Motherlove by Thorne Moore

help. What if Gary found out about that? He’d be that mad.
    Carver was the bloke upstairs. Top Dog. She was always a bit afraid of him. No, really afraid. Big black guy with eyes like bullets. Nobody messed with Carver, not even Gary. She’d delivered stuff for him now and again, because he’d asked, politely, and she’d pretended it was fine, too terrified to refuse. But mostly she ducked out of sight if she saw him first. Then one day he’d caught her on the stairs, looked her over, and asked her what she was going to do. Like she had choices.
    She couldn’t tell Gary that. Couldn’t tell him that Carver had asked her if she wanted to him to fix something up for her. Or that she had shaken her head. Better let Gary believe she’d been just too stupid to know what to do.
    Perhaps she was stupid. Lindy couldn’t understand her own impulses. What happened in this world, or at least what happened to her, just happened. No rhyme or reason, no good or bad. So, lying alone on her mattress, she just hoped that Gary would forgive her and accept the baby because it was too late to put right her mistake. She never paused to think that maybe she had said no because she, Lindy Crowe, actually wanted the baby. She had been too useless to get rid of it, but not too useless, in her own small way, to look after herself and the spark of life within her. She’d stopped drinking – couldn’t afford it, could she? Hardly ever smoked. Tried to remember to eat. Had dreams sometimes about holding her baby, cuddling it, having its fingers grab hers. Someone of her very own to offer her the one thing she had ever craved.
    It was Gary’s, whatever he said. She hadn’t been sleeping around while he was inside, at least not for the first four months. She hadn’t slept around before, neither, not once she’d moved in with him, though he’d kept telling her his friends would pay good money if she gave them one. She’d hoped she wouldn’t have to do that anymore. She would have done it, for him, in the end, but he was still bullying her about it when he’d got done for demanding money with menaces. Leaving her to cope all alone.
    She’d started off well. Got a job, night cleaning. Greg paid her cash in hand and she’d enjoyed it, working through the night hours with old Sal, in brightly lit offices like another world. She was good at it too, sweeping, cleaning, polishing, making things neat and pretty. And even if Greg wasn’t quite legal, it was like Christmas every week, knowing there’d be cash at the end of it. But then she’d starting throwing up and showing and Greg had told her to get lost and she was stuffed, in every possible sense. She was driven back to the inevitable round of prostitution and shoplifting. Not that many men were that keen for a fuck with a pregnant woman. Shoplifting was easier though. No one thought twice about her bulges.
    She’d signed on too. She hadn’t dared try before because they’d have just put her back in care. But now she was seventeen, they couldn’t send her back, so a month ago she’d finally made it into the Job Centre, and found herself filling in a load of forms. Did she have a permanent place of residence? Yes! What rent did she pay? None. She shouldn’t have said that. Did she have a partner? Yes, but he was in prison. Name, age, date of birth, National Insurance number… She didn’t know nothing about half of it, all the questions and the boxes and the haranguing woman with big shoulders and steel glasses who looked at her like she was a worm. It was all just another of those processes that happened to Lindy, inflicted by other people, the usual round of meaningless battering. But she had emerged with the promise of a giro and leaflets on maternity welfare. Not bad for all that bother. The money didn’t go far, but it was regular, enough for some food and light and weed,