by Denise Mina
‘I can only tell you some things, pet,’ he said.‘I can only tell you what I actually know. I’m not interested in the gossip so I don’t know what other people are saying. Okay?’ ‘Yep.’
‘There’s something very bad happening and I don’t want to be involved in it, right?’ ‘What kind of bad thing?’
‘I’ll tell you in a bit, but you have to promise me you won’t repeat it.’ ‘Promise.’
He gave her a hard look.‘Listen, this is very important, don’t just say it like that. Don’t repeat it.’ ‘Right, Martin, I promise I won’t.’
He looked anxiously around the canteen.‘I don't know who’s involved in this. They might be here right now, watching us.’
‘Then don’t act suspicious. I’m just here to see the place again and you’re a helpful porter who was asked to show me round again. I didn’t ask to see you, my doctor phoned you, remember?’
Martin’s face relaxed.‘Aye,’ he said,‘that’s right.’ ‘And if they called you over the Tannoy and told you in the office lots of people’ll know about it.’
‘Right enough. Come and we’ll make a show of it, then. I’ll take you around the old place again.’ Martin tidied his tray away to the appointed place and the canteen women thanked him.
He took her to George III ward. She was so engrossed in what he had said that she didn’t feel much about being back there.‘You remembered which ward I was in,’ she said. ‘Oh, aye,’ said Martin, as if it was nothing.
When they were standing in the lift she asked him if he knew which ward Siobhain McCloud was in.‘George I,’ he said quickly as if he had known the question was coming. ‘They were all in George I.’
They visited the day room and the patients’ canteen. On the way over to the Portakabin counselling suites they passed through the gardens. The flower-beds were bare now, sunken patches full of naked lumps of frozen mud, like measle scars on the well-kept lawn. Liam liked to sit here with her. They used to bring Pauline out and give her cigarettes. She wasn’t allowed them because they suppressed her appetite but Maureen suspected that the real reason was punitive. Pauline wasn’t starving herself to death because she wasn’t hungry enough.
They walked past the Portakabin where the joint session with Winnie had taken place and back into the main body of the building. Martin led her into the theatre lift. It was big enough to accommodate three trolley beds and their attendants comfortably. Maureen looked around the stainless-steel box.‘I’ve never been in one of these before.’ ‘We’re not really supposed to use them,’ he said,‘but they’re always free.’
The doors closed in front of them and he pressed lower basement, taking her to a part of the hospital she had never been to before. The lift slid downwards, alighting softly, and the doors opened out onto a shallow lobby. They stepped out, turned right and walked through a set of fire doors, straight into a fork in the corridor. The right-hand side led up a long, windowless ramp; the left led down, deeper into the ground. They took the left fork to a corridor running parallel to the kitchen. One of the strip lights was failing, palpitating nervously. The smell of overcooked meat and synthetic gravy wafted up the corridor in a warm stream. Maureen could feel her mouth watering. Martin opened an old wooden door on the left of the corridor.‘In here,’ he said.
They went into a dark L-shaped room. The foot of the L was obscured by a tall dusty hillock of bin bags stuffed with hospital blankets. Martin led her behind the little hill and down the L’s foot to a small door. He pushed it open and flicked a switch. A bare light-bulb lit up the little room. The low ceiling sloped sharply to the left and the walls were bare, crumbling stone. Behind one she could hear a steady, low-pitched thrumming like a ship’s engine. It was a warm room, perhaps because it was so close to the kitchen. On the walls hung posters of the Partick Thistle football team dating back to the 1960s. A small hand sink stood at the back of the room with a single cold tap. In front of it was a lonely hospital chair made of metal and cloth, taking up a third of the entire floor space. A pile of discarded tabloid newspapers was stacked unevenly against the wall. Some loose tea-bags, a large kettle and a transistor radio were sitting on top of a miniature set of beautifully varnished mahogany drawers with a polished brass window on the front of each drawer to hold a label in place. Martin saw her looking at it.‘They used to keep the medicine in that, back in the olden days.’
‘Is this your den?’ asked Maureen.
‘Aye. No one knows it’s here except me. This is where I do all my skiving.’
She motioned to the Thistle posters.‘I didn’t know you were a religious man.’
He grinned sheepishly.‘Oh, aye. Season-ticket holder for my pains.’
Partick Thistle FC, known as the Jags, is one of the few Glasgow football teams not associated with either side of the Protestant/Catholic sectarian divide. Their fans are known locally for their passive but exceptional eccentricity and the team are known nationally for being crap.
Martin motioned for her to sit down in the chair, took the teathings off the mahogany drawers, put them on the floor, and crouched down on it. He looked uncomfortable so low with his big knees tucked under his chin. His feet were an inch away from hers.
He began to talk. He said that several years ago there had been some sort of problem in George I. The women in the ward were all getting much worse. It turned out that someone was interfering with them sexually. They changed all the staff and the problem cleared up but a lot of the original patients had never recovered. Martin’s voice had dropped so low Maureen had to lean forward to hear him above the throbbing hum of the engine behind the wall. ‘I never knew about this,’ she said.‘Did they prosecute someone?’
‘Have you been to George I?’
‘No.’
‘Oh, God, the poor souls can hardly talk. They couldn’t go to court– half of them don’t know their own names.’ ‘How did they find out, then?’
He looked at a distant place somewhere through the wall and hugged his knees to his chest.‘Burn-marks. They’d been tied up or something. They’d burn-marks on their bodies from the rope. And they were hurt . . .’ He motioned downwards. ‘Where?’
‘Their flowers– their flowers were cut.’
‘With a knife?’
‘I don't know. You don’t like to ask questions about things like that. I always thought it might be just that they were scared and they were dry.’ Martin was crying, his face impassive.
‘Didn’t they think to DNA-test the semen and compare it with possible suspects?’
‘There wasn’t any semen,’ said Martin.‘He’d wore a rubber. He knew exactly what he was doing.’
His voice took on a peculiar timbre, halfway between a cry of despair and a growl.‘I was there every day while it was going on. I didn’t even notice. I keep my eyes open now.’
‘Oh, Martin, who would think to look for that?’ He coughed hard and wiped his face dry with his hand. She wanted to touch him. She could reach her hand out just a little and touch his brown cheek, but she didn’t think he would like it. It would be done to console her, not him. He pulled his knees tighter to his chest and looked further through the wall.‘If any of us had noticed we could have stopped it.’
She reached out and touched his hand with the tips of her fingers. He looked up, startled by the intrusion, and relaxed the grip on his knees. She shouldn’t have touched him.
‘Anyway,’ he said, stretching his legs out in front of him, ‘it doesn’t much matter what I feel about it.’
‘Do they know who it was?’ she asked.
‘No, but your boyfriend was tied up, wasn’t he?’ Maureen nodded.‘With rope?’ She nodded again.‘Did you know he was here?’ asked Martin. ‘Douglas was here?’
‘You didn’t know, then? I thought that's why you came back. Two weeks ago he asked Frank in the office for a list of patients’ names from George I. He said he w
as doing a follow-up study about how they got on. Frank’s a stupid bastard. He told loads of people that Dr Brady’d been in. Frank isn’t even authorized to give out that sort of information so he was telling on himself as much as anyone. Brady seems to have been a bright man. I’m surprised he hadn’t the good sense to use a different name.’ ‘Well ...’
‘Anyway, those of us who’ve been here for a while knew what it was about because he’d only asked for the George I names and he’d only asked for that time. Was he daft?’
‘Not really. He wasn’t very good at being secretive. You think he was killed because he got the list, don’t you?’ ‘Aye,’ said Martin.
‘Did you tell the police about this?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘I don't know.’ He looked at his feet.‘That's a lie. Ido know. I don’t want to be involved in this. It’s finished now and I’m too frightened to get involved.’ He didn’t try to excuse himself but left the statement hanging in the air between them.‘Was Douglas Brady married?’ he asked. ‘Aye.’
‘What were you doing going out with a married man?’
‘God, Martin, I can’t remember any more.’ She’d taken up his time, reminded him of a deep hurt and touched his hand. She stood up.‘I’d better be going,’ she said. Martin had to stand flat against the wall to let her by. He came out after her and turned off the light, pulling the door to.
‘That’s a lovely wee den. How long have you had that?’
‘Years,’ he said, leading her through the L-shaped room and back to the kitchen corridor.‘Years and years and years. Don’t tell anyone. It’s my secret.’
He walked her down the gravel path to the road and along to the bus stop. She knew fine well where the bus stop was and said Martin needn’t bother but he said that he didn’t need to do any work as long as she was with him and to shut up. The pavement was littered with dead leaves from the trees in the hospital grounds, helpless little carcasses, unable to defend themselves from the breezy wash of fast-passing cars.
‘I think it’s kind of you to keep seeing that stupid doctor so as not to worry your family,’ he said. ‘I only do it so they won’t hassle me.’
‘Aye, well, lots of people do good things for the wrong reasons. It’s still a good thing.’
He waited with her until the bus came and bade her take care.
20
Lynn
She got off the bus outside a large chemist’s shop in the town centre. It was on three levels and sold everything from face cream to home electrolysis kits. Maureen had a weakness for cosmetics, even the pseudoscientific face creams that made mad claims. She knew that surgery couldn’t really come in a tub, that cream would have to be sold as a medicine if it did anything but moisturize, but still, when she felt bad, a good temporary solution was a face mask and a new tub of miracle face cream or a hair dye. She wandered up and down the aisles, pausing at displays, reading packets, and settled on a dark hair dye that would condition and moisturize, and a face mask she’d used before. The mask was too harsh for her skin, it left it red and sore, but the cream came out of the tube black and turned bright orange as it dried. It always gave her a buzz.
Back at the house Benny had left a note on the coffee table in the living room to say he was speaking at an AA meeting and would be back at eight. Maureen started the bath running, took two clean white towels from the linen cupboard in the hall and locked the bathroom door. She stripped off, pinned her hair on top of her head and put the face mask on, spreading the black cream evenly over her face and neck. It had a pleasing rubbery texture. She sat on the edge of the toilet seat as she waited for the bath to fill and rubbed her fingers together, gathering the residue of the face mask into a gluey lump, rolling the warm black grape into the soft hollow of her palm.
She thought about Douglas; not shoddy, lying Douglas but the kind, compassionate man she’d been training herself to forget. She could understand him giving Siobhain money because of the Northern but Maureen hadn’t been raped when she was there. Apart from Winnie, nothing bad had happened while she was in there. She thought about Shirley’s suggestion that Douglas had been fucking someone in his office at the Rainbow. It seemed wildly out of character for Douglas. He had been so concerned with differentiating their relationship from that of a therapist who fucked his patient. He used to talk about it a lot. But, then, he hadn’t mentioned that recently either so it could have been him. The bath was full. She turned off the taps.
Her face was rubbery and orange. Rolling her fingertips up her neck, she gathered the edge of the mask and pulled it off whole. Every pore on her face was tingling. The bathroom was foggy with steam as she slipped into the deep bath, sliding down until only her nose and tits were sticking out of the water, thinking of poor Ophelia. The scratches on the back of her neck bristled as the water hit them.
She stepped out and dried herself with the crisp, clean towel. The hair dye was the darkest she’d ever used: it wasn’t Goth black but it wasn’t a kick in the arse off it. She was shaking the bottle when she realized that she would ruin the white towels if she used them.
She chucked some clothes on and went into the hall, looking for an old towel in the airing cupboard but there weren’t any. Benny had some scabby ones, Maureen had seen them. She went into his bedroom, knelt down by the chest of drawers, pulled open the bottom one and rummaged, feeling for a towel texture. The drawer was filled with big winter jumpers and odd socks. Her hand landed on a glossy piece of paper. She nearly pulled it out before she realized it was a pornographic magazine. She shoved it back in, bristling with embarrassment, and pushed it to the very back. She felt something hard and flat and plastic lying on the floor of the drawer. She pulled back a jumper and looked in. It was a CD: it had been set into the corner of the drawer on the floor so that it didn’t get lost in the jumble. She lifted it out, recognizing the two-tone corner before she saw the front of it. It was The Best of the Selector CD. It was the CD she had left on the bedroom floor up in Garnethill; it even had the crack on the corner of the plastic cover.
She put it back where she had found it, covering it over with the same jumper and odd socks, and went back into the bathroom.
She combed her hair into a pony-tail and hacked through it with a pair of nail scissors. It was half-seven.
She listened at the bathroom door. The flat was still. She left a note on the kitchen table saying she’d stay at Leslie’s tonight, and made her way down to the Great Western Road, taking a back-street route she had never known Benny use.
Liam had more or less lived there for three years so she remembered the phone number. Lynn had moved; the guy who answered gave her an Anderston number. ‘Hello, Lynn?’
‘Aye,’ said Lynn cautiously.
‘Lynn, it’s me, Maureen O’Donnell.’
‘Mauri! How the fuck are you?’
They arranged to meet, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, in a large, busy café near Lynn’s house.
*
Lynn waved happily when Maureen walked through the door. She had naturally black hair and flawless pink velvet skin but her eyes were her crowning glory, black with a blue tinge that made them look like polished, semiprecious stones. Her body was slight and wiry and if Liam was to be believed she was unusually agile. She had a deep, gruff voice from smoking twenty a day from the age of twelve. She was eating a bowl of carbonara made with cubed gammon. Expertly, she rolled a string of spaghetti onto her fork as Maureen sat down.‘So what’s this about, Secret Squirrel?
And what have you done to your hair?’
‘Cut it myself,’ said Maureen, sitting down.
‘It’s all uneven. You come to mine after we’ve eaten and I’ll straighten it.’
‘’S all right,’ said Maureen distractedly.
‘No, it’s not. There’s all jaggy bits hanging down at the back. It looks like a mad wum
min’s fanny.’
They sat in silence for a moment as Lynn chewed a mouthful of pasta. The creamy sauce gathered at the corners of her mouth; it looked like froth. Maureen looked around the room. Tourist posters of Italy had been pasted onto the wall: behind Lynn’s head loomed an aerial photograph of Florence. The pictures were skirted with flags-of-all-nations bunting.
‘Auch,’ said Lynn:‘Let’s just skip all these pleasantries.’
‘Aye,’ said Maureen.
Lynn looked her over.‘I know about your boyfriend, Maureen. Is that why you’re doing this silent, haunted thing?’
‘Am I?’
‘Aye.’
‘Don’t tell anyone we’ve met, eh?’ said Maureen.
‘I’m not sure we have yet,’ said Lynn.
They sat in silence until Lynn had finished eating. She paid the bill.‘Come on,’ she said, standing Maureen up and slipping her arm through hers.‘Let’s go back to mine and fix your hair‘
Lynn was living in a big flat on Argyle Street, across the road from a twenty-four-hour grocer’s. The house must have been very grand once: it had five large bedrooms and a massive communal kitchen with a walk-in larder. The ceilings were thirteen foot high with ornate cornicing. One of her flatmates kept a gang of giant, love-bombing cats. The minute they got through the door the cats started rubbing against their legs, and when Maureen sat down on one of the kitchen chairs three of them scratched and hissed at one another for the right to sit on her lap.‘If you sit on that wee settee,’ said Lynn, pointing over to a green two seater by the TV,‘they can all love you at the one time.’
Maureen sat on it and her knees were immediately covered with a carpet of purring animals. Lynn stood behind her, spraying her hair with a pump-action aerosol full of water. She combed Maureen’s hair this way and that, snipping at the bottom with a pair of sharp hair scissors.‘Oh, Maureen,’ she said.‘You’ve hurt your neck.’ ‘Yeah.’