by Ron Butlin
The afternoon heat rose from the paving stones. A small child bumped into her, then ran off into the crowd of shoppers. She passed a comforting hand over her stomach.
Just as when her train had been approaching the city, she again heard the rhythm of its wheels rattling over the tracks: Somewhere to stay Somewhere to stay Somewhere to stay . . .
But first, she thought, somewhere to eat.
With luck, she might have missed the lunchtime rush. Suitcase in hand, she hurried along Princes Street, heading to Mackie’s Buttery.
So, it seemed, was everyone else.
The place was mobbed. Overcrowded. Packed. Heaving. Queue right to the door.
And hot. Hot. Hot.
Quarter of an hour later, she and her tray with its corned-beef sandwich and pot of tea had found a small round table set in a crowd of other small round tables over by the window. Having put her suitcase down beside her, she stared out at the Gardens, then up at the Castle. The Black Douglas and his men, shields tied to their backs, had actually climbed up the rock face to capture it, or was that Stirling Castle? The little she’d learnt about Scottish history when she was at school – Bruce and the spider, William Wallace being betrayed and beheaded, and then Mary Queen of Scots – was from such a long time ago. As she understood it, nothing much else had happened during the next five hundred years, except down in England. She kept meaning to read a Scottish history book, if there was such a thing. She couldn’t remember ever hearing of —
‘These seats taken?’
She shook her head. ‘No, please — ’
Three people sat down and took over her table. Mr and Mrs Bicker and little Miss Bicker.
From the start Mr Bicker was on the defence:
The choice was his, no? He’d given up the fags, but the cigarette coupons were still his. Weren’t they?
Mrs Bicker said she needed shoes for work. Last year’s had been soled and heeled twice – the soles and heels were now all there was. First drop of rain and she might as well go barefoot.
No one’s asking you to go —
Do you want me to go barefoot?
It’s not a question of —
So you do want me to go barefoot? Soled and heeled twice, I’m telling you. First drop of rain and I might as well go barefoot. And as for Annie’s shoes . . .
Mrs Bicker kept at it.
Meanwhile Young Annie Bicker sat and stared, watching every single mouthful as Maggie finished her sandwich.
Only a few sips of tea remained.
Having remained politely silent so far, Young Annie now spoke up: ‘You got any, missus?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Coupons for sweeties. I like sweeties.’
‘No, I’m sorry I can’t help. A real shame if you’re — ’
But Young Annie had already turned away.
Maggie finished her tea and mumbled a goodbye as she stood up. She grabbed her suitcase that was now wedged between Mr Bicker’s chair and her own. She jerked it free. No one paid any attention. She might as well have been invisible.
Leaving the Bickers to each other was surely a good start to the rest of the day.
Somewhere to stay Somewhere to stay Somewhere to stay . . .
She was crossing Princes Street intending to buy an Evening News from the paper seller at the top of the steps leading down to the Gardens when —
newhaven was written at the front of the tram.
Next moment she found herself sitting downstairs in her favourite seat behind the driver, her suitcase stowed under the stairs. She was certain her parents would slam the door in her face, but, then again, they might not. They’d had time to cool down, to think better about things and about her. It would be different. There was surely more to the world than a corridor running between Stornoway and Edinburgh, a corridor with a slammed-shut door at either end? Yet here she was, going down its spiteful length once more as if she couldn’t help herself. But Newhaven was her home. She’d been born there. She’d gone up and down the same front steps every day for the last thirty years near enough. Ten thousand times up and down. This would make it her ten thousandth and first time – and it was going to be different.
If she changed her mind, she could get off at any stop. Any stop at all.
The tram trundled along Princes Street towards the East End, past the Waverley Market and the North British Hotel before sweeping left down into Leith Street, past Fairley’s Ballroom where the squaddies and sailors still battled out the war with each other, not that she’d ever be going there again. Then past the Playhouse cinema where the organist on his platform rose up through the floor to play during the interval, past tree-lined Elm Row and into Leith Walk proper. Yes, this was her city. Here, at least, she knew she belonged.
The best way of not getting the front door slammed in her face . . . was to walk straight in.
Through the vestibule door’s stippled glass she could see the familiar hall, the hat stand, the curved hall-table against the wall with the oval mirror above, the grandfather clock, the staircase going up to the bedrooms.
From the sitting room straight across came the sounds of a football match on the radio. Her father would be in his armchair, following every kick of the game. Her mother would be in there, too, reading the Scotsman or knitting.
Ever so slowly Maggie inched open the vestibule door and stepped into the main hall. She took her time easing the snib back into place, making sure there was no tell-tale click.
She was now inside. She was back home.
So far so good.
She put down her suitcase at the bottom of the stairs.
The measured tick . . . tick . . . tick of the grandfather clock, the faint sounds of the football match, the smell of the freshly polished floor – this was her home on a Saturday afternoon.
A last-minute check in the hall mirror. The light was poor. A quick comb through her hair and giving it a pat. Some fresh lipstick? But what if she smeared? She didn’t need a wounded-looking mouth, a crazed and begging-looking mouth. What she wanted was a war-mouth, a blood-red snarl of a mouth, to show her parents she was no longer their dutiful daughter, no longer their little girl with no life of her own and no plans for her future but theirs. She’d be a mother herself by the end of the year. Like it or not, she was their equal.
She snap-shut her lipstick, pocketed it, then marched firmly across the parquet floor. Grasping the handle, she took a deep breath and threw open the sitting-room door, stepping into the comfortable predictability of her parents’ Saturday afternoon.
Her mother looked up, startled. Knitting needles click-clicking, click-clicking, click-clicking, click —
Her father’s faraway gaze was suddenly bewildered, no longer at the Easter Road stadium but not yet back in his own sitting-room, and with his cup of tea arrested just a few inches from his lips . . .
Not a word. Not a movement. The pair of them freeze-framed in shock. The radio commentary continued: Ormond’s crossed high into the box, Turnbull’s there and Laurie Reilly . . .
She crossed the room to take up position on the fireside rug.
‘Hello.’ She didn’t smile. Didn’t step forward to hold out her hand. Didn’t make as if she was about to embrace them.
In her unbuttoned coat with the belt hanging loose, she looked like someone who’d just stepped in for a flying visit, someone with a life of their own outside the confines of home and family, someone who decided for herself when she’d arrive and when she’d leave.
She glanced at each of them in turn.
The crowd was cheering, chanting, there was the whirring-ratchet clatter of football rattles.
Her mother? A deeper sag to her shoulders and to her mouth.
Her father? His eyes refusing to meet hers, the fingers of his left hand picking at the armrest of his chair, his half-raised cup of tea
now in real danger of spilling. His unaccustomed awkwardness, his uncertainty. His gathering anger.
This was not the man who’d pushed her in the Victoria Park swings every Saturday morning, always so careful to use both hands to keep her safe, taking a step backwards and hauling the wooden seat up to his fullest stretch. ‘Higher, Daddy! Higher!’ She’d squealed with pleasure as he sent her hurtling forward, her back arched and legs thrust out in front. Arcing upwards and upwards, soaring into the open sky . . .
Her father: ‘That’s them ahead now, Muriel, 3-2.’
Her mother: click, clickety-click, clickety-click . . . (tugging at the length of wool to release a few more coils from the ball at her feet). ‘Who’s playing again?’
‘The Hibees, of course. Against Third Lanark. The Thirds drew with Rangers last season – one more goal and they’d have won us the League for the second year running. But this is just a friendly.’
‘Are they not always friendly?’
‘Ach, Muriel, you need to take more interest.’
She stepped forward until she was almost touching the knitting needles.
‘It’s me, Mother.’
Without seeming to notice her own daughter standing in front of her, the older woman turned away and stooped to unhank her line of wool from where the ball had rolled under her seat. That done, she resumed knitting, keeping her head bent over her needles like a conscientious schoolgirl learning a new pattern. Fingering the individual stitches along the length of the needle, she counted them out under her breath. Eight, nine, ten . . .
Maggie stared down at the uneven parting in the grey hair, a near-white dandruff-flecked line. As a little girl, she used to watch her mother check her appearance every morning in the hall mirror. Such grown-up neatness was part of an adult world she herself looked forward to belonging to one day. After a last few dabs of face powder the small puff-pad would be replaced in its sleek round tin with the mirror set inside the lid, then, returning to the large oval looking-glass, her mother would angle her head this way and that to check herself first in profile and then full on. Chin on chest and comb in hand, she’d lean forward to inspect the top of her head and smooth out any remaining loose strands, laying them to the right or left of her precisely combed parting.
‘But no one sees through your hat, Mum,’ Maggie had said to her once.
God does, little one – and so do other women.
The parting she could see now, unprotected either by a hat or stray curls, jerked in abrupt lunges across the exposed skin like a piece of badly done stitchwork, a clumsy suturing of the thinning scalp. Her mother seemed suddenly much older. Her father too. As if they’d been fast-forwarded from their mid-fifties straight into premature old age, missing out the years in between.
‘Mum?’ It was all she could do to stop herself placing a hand on her mother’s head and letting it rest there.
‘But then I’d no want you ever coming along tae an actual game, Muriel. Fitba terraces are no place for a woman. Nae toilets for a start, less ye fancy joining us in the line, splashing up against the wall!’
‘Colin! How can you? Really, you are the very limit sometimes.’
Her mother’s shoulders had started to tremble. The light grey knitwork shook in her hands like an unfinished sail billowing in a sea-breeze, except there was no wind and no sailing boat – only an old woman’s distress.
‘I’m standing here, Mother. Right in front of you.’ How hard it was to resist reaching down to take the hands that had begun to shake, to force them to lay aside their knitting; and to make her mother look at her.
Her father got to his feet, crossed over to the radio and turned up the volume:
. . . can hold their lead for the last two minutes. what a front line. the famous five they’ve started calling them. smith, johnstone, reilly . . .
Almost cringing under the too-loud commentary now booming around the room, her mother seemed to shrink in her seat, dwindling further into old age.
Her father sat down again.
the hibs supporters can hardly believe what’s happened. keep this up and next year the league and cup double might . . .
She faced each of them in turn: ‘Mother? Father?’
. . . the famous five leading the march to victory. the whole of easter road’s yelling for the referee to blow his . . .
Clenching her hands at her sides, gritting her teeth.
Wanting to march across to the radio and switch it off.
Wanting to rip the knitting out of her mother’s hands and yell: look at me. mother! look at me!
Wanting to pick up her father’s tea from the small side-table and throw it in his face . . .
Upstairs, her bedroom was in near-darkness, the curtains pulled shut. No pictures on the walls. No books on the shelves. The mattress stripped. Empty fire grate. Cleared of all her ornaments and knicknacks, her dressing table had been polished to a hard shine. When she opened the wardrobe, the hangers made a wooden-sounding clack as they knocked against each other.
As a teenager she’d taken to tilting the dressing-table mirror this way and that, when checking her appearance. The instant she saw a hint of attractiveness in the sweep of her hair, in her practised smile and the elegance of her unclenched hands, she’d been ready to leave. Where else could she have found the courage to go out and face the world?
And now?
Was this really her reflection? There was no courage here, nor any sign of it – not in these wounded eyes, these clumsy hands, this slack hair.
Come on, Maggie, come on, she urged the woman in the mirror.
Like the room itself, had she, too, been emptied out, stripped bare? Her reflection half-raised a hand as if about to offer comfort, only to let it drop again. Then it clenched a fist, clenched and clenched until Maggie felt the fingernails digging into her palms.
Her parents. Her own parents. Within minutes of her confessing what had happened to her, they’d told her to leave the house and never come back. They’d shouted at her and yelled. When she collapsed weeping on the couch, they’d simply got up and walked out the room. Later, in the hall, she’d found her suitcase packed and waiting. They’d ordered her to go, to go now. Pushed her into the vestibule. Pushed and pushed her onto the front step, onto the street. Locked the front door.
She glared at the woman in the mirror – why hadn’t she made a scene? Why hadn’t she rung the bell, punched and kicked the door? Screamed abuse at them?
Her voice hardly above a whisper but charged with cold, cold fury: how could she have let herself be treated like that? Her whole life . . . like she’d never been born? She heard herself curse the house, curse it to a bombed-out rubble of shattered doorways and gaping windows. Curse her parents trapped in the shut-in self-righteousness of their sitting room.
Clump-clump-clumping back down the stairs as loudly as she could. Clump-clump-clump! Maggie came to a stop in the hall. Hesitating. The sitting-room door had been closed again – their chilling contempt beginning to freeze around her.
Behind her, the grandfather clock’s relentless tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . continued to fill the house. Tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . measuring out endurance to the lifeless furniture, to the carpets, doors, corridors, the staircase . . . and to her parents barricaded behind their silence.
Then, and without stopping to think what she was doing, she went straight up to the grandfather clock and its hateful tick . . . tick . . . tick . . .
She opened its front case.
She reached in.
tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . ti —
No one paid any attention as Maggie laboured across to the very edge of Newhaven harbour. No one glanced over to see her stand her suitcase on the quayside, then pause for a moment, taking time to gaze down into the sunlit water that rippled-and-broke, rippled-and-broke almost soundlessly against the thick woode
n posts.
No one watched her as she pulled back her arm, took aim – then hurled the pendulum as far and as high as she possibly could. Up into the air it rose, glittering as it arced briefly in the afternoon sun, suspended motionless for an instant before falling straight down into the blue-green depths.
There was hardly a splash.
A wonderful moment, and Maggie savoured it. She gave herself a really big smile. As she stood there on the quayside she imagined the dead stillness now filling her parents’ house, and pictured the pendulum sinking ever more deeply into the harbour’s muddy ooze, its hateful tick . . . tick . . . tick . . . choked at last to a permanent silence.
She returned to Princes Street, getting off at the stop between the Scott Monument and the Galleries. It took her so long to pull her suitcase out from below the stairs that she had to struggle through the press of passengers already crowding to get on:
‘Out the way, please . . . Please, I’m trying to get off . . . Out of the way . . .’
Then she was down. Once off the tram her suitcase seemed suddenly much heavier than before and she could manage only the clumsiest stumble-steps. Having reached the end of the platform she hesitated, not daring to leave the safety of the tram stop, the one small island of calm in the middle of the rushing street. The city centre was crowded, every department store and shop sure to be packed. Jenners, Fraser’s, J&R Allen’s, Patrick Thomson’s, British Home Stores – the Saturday afternoon shoppers seemed to have melded together into one sweltering mass of summer frocks, hats, handbags, shopping bags and children squeezing in and out of doorways, jostling on the pavements, cramming themselves even more tightly together at junctions while waiting to cross.
The ground beneath shook with the rumble of tram after tram; overhead cables sparked their electric hiss-and-spit; bells dinged warnings to the men and women swarming across the rails. The heat was pounding at her. A few minutes to pull herself together and she’d be all right. Maybe a rest on one of the benches along the stretch of pavement in front of Princes Street Gardens?
