Resolution

by Denise Mina

  Suddenly, the other voice came towards her out of the ward. He was fat, dressed in pale blue and holding a fiver, jogging with his heavy arms up at his shoulders, running after his pal, calling in a mock whisper. ‘Hughie,’ he said, ‘Hughie, get us a couple o’ Twixes.’ He turned the corner, going after his pal. Maureen held her breath and slipped across the corridor.

  It was a small room with four beds arranged two against each wall with the curtains pulled between them. A very old man was asleep in the bed in front of her, his hand lying limp by his side, a newspaper on his chest. She crept round the curtain. In the bed beyond, she saw Michael sitting bolt upright, wide awake and looking at his feet. She waited for a scream or a lunge, but Michael sat still, a small man in pyjamas. He had Liam’s eyes and square jaw.

  Maureen stepped forward and Michael turned to her, looking for guidance. He didn’t know who she was. She pulled back the bed covers and he swung his feet around to the floor, feeling for slippers with his toes. For reasons she would never be able to fathom, she helped him on with his dressing-gown before taking his upper arm and guiding him out of the room, across the corridor to the dusty kitchen.

  It was dark and silent apart from Maureen’s laboured breathing. She held his arm tight and felt her skin burning where it touched him. Michael didn’t struggle or try to get away. He seemed to find her fingers digging into him reassuring, as if she was grounding him. He smelt of sour vodka and dusty cheese. The smell infected her, getting into her lungs, sticking to the moist membranes in her mouth. She felt Michael seeping in through her skin.

  They listened to the fat nurse’s feet as he came back down the corridor and went into the ward. The chair squeaked as he sat down. He hummed to himself and cracked open a paper. Beside her, Michael was still. She led him out of the kitchen, pushing him in front of her, afraid to let go of his arm in case she couldn’t bring herself to take hold of him again. He followed her prompts compliantly and said nothing until they were two corridors away.

  ‘Is it-it-it?’ he asked, smiling nervously as though they had just been introduced.

  Maureen heard it through the rush and roar in her ears. He reminded her of Farrell. ‘Yes,’ she whispered, walking just in front, reminding him to keep moving. ‘Do you know this way?’

  ‘Yes,’ he whispered back, chopping a straight path with his hand, gesturing ahead.

  ‘What are they doing to you in here?’ she said. He hesitated, unsure. ‘Walking?’ ‘They’re walking you?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said definitely. ‘It’s walking.’ He was watching her, reading her face, trying to work something out, who she was or why they were whispering. ‘Do you know me, Michael?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘Who am I?’

  ‘A doctor.’

  She stopped and looked at him. ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m ...mm.’ He chopped forward with his hand again, forgetting what they were talking about. ‘A doctor?’

  ‘You’re in a hospital but you’re not a doctor. What are you?’

  ‘I’m in. Nurses? Nurses? I make nurses?’ The burning in her hand subsided. He wasn’t addled with medication: it always left a blurriness in the eyes. She heard the clatter of a trolley being pushed a long way away. They had to get out of the corridor.

  As they hurried along she tried to remember what Doyle had said. Leave the knife, but wipe it first. Take the knife out when Michael was looking away. Phone someone when she got in, talk about the court case tomorrow or something.

  Just as they arrived at the door to the disused wing of the hospital, she suddenly wondered how Doyle knew about the case tomorrow.

  Maureen pushed open the door and stepped down into a fog of stale, damp air. Blinking to adjust her eyes to the gloom, she could hear her heart beat. Michael followed her, dropping the step to the corridor. He stumbled, letting out a little frightened exclamation. She reached out and caught him under the arms and wondered what the hell she was doing here, stealing this confused old man with Liam’s eyes. He stood upright and she turned away from him. This wasn’t the time to think, she’d been thinking about it for a year already. But Michael hadn’t been real then: he hadn’t been as small and he hadn’t been confused. Don’t look at him, she told herself, steeling herself against humanizing pity, don’t think about it, just do it.

  The room wasn’t hard to find. Maureen followed the floor of broken tiles down to a window, looked left and right and found the corner room. She pushed open the door and ushered Michael in ahead of her as Doyle had told her to, reaching for the knife in her pocket. Doyle had been right about the room. It was bright but the window was covered by the fervent growth outside. The floor was covered in dust and rubble, crunching underfoot. It felt like the mental rehearsals of killing him, but Michael had been taller in the fantasy, stronger and scary, not this frightened and bewildered little man. He looked back at her for reassurance and she urged him onward, thinking of the baby: that was why she was here. She was doing it for the wean.

  She pulled the knife from her pocket and stepped towards him. He was pointing at something on the ground, trying to ask about it but forgetting the words: ‘Whatsits, it-it?’

  She had the knife in her hand, raised the tip to his back and a chink of light caught her eye. It was outside the window, just outside, inches outside, a bit of glass catching the light. Mark Doyle was outside the window, crouching among the foliage, holding a small video camera to the hole in the broken pane and filming her. He had knives in his eyes.

  43

  Impossible Future

  She was shaking so much she could hardly see. Needles of broken glass were stuck in her arm, each puncture demanding attention, each an urgent distraction. Michael groaned behind her and she spun, startled, almost dropping the knife. It was so much sharper than she had thought it would be, so much sharper than a normal knife.

  She was terrified. She could hear her own breathing, in her ear, like a stranger’s breath. It wasn’t dignified, not a happy exit. She was afraid of herself. All her elaborate justifications had dissolved in the visceral reality.

  Down at the burn, before the road, she washed her hands and cried at what she had done, rubbing her arms with the dirty water, working the glass deeper under the skin, the sharp pain reminding her that she wasn’t dead. She took her squelching, bloody boots off and walked home barefoot, like a pilgrim, taking dark back roads. She left the boots a mile away, under a mattress on some wasteground. As she walked towards home she felt sure that the tangy metal taste of panic would stay in her mouth for ever.

  When she climbed the stairs to her house she wanted to bang on Jim Maliano’s door and apologize for what she had been thinking about him, give him a gift of something, take the packet of biscuits he had brought her from holiday and be gracious.

  Following Doyle’s instructions, she phoned Kilty the minute she got in the door and casually invited her over.

  Leslie was sitting at the kitchen table, watching her in the hall, staring at her bleeding arm. When Maureen had said a cheery, ‘Cheerio,’ and hung up on Kilty, Leslie called to her, ‘Mauri?’ She looked frightened. ‘Liam phoned for you. I told him you were asleep, like ye said.’

  Maureen fell forward until her face hit the wall. She stood there, sobbing, terrified and disgusted, rubbing her forehead against the plaster.

  Leslie took her into the bathroom and washed her face, then pulled her bloody T-shirt over her head and took off her sodden bra, made her drop her shorts and her bloody knickers. She took a poly-bag from the kitchen and wrapped the clothes in it, tying the neck of the bag tight as Maureen sat trembling on the side of the bath. She looked down at her wee bony body and saw that his blood was all over her, splattered on her calves, stuck in the wide pores on her thighs, smeared on her breast. Her forearms were covered in cuts, bits of glass glinting in the wounds like Mark Doyle’s lens. The pain was all that was keeping her conscious. Mov
ing with what seemed like supernatural speed, Leslie stood her in the bath and washed her down with cold water from the showerhead. She brought some fresh clothes from the bedroom and got Maureen to hold on to her shoulder as she stepped her into the pants and shorts. She put the bra on wrong, pinching the skin on Maureen’s left tit with the elastic, and pulled a fresh T-shirt on over it. She was tweezering the broken glass out of her arm before Maureen spoke. ‘Leslie,’ she whispered, ‘I’ve done something . . .’

  Leslie nodded at her arm, frowning hard. ‘Were you careful?’

  Maureen thought about it. She couldn’t focus at all. She thought she’d been careful but she didn’t know, she couldn’t know. She shrugged, making Leslie lose hold of a long sliver near her wrist. Frustrated, she slapped her hand reflexively and Maureen jumped. Leslie looked at her and Maureen realized she was crying too. ‘You better’ve been,’ Leslie said, her voice terrifyingly shrill, her nose glowing red. ‘You better not . . . Fuck.’

  Leslie sniffed hard and went back to the tweezers. Salt tears dripped on to the cuts on Maureen’s arms. Leslie cleared her throat. ‘Mauri, I’m pregnant,’ she said calmly, ‘and I’m keeping it, and I’m gonnae need you to bring it up with me.’ She started crying again. ‘I can’t do it myself, Mauri. I don’t know the first fucking thing about weans.’

  Maureen was stunned. ‘Ye can slap me again if ye like,’ she said.

  By the time Kilty arrived Leslie had Sellotaped toilet paper over Maureen’s cuts and dressed her in a long-sleeved top. They were both stunned, and pretended they’d taken a Valium each to calm them down for tomorrow.

  ‘You shouldn’t drink on top of Valium,’ said Kilty, staring at Maureen’s full tumbler.

  ‘No,’ said Leslie, ‘it’s all right. Ye can drink on top of these ones.’

  ‘Well, why aren’t you drinking, then? You must have finished your antibiotics by now.’

  Maureen looked at her glass and wondered, for a moment, whether she’d done it to fan the fires of her self pity, so she could keep on drinking. She interrupted Kilty’s speculating to tell her she’d seen her dad in hospital but not to tell anyone because the family didn’t want her to see him. She described the way he spoke, that he said he was a nurse and thought she was a doctor.

  ‘That sounds like a wet brain,’ said Kilty, pestering a cigarette, creating banks of smoke. ‘That would explain the confabulation.’

  ‘The what?’ said Maureen.

  ‘Making things up, I’m a doctor, all that stuff. Bits of their brain gets burnt out and they make things up to try and make sense of what they see.’

  The skin on Maureen’s forearms was burning. She had to concentrate hard to sit still and not rub the wounds or press the tissue.

  ‘A girl in the detox unit’s dad had it,’ said Kilty. ‘I used to take her up to visit him in hospital. One week he’d claim to be a sailor, one week he was a nurse, but he was always pretty cheery. Couldn’t remember anything he’d done in his life. His family hated him, they were like these pent-up balls of fucking fury because he’d kicked the shit out of them and ruined their lives, but he couldn’t remember it. So, there was this nice wee guy sitting in a bed smiling, and the family used to gather round him like angry vultures. I swear the mother used to hurt him when no one was looking.’

  ‘Can ye get better from it?’ said Leslie.

  ‘Oh, guessing, I’d say the recovery rates are low. Most people die from it, I think. I heard something about vitamin B injections but I can’t remember what it is.’

  Maureen looked at her tumbler of whisky suspiciously. ‘How do you get a wet brain?’

  ‘Well, if ye drink heavily for years and don’t eat. It’s heaven for alkis, really, if you think about it. They drink to forget and then, one day, they finally do forget.’

  Maureen nodded, ignoring the itching and trying not to touch her arms.

  ‘So,’ said Kilty carefully, ‘are you ready for tomorrow?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Maureen. ‘Let’s not talk about tomorrow just yet. Tell us about Josh.’

  Kilty wasn’t sure about him. He was nice and doing defence work because he thought it mattered, but he was a lawyer and she had a horrible image of herself wearing pearls and drinking Chardonnay. She didn’t think it would work, really, but he was a nice guy and quite funny.

  Maureen half listened, watching Leslie’s face for visual clues about how to react. She kept thinking she was back in the dusty kitchen, watching the fat man running for a Twix, the sour smell of Michael as she caught him under the arms when he stumbled, the crunching underfoot, down by the burn. She understood the urge to drop away from life, walk into a police station and make a confession, to have the confusion and the terror over, to tell someone else, in detail, what had happened. But as she stood over the body she’d made a pact with herself: that her penance for this would be that as long as she lived, she would never tell anyone what she had done. And Sheila was right: it would always be the most important thing that had ever happened to her.

  They lay on their beds in the darkness and gradually Leslie and Kilty’s breathing deepened. Maureen lay awake, eyes open wide, staring at the ceiling. Headlights from occasional cars going up the steep hill rolled along the ceiling. Drunk people passed in the street, shouting or laughing, or staggered home alone. In the city below, sirens wailed and police cars rushed to avert crimes. Ambulances followed them or ventured out on their own.

  She looked at her watch. It was ten to four and the sun was smearing the sky blue, waking the birds. Her arms were itchy, the Sellotape tugging at small hairs. She sat up and lit a cigarette, pulling her knees up to her chin and clasping them tight. If she didn’t die from this, if the police didn’t catch her, she was going to get away from here. She was going to sell up and go to St Petersburg and spend a month in the Hermitage, filling her eyes and her head with beautiful things and never waste a calm hour, never spoil a good meal with worry. The cigarette burnt her tongue, stripping it and making her mouth taste of metal tape again. She was getting pain spots in her lungs and couldn’t laugh without coughing any more. She would go to St Petersburg and stop smoking and see beautiful things. If she had her time over again she’d stop drinking. In the impossible future she’d strive to be happy.

  44

  Afterlife

  They woke up when the alarm went off at eight thirty and found Maureen sitting up in her sleeping-bag, a thin cloud of cigarette smoke hanging above their heads. They tried to make her eat something but she couldn’t. They nagged her so much that she tried but couldn’t swallow and had to spit the toast out into the bin.

  Kilty had brought a crisp white shirt with an open neck and short sleeves for her to wear but her bloody arms would have showed. Maureen said she had already decided to wear a yellow top with long sleeves and the words ‘porn star’ printed on the chest. Leslie was ironing her skirt in the kitchen and shouted through that it was much better than the clean white shirt. Kilty watched them both curiously. Maureen changed in the bathroom. The tissue had dried on the blood, sticking to the wounds, but she didn’t want to change the dressing herself. She put the clothes on and made an attempt with some makeup, using the last of the Dior mascara she had bought when she was flush, rubbing Touche Éclat into every crevice.

  They left the house early, tripping down the stairs. The sun was splitting the pavement, filling the city with an unearthly white light. They walked in unison, barely talking, following the quieter streets down to the river. It was half past nine and the traffic was thinning after the rush-hour. Harassed-looking women in estate cars drove home after the school run and bus drivers, pissed off after the early shift, jammed the road on their way back to the station. Maureen was so tired she could hardly feel her feet on the ground, hardly see a hundred yards in front of her through the scalding light.

  They walked along by the river, sweating gently, picking up the breeze as they passed
the Sheriff Court on the far bank and followed the road round to the tail end of Paddy’s. The settee was still under the bridge but the men weren’t there. Maureen half raised a thoughtless hand, waving to where they might have been. Down the lane Gordon-Go-A-Bike thought she was greeting him and waved in response, pedalling slowly, going nowhere.

  The High Court of Justiciary looked out over Glasgow Green, where junkie prostitutes, too down on their luck to look for drivers, relied on drunken pedestrians for their trade. Flanked by the city mortuary, the front of the building was a neo-classical string of ionic columns surmounting a set of stairs, topped off by a long pediment. Gathered outside on the stairs, four or five clumps of smokers made the most of the opportunity, puffing away and chatting to each other. One group was composed of lawyers, obvious in their expensive suits and easy manner. Another crowd wore cheaper suits and nylon skirts, smiling nervously and inhaling deeply.

  Inside, through a revolving door, was a white lobby with a sparkling mosaic floor that ended abruptly in a set of plain, modern fire doors. At the side of the stairs a court official in a grey uniform was standing behind a black marble desk and police officers were dotted around, as if they were expecting trouble. The hall was full of people looking lost, wearing sombre outfits. At each side of the hallway, suspended from the ceiling, were television monitors, stuck on vibrant blue screens and Maureen saw the name: HMA – v.–Farrell. She approached the reception desk.

  ‘Can I help you?’ said the uniformed man pleasantly.

  ‘I don’t know where to go,’ said Maureen. ‘I’m a witness.’

  ‘Do you know which case it is?’

  Maureen pointed up at the monitor. ‘That one,’ she said, and showed him her citation paper.