Redemption Road

by Lisa Ballantyne

  ‘Does it hurt?’

  ‘You’re pulling my hair.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I like my long hair,’ she whined.

  ‘You know the great thing about hair?’ he said as he worked. She shook her head and he tutted at her because of the movement, but she kept still and so he answered, ‘It always grows back. Hair’s the easiest thing in your life to change. Hair’s your chance to change without doing anything drastic, and why would anyone not want to change if they could?’

  She looked up at him, brows raised quizzically.

  When he was finished, he put the knife away and spun her around to inspect her. He lifted up her chin. Shorn, he could see the shape of her face better. It was the shape of her mother’s face: high cheekbones and a pointed chin.

  ‘You look great,’ he said, smiling at her. ‘Do you wanna see?’

  She nodded and he led her around the car to the side mirror, which he twisted towards her. She peered into it, smoothing the hair over her forehead.

  ‘I look like a boy.’

  George leaned down to peer into the mirror beside her. He wanted her to look like a boy, and he planned to buy her an outfit tomorrow to complete the look. The police didn’t know who they were looking for, but they were looking for a tall man with a seven-year-old girl.

  ‘I don’t think you look like a boy. I think you look cool. I think you look like a dark-haired Annie Lennox.’

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘A cool lady with very short hair.’

  Moll looked back to the mirror and turned her head this way and that. ‘I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m ugly anyway.’

  ‘Hey,’ said George, sitting down in the back seat, taking her by the wrist and dragging her gently into the space between his long legs. ‘You mustn’t say that.’

  ‘It’s true. I have a weird eye and I’m…’

  George pulled her into him and spoke close to her ear. ‘Nothing about you is weird or ugly, do you hear me? You’re my wee lassie.’

  She looked up at him. Her hair was spiky, uneven and longer along the back of her neck and George thought she looked like an otter, although he would never have told her. ‘You’re cool, and you’re strong, and I think you look great. You’re just the way I always knew you would be… I used to imagine meeting you. Did you ever think about me? About what I would be like?’

  Moll considered for a moment, then nodded.

  ‘What did you think I’d be like?’

  ‘Taller.’

  ‘I’m six foot three!’

  ‘I thought you’d be taller, and thinner, more like my dad.’

  ‘I’m taller than your new Dad. I saw him; I’m sure.’

  ‘But you’re not thinner.’

  ‘Not many men are.’

  She was leaning against his thigh, looking at her thumbnail, making a teardrop shape with her forefinger and thumb. He put his arm around her.

  ‘You’re better than I ever imagined. I mean it. I told your mum when you were born I always wanted a wee girl, and I did. I didn’t want for you to be taken away from me. I asked your mother to marry me, you know, twice. Did she ever tell you that?’

  Moll shook her head, not looking at him.

  ‘I got her a diamond ring and everything. I still have it.’ George reached into the pocket of his jacket and opened the box. Moll stroked the diamond with her forefinger. ‘I asked her once in front of her parents, and a second time I got down on my knee in a park in Glasgow. That’s pretty romantic, don’t you think?’

  She nodded again, and bit down on a yawn. He snapped the ring box shut and glanced at his watch. It was nearly nine.

  He spread the travelling rug across the back seat and told her that she could lie down. He told her to take off her school jumper and use it as a pillow. When she was lying down, he took off her shoes and laid them at her side, noticing how long and thin her feet were. He shook off his jacket and covered her. He closed the doors, then reached into the front seat for his lighter and packet of Benson and Hedges.

  He smoked a cigarette, leaning against the car and wondering what would happen now. As a child, his sister had told him that the way to succeed was to surrender. ‘Just do what they say,’ she had counselled him, referring to their older siblings, their father or the nuns, but George had not been able. His sister’s sympathy for him had waned as he was repeatedly belted by the nuns, beaten by their father and taunted and exploited by their brothers. In the end, even Patricia had turned against him. George’s inability to listen to her had confounded him.

  In the McLaughlin family he took his share, but being the youngest and his mother’s favourite he had seemed able to coast below the main violence, although his mother had never been able to protect him fully. Nevertheless, he remembered the day when his sister gave up counselling him, his father broke his spirit and he decided to run away one day where no one would ever know him; somewhere no one would recognise his face or know the family he had belonged to. He had decided to start a new family, to raise children who loved him. Even now, it was this that George wished more than anything else: he wanted someone to love who would not kick him in the teeth. The money in the boot had never been an end in itself to George. It was his escape, nothing else.

  George used his wrists to pick up his lunch box and started to walk home. His hands were swollen from a belting Sister Agatha had given him because he had been unable to write with his right hand. He was seven years old and had been punished from the beginning at school, because of his left-handedness, but this year Sister Agatha had taken it on herself to cure him of the bad habit. George walked with his head down, feeling his knees cold beneath his grey school shorts.

  The brief space between home and school was usually when George felt most comfortable. The hours between three thirty and five were always his happiest. He would play football among the tenements, or he and the other boys would tease the girls who were playing peever, drawn roughly on the pavement with stones.

  Sometimes the girls would chant at him:

  ‘Georgie Porgie, Puddin’ Pie,

  Kissed the girls and made them cry,

  When the boys came out to play

  Georgie Porgie ran away. ’

  George would mimic a dance as the girls sang, and then, as they finished, he would rush in and upset one of them. Sometimes he would steal a bow from a ponytail, or lift up a skirt, or take their skipping rope and run off with it.

  Arriving at school and coming home were always the worst points of the day. He hated being at home, the dread of his father’s return, and then the hours when his father was there, when George felt as if he were holding his breath, as if he might explode. Every act required so much concentration and it was only a matter of time before George let go, and drew attention to himself.

  But then, he hated school too: the nuns, like black jellyfish floating around the classroom, ready to sting him at a moment’s notice.

  Now George struggled with the lock to the close door, the key awkward in his purpled hands. He dropped his lunch box in the hall, but managed to pick it up and take it into the kitchen, where his mother was staring into the fire, smoking.

  He sniffed and she turned to him.

  ‘There’s a loaf there, take a slice with a pickled egg.’

  His mother pickled her own eggs, which were kept in a pail at the bottom of the wardrobe. He used to love touching them with his forefinger, ducking their cold bald scalps and smelling the acrid vinegar from his fingertips.

  But today his hands had been beaten into gloves. He knew he was unable even to cut himself a slice of bread, let alone eat a slippery egg.

  ‘I’m all right.’

  ‘What d’ya mean?’ said his mother, turning. ‘You’re always half starved.’

  George stood at the door, sniffing. His nose was running and he licked it with the tip of his tongue.

  ‘Do you want me to do it for you?’ she said, exhaling and casting her cigarette into the fire. There was
an opened pack of Woodbines on the table.

  George sniffed again and his mother got to her feet. The kitchen smelled of stewed beef and turnip and he knew that they would have mince for their tea. She was in a kitchen overall, her arms blanched white as she took the knife and cut him a piece of bread.

  Most of his friends’ mothers had strong arms and fat, pink fingers. His own mother was thin and small and when she cut through the loaf the sinews showed on her lower arm. George was not sure why, but her thinness always made him feel sad.

  She put the slice of bread on to a plate and passed it to him. He kept his hands at his side.

  ‘Are you handless?’ she said, holding the plate in mid-air.

  ‘I got belted,’ he said finally.

  His mother put the plate on the table and turned over each of his palms. ‘That’s a bloody disgrace. How many times?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘Twenty-six! What on earth for?’

  ‘Writing wrong.’

  His mother pursed her lips. Today was the worst belting he had had at school, but George knew that it counted as a small injury at home.

  She took his palms in hers and raised them to her lips. ‘Kiss it better, shall I?’

  He still couldn’t eat the bread or grasp an egg from the pail, but he felt better when her warm, thin lips touched his bruised palms.

  Sometimes his mother was days in her room after Brendan had been at her. George wouldn’t hear her or see her, yet would be told to empty the basin of bloodied water. So much of his relationship with his mother was physical, unspoken: a kiss, fingers through his hair, a bowl of bloodied water. Neither of them ever needed to say a word.

  George took a seat at the table. ‘Tell me about when you lived with your granny.’

  His mother smiled and lit another cigarette and settled back in her chair, staring at the fire. She had told him the story so many times, but only when they were alone. She would whisper to him when he was in bed at night, or when he had been younger she had sat him on her knee and rocked him.

  ‘When I lived with my granny,’ his mother began, ‘that was when I remember being happy. She lived in a cottage by the sea close to Penzance, in Cornwall, near Land’s End, right at the bottom of the country, far away from everything. The cottage was all on one floor, no stairs, and there was no electricity and no running water, and the old place smelled of peat and the ocean. It was so cold in the winter that your hands would swell up until the fires were lit. There was a well out the back and sometimes my granny would ask me to get a pail of water and I was a wee skinny thing but I would carry it with two hands back to her, and then she would make breakfast: porridge and hot tea and sometimes eggs or a kipper…’

  ‘Tell me about the oil lamps,’ said George.

  ‘Well, there was no electricity in the house and so when it got dark, my granny would light the candles. But she had a big oil lamp that she would carry around the house and light my way to bed. I loved the smell of it and the golden light that came out of it. When I was tucked up in bed I was always warm, with a crocheted blanket on top that my granny had made herself. Some of the patches were made of the softest wool and I would stroke those patches while she sat in the light of the oil lamp and sang to me.’

  ‘Tell me about the morning.’

  ‘In the morning, we would get up at daybreak, just after the cockerel crowed, and we would light the fires and clean the house, and we would listen to the waves crashing on to the shore, and we would decide what to do with our day after the work was done. Sometimes we would knit or crochet, or sometimes we would look for stones on the beach, and if the weather was bad we would just sit by the fire and tell stories…’

  George closed his eyes. He could imagine the whole cottage almost as if the memory was his own. His mother had lived there until her grandmother died, and then she had come to Glasgow to live with an aunt and find work, and it was then that she had met his father. But it was only the Cornwall piece of the story that George liked to hear. In his mind, the cottage was heaven: peaceful, distant, safe.

  He was smiling at the bread on his plate, when his brothers and sister burst into the room, tearing into the bread and butter and trading insults like marbles. His mother put her ashtray away and started to prepare dinner. She never tended to the others as she tended to George. She didn’t ask them about their day, or cut them a slice of bread, or tell them to help themselves from the pail of pickled eggs in the bedroom.

  ‘Patricia, will you do my maths homework for me?’ said George, pushing the bread to the side of his plate and lowering his mouth to take a bite.

  ‘What’ll you give me?’

  ‘A big smile,’ said George, giving her one anyway. He had more than maths homework to do, but the teachers would think he had done his own maths. He couldn’t ask anyone to do his other homework, as his ugly, backward letters were too distinctive. There was talk of him being held back a year or put in a class just for idiots.

  ‘If you do everything I say from now till bedtime, I might help you out,’ said Patricia, leaning back in the chair and looking down at him as she ate her bread. Patricia looked like her mother, but she was similar to their father in that she enjoyed power and control. George looked like his father, so everyone said; he couldn’t see it himself, but his character was unlike him in every respect.

  ‘Awright,’ agreed George.

  ‘Kneel down on the floor to eat your bread.’

  George leaned forward on to the plate to take a bite then got down on to the floor as his sister requested.

  ‘Eat your bread down there. Take it in your hands and eat down there.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said George, laughing, showing her his palms.

  ‘Wow. How many did you get?’

  ‘Twenty-six.’

  ‘That’s unheard of,’ said Patricia, raising her voice to her mother, who was stirring mince. ‘Wouldn’t you say, for the primary, like?’

  Their mother sighed and nodded.

  ‘Well, just stay down there. I can feed you.’ Patricia swiped his piece of bread and then forced a piece into his mouth, so that George had to twist away.

  ‘You’re my little puppy dog.’

  George crossed his legs and accepted it. He liked his sister best and he needed his maths homework done.

  The McLaughlins owned two flats side by side on the second floor of a tenement on the Shettleston Road. They had two bathrooms and two kitchens and four bedrooms, but one of the kitchens was unused. Each of the children was carefully conditioned to know the sound of their father’s footfall on the stairs. Brendan did not follow regular patterns, so there was no particular time to expect him. Often he came home for dinner, but sometimes he did not. When his father was not yet home, George felt that his whole body, every inch of his skin, was listening for the sound of his hard heels against the stone steps.

  While George and his sister were fooling around, everyone heard Brendan’s footsteps.

  ‘Get up off the floor and sit down at the table,’ said his mother, but George was already getting up, using his stomach muscles as it was too painful to press his palms against the floor.

  His brothers, who had been fighting underneath the pulley – mock-stabbing each other below the drying sheets – stopped without being asked and sat down at the table. Patricia, with her sharp mouth, was silent. She got up and began to set the table, taking extra care over her father’s place setting, seeing that the cutlery lined up and the glass was clean.