by Denise Mina
She wasn’t actually old, he realised. She could only be fifty, early fifties. He supposed her old because she was older than him when it mattered. Maybe it didn’t really matter any more.
Suddenly tired, Boyd took a deep breath, tilting his head back and looking down a cheek at the hall. His half-shut eyes turned the people into a blur, melting them into a solid mass of hairspray and jackets.
Smokers were coming to the door, bringing hats and bags, gleeful at being free to go outside. Tommy Farmer was standing by his seat, pulling his jacket on, about to leave, and Boyd thought he could go in and approach him now. He opened the door just as a fat man in full kilt outfit came through the door.
‘Ahh!’ He threw his arms out and grabbed Boyd. ‘Brilliant!’ He was sweating wildly. ‘Fantastic food, Boyd.’
Tommy drifted past them as the man dragged Boyd into the hall. Everyone turned to look at him. A smattering of applause rolled round the room, not quite enough in Boyd’s opinion but a round of applause nonetheless. They’d thank him during the speeches, maybe people were saving their appreciation for later. Then he was in the hall, out on the choppy waters of society, bobbing from table to table. Hands reached for him, congregation members and customers. He found himself sucked into eddies of conversation, compliments and introductions.
Now he was under the balcony being introduced to a small, purple-faced pensioner who knew his father. The plum-faced man talked angrily about the Reverend Robert having died, how the church had gone downhill since, as though the death had been directed at him. His flustered wife took over the conversation. She was at school with someone who knew his mother, but they had died and that was a mercy and wasn’t Boyd doing well? So nice he was back home. And how many children? Two boys? Well, that must be a handful!
Miss Grierson was suddenly behind him. She didn’t wait for a break in the pensioners’ ramble but whispered in his ear,
‘I’ve got some white.’
She said it very casually, as if she was warning him about a gravy spill.
Boyd stood as still as if she had goosed him back. He nodded at the old woman in front of him. Someone’s daughter had an illness of some kind but she didn’t let that hold her back.
Miss Grierson murmured to him, her lips brushing his ear lobe, ‘Give me the café keys and wait five minutes.’
Without breaking eye contact with the lady telling the story, Boyd took his keys out of his pocket and handed them to her.
From the corner of his eye he saw Miss Grierson coursing to the doors, tacking between tables and squally groups of people. Elated, he looked around for someone to waste the five minutes on.
With misplaced delight he smiled at an old woman sitting nearby. She gave him a pained smile, her hand rubbing circles on her swollen knee in an orthopaedic brace.
‘Knee’s giving me gyp,’ she said, as if he had enquired.
‘She’s to keep it up, haven’t ye, pet?’ another old woman explained across the table. She was warmer, more likeable. ‘You the Puddle Café man?’
‘Paddle. Yes.’
‘Oh, son, your prices are criminal.’
Boyd was irritated by that, but he was getting a sniff in a minute, so he shouldn’t really let trivial slights worry him. Let it go.
‘You’re a Fraser, aren’t you?’ chimed the Martyr-to-her-knee.
‘And tell me this,’ the stupid cow called over, ‘isn’t your family the Lawnmore Frasers?’
It was the way she said it, the intonation of the odd girl he’d met on the seafront. Boyd realised that he was looking at the two grannies and he smiled.
‘Yeah, the Lawnmore Frasers.’
The two grannies nodded, once to each other, once to him, running through the family history in their minds, finding him acceptable.
‘Are you Granny Eunice and Granny Annie?’
‘Oh! How would you know that?’
‘I met Lea-Anne earlier, with her dad, down at the esplanade—’
‘Coming out of the pub, likely.’
‘Yeah,’ said Boyd, ‘coming out of the pub. Didn’t she say one of you was babysitting tonight?’
The women looked at each other. The father didn’t want to go out in the end, one said. He gave them the ticket, said the other, and they just came together.
Boyd started to tell them how he recognised the intonation of their speech in their granddaughter’s, but someone who had a sister who had just had a stroke was standing by the table and no one was very interested in his phonetic observations. He shifted away and the Martyr called after him,
‘And son? Listen: your gravy wants salt.’
He walked away feeling belittled and imagined Sanjay laughing at him. Your gravy wants salt.
Tommy Farmer crossed his path and glanced at him, but Boyd didn’t give a fuck about him now. He walked straight out of the halls and down to the café.
Iain watched Tommy cross to the door and thought quite suddenly that it might be nice to get a breath of air himself. He stood up, lifting his jacket off the back of the chair and smiled suddenly. Fresh air, indeed. An addict’s lie: he was going to beg a smoke off someone.
And then he was outside with the gaggle of smokers lined up along the disabled ramp. Everyone was there, all the good-looking women and guys, younger than him, most of them, but good guys. A young team were listening to Darren Oaky tell a story and snorting and laughing. Tommy took a fag out and watched Darren, a little jealous pinch between his eyebrows. Tommy couldn’t tell a story.
Iain walked towards him and saw Tommy’s face harden.
‘Wee Paul says you says it was you,’ muttered Iain.
Tommy snorted, ‘So?’
They squared up to each other. No fighting though, Mark would not approve, so they looked at each other and neither said what they were thinking.
Tommy was thinking that it was him: he’d done all the organising, got the van, etc., so it was him, really.
Iain was thinking that he had raised his hand over the woman. He got Andrew Cole to loan them the boat and it was his hands that had killed her. Slowly, Tommy’s eyes fell to Iain’s fingertips.
‘Your hands look fucking mental,’ he said.
Iain looked at them. Lainey said that too. But Tommy was just distracting him. ‘You leave off Murray Ray,’ Iain said, dropping his hand, ‘or I’ll fucking swing for you.’
They looked at each other. Tommy decided something that Iain couldn’t fathom. He smirked. And lit the cigarette. Iain looked at the packet. ‘Gae us one.’
Tommy did. Iain still had his lighters, yellow yellow, but that didn’t bother him as much any more. They smoked next to each other on the ramp, a peace pipe of sorts.
Darren was into another story and more people came out. Some of the smoking women had men’s dinner jackets draped over their shoulders for warmth. Tommy sloped off.
Iain begged another fag off a woman he knew. He’d done everything he needed to do. He felt quite good. He stayed outside, even when the cigarettes were done, keeping to the outskirts of the crowd, enjoying being part of it but still separate.
It got colder, darker. The smokers pulled their jackets and coats around them, huddling together for warmth. Darren and another young guy started telling the same story. They were speaking too loud, shouting different versions of the punchline over each other for the audience of women.
The drone was so faint it felt like a memory at first, a faraway whine coming over the roof tops from the east: fire engines. Chat around the door petered out. The night felt suddenly cold as the drone got louder. It was coming from the shore.
Red lights flashing at the bottom of Sinclair Street, filling Boots the chemists’ window with a bloody, molten smear. Sirens cut dead in mid wail.
The crowd drifted out to the street, watching down to the water. A black cloud of smoke billowed taller than the town, rolling in like a monster stepping out of the sea.
A voice in the crowd: ‘Oh, Christ, it’s the Sailors’.’
A woman called to the doors–‘Somebody! GET MURRAY OUT HERE’ and people in the hall took up the cry–‘Murray’s place is on fire!’ ‘Get Murray out here!’
But Murray wasn’t in the hall.
Hardly breathing, Iain watched as Eunice and Annie came to the door. They stood, backlit. They held each other, watching down to the water, as stone-faced as fishermen’s wives in a storm. Iain froze: they were both there. Murray wasn’t there and Lea-Anne was never left alone.
Iain was next to them, looming over them, breathless with terror and the little women didn’t need to speak or tell him. They turned their horrified faces to the fire. ‘WHERE ARE THEY?’ shouted Iain, but he knew where they’d be. ‘YOU NEED TO TELL! YOU NEED TO PHONE! ’
But they didn’t have phones with them. From the corner of his eye he saw a bright rectangle of light, someone taking a picture of the fire. He grabbed it, shoved the indignant photographer away and held it out to Annie: Emergency! Say they’re in there! Annie fumbled the phone to Eunice and she stabbed at it three times.
Glass exploded somewhere far away, the high snap carried on the wind. Iain saw red flames lick above the rooftops, stark against the black water. Thick black smoke curled up taller than the town, billowing in from the west. The smoke was Mark’s proxy, the town cleaved to his will and Iain watched it coil around the buildings on the seafront.
He was moving, heart hammering, not certain he was moving because everyone around him was moving too, inexorable as a mudslide, downhill, into the fire.
A gust of wind from the water blew the thick smoke up the valley of the street towards them. The mob recoiled but not Iain. He walked on into the benedicting smoke. Heat and a grainy weight pressed on his chest. He hurried into it, breathing deep the suffocating black.
The wind changed direction. Like a giant incense burner over the town, it swung the smoke out of the narrow street and away, up, out to sea.
Iain slowed to a stagger. As sudden as the grace of faith withdrawn, he found himself alone outside the Tesco Metro. Smoke rose from his good jacket. He coughed and his spit was black.
He shuffled on, to the corner, stopping when he got across the road from the burning pub.
The inside of the café looked bigger in the dark. It looked bigger and braver and, like, just the smartest thing anyone had ever done. Boyd was sweating and, as if seeing the half-lit room for the first time, he knew, deep in his heart, that he had done a laudable thing here.
Really, when you thought about it, bringing seasonal, local, organic food to the town–genius. And he had brought it to the town, because there was nothing, literally nothing, like that here before him. And they complained that his gravy wanted salt.
He looked down at Miss Grierson’s head, bobbing at his crotch. He’d momentarily forgotten what they were doing but abruptly, all the sensations flooded his mind and he was lost in it, the wetness and strangeness, that it was her, that it was here, in the dark, when his eyes were burning, his nose fizzing. The blinds were drawn on the windows. Lights flashing past, white noise outside, people in groups passing. The detritus of the evening’s event was stacked all around the kitchen. He didn’t need to come in tomorrowrowrow—
Flashes of light blossomed behind his lids as he bucked into her mouth, long-term tension pulsing out through his cock. He caught his breath and his work-obsessed mind finished the thought–he didn’t need to come in tomorrow because the girls would do the washing up in the morning.
Fuck. He opened his eyes. Fuck. Even a blow job from a stranger was ruined by intrusive notes about the fucking staff rota. He was wired and angry again. A waste of a crime.
He looked down and saw Miss Grierson pull away. Then she did a very odd thing. It happened so quickly, just a second. Boyd instantly blinked, rerunning the action in his head, teasing the different movements apart because they didn’t seem to fit together: first, she twisted away from him, turning the full three-sixty, fishing in her mouth for something. Then she turned back to face him and her hand was at her side, her face a picture of innocence. An air hostess smile, devoid of personal feeling, an obligation.
Boyd opened his eyes. It was odd because the movement was so fluid. It seemed–he couldn’t think of the word for a second but then it came to him–professional.
Time lag. Time slips. He hadn’t taken cocaine for a long time but did remember time slips. This didn’t feel like that though. Didn’t have the guillotined sharpness in the middle.
Miss Grierson stood up and smiled at him. A silver trail across her cheek caught the light. She had a little snowy rim on her nostril.
‘Let’s go to my house,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve got plans for you.’
He glanced down and saw a baggy condom in her hand. She saw him looking at it. ‘Dental dam,’ she said. ‘HIV.’
It wasn’t a dental dam, though. It was a female condom, sort of. But shorter, sort of?
Boyd took his key out of the door shutter and stood up.
Now that, just there, that was a time slip. That did feel like a cut-out bit. He couldn’t work out why that mattered really, until he turned and saw her smiling as she walked away uphill. Miss Grierson. For fuck’s sake. Walking time lag.
Side by side, they took the wide road diagonally, each with their hands deep in their pockets, staying wide of each other in case they were spotted. Down a back road towards her house. Why had they gone uphill, he wondered, as they walked through moonshadows from overhanging trees. Her house was downhill from the café. Was it a short cut?
‘Did you see someone down there?’ he asked.
‘What?’
‘Why are we going this way?’
‘Just… I like this.’ She drew an arc over her head. ‘The trees.’ She smiled away from him, her eyes lingering on his face. Everything felt weird now. He was cold, she was odd. Was she a prostitute? What had she done for a living in America? In London?
‘What did you do for a living in America!’ He meant to ask her casually but it came out like a demand for payment.
‘In America?’
‘Yeah.’
They walked on for a bit.
‘School teacher!’ She sounded exclamatory herself, as if she was shouting a joke. But she wasn’t smiling.
‘Oh.’
They carried on, crossing so they were walking next to a high wall into someone’s garden, on the grassy verge, even though the road was empty. They were keeping in the shadows, him following her. She did not want to be seen with him. That made him feel more comfortable. She was secretive. That was good.
He followed her across the road, down the side of her family grounds, through a garden gate at the side, which was fitted with a new padlock.
The gate shut behind him and Boyd found himself in the Grierson’s massive garden. Everything was dead. Trellises of desiccated vine skeletons were nailed to the back wall. It looked like a vegetable torture chamber.
She saw him looking and dropped her hand to her side, the keys jangled in her hand.
‘Lovely,’ said Boyd of the midnight garden.
She looked at it and her lip curled distastefully.
‘Don’t you like it?’
She shrugged a shoulder. ‘What’s the point of it?’
‘Making something.’ He smiled. ‘The point is a lovely garden.’
She nodded reluctantly. ‘Yeah, I’ve never seen a gardener enjoy a garden, have you? It’s never finished. They can’t stop. It’s work that makes work. Bit bloody pointless to me.’
He felt weird hearing her say that. It sounded so nihilistic, so contrary to all of the given values in this place.
They looked at each other in the dark, her face up to meet his, her eyes sad initially, becoming amused as the look lasted too long to mean nothing.
‘What are we doing here?’ asked Boyd.
‘Having a dirty little fuck?’ She laughed, self-mocking, sweet, and he realised the sinister overtone was just a mixture of coke and tiredness and worry because he’d never done t
his before. But he was enjoying it. And he’d done it now. And it wasn’t going to get any better or worse if he left right away. And she had made him cum so he sort of owed her.
‘Let’s go inside,’ he said.
She squinted down the garden. ‘You sure? You’re married. I’m not.’
‘Is that an issue for you?’
She looked at the keys in her hand, separating them, laying them out on her palm. ‘I’ve decided: I’m leaving. I don’t belong here any more. I don’t know where I do belong, but not here. Tonight I just want a bit of a high and a little fuck.’ She looked at him, pleadingly. ‘No bullshit afterwards. ‘
Something had happened to her, he could see it in her eyes. She’d had an affair and got burned. Boyd thought maybe the man told his wife. The wife would be angry. The wife would have blamed Susan and all she wanted was a fuck and a bit of tenderness and it was a damn shame.
Boyd bent down to kiss her on the lips. As he did, he felt a salt glaze of dried sweat crack on the back of his neck. His T-shirt, heavy with perspiration from the evening’s work, peeled away from one of his underarms.
Boyd wanted more coke. He wanted a bit of tenderness and a nice, uncomplicated fuck that didn’t have to be negotiated for with promises of time back for yoga practice. He wanted those things so much it didn’t occur to him to wonder why Miss Grierson was moved to fuck a sweaty married guy, on the floor of her mother’s conservatory, next to a hole in the floor that was shaped like an open grave.
Three fire engines were already addressing the blaze, but here came another. The fourth engine, heard in the distance, was coming from another station. The ear-splitting alarm came closer and closer until it was so loud Iain felt it in his eyes.