by Denise Mina
Her bedroom had been a beloved refuge during her growing up. When she was thirteen she’d got a Saturday job in a fruit-and-veg shop and bought a Yale lock with her first wage,fitting it on her bedroom door to stop Winnie coming in late at night when she was pissed, reeling at the bottom of the bed in the stark stream of light from the hall, scaring the shit out of her. Winnie changed the lock one day when Maureen was at school. Maureen changed it back. Liam declared his room an independent republic.
Winnie used Maureen’s as a box room now. The door still had the scars from twelve screws bored into the same three square inches. Greasy Blu-tack stains on the wallpaper hinted the outline of each of her favourite posters, and the books she no longer wanted were lined up on the shelf, Enid Blytons, Agatha Christies, an O grade maths textbook, Dandy annuals. A pile of cuddly toys sat in the corner gathering dust: Winnie had kept giving them to Maureen for birthdays and Christmases, confusing her with Marie who liked that sort of thing.
She found the shoe box full of photographs under the bed. They had been rifled through recently, photos were bent over and shoved down the side, still springy but resigning themselves to their new position. She stuffed her bag with them, taking all of them, even the ones from when she was small.
The last one was stuck under the fold at the bottom of the box. She picked and picked at it but it was stuck. She had to unfold the floor of the box to get it out. It was of her and her father. She was sitting on his knee, hugging him. He seemed to be drunk, his shirtsleeves were rolled up– he always did that when he was drunk, they used to look out for it. Maureen remembered the time. It was winter and the abuse had begun. She was adoring to him when other people were there and she knew he couldn’t touch her. She thought if she was nicer to him he would stop hurting her when they were alone.
She remembered that it was taken at Christmas-time. Liam wanted a Chopper bike and Maureen asked for a big doll she’d seen hanging from a stall in the Barras. It had a tartan dress and a big tammy. She got the doll but the minute it was out of the packet she noticed that the stitching was rough and the doll’s eyes had been painted on wrong. She cried all day. Liam got his Chopper and wouldn’t let her have a go on it.
She lifted a copy of The Master and Margarita and a battered hardback, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, stolen from the school library. She put them in her bag and scanned the room. A yellowing picture of Joe Strummer was lying under the bookcase. She shoved it in her pocket. There was nothing else there she wanted.
A bizarre ceramic ashtray she’d made in occupational therapy at the Northern was sitting on a table on the landing. It was round with a target pattern painted on the face of it in red and white glaze. It was the first thing she had made in the class and Pauline had helped her with the colours and the varnish. When she presented it proudly to Liam in the hospital gardens he had said it was great: when she got out she could make a fortune designing ashtrays for badly co-ordinated smokers. She picked it up and crept out of the house.
They’d been questioning him for three hours. The officer on the desk told her that he didn’t know when Liam would get out, it could be a while.
She bought a lemon tea from the machine in the lobby and was just settling down for a long wait when Liam emerged from a corridor followed closely by McEwan. They both looked exhausted and angry. Liam’s expression didn’t falter when he saw her. He took the steaming plastic cup from her hand and put it down on a chair.‘Come on,’ he said, taking her hand.‘We’re going home.’ McEwan and Liam parted without saying goodbye.
18
Mr Wig
Liam didn’t want to talk about what had happened at the police station. All he would tell her was that Paulsa, the guy he had been to see at Tonsa’s on the afternoon Douglas was murdered, had confirmed his alibi. Liam said he definitely wouldn’t be allowed to see Maggie again. McEwan had phoned her parents and made them confirm his alibi for the evening.‘They asked you about the evening, then?’ she said.
‘Yeah.’
‘Me too. It was good of Paulsa to come forward.’
‘Paulsa needs a lot of mates right now. He’s just lost a lot of money.’ ‘How?’
‘Bought a job lot of bad acid, sank all his money into it without trying it first.’ ‘Why’s it bad?’
‘Unsellable. A totally sick trip and everyone knows about it.’
Liam parked outside Benny’s close but didn't move to get out of the car. The street was quiet, bathed in the warm orange street-light, like a film set.
Maureen brushed his hair off his face.‘You look sad.’ ‘I’m not sad,’ he said, chewing his lip.‘I’m scared.’ She had never heard him admit to it and hearing it now frightened her.‘Oh, Liam,’ she whimpered pathetically, ‘I don't want you to be.’
He looked out of the window.‘If we get through this in one piece I’m going to sell the house and go to university.’ ‘That’s good,’ she said softly.‘And what if we don’t get through it in one piece?’
‘Then I’ll need to see what bits are left over and what can be done with them. I’m never going through that again.’
‘I’m sorry to have brought this on you,’ she said, thinking she sounded like Siobhain.
Liam said he didn’t want to talk about it and he knew Benny would insist.‘Just tell him we’ve been at Mum’s, okay?’
A white Volkswagen was parked on the Maryhill Road opposite the bollards to Scaramouch Street. The two officers watched Maureen and Liam get out of the Triumph and go up the number twelve close. The driver picked up the radio and called in.
The heating was on and the flat was comfortably warm.
‘I’ve been waiting hours for you two,’ said Benny. He had splashed out and bought three venison steaks for dinner. He banished both of them from the kitchen.
They sat on the settee watching television until Benny brought the dinner in. The meat was sweet and tender and he gave them cream-and-butter mashed potato with caramelized onions through it and steamed leek on the side. When the dinner had gone down a little, helped along by strong coffee, Maureen went down to the Ambassador to buy some ice cream.
The Ambassador coffee bar on the Maryhill Road was famous for its home-made ice cream. Its other claim to fame was the Aquarium Wall: an amoeba-shaped window had been cut into the plywood partition wall and an outsized fish-tank had been placed behind it. The tank was empty now; a layer of pebbles sat on the floor of the dry aquarium covered in a green carpet of algae-stain.
No one ever seemed to eat in the café: the tables were always empty. It stayed open late at night, selling cigarettes and chocolate to locals. Behind the counter dark wood shelves reached right up to the high ceiling; a small ladder on rollers was fitted to the top one and they all strained under the weight of multi-coloured sweetie jars.
The man behind the counter was something of a local celebrity: apart from organizing the under twelves’ football league he had the most obvious toupée in Maryhill, possibly the whole west coast. His hairpiece sat so high on his head it looked as if he kept his sandwiches under it. He was part of a local rite-of-passage: boys used to tell the wee kids that his name was ‘Mr Wig’ and get them to go in and call him by name.
Trying not to look at his hair, Maureen ordered a large tub of their home-made ice cream and a bottle of Irn Bru. Mr Wig bent down to scoop the ice cream out of the freezer and she found herself face to face with his matted rug. Below the thick hairs on the toupée the weaving was dirty.
She deflected her gaze by staring at the jars of sweeties. When they were very small Winnie would take them to sweet shops on Sundays after mass. Each child was allowed to choose one quarter. Maureen couldn’t remember her favourite, it changed all the time, but Liam chose the rhubarb rock every time, without fail. She ordered a quarter. Mr Wig weighed it out and scooped it into a paper bag, flipping it over as he twirled the corners to close it.
Back at the flat sh
e gave the bag of sweeties to Liam. He opened it immediately and handed them round.‘Man,’ he said,‘I haven’t had these for years.’
In the kitchen she made floaters, pouring the fizzy Irn Bru into long glasses and spooning the ice cream into it.
They mixed together, frothing all the way up the glass, settling down slowly while she added more ginger. The kitchen smelled like sweet-tooth heaven. They ate them as floaters should be eaten, greedy and graceless, with spoons and slurps and licks.
Benny had gone to the video shop, looking for Reflecting Skin but it was out. He got L’Atalante instead, a French movie made in the thirties about a barge captain and his new wife.
They spent the evening wrapped in the cosy comfort of old friends, talking hardly at all and attending to nothing but their comfort. They would remember it as their last happy evening together, as a gentle pause in a troubled time.
19
Martin
She phoned beforehand, just to make sure that Martin would be working that day. She couldn’t bear the thought of turning up at the hospital without a kind face to greet her. The head porter told her Martin was on a back shift so she waited until the afternoon before setting off.
The Victorian façade of the Northern Psychiatric Hospital looked strange because the proportions were wrong. The Doric columns were too thick, the pediments too squat. With different associations Maureen was sure she would have found it beautiful but she couldn’t. It looked nightmarishly lumpen. She didn’t remember seeing the front of the building until the day she left to go home for good. She sat in the taxi and waved happily as Pauline, her anorexic friend from OT, waved back. Skeletal Pauline was standing in the chubby doorway as the taxi circled a turn. Maureen didn’t notice that Pauline was crying until they passed her for the second time.
After the joint session, when Maureen started slipping back into the hazy blackness, it was the thought of Pauline that stopped her toying seriously with the idea of suicide. They had both been abused by their fathers, Pauline had been raped by her father and brother, but their responses were very different: Pauline couldn’t get angry and Maureen couldn’t get anything else. Pauline could never bring herself to tell: she said it would break her mother and that would be harder to bear than the abuse. She was putting on weight when Maureen met her. They did ceramics together– Pauline helped glaze the target ashtray in Winnie’s hall. She was the best student in ceramics, she’d repeated the course three times. She’d been in hospital longer than anyone else in the class.
Maureen couldn’t bring herself to go back and visit afterwards but she did phone Pauline. They didn’t have much to say to each other, their closeness was born of proximity not affinity, but Pauline was always pleased to hear from her and dragged out the phone calls, talking about how her application for a house was going, repeating gossip from the ward, who was being released and what the staff were up to. Maureen found herself reluctant to phone. She stopped questioning Pauline, trying to cut the conversation short, and the phone calls got further and further apart.
Pauline was released a few months after Maureen. She wasn’t given a house: apparently she’d been told that she would have to wait another three months. She’d been offered bed and breakfast in a bad area and turned it down.
Within a week of her return to the family home she went to the woods near her house and took an overdose. She was missing for three days before a woman out walking her dog stumbled across her body. She was lying on her side, curled into a ball under the base of a tree. Her skirt had blown up over her face. At the funeral a nurse told Maureen that, until they found a goodbye note in her bedroom, the police thought it was a murder because they found dried semen on her back. Someone had wanked on her as she lay dead or dying. Months later Maureen travelled deep into the suburbs to visit the wood. It was a scraggy stretch of trees leading down a hill to a main road, cut back at one side for a playing field and at the other for a private driveway. The locals were proud of the old wood but only to the extent that it didn’t interfere with their individual property. The trees were thin and ailing so that a walker would nearly always be visible from either side. Burnt plastic and cigarette ends spoke of children from good homes coming here on summer nights to drink cider and touch each other up and set fire to things. Maureen lay down among the dog ends and looked up at the tree tops, empty tears running into her hair, and apologized far too late for leaving Pauline alone.
At the cremation Pauline’s kind, bewildered mother cried so hard she burst blood vessels in her right eye. The father stood next to her in the pew, his arm around her, patting her shoulder when she whimpered too loudly. There were two brothers. No one knew which had raped Pauline. She never told. The minister told them that Pauline was a well loved and dutiful daughter. Her coffin slid noiselessly along the conveyor belt, off through a red curtain.
The handful of mourners who weren’t family had met Pauline in hospital and knew about her family. They avoided the usual pleasantries that accompany a young death. Only her mother thought it was needless. The mother had been too distraught to make a funeral tea and since Pauline was the only daughter there was no one else to do it for her. She apologized to everyone for her breach of protocol as the mourners walked single file over the motorway pedestrian bridge to a dingy pub.
Liam bought the father a pint of heavy. Liam had known Pauline and liked her. He knew what had happened to her. ‘How the fuck could you do that?’ said Maureen, under her breath.
‘Hush, hush now,’ said Liam and pushed her outside. ‘I put two acid tabs in it. His head’ll burst.’ She told Liam he should learn to restrain himself. ‘I did,’ said Liam.‘I wanted to give him eight.’ Weeks later Maureen heard through the grapevine that the father had suffered some sort of schizophrenic episode and had briefly been hospitalized himself.
She could feel Pauline’s wan smile warm her heart as she crunched over the gravel to the side door.
She found Martin in the staff canteen. He was sitting with his back to her but she recognized him from his broad shoulders and muscular arms. The back of his neck was creased and weather-worn as if he had worked outside for a long time. He was eating a greasy pie and chips.‘That stuff’ll kill you,’ said Maureen.
Martin looked up and smiled at her. His white crew-cut sat like a tiny halo around his brown face, his eyes were set into a bundle of laughter lines. ‘Hello, pet,’ he said.
He had begun to age in the two years since Maureen had seen him: his ears and nose looked bigger. He reached over the table for the sauce bottle and she noticed that his wrists were swollen and he was wearing a copper bangle. He had red broken veins on his cheeks and white tufts of hair had been carefully trimmed on his ear-lobes.
‘How long’s your break?’ asked Maureen.
‘I’ve got another half-hour.’
‘Can I sit with you?’
‘I’d be annoyed if you didn’t.’ Maureen went to get a cup of tea.
‘I got a phone call from a woman called Louisa Wishart at the Albert this morning,’ he said, when she sat down. ‘Oh?’
‘She phoned me in the general office and they had to call me over the Tannoy. She said that you’d be coming back to see the hospital and would I look after you.’ ‘I hope you don’t mind.’
‘No,’ he said, chewing his last forkful of pie and chips.
‘I got time off for it. Is she your doctor now?’
‘Yeah. She told me she’d worked here, I thought you’d remember her.’
‘Ah,’ said Martin, wiping his mouth with a paper serviette,‘that explains why she was so pally. They’ve all worked here at one time or another. She must have been young. You don’t pay much attention to the young ones.’
‘She’s got big glasses, they take up half her face and she does this—’Maureen clasped her hands together and stared hard at him in an exaggerated mimic of Louisa.‘She looks a bit like a fish.’
>
‘Naw, pet, I can’t place her.’
‘Well, she’s pretty forgettable.’
‘She doesn’t sound it.’
Martin was not a warm man but his natural calmness was so soothing it felt like warmth. He didn’t seem as calm as usual today. He kept glancing around the canteen as if he was looking for someone. Maureen sipped her tea with a growing sense of unease. Martin watched her.‘I saw you in the paper,’ he said.
Maureen blushed.‘Oh, yeah?’ ‘That's why you're here, isn’t it?’
‘Aye.’
‘It’s nothing to do with your treatment, is it?’
‘No.’
‘Why does she think it is?’
‘I lie to her. About most things.’
‘Why?’
‘I don't want to tell her. I think she’s a twit.’ Martin was suddenly interested.‘Has she got dark hair?’ ‘Yeah, loads of it.’
‘I do remember her. She was here a few years ago, just for six months. You’re right. She was a twit.’ They smiled at each other across the table. ‘Why do you still see her?’
‘My family worry about me if I don’t, you know, see someone.’
‘I’m going to get a cup of tea, pet. D’you want another one?’
She didn’t. Martin came back with a tea-cake for her. It was mallow and biscuit, covered in milk chocolate. It was a child’s biscuit. She must seem very young to him, she thought. She didn’t know whether he was married or had children. He didn't offer information about himself. He wasn’t secretive, he just didn’t seem to feel the need to justify his life by placing himself in context. Maureen hoped he was married to a nice woman, that his wife trimmed his hairy ears for him of an evening, and she hoped he was a father. She thought he would be a good one.