The Weight of Angels

by Catriona McPherson

  I took Angelo’s arms and shook him until he drew his gaze away from the window and looked down at me. ‘What is it?’ I said. ‘Tell me what’s over there.’

  ‘Ali?’ said Marco. He prised my hands off Angel, then curled his big ones around them. ‘You’re freezing,’ he said. He reached over and clicked on the lamp on the table in front of the window. I winced as what seemed like a spike of brilliant light stabbed me. ‘Jesus, Ali,’ Marco said. I peered past the orb of light out into the dark again. I couldn’t see anything over at the abbey, between the reflection of the lamp and every raindrop acting like a prism, but the neighbour was still out there looking in, his face sharp with delight. Then, suddenly and deliciously I found myself wrapped inside a cool grey cuddle that fitted me perfectly and filled the whole world.

  I didn’t want to come back, not to wet hair and the corkscrew tug of tights too hastily pulled back on and the food smell in our living room. But, hard as I screwed my eyes shut, the cool grey was gone, in its place the leathery bulk of the couch arm under my head and Angelo and Marco whispering.

  ‘Get some whisky.’

  ‘She hates whisky.’

  ‘I don’t need whisky,’ I said, sitting up a bit. ‘Did I faint? I’ve never fainted in my life.’

  ‘What’s wrong, pal?’ Marco said. He was chafing my hands. Where the hell did he learn how to chafe hands? It was something the capable wife did in black-and-white films.

  ‘Someone’s dumped a dead baby,’ I said. I heard Angelo start to say something, bitten off before it got going. ‘I might have that whisky,’ I added, and he went through to the kitchen, to where we had a bottle on top of the fridge. Budget or no budget, we needed one bottle of something in the house.

  My parents, typical farmers, had ended every long day with two whiskies at the fireside. Slippers and sleeping dogs. My first taste of drink was a chubby finger stuck in the dregs and sucked while I was doing the dishes. It made me shudder. It tasted worse than earwax or the flecks of a drilled-out filling, and after that I remember looking at my parents as they sat taking their first sips, while the smoke belched out from among the logs and thinned to a ribbon. I’d wondered if they were just pretending.

  They retired to France, to a villa with balconies and patios and someone coming in to do the garden. My dad’s toast at their leaving party was ‘never cut another blade of grass in my life’.

  ‘Ali?’ Marco said softly. He was on his knees beside me, his face so close I could see all his pores and the spikes of beard he always missed at the right corner of his mouth until I told him.

  ‘I was thinking about Mum and Dad,’ I said. ‘Home. Everything always seemed so set in stone. And then how much it changed. I wonder now if any of it was real.’

  ‘Hey,’ said Marco. ‘Where’s this coming from?’

  They passed the farm to my brother, like farmers do. It was fine by me. They’d helped me out when I bought my own business and I knew enough about farming to be sure I was well out of it. My brother, two years younger, looked ten years older and his wife was long gone, taking the kids with her. And it was fine by me that they went to France. Why shouldn’t they? A bit of warmth and ease after forty years’ grubbing a living from between the stones.

  ‘How could they stay away?’ I said. Marco shushed me. ‘And how could someone throw a baby away, like an old sweetie wrapper? Leave it lying there.’

  ‘Is that what happened, then?’ said Angelo, coming back and putting a glass into my hand.

  ‘Let’s not dwell on it,’ Marco said. ‘The cops know what to do.’ He nudged the glass towards my mouth, making me think of a mother hyena pushing a cub’s snout down into the carrion. I needed to get a grip, I told myself. Where had that come from? I swallowed a mouthful and let the shudder pass through me.

  ‘Not that,’ said Angelo, jerking his chin towards the front window. ‘I mean, Gran and Granddad. You’re not speaking, just because they moved away? Cos Billie said they’ve got a pool now?’

  Billie was my brother’s wee girl. It was news to me Angelo was in touch with his cousins, like it was news about the pool. ‘Not because they moved,’ I said. ‘Because they didn’t come over to see me when I was ill and needed them.’ I tried to laugh. ‘They were probably too busy digging out the pool.’

  ‘Needed them for what?’ said Angelo. ‘They’re not doctors and nurses.’

  ‘Let’s not dwell on that either,’ Marco said. ‘Water under the bridge.’

  I threw back the rest of the whisky. ‘You don’t need your mum and dad for things. If you ever need me, Angel-boy, you call and I come. Right?’

  ‘Jesus, Mother,’ he said.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I said. ‘You need me, you call me, I’m there.’

  He gave that mouth-closed laugh and shook his head at how lame I was. So, when the knock came at the door, he was looking right at me. There was nothing. No eye flash, no flare of fear. His smile widened. ‘What’s this now?’ he seemed to say, before he pushed himself up from where he was squatting and went slouching through to the front door.

  She looked about twenty, the girl Angel ushered in ahead of him, and I would have recognized her as Galloway if I’d met her on the streets of Rio or crossing the tundra. She was short and sturdy, a series of cylinders joined together, like a balloon animal. Her fair hair was so thick her ponytail stuck straight out like a spigot and she had fine fair eyebrows and a velvety covering above her top lip that would start to be a nuisance when she hit her forties. She’d put concealer on her spots about six shades too dark for her milky skin. She could have been me before I learned better.

  She undid her coat before she sat down and I thought either she had put on weight recently or the Dumfries and Galloway police uniforms didn’t come in half sizes, because everything was a struggle for her: wedging herself back onto the couch; reaching her notebook out of her pocket; managing the teacup that Marco brought her.

  ‘Just routine,’ she said, smiling round the three of us. ‘Can you give me your full names?’

  Marco reeled them off, head-of-the-family style.

  ‘And can you tell me when you were last in the abbey grounds?’ she said. ‘Do you have a family dog you walk over there, kind of thing?’ It was a line she’d been given and told to use. No one says ‘family dog’ spontaneously.

  ‘I avoid it,’ I said. ‘It gives me the creeps.’

  ‘I don’t think I’ve been over there since—’ Marco was saying, when her phone rang. She answered it without excusing herself and we heard the quack of someone’s voice speaking urgently to her. Her head jerked up and she shot a look at me, the milky skin on her neck turning the boiled pink of sunburn.

  ‘Right,’ she said. She hung up. ‘I’m just going to wait for my . . . colleague,’ she said.

  Through the thin wall to next door, we all heard someone leaving and we sat there, dumbly listening to the footsteps as they went down one path, and came up the other. Then there was a sharp rap and Angelo went to answer.

  The sergeant was a burly fifty-year-old, Northern Irish, I thought when he spoke, with a broad, ruddy face and cold little eyes, belying his smiles. He could have been the sarge in some American telly series, handing out wisecracks and setting mavericks straight again.

  ‘Now then, Mrs McGovern,’ he said, as he settled down, tweaking his trouser creases and nodding at the constable to take notes. ‘Your neighbour tells me all this across the way has upset you.’

  ‘Of course it’s upset her,’ said Marco. ‘You’d be worried if it didn’t.’

  I was sure the sergeant flicked a look at Angelo before he spoke again.

  ‘How about if you talk me through what happened?’ he said.

  ‘We heard the sirens,’ Marco began, but the sergeant held up his hand.

  ‘Your wife first, sir,’ he said.

  ‘We heard the sirens,’ I repeated. ‘And Marco went over to see what was happening while I went and got changed. And then Marco came back and I went over. T
hen I came back and the constable arrived.’

  ‘Well, that all sounds very ship-shape,’ the sergeant said. ‘And why did you come back, Mrs McGovern?’

  ‘Like what Mr . . . what Next Door said. Someone over there told me what had happened and I was upset.’

  ‘Who’s this someone?’ the sergeant snapped. Maybe he thought one of his men had been blabbing.

  ‘One of the other neighbours,’ I said. ‘A woman. I don’t know her name.’

  The sergeant took a deep breath and looked around. ‘Quiet place like this,’ he said, ‘I always imagine you’d be tight-knit. But it doesn’t sound like it.’

  ‘We’ve only been here a few months,’ I told him.

  ‘McGovern!’ said the sergeant, snapping his fingers. He swung round to face Marco. ‘Paulo McGovern?’

  ‘Was my granddad,’ said Marco.

  ‘That’s right,’ the sergeant said, his broad grin creasing his cheeks into puckers and his little eyes glittering. ‘You’re Tony and Maria’s boy, aren’t you? You’re the one that sold up. You didn’t have many friends in the D and G after that, son.’

  Marco said nothing. Not even to the ‘son’. Paulo’s Fish had been open from lunch till the pubs shut, seven days a week, for fifty years, serving the Dumfries and Galloway coppers on the day, back and night shift and pretty much everyone else too. When the fair Maria, Paulo’s daughter, married Tony McGovern, he gave up his apprenticeship at the motor works and took to frying. He was still in charge when I used to go in, one of a giggling crowd with our skirts rolled up, hoping to see his son, the boy who’d got Maria’s black curls and a name to match them. We met officially at Sandy Pearson’s twenty-first and Marco didn’t remember me. Or, at least, he didn’t connect who I’d become with one of the quieter girls from the waves of gigglers who had passed through the shop over the years.

  Even that first night, he was already full of his plan. He told me all about it, sitting on the bonnet of his car outside the function room in the quiet and the cool, looking at a star-filled sky. ‘It’ll be a fishmonger’s, with some café tables where people can eat freshly prepared food – they’ll come in and choose it on the slab and ten minutes later they’ll be eating it . . . Thai prawns in ginger, a skate wing in beurre noisette. And I’ll have evening classes too. A cooking school. It’s going to change people’s minds about good food. I’ll cater weddings and parties. Teach folk there’s life beyond steak pie and chicken breasts.’

  I’d quite enjoyed my dinner, so I didn’t say anything. I certainly didn’t say no one would want to sit and eat in a fishmonger’s with the smell of it all round and people queuing for a pound of haddock. And, besides, I had my own dreams and no one who’d listen to them.

  But the difference was that my dreams came true. Face Value was a solid business and I was good at it, cautious and tireless. I didn’t mind the second-hand dryers and the homemade gowns, didn’t mind washing my own towels at home on Sundays. Truth is, when I had enough money to use a towel service, I missed seeing them dancing in the breeze on the washing rope. And when I finally fitted out the salon properly, everything matching and new, I was sad to see it all go. I was jealous of the girl who came down from Glasgow with her brother in a rented van and bought it to start her own place.

  Marco did things differently and explained it all: you had to get people through the door. You had to entice them. When you were trying to get people to eat your food you had to show some panache. I didn’t argue. I didn’t say that when people were letting you dig in their pores and put chemicals on their eyelashes you couldn’t afford to look like a hole in the wall.

  And, anyway, his corporate Christmas cards and all the carrier bags with the logo on them, the auction prizes he donated and the gift hampers he handed out reassured me. Everything looked fine so it was fine.

  When he commissioned a designer after Angelo was born, adding ‘& Son’ to the sign, I said maybe he was jumping the gun. He told me I was the evil fairy at the christening, showering curses. But he was smiling when he said it, and he had his arms round me.

  For a few years after that I was too busy to notice, and then I was ill. And then I was busy again. I said nothing when he refinanced, when he started selling sandwiches and put in a drinks fridge to try to keep the café tables turning over. I said nothing when he sold the café tables and put a preserves display up instead, on a franchise basis. Fish and jam, I thought. But I said nothing. It wasn’t until Angelo was twelve that I finally spoke up.

  We had that conversation against the din from behind the Monster poster on Angelo’s bedroom door, the bangs and thumps as he let us know what he thought of us. Marco had just told him he couldn’t go to New York on a school trip.

  ‘New York?’ he said to me. ‘Broadway? Gimme a break, Als. We went to the panto in Ayr and thought ourselves lucky.’

  ‘All that’s wrong is he doesn’t know why,’ I said. ‘Tell him why. Tell me why.’

  And out it all came. The second refinancing, the overdraft, the unsecured loan, the credit-card balances.

  ‘How about a van?’ I said. ‘Take it to them if they won’t come to you.’

  ‘A fish van?’ he said. ‘Why don’t I refit the fryers and extractors and start selling battered burgers to school kids?’

  Because you couldn’t get a loan to buy the fryers, I wanted to say.

  ‘Why don’t you get a van?’ he went on. ‘Do you fancy touting round the farms and schemes in a wee van?’

  ‘I would if I had to,’ I said.

  ‘Good to know,’ said Marco. And out came the rest of it. Out came the news that Face Value and McGovern’s were in it together. That I’d been propping him up for years.

  ‘But how?’ I said. ‘It’s mine. How did you manage to borrow against it when it’s mine?’

  ‘You signed the papers, Ali,’ Marco said. ‘I did it on advice. Years back, when you weren’t so great, you know. In case, things went bad and I had to step in.’

  I couldn’t even laugh. I just sat there gaping at him, trying to take it in. He had put papers in front of me when I was a zombie, drugged to my eyeballs and hauling myself through each unwelcome day. I could still remember exactly what it felt like, even though Marco didn’t understand when I tried to tell him. It felt like the past was quicksand sucking at me and I had to grapple my way out of every hour and into the labour of the next one.

  ‘I did it for you,’ he said. ‘So I could prop you up and you’d never know.’

  ‘And then what? It just came in handy when things turned out the other way?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking straight. You were happy again. I wanted you to stay happy. I thought I could ride it out and you’d never know. I couldn’t face seeing you go back down.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ I said. ‘You don’t lay this at my door. I am fine. I was ill and I got better and I’m fine. You don’t put this on me.’

  Then I cleared off the dining-room table and we sat down together with every scrap of paper and every statement printed out, to put it right.

  And he blocked every single one of my suggestions. I told him I didn’t care which way we went – him working for me or me working for him, but we had to pick one basket for the few cracked eggs we had left. I told him it was time to swallow our pride and start again. And he would have none of it. He wanted to hang on.

  I let him. But deep inside I thought bitter thoughts I’d never tell him. I’d never tell him he had taken his grandfather’s hard work and thrown it away on some stupid pipe dream because he thought he was too cool to make chips and shake a bottle of sauce. I’d never tell him about giving full-body cleansing massages to fat women in their fifties who still had back acne or painting over some bloke’s yellow toenails when he was headed to Ibiza. I’d never tell him to look at all the other men who gave away auction prizes and hampers at Christmas: mechanics and publicans and newsagents. Dirty overalls and dirtier fingernails and buckets of sawdust for puddles of sick and getting up at four o’clock hop
ing the pigeons hadn’t pecked the rolls and no one’d pissed on the Radio Times.

  ‘You don’t understand, Als,’ he said. ‘It’s different for men and women.’

  I shook my head at him, no idea what he was on about.

  ‘Me losing the business, or even me losing you your business . . . it goes deep. It’s different for men.’ He took a deep breath before what he said next. ‘Different things hurt most of all. I understood that when it was you.’

  I didn’t want Marco struggling in quicksand till he ached all over. And, even if I hardened my heart about that, I didn’t want Angelo seeing it. And we couldn’t all take off to Australia for a treat this time. What else could I do but stand beside him and keep hoping?

  Finally, tail end of last year, we lost everything. We lost Face Value and McGovern & Son and our lovely house. We kept the cheap car and sold the good one. We rented what we could afford and ate off our knees in a row in front of the telly. We looked for jobs and lied to get them. And now here was this cheery-faced sergeant saying, ‘You’re the one who sold up,’ and calling him ‘son’.

  ‘So where are you working these days?’ he was asking Marco.

  ‘Is that relevant?’ I found myself saying.

  ‘Just in case we need to follow up,’ said the sergeant. ‘Or are you here most of the day?’

  ‘T&C,’ said Marco. It was the Castle Douglas builder’s yard, trade and commercial. None of Marco’s skills would have got him a job there, so he had to be serving customers or stocking shelves.

  ‘What’s the number?’ the sergeant said. ‘Or do they let you keep your mobile switched on?’

  I stared hard at the young constable, wondering if she’d started out sweet, if watching this cherry-cheeked man operate would turn her. ‘Or are you here most of the day’ meaning he looked unemployed and ‘do they let you keep your phone on’ meaning he’d got a job one step up from McDonald’s.

  ‘I’ll find out and let you know,’ Marco said. ‘I’ve only just been taken on and I don’t really start for real till Friday.’ He sounded cocky enough, but what did I know? Maybe being younger and taller and having all his hair made him the alpha here. Men were different, like he’d told me.