This Road is Red

by Alison Irvine

  Adam held a screwdriver in his hand.

  ‘Was that you chapping my door just a second ago?’

  ‘No, mate.’

  ‘Did you hear anybody chapping my door?’ Kamil was aware of his voice coming out panicked.

  Adam paused. ‘I might have heard a knock or two. Look, pal,’ Adam changed the subject. ‘The polis are probably going to show up later and I’ve got to be somewhere else. If you hear them giving my missus any hassle will you come out?’

  Kamil said he would and made to go back into his flat.

  ‘You reckon it was your ghost then?’ Adam said.

  ‘I’m not suffering it if it was,’ Kamil said. He shut his door and tried to calm himself.

  ‘Stay if you’re staying,’ he said to the ghost, ‘but don’t give me any hassle. You’re the one that jumped out of the window. I live in this flat now.’ He stood in the bathroom trying to decide whether to get back in the bath for another soak or give up and get dressed. He put one foot in the water and was astride the bath when the door thumped and rattled again.

  ‘I’m not having this. Give me peace! Stay and behave or fuck off,’ he roared into the steamed-up bathroom air.

  He threw open his front door and came face to face with the concierge who stood with a mop and bucket and bottle of bleach.

  Silence. Kamil hid his naked body behind the door. The concierge held out the mop and bucket and bleach and when Kamil didn’t move, put them on the floor.

  ‘My partner told me you were having a bit of bother with the pigeons,’ he said.

  ‘I was, aye.’

  ‘Everything all right? Nothing upsetting you?’

  ‘Not now, no.’

  The concierge stepped backwards and raised a hand. Kamil closed his door and whispered to the walls, ‘Don’t give me a showing up again, ghost. Bob. That’s your name. That’s what I’m calling you. You’re just an ex-tenant who likes your old flat. I’m onto you. This is your last warning, Bob. Give me some peace.’

  He dressed, apologised to the cat for leaving her alone and went to his work in the restaurant, baffled.

  Helen and Sharon McDermott

  Helen: It was roughly about eight pound. You just had to take your luck. I used to sit in a foursome, there were four of us and then when the interval came, you had a fifteen-minute interval, and you’d bring the cards out and sit and play ordi- nary bingo with the cards till the session started up again.

  Sharon: When I was pregnant I started going with my ma. Helen: I used to say to her just get three books. She didn’t know how to use the books. So I had six books and she had three and she didn’t know how to play for a single line so I’m trying to watch my book and watch hers at the same time. That was actually nine books I was playing between the two of us. I said never again are you coming back to bingo.

  Iris 1991

  ‘You come to the bingo with me,’ her ma said when Pamela was seventeen weeks pregnant. ‘Come on hen, it’ll give you a boost.’ So Pamela sat with her ma and the ladies and her ma kept an eye on her books even though Pamela could play fine by herself now. In the interval she went to the toilets and had a look at the clothes the women were selling. Some of the tops were nice but Pamela didn’t have enough money and she knew she’d get too fat to wear them soon so there was no point buying them. The pregnancy was a distraction. Once it started moving she thought she’d cope better because the kicks would remind her to hold her course and her nerve. The midwife told her to imagine standing on a boat and pulling on a rope to get her through a stormy sea. Pamela found listening to the Talking Heads helped. She couldn’t say why.

  ‘I’ll put the chest of drawers from my room into yours,’ Iris said. ‘Will you move back just before or just after the wean’s born?’

  ‘I don’t know, Ma, we haven’t decided.’

  Her ma’s knuckled fist rested on the table. The interval ended and the next game began and the women looked at their books. Pamela did well. She was concentrating better now, despite being pregnant, and her numbers flew in.

  ‘And Liam, how is he doing?’ Iris asked.

  ‘I just leave him to it now,’ Pamela said.

  The caller called another number on Pamela’s book and Iris leaned over and squeezed Pamela’s hand and said, ‘Go on hen.’

  Neither of them had the next number.

  ‘What does his ma say about the wean?’

  ‘She doesn’t want to know. He borrowed some money off her and never gave it back and she said she’s had enough and wants rid of him.’

  ‘That’s a shame. It’s not the wean’s fault.’

  Pamela had the next number. And the next and the next. A

  forty-four, an eighteen and a fourteen.

  ‘Ma, look.’

  ‘You’ve got a line, Pamela, well done, you’ve won something.’ The game continued. Nobody shouted ‘house’. Pamela only had a thirteen to go. As each number was called and nobody shouted, Pamela looked up at the board to see which number was going to be called next. It was never a thirteen.

  ‘You know you’d be better getting shot of him if he’s not clean,’ Iris said.

  ‘Ma, give me peace, I only need a thirteen.’

  Her number still didn’t come but neither did anybody else’s winning number and Pamela was restless as she waited. Come on, come on, come on, come on.

  It killed her. A woman shouted and if the woman didn’t shout, Pamela would have won. The next number came up on the board after the woman shouted and the next number was thirteen.

  ‘I would have won. Look, I would have won.’

  Pamela stood up. She pointed at the board and grabbed her ma’s arm.

  ‘I see it,’ her ma said.

  The board had a huge figure on it. Twelve thousand pounds.

  ‘What we could have done with all that money,’ Pamela said. But she didn’t win the money.

  ‘No, you didn’t win,’ her ma said.

  ‘Fucking bingo,’ Pamela said.

  ‘Don’t upset yourself,’ her ma said. ‘Really, you mustn’t. If mummy gets upset, baby gets upset.’

  Pamela sat down and did a double take at her ma, spouting the baby books at her, but stopped herself from retorting because she saw only concern in her ma’s face and her ma reached out and stroked Pamela’s cheek and jaw. They walked arm in arm as other women bustled to get on the bingo buses.

  ‘Some amount of money I could have won,’ Pamela said.

  ‘I know, hen, I know. But you won a line. Do you want to give me your thirty-nine pounds and I’ll keep it aside for the wean?’

  Pamela gave her mother thirty pounds and kept back nine. She told her ma she would get chip suppers for her and Liam. Iris put the notes in her purse and said she would keep them with the rest she’d saved back in the house. There was a lot to invest in the new baby.

  Kamil 1991

  The footsteps and floor-creaks became normal. Kamil would lie on his bed in the mornings or the evenings and hear sounds of someone walking in his living room, and this happened so frequently that he came to see the ghost as a kind of flatmate; one who didn’t bother him and never used the last of the milk. The cat took to arching her back and rubbing herself against nothing. Kamil could only assume that she was pressing herself up against the ghost’s legs. The thing that concerned Kamil was other people. A friend house-sat for a night and phoned after fifteen minutes saying he couldn’t stay because the chest in the bedroom had spewed out one of its drawers, tipping its contents onto the floor. Kamil doubted a girlfriend would put up with anything like that.

  One night the cat jumped in front of him as he walked from the living room to the hall. Spitting and shaking, it made as if to protect Kamil from something. On that occasion, it wasn’t fine to imagine some benign housemate padding around in his slippers and sharing the couch with him; whatever it was had made his cat evil and angry and petrified. Kamil picked up his keys, coins and coat and fled.

  He wanted a drink. His options were the Br
ig or the Broomfield Tavern. Until then he’d avoided both but that night he took his chances on the Brig which was dug into the concrete, down a flight of stairs and at the end of fifteen yards of unlit alleyway. Windowless. Exclusive. Noisy. Kamil approached it without getting jumped. He opened the door and the noise stopped. He suddenly felt as if he was the only Asian in Red Road. Perhaps he was; the only non-student Asian anyway, the only one who put his head through the doors of the locals’ pubs. But to turn back now would be worse than walking through the silent tables to the bar. So he strode on and ordered his pint, and after a while people began to talk again.

  Kamil stood at the bar and drank and noticed the pool tables with red cloth, the darts board, and watched a man he thought must be the landlord walk from table to table collecting glasses, saying a word or two. The barmaid wiped up spills with a cloth. She took money from Kamil and then removed a comb from the back of her up-do, smoothed her palm over her hair and put the comb back in.

  People approached him and asked where he was from.

  ‘Govan, originally,’ he said and watched while they took him in, questions forming on their furrowed foreheads.

  ‘Before that?’

  ‘Nowhere else. The Southern General? I was born here.’

  ‘Oh right, pal. Do you stay in Red Road?’

  ‘Aye.’

  No bother. Just nosiness.

  ‘You looked a wee bit nervous walking in here, son,’ a man said.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘No.’

  Kamil told him the story and the man said, ‘I don’t feel sorry for you. I feel sorry for your cat. You left it in there while you shat yourself.’

  Oh God, the poor cat. Poor undeserving Fluffs. He’d put hell into her life and left her. But he couldn’t go back until he’d got a few inside him. He couldn’t go back.

  ‘My cat can handle herself,’ he told the man, remembering the words of the taxi driver.

  ‘I’ve heard that some of these houses are haunted, right enough,’ the man said, and that seemed to close the conversation.

  A woman came into the bar and people turned their heads but didn’t hush their conversations. As she walked down the centre of the bar with the tables and chairs either side she put the strap of her handbag over her shoulder. She stood beside a man who’d nursed the same pint for as long as Kamil had drunk two. The man looked up and pulled a stool from the table. The woman sat. She didn’t remove her coat. The man seemed to be defending himself while the woman shook her head.

  ‘Is it an Indian restaurant you work in?’ a man who drank

  Guinness asked Kamil.

  ‘No, it’s not, pal.’

  ‘Are you a chef?’

  ‘No, a waiter.’

  The woman stood up and the table wobbled as she gathered her bags. The man steadied his pint glass.

  ‘Do what you fucking like,’ the woman said and walked back through the pub and pushed both hands against the door. The man breathed in and as he breathed he made as if to move but then he must have decided otherwise because he turned his head away from the door, tipped his glass and drank the remains of his lager, and brought the glass to the bar.

  ‘Same again please, May,’ he said.

  ‘Haven’t you got a home to go to?’ the barmaid said.

  ‘There’s too many people in it,’ the man said. He took his pint back to his table and placed it next to his paper. Kamil ordered another drink and a crowd gathered; acquaintances of the man he was talking to, all keen to know who he was and what he did and where he lived. The Brig was all right. A few of the men had ghost stories of their own. They all felt sorry for Kamil’s cat.

  Michael 1991

  Michael was glad he was alone. The peace was so rare and delicate it made him want to sleep. When it was just him and Kay he liked his peace and quiet, but now, with Kay’s best pal and Michael’s brother taking turns on the sofa or the lounge floor, there was never a moment’s peace. Kay was out shopping. His brother was at work. Trish, Kay’s friend, was at her ma’s. Michael pressed play on his Waterboys tape, rolled his sleeves to his elbows and washed his hands. He put onions, carrots, lentils, barley and a couple of stock cubes onto the work surface. Sharp knife and chopping board. Big metal pot. Salt and pepper. The kettle was already boiled from the coffee he’d made. He took the grater from the drawer and gave it a rinse because there were smears of cheese left on it. Then he laid his hands on the chopping board and looked out of the window. He sang the words of one of the songs in his head.

  He picked up an onion and a key turned in the lock. Fuck.

  Trish came into the kitchen, looking as if she’d smoked her giro. Michael cut the bum off the onion. She put a paper bag onto the side.

  ‘Pie. My pie. Don’t touch.’ She opened the window. ‘Where’s

  Kay?’

  ‘Gone shopping with her ma.’

  ‘She could have waited for me.’

  ‘Go and follow her in. She’ll be at the bus stop. She’s not away long.’

  Trish opened the fridge.

  ‘Where’s my ginger?’

  ‘In there somewhere.’

  ‘Oops,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d scooped it. What you making?’

  ‘Soup.’

  ‘I love soup.’

  ‘So do I.’

  She watched him as he peeled the skin off the onion and chopped it in half.

  ‘I can make really good soup.’

  ‘I’ve never seen you make soup.’ Michael had only seen

  Trish make a joint.

  ‘Shall I give you a hand?’ She put her ginger back into the fridge.

  ‘No, you’re all right. I like the chopping.’

  She lit a cigarette and took a saucer off the draining board.

  ‘Me and Kay want to have a party,’ she said.

  ‘Listen, Trish, we need to talk to you about something.’

  ‘Who needs to?’

  ‘We do. Me and Kay.’

  ‘Kay’s not here.’

  ‘Aye, but we’ve talked about it. She knows I’m going to bring it up with you.’

  ‘Bring what up?’

  He scraped the chopped onion to the corner of the chopping board and started on another one. ‘We’ve been thinking.’ He peeled the onion’s paper skin and it crackled. ‘If you’re staying here with us for any length of time...’

  ‘Kay said I could.’

  ‘I know, we’re not saying you can’t. But if you’re staying here and using the electricity and eating the food...’

  ‘I go to my ma’s for my tea. I don’t eat here.’

  ‘You do sometimes.’

  ‘And I buy my own food. Don’t I?’ She pushed the pie out of the bag and took a bite. ‘See. My own food,’ she said. Flecks of pastry stayed on her lips. Some fell on to her jumper.

  ‘You do eat the food sometimes.’

  ‘No I don’t.’ She was getting agitated. He didn’t want her to get agitated.

  ‘Whatever,’ he said. ‘We were just thinking that seeing as you’re staying here now, you could put a bit towards the food and the electricity.’

  She stopped chewing. He pushed more chopped onion to the side of the board and got the next one.

  ‘That’s some amount of soup you’re making,’ Trish said.

  ‘Aye. It’s for Kay to take into work.’

  She ate her pie then went into the living room. He finished the onion and topped and tailed the carrots. Quickly now, Michael grated the carrot, made up stock, sweated the onions and poured the whole lot with the lentils into the big pot. He shook salt and pepper and wished he’d bought a hough. A final stir, the lid on the pot and the heat turned down.

  ‘Trish!’ he called. ‘Are you in for a wee while?’

  ‘I might go to my ma’s for my tea.’

  ‘Okay, but are you in for the next hour?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Do me a favour, turn the soup off after an hour.’

  ‘Do I do a
dd anything to it?’

  ‘No, but if you get up for any reason, give it a stir.’

  She’d tidied the lounge and had stacked his uni books and papers and pushed them to the edge of the table. A wash bag was on the table now, with cotton wool, nail varnish and nail files taken out.

  ‘Michael.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Tap us a fag.’

  He threw one to her and opened the front door. A man stood outside. He wore a khaki anorak and trainers. In his hand was a six-pack of Tennent’s. Michael was surprised.

  ‘What do you want?’ he said. He thought the guy was one of her next door’s punters.

  ‘Is this Trish’s house?’

  ‘This is my house,’ Michael said. ‘She sleeps on the couch.’

  ‘My turn on the sofa bed tonight,’ Trish said. Michael looked round to see her wearing lipstick and smelling of Kay’s perfume.

  ‘Hiya Stephen,’ she said. ‘Come on in.’ Michael left them to it.

  Incident Book 1991

  On routine inspection of back stairs of Ten Red Road Court, concierge found body believed to be friend of tenant in flat eighteen/three. D.O.A Ambulance and police called. Body taken away. Not suspicious. Drug overdose. John.

  Michael 1991

  The Broomfield Tavern wasn’t a place to study and Michael knew he was kidding himself on that he’d get his reading done. But after he’d chosen a seat where he could keep the whole pub and the exit doors in his sights he took his book from his bag anyway. The pub was busy with Saturday afternoon drinkers. One of the televisions showed horseracing. The other one showed football. Men rested pints on the barrels that stood between the tables and the bar. The smell of onions came from Michael’s fingers as he flicked through the pages of his book. He looked up when the pub fell silent and saw the Asian guy from the Brig walk in. The football commentary carried on, like the hesitant music in some saloon bar, but everything and everyone else was quiet. Horses jumped silently. Punters held glasses and stared. Michael thought the Asian guy was brave. He didn’t seem bothered by the sudden silence and he went straight to the bar as if he had some business to take care of. Michael heard him order, ‘Give us a pint of Tennent’s please pal,’ and the pub was still silent. A couple of known bnp supporters were in. They stood along the bar from him and stared. The Asian guy paid his money, picked up his pint, turned from the bar, and that’s when Michael waved at him. He couldn’t have him pick his way through the silence and find a seat.