Slip of the Knife

by Denise Mina

  Paddy looked at Dub, a long strip of cool buying her nice chips to share after a hard day of misery and grim. She chewed her tongue hard and looked back out into the park. It would be getting cold soon: the heat from the day was leaving the earth and there wasn’t any cloud cover. Fuck him, she thought, fuck him. He’s a creep and I’ve had a hard day, but her hand found the door handle and she got out into the street, hoping he’d see her and run for it. She stepped out of the street light into the shadow of the trees and cleared her throat.

  “Is that you?”

  Whoever it was slipped back behind the tree.

  “’Cause if it is you, Sean’s very worried and we’re out looking for you.” She looked back at Dub handing a fiver over the counter, the parcels tucked neatly into a flimsy blue plastic bag hanging from his hand.

  “We’re getting chips.”

  Her heart sank as Callum peered skittishly around the trunk of the tree. He must be hungry. For the sake of Sean she waved him over to her. “Come on.”

  “I can’t go back. They’re all over the place.”

  “OK, get in the car and we’ll eat the chips and think of something.”

  Dub was surprised to find Paddy getting into the car with a bulky young stranger but he managed to defer his curiosity until they were inside. They could tell Callum had been crying. He had managed to get dirt on his face and there were clean tracks where the tears had fallen, smeared where he had wiped them away. She looked at him in the dark and remembered the terrified wee boy in a hospital bed nine years ago.

  She introduced Dub to him, him to Dub, and they opened the chips. The haggis supper was too big for her anyway so she halved it with him and Dub donated a third of his fish, giving Callum his can of Irn-Bru. Callum thanked them through a mouthful of sausage, cramming chips into his mouth, explaining that he’d only had a cheese sandwich and he was starving. The chips were sweet and salted to perfection and they sank into the easy camaraderie of hungry people enjoying a good meal.

  Dub finished first, gave a satisfied sigh, wiped the grease from his mouth with a paper napkin, and looked at Callum, still eating on the backseat.

  “What are we going to do with you, my friend?”

  “We can’t take him to ours,” she said.

  “How no?” Callum was sitting in her warm car, his mouth was full of her dinner and neon orange juice, and he still sounded as if he’d been slighted.

  “Because journalists were coming to our door looking for you before you even got out, and someone smashed the door in and pissed on our beds today. You want to sleep on that?”

  Callum wasn’t sure whether to believe her but he looked to Dub and he confirmed it with a wrinkled nose. “We were lucky, though. I mean, they didn’t shit on them.” The way he said it was so ridiculous that Paddy started laughing and couldn’t stop: it sounded as if the guy had given them the option of one or the other. She laughed and looked at Callum, who was frowning at Dub until he caught Paddy’s eye and started laughing too, like a sad child out of practice, opening his mouth wide and pumping laughs out of his face. Dub was used to being laughed at. He had been a comic for a long time before he became a manager and he took it as a compliment, smiling and nodding at them, saying “it’s true” every so often. It reminded Paddy of her father. One of Con’s loveliest traits had been his willingness to be the butt of jokes; he let the children laugh at him when he was silly, smiled when other men ridiculed him.

  When the hilarity had died down Dub turned to Callum, eyeing him as if he was measuring him up for a new suit. “Where are we going to keep this guy safe, then?”

  Paddy looked back at Callum. He already looked nicer, softer and less wary of her. “Uff, I don’t know. Can’t take him to the Ogilvys’, or ours.”

  “What about my mum and dad’s?”

  Dub managed comedians for a living. The closest he had ever come to real danger was defusing an ego. His parents were indulgent but Paddy didn’t think they would appreciate him arriving with a famous murderer looking for a bed. And they only had two bedrooms, which meant that Paddy and Dub would be dumping him and leaving again. Callum was pleased by the suggestion though, possibly because it made him sound trustworthy.

  “They are quite elderly,” Paddy said reluctantly, “a bit stuck in their ways, Callum. I don’t know if you’d like it there.”

  “I like family units,” he said hopefully.

  His face looked calmer now he wasn’t hungry, traces of the laughter still showed in his eyes, and as he leaned forward to answer them he held on to his shins, bending eagerly forward like a child discussing his Christmas present.

  “Well, they’ve only got one room anyway and I think we should stick together. What about a hotel?”

  “Nah.” Dub was certain. “The papers’ve all got reception paid off to tip them about anyone interesting.”

  He was right.

  “And we can’t go to one of my clients because they’re all publicity-hungry wankers and they’ll drop the dime.”

  “‘Drop the dime’?” mimicked Paddy, and she and Callum laughed again, less because it was funny than because they had enjoyed it so much the first time.

  “OK.” She started the engine. “We’ll go back to ours, pick up some stuff and go on to a place I know. We’ll get the sleeping bags, unless someone’s shat in them.”

  They drove back across the Kingston Bridge, a high concrete arch over the river. The city lay spread out below them, bright and thrilling, and Callum sat, awestruck, with his face to the window, wondering at the lights.

  A high white moon hung above the city and Paddy had the sense of skidding across ice to her doom, pausing to enjoy the slide.

  II

  She left the lights off in the hall, put the bits of wood that completed the front door on the floor, and went into the dark kitchen to call Sean. The answer machine caught the call so she told it she and Dub had found the package in question outside the supper shop, and were going to look after it for a while. See you tomorrow at the cathedral.

  She crept into Pete’s room. He would need clean shirts for school, fresh underwear; there wasn’t that much at his dad’s house. He only ever stayed there for a night or so.

  She held the neatly folded bundle of clothes and looked around Pete’s room. Dub made Pete’s bed every morning, plumped the pillows and pulled the duvet tight across the bed until it was a smooth marshmallow. The bed was still made; the whale mobile that hung from the ceiling spun slowly in the stirred air; his toys were all in order. Nothing was moved in here, the tracksuited ned hadn’t been in here. He must have come to the door and balked at smashing up a child’s bedroom. It gave her hope. She went into her own room, looked at the stain on the stripped bed, smelled the caustic tang of piss, and then remembered that he’d been at Pete’s school gates. There were no boundaries.

  Frightened by the thought, she gathered black clothes for herself and Dub for tomorrow, pulled two tightly rolled sleeping bags down from the top of her wardrobe, remembering buying them in the scout shop with Pete when he and BC decided to sleep in Trisha’s garden for BC’s birthday. They’d come in after an hour because it was cold.

  She got Dub’s funeral coat out of his cupboard. Her neat black coat was still in the plastic wrap from the dry cleaner’s and she folded it over her arm for Terry’s memorial service tomorrow. From the hall cupboard she brought out a torch and the round bowl of an old tin barbecue.

  Laden, she stood in the hallway and looked back at the records scattered on the floor, at Terry’s silver trunk sitting on its lid, at the general mayhem he had caused to her perfect little house, and the feeling she got was how angry the ned was, how angry and frightened.

  III

  The road was quieter than it had been during the day but still some drivers careered around corners as if they were meeting a dare. On long stretches of dark road pinprick lights would appear behind them, filling the mirror a few minutes later, blinding her until she slowed to the side and let th
em pass.

  Dub put the radio onto a pop station and Callum seemed to go into a trance, gazing out of the window at the moonlit countryside without seeing, his eyes steady during the whole course of a song. He didn’t speak unless he was spoken to, she noticed, and it made her feel sorry for him. One day they might talk to each other, a long time in the future, and he might tell her what had happened to him in prison.

  She couldn’t quite remember where the turning for the house was so she slowed when she saw familiar hills, irritating a small car on the road behind her. The driver hooted at her to hurry up and Callum turned and looked out of the window. He said it was a really old guy who could hardly see over the steering wheel and he and Dub laughed at her for being so cautious.

  She saw the turning up ahead, indicated carefully and took it, the impatient pensioner behind giving her a farewell-and-fuck-you toot on his horn as he passed behind them, making them all smile. When his lights had disappeared all they had to see by were their own headlights. The grass on the driveway had been flattened by Merki’s car but in the dark it seemed deeper and more impenetrable.

  She drove on as far as she dared, realizing once they got out that she was much farther into the drive than Merki had gone. In the harsh moonlight the cottage was forlorn and ramshackle. They could almost smell the damp from outside.

  Dub and Callum were unenthusiastic but she’d stopped at a garage and bought some bread and butter, some cans of juice, firelighters and smoke-free coal and promised them a fire when they got inside. Back at the house she’d had the idea that they might be able to use the old barbecue as a grate but it seemed a bit stupid now.

  They carried the stuff around the back and Dub tried the kitchen door. It was locked so he used a penknife to pick around the lock and the wood crumbled away easily. Chipping at it, he managed to expose the lock and push it out of its nest. He swung the door open.

  The sweet-sour smell of mildew hung in the air and a frantic scuttling marked the exit of a brood of mice into the other room. Callum didn’t mind but Dub looked around distastefully at the buckled lino floor and the mouse droppings on the worktop. He was quite meticulous in their house, wouldn’t use the bath unless it had been cleaned and was always throwing things out of the fridge because they had reached their sell-by date.

  The room was empty of personal effects, but otherwise it looked as if someone had just walked out. Ten years of gray dust encrusted the elaborate Victorian cast-iron range in the inglenook, the oven doors all firmly shut, lids down on the cook plates. The black stovepipe at the back had collapsed and slouched crazily against the inside of the chimney. She had seen the pine dresser through the window during the day but not the feet swollen and rotting with moisture. A Formica table was pushed back against a wall, a matching chair on either side, backs to the wall. The sink under the window was basic, a white ceramic Belfast box with a shelf on the right-hand side, serving as a draining board. The cottage looked as if the family had spent their savings a generation ago, and this was the dwindled remains of a poorly managed natural advantage.

  Dub stood stiffly by the door, his eyes flickering around the room, finding a thousand things to complain about but saying nothing. Callum asked his permission to go and look in the front room, which they both thought was weird but neither of them said so.

  “Sure,” said Dub and Callum went off through the door, stepping carefully over the wobbly floor. He shouted back to them that it was darker in there, the mice were in the skirting, he could see a baby mouse. Dub shuddered.

  She put the barbecue on top of the range, put four firestarter bricks in the bottom and coals on the top, touched a match to the greasy bit of white peeking out of the coals. Orange light filled the room, highlighting all its shortcomings, and Dub made a frightened face.

  Paddy smiled at him. “If you can’t handle it we can sleep in the car.”

  “Nope. I’m fine. It’s fine.”

  She wanted to touch him again. Callum was in the other room so she slid over to him. “There’s only two sleeping bags. We’ll have to share. Is that OK?”

  He looked around the floor. “But where?”

  No part of the floor was any cleaner than anywhere else. She suggested seeing if they could find a broom and he liked that.

  They found Callum in the front room, lifting the lid on the sloping piano. He tried a key but found it dead, tried the next and the next and the next until a faint twang came from inside the piano’s belly.

  Seen from the inside, the room was a good size. There was no fireplace but a fat potbellied stove sat at an angle in the corner. One of its thin legs had sunk into the carpet, ripping a hole and pulling the chimney pipe from its shoring in the wall behind.

  Dub held back at the door to the kitchen. “Smells revolting in here.”

  Paddy wanted to point out that it was pretty though, the windows were nice, and then she wondered why she was trying to sell it to him. It didn’t matter if he liked it or not. They were only staying a night.

  The other rooms were in no better state. A rudimentary bathroom had a blue plastic toilet with a horribly stained dry bowl. The window was broken and leaves had gathered on the floor and in the bath, mulching through the years. Ragged spiderwebs coated the break in the window.

  Two bedrooms, both small, one with a fireplace and a dead bird in the grate. There was no broom.

  It was a relief to get back to the civilized kitchen, where the smell of damp was tempered by the warmth of the barbecue fire.

  Dub said he didn’t think he would be able to sleep at all in here because it was so dirty. Callum took the cardboard box down from the dresser, shook it to make sure nothing was hiding in there, flattened it, and used the edge to brush part of the floor clean for Dub’s head.

  Paddy watched him, bent double in the flickering light, scratching at the floor to clear a space for someone he barely knew, enjoying the roughness of everything, adapting to his new life and not at all bitter, and she found herself thinking that if Pete had lived through what Callum had and was like this on the other side, she’d be quite proud of him.

  Dub thanked him.

  Callum unfurled the sleeping bags and sat down in his, zipping it up to his neck, expertly rolling his jumper into a small cylinder to make a pillow. He lay down with his hands behind his head, shut his eyes, and became still almost immediately.

  Dub and Paddy sat up, drinking a can of juice in silence to let Callum sleep, passing it back and forth. Paddy lit a cigarette and Dub gave her a look that suggested she was adding to the smell in the kitchen.

  “I like them,” she whispered.

  Callum’s leg stirred in the dark. He wasn’t asleep at all. She looked over and saw that he was smiling in the dark. He’d misheard her. He thought she’d said, “I like him.” And she was glad.

  Fully clothed, they stood up and tried to negotiate two people in one sleeping bag. They unzipped it and laid it out on the floor, putting the opening in the space Callum had cleared for them. Paddy lay down, Dub lay next to her, and they had to cling to each other to do the zip up.

  She looked up at the warm orange light rippling across the ceiling, felt Dub’s heart racing beneath her hand, and fell asleep smiling.

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  THE DARKNESS IN SUBURBIA

  Martin McBree looked back up to the dark windows of Paddy’s flat in Lansdowne Crescent. It hadn’t been hard to get the door open; it was only propped shut and when he got in he realized why: ransacked, the beds pissed on. No one was coming back here tonight. She was lost to him.

  Back in the car, he lit a cigarette and started the engine. There was nothing for it but to go to option two. The nasty option. He had a grandson that age.

  He pulled out of the crescent and made his way to the broad Great Western Road. It was three in the morning and very quiet. Taxis and the odd night bus sped along the straight road, making use of the clear stretch ahead of them.

  He parked carefully in the street, reversing neatly
into a space between two cars, nudging tentatively backwards and forwards until he was equidistant between the two. The first rule of a lightning strike: attract no attention.

  He opened the car door and threw his cigarette end into the street, stepping out after it, the toe of his shoe crushing the scarlet tip against the tarmac. A double-decker night bus sailed past him, speeding down the incline of the hill. In the cold white cabin light the lone passenger’s pasty face looked drained and ill, staring blindly out into the dark, seeing nothing but his own reflection in the glass.

  McBree hated Glasgow. He hated the plump women with their rasping accents, the aggressive undertone of the men in bars, the chatty shopkeepers who asked personal questions. New York wasn’t like that. In New York they told you about themselves, the women were handsome, the accent exotic and mellifluous. He smiled at the thought of New York, recalled the warm evenings and the smell of car fumes mingling with street food, being able to drink in bars without a soul raising the subject of politics.

  In New York he changed how he dressed. Val asked him about it when he came home, said he looked cheap in his print shirts and loafers. She hated change. If she had her way they’d take the kids and go and live in the parish house with the gnarly old priests, but Martin had seen another life out there, a life devoid of the Church or the struggle, where a man could just be.

  He smiled as he stepped onto the pavement. New York. Everything was brighter then and it wasn’t even very long ago. Over the cusp of the hill came an old man in a deerstalker hat and overcoat, dragging an elderly King Charles spaniel out for a stroll in the middle of the night. Incontinent dog or insomniac owner. Martin sank his hands into his pockets, keeping his head down, pretending to feel for house keys as he walked past the old man.