Sixteen years earlier
The girl in paint-on blue jeans was drunketty-drunk-drunk as her dad used to say. Blonde silky hair framing a heart-shaped face, and small tip-tilted breasts. No one had to imagine their perfection because the girl’s top was off as she danced on the bar. She danced well, her tanned arms lifted, but the baying members of the college hockey club weren’t showing their appreciation of any sense of rhythm. As the girl swayed, almost toppling, and the reaching hands went up to pull her down, Peggy Boland in her solitary corner of the college undercroft bar, put down a half-finished pint on the sticky table. She closed the ring-file binder and slid it under the bench, before pulling on the sheepskin jacket.
Enough already.
She stood up, remembering too late to duck to avoid concussing herself on the stone arch. She should have stayed in the library. But it was Friday night, and she thought – this once – she would finish her work while enjoying a drink in peace. Thanks to these braying, lecherous toss-bags, she was managing neither.
Cursing under her breath, she stood on the chair to rescue the tee-shirt dangling from the candle light-fitting, before pushing and shoving through the outlying ranks of the cheering rabble.
The team captain, his cheeks bumpy with purpling acne scars, was holding the dancer upright against his chest, his meaty arm around the golden skin.
Peggy moved with the crowd, using her own height and weight to intimidate the middle ranks. She need full ticket access. She caught a glimpse of the blonde’s bleary-eyed face, as the bruiser half-carried and half-dragged her through the crowd towards the doorway. A dozen others followed him, whooping their encouragement.
He didn’t notice Peggy at first.
“You’re in my way, Chewbacca.” His breath reeked of stale beer and spicy kebab. The colour rose in Peggy’s cheeks as she held out the girl’s discarded tee-shirt. “You’ll catch your death. It’s perishing out.”
The blonde’s green eyes attempted to bring Peggy into focus as she patted herself down to check the exact state of her undress. The small hand went to her mouth in exquisite confusion at the nakedness it discovered, and blushing she shrugged herself into her top as the mob booed its disapproval.
“Come on with me, sunbeam,” Peggy said. “It’s past your bedtime.”
She was even prettier close up, Peggy thought. Smiling hazily, the girl took a step towards her. Two steps.
“You’re not her effing mother.”
The meathead jerked the girl back into him, holding her forearm tight enough to make her squeal. She slapped the palm of her hand against his barrel-chest in feeble protest.
“Bugger off, Lurch.” The voice of entitlement – the result of hundreds of thousands of pounds spent at the right sort of school with the right sort of people. Not that of a man used to disappointment or refusal. “If anyone’s seeing her home, we are. Aren’t we, boys?”
The captain leaned down to slam his wet lips against the girl’s, forcing open her pink lips and pushing his tongue into her mouth to the raucous cheering of his team-mates. She reared back, the blonde head moving from side to side as she tried to squirm away, but he held on, sliding his muscled thigh between the slim legs.
One of the team held his hockey stick in his hand, the curved head balanced on the floor as if it was a rifle and he was a solider on guard duty. He took the kiss as his cue to shove Peggy hard in a bid to get her moving, but she held her ground. It helped to be a big lass sometimes.
“Touch me again, and I will deck you,” she said to the rifleman and there was a roar of laughter and jeers from his teammates.
Why wait? It was inevitable.
Peggy slammed the heel of her hand into the soft tissue of the Roman nose on the right and heard it break.
Her dad, a roughneck on the oil-rigs, taught her never to wait for the lummocks to catch up. It was a waste of your valuable time and evolutionary advantage.
“Peggy lovey, when it’s going to end badly, be sure and get your retaliation in first,” he’d told her. “Don’t ever think you have to play nice. Trust your instincts and play by your own rules – not theirs.”
Blood gushed from the Roman nose as she wrested the hockey stick from the rifleman’s shocked grasp, driving the stick end into his belly and the wooden head into the jaw of the man on the left, raising her leg in the same moment and kicking him full-on in the crotch. Shrieking, he staggered sideways, bent over, his hands clutching his groin. If she was lucky she’d broken his jawbone and front teeth as well as dispatching his bollocks to his chest cavity.
She had seconds.
She grabbed the blonde’s wrist, hauling her away from her captor, taking a step backwards and then another, her eyes still locked on the shocked face of the team captain. The dancing girl moved as Peggy moved. Sobering up fast. Heat coming off her. The smell of blackcurrant and cider.
There, Peggy saw it.
A white-hot flare of outrage.
The big lump had disrespected him. In front of the boys. Failed to pay due deference. Worse yet, she was stealing his prize. His beautiful piece of flesh.
As the meathead rushed them, Peggy used the stick as a scythe shin-height forcing their attackers into reverse, tipping a chair, another, and then a table, glass shattering against the paved floor, before slamming the stick at an angle into the narrow doorway creating a barricade between them and the rats’ nest of boys.
The meathead shouted – hurling aside a broken chair, his teammates piling in behind, as Peggy shoved the blonde out into the corridor, slammed the huge outer door shut and rammed home the bolts. There was a moment’s silence as the two girls leaned their backs against the door.
It was cooler in the stone corridor. The air fresher without the fug of cigarette smoke and the heat of sweaty, compressed bodies.
There was a crashing noise as the ancient door juddered in its frame as if a bench was being used as a battering ram.
“Nice stick work,” the blonde said, as she smashed the glass case of the fire alarm with her elbow and pressed the button. “But how fast can you run?”