by Denise Mina
‘But what justification would there be for adopting violent tactics?’
‘Negotiations,’ said Leslie, adopting a Belfast accent, ‘have irretrievably broken down.’
‘I don't accept that,’ said Maureen. ‘I think what you mean is you’ve lost patience.’
It was unfair of Maureen to say that: Leslie worked in the shelter with women who had been systematically beaten and raped by their partners. In Leslie’s world men rape children, they kick women in the tits and teeth and shove bottles up their backsides; they steal their money and leave them for dead and then feel wronged when they leave. If anyone could justifiably lose patience Leslie could.
Leslie thought about it for a minute. She looked despairingly at her glass and struggled with some thought. Her face collapsed with exhaustion. ‘Fuck it,’ she said. ‘Let’s get really pissed.’ And they did.
Maureen’s head was fuzzy with red wine. She put on her softest T-shirt straight from the wash to make herself feel coddled and went to bed. She took more than the prescribed dose of an over-the-counter liquid sleeping draught and fell asleep with her eye makeup half off and her leg hanging out of the bed.
2
Douglas
Douglas was tied into the blue kitchen chair with several strands of rope. His throat had been cut clean across, right back to the vertebrae, his head was sitting off centre from his neck. Splashes and spurts of his blood were drying all over the carpet. One long red splatter extended four feet diagonally from the chair, slashing across the arm of the settee and nearly hitting the skirting board on the far wall. She couldn’t seem to move. She was very hot. She had been scuttling back down the hall from the toilet when the blood-drenched cagoul lying just inside the living-room door caught her eye. A trail of bloody footprints led to Douglas, tied to the chair in the dead centre of the room. The footprints were small and regular, like a dance-step diagram.
She didn’t remember sliding down the wall into a foetal crouch. She must have been there for a while because her backside was numb. She couldn’t see him now, just the cagoul and two of the footprints but the sweet heavy smell of blood hung like a fog in the warm hall. The yellow plastic cagoul was drenched in blood. The hood had been kept up; the blood pattern on the rim was jagged and irregular.
He could have been there all night, she thought. She’d gone straight to bed when she got in. She’d slept in the same house as this.
Eventually, she got up and phoned the police. ‘There's a dead man in my living room. It’s my boyfriend.’
*
She was standing still next to the phone, sweating and staring at the handle on the front door, afraid to move in case her eyes strayed into the living room, when she heard cars screaming to a stop in the street and people running up the stairs. They hammered on the door. She listened to the banging for two long bursts before she could reach over and open it. She was trembling.
They moved her into the close and asked her where she had been in the house since coming in. A photographer took pictures of everything.
Her neighbour, Jim Maliano, came out to see what the noise was. She could hear him asking the policemen questions in his Italian-Glaswegian rat-a-tat accent but couldn’t make out what he was saying. Maureen was finding it hard to speak without drawling incomprehensibly. She felt as if she were floating. Everything was moving very slowly. Jim brought her out a chair to sit on, a cup of tea and some biscuits. She couldn’t lift the cup from the saucer because she was holding the biscuits in her other hand. She put the cup and saucer down on the ground, under her chair so that no one would knock it over, and balanced the biscuits on her leg.
The neighbours from downstairs gathering vacantly on the half-landing, standing with their arms crossed, telling each new arrival that they didn’t know what had happened, someone had died or something.
A plain clothes policeman in his early thirties with a Freddie Mercury moustache and piggy eyes cautioned Maureen.
‘You don’t need to caution me,’ she mumbled, standing up and dropping her biscuits. ‘I haven’t done anything.’
‘It’s just procedure,’ he said. ‘Right, now, what happened here?’
He said yes to everything she told him about Douglas as if he already knew and was testing her. He interrupted Maureen as she tried to explain who she was. ‘You lot,’ he said tetchily to the assembled neighbours, ‘you’ll be contaminating evidence there. Go back indoors and wait for an officer to come and see you. Give your names and addresses to her.’ He gestured to a uniformed policewoman and turned back to Maureen. She threw up, narrowly missing the policeman’s face but hitting him squarely in the chest, and passed out.
It took her a minute to work out where she was. It was a large bed, a black-lacquered mess with small tables attached at either side. It looked like the devil’s bed. Jim Maliano was third-generation Italian immigrant and proud. His house was a shrine to Italian football and furniture design. On the wall at the foot of the bed a black and blue Inter Milan football shirt was squashed reverently behind glass and framed with tasteful silver. It was wrinkled and fading like a decaying holy relic.
Her mother, Winnie, was sitting by her feet stroking them histrionically. Winnie liked to drink whisky from a coffee-cup first thing in the morning and most days were a drama from start to finish. She coughed a sob when she saw Maureen open her eyes. ‘Oh, honey, I can’t believe it.’ She slid up the bed, cupped Maureen’s face in her hands and kissed her forehead. ‘Are you all right?’ Maureen nodded.
‘Sure?’ Winnie’s breath stank of Gold Spot.
‘Aye.’
‘What on earth happened?’
Maureen told her about finding the body and passing out in front of the policeman. Winnie was listening intently. When she was sure Maureen had finished talking she said that Jim had left a wee brandy for her, for the shock. She lifted an alcoholic’s idea of a wee brandy from the side table. ‘Mum, I’ve just thrown up.’
‘Go on,’ said Winnie, ‘it’ll do you good.’
‘I don't want it.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘I don't want it.’
Winnie shrugged, paused and sipped.
‘It’s good brandy,’ she said, as if the quality of drink had ever made a difference. Maureen would phone Benny and get him to come over. Benny was in Alcoholics Anonymous and Winnie couldn’t stand to be in the same house as him. Winnie sipped the brandy, nonchalantly taking bigger gulps faster and faster until it was finished while Maureen got up and dressed. Jim had left out a Celtic football shirt and black jogging trousers for her. She took off her sticky T-shirt and slipped them on. Just as she was tying the drawstring on the trousers she caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror on the far wall. She had one panda eye from last night’s makeup and her hair was dirty and stuck to her head. She had only washed it the morning before. She ran her index finger under her eye, wiping off the worst of the nomadic mascara.
The moustachioed policeman looked around the door. The front of his jacket and shirt were wet, he had washed Maureen’s vomit off too vigorously and although he had tried to pat them dry the jacket lapels were losing their shape and his shirt front was see-through. Maureen could see an erect nipple clinging to the wet material. ‘Are you decent?’ he said, looking her up and down.
He was followed into the room by the policewoman and an older officer with rich auburn hair flecked with grey. Maureen had seen him directing the Forensics team. His pale face was dotted with orange freckles, oddly boyish in such a serious man. He had a big gap between his two front teeth and watery china blue eyes. She remembered him for his courtesy when he moved her into the close.
‘I don't usually dress like this,’said Maureen, smiling with embarrassment at her outfit. ‘Can I get my own clothes?’ ‘Is that what you were wearing last night?’ asked the Moustache, gesturing to the discarded T-shirt on the bed. ‘Um, ye
ah.’
He pulled a folded white paper bag out of a pocket and took a biro from his breast pocket. He slid the pen under the T-shirt and poked it into the bag.
‘We’d like you to come with us, Miss O’Donnell,’ said Moustache Man. ‘We’d like to talk to you at the station.’
‘You can’t arrest her!’ shouted Winnie, her voice a startling wail.
‘We’re not trying to,’ said the policewoman calmingly.
‘We’re just asking her to talk to us. If she comes down to the station it’d be voluntary.’
Winnie put out her hand in front of Maureen in a dramatic, brandy-induced, gesture of maternal protectiveness. ‘I demand that you allow her to see a solicitor,’ she said.
Maureen shoved Winnie’s hand out of the way, ‘Stop it, Mum,’ she said, and turned back to the police officers. ‘I’ll come down with you.’
Jim Maliano watched from the living-room doorway as the motley crowd walked down the dark hall. When Maureen came past him he reached out and squeezed her shoulder gently. His small gesture of empathy touched Maureen unreasonably and she vowed not to forget it.
The rest of it was a bit of a blur. She remembered Winnie crying loudly and a small crowd parting outside the close to let her through. The red-haired man got into the driver’s seat of a blue Ford and the policewoman helped Maureen into the back seat, climbing in next to her. He asked if she had been cautioned. She said she had but she wasn’t really listening. He recited it for her. Within minutes they were in Stewart Street police station.
It was just round the corner from her house but Maureen hadn’t paid much attention to it before. The three-storey concrete building sat on the edge of an industrial estate and was fronted with reflective glass. It looked more like an office block than a police station. They drove round to the back and pulled into a small car park. It was surrounded by a high wall topped with spiralled razor wire. Looking up at the back of the building from the car park, she could see small, mean, barred windows.
The red-haired man helped her out of the car, holding onto her elbow longer than he need have. She must look a bit wobbly. Now, don’t you worry,’ he said. ‘That’s the worst bit over. We’re only going to talk to you.’
But Maureen wasn’t thinking about that. She just wanted to see Liam.
3
Marie, Una and Liam
Maureen was the youngest of the four of them. They all bore a striking family resemblance: dark brown hair, square jaws and fat button noses. Their build was the same too: they were all short and thin. When they were children, people often mistook Liam and Maureen for twins: they had been born ten months apart, both had pale blue eyes and they spent so much time together they adopted all of the same mannerisms. When they hit puberty Liam refused to hang about with Maureen. She didn’t understand: she followed him around like a little dog until he threatened to beat her up and stopped talking to her. Their resemblance gradually faded.
Marie was the eldest. She moved to London in the early eighties to get away from her mum’s drinking, settled there and became one of Mrs Thatcher’s starry-eyed children.
She got a job in a bank and worked her way up. At first the change in her seemed superficial: she began to define all her friends by how big their mortgage was and what kind of car they drove. It took a while for them to realize that Marie was deep down different. They didn’t talk about it. They could talk about Winnie’s alcoholism, about Maureen’s mental-health problems, and to a lesser extent about Liam dealing drugs, but they couldn’t talk about Marie being a Thatcherite. There was nothing kind to be said about that.
Maureen had always assumed that Marie was a socialist because she was kind. The final break between them came the last time Marie was home for a visit. They were talking about homelessness and Maureen ruined the dinner for everybody by losing the place and shouting, ‘Get a fucking value system,’ at her sister.
It happened six months before Maureen was taken to hospital, but the way Marie told it there was only a matter of weeks between one incident and the other. And that explained it. Maureen was mental and Marie forgave her. Marie was married to Robert, another banker, who worked in the City. They had been married on the quiet in the Chelsea Register Office two years before but Robert had never found the time to come to Glasgow and pay his respects to her family. It was a shame because now he couldn't afford to: he had become a Lloyd’s Name at just the wrong time, on just the wrong syndicate, and they were living in a bedsit in Bromley.
Una’s husband, Alistair, was an integral part of the family. He was a plumber and couldn’t believe his luck when Una agreed to marry him He was a quiet, honourable man and, to Una’s everlasting joy, had proved himself eminently malleable. She began by changing the way he dressed, then moved on to his accent and at the moment she was trying to change his career.
Una was a civil engineer and made a right few quid. She scheduled beginning a family for 1995 and had virtually booked her maternity leave but she didn’t get pregnant. She put a brave face on it but recently she had confided in them all, individually and in confidence, that she was getting desperate. Maureen went with her to the clinic when she had the preliminary tests. It turned out that Alistair’s sperm count was a bit low and he was put on a course of medication. Una was happy and Alistair was if she was.
When it came time for Liam to go to secondary school, Michael, their father, had lost his job as a journalist because of his drinking, quite a feat in those days. They couldn’t afford to send Liam to the private school Marie and Una had been to so he was sent to Hillhead Comprehensive and Maureen followed him a year later. It was a good school but neither of them studied very hard.
Winnie’s alcoholism progressed rapidly after Michael left them. Within four years she was married again and their new stepfather, George, became the silent partner in loud, brutal arguments. Despite the atmosphere in the house Liam delighted his mother by getting into Glasgow University Law School. He dropped out after six months and started selling hash to his friends on a casual basis but he discovered a talent and went professional. He bought a big house. They told Winnie he managed bands. Maureen used to nag him about security in the house but he said that if he started to worry about things like that he’d get really paranoid.
His present girlfriend, Maggie, was a bit of a mystery. She was a model, but they never saw her model anything, and a singer, but they never heard her sing either. She was very pretty and had the roundest arse Maureen had ever seen. She didn’t seem to have any friends of her own. Poor Maggie had a lot to live up to: Lynn, Liam’s first and last girlfriend, was a doctor’s receptionist and as rough as a badger’s arse but such a great crack even Winnie’s snobbishness dissipated when Lynn told a story.
Maureen did well at school and went straight to Glasgow University to study history of art. She was in her final year when she began to think she was schizophrenic. The night terrors she had always suffered from got progressively worse and she started having waking flashbacks. They were mild at first but escalated in frequency and severity. Because she didn’t know what she was flashing back to, she thought they were random delusions. In her more lucid moments she realized something was very wrong. She had never done acid so that wasn’t it. She began to read about mental illness and found that she was in the right age group for her first schizophrenic attack. She wasn’t very surprised: like many people from unhappy families she’d never assumed the future would hold anything too thrilling She told no one, got the job at the Apollo Theatre and bought the tiny flat in Garnethill so that when she fell down the big black hole into the hands of the social services they wouldn’t make her live with Winnie.
It took a year and a half of patient panic for the breakdown to come.
She was sitting upstairs on a bus. A fat man sitting behind her was breathing mucosally in her ear. The noise got louder, closer, more rasping until it was deafening. She waited for him to hit h
er, a fisted slap on the side of her head. When it didn’t happen she screamed for a bit and threw up. The driver came to see what was wrong and found her sobbing and trying to wipe up the mess with a single tissue. He told her to leave it. She ran off the bus. None of the other passengers came after her.
The family got worried when Mr Scobie, the manager at the Apollo, phoned Winnie’s as a last resort. Maureen hadn’t been at work for three days and hadn’t called. Liam went looking for her and found her hiding in the hall cupboard in Garnethill. She had been there for two days and had urinated and defecated in the corner. She remembered Liam wrapping her in a blanket and carrying her downstairs to his car. He pulled the blanket over her face and whispered to her all the way to hospital, telling her she was safe, still safe, be brave.
One month after she was admitted to the Northern Psychiatric Hospital Una’s husband Alistair came to visit on his own. He asked to speak to her and her psychiatrist together and broke Una's confidence, telling them that this had happened before. When Maureen was ten she had been found hiding in the cupboard under the stairs. She had been there for a whole day. Her face was bruised down one side and when they gave her a bath they found dried blood between her legs. No one knew what had happened because Maureen couldn’t speak. Michael packed a few things, took the cheque book and disappeared for ever. Winnie told the children that Maureen had fallen on her bottom and got a surprise. It was never mentioned again.
Winnie had never forgiven Alistair for telling. She phoned him sometimes when she was drunk. He wouldn’t tell Maureen what she said.
Leslie came to the hospital every day, working her visits around her shifts at the shelter. She treated the hospital stay as if it was something that was happening to both of them together. Leslie was scared at first and then settled into the routine, getting angry about the pettiness of the ward rules and making friends with the other patients. Everyone else behaved as if they were coming to view Maureen. She knew that it was her friendship with Leslie that prompted her to get angry and get better. Their relationship changed after the hospital: Maureen couldn’t bring herself to lean on Leslie in even the smallest detail. She was always reluctant to phone her when she had a problem. Leslie dealt with other people’s emotional crises all day every day at the shelter and Maureen knew she could easily tip the scales and go from being Leslie’s pal to being her client. She found herself wishing Leslie would have a disaster sometimes, something minor and fixable, so that Maureen could save her and restore the balance between them once and for all.