by Denise Mina
Terry raised an eyebrow. ‘But my nipples are unusually beautiful, Patricia, and you’re only flesh and blood.’
Paddy giggled and looked away as he yanked the shirt over his head without unbuttoning it. He stepped into her range of vision, a sudden outrage on his face, and shouted, ‘Don’t look at me!’
His arms were too thin; his chest was covered in tufts of soft black curly hair, arranged in a handsome T shape, the tail of it disappearing into the waistband of his trousers. His nipples were deep pink, the hair radiating away from them like eyelashes, making his chest into a startled face. She grinned and watched him pull on his fresh T-shirt. She wished Sean could see them.
‘Didn’t your parents mind you moving out?’
‘Ah,’ said Terry, lifting his jacket from the floor,‘they died. In a car accident.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘No, I’m ...’ He shook his head. ‘Stupid. I shouldn’t have told you that.’
‘Why not?’
Embarrassed, he screwed an eye shut and shrugged. ‘People don’t really want to know about stuff like that. It makes them uncomfortable.’
‘The fusty man-smell in here makes me more uncomfortable.’
He smiled weakly at her and glanced away.
‘I am sorry about your folks. It must have been a bit crap.’ He nodded at the floor. ‘That’s exactly what it was. It is. A bit crap. Why have you stopping wearing your engagement ring?’
As they locked up the room and walked slowly down the stairs, Paddy told him about the shunning, about Sean shutting the door on her and her midnight games with Mary Ann. By the time they’d reached the car Terry knew more about what was going on in her family than Paddy’s own mum.
He opened the passenger door for her. ‘He didn’t phone back?’
‘Not once.’ She climbed into the seat and waited until Terry was in the driver’s side. ‘Wouldn’t even come to the phone when I called him. Nothing.’
‘He sounds like a spineless wee shite.’ He started the engine. ‘But I would say that, wouldn’t I?’
For the first time in her life, Paddy felt like a full-grown woman.
III
Barnhill was a brutal landscape. The barren little group of low-slung houses sat tight against the windy hill, cowering from swooping gangs of black crows. It was hemmed in to the east and west by high-rise flats soaring thirty storeys up into a big grey sky. The flats were built with asbestos, tissue and spit; victims of running damp, they were popular with no-one but shit-machine pigeons. To the south, between Barnhill and the city, sat the sprawling St Rollox engineering works which had supplied train carriages to half the Empire. The two institutions went into decline hand in hand and gradually the surrounding land was abandoned, left littered with chemical residues and bits of scrap, contaminated and useless.
Barnhill itself was little more than a circuit of five or six long streets of identical houses, a squat row of shops with a turret at the corner, a post office and a school. The recent recession showed in the area. The shopping bags the women carried were all from discount shops and men, white faces crumpled against the brazen rain, gathered outside the bookies and the pub, too broke to go in. ‘This place is a shit hole,’ Paddy said.
‘It’s not that bad,’ said Terry, who would never have to countenance living there.
He pulled the car out onto the bleak Red Road. The road dipped between two soot-blackened walls and suddenly they were around the corner from the house. Paddy slid down in her seat, imagining that Sean and all the Ogilvys would be standing in groups on the kerb, as they had been on the day of Callum’s father’s funeral, dressed in sombre blacks and greys, saying goodbye to Callum Ogilvy’s mother, making hollow promises to see her again soon.
The Ogilvy house was on a sharp hillside. Crumbling concrete steps led up to it and the grass in the steep front garden was knee deep. Paddy wasn’t certain that she would be able to remember which house it was, but someone had helpfully aerosolled FILTH OUT on the wall at the bottom of the garden.
The living-room window was boarded over. The house might have been abandoned but the front door was opened a little and bits of plastic toys were scattered across the front garden, a stuffed pink thing with balding patches lying on a cushion of lush green grass, soaking up the rain. As they cruised slowly past the house Paddy saw a small leg in brown flares sticking backwards out of the front door, swaying on the toe as if a coy child had turned back into the house to ask a question.
Paddy sat back deep in her seat, watching the sad house pass. Quite suddenly the weight of her family and Sean’s disapproval seemed justified. If women didn’t conform, this is what happened. She would end up in a rundown council house with a hundred starving children and no extended family to help out during the hard times. It took her a tearful moment to remember that she hadn’t done anything wrong.
She turned and looked at Terry, desperate to think about something else. He was looking ahead, unaware of her for the moment, thoughtlessly slacking saliva around with his tongue. The sound made her stomach warm.
‘What are you smiling at?’ he asked.
‘Nothing.’
They were driving down a short connection between two long roads when they saw what they were sure was the other Baby Brian Boy’s house. It was on the ground floor of a four-in-a-block cottage, and below the window, starting from the ground, a sooty trail sprang up the brickwork where someone had tried to set a fire. Fresh window putty was still unpainted where the window had been replaced, light still catching a linseed-oil glisten. Even before the vandalism Paddy could see that it wasn’t a wealthy home. The curtains were faded and dusty, the patchy grass was overgrown in the front garden and the drive up to the door was so potholed that it couldn’t have been used by a car in a long time.
Terry gunned the engine. ‘Let’s go to Townhead and see the layout there.’
The rain came on as they drove down the broad dual carriageway through Sighthill. The high flats there were monolithic walls of homes, standing sentry on the summit of a small hill. The only other feature in the area was a large cemetery, not high Victorian but a poor person’s cemetery of small gravestones marshalled into neat rows. The wind pushed the rain sideways, into the faces of the pedestrians, catching the legs of people cowering in bus shelters. It took eight minutes in the car to cover the distance between the Baby Brian Boys’ houses and the Wilcox home. By the time they arrived in Townhead the rain had stopped, leaving the streets dark and glistening.
Even with the car windows up and the noisy engine running they could hear the hunger strikers’ march three blocks away. Hundreds of male voices shouted in unison, chanting through the silent city. Paddy had been on CND marches, where the noise was less aggressive, the chanting mellowed by women’s voices, but this sounded different: they sounded like a wild army. Every so often a call would go out and be answered by the mob. Whichever way they turned the sound seemed to be getting closer.
Following Paddy’s directions they found the Wilcox house and pulled up by the pavement. A few small bunches of posies had been added to the display of drooping yellow ribbons on the railings. Apart from that the house looked the same as it had when she’d come with McVie, but the streets were deserted. Even though it was Saturday the children on the scheme had been forbidden to play in the street because of the trouble there would be in town. A wave of sound rolled up the hill from the march.
‘I like this,’ said Terry. ‘I like cruising around with you, playing at journalists.’
She nodded. ‘So do I. I’ll be Bob Woodward.’
‘I’ll go Bernstein, just this once.’ He smiled. ‘D’you ever wonder how those guys felt as they fell asleep at night? They didn’t just report miscarriages of justice, they corrected them. How cool is that? That’s what I want to do.’
‘Me too,’ said Paddy, breathless and startled at how perfec
tly he had articulated her lifelong ambition. ‘That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.’
They looked at each other, for once nothing between them, eye to eye. She couldn’t look away, didn’t want to in case he was going to say something, and he stared back. They sat there for a moment, stuck like dogs, panic rising in Paddy’s throat, until they tore their eyes away, cleared their throats and caught their breath. She thought she heard him mutter an exclamation but was too embarrassed to ask what it was.
‘Look.’ Her sudden voice filled the car and she pointed ahead to Gina’s house. ‘There’s the alley to the swing park.’
‘Is it? Yeah? Is that it? Did they come down here?’
‘No-one saw them but the police still think so.’ She turned to look at him but lost her nerve and stared at his ear.
They heard it before they saw it, high-pitched and carried on the cold air, less a tune than a collection of notes. The ice-cream van was coming. From front doors and gardens small children began to appear on the pavements. Paddy turned in her seat, watching back down the road to where they were gathering in the car park. Something about it bothered her.
The queue was small for a Saturday afternoon. A young mum with a baby on her hip and a dirty-faced toddler, chaperoned by an older sister, watched the road expectantly, the young excited at the proximity of sugar, the older ones drawing together, glancing around, defensive and careful because of the march and what had happened to poor Brian Wilcox.
Terry sighed. ‘Shall we go?’
It was then that Paddy realized what was wrong with the scene. Gina’s house was up the road. The children were all waiting in completely the wrong place. The grocery-van man had told her that the ice-cream van stopped in front of Gina’s house.
The music got louder as the van turned the corner, the tinny tune bouncing off the flats and rolling up the street towards them. ‘Eh?’
She looked at Terry. He was waiting for an answer.
‘Eh, what?’ she said abruptly.
‘Eh, shall we go?’
She looked back down the road. The ice-cream van might have moved its stop position. It might have been thought insensitive to keep stopping outside the Wilcox house. Maybe they didn’t want the association and moved down the street.
‘Hang on a minute.’
She opened her door and stepped out into the street, shutting the car door behind her, looking for someone to ask. A small blond boy in a blue anorak was running towards her on his way to the small crowd at the van. ‘Son,’ she said.
He ignored her and continued to head past her to the van and the quickly dissipating queue.
‘Son.’ She stood in his way. ‘Wee man, I’ll give ye ten pence.’
The boy glanced at her and slowed. He was skinny, and the lip up to his nose was chapped raw.
Paddy took the big coin from her pocket. ‘Does the icecream van always stop down there?’
‘Aye.’ He held out his hand.
‘Did it always or just recently?’
‘Aye, always.’ He licked at his raw top lip with a dexterous tongue.
‘Did it not used to stop up there?’ She pointed back at Gina Wilcox’s.
The boy put his hands on his hips and huffed up at her.
‘Mrs, I’m not missing that van,’ he said definitely.
Paddy gave him his coin and he belted off down the road. Terry was watching her, frowning from inside the car. She held up a finger and walked down towards the ice-cream van. By the time she was halfway there the engine had started up and the van was moving off, leaving the satisfied children eating happily. Paddy watched the van pass Terry’s car and the Wilcox house, drive up out of sight and reappear again on the cross, heading over to Maryhill. The music wasn’t sounding and it wasn’t stopping again any time soon. She turned back to the kids. The boy in the anorak was clutching a quiver of Curly Wurlys, pointing at Paddy and explaining his wealth to another child.
‘Did that ice-cream van ever used to stop there?’ She pointed back towards the Wilcox place.
‘Nut,’ said the Parka boy, and the wee girls around him confirmed what he said.
‘It stops here,’ said a plump girl in glasses.
‘It always stops here,’ said a bigger girl.
Paddy nodded. ‘What time does your grocery van come on a Saturday?’
The children looked blankly at one another. It was a ridiculous question. Most of them were too young to tell the time, never mind predict patterns in retail provision. ‘Is it in the afternoon? Is it soon?’
‘Aye, soon, but his sweeties are mostly rubbish,’ said the Parka boy, misunderstanding the purpose of her interest.
Paddy thanked them and walked back to the car, opened the door and held onto the roof, hanging in. ‘Terry, listen, I’m going to go into town from here. I need to get home really. Is that OK?’
He frowned and nodded at the window. ‘Sure, fine. Get in and I’ll drive you down to the station.’
She patted the roof twice and glanced up the road. ‘Aren’t you going back to the office to finish up?’ ‘Finish up what?’
‘Finish up what you were doing earlier.’
‘Oh.’ He smiled, nodding his head a little too adamantly. ‘Yeah, I could, yeah. I’ll do that, yeah.’
He had a pleading little look in his eye. Paddy couldn’t stop herself. She knelt on the dimpled plastic seat, leaned over, gave him a soft kiss on his cheek and pulled back before he could do anything with it. ‘I’ll see you later, Terry.’
She slammed the door as he answered and never heard what he said in return. She walked off down the road, cutting across a bit of lawn, heading into the heart of the housing scheme.
28
By a Hair
I
Paddy waited for almost forty minutes in the dark mouth of the lane beside the Wilcox house. It was a balding sliver of ground left between the two houses, worn into a single track by scuffling feet. Sometimes it seemed to Paddy that the whole of the built-up city was nothing more than a series of interludes between patches of abandoned waste ground and war-time bomb sites. Grass on either side of the path glistened, black diamonds trembling on the razorsharp tips. The far end of the dark path blossomed into a brightly lit street, and across the road she could see the low picket fence around the swing park, empty now, dark shadows pooling under the swing seats and slides. The distant noise of the angry marchers rolled up the hill.
She smoked a cigarette to pass the time, thinking of poor Heather sitting on the bin and being annoyed in the editorial toilets. Paddy’d give anything to be back there again. She dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, watching her toe rub it into the soft mud, bursting the paper and spreading speckled tobacco shreds over the grass.
A movement at the far end of the lane caught her eye.
The black outline of a woman, holding the hand of a small girl, was looking down into the lane, hesitant when she saw Paddy’s dark profile, androgynous and threatening.
‘I’m waiting for the grocery van,’ Paddy called reassuringly.
Still the woman waited, her hand tightening around the balled fist of the small girl. Paddy stepped back out into the light in front of the Wilcox house and the woman moved towards her, muttering something to the child.
‘Sorry,’ said Paddy as she approached. ‘I didn’t mean to scare ye.’
Close up, the woman was younger than her beige mac and head scarf implied. She shot Paddy a disgusted look and yanked the child across her path, away from Paddy. She was right in a way: Paddy shouldn’t be hanging about in dark lanes frightening women and children going about their business.
‘Is the fella Naismith’s van due soon?’
The woman didn’t look at her, but muttered aye, ten minutes. Might not be Naismith but. Sometimes his son drove it for him.
Paddy took the two unrequested sentenc
es as forgiveness and watched the retreating back of the woman moving down the street. At most she was two years older than Paddy, already a mother and already pinched and angry.
She could see Sean at home, sitting in his mum’s hall, on the black plastic seat attached to the telephone table, holding the moss-green receiver to his ear, listening to the phone ring on the telephone table in her mum’s hall. Trisha would tell him Paddy wasn’t in and then he’d be worried. He might not be bothered about contacting her, he might have decided to ignore her for another month beyond the family shunning. She didn’t feel she could predict him any more and it made her like him less but want him more. She looked up to find a black velvet stain racing across the sky. The rain storm came without warning, so heavy and abrupt that although she ran the hundred yards to a block of flats the water running down the street was soon deep enough to reach over the sole of her boots and sneak in through the stitching. She stood in the doorway, holding up her hood with both hands, watching as the sky dropped cold slits of silver, obliterating the ambient noise from the motorway and the chanting of the protest marchers. The road surface was a rippling black sheet. The rain gathered at the bottom of the hill, bubbling around drains. Her feet were wet, her black woollen tights soaking up the water like blotting paper, distributing it evenly around her ankles.
She saw the headlights hitting rain drops first. Creeping along behind the twin beams, Naismith’s van felt its way along the road, meekly speeding up at the base of the hill to get clean through a deep puddle and stopping on the hill incline. The back door opened and Naismith himself peered out, getting a face full of rain before ducking back in. From a nearby house a woman came running as fast as she could, head down, holding the neck of her overcoat tightly shut. Paddy waited in the doorway for a bit until the customer might be finished and about to step down from the van. She didn’t want to wait outside in the rain.