by Denise Mina
She was a shit girlfriend, she knew she was, but she didn’t know how to say it without sounding as though she was prompting a denial or looking for reassurance. ‘Dunno, just, I’m a bit distracted.’S not very fair on you.’
‘You didn’t seem very distracted a minute ago. You were concentrating pretty hard every time I looked at ye.’ They smiled lazily at each other.
‘It’s amazing, isn’t it?’ said Maureen softly. ‘There’s a point when you’d sell your soul for a come and then two seconds afterwards you can’t really remember what happened, but the world isn’t half as bad as it seemed before and the light’s different and everyone means well.’
‘God’s own medicine,’ said Vik.
She looked at him. ‘I like it that you don’t make things into a drama.’
Vik knew what she really meant, that she didn’t want a scene or heartfelt declarations. ‘I do, sometimes.’
They looked at each other. The last time they had met like this it was winter, they had been boyfriend and girlfriend, going out, meeting his friends. She hadn’t liked it. Thinking back honestly, she wasn’t used to making all the compromises normal dating required. Because Douglas had been married she could tell him to fuck off when he annoyed her, and he’d still come back. She could refuse to see him when she didn’t feel like it and still maintain the moral high ground. She could indulge herself because mistresses have few duties. She wondered if Sheila was right, if it was just petulance and immaturity on her part that made a relationship seem impossible. Being brutal with herself, she thought it probably was. ‘Vik, I’m still not up for the whole, full-on relationship.’
He placed his hand on her stomach, softly pressing the flat tips of his fingers into the skin, one after the other, as if he was playing her. ‘It’s all right,’ he said. ‘I’ve just had one of those.’
‘Oh.’ It hadn’t occurred to her that he might have been off with someone else.
‘Other women do find me attractive, ye know.’
‘I know.’ She nodded over and over. ‘I know.’
‘Tell me you haven’t been out with other guys.’ She shrugged nonchalantly, said,‘Oh, yeah, yeah,’ and gave herself away. She hadn’t been out with anyone, hadn’t fancied anyone or thought of anyone but him.
When she looked up he was smiling and pleased. ‘I like that,’ he said. ‘Fuck off.’
But he was still smiling. ‘If ye haven’t been out on the ran-dan with loads of hunky men what have ye been doing? Have ye been going to art galleries?’
She smiled back at him ‘Naw, God, I haven’t done that in a while.’
‘But you love looking at art.’
‘I know, I should—’
‘Ye should make time.’
‘I should,’ she said.
‘My wee cousin takes me to exhibitions all the time and I kept expecting to see you there. She’s training to be a curator.’
‘How do ye train to be a curator?’
‘Master’s course in Belfast. She gets in everywhere free. You should do that.’
‘I’ve got a job,’ she said, and smiled ruefully, imagining herself in a big suit, with a CV and prospects. ‘What’s your job?’
‘I sell drugs to schoolchildren.’
Vik looked at her, half believing, until she reached across the bed and picked up her cigarettes, shaking them at him. ‘Down at Paddy’s,’ she said, and he smiled.
They sat up, Vik shuffling around on the bed so they were sitting next to each other, bare hip to bare hip, looking out of the three-inch space between the red velvet curtains.
‘If you could look at any painting in the world,’ he said, ‘what would it be and where is it?’
‘Good one.’ Maureen nodded, savouring the challenge. ‘The Demoiselles d’Avignon, in New York, or Matisse’s Arab Coffeehouse in the Hermitage.’ ‘Why the Coffeehouse one?’
‘I dunno, because it’s so still. If you could see anyone play, who, where and when?’
‘Obviously Elvis in Vegas, early seventies.’
‘Not the Las or the Birthday Party?’
‘Nah, I like hearing about their gigs but I wouldn’t want to have been there.’
She put the ashtray on the bed and reached over to light his cigarette.
‘That’s my lighter,’ he said, holding her hand and looking at it.
‘Yeah, you left it here that last time.’
‘You kept it.’
‘Yeah.’ She felt embarrassed. ‘It’s a good lighter.’
‘No, it’s not, it’s crap. The flint chimney’s too wide. I thought I’d lost it.’
She dropped it into his hand, ashamed of how much store she’d set on it. ‘Well,’ she said briskly,‘you’ve got it back now.’
He smiled, lowering his head to look her in the face. ‘Maureen, did you do something romantic?’
She pulled her chin away. ‘What?’ she said, sounding huffy. ‘Found your lighter?’
Vik took a draw on his cigarette, gazing out of the window. ‘You like me,’ he muttered at the curtains. ‘You like me, ya sneaky wee bird.’
They sat smoking and smiling at the window, listening to children calling to each other in the street, the summer birds shouting and cars speeding past up the steep hill. She looked at his shoulder, a perfect sphere with dimples where the tendons attached the muscle to the bone. Two long dark hairs stuck out to the side like symbolic epaulettes. He had been sunbathing with his shirt off, and the skin on his chest was darker than usual, glistening. Vik looked at her. ‘Are you going out tonight?’
‘No,’ she said, and immediately regretted it. Vik was in a band and had a large group of friends, none of whom she had anything to say to, none of whom had anything to say to her. She hated being a sidekick and sitting with the other girlfriends.
‘Well,’ said Vik, as Maureen calculated the relative excusing values of sudden sickness and a family trauma,‘how d’you fancy a picnic?’
‘What kind of picnic?’ she said stiffly.
‘You and me up the hills. Nice food, bit of a smoke?’
‘Just us?’ she said hopefully.
‘Yeah.’
‘Your band aren’t playing Hampden tonight, then?’
He stubbed out his fag in the ashtray. ‘Not tonight, no.’
The Campsie Brae is a steep ridge overlooking the city from the south side. It was as close to the country as Maureen had been for a long time. They skinned up and smoked on the way over, keeping the windows up on Vik’s Mini so that the car functioned as a giant bong. By the time they arrived they were giggly. Cars, large and small, old and new, were stopped along the dark country road, seeming abandoned until the headlights hit steamed-up rear windscreens and picked out shadows inside. Vik drove out on to the brae, moving away from an epileptic Honda Accord and over to the far side of the ridge. Below them lay the city, a carpet of yellow and red lights under a black sky. In the foreground were the high towers and small windows of Castlemilk housing scheme. As Vik stopped the car and pulled on the handbrake, the headlights picked out the nose of a shopping trolley thrown beyond the ridge. He tutted. ‘This isn’t the country, this is the city with nae hooses.’
Maureen grinned and handed Vik his bag of chips and gravy. ‘This is as close to the real country as I like to get,’ she said. ‘Why?’
‘It’s scary out there. There’s no lights and the shops are rubbish.’
They laughed loud and long because they were spliffed, they’d just had sex three times, and they were together.
She sat up in the bed, watching him settle into sleep. It was too hot even for a sheet and his elbows were tucked into his sides, his hands modestly hiding his nipples, his cock lolling to the side when he shifted his legs. She said a soft goodnight to the child in the cupboard, feeling safe because Vik was here. As she looked at him she remembered all the transient boyf
riends who had bridged the lonely gap between hard nights and harsh mornings. Still asleep, Vik’s hand fumbled anxiously to find hers and hold it. Tenderness on the hinterland of intimacy.
15
Nightie
As Maureen woke up her first thought was of Ella, lying in the bed in the Albert with the sheet over her mouth and her red, vacant eyes. She sat up slowly, trying not to wake Vik. Yellow splinters of morning sun prickled around the heavy curtain and the air felt warm and sticky. She slid out of bed and went to the loo. Si’d be there again today, staring at Ella, frightening her, bullying his seventy-year-old mother. Maureen wanted to go and visit again, just to show him that Ella had a pal, someone who’d cross the town to see if she was okay. Back in the kitchen she made two cups of coffee and realized that she didn’t know what Vik took in his. She made an approximation of all the coffee variations: a bit of powdered milk and one big sugar, leaving it unstirred so that he could drink the first half of the cup if he didn’t take it.
Vik was still asleep, snoring gently, his face loose, his big hands clasped together on his stomach. She put the cups down on the side table and climbed back on to the bed, stroking his bristled cheek with her fingertips. ‘Wake up, Vik,’ she whispered softly. ‘Your mum’s here and she’s absolutely furious.’
Vik was awake and sitting bolt upright within three seconds.
The day seemed especially bright as Vik drove her across town to the Albert. The white light breezed lazily, deflecting into the shadows, melting the sharp edges of the buildings. Maureen felt normal, sitting in the nice car with her handsome boyfriend and her formal clothes on again. She imagined being seen from the outside by some mystery viewer. She’d look happy, at peace, loved and cosseted, like a real person with a life and a future.
The smell of smoke and gravy lingered inside the Mini. They wound the windows down and sang along to Aretha’s ‘Natural Woman’. The song was miles out of both their ranges and they squeaked and growled, stopping and catching the tune whenever they could. The roads were quiet and Vik parked outside the hospital, switched Aretha off and turned to look at her. ‘Are you sure about the records?’ he said, nodding to the stacks in the back seat. Maureen had given him her record collection. Her record-player was broken and she wanted to get the dusty, pointless piles out of the house. ‘Aye,’ she said.
‘I’ll give them back to ye later, if ye like.’
‘I don’t think I’m going to want them.’
‘They’re not all shit.’ They smiled at each other.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and paused. ‘I’m sorry things are the way they are with you. Ye seem happier.’
Maureen didn’t want to remember any of that when she was with him. ‘Mibbi I am. Will ye come and see me again?’
‘Well, Shan and I are coming to the trial next week.’
‘But will ye come and see me afterwards, just yourself?’
Vik raised a salacious eyebrow. ‘Listen,’ he said,‘after the welcome I got last night, an Ebola quarantine wouldn’t keep me away.’
Through the open doorway to Ward G Maureen saw a young man in a suit in the centre of the ward hammering out a plodding rendition of ‘Nearer My God To Thee’ on an electronic keyboard. She remembered the holy rollers coming round her ward at the Northern on Sundays; and a particular Sunday when Angie, the tiny woman in the bed next to her, emptied a bottle of Lucozade into a box of Bibles.
Maureen tried to remember how she had been with Si McGee. He would have received the small claims letter and she didn’t know what she could say about it. She could pretend it hadn’t happened, hope Ella had owned up during a warm chat with her son, but it didn’t seem very likely. It was just a mix-up and she was the cheery mug from the market. Getting into character, she speeded up her walk and made her way to the nurses’ station. There was no one there. A hot cup of tea sat on the wooden desk, burning a damp ring-stain into the surface. The door to Ella’s room was firmly shut. Maureen took a deep breath, remembering who she was meant to be, knocked briskly and opened it. Ella’s bed was empty, the blankets neatly folded on the end. The windows were open to air the room. Maureen turned to find the nurse standing behind her. ‘Has she gone?’
Disconcerted, the nurse took Maureen by the elbow, holding her quite tightly, guiding her firmly towards the station. Thinking she was in trouble for passing herself off as Ella’s daughter, Maureen tried to act surprised and confused. Si must have found out and corrected the nurses.
But they could hardly arrest her for that. She hadn’t said she was the daughter, she just hadn’t contradicted the nurse.
The nurse sat Maureen down and asked whether she would like a cup of tea, pointing at the steaming cup to illustrate the tricky concept. Maureen refused it nervously.
Behind the nurse, standing upright between a filing cabinet and the wall, was a polythene bag and sitting on the top was the blue nightie Maureen had bought for Ella. ‘Wait a minute,’ said Maureen,‘where is she?’
The nurse sat down heavily on the chair. ‘I am so sorry,’ she said, taking Maureen’s hand. Her hands were damp and smelt of Dettol. ‘We didn’t have a number for you and your brother couldn’t give us one. I’m afraid your mother died yesterday.’ ‘She’s dead?’
‘I’m afraid so. I’m sorry.’
The door opened behind them and the sullen beardy nurse took two steps into the room. ‘Oh,’ he said, startled and staring at their clasped hands. ‘Sorry.’ He backed into the corridor and shut the door.
‘She was all right yesterday,’ breathed Maureen.
‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like a cup of tea?’
‘What happened?’
‘She slipped away yesterday.’
Maureen tore her hand from the nurse’s. ‘What the fuck are you talking about? She was all right yesterday.’
‘Her heart . . .’ the nurse looked confused‘. . . failed. It can happen in older people.’
‘What– they just stop living?’ said Maureen angrily.
‘That’s it? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘Maybe you should speak to the doctor,’ the nurse said, and moved to stand up.
Maureen grabbed her by the wrist, holding it tight. ‘When did this happen?’
The nurse looked alarmed. ‘In the afternoon.’ ‘What time?’
‘After four, before teas at five. Please let go of me.’ Maureen released her wrist. ‘Was he here?’ she said quietly.
The nurse was bewildered. ‘Who?’ ‘Was he here?’
The nurse clasped her hands on her lap and looked at them. ‘Yes,’ she said quietly. ‘He was with her when it happened, with his wife.’
‘His wife?’ Maureen hadn’t thought of Si as married. ‘Are you doing a post-mortem?’
‘Why?’ said the nurse, looking up sharply.
‘Could he have smothered her?’ said Maureen. ‘Could he have poisoned her?’
‘Look, I’m not in a position to say,’ said the nurse carefully, realizing she had stumbled into the middle of a bad family feud.
‘How do I get a post-mortem done on her?’
‘Maybe you should speak to the doctor about your mother. He’ll be back on in an hour.’
‘You listen to me,’ said Maureen, leaning across the desk, pointing in the nurse’s face. ‘I’m going to phone the police and if I find out that her body has been released to him I’ll hold you personally responsible.’ She turned and opened the door.
‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ said the nurse anxiously. ‘It’s not even my department. Don’t ye want to see her?’ Maureen was suddenly calm. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’
She had to wait in a converted cupboard, sipping sweet milky tea that someone had forced into her hand. The department-store poly-bag sat against her ankle. Si had left everything she had bought for Ella. She was in the bowels of the hospital, deep in the earth, thr
ee floors below the lobby. The artificial lighting was bright and, despite the insistent heating, the walls still smarted damp and cold. Maureen was only wearing a vest and jungle shorts and her arms were covered in goosebumps. They would never have let her see Ella’s body if they didn’t think she was her daughter. Ella’s real daughter couldn’t have come to see her at all. She sat forward, bending over her knees, wishing she could smoke. Si’d had his wife with him. Maybe he was married to the foreign woman Ella had mentioned when they were filling in the form. She tried to remember whether he had a wedding ring on his finger but couldn’t.
A small black man with tidy features stuck his head around the door. He wore a white coat with bulging pockets and wire-framed glasses. ‘Hello there. Would you like to come through and see Ella now?’ His voice was low, and Maureen appreciated the thought that had gone into reading the toe-tag before he came through.
He led Maureen across a hallway, unlocked a small door and took her through a narrow corridor to the Chapel of Rest. Designed to offend no one’s religious sensibilities, the chapel had none of the symbols that would have made sense of it. There were no crosses in the room, no doves, no crescents, just a red and white stained-glass lamp, a narrow shelf with a bunch of silk flowers on it and a trolley, prettied up with a sheet.
The sheet was folded down under Ella’s chin, tucked in tight as if to hold her in place. The plaster cast had been cut off her leg. Her eyebrows were still missing, her hair brushed back flat against her head. She looked like a venerable old gentleman. Her arms were by her sides, the gold necklace was missing, presumably in Si’s pocket. Her teeth were in her mouth and Maureen could see where her lip curled up that the break had been stuck together with clear glue. The soft light made her look restful.
Ella’s own daughter hadn’t come to see her. Maureen didn’t imagine Ella had been a particularly good mother, but no one had mentioned Si’s father. Ella had stayed and done all the work, just like Winnie. Maureen thought of Winnie lying there, with everything unsaid between them, nothing resolved. Winnie had stayed and brought them up. Maureen wanted to reach out and pick Ella up, wrap her arms around the pushy old woman and stroke her hair, pet away all the grief and sorrow. Lying in the simple room on a cold table, Ella looked like a monument to the forgotten constancy of women.