The nightmare went on and on for Milly. She collected the two urns containing her parents’ ashes from the undertakers, wondering – not wanting to, but unable to stop herself – how much of the dust inside the bronze-coloured urns was flesh, blood and bone, and how much was just scorched fragments of metal from the Jet Ranger.
Got to stop thinking about that, she thought.
And now came the reading of the will. In his office, Mr Gatiss the family solicitor read it out to Harlan and Milly. Milly was so dazed that for a long while none of the dry legal words he was spouting even registered. Then she saw Harlan sitting there with a big shit-eating grin on his face and said: ‘What?’
Patiently, Mr Gatiss pushed his half-moon specs up his nose and read the will again.
This time, Milly paid closer attention. The gist of it was, Harlan got everything. Everything. Milly got an allowance, thirty grand a year, that was all. The rest went straight to Harlan. Charlie and Nula’s entire fortune. The houses. The cash. The business. The nightclubs. The boats, the cars. The whole damned lot.
She sat there and thought of course.
She’d never been rated. She was just a girl. Harlan was the boy, the favoured one, heir to Charlie Stone’s empire. She thought of coming downstairs to proudly display her first teenage party dress and Charlie saying, crushing her in an instant: ‘Well no one’s ever going to call her Twiggy, are they?’
Subtlety had never been Charlie’s strong suit. Mum had thumped his arm, shushing him, but Milly had got the message, loud and clear. She looked a mess. She was a mess. Fat and ugly. But Harlan? For Charlie, everything perfectly dressed and handsome Harlan did was OK. Nothing had ever changed that for Charlie, not even when Nula had started to hate Harlan and fear him.
For Charlie, Harlan could do no wrong. And here was proof of it.
Milly drove into town that night and went to one of the nightclubs Dad had owned. Now it was Harlan’s. She ordered a Bloody Mary at the bar and then stood there, wondering what the fuck she was doing here amid the deafening noise of Diana Ross belting ‘Chain Reaction’ out of the sound system. She downed the drink and ordered another. Then she felt a bit sick. She wasn’t much of a drinker. But she drank the alcohol because it numbed the pain.
Feeling hazy, she stumbled off toward the ladies and stood and stared at her face in the mirror, noting that her potato-shaped nose – thanks, Mum! – was shiny with grease, her lipstick gone. She dabbed powder on and added a slick of lipstick. Better. Well, a bit. Other girls were pushing in alongside her in the cramped loos, and a black-haired beauty with hard, knowing eyes came up beside her and met Milly’s gaze in the mirror. She was exactly the sort of girl who’d always frightened Milly, reminding her of the snobby tomboy girls at school and at the stables, the ones who’d bullied her.
‘Need a livener then?’ the girl asked with a smile that didn’t reach her eyes. She had a tiny square of cellophane in her hand, a couple of pills inside. ‘Tenner?’
You never touched drugs. Not even cannabis, which everyone said was harmless. That had been rammed into her brain, nailed into it, from an early age. Playing with drugs was Russian roulette. You could be fine on it – maybe – or it could induce psychosis. You could wind up a paranoid schizophrenic. Pull the trigger, her dad had always said, and see whether the bullet took your brain right out. Your choice!
Which was fucking ironic, given the fortune that Charlie Stone had apparently – according to Belle – made from selling the damned things. But looking at this girl, looking at the stuff in her hand, made Milly wonder.
Everything hurt. Life hurt, right now. Her parents were gone. She missed Mum already, much to her surprise, and she had once adored her dad, even if he did have faults, even if he was the world’s worst crook, a fucking drugs baron, even if he’d never rated her at all. Now she was afraid of the future, under Harlan’s thumb. He would be in charge, and she would be nothing. As per usual. She stared at the pills in the girl’s hand. It made you feel better, they all said. Milly felt she would give anything, to feel better.
‘You in or not?’ said the girl, getting impatient.
Milly pulled a tenner out of her bag and handed it over. Then she tossed the pills onto her tongue, bent her head to sluice in water straight out of the tap.
For the first time ever, she let the good times roll.