by Ron Butlin
Having discussed terms, Maggie agreed to come back with her suitcase during her afternoon break, and move in properly after work.
When she returned at eight-thirty that evening the room was all hers. The dead woman’s bed stood in the corner. Opposite was a family-sized tombstone of a wardrobe that reeked of shoes, old clothes and camphor. The top of the dresser was a clutter of postcards, photographs, some letters in a rack, a comb, nailfile, a Present from Dunbar ashtray; wisps of greyish hair were tangled among the bristles of the hairbrush.
Maggie dumped the lot into an old tartan shopping bag she found hanging behind the door, to go out in the next bin collection. She felt sad for the widow woman dying here alone, but the less she knew about her the better she’d get on. The drawers were empty. Mrs McKenzie must have gone through them already.
She set about making the bed. A Louis-the-Something chaise longue was one thing, but a real bed with a mattress, clean-smelling sheets, thick blankets and a quilt that fitted neat as a pie-crust on top was quite another matter. After a full day on her feet, scooping and salting, she could hardly wait to climb in under that welcoming crust and get baked to sleep. She had a quick wash in the bathroom down the hall, undressed and got under the blankets. So snug and pie-warm!
It was only when she laid her head on the pillow that she realised she’d just made her bed without hearing her mother’s usual comment. She grinned to herself in the dark. It was a good start.
For the next three months Maggie would sleepwalk out from her room at Mrs McKenzie’s, down the stairs, along Fountainbridge, over the railway, past the graveyard, then sharp right, down to the junction, across to the start of Gorgie Road, under a railway bridge and straight on till she reached Fusco’s – and sleepwalk back again nine hours later. Back and forth, back and forth, six times a week, like she was in a dream. Someone else’s dream, not hers.
Every Saturday evening she went to Mrs Mackenzie’s kitchen to pay her week’s rent in advance, placing the ten-shilling note and loose coins onto her landlady’s waiting palm. Back in her room she dropped whatever cash remained, uncounted, into the empty drawer of her bedside cabinet to join the previous weeks’ earnings and the slither of pennies, threepenny bits, and occasional sixpences she’d been given as tips. If she needed to buy something, she took a handful of small change from the drawer. She spent very little. With Sunday as her only day off, she didn’t have much opportunity – all the shops were shut and so were the cinemas and variety shows. She was at liberty to go to church, of course. Failing that, she was free to walk up and down the more or less deserted streets, or, if she found a park that was unlocked, she could stroll along the paths, past playgrounds with their swings, roundabouts and the witch’s hat all chained up for the Sabbath. There was no question of visiting her brother Billy at home. It would be like visiting her parents all over again – except it’d make things really hard for her sister-in-law.
The best Sundays were when there was a light in Jean’s shop, which meant she was having to work over the weekend. What a joy it was to walk into the comforting smell of cakes and baking, the sweetness of thick icing and melting chocolate, and the luxury of her sister-in-law’s good humour and kindness. Here Maggie would sit and chat, and laugh, and tell Fusco stories about some of her customers, about Grace and her football-daft husband Norrie, storing up Jean’s cheerfulness inside her to carry back to her room at Mrs McKenzie’s.
‘Were you ever in the Hebrides?’
Without glancing up, Maggie continued scooping chips into the newspaper. ‘Salt and sauce?’
‘The both, please. I’m wondering, were you ever in the Hebrides, on Lewis?’
She shook on the salt, then the sauce. ‘Pickled onion?’
‘No thanks. Stornoway maybe? Can ye double-wrap? I’ll be taking them back to the B&B.’
‘No, never been.’ Maggie finished folding the two extra sheets of newspaper around the fish supper. Now she’d have to hand it over, to raise her eyes and look at the customer.
He was early thirties, red hair. Never seen him before. She took the man’s half-crown and rang up the till.
‘Didn’t you stay at Mrs Stewart’s boarding house a few months back?’
Her hand shook as she laid out the man’s change on the counter.
‘Stewart? I don’t know anybody called Stewart. Never been to Lewis either, like I said.’ But even as she spoke she could feel herself blush. She drew her hand across her face as if to wipe away sweat. It suddenly seemed hotter than ever standing next to the fryer.
‘You’ve a perfect double then – Michael showed me a photograph. Not that he can see it, poor man, but he keeps it.’
When Maggie made no reply, he continued. ‘Well, maybe I’m wrong, but I’ll give him your best. Greetings from a bonnie lass in Edinburgh! Michael’d like that!’ A moment later the man was gone.
For the rest of that shift, Maggie let her hands carry on with the scooping, salting and wrapping while she herself stood again at the window of her room at Mrs Stewart’s gazing out over the harbour, Michael’s arms around her.
A week later she came into the chip shop to find Grace grinning from ear to ear.
‘Ye’ve got fan mail!’ Grace pointed to an envelope propped on the shelf next to the radio. ‘Came this morning, Tony says.’
Margaret Davies, c/o Fusco’s Fish Restaurant, Gorgie Road, Edinburgh. Firm handwriting, neat fountain pen.
‘Postmarked Stornoway. Whae’d ye ken in thon place?’
Maggie stuck it in the pocket of her overalls. ‘Relatives.’
‘In the land o the Wee Frees?’
A second letter came in the afternoon post.
‘Mair relatives?’ asked Grace.
Back at Mrs McKenzie’s, her coat still on, she sat on the edge of her bed and tore open the first envelope. She unfolded the light blue notepaper –
Dearest Maggie, . . . I still think of it as your room, as our room really after all we shared together there . . . When I came downstairs in the morning to find you . . .
But she was hardly able to read the words, as written down by his friend Lachlan. Her tears seemed to have come from nowhere.
She wrote back to Michael an hour later.
It was the last Saturday in August. Since starting at eleven that morning she’d been scooping and salting for three hours solid while walking miles, it felt like, up and down the same stretch of lino behind the metal counter. The occasional trip to the back kitchen or to carry heaped plates into the side room had seemed like a relief. Her face, the inside of her mouth and even her lungs felt so clotted with grease that, by the time the lunch customers left, she felt she herself had been battered and basted to a turn. Forget staying indoors. She went out onto the back green. Putting her plate on the step, she eased herself down onto the sun-warmed stone and leant against the tenement wall. She slipped off her shoes. At last she could relax completely. Balancing her steak pie and chips on her knees, and with a cup of sweetened tea to hand, she was to all appearances a woman without a care in the world. Thanks to the loose-fitting overalls no one could notice that she was starting to show. She ate slowly while staring at the sheets and pillowcases, shirts, dresses and underwear strung out on the drying lines.
‘Maggie?’
Tony was standing in the doorway. She put down her fork.
‘Hi, Tony.’
‘Grace, she very tired. Like dog she say. Good you got more sense than have babies, Maggie. You stay more late this night, help me? Much peoples. I do money, you chips – easy.’
Grace, too, was pregnant. During the slack periods Maggie was kept up to date with the expectant mother’s state of health, her ever-changing views on baby clothes and baby care. The younger woman had slept well the previous night, or not so well. The baby had kicked. The baby had kicked again. Did Maggie think a newborn should be left to cry like that scienti
st said on the radio or picked up at once? Grace didn’t want to spoil him. A girl was different. But it was going to be a boy because that’s what Norrie wanted – someone to play for the Hearts. Should he be bottle- or breast-fed? She talked about cribs, prams, grandparents; she detailed how she coped with morning sickness, exhaustion, swollen ankles. Maggie was spared none of it and endured every last symptom and circumstance while unable to say anything of her own in return. Sometimes she felt like screaming.
‘Happy to help, Tony.’ It would get her through another day.
‘Thanks, thanks. Real big help for me. For Grace too. For you extra money.’
‘Always welcome.’ Maggie waved her fork to show how pleased she was.
‘More tips when pubs shut. Saturday night is different peoples. But I always here and Slow Peter. So no worry, Maggie.’
Dressed in his usual blue overalls and sandshoes without socks, Slow Peter was standing at the kitchen sink with his back to her, rinsing dishes. It was eight o’clock. The weather had broken and for the last half hour heavy rain had been battering the kitchen window.
She watched him run water over one side of a plate, turn it over, then rinse the other. Careful and methodical, he filled slot after slot on the drying rack. One plate . . . one plate . . . one plate. She sighed as she put down the fresh stack of dirty dishes she’d brought through.
‘You fine, Maggie?’
‘Fine, thanks, Peter. Bit tired.’
Slow Peter lifted the top plate and began scraping the leftovers, some fish batter and mashed-up chips, into the metal waste bin next to his sink. It was a badly dented oil drum with Mobil lettered in red.
‘Pigs’ll be grinning the night. Like Christmas dinner tae them.’
That rancid smell of fried fat – she’d need to wash it out of her hair before she could finally crawl into bed. She’d put on fresh sheets before leaving for work to be ready for tomorrow’s all-day sleep. Would there be any hot water left? Had she a clean towel? Nearly three hours to go, more like three years.
‘My pigs is always pleased tae see me. Smiling and grinning they are. Cleans their bowls tae the last lick, not like them.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the side room while tipping an uneaten fish cake into his drum.
Maggie smiled, not a waitress-smile this time but the real thing.
‘We were taught to never waste food.’ The instant she spoke she realised she was sounding like her mother, but couldn’t seem to stop: ‘Rationing, you understand, and the War. My mother . . .’ she heard herself blundering on, ‘she made soup out of anything. Even the cheese rinds went in. And bones too, of course.’
‘My pigs eats bones.’
‘We didn’t actually eat the bones, Peter.’ Her mother’s voice again, her mother sitting in the Newhaven house, her knitting needles endlessly click-clicking, click-clicking, click-clicking . . .
‘You sure you’re okay, Maggie?’ Slow Peter was holding out a soapy wet hand as if offering to steady her.
Thirty-one years old, and over six months pregnant. No husband. No family. Spending her Saturday night standing in puddles of greasy kitchen water in the back room of a rain-lashed fish and chip shop on Gorgie Road – she was okay?
‘Fine thanks.’
What else could she say to a man? Even to kindly Slow Peter? If she clammed up, if she did her best to ignore him, to ignore them all, there they’d still be, as always, the men of this world – like so many closed doors blocking her at every turn. Unless, of course, they wanted something enough to let her in. Afterwards the door was slammed shut . . . and she’d be shoved out into the street once more. Always the same closed door, the same street, the same man-made world. Not Michael, though, and his letters of long-distance affection . . . the words and phrases repeated over and over . . . hope . . . happiness . . . one day . . . you and me . . . They helped her blot out everything else. The photograph he’d sent her of him in his uniform stood propped up on her bedside table like a souvenir of another life, someone else’s. Often, when she was about to write to him, she’d sit on the edge of her bed and let her fingertip trace the forehead, the cheeks and lips she could see in the photograph, like he’d shown her. No white stick, no milky eyes – but, yes, it was Michael, her Michael. Of course it was. And she loved him.
‘I’m fine, Peter. Thanks.’ Another half-smile, a waitress one this time. ‘Better get back through.’
‘Bye, bye, Maggie.’
She returned to find a queue had built up – a line of pig snouts and trotters at their counter-long feeding trough. Cod and chips no sauce – scoop and scoop, salt and wrap / pie supper with two pickled onions – scoop and scoop, salt and sauce and wrap / three sit-in suppers for a family guzzling at their own small trough in the side room. Back to the queue . . .
They started piling in at closing time. Piling in, staggering in, tumbling in, falling in, laughing, singing, joking, flirting; the queue soon became a multi-headed beast with no tail in sight. Some were drunk, some very drunk. Loud and cheerful, mostly. Tony had said to her, ‘Like in pub – they at counter, they get served.’
By ten-thirty she was worn out, utterly.
At last the queue had dwindled to nothing and the counter was deserted except for a solitary man at the far end in drenched-through overalls, finishing his sixpenny bag. He stood, dripped and fed one chip after another into his mouth while staring out at the darkening street. He’d be leaving any minute. That was the good news. The bad news was that Norrie had turned up. Norrie was Grace’s husband. Drunk but still on his feet, he’d come roistering in at closing time with some other men to mop up the night’s beer with sit-in suppers all-round. The three men were in their thirties and heavily built. One wearing his cap with the brim pulled down low like a duck-bill, another with fair hair and a hesitant moustache. Norrie, in a blue check shirt, had his work jacket slung over the chair back. It seemed they’d just been paid off from building work on some new bungalows up the road. They seemed to fill the cafe with their noise.
She leant against the counter, giving the stainless steel a last wipe with a wet cloth.
‘A seat here for ye, Maggie. Rab’s been keeping it warm for ye!’ Norrie looked flushed with drink. ‘He’s eaten good and’s fair raring for his afters!’
Duck Bill roared with laughter, the Moustache gave Norrie a punch on the arm.
She managed a half nod in their direction while sidling herself and her cloth further off down the counter.
‘Been a bit pan-loafie, aren’t ye, Maggie?’ Norrie called out. No need to look over, she could imagine him sticking his nose in the air to mime a mock-polite sniff, and not for the first time.
‘Yer no frae Gorgie, are ye? Fancy yersel New Town? Morningside?’ Duck Bill chipped in.
‘Where sex is what their coal gets delivered in!’ shouted Norrie. More laughter.
The man in the overalls had now finished his chips and was holding out the scrunched-up wrapping paper for her to take. She was forced to return back along the counter, for the bin.
‘Naebody misses a slice off a cut loaf, pan or plain, eh?’ The Moustache grinned at her and patted the empty seat beside him.
‘Rab’s no being cheeky or nowt, Maggie.’ Norrie stubbed out his cigarette in his half-finished black pudding supper as he called over to her: ‘Sae lang as yer a woman’s whit he means. An yer aa that!’ Even at that distance his sun-beaten face showed the tiredness of several days’ grey stubble.
‘Things okey-dokey, Maggie?’ Tony had come through from the kitchen and was ringing up the till.
‘Fine.’ She waitress-smiled and tucked a loose strand of hair behind her ear.
Smell the cooking grease on it? She could feel it, a smeary slickness that stuck the separate strands together into a solid, larded hank.
Norrie had started singing:
‘Rab kens a lassie, a bonnie, Scottish
lassie,
She’s sweet as the heather in the dell . . .’
The others joined in, clapping in time.
‘There’s nane sae classie as Rab’s bonnie lassie,
Maggie, his Scots bluebell!’
Loud cheers. Applause. Expectant faces turned in her direction. The windows were steamed up, but she could see the rain coming down harder than ever. The headlights of a passing car swept the darkness. If she was lucky she might still get the last tram home . . .
Back through in the kitchen she ran herself a glass of cold water and dabbed her face and brow.
Slow Peter straightened up from stacking plates in a cupboard. ‘These pigs likes their windows closed tight. Gets choking hot.’
‘I’m okay now, thanks. Long day.’
‘Days here aye long.’ Slow Peter picked up more plates. ‘Sunday the morn. Shortest of the week, but aye the best.’
‘You said it, Peter.’ She returned to the counter.
‘Here she comes. Rab’s bonnie lassie!’ called Norrie. ‘Maggie, ye broke his hairt when ye went away there! Couldnae even finish his chips – we thocht he wis a goner.’
Another laugh.
‘Likely he’ll be needing the kiss of life – and yer the only woman in the place. Job’s all yours!’
More laughter, hands slapping the table top.
The kiss of life? She’d gone on only one date with the man she’d met at Fairley’s – a drive down to Silverknowes in his Morris Minor. A romantic stroll along the seafront, he suggested. They’d parked at the top end away from the streetlights and that’s when a sudden downpour started. The heavens emptied. He suggested they move into the back seat to be more comfortable. Again . . . and again . . . and again the slow sweep of a lighthouse beam from the island out in the Forth lit up his face, then drew total darkness over it: I want to show how much I care for you, Maggie. I want to show you. I want so much to –