‘God, Lee, that could have been us,’ Tracie said. ‘They’re good-looking like us… he’s dark and she’s blonde.’
Finding a child-minder to look after Carla had obviously given Tracie far more freedom than when she’d relied on Irene. I couldn’t understand why the poor kid spent so much time with the woman. Tracie only worked part-time and, even when she wasn’t going out, she seemed to prefer not having Carla around. Maybe she thought being a mum was all about dressing her like a doll in frilly ankle socks and hair ribbons rather than spending time with her.
‘She likes being at her house more than she does here,’ Tracie said, when I asked her why Carla was spending Christmas Day with her childminder. ‘She’s a really nice woman and is really good with kids. They do all sorts of stuff together. You should be pleased I’m getting to spend so much time with Lee.’
But there were plenty of times when Tracie would go out without even telling him what her plans were. She’d tell him to pick her up and would often be out when he did. When he had chicken pox and was living with Tracie, she’d even told him he’d just have to fend for himself. Just because he was off work and in bed, itching and covered from head to toe in sores, didn’t mean she had to stay in. After just a couple of days, she told him that, if he wasn’t up to going out on Friday, he might as well come home to Ray and me.
‘I’m not your fucking nursemaid,’ she told him.
Typically, she’d packed Carla off to her childminder, put on her slap and high heels and told Lee she didn’t know when she’d be back.
It was an entirely different matter if Tracie was ever ill. She only had to get a mild headache and the world would have to stand still while she went to bed.
When Danielle came to stay with us for the weekend, I usually offered to have Carla because they enjoyed each other’s company so much. There were a couple of occasions when Danielle stayed at Tracie’s when it was Lee’s weekend to have her. But, when the rows between her and Lee seemed to get more and more regular, I stopped letting her go. I knew Lee would never let her witness any violent confrontations or listen to Tracie’s foul-mouthed temper tantrums, but I couldn’t risk it.
When Brian asked Ray and me why we thought Tracie had always had such a hold over Lee, the only reason we could come up with was the sex, and the fact that he couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving him or being physically intimate with another man. She loved to make Lee jealous, especially in front of his friends. I couldn’t remember a single occasion when Lee hadn’t come home and described her provocative dancing with blokes who thought she was out clubbing alone. If Lee ignored her behaviour, she’d go up to someone on the dance floor who was dancing with another girl and start dancing in between them.
In my day, she’d have been described as a prick-tease. It was the only way she knew of getting attention – the short skirts, skimpy tops and high heels got her noticed. It didn’t matter that she wasn’t particularly bright and only talked about things she watched on the telly or make-up and hair products she’d seen in magazines and wanted to try. She was a tarty blonde with a half-decent face and figure. What else did she need to get attention in a busy pub or nightclub?
Any hopes we’d had that Lee would come to his senses and end their relationship were dashed in June 1996 when Tracie discovered she was pregnant.
It was last thing we’d expected but Lee was over the moon and Tracie lapped up the attention when they came round for a meal to tell us.
‘It’s great, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘A little brother or sister for Danielle and Carla. We can’t wait, can we, Lee?’
They both seemed so delighted that Ray and I wondered whether having a baby might force them to take a more mature attitude to their relationship. It might even be the making of them once they realised just how much hard work and responsibility would be needed to look after a little one.
But, at the back of my mind, there were nagging doubts about how Tracie would cope with pregnancy when her life revolved around going out to have a good time. Lee had already proved himself as a hands-on dad to Danielle but he knew he’d only been able to do his bit because Anita was such a brilliant mum and Ray, Michelle, Steve and I were always around to help out. And would Tracie feel the same way when her bump got so big she could no longer fit into her skimpy outfits.
It was a worrying prospect, especially as the pregnancy was unplanned and Tracie rarely went out of her way to spend more time than she had to with Carla.
Two months later, it seemed that fate had stepped in to end all the uncertainty. Irene rang and said Tracie fallen down some steps while she’d been out shopping in Redditch. She was four months pregnant and had suffered a miscarriage. Irene said Tracie was so devastated that she’d told her mum to make sure we didn’t turn up at the Alexandra Hospital where she said she’d been taken by ambulance. She couldn’t even face seeing Lee.
We all went over to her flat to see her the next day. I’d never seen Tracie looking as vulnerable and upset as she was that day. Hollow-eyed and sobbing as she sat next to Lee on the settee, she was convinced it was all her fault. No matter how much we tried to console her and tell her they could always try again, she told us she was convinced the miscarriage was a punishment. It took the best part of a month for Tracie to put losing the baby behind her and resume hostilities with Lee.
Lee was certain her dramatic weight loss – nearly two stones in six weeks – was a result of her miscarriage, but I wasn’t convinced. She was definitely eating less but didn’t appear to have lost her enthusiasm for clubbing and drinking. If anything, she was far more obsessed about her appearance than she had ever been and had even sent away for brochures on cosmetic surgery. It didn’t take me long to work out what she’d got in mind. What better excuse to get Lee to stump up the money for a boob job than the trauma of losing the baby?
‘Even Lee thinks my boobs aren’t what they were,’ she told me. ‘All this weight I’ve lost has made them go really flat.’
She’d been seeing Lee less than a year when she started going on about wanting a breast enlargement. From the moment she knew he had some shares with West Midlands Travel where he worked as a bus driver, she was like a dog with a bone. He would be the one to benefit if he cashed them in and gave her the money for a boob job, she’d told him. With bigger breasts, she’d said, he’d fancy her even more and, who knows, they might even get her the modelling break she was convinced was just around the corner.
I told Lee I thought he was mad even to think about throwing away his hard-earned cash on her and he never mentioned it again.
One afternoon, not long after the miscarriage, she turned up with Lee for lunch and started going on about her boobs. They were obviously swollen with milk, hardly the kind of topic I’d have expected her to mention at the dinner table, but it didn’t stop her embarrassing Ray.
‘What do you think, Ray?’ she laughed. ‘I suit them bigger, don’t I?’
Ray didn’t know where to look, let alone what to say. I could see Tracie was enjoying his embarrassment. Lee said nothing.
‘Come on,’ she went on, grabbing Ray’s hands and planting them on her breasts. ‘Have a good feel and tell me what you think. They’re enormous, aren’t they?’
Talking to the police about Tracie that day and going over everything that we’d had to put up with really helped all of us to put things into perspective. She’d caused so much unhappiness with her selfish behaviour and yet I’d gone on accepting her for Lee’s sake. Tracie knew how much we all loved him, but seemed to take a perverse pleasure from watching us tread on eggshells when she was around. We’d had no option but to put up with her. We couldn’t risk losing Lee. And, no matter how bad the arguments between them were, he was always prepared to give Tracie one more chance.
In the September before