The man struggled to his feet and approached them, face contorted with corrupt rage, and lunged for the girl.
‘Get-!’
David roughly interposed his own body causing the man to stagger backwards, wind-milling to keep his balance.
‘Shut up and sit down, you! Not another word! Got it?’
His practised baleful look had the intended effect and the man fell back heavily onto the sofa, trying unsuccessfully not to look daunted. David was just about to take the girl inside when a woman staggered out of the house. She was dressed in torn, slatternly garb, and she was not that many years older than himself. Her face was smeared with garish gobs of cheap makeup and she was quite obviously dead drunk- or worse.
Without a word to David or Monica, apparently too out of it to fully register their presence, the woman navigated her way towards Monica’s stepfather and collapsed into his lap.
‘Got‘ny more blow, luv?’
Turning his head away in disgust when she kissed the man’s foul-breathed, unshaven gob, David chanced to catch a glimpse of a figure hanging back in the shadows of the house’s interior; a fellow he recognised as one of the drug-dealers who hung about his school. At the sight of him, something in David snapped.