Letting out the Worms: Guilty or not? If not then the alternative is terrifying (Kitty Thomas Book 1 by Sue Nicholls (primary phonics .txt) 📕

Kitty tapped on Cerys’s window. ‘I’m going on somewhere else,’ Kitty said, and Cerys nodded and grinned at her.

‘Have a good time and look after your dad.’

Surprised, but impressed at this intuition, Kitty laughed. ‘I will. You take care.’ She stood at the edge of the pavement and waved them off, hoping, for Cerys and Freya’s sake, that Alice would not puke.

In a bar at the other end of town, the men were surprisingly decorous considering that they had been drinking for about two hours. Kitty gave her father a wary look, weighing up the level of intoxication he had reached. A new, slimmed down father met her gaze. Over the past few months, with his wedding photos in mind, Cerys had nagged him to cut down his beer intake, and to Kitty’s amazement, Paul had capitulated. This new, svelte father greeted her with loud enthusiasm. ‘Pops! You’re here.’

In parity with his bride to be, Paul sported a tee-shirt. Not pink but black, with Day-Glo orange lettering that spelled out the caption Brushing Gloom.

Kitty frowned in puzzlement, until the wordsmith in her saw a Spoonerism of sorts and she laughed out loud. ‘Where did you get the top, Pop?’

‘Anwen. Like it?’ He stuck out his chest to model the caption.

‘Very good.’

‘I still don’t get it,’ Maurice complained.

‘Keep thinking, you old duffer.’ Paul responded.

Kitty liberated a chair from a nearby table, and the men squeezed up to fit her in. She was reminded of the bar in Mauritius with Jean and Jerome, although here there was less smoke and a smaller number of drinkers. With effort, she ignored the persistent memories of her trip and focused on the lopsided faces around her. Opposite her, Mick and Maurice sandwiched her father on a curved, bay-window seat. Lucas and Sam were on her right in the space between herself and the edge of the window seat, and two men she had not met before, sat on her left. They turned out to be Jack and Lewis, husbands to Alice and Freya, respectively. Kitty did not mention Alice’s performance in the restaurant.

The surface of the circular table around which they sat, was overwhelmed by their six newly filled glasses and a mountain of empty crisp packets.

Jack pushed back his chair and leered over Kitty. ‘What can I get you, Kitty.’

‘I’m good, thanks, I’ll get my own and put into the kitty for the next round - you do have a kitty (apart from me)?’ She batted off the old and boring joke before anyone else could make it.

When she got back with her drink, Paul’s beer was already half finished. ‘Careful Pop,’ she warned, ‘You want to make it through this evening, don’t you?’

Paul looked at her through hooded eyes and said indistinctly, ‘I’ll be fine, Pops. You’ll take care of me, won’t you, after all you are my Best Woman?’

‘It wasn’t in my plan. No.’ She gave him a slight frown, and he pulled a face at her.

‘Leave me be, woman, it’s my last night of freedom.’

It was not, but she did not bother to correct him. Hard experience had taught her that there was no point. He would get joyfully inconvenient and then, allegedly, forget everything the following morning. Kitty had her suspicions that pretending to forget his behaviour the night before was his way of avoiding hassle. She picked up her pint. ‘Well, here’s to you Pop. Congratulations, and wishing you a happy and healthy future with Cerys.’

Everyone raised their glasses and clonked them together.

‘Cheers,’ Paul responded before saying, ‘I looked it up and you can be called Best Woman.’ Then he chuckled and said, ‘When I do the same for you at your wedding, I’ll be called the Man of Honour, which of course will be totally appropriate.’ He drained his beer. ‘Same again?’

Kitty tried to rid herself of the image of her father following her down the aisle wearing a tutu over his suit, and dug into her jeans for her wallet. ‘Not for me yet.’

‘I’ll have one.’ Jack was the only taker and Kitty’s thoughts went to Alice, Jack’s wife, and her state of inebriation when Kitty last saw her.

While they waited for Paul, Kitty caught up with the news. Maurice was enjoying Anwen’s visits to clean and spoil him with cups of tea and biscuits and much needed conversation. It was some time since he had been so animated and she was glad, not only for him but for his sons, Sam and Josh.

‘She’s bright, that one.’ Maurice was saying of Anwen. ‘She hardly had any schooling when she was young, but she’s been teaching herself in the school library. Got to take your hat off to her.’

‘She’s a nice girl,’ Kitty agreed and met Sam’s gaze. He would doubtless be remembering the other things Anwen had been up to.

Paul plonked two pints and more crisps on the table and the conversation moved on, ranging through the usual bloke stuff, football, cars, films, music, technology and so on. After another round, Paul got sentimental. ‘Oh Kitty. When did you get so grown up? It doesn’t seem long ago that you were this tall.’ He patted an invisible head at about the height of a five-year-old.

Kitty glanced at Sam again before saying, ‘I remember being five, Dad. Do you?’

‘Remember being five? Nah.’

Not you being five, me being five. The thing I think of most often is that wagon you made us. Do you remember us whizzing down Little Callum Hill?’

‘I do.’ Paul squinted at her. ‘Some bugger stole it. Annoying after the effort I put into it. Took me ages to find those wheels, they came off two wheelchairs.’

Kitty took a slurp from her beer and said, ‘Funnily enough, it’s turned up.’

‘What?’ Paul jerked out of his stupor. ’Where?’

‘In the woods behind