by Denise Mina
“Right, pal? Are you one of the comics?”
“Yeah.” Dub shook his hand firmly once and let go. “I compere here. Dub MacKenzie.”
“I’m George Burns.”
Dub reeled as if he’d been slapped on the back of the head. He shook his head at Burns. “No, pal,” he said, “what you are is comedy fucking gold.”
FIFTEEN
A BAD TIME FOR BIG GIRLS
I
The audience had gone home. The comics and bartenders were all sitting at a corner table in the empty cellar, sipping their staff drink. For the open-mike attempters it was the only kind of payment they’d get for their efforts, one shitty drink, a pint of the cheapest lager or a sweet wine. Paddy thought they were being overpaid.
Lorraine was two giggles and a hair flick away from offering herself there and then to George Burns. Paddy watched him, noting that he was pleased at the girl’s attentions but also somehow detached, observing Lorraine’s behavior and thinking about it.
Lorraine listened to his stories along with the rest of the table, laughing extra hard at the punch lines, sitting forward to fill his line of vision, touching her hair, her décolletage, her lips, drawing his eye to them. Burns held the table rapt. He had never done a gig, yet almost every comic at the table was listening to him talk. Usually, Paddy had noticed, when one of them told a joke another comedian would tell a better one, or interrupt to rewrite the punch line, but they were all deferring to Burns, laughing at his stories and enjoying him. It wasn’t because of his age, either; it was because he was a great storyteller and the police was the perfect place to pick up material. Even Dub listened, smiling at the table and nodding occasionally, mentally charting the technicalities of what Burns was doing instinctively.
Paddy downed the last of a flat Coke she had bought an hour ago, pulled her scarf on, and stood up, announcing that she would need to leave now for the last train. Normally Dub walked her to the station, but before he had the chance to reach for his coat Burns shot to his feet, knocking Lorraine over a little.
“I’ll run you home.”
“No,” she said, “no, I’ve got a Transcard anyway. It’s not costing me.”
“I need to talk to you about the guy you mentioned the other day.” He glanced at the adoring clowns around the table and decided to risk the indiscretion. “Lafferty.”
Dub dropped his hand to his lap and conceded to him. He could only offer to walk her to the station. He didn’t have a car.
“Oh,” she said, “okay.”
Burns looked at everyone. “I’ll see you next week.”
“Brilliant,” said Muggo the Magnificent.
Burns and Paddy gathered their things and said their good-byes. She felt proud being escorted out by him. She didn’t like him or want to spend time with him but she loved the idea of Lorraine and the others watching them leave together. Lorraine looked crestfallen that he was leaving with someone else. Even Dub, who had just been usurped as their leader, raised his hand in salute: “See ye, Paddy.”
Paddy led the way upstairs, aware that Burns’s eyes were watching her fat arse. She found herself putting an extra bit of swing in her walk, swaggering almost, not ashamed of her body the way she usually was when she felt observed.
Upstairs in the pub the staff were cleaning up, washing ashtrays and loading dirty glasses onto the bar. One guy dragged a trash bag after him, gathering rubbish from the tables. No one acknowledged Paddy and Burns as they walked to the far doors and let themselves out into the frosted street.
Burns rolled his shoulders back proudly when he reached his car, a Triumph TR7 sports car, beige with black trim, the roof sloped backward as if bent by the incredibly high speeds the car routinely reached. Through the window she could see bucket seats upholstered in black leather, designed to curl around the body, with matching lush headrests and a leather-coated steering wheel. She was impressed but determined not to comment on it.
“I stay in Eastfield, know it?”
“Yeah.” He looked a bit surprised. “Had you down as a Pollockshaws girl, to be honest. Somewhere a bit nicer.”
“Eastfield is nice, it’s just fallen on hard times.”
He unlocked the passenger door for her, giving her a frank look that lingered too long to be innocent. He skirted around the bonnet for the driver’s door as Paddy climbed into the low seat. The interior of the car was immaculately clean; she could imagine Burns lovingly oiling the leather on his days off.
He opened his own door and dropped in next to her, smiling to himself, anticipating his return to the comedy club next week. “You watch a lot of comedy, tell me this: what goes down better, characters or observational stuff?”
She thought about it. “Well,” she said, “character does well initially but observational has a longer life. You can keep the same act for years with observational but it’s easier to make a breakthrough with a novelty character.”
He smiled at the road as he started the engine. “Which attracts the most birds, though?”
Uncomfortable, she arranged her narrow black skirt to hide her fat legs. “So,” she said, “how long have you been married?”
He tutted sullenly and looked at her. “You don’t mess about, do you?”
She shrugged. “I’m just asking.”
Burns flicked on the indicator and checked the empty street, looking over his shoulder, avoiding the straight answer. “Why? Are you married?”
“Burns, if I was married I’d wear my wedding ring all the time and everyone would know.”
They drove on in a heavy rankling silence for a few minutes, negotiating their way out of the deserted narrow valleys between the buildings. The pine air freshener swung rhythmically from the mirror, the cellophane envelope hanging off it like a pair of trousers dropped to the knees. She should have taken the train.
They hit the main thoroughfare and the Friday-night traffic. Closing-time drunks littered the streets, staggering out in front of the traffic and causing trouble among the bus stop queues. A woman wearing a flying suit and gold belt with strappy high heels swung her handbag playfully at her boyfriend. Paddy saw short rara skirts and ski pants and nipped waists. It was a bad time for big girls. She suddenly thought of Vhari Burnett and remembered that she had to get Burns talking if she wanted to find out who Lafferty was.
“The town’s been quieter in the past month or so,” she told the window. “Or maybe it just seems that way.”
“It is quieter. Do you want to know why?”
“Go on, then, why?”
“I’ll show you.” Burns swung the car in a sharp U-turn, doubling back through the Trongate in a highly illegal maneuver and cutting through a red light. He drove onto the Gorbals, taking the Rutherglen Road and an off-ramp to St. Theresa’s Chapel next to the high-rises. For a moment Paddy thought it was a bad idea to be alone with this man; there was a frightening energy at his core. If he did anything to her she wouldn’t be able to go to the police: he was the police.
II
Burns pulled over and stopped the engine, sliding down in his seat.
“Watch,” he said.
They were across the road from the shopping center, in a tall, wide alleyway straddled by massive stilts supporting the high flats above it. The breadth of the building was picked out in wide stripes of gray and black. The underbelly of the flats was a stained concrete slab. Between the stilts was a row of squat, shuttered shops.
It was a familiar scene to Paddy. The next-door police station was a nightly stop for her and Billy. It was usually the last stop before the death burger van at two thirty and the lit blue POLICE sign hanging over the door made her feel hungry and a little bit excited at the prospect of a cheeseburger. The incidents in the station were usually drink-related family fights.
“Why are we here?”
“Just watch.”
“Are you going to tell me about Lafferty?”
“Seriously. Watch.” He pointed at the block of high-rises looming over them. A lot of the w
indows were open, she noticed. An unusual number for February. She’d heard the heating was sometimes controlled centrally in the older council blocks and they could easily overheat if the system went berserk. But not all the windows were open.
At first she thought it was something falling slowly from a window on the third floor, but it was a bit of paper being lowered softly on a string. When it reached five feet off the ground, a tiny shadow figure materialized from behind one of the stilts, tugged the paper free, and melted away again. The string hung there, billowing gently until another young man ducked out and tied a note to the end, watching as it rose above his head. Farther down the block another weighted string was lowered from a first-floor window and someone else stepped out of the shadows, caught it, and tied a paper to it.
“What’s going on?” whispered Paddy.
“That’s money going up, heroin coming down. It’s the reason the town’s so quiet. The people used to be in the town on Friday nights having knife fights. Now they’re around one another’s houses, jagging up and watching telly.”
She thought about the traces of cocaine Sullivan had found on her note, currently sitting in PC McDaid’s cupboard. “What about cocaine? Do they sell that here?”
“No, that’s the other end of the scale. Rich people. They never really catch those ones; they’re too well connected. See, we can’t search the flats without a warrant and the tenants won’t open the door unless they know who it is. This way they can deal without opening their front doors.” Burns paused. “I asked around about Lafferty, by the way. He’s up to his elbows in all of this.”
“Really?”
“Yeah.” He pointed to the shadows and the strings. “He’s a known face but no one knows which outfit he’s working for and there aren’t any charges outstanding against him.”
“Did Vhari Burnett ever prosecute him?”
“The Bearsden Bird?”
She didn’t want to give Sullivan’s lead away and half-wished she hadn’t mentioned it but nodded softly.
“Not that I know of.” Burns stroked the leather steering wheel. “Someone else was asking about that. Have you heard something we should know about?”
“No, name just keeps coming up, that’s all.” Paddy looked and found his eyes drinking in her bare neck and her mouth. He didn’t stop when he saw the coldness on her face, either, but smiled ruefully, as if he knew he’d never touch her and regretted it.
He turned the key, starting the engine and startling the buyers so that, black on black, they scattered like a flock of bats under the black belly of the building.
SIXTEEN
BETTER TO BURN
I
Kate sat at the table in the small green kitchen, frozen with terror, repeating Knox’s name under her breath in a mantra, trying to feel safe. She couldn’t bring herself to turn around and look back at the man peering curiously in through the window. She could hear his hand brushing dirt from the small pane above the sink, feet crunching on the dead plants below the window as he swayed from foot to foot. He must have been as cold as she was.
And it was cold in the house. She had found logs under the back porch and coal in the cellar but didn’t dare build a fire. She didn’t know who was watching. Luckily she had found a wardrobe full of woolen sweaters and trousers in the back bedroom and now wore three layers, none of which suited her. She didn’t care. She had turned all the mirrors to the wall. She couldn’t bear to look at herself.
The light hit the table at an angle and she could see long, tongue-shaped trails through the dust. She licked it last night, trying to be frugal and not waste a spilled drop because the envelopes seemed to be emptying by themselves. She had mixed the contents of one of them with the milk powder but it just meant she had to get more into herself to achieve the same sense of comfort and it was hard because her nose was so sore and raw. She had to hold the tip of it out from her face to sniff. The second envelope wasn’t mixed with milk but the contents were still evaporating. It seemed inconceivable that she was taking it all. There was no one else in the house, even though she had been convinced for a period last night that there was, so it had to be her.
Kate imagined the face at the window had blurred features because of the soil stuck to his pale skin. There would be a deep, bloody, black hole where his eye should have been. His fingernail scratched slowly down the window, a high-pitched shriek, running down her spine vertebra by vertebra.
Kate covered her eyes and tried to breathe. It didn’t matter which room she went into, where she sat in the house, the man from down the hill would be behind her somewhere, singing sometimes, a vague tune in a low growl, trying to get her attention. Every spare corner of her head was filled with him; every time she shut her eyes she recalled the sight of him, her fingers tingling with sensation of a pencil through paper.
Since last night he was becoming confused in her mind with Vhari. She saw them as a couple, happy together, malevolent only to her, the cause of their troubles, cause of their deaths. Vhari hadn’t had a boyfriend since fat Mark Thillingly dumped her, but now she was drawn to the one-eyed man by their shared hatred of Kate. The couple lingered in the shadows, became more confident at night, tiptoed across landings, laughing behind doors, playing whispering tricks on wide-awake ugly Kate.
To be ugly. She was now ugly. It never seemed possible. Maybe at sixty or fifty but not at twenty-two. She caught her reflection in the windows during the day and saw a stranger, so thin she might have been a boy, her nose flattened, widening her face, making her look more freakish than plain. She grew up knowing she was beautiful. Her looks invited privilege and she took it wherever she went. She left school at sixteen and never worked, never wanted, never even had to ask for favors, just got given everything. People liked having her around. Not anymore.
She looked at the almost empty second envelope. There was no one at the window despite what she could hear. She still knew that much anyway. She had to get the fuck out of here. She had to get back to the city and visit Bernie’s garage.
If she didn’t get up from this chair soon and move she’d be found next May, swinging from the stairwell.
II
Paddy smarted at Burns’s parking a little bit down from her house and turning off the engine. It wasn’t for him to decide they’d stay and talk for a while. And yet they lingered, a combative silence hanging between them. They were both in the middle of a stretch of night shifts and neither of them were anywhere near tired.
The Meehan house squatted like a fat frog in the overgrown garden. Only the living-room light was on. Marty and Gerard would be watching late-night TV. They’d have to share a room tonight, as they did before Caroline got married and moved out. They would have spent their evening being directed by Con as they moved Gerard’s bed back into what was now Marty’s room and brought Caroline’s dusty single bed down the narrow ladders from the attic. The camp bed, a deathtrap for anyone over four stone, would have been unfurled and set at the foot of the room for Baby Con to sleep in near his mum. Paddy thought about the bus journey here from Caroline’s house and the shame of everyone seeing what her husband had done to her. Trisha would insist that Caroline go back to John. She’d make her go back again and again until she complied enough and demeaned herself enough and supplicated herself enough to make it work. Marriages couldn’t fail in their family. Divorce was for other people, Protestants, movie stars.
Paddy looked at the house. Better to marry than burn, they said. She’d rather burn.
A gentle wind nudged the branches of a tree in the street behind them, shifting the dim lights on the road and houses around them into a moving landscape of black and gray.
“So.” Burns turned to face her, the leather squeaking beneath him. “This is where you live.”
The atmosphere between them was thrilling and unkind.
“Yes,” she said stiffly, wondering why she didn’t just throw open the door and get out. “Where do you live, with your wife?”
He tr
ied to smile. “You’re very interested in my wife.”
“I’m interested in the fact that you wear a wedding ring at work and not when you’re out at the pub.”
He sighed patiently and cupped the gearstick with his hand. They both looked at it: if he flexed his fingers the tips would be inches from her thigh. “You don’t know what the police are like. It’s important to fit in. You can’t tell everyone in the canteen that your wife’s mentally ill and you’re frightened to go home.”
He glanced up at her to see if the lie had taken but she was skeptical. “Your wife’s mentally ill?”
“What do you think would make a woman do this?” He lifted the waistband on his sweater and undid two buttons on his shirt, pulling it open and baring his stomach. The skin was as smooth and shiny as toffee. She could see the outline of his muscles. A suggestive seam of black hair crept down under his waistband.
“Look.” He touched a patch of perfect skin.
“Where?” she said, glad of the excuse to keep looking.
“There.” He touched himself again.
“I can’t see anything.”
“Here.” Reaching over to take her hand, he pressed her fingertips to the warm skin. Her hand slid across his stomach, taking in a small scar.
“There?”
“Yeah. A bottle opener. She came at me with a bottle opener.”
He thought she was a mug and was using the cheapest lines on her, insulting his absent wife to trick the knickers off her. Yet she still felt her fingers glide across his silken skin and her mouth began to water. His hand covered hers, pressing the fingers deep into the skin.
“I think you’re a liar,” she whispered.
His free hand slipped along her thigh. She didn’t care if he felt the fat there. He didn’t deserve a thin girlfriend.
“You’ve got me all wrong,” he said breathlessly. “I’m a good guy.”
The dark night pressed around the car, blacking out the windows, seeping in through the cracks and filling the tiny cabin with the moist, musky scent of nighttime. Unbidden, Paddy’s hand slipped up to his chest and her fingers felt an erect nipple, a tuft of hair, a heartbeat so forceful she could almost hear the echo of it in the car.