know. Cheers for the beer, Jules. Catch you later, Soph.” She went back to the table she was sharing with her best friend and business partner, Cass.

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