A Fine House in Trinity

by Lesley Kelly

  ‘You’re Joseph Staines’ grandson aren’t you?’

  I nodded. ‘Aye.’

  ‘He was married to my sister.’

  ‘Florrie?’ I was delighted to meet one of her siblings at last. I put my hand out to shake his. He didn’t take it and I noticed that he was a bit the worse for wear.

  ‘That bitch ruined my life.’

  I thought I’d misheard him. ‘What?’

  He stared into his pint. ‘She had my father wrapped round her little finger. She made life miserable for all of us growing up - always slapping us around, or telling my dad that we’d done stuff and getting him to belt us.’

  I couldn’t believe this. ‘Florrie did this?’ I wasn’t having my step-grandmother spoken about like that and I stood up to go. The man put his hand on my arm to stop me.

  ‘And then, to cap it all, when my dad dies and leaves her the money to divide up between the family as she sees fit, instead of giving it to us she passes it all on to her fancy man.’

  I didn’t linger over my pint after this.

  Florrie must have been delighted to meet Joe and his dysfunctional family. The one and only time the Staineses have ever offered anyone a shot at redemption.

  Friday

  I know Paisley a wee bit. We lived there for six months or so, in a tenement block not far from the station. Janine’s mother, Mrs Jardine, lives on the outskirts of the town, a world away from where we stayed.

  I find her address no problem. It’s a sturdy wee bungalow, set behind a front garden of grass surrounded by flowers and heather. I go to open the gate but something holds me back. The woman’s obviously got a good life here. She can probably live without me and her junkie daughter stirring up the past. But the curtains twitch – she’s seen me so there’s no going back. I just hope that Janine has sent me on a wild goosechase.

  ‘I’m Joseph Staines – we spoke on the phone?’

  She nods and stands aside so I can step in. I walk down a narrow corridor and turn, as directed, into a pastel-painted living room decorated with photos of her grandbairns. Mrs Jardine follows me in and I get a chance to look at her. She’s a handsome woman in her fifties, full-figured, with greying brown hair cut in a neat bob. I don’t see too much of Janine in her.

  ‘Thanks for agreeing to see me, Mrs Jardine.’

  ‘Call me Sheila.’

  Sheila insists on making me tea and I take the time to look at her family photographs on her mantlepiece. There’s a wedding photograph of a young couple, and school photographs of three gap-toothed bairns.

  ‘Your grandchildren?’ I ask as Sheila comes in carrying a tray.

  She nods. ‘Ross is seven, and the twins are five. I’m a very proud granny.’ She reaches behind the grandchildren’s pictures and pulls out a framed photograph of a little girl playing on a beach. She’s a pretty wee thing with blond ringlets. ‘My niece.’ She passes me the picture. ‘That was taken in 1980. She’d have been about eight.’

  The telephone rings and Sheila excuses herself. She leaves the living room door open, and I can’t help but overhear her half of the conversation. I get the feeling it relates to my being there. I gently push the door shut and wander over to the window. Her back garden is every bit as lovingly cared for as the front. I’m so busy staring at it that I don’t hear Sheila comes back into the room.

  ‘I have to say, Joseph, that my husband’s not very happy about me speaking to you.’

  I don’t blame him. ‘Oh – why not?’

  ‘He thinks I should let things lie. Everything that happened to me connected with Leith was bad, and he’s just worried for me if you bring it all up again.’

  I feel really rotten but I don’t try to put her off. She pours out the tea and hands me a china cup.

  ‘So, you’re a friend of Janine’s?’

  ‘Not really, to be honest.’

  She smiles. ‘You’re certainly not like some of her other friends.’

  ‘Aye.’

  We sit in uncomfortable silence for a minute or two while I try to think how to start. Sheila speaks first.

  ‘If you’re not a friend of Janine’s, why are you here?’

  It’s a good point and I’m not really sure I can explain that to myself never mind her. I try a half-truth.

  ‘’Cause I’m worried about your Janine. She’s shouting her mouth off round the scheme and she’s going to get herself into trouble.’

  ‘What’s she saying?’

  ‘Did you hear about that body that was found in a house in Trinity?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No.’

  I sigh and think how best to summarise what’s happened. ‘Well, developers smashed through a wall, or something, and found the skeleton of a young lassie. Janine’s been going round and saying it was her cousin and that she was murdered.’

  Sheila’s staring straight down at her tea, and I notice that that cup’s shaking a bit.

  ‘Sheila?’

  She looks up.

  ‘Do you think your niece was murdered?’

  There’s a long pause. She eventually says, ‘I don’t know. But I do know that’s what my sister thought.’

  ‘Why?’

  She sighs. ‘My sister had her kids far too young. She wasn’t even out of her teens, and she wasn’t capable of looking after them properly. Her laddie was completely out of control, always in trouble with the Police, and Shee-Shee…’

  ‘Your niece?’

  She nods. ‘Aye, that was our daft name for her cause when she was little she couldn’t pronounce her own name and that’s what it sounded like when she tried. Anyway, Shee-Shee was a bit wild, always hanging round with the laddies. Not that I’m in any position to criticise anyone else’s parenting, not with the way my Janine turned out.’

  I give an embarrassed nod.

  ‘When she was just into her teens she took up with this laddie Stoddart. The laddie was no looker but he’d plenty cash, which was enough for our Shee-Shee. Anyway, she’d been knocking around with the laddie for about six months, when one night she just doesn’t come home.’

  This story is bringing back some memories for me, and they aren’t memories that I want to confront. I try to focus on what Sheila is saying.

  ‘Mags, my sister, goes round to the Stoddarts’ house to see if she’s there, and the father, Guthrie I think he was called, laughs in her face and says that his son’s not seen that ‘wee tart’ for weeks.’ She stops and takes a drink of her tea.

  ‘Mags knows this isn’t true, and starts shouting the odds, saying she’s going to the Police and that, and Guthrie flips and throws her out. That night I’m round at Mags’ when a man comes to the door.’

  ‘Guthrie?’ I ask. ‘Or was he a young laddie called Bruce?’

  She shakes her head. ‘No, he says his name’s Meikle, and that Guthrie’s sent him to apologise and give us some news about Shee-Shee, and can he come in? We let him in, and as soon as he’s inside he starts laying into Mags, saying all sorts of stuff that’ll happen to her if she goes to the Police. I try to help her and he pulls a knife and starts threatening me as well, saying that he knows I’ve got kids, and he knows where he can find them.’

  I wince. ‘So, you never went to the Polis?’

  She snorts. ‘We never even reported her missing. What could we do?’

  She’s right. If they’d grassed up the Stoddarts they’d all be under the floorboards of Mavisview. ‘Is Mags still in Leith?’

  ‘No. About four years after Shee-Shee disappeared’ - the tea cup’s shaking again - ‘my sister killed herself.’

  I’m not sure whether to say anything but I figure she ought to know.

  ‘The house where the body was found was owned by a member of the Stoddart family.’

  ‘Oh Jesus.’ She spills her tea all over her skirt. I lean forward to help but she pushes me away and goes out of the room. It’s a good ten minutes before she reappears, wearing a different outfit and a forced smile.

  ‘So, it looks li
ke we were right then’ she says.

  I nod. ‘Looks like it. Are you going to go to the Polis?’

  She picks up the picture of her niece and stares at it for a moment, before putting it back on the mantlepiece. ‘No, son. Not after all this time.’

  I’m not sure if that’s the right decision or the wrong decision for her. ‘It might give you, what’s the word, closure?’

  But she shakes her head. ‘No, son.’

  As she’s showing me to the door she stuffs a twenty pound note into my hand and asks me to pass it on to Janine. I wonder if she knows what Janine’s into but she must have read my mind and says, ‘I don’t need to know what she spends it on.’

  And as I leave her lovely wee house, I think of her there with her man and her job, surrounded by her grandbairns, and I wonder if she’s ever known a minute’s peace in her life.

  I’m just closing her garden gate behind me when the door opens again and she calls me back.

  ‘I don’t know if this is any use to you but you might as well take it.’

  She hands me another photograph. ‘It’s the most up-to-date one I have.’

  I take a good long look at the picture.

  I know the face. I thought I would.

  Shee-Shee. Shirley-Anne Jackman.

  1985

  My dad and I weren’t really getting on. The usual teenage stuff – staying out late, drinking too much, smoking. Oh aye, and me being a seething cauldron of hatred, due to him killing my mother off probably didn’t help matters between us either. In five years my dad had never mentioned my mother. Col and I had discussed it, but neither of us has had the nerve to actually confront Dad about what was going on. No wonder Colin found God.

  By the time I was seventeen I had four O-grades, two Highers and an almighty chip on my shoulder. Salt’n’sauce for your grievance, Mr Staines? Oh, I was mad at Dad for everything: my ma, the moving about, you name it. When he came home one day and mentioned a new job in Helensburgh I decided I was out of there.

  ‘I’m not going,’ I said, geared up for a fight.

  Dad nodded. ‘I wasn’t sure if you’d want to.’

  This took the wind out of my sails. I hadn’t entertained the possibility that he was just as fed up of me as I was of him. I immediately felt hard-done-to.

  ‘I know when I’m not welcome.’

  ‘That’s not fair, son.’ He patted his pocket looking for his fags, then he remembered he gave up smoking a couple of weeks ago. I think he got fed up of me stealing them. ‘Everything I’ve done, it’s been for you and your brother.’

  With hindsight, this would have been the time to bring up the issue of my missing mother, but like any seventeen-year-old laddie I wasn’t coping well with the emotional turn the conversation was taking. So I shrugged.

  My father sighed and said, ‘You could go to college.’

  I hadn’t thought of that, but as soon as he said it, it seemed a perfect solution.

  I did some extensive research about my career options, which consisted of me asking Linda McFarlane’s opinion while she lay on her bed leafing through Just Seventeen magazine. She’d undone the top three buttons of her shirt and her tie was hanging loosely round her neck. Every so often she threw her red curls back over her shoulders and when she did that her skirt, which was already two inches shorter than the length approved by St Kentigern’s Academy, rode up further. I reckoned she had two more moves before I could see her pants. It was an image that’s got me through many sleepless nights since.

  ‘What do you think I should study at college, Linda?’

  She looked at me over the top of her magazine.

  ‘Do you want to get rich?’

  I shrugged. ‘Maybe.’

  ‘Or do you want to meet lassies?’

  I didn’t answer that one ’cause I knew it was a trap. To my surprise she went on.

  ‘’Cause if you want to meet lassies…’ She turned her magazine round to face me and pointed to an article The Top Ten Sexiest Professions for Men, ‘here’s your answer.’

  I wasn’t sure that this was the most scientific way to make a decision affecting the rest of my life, but I was intrigued nonetheless.

  ‘What’s at number one?’

  ‘Architect.’

  I could see the glamour in that but I wasn’t going through six years at university just to improve my chances of getting laid.

  ‘And number two?’

  ‘Doctor.’

  Six years at university and you have to deal with sick people. I gestured to her to go on.

  ‘Professional athlete. Right up your street.’

  I threw one of her soft toys at her. Gratifyingly she wriggled to avoid it and revealed another inch of her upper thigh.

  ‘Fireman.’

  ‘Too dangerous.’

  ‘Lawyer.’

  ‘Too much like hard work.’

  ‘Pilot.’

  ‘Don’t you have to be gay to be a pilot?’

  ‘Naw – that’s air stewards. You’ve got to be dead bright but, so that rules you out.’

  I looked for another soft toy to throw at her but she carried on before I could lay my hands on one.

  ‘Musician.’

  ‘I’m not very musical.’

  ‘Model.’

  ‘You definitely need to be gay for that one.’

  ‘Oh aye – that’s all that’s stopping you, Stainsie. Teacher.’

  ‘Away you go – nobody finds teachers sexy.’

  ‘It says so here! Just Seventeen doesn’t lie. Anyway, last one. Chef.’

  Chef. I couldn’t immediately think of a reason why not. Couple of years at college, then a lifetime of lassies falling at your feet, assuming there aren’t any doctors or firemen in the vicinity.

  ‘Aye, a chef would be all right.’

  Linda laughed. ‘You – cooking? You could burn water.’

  ‘Is that right?’ I couldn’t find anything to throw at her so I leapt on to the bed and started tickling her. She was laughing so hard my hand was in her knickers before she could push me off.

  My dad pulled a face when I mentioned the idea of catering college, but he didn’t say no.

  ‘I’ll help you out, you know, financially and that.’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Have you thought where you’ll go? There’s plenty colleges in Glasgow.’

  And I don’t know what made me say it, maybe I knew it was the thing that’d annoy him most, but I said, ‘I was thinking about going back to Edinburgh.’

  He stared at me for a minute. ‘No.’

  ‘You can’t stop me.’

  ‘I’m not paying for you to go back to that place. It’s nothing but bad memories.’

  I was really losing it now. ‘Not for me it isn’t. I’ve got plenty of good memories of living there.’

  But I still couldn’t bring myself to mention my mother. I wanted to ask him if she was still living there, if that was what all this was about but I didn’t have the nerve.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ he said, and walked out. Next time I saw him, he’d got a fag in his mouth.

  But he’d got me over a barrel. Even if I studied part-time and got a job I wasn’t sure that I could afford to go to college without any help from him, not when you factored in renting a room, food, and travel. I was on the point of giving in and getting the bus to Glasgow to get some prospectuses when Florrie rang.

  ‘How are you doing, son?’

  ‘Not bad, Florrie. How are you?’

  There was a slight pause. ‘Not bad, son. Taking it one day at a time.’ It’d been three months now since Grandad died. ‘How’s school?’

  ‘I’m thinking about leaving, Florrie, and going to college.’

  ‘Oh, aye, son. In Glasgow I suppose.’

  ‘I was thinking Edinburgh…’ and I swear I was about to add, ‘but my dad’s not keen,’ when she jumped in.

  ‘Edinburgh! Oh, that would be great, son. Remember I’ve got a spare room here if you ne
ed somewhere to stay.’

  By the time my dad got home from work I’d got an interview arranged with Telford College and my bag half packed.

  It took him a long time to forgive me.

  Friday

  When I get back to Edinburgh I head straight for Shugs to tell Wheezy about my meeting with Mrs Jardine. Before I get a chance to open my mouth he starts talking.

  ‘Some bloke’s been asking about you round the scheme.’

  I close my eyes and hope for the best. ‘Polis?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Wheezy’s playing with a beer mat. He only does that when he’s worried about something, so now I’m seriously fretting as well. He carries on. ‘Anyhow the Polis know who you are and where to find you. Naw, this laddie wasn’t Polis. He was in here about an hour ago. Big chap and handy-looking with it.’

  ‘Aw, Christ.’ All I need is another hard bastard looking for me. ‘Did he say what he wanted?’

  He shakes his head. ‘Naw, but he was flashing his cash about, hinting that he’d see anybody right that could point you out to him.’

  ‘Did anyone help him out?’ Considering how many people gave my name to Danny Jamieson I’d be surprised if there wasn’t a queue of people waiting to cash in, but Wheeze shakes his head again.

  ‘Naw, not with me sitting right there. But I don’t know if anyone else has said anything.’

  This isn’t right. I go out of my way to avoid trouble and it’s still finding me. Some bastard’s bound to tell him where I am when Wheeze isn’t there listening. I wish we still lived in the days when living in a church meant sanctuary.

  ‘Right.’ I’ve had it with Leith. ‘Enough is enough. I’m leaving until all this quietens down.’

  Wheezy throws his beer mat at me. ‘No, you are not. You’re not going anywhere until you’ve put my Marianne in the clear.’

  Sod that. ‘Marianne and you can sort it out yourselves. I’ve done my bit.’

  And I push my chair back and take off, with Wheeze throwing curses at my back.

  I’ve got about fifteen quid left, which is just enough to get me a bus ticket to Glasgow. I’ll drop in on my brother and see if he can put me up for a few nights. It’s not ideal but social embarrassment is better than a kicking any day. With him and his wife being big into religion the chances are they’ll feel obliged to help me out. After all, I’m family.