by Denise Mina
‘Yeah,’ said Maureen. ‘Can we talk to your dad about Si McGee?’
Kilty smiled uncomfortably. ‘I dunno. He’s not very keen on you at the minute.’
Kilty promised to meet them the next evening and left, shutting the door quietly behind her. Leslie waited until Kilty’s last footfall had finished echoing around the close.
‘Mauri,’ she said,‘why are you so afraid of Angus Farrell?’
‘Nothing.’
Leslie, not known for affectionate gestures, reached out and touched her arm. ‘You’ve been freaked by him since Millport. What happened there? I know ye didn’t just feed him the acid, I know something else happened.’
Maureen sighed into her chest. She wanted to speak, wanted to say it out loud, but it stuck in her throat and swelled. ‘You know the dreams?’ she said. ‘About the fingernail and the blood?’
‘Yeah,’ said Leslie, filling in the hesitation.
‘He said . . .’ she swallowed hard against the lump in her throat,‘ . . . Angus said Michael raped me.’
Leslie sat back against the sofa and together they looked out at the black sky. ‘He said this in Millport, right?’ ‘Yeah.’
‘After you’d given him the acid? After you’d tied him up?’
‘Yeah. But he was my therapist, he was astute, he knew things.’
‘Mauri, that’s a lot of shite. He said it to hurt ye, to frighten ye. If ye’d been raped at that age ye wouldn’t get a wee nick inside the wall of your fanny. It would be split all the way up.’ ‘But he said—’
‘Mauri, I think Angus Farrell probably said a lot of things to a lot of people.’
Maureen looked into the deep swirling amber in her glass. ‘I feel as if I’m losing it again,’ she said, in the quietest voice.
Leslie was afraid she was right.
Without meaning to, they slept on the floor in the living room. It was the breeziest room in the house with the biggest windows and everywhere else was unbearably hot. When they woke up it was eight o’clock and they were already late for the market. Outside the window a pitiless sun glared over the city and they both wished it would rain. The market was busy and the Saturday crowd of buyers were waiting impatiently for them. They served the backlog and settled on their wee stools, glad to be in the cold tunnel. ‘There was guys here looking for the two of you earlier,’ said Peter.
‘There was a gang of men when we got here,’ said Leslie.
‘Two guys looking for you.’ Peter pointed at Maureen. ‘One of them had a suit on and the other one had a camera. Guy in a Celtic shirt was asking for you, Leslie.’
After little discussion Maureen and Leslie decided to pack up for the day. They told Peter to spread the word that they wouldn’t be back for a week or so.
32
Authentiky
Leslie didn’t want to go to the country but she had promised to humour Maureen for a week and, anyway, she had nowhere else to go. Maureen lit two cigarettes and handed her one as she rattled the old van down the slip-road from the motorway and stopped at the roundabout.
Lanarkshire is fine countryside. Lush old trees hung over the road or sat softly on the rolling hills. Past the concrete sprawl of Motherwell, residents had paid enough to relish the luxury of privacy and there were few houses near the road. Behind hedges and trees, the hills were scattered with new bungalows and solid old houses built when the area was farming land, before its proximity to Glasgow made it commutable. The road was narrow and busy at weekends. The only set of traffic lights in the area caused tail-backs of up to half a mile on Sundays, when the car-boot sale was open. As the van passed a field with opaque Nissen huts cloaked in rippling Cellophane, Maureen spotted a signpost. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Dreyloan.’ She checked the address in the phone book on her lap. ‘That’s it. Left up here.’
Leslie turned the van over the old stone bridge. Far below they heard the sound of cool water splashing through a rocky crevasse.
Dreyloan village was picturesque and litter-free. The cars parked in driveways were new and expensive. Even the Saturday visitors from the city looked healthier than average and certainly better dressed. Their shoogly van attracted interested glances as they parked by the green. Leslie pulled on the handbrake and turned off the engine, pocketing the keys. She waited for Maureen to get out so she could shut the passenger door from the inside but Maureen didn’t move. ‘Will we get out?’ said Leslie.
Maureen was smiling straight ahead, her head tipped to the side. In front of the windscreen, on the edge of the village, a small office in a pretty pink cottage had a large to let sign nailed above the door. It was McGee and McGerty, estate agents.
‘That doesn’t mean anything, really,’ said Leslie, worried by how pleased Maureen seemed. ‘There could be a lot of other explanations.’
‘Aye,’ said Maureen. ‘Could be.’
The village green was a long bumpy stretch of grass. In the centre, at the intersection of two diagonal paths, stood a solemn monument to the war dead from the village. Around the perimeter of the green, villagers and visitors were catered to by a cake shop, a camping-equipment store, a curry-house and an olde authentiky coach-house pub, doing three-course meals for a fiver. Around and about, visiting families climbed out of cars after long drives in hot weather, a couple of men in obscenely clinging Day-glo outfits stood next to fancy racing bikes drinking from water bottles and panting, wiping sweat from their necks. Maureen and Leslie headed straight for the estate agents. The cottage was a squat single storey, with deep windows and a step down to the entrance. McGee and McGerty had one window of the cottage; the other was occupied separately by a small post-office-cum-newsagent. The window display only showed six houses for sale but they were laid out tastefully on grey card, without prices. They were cottages, a barn conversion and a manse, photographed in perfect sunshine and with bare, expensive graphics laying out the details. Maureen looked at them and it occurred to her that she could sell her house, take the money and just piss off. ‘Posh,’ said Leslie.
Inside the front door the two businesses had built their own entrances, diagonal doors facing the main entrance like a moral choice. Maureen pushed the door, setting off a tinkling bell, and stepped into a small room with plush carpeting and a single desk. The man behind the desk, elderly, in a pink and baby-blue Pringle sweater and grey flannels, was on the phone. He looked as if he had been pulled off a golf course and made to sit there. He clearly wanted the person at the other end of the line to think he found them hilarious. With sorrow-sodden eyes he laughed and nodded, texturing his laughter with high and low intonation, rocking back and forth in his chair. Maureen and Leslie sat down across the desk from him. He mouthed at them that he’d just be a minute and laughed some more before hanging up and looking sadly at them. ‘What can I do ye for?’
‘We’re interested in the lease for this place,’ said Maureen. He smiled insincerely and looked at them. ‘Can I ask what you do?’
‘We’re web designers,’ said Leslie. He frowned at his papers. ‘Really?’ ‘Yeah,’ said Maureen.
The man didn’t know what else to ask them because he didn’t know anything about web design, which was just as well because they didn’t know anything about it either.
‘Are you handling the lease?’ said Maureen.
‘Yeah.’ He pulled open a drawer of his desk and lifted out a summarized schedule on stapled sheets.
‘What’s the walk-through like here?’ said Leslie, making Maureen flinch. Even she knew that web designers didn’t care about trade from idle passers-by. The estate agent, however, didn’t seem to be aware of this.
‘Well,’ he said, sitting back, pressing his fingertips together, making a church of his hands,‘it’s good for the area because of the post office next door and the pub across the way. Also, because there’s damn all to do in the village, lots of people walk around the square.’ He pushe
d the schedule across the table as if he couldn’t be bothered talking any more. ‘It’s a big village for the overall area and people come here to shop. There’s a Spar around the back of the kirk.’
‘Nice,’ said Leslie.
‘So, is this room all that’s included in the lease?’ asked Maureen.
‘No, no, there’s this room and a back office and upstairs as well.’
He stood up to show them round but Maureen waved him back into his chair. ‘We’re looking at a lot of places,’ she said. ‘You said the walk-through’s good, so why are you leaving?’
‘No, no,’ he said. ‘’S nothing to do with this place. The business is winding up.’ ‘Going bankrupt?’
‘No,’ he said defensively,‘just dissolving. The senior partner’s retiring.’
‘And the junior partner?’ The man broke eye contact. ‘He’s not . . . as experienced.’
Maureen smiled. ‘It’s McGerty who’s got the money then?’
The man looked up at them. ‘Who are you?’
The olde authentiky pub had a lot of young bar staff decked out in black uniforms with fussy white pinnies over them, serving the tables. Maureen ordered a pint and Leslie asked for a cheese and ham toastie and a bag of smoky-bacon crisps. She asked Maureen to have something while the tweeny waitress stood there and smiled at them. ‘I’m all right,’ said Maureen, lighting a cigarette.
‘What are ye going to have for lunch, then?’ said Leslie.
‘I’m not hungry,’ insisted Maureen. ‘I’ll have something later.’
‘Have something now.’
Maureen looked at the waitress. ‘That’s all for now, thanks,’ she said, and waited until the girl had written everything down in longhand and gone away. ‘How’s the stomach now?’
‘Wee bit better,’ Leslie said, wrinkling her nose. She looked out of the window at the McGee and McGerty office. ‘It doesn’t mean anything.’
‘McGee’s business is going down the tubes and it doesn’t mean anything?’
‘Well, lots of people change what they do for a living. It doesn’t mean the automatical next step is moving in to whore mastering.’
Maureen smiled knowingly. ‘Do you think Si McGee is the sort of man who could happily take a drop in his income and social status?’ ‘How do you mean?’
‘You were right,’ she said. ‘It’s not about the money at all. McGee’s not interested in money. It’s about status, proving he’s as good as the other good old bhoys. It means everything to him.’
33
Video
Maureen was feeling confident and ready for anything. She knocked on the glass panel and stepped back. A shadow moved in the kitchen corridor and Liam opened the door. He didn’t have a top on and had been sitting in the garden. Liam’s house was the one good thing that had come out of his foray into the underworld. It was a three-storey townhouse in the middle of the West End, with high ceilings, magnificent windows and a stretch of garden at the back. In times gone by the West End had been a tatty, cheap area to live. Students clustered together in damp old houses with boilers held together with sticky tape and glue. Men left drink-ruined marriages and came to live in bedsits here, trying to revive their glory days. It was a better area now. The housing boom meant that bomb-sites and inches of spare ground were being developed into cramped flats for short, thin people with no possessions. Deserted shops and boarded-up garages had been taken over by sandwich bars and international coffee-shop chains. The bookshops had shut, replaced by designer clothing outlets.
When he was dealing, Liam had left the downstairs of the house dirty and unaltered to discourage his sometimes desperate clients from trying to rob him. Since enrolling as a student he had become obsessed with renovating it. He used all his spare time to strip the flock wallpaper, bare the scored plaster and woodwork, filling the rooms up with a lot of chairs he bought in auctions. His obsession with chairs was getting to be too much: the place was beginning to look like a Quaker meeting house. He had left the garden and kitchen until last and had just started making inroads on them. Maureen had never known him to have any interest in gardening, much less skill at it, but the long dry stretch of mud had sudden thin grass growing on it. Just outside the kitchen window a small herb bed had been planted with cuttings and sticks with pictures on them, proclaiming the potential. A seemingly ready-made shrubbery was flourishing at the far end.
They were sitting in the first-floor sitting room, above the noise of the traffic. The floor-length windows clipped the top of the roofs opposite but mostly they were filled with blue sky, textured with occasional puffs of white cloud, like living paintings. It was a blue room, kept plain and empty apart from the Corbusier lounger, the cracked leather chesterfield and the telly and video.
Liam handed her a mug of tea and pointed at the Jiffy bag on the floor. ‘It might be completely innocuous,’ he said.
‘I know.’
‘It’s probably a promo for Disneyland or something.’
‘Probably.’ Maureen didn’t move to put the video into the machine but sat looking at the envelope, sipping her tea. ‘But you don’t think it is?’
‘No.’ She sipped again. ‘He’s the only person who sends me anonymous mail.’
‘It’s not from the hospital, though, is it?’
‘No. It was hand-delivered. He must know people on the outside.’
‘Okay,’ said Liam, slapping the back of the sofa. ‘I’ll watch it.’
She was on strict orders to wait downstairs but found herself hovering in the hall, smoking a fag and trying to hear anything from upstairs. It would last about an hour, she guessed, from the big reels, or maybe even just half an hour. She could hear the floorboards creak as Liam walked to the video, the click of the tape being sucked into the machine. He walked back to the sofa and pressed ‘play’ on the remote. She listened. There was no sound for about five seconds then suddenly Liam scarpered out of the room and leaned over the banister. She looked up at him, turning a little circle on the stairs to see his face properly. His mouth was open and he seemed to be swaying. ‘Liam?’
He fell back heavily against the wall. Maureen put down her tea and ran up the stairs to find him hunkered on the floor.
‘What is it?’ she said, rubbing his back.
Liam coughed hard. Maureen fed her cigarette to him, holding it against his lips and Liam inhaled a full centimetre. ‘Pauline Doyle,’ he said, exhaling thick smoke as he spoke. ‘On a bed.’ ‘Pauline alive?’
Liam hung his head. ‘On a bed.’
She had never thought of herself as more hardened than Liam but she could watch it and he couldn’t. He was sitting downstairs in the front room, chain-smoking and sipping medicinal bourbon while Maureen watched Pauline on a Bed.
It was a small room with girlie curtains in flowery peach and a single bed. The bedstead was green velour. There were two people in the shot. Outside the window cars and lorries sped past on a distant dual carriageway. It was homemade, the date and time were stamped in the corner of the screen, four months after Maureen’s discharge from hospital. Pauline had been in the hospital recently, that much was clear, because she was over six stone. It didn’t look like a rape. To anyone who didn’t know Pauline, it was a normal, grubby home-made porn tape. Pauline sat on the single bed wearing a dirty red nylon bra and pants with scratchy lace trim, looking at the man’s face apprehensively, trying to catch his eye, glancing occasionally at the video camera. A casual viewer, chugging along to the action, wouldn’t notice the similarities between the skinny bird on the bed and the guy doing her, wouldn’t notice that behind the apprehension she was asking him, please, not to hurt her.
Pauline’s father touched her here and there, pointing her at the camera, showing it her flower and her wee tits, touching her in a way that communicated disrespect tinged with disgust. He did things just because he could do them, slapped he
r leg really hard with a belt buckle, showing how compliant she was. Pauline, unmoved by indignities she had experienced many times before, watched his face, looking for signals that it was all about to get much worse.
The father was talking to the camera but there was no sound on the tape. He seemed to be asking for encouragement, pausing with a knee on the bed and nodding at the viewer, turning Pauline over as if this was what had been requested, checking back for reassurance. He got his spindly old cock out and fucked her up the arse, flashing a smile at the camera. He didn’t even have a full hard-on. Pauline was on all fours, her bony wee bum two-thirds to the camera, shuddering when his pelvis banged against her, absently watching the cars pass on the dual carriageway.
Maureen was on her third cigarette in twenty minutes.
She was sitting forwards, her hands holding her face, tears spilling from her eyes as if they were trying to wash grit away. The father finished, pulled out and, while he was standing there, pointing at her, the shot zoomed in on Pauline’s bum. The father lifted her by the hips and moved her a few inches across the bed like a dog being shown, so the camera could get a better shot of her genitals. Pauline didn’t struggle, didn’t even bend in the middle. This had happened before. Her hole was as dilated as a fifty-pence piece. The screen went blank.
Maureen didn’t know much about video cameras but assumed the zoom wouldn’t be remote. There had been another man in the room watching all of this, a man working the camera. Pauline’s other brother was there and the father had been talking to him, nodding to him, asking him things. Maureen sniffed hard and wiped the hot tears from her face. Mark Doyle had grown up with these people. No wonder his skin was trying to rot away.
She stayed in the room for a while, watching the sunlight flicker on the varnished floor, the fervent blue sky over the rooftops opposite. She hadn’t stayed in touch with Pauline after she got out of hospital and this was what had happened. Maureen should have had Pauline to stay in her flat, sleep on her floor, take her bed, even– she would have given her the bed if she’d known. But she had known, Pauline had told her: her father and brother had been raping her anally for years. She just hadn’t bothered to imagine it. Pauline had refused to tell the police because she was afraid it would have killed her mother. Maureen knew now that she was right.