Sal

by Mick Kitson

  It was quiet again. We waited. It seemed like another hour and then two women came out and stood on the patio looking out into the trees over the lawn and talking and one put her arm around the other one. They were too far to hear what they were saying. One woman had long dark hair and the other had really short blonde hair and was wearing a long grey coat. They stood there for a while and talked and then the woman in the grey coat walked out across the grass towards the trees. She turned and was talking to the other woman walking backwards over the lawn and you could see her breath going up in wee clouds.The other woman got some tobacco out and made a roll-up. She held it out to the other woman who walked back to her and took it. All the time she was talking and moving her arms up and down and holding her hands up like she was showing how big a fish was. She got the roll-up and lit it with a lighter and walked back out onto the lawn blowing smoke up and looking up at the trees. The other woman stayed on the patio and was talking and saying stuff to her and shaking her head. Then a big tall thin man with a beard came out and stood leaning on the wall by the sliding door and started saying things to them and then he pointed back in the house and then he went in.

  The woman on the lawn was standing looking out at the trees and the other woman was shouting things over to her. You could just hear her voice but not the words. Then she turned and walked back in the house quick like she was angry. The woman on the lawn stayed looking at the trees and then she turned slowly looking all along the woods towards where we were. And Peppa whispered ‘That’s Maw!’

  And I looked through the monocular and it was. Her hair was short and like a crop and yellow blond. But it was her. You could see the bulge of her big tits under the coat which was long and almost touched the ground. She stared over at the woods and it was like she was looking at us. Peppa went to get up and I grabbed her. ‘I’ll go and get her . . .’ she whispered.

  I said ‘No, wait.’

  Ingrid said ‘I can go . . .’

  But then she turned and threw the butt of her roll-up down and walked back towards the house and went in the doors.

  I said ‘It was her. She’s changed her hair.’

  Peppa said ‘She’s got a new coat. It’s like a man’s coat.’

  It wasn’t the sort of coat Maw would wear. She wore wee skinny leather jackets and jean jackets and she always wore heels and skirts. And her hair. She had long really nice brown hair and now it was all cropped and yellow.

  Peppa whispered ‘Her hair’s like Niall out of One Direction Sal. Is she trying to look like a lad?’

  Ingrid shifted up onto her knees and said ‘My back is hurting me. I am sorry, I have to stand.’

  She got up slowly and backed away from the edge of the trees into the wood and walked up and down stretching forward and holding her back at the bottom.

  I watched the doors but nobody came out for ages. Peppa wrapped herself in a blanket and sat cross-legged and Ingrid lay flat out on the wood floor with her arms stretched up above her head. The sun was right up over the garden now and steam was rising off the frosty grass. It was really quiet again, just sometimes a crow, or a bird tweeting. Ingrid got onto all fours and started arching her back up and down and breathing on short puffs. Peppa leant against me with the blanket round her and I thought she might go to sleep and I just sat and watched the sliding doors through the monocular.

  I could tell by the sun and the way the shadows of the trees were starting to get longer on the lawn that we had been waiting for about four hours, and then the sliding door opened and the woman that Maw had been with came out with the tall thin man and another guy with short white hair wearing a fleece.They all smoked and sat on the benches and I could hear little sounds of laughing from them. The thin guy stood up and was waving his arms around and looked like he was telling them a story and they were both laughing. Then we heard a car coming up the drive and stopping round at the front of the house and I got tense in case it was polis. Peppa heard it too and said ‘I’ll go and look’ and she crept back along the way we’d come so she could see the front of the house. Ingrid was sitting with her eyes closed and her knees up under her chin. We heard Peppa coming back through the bushes and she sat down next to me and said ‘It was a white van with a man bringing boxes in the front.’

  The three of them on the benches were all standing now and looked like they were going back in. Then Maw came out again and she stood on the patio and they talked to her and she was shaking her head and kept putting her hands up to her mouth.We watched her. I wanted the others to go in and leave her out there but she didn’t even have a fag and then went back in with them.

  Peppa said ‘This is stupid Sal. Let’s just run in and find her.’

  I said ‘No Peppa. There’s other people in there. They’ll know it’s us and they’ll call the polis and we’ll all get nicked.’

  Ingrid crawled over to us and put her arms round us and said ‘She will come out again. Don’t worry. Relax. Let it happen. If she does not I will go in. Nobody knows me. I will tell her I am a doctor and you are here and get her to come with me.’

  As she was saying this Maw came out of the doors again on her own with a tobacco pouch and started rolling a fag and Peppa jumped up and before I could stop her she ran out onto the lawn and sprinted towards Maw and she shouted ‘Maw! It’s us!’

  I stood up. Maw was standing on the patio with her mouth open and her hands out and Peppa ran up to her and hugged her and Maw nearly fell back. She was shouting and clinging onto Peppa and then Peppa started pulling her hand and dragging her back towards us. I stepped out of the trees and walked towards them and Maw saw me and I waved and she made a big crying sound like ‘AAAH!’ and let Peppa pull her. I ran over and she got me and hugged me hard and she was crying and going ‘Oh Sal. Oh Sal . . .’

  We pulled her into the trees and she was shaking and swaying like she was going to faint. Peppa was going ‘You can come with us. We live in the wood with Ingrid and you can come and live with us. We made you a bender.’

  Maw said ‘What? I can’t. Wait, I can’t . . .’

  And then she saw Ingrid and Ingrid stepped up to her and took her face in her hands and said ‘You are saved by us. You can come with us and we will look after you.’

  Maw was shaking still and she said ‘Where are we going?’ and we started pulling and dragging her back through the woods. It was like she was blind and couldn’t see where she was and we had to pull and hold her hand and go ‘Come on, that’s it, come on, just up along here . . .’ As we got near the wall I heard a voice shouting ‘Claire? Claire?’

  We got her over the wall and I ran in front and dragged all the branches off the Rolls-Royce and Ingrid got down under the steering wheel with her bit of wire again. Peppa pulled Maw up to the car and when she saw it she looked around and said ‘It’s a Rolls-Royce’ and Peppa said ‘Aye, we nicked it.’

  I opened the back door on the lane side and we got Maw in and I made her lie down by the seat where your feet go and Peppa covered her in a blanket and then jumped in. Ingrid was shouting in German at the car and then it started and she went ‘Aha!’

  Ingrid backed off the grass and then roared off fast up the lane and I was in the front seat looking back to see if anyone came after us. We drove a bit up and then Ingrid swung the car round in a driveway and went back down the lane past the Abbey entrance and started going fast and we got rocked and swayed about going round the corners. Peppa was saying to Maw ‘You stay there Maw and then nobody can see you.’

  On the other road Ingrid slowed down a bit. It was starting to get dark again but there was nothing following us. We got back down and turned right onto the main road and just cruised along and Maw sat up on the back seat. She just looked amazed and kept crying and then laughing and hugging Peppa. She said ‘I thought you were dead’ and she cried again.

  Her hair was nice short. It was dyed blond and she was still really pretty and looked young and her eyes were clear and bright even though she was crying. I sat in
the front seat looking back at her.

  She said ‘Where did you go?’

  I said ‘We ran and we survived in the forest. And we met Ingrid.’

  Peppa said ‘She’s German. She taught me how to say arse in German and it’s just like arse in Scottish.’

  Maw said ‘Everyone’s looking for you. I thought you were dead. The polis told me they thought you might be dead. They thought someone had got you . . .’

  I said ‘Nobody got us.We escaped and hid in the woods.’

  Then Maw leant forwards and put her hands round my face and said ‘Sal I’m sorry.’ And she started crying.

  I said ‘I’m not sorry I killed Robert Maw.’

  Maw said ‘Oh Sal’ and kept on crying.

  We were getting back near the Little Chef and I said to Ingrid ‘What’re we going to do with the Rolls-Royce?’

  And she said ‘We leave it. In a layby near and I will leave money in it for the window and the petrol for the owner.’

  Maw said ‘Where are we going? I was in the rehab and . . .’

  Peppa said ‘Maw you are gonna come and live in the woods with us. We’ve got a camp and we have a fire at night, it’s great.’

  I said ‘Maw you cannae drink.’

  She said ‘Sal I’m sober. I’ve stopped. I’m gonnae stay stopped. Oh Sal . . .’ And she cried again for a bit. And then she said ‘This is mad.’

  Peppa said ‘Maw have you got any fags?’ and Maw said ‘Aye, roll-ups’ and Peppa said ‘Geez one’ and Maw laughed and said ‘No Peppa’ and I said ‘No Peppa.’ Then Maw said ‘I’m giving them up too.’

  We pulled into a layby about half a mile from the Little Chef and there was nobody around. Ingrid pulled the wire out from under the steering wheel and the car stopped and the lights went off. It was dark and Ingrid got a notebook out of her pocket and pulled out a piece of paper from it and wrote ‘Thank you for this car and here is money to pay for the window’ and then she put a roll of tenners in the note and folded it and left it on the front seat. She said ‘I left a hundred pounds. Windows in this car are very expensive.’

  We left the blankets in the car and Ingrid went in front with a head torch and I went at the back with one and we climbed over a wall and went across a field and got into the woods behind it. Maw had Converse on and they were okay for walking, not like the heels she used to wear a lot when she was stripping. She did okay going along through the woods and sometimes she went ‘Oooh it’s spooky’ and she laughed. We climbed up a bit and followed a path along a high bit and we could see the Little Chef lights down below through the trees. Then we found the path towards the top of the valley where the river was and where we climbed up. None of us spoke, we just climbed up through the woods and there was just the sound of our feet on the snow and twigs. There was a wee bit of moonlight from a half moon and the stars were out already and they were bright.

  Peppa was holding Maw’s hand and watching her as we started down the other side and saying ‘Careful there Maw’ and ‘Just a wee step there’ and I knew she liked it leading her and showing her where we were going.

  Ingrid was going slower than she normally did and holding her back and then she stopped and bent and let out a long low moan. I went over to her and put my hand on her and she said ‘Bad pain Sal.’

  I said ‘We’ve got more painkillers at the camp’ and she shook her head and in the moonlight her face was all screwed up and she had her teeth clamped together. Maw said ‘Is it your back darlin’?’ and Ingrid nodded her head up and down and then let out a big long breath. She straightened up and said ‘Come. We go. I will go at the back. I go slow.’

  I gave Peppa my head torch and she led Maw and I walked behind with Ingrid holding her arm and she was gripping my hand hard. It took ages to get back to the camp and I had to push Ingrid up the slope and she was in agony all the way.

  We got into the camp and I got the fire going and we lit Ingrid’s candles and then got her sitting by the fire and got a blanket for her and I put some rocks in the fire to warm. I got her two ibuprofen and codeine and she said ‘No. All of them’ and she took all six left in the pack.

  Peppa got the head torch and showed Maw her bender and Maw was going ‘Did you make this? It’s great. Oh a wee table!’ Peppa was really excited about Maw having a bender and then she brought her and sat her by the fire and wrapped her in a blanket and I made tea for all of us. Ingrid just sat in the firelight with a kind of grin on her face.

  We had corned beef and beans and bread and then we had some Dundee cake and then Maw rolled a fag and lit it. She looked young and pretty in the firelight and I sat next to her and she put her arms round me and Peppa. Ingrid said ‘Claire may I have a cigarette please?’ I didn’t know Ingrid smoked, and she was a doctor, but Maw rolled her one and she lit it and coughed a bit and said ‘I have not smoked a cigarette for forty years. But it is a special night. It reminds me of being young. In the DDR everyone smoked.’

  Peppa said ‘Ingrid is really old Maw. She’s seventy-five.’

  And Maw said ‘Never!’

  ‘And she’s a doctor and she defected from the DDR in nineteen seventy-nine. And she was a hippie and got beaten up by the polis on the hippie convoy’ I said.

  Peppa said ‘And she loved a man called Max and he cheated on her and she got depressed and did research. And she had a boyfriend called Matt who was young enough to be her son. And she knows all the German swear words.’

  Ingrid was laughing. ‘I have told them my whole life Claire. I have never told my whole life to anyone before.’

  Maw laughed too. Then she said ‘I am so sorry. You’ve had to look after them.’

  Ingrid said ‘They look after me. They are angels. They have made me happy.’

  Peppa said ‘I’m an angel’ and held her hands together like she was praying and put on a holy face.

  Maw said ‘Are you really a doctor?’

  Ingrid said ‘Yes. I was in general practice for fifteen years before I retired and came to live here.’

  Peppa said ‘Ingrid can make bread and candles. And she can sew hats and make pots and she took three Pike teeth out of my hand when I got bitten by a Pike I caught with Sal at the other loch, I had a fever and I was really sick and she made me better . . .’

  Maw said ‘You got bitten by a Pike?’

  Peppa said ‘Aye he was a big bastard an’ all, and he ripped three big cuts in my hand. Sal ate him.’

  Ingrid said she needed to go to sleep and I wrapped a hot stone for her and went with her over to her bender and she got took off her big coat and boots and then got into the bed and I put the stone in behind her back. She touched my face and said ‘We got your mother Sal.’ And I kissed her and left her to sleep.

  Maw told us what happened when we ran. She woke up hungover like usual and she needed the toilet and she couldn’t get out of the room. She banged and called us and Robert for ages and then she started shouting out of the window and banging on it. She found her phone and she tried Robert’s and heard it ringing through in the front room. Then she tried our phones and they were dead and she tried two lassies from the club but they didn’t answer. She couldn’t think who to ring and then she found Ian Leckie’s number in her call history and she rang him.

  He said he’d come. When he got to the flat he rang and said he’d have to break the door in and she said okay. She knew there was something wrong and then heard the door go in and Ian calling her round the flat and then he went ‘Jesus!’ And then he started shouting for me and Peppa and he found the key on the carpet and unlocked her door and said ‘Don’t go in Sal’s room Claire’ and she thought we were dead or hurt and she screamed and pushed past him and ran in and saw Robert dead on my bed.

  Ian called the polis and they came and loads of them piled into the flat and they kept Maw in the front room and kept asking her where we were and she said she didn’t know. She couldn’t even remember what had happened the night before and she wanted a drink but they wouldn’t let
her have one.

  All the flat got taped off and they started asking everyone in the close if they’d seen us and Ian Leckie and some other men started searching around the flats and the play park and the back of the railway. They took Maw to the station in town and kept asking her what happened and what we did the night before. They asked her all about Robert and they said they’d found nicked phones and cards and drugs in the flat.They kept her overnight and they interviewed Ian Leckie and took his phone and the next day a woman from social services came to see Maw and a solicitor, and Maw was rattling and dying because she needed a drink to cope with it all.

  Maw saw a doctor and then they took her into a hospital and gave her a room and pills to calm her down and the polis stayed with her and kept asking her stuff about us. Then the polis said she had to go and talk to the press and she got took to the station and she cried in front of all the cameras and reporters and said for us to come home.

  Then they arrested Ian Leckie and questioned him for two days on suspicion of killing Robert. They let him go because they had no evidence on him. Which shows how fucking stupid the polis are.

  Maw stayed in the hospital for three more days and all the time they were coming and talking to her and telling her we were still not found. They asked loads about Robert and they told her he had convictions for being a paedo before he met her. She cried and cried and wanted to kill herself. They asked all about Peppa’s da and all about my da and all about the club where she worked and the lassies she knew there. The doctor and the social workers kept coming in to her and telling her stuff and examining her. And then the solicitor came to see her and told her she wasn’t being charged with anything yet. But they might charge her later with neglecting us. The doctor said she needed to go into a rehab because she was having withdrawals and shaking all the time. The doctors said they would pay and Maw said it cost £2,000 a week.