‘It’s not every day your big brother dies.’ Joe brought the bottle into his chest and cradled it there like it was something beyond precious. ‘So, a wee drink the day after his funeral is only to be expected. In fact, some would suggest I would be a callous human being if I didn’t get rat-arsed, down-in-the-gutter drunk.’
Paula looked at the bottle. It was a Tanquerey Number 10. She stepped back and he moved inside.
They hugged, her head on his shoulder, the skin of her forehead warmed by the heat of his neck and chin.
‘Why’s it so bloody hard, Paula?’ he asked, and she could feel the deep rumble of his voice against her cheek. His arms round her back felt so solid, she didn’t want to move.
Eventually, he took a step back. With false cheer he said, ‘This gin isn’t going to drink itself you know.’
‘Does it go with croissants?’ asked Paula, trying to give him a smile.
‘What?’
‘Must be almost noon and I still haven’t had my breakfast.’
‘And?’ As if having breakfast on a day like this made any sense.
Paula gave up any effort at an explanation, and instead said, ‘Long story.’ She walked back to the kitchen.
Once there she turned to him. ‘You know where the balcony is. Give me a chance to have a quick shower. I’ll meet you there in ten minutes.’
The shower did little to wash the fatigue from her muscles or the fog from her mind, but it did make her feel a little more human to have cleaned up and put on clothes. She chose one of Thomas’s black t-shirts, which almost reached her knees, and a pair of bright-pink leggings. It was only when she was pulling the Lycra over her toes and it caught on a ragged nail that she noted the colour and wondered if it was inappropriate. She decided she didn’t much care and with an extra note of defiance used an equally pink scrunchy to hold her wet hair in a ponytail. Pushing her feet into a pair of white trainers she joined Joe on the balcony.
When they’d first moved in, they’d had the kitchen extended, and the balcony created by the flat roof was accessed from a landing halfway up the stairs. The kitchen was slick and elegant, but the balcony became her favourite part of the house. Particularly when Thomas got working with his plants.
It held a small glass table with four seats on one side, and the other half was occupied by a pair of loungers and a large patio umbrella. At every corner was a cluster of three plants – some sort of miniature palm trees and ferns, Paula presumed, suddenly aware that she’d never bothered to ask.
Joe was reclining on a lounger when she stepped outside, and he’d positioned the bottle of gin, two glasses, a bucket of ice and a large bottle of tonic on a table.
Poor Joe, thought Paula as she sized up the scene. She had to remind herself she wasn’t the only one who was grieving here. She surveyed him stretched out in front of her. He looked as if he was settling in for the rest of the day.
She really wasn’t sure she wanted anyone’s company for a whole afternoon. But she took a moment to steel herself and then unscrewed the bottle.
Joe groaned as he got to his feet, moved over to the table, then groaned again as he sat down. ‘Good Lord,’ he said. ‘I feel like I’m about ninety.’
Paula examined his face. Even with the grey pallor of grief and fatigue he was still a handsome man. ‘You don’t look it,’ she said.
He reached out for his glass and took a long sip. ‘Bless you, Paula. You will surely get through the gates of heaven.’
Paula took a seat. ‘Thanks.’ She took a sip from her glass. ‘But will Thomas?’ She regretted the flippancy of the words as soon as they left her mouth.
Joe looked up from the table. ‘What does that mean?’
She tutted. ‘Just ignore me, Joe.’ Paula sat back in her chair and crumpled into a slouch. ‘I’ve just been hearing some stuff that has made me wonder what I knew about my husband.’
‘What have you been hearing?’ Joe had assumed his priest expression now.
‘Oh, nothing.’ She thought it might be best to the change the subject. ‘You okay, Father Joe?’ she asked.
He stared into the distance. His eyes glazed with grief. His expression that of someone who found himself seriously wanting. The grey in his expression lifted as if by huge effort. ‘I was so envious of Thomas when he brought you home. I remember it like it was yesterday. I had just turned fourteen and in walked this goddess.’
‘Please…’ interrupted Paula. ‘I was a spotty sixteen, frightened to look out from behind my fringe and certain that my backside was the size of…’ she stopped. The well of energy required to finish the attempt at a joke was dry.
‘And that’s what was so attractive about you. All this beauty and you weren’t aware of it.’ He smiled as if it cost it him to do so, and his eyes grew distant as if a display of scenes were scrolling across his memory. ‘Thomas was so nervous when he brought you home.’
‘He was not.’ Paula murmured her disbelief.
‘He most definitely was. I remember him talking about you long into the night.’
Bill, Thomas and Joe shared a bedroom in their youth. Bill, being the elder, had a single bed pushed against one wall and Thomas and Joe shared a set of bunks, with Thomas on the top.
‘He was crazy about you. You know that, don’t you?’ Joe was suddenly serious. His eyes were focussed on hers and his tone sharp – certainty in his voice. ‘You really were the only one for him. Whatever…’ he waved his right hand in the air ‘…nonsense you heard, you were the love of his life, Paula.’
‘Oh, Joe.’ Paula reached out a hand and placed it on top of his. A sob escaped her throat. She cried softly for a few seconds and then wiped the tears from her face with the back of her other hand. ‘I’m so … so bloody angry,’ she said. ‘A heart attack? He was a fit man. Well, for his age and for someone who lived in this part of the world. But still, a heart attack? It just doesn’t add up.’
‘There has been heart disease in the family,’ Joe replied. ‘That’s what killed our dad, remember?’
‘And as for being the love of his life…’ Paula was only half listening to what Joe said. ‘We could have been better to each other.’
‘Show me a married couple and I’ll show you a relationship that occasionally fractures,’ said Joe. ‘Besides, sadly, we tend to save the worst of ourselves for the people who mean the most.’
‘True,’ said Paula. She took a sip from her drink. ‘You honestly never missed being in a couple?’
‘Nope. Never. What you never had you can’t miss. Besides, being important to a whole congregation of people has been a compensation.’ He mused over this statement. Looked as if he didn’t quite like the nuance. ‘That sounds a bit egotistical.’
‘I think I know what you mean. My role in life was to be part of a pair. And in the main, it worked.’ Hadn’t it? She thought of their last row. The night before he died. It was over something and nothing. She’d taken his words and twisted them. Turned a petty statement into a major crisis. What happy couple did that?
Joe looked at her as if he was about to say something. Thought more of it and took another drink.
‘What?’ asked Paula.
‘You were more than just his wife, Paula.’
She tried to make sense of the jumble in her head. A wife. Was that really what she was? Was that all? Nearly three decades and she had nothing to show for it but a marriage and a death certificate?
‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she said. ‘I enjoyed being his wife. I enjoyed having this lovely man by my side … and when Thomas focussed on you it was like you were the only person in the world.’ She ran out of the energy to speak and looked out across the Glasgow skyline as if she might find peace there.
‘Why did he have to die?’ she asked Joe after several minutes of silence. ‘I feel so guilty, you know? I could have been a better wife. Neither of us handled Christopher’s death well.’
Joe had assumed his professional, confessor expression again.
&nb
sp; ‘How daft is that? The one person who can understand your loss the most and it pushes you further away from him.’ Then she reined herself in. This wasn’t all about her. Joe was grieving as well.
‘Thomas took Christopher’s death hard,’ said Joe, nodding.
Paula noted that their glasses were now drained, so she offered to pour them both another.
As the ice clinked into the glasses she asked, ‘What’s your earliest memory of him?’
‘Playing football. What else? This is Glasgow. Bill didn’t want me trailing around after them, but Tommy was great. I was never a bother to him.’
‘I guess that explains why you were closer to him than to Bill,’ Paula said as she pushed Joe’s glass across the table.
‘That and the fact that Bill can be a bit of an idiot.’
She thought about Joe’s relationships with his brothers. And that between Bill and Thomas. As far back as she could remember there had been some form of competition between the two of them, and as far as she was aware, Thomas always won.
‘Thomas and Bill,’ she said. ‘When did it start – that need to best each other?’
Joe paused with his drink almost at his lips, and looked over the rim towards Paula as he answered. ‘Goodness, I’m not sure. It feels as if that pattern was set up even before I was born.’
‘Did it ever turn nasty?’
‘Once … that I’m aware of.’ And Joe’s expression betrayed the fact he was back in the past. ‘A football match. Well, a wee kickaround in the park with a bunch of pals, really. I was in goal…’ he smiled ‘… because I was rubbish. Thomas scored with an overhead kick. An absolute beauty. All the other guys were crowding round him, praising him, and the look on Bill’s face – I’ll never forget it. He was so jealous. Five minutes later they both went for the ball, even though they were on the same side. Bill went in far too fast and far too heavy. Broke Thomas’s ankle.’
Paula gasped. ‘Really?’
‘But Thomas even turned that into a win.’ Joe smiled faintly. ‘He got his stooky signed by half the players at Partick Thistle.’ Joe held his glass up in a toast to Thomas. Then he tapped his fingertips on his glass. ‘It’s as if Bill took the very worst traits of my parents and ran with them.’ His expression slumped. ‘And Tommy took the best.’
‘You’re talking to his wife, Joe. There’s no need to sanitise his memory. I know he wasn’t a saint.’
‘He was a good man, Paula. One of the very best.’
Paula looked into his eyes, considered what the note said and read a ‘but’ in there. ‘What do you know, Joe? What was Thomas up to?’
Joe looked away from her, to the sky and the huge, dark clouds sailing towards them. There was conflict in his eyes and an uncertainty.
‘Tell me Joe. What do you know?’
He looked at her and forced a smile. But she saw sadness, a weight that was all but crushing him.
6
‘Mum?’ Cara Connolly shouted as she walked in the door of her mother’s flat, a one-bedroom on the second floor of a tenement building that had seen better days, just two minutes’ walk from Pollokbrae Baths. The whole area had seen better days, a deterioration that was not helped by the growth of slum landlords. Entire families, mostly immigrants and refugees, being housed in one room, with poor ventilation, ineffective heating and dangerous wiring, was depressingly common.
The newspapers were full of articles saying that the council were going to get tough on the landlords. But Cara would believe it when she saw it.
Stretching along the street, the ground-floor apartments were all shops. But there were none of the artisan coffee establishments offering sourdough bread and quinoa that had sprung up in the more gentrified areas of the city. These were mostly charity shops, pound shops, betting shops and tatty pubs, all with signage in primary colours. The sign over the shop just to the right of the entrance to her mother’s building had bright-red lettering with a fluorescent yellow background, and the window was full of hand-written notices offering cigarettes and beer at ‘knockdown’ prices.
As she walked into the passageway that led to the stairs and her mother’s flat, Cara looked up at the building, and saw dirty windows, satellite dishes, and large-leafed plants growing out of the cracks in the stained masonry. Inside the close, as she approached the stairs, she could see that it was cleaner than the last time she visited. Mum must have got the neighbours organised. But the plaster was still cracked in the corners, and a pipe was leaking just above the back door, creating a large, foul-smelling puddle they’d all have to negotiate when going out into the back green to hang out their washing.
Inside her mother’s flat, the picture improved. Everything was second-hand, but it was all scrupulously clean – a result of her mother’s favourite pastime. And there she was, on her knees in the kitchen, scrubbing brush in hand as if she was trying to work off the pattern in the linoleum.
‘You’ll not get it any cleaner, Maw.’
Helen Connolly looked up and gave Cara a half-smile. ‘There’s nobody will say I’ve got a mucky house, doll.’
‘Aye, cos it’s cleaner than a nun’s wimple.’
Her mother narrowed her eyes. ‘Is that something rude? Cos I’ll no’ have a daughter o’ mine using nasty words.’
Cara rolled her eyes. This was all part of her mother’s rehabilitation. Since she’d come off the various substances that had haunted most of her adult life she’d also taken to cleaning up her use of language. As if using more socially acceptable words would help her to sustain the habit of better behaviour.
Helen slowly and carefully got to her feet as if she was dutifully bearing a hundred-kilogram weight on her shoulders – her conscience, thought Cara. She groaned and steadied herself against the side of the fridge with one hand while she rubbed at both knees with the other. ‘Old age doesn’t come itself, doll, neither it does.’ She looked at Cara and beamed, displaying a misshapen row of brown and yellow teeth. ‘Lovely to see you, Cara. To what do I owe this pleasure?’
Cara assessed her mother’s face and tone for sarcasm. She couldn’t help herself. When her mother was on drugs she was the passive-aggressive queen, and Cara, prior to the last 398 days always anticipated a response of that flavour. To find that her mum had turned into this caring, pleasant, cleaning machine was a constant and welcome surprise. And her being clean for that number of days was a major achievement.
‘Your hair’s lovely. You had it done?’ Cara asked.
It wasn’t really. It was cropped close to her skull apart from a wiry brush at the top, and dyed a harsh blonde that made her mother’s bony face look even paler. But still, she was continuing to make an effort and that in itself deserved praise.
Helen raised a hand to the side of her head and patted it, obviously pleased that her daughter noticed. ‘You don’t think it’s too short? Mrs McGarrity thinks it’s too short.’
‘It’s lovely.’ And overtaken with a rush of tenderness Cara leaned forwards and kissed the papery veined skin of her mother’s cheek.
‘Oh, don’t be doing that.’ Helen stepped back, waving her arms in the air. She was still struggling to get used to being hugged. Though, judging by how pink her face had turned, she was delighted.
As Helen lowered her hands, one sleeve remained rucked up and Cara could see the scars on the inside of her mother’s arm. They were long healed, Cara remembered angry raised skin, seeping with infection.
Reading her daughter’s look, Helen hastily pulled the fabric down. ‘Cup of tea? How about I make us a cup of tea?’
‘A glass of water will do, thanks,’ Cara said, in the vain hope that her mum would take a seat and relax.
‘Nonsense. I’ll no’ have it said that my daughter came to my house and didn’t even get a cup of tea. Go through to the front room and I’ll get it sorted.’ With that she shooed Cara out of the kitchen.
Cara always left her mother’s house exhausted. She knew the constant activity was how her mother coped. F
or most of her life it had been drugs, but now it was the bustle and busyness of the everyday. Cara knew she cleaned for a couple of her elderly neighbours and didn’t take a penny for it. ‘Keeps the demons at bay, doll,’ she had offered one day in a rare moment of honesty. The past was firmly in the past and nothing good would come from digging through it. That was the belief Helen had learned at the knee of her grandmother.
In the front room, which was really at the back of the building, Cara walked over to the window and looked down on what was optimistically called The Back Green. It did have grass, once upon a time, but now the communal garden space was nothing more than a communal dump. Empty beer cans, gaudily coloured plastic bags, and cigarette butts were everywhere, and Cara counted two mattresses, half a child’s cot, three wheel-less bikes, a car battery and a black, inside-out golf umbrella.
‘Please don’t start,’ Helen entered the room carrying a tray. ‘I spoke to a woman at the council and they’re sending a man round.’ It was a common argument between them. Cara asserted that no one should have to look out on that mess, and threatened to call the council. Her mother, terrified that someone at the council offices would take against her always replied that a man was coming out.
Still, it had been worse. Cara had come to visit three months ago to find her mother out the back cleaning a lump of human faeces off Mrs Kelly’s windowsill on the ground floor. ‘I heard the toilet was blocked on the top floor,’ her mother had explained with an apologetic look. ‘They’ve been on to the landlord and he’ll not do nothing. An’ the council says it’s not their job.’
‘For crying out loud. You can’t be living somewhere where folk throw their shite out of the window. This isn’t the sixteenth century for Christ’s sake.’
Furious that her mother had to perform such a task, and feeling weirdly culpable, Cara got on to environmental health, the police, the local newspaper and local radio station, and something was done. As a result Helen became sure she was a marked woman. ‘Folk are different to me now, doll,’ she’d said. ‘So next time let us sort it out in our own way, eh?’
After He Died Page 4
