Chasing Angels

by Meg Henderson

  It didn’t do to dwell on it, Kathy decided. If you thought about it too deeply it might drive you mad. Better to keep your emotions locked away inside yourself, and your feelings beside them. It didn’t help to think about the barred windows, the terror of the dying and the thoughts that ran through their minds as they looked out to safety only feet away. Sometimes, if she wasn’t on her guard, she would find herself wondering what went through Lily’s mind as she fought for her life. Did she think of Peter, or Con, Aggie even? Did she send a last frantic message to her, and if she did, why had she been unaware of it? How could she have been unaware as Lily died? How was it possible that she didn’t feel something? She had been painting in the school Art Room, happy, enjoying herself, while Lily was dying. How could that be? Then she’d catch up with her mind, drag it back and lock it up again. Art became a trigger, though, all thoughts of Art reminded her of Lily’s dying. One of her greatest escapes from life at Moncur Street had been to visit the Art Galleries near Kelvin Hall, where she would wander round the vast, usually quiet rooms, the squeaking of her shoes on the polished floors the only sound, lost in the canvases, and sometimes there would be an exhibition at the McLellan Galleries in Sauchiehall Street. She was always careful to keep her interest in Art to herself, barely mentioning her Gallery jaunts even to Harry, and never mentioning them to Jamie, because she knew he would think it odd. Had the word got round it would’ve given Aggie in particular ammunition against her, but even in the wider community where she lived, an artistic bent would’ve been regarded as deeply suspicious. Lily’s death put an end to all that anyway. All Art became inextricably linked to that day, so she never visited the Galleries again, and she never painted again either. Reminders were dangerous; they prompted thinking, which brought feelings to the surface, and what use was that?

  Neither was it of any use to those who died or those who mourned them that questions were asked about the fire in the House of Commons, or that Scottish Secretary Willie Ross was called on to make a statement in the House about Glasgow’s worst fire disaster. What did all the speeches by the civic leaders achieve, when the dead remained dead? After the James Watt Street fire there was public outrage about the lack of safety in warehouses like Stern’s, and bars were removed from similar buildings later, but that was no consolation either, because it had come later. It was always later. Nothing ever happened before innocent people needlessly died, only after the event, only ever later, and it was no use then, because Lily was dead. Kathy finally had to accept that. Lily wasn’t lost in a backstreet, Lily was dead. They wouldn’t let her see her mother’s body once it had finally been identified, but even without that proof she knew that had Lily been alive she would have come home.

  They buried her in St Kentigern’s, the Catholic burial ground in Springburn, beside Con’s mother and his sisters. Father McCabe had even worked a flanker by doing the full business at her funeral and seeing her off as the Catholic she wasn’t, because Lily had no time for any religion. Con was in fine form; becoming a widower, especially in such public circumstances, was the pinnacle of his suffering, and his dramatic acting skills raised Lily’s funeral to a theatrical event. He cut a splendidly tragic figure and he knew it; this was the performance all his previous smaller roles had been leading up to. Kathy had wanted to stop it, but she couldn’t summon the energy; it was all too difficult. She was floating somewhere, detached, not part of it, and so it would continue for years afterwards. She was fifteen years old and her mother was gone, so what did anything matter any longer, least of all how Con was behaving? What sobs he conjured up, whatever words were chanted over her, wherever they buried her and how, one thing was sure: Lily wasn’t coming back. The funeral had been like being in a fog, with only the occasional thing getting through. There was the constant flash of cameras, but she couldn’t have cared less about the press, they simply didn’t matter. She had argued briefly with Aggie over Peter’s non-appearance, a touch of normality there at least. When it came to the part of the service for taking Communion Father McCabe had glared directly at her, willing her to walk out and receive the Eucharist, and she’d defiantly stared back at him and remained in her seat. Jessie in her ‘fuck me’ shoes, her face buried in a handkerchief; shades of things to come, had she only but known it. Harry smiling sadly at her, telling her he was sorry with his beautiful blue eyes, his sister Claire looking blankly, and Jamie standing stiffly to the side, characteristically unable to express anything, because Jamie didn’t do emotion. And Aggie, dry-eyed as her first-born was laid to rest at the age of forty-two. No mother should have been that composed at outliving her child. She knew then what she had always suspected, that Aggie had never really liked Lily, though it would take her a few years more to find out why. None of it felt real, though, and next day she fully expected to see Lily again. It was as though in her mind she thought, ‘Right, that’s that over. Now I wonder when Lily’s coming home?’ And even all these years later, locked away in her mind, fifteen-year-old Kathy Kelly was still waiting.

  The only possession of Lily’s retrieved from the fire was a charred scrap of material from the coat she had been wearing that November morning, identifiable only by the cheap heather brooch Kathy had bought for her in Fort William two years before. And, of course, there was the bright red satin box from Cockney Jock’s stall, that would’ve been her birthday present from her daughter on the Tuesday Lily never saw. For years it lay untouched, still in its brown paper wrapping, inside a big, tan, papier-mâché suitcase under her bed. But Kathy didn’t have the box or the brooch any longer, she had given them to someone long ago.

  4

  It had taken everyone at school a while to get back to normal after Lily’s death. The other girls would talk quietly as she passed and look at her from the corners of their eyes, but it was meant kindly; they were treating her with kid gloves. She noticed it, but like everything else, it didn’t matter. She dropped Art, much to her teacher’s annoyance. Art, like home economics and shorthand and typing, was usually given to the idiots, to fill the gaps in their timetables left when they were withdrawn from more academic subjects, but Kathy was actually good at it. ‘But why, Kathy?’ the Art teacher asked. ‘You’re good at Art, and you enjoy it so much. Why would you drop it just like that?’ Kathy shrugged. ‘Because I want to,’ she replied. ‘I never really liked it anyway.’ The teacher didn’t understand and there was no way Kathy could explain, not that she wanted to. What no one seemed to realise was that there was no purpose to anything any longer, not to Art, not to life. They had been such a close partnership; Lily and Kathy against Old Con, against Aggie, against the world. Not only had it ended, but it had done so without a proper, neat ending, without a finale. It remained in Kathy’s life like a loose tie and, having no idea how to deal with it and proceed, she didn’t. Old Con had settled in to his role as a very public widower with ease, the general air of sympathy being translated into as many free drinks as even he could manage. Having had no marriage for many years, if ever, his only need was to be looked after, and Kathy had already been doing that for years along with Lily anyway. Only now she was alone.

  When she was sixteen she left Our Lady and St Francis. The Careers Officer had got her an interview for a job with William Hodge, a printing firm in the centre of the city. He had looked at her previous school record, noted her artistic ability and decided this was just what she was looking for. She wasn’t looking for anything as it happened, she was going with the flow. She entered Hodge’s through the impressive frontage in Frederick Street, all glass and polished marble, to be interviewed by Mrs Smith, a woman of indeterminate age that the teenage Kathy had mentally classified as ‘old’. Mrs Smith had very black, very neat hair and thick glasses with rhinestone-studded frames that swept up out-rageously at the corners. She spoke sweetly and quietly. There was room for career advancement with the firm, she said, for the right sort of girl, and an interest in Art was essential, because the high-quality work was of a demanding nature. The s
tarting wage would be £3 1/11d per week. When Kathy started she discovered that Mrs Smith was in fact Miss Smith, the married title having been awarded to deflect attention from the fact that she was a bitter spinster. If it had been intended as an honour it had achieved the opposite, and when the other women said her name you could hear the quiet sarcasm in their voices. It was, to their shame, their only sign of rebellion against her unnecessary harassment of them. Mrs Smith hated women who were married, and perhaps hated those who still had a chance of marrying more than those who already had. Despite her sweetness at the interview, it was very clear from the first morning that she had Kathy Kelly in her sights. There would be no more entering through the Frederick Street portals, from now on she would arrive for work at the business end, the dingy back door in John Street; she wasn’t a visitor now, she quickly realised, she was a worthless drone. The job involved sitting at a long table in a cramped, dull workroom from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. with ten or twelve other women. Requests to visit the toilet were carefully considered by Mrs Smith, and permission was often refused for no reason other than her mood. Kathy was amazed to see that the women accepted these arbitrary refusals calmly and without protest. There were no tea breaks, and the half-hour allowed for lunch was spent at the worktable eating sandwiches, or, as in Kathy’s case, standing outside, whatever the weather, to escape what was inside. The artistic skills required were put to good use assembling calendars, the mainstay of the firm’s production. There were four different pictures that had to be first glued on to cardboard. One was of an idyllic farmhouse set beside a sparkling clean yard, despite flocks of hens and ducks running around in brilliant sunshine, another showed a country cottage set in a garden overflowing with flowers in full pastel bloom. The last but one was a portrait of a pink-crinolined lady, wearing a wide straw hat tied under her perfect chin with broad pink ribbons, and carrying a basket of roses and, finally, two white Highland terriers wearing stupid grins and tartan bonnets. Pots of thick, brown glue sat in the middle of the table, and the revolting smell hung heavy in the air. Mrs Smith checked the levels in the pots regularly, glaring at the women as she passed, and any request for a fresh supply from a stone flagon kept in the corner was greeted with abuse. What were they doing with it? Did they think the firm was made of money? It would come out of their wages, and not just the one asking for more, but all of them would be penalised for making free with the glue. The stink of the stuff was everywhere, the smell attached itself to their clothing and hair and irritated their eyes and nasal passages, and after the first hour she spent in the place Kathy had a headache. At the end of the table the pictures were glued to their backings and passed down to another group, who glued on two pieces of ribbon at the centre on the back, and finally they were passed down to where Kathy sat, ready to glue the small calendar booklet precisely to the ribbons, so that it hung below the picture. She could see immediately where the art came into the procedure, and as for career advancement, that consisted of the possibility of moving up the table, from glueing on the calendar to glueing on the ribbons, and perhaps in twenty years’ time she might reach the pinnacle and be trusted to glue the pictures to pieces of cardboard. But not if Mrs Smith could help it she wouldn’t. Five hundred of these works of art had to be completed each day, though God alone knew where five hundred people with sufficiently bad taste were to be found willing to buy them, and Mrs Smith took great delight in harrying the new girl into, she hoped, some form of abasement. The other women whispered to her not to cry, that Mrs Smith was an old bitch, and just to ignore her, but Kathy was completely unconcerned, she’d dealt with worse in her time. Day after day they sat there together, either talking or not as they worked, depending on Mrs Smith’s humour at any given moment, sticking things on to other things. If talking had been allowed that day they would try to brighten the tedium with the odd short burst of conversation, which Mrs Smith took pleasure in slapping down after a couple of sentences as her mood altered. They talked of the professional wrestling on TV, of what bad buggers that Mick McManus and Jackie Pallo were, and how somebody should give them a doing. Once, to relieve the boredom, Kathy interrupted in an aggrieved tone of voice to say that Mick McManus was her favourite uncle, and she objected to him being called a bad bugger. This was greeted with silence. Sometimes, to vary the conversation, they talked of what they had on their sandwiches, or what they might have tomorrow, but regardless of the topic of permitted conversation, Mrs Smith, her mean little face twisted with bitterness, kept on at Kathy. The others told her it would stop when another girl arrived, then Mrs Smith’s malevolent attention would pass to her instead. They had all gone through it, they said, and Kathy was amazed that they hadn’t left years ago, or that they were all so easily browbeaten that not one voice had ever been raised in support of each new girl.

  The end came one Monday morning, when faced with another pile of artistic calendars, an exciting new range showing spaniels wearing outsized glasses this time, Kathy knew she couldn’t stand another day there. She had taken her coat off, Mrs Smith snapping at her heels the minute she walked in the door, and then she had moved to her stool. She looked at the waiting pile of rubbish, then at the others, women who had spent their entire working lives in this room, doing the same worthless tasks, being verbally abused by the old biddy who had never snared a man and hated them all because they had or might. She turned again and put on her coat without a word.

  ‘Where dae ye think you’re goin’, lady?’ Mrs Smith demanded.

  ‘Ah’m off, Miss Smith,’ Kathy replied calmly.

  Mrs Smith bounded across the workroom and grabbed her by the arm, propelling her back to her stool. ‘You’ll sit oan your arse!’ she shouted.

  Kathy said nothing. Leaning forward she lifted a pot of thick, brown glue from the table, turned to where Mrs Smith was still holding her by the arm, and slowly poured the glue over her head. There wasn’t a movement or a sound in the room as the women watched the glue coating Mrs Smith’s carefully coiffed hair, then run over her glasses to her face before dripping down her cardigan in thick, brown stripes. Then an intake of breath broke the silence, closely followed by Mrs Smith’s screams of rage. Her hands flew to her perfect hair, which lifted off her head; she had been wearing a wig. Kathy wondered in a detached way if there was anything real about the woman; would she claw at her now two-tone cardigan and blouse to reveal a robot underneath? Mrs Smith lifted a pair of scissors from the workbench and came at her, screeching like a banshee, but Kathy sidestepped the assault and neatly put her foot out, tripping her, so that she landed in a heap on the floor and lay yelling on her back. Before she could get up again, Kathy put her foot on top of the older woman’s stomach and pressed hard enough to discourage her. ‘If you know whit’s good for ye, ye’ll stay there, ya miserable auld bitch!’ she said very quietly. She reached for another pot of glue. ‘Wan move, wan merr noise oota ye, an’ ye’ll be drinkin’ this!’ She moved the pot menacingly in the direction of Mrs Smith’s mouth, and smiled as it was promptly shut. ‘Right, fine,’ she said brightly, smiling at the other women, all of them standing back, their eyes wide with shock. ‘Ah’ll be off now,’ she said conversationally. ‘Y’know, if wan o’ youse lot had had the guts tae take her oan years ago, ye wouldnae have hadtae put up wi’ a’ this –’ she threw her arms wide to take in the workroom and Mrs Smith, the glue pot still in her hand, and the glue from the pot flew out, landing in a long, lazy arc against the wall, ‘a’ this shite! Ye should think black burnin’ shame o’ yersel’s that she’s been treatin’ ye a’ like this, ye deserve everythin’ ye got, every wanno ye!’ And with that she removed her foot from Mrs Smith’s stomach, carefully replaced the glue pot on the table, and walked out, never to return.

  At the Employment Exchange the following day she was asked why she had left Hodge’s. She said the smell of glue made her sick and was immediately sent after a job in Wilson’s chemist’s shop in Govan, across from Fairfield’s shipyard, which she got. The staff were all female
, apart from the two pharmacists, a pleasant man of about sixty, Mr Liddell, whom she liked, and another in his thirties, Mr Dewar, who regarded himself as a cut above everyone else. The women were addressed by their Christian names regardless of age, while the two pharmacists were ‘Mr Liddell’ and ‘Mr Dewar’ to the women, and Desmond and Nigel to each other. Mr Liddell was very tall and slim, with what was left of his white hair carefully slicked down with Brylcreem, which he bought every week with his staff discount. Looking up at him from below, as everyone had to, there was an illusion of his body gradually tapering to a point, with the sheen of the Brylcreem adding to the way the light reflected off his shiny bald head beyond. A little way short of that he had horn-rimmed, half-moon specs perched on a long sharp nose, with a little bump at the end that seemed to have been put there specifically to keep his glasses in place. He wore a white coat at all times and was polite but distant, and he gave the impression of being a man serving out his last few years before retirement, keeping his head down and putting in the time, all the while discreetly itching to be gone to the little boat he kept off Largs and sailed whenever he had a free moment. It was his idea that Kathy should become a trainee dispenser in the little pharmacy, filling prescriptions that then had to be checked by whichever pharmacist was on duty. She was aware that Nigel Dewar checked everything she did with what seemed like undue thoroughness, and she felt slightly uneasy with him. He moved around the pharmacy and the outer shop with a kind of deliberate energy, as though now that he was here, everything would work as it should. He was a small man with a ferretlike face, receding mousy hair and a wispy goatee beard and moustache, and he had a liking for wearing corduroy; he seemed to have trousers and jackets in every colour. Everything about him seemed to have been carefully and precisely worked out to convey some picture of perfection he held in his mind of what a wonderfully offbeat character he was, from his velvet waistcoats, his collection of bow ties, the ever-present desert boots, and the contrived way what was left of his hair was carefully arranged to fall over his brow. For some reason he thought it added to his self-constructed eccentricity that he drove an elderly red BMW that was forever breaking down and was his pride and joy. Pompous, that was the description of him that came most easily to mind, and she disliked him on the spot. She noticed the way he always seemed to undermine Mr Liddell in very subtle ways, and his almost imperceptible impatience with the older man, even in front of others. He didn’t ever say anything out loud, but he treated Mr Liddell with an exaggerated deference that the older man didn’t seek, somehow calculated to give the impression that he did.