by Denise Mina
Inside the van the rows of seats were bolted to the floor and the cabin was cut off from the driver by a wooden partition. With the van doors shut firmly behind them, they drove a couple of hundred yards, and then they stopped. The noises were different here, they sounded internal; a water drip echoed loudly, a distant whirr, like an outboard motor, bouncing between walls, amplifying. The six men waited inside the van, nodding pleasantly at one another, smoking and checking their watches. A sharp knock on the side of the van caused the driver to shout something and the man nearest the back opened the doors. They were parked in a hangar. While their luggage from the plane was being handed in, Meehan spotted a fire hydrant on a wall, sitting above a bucket of sand, and he saw that the instructions were in Cyrillic script. He was in Russia.
He had been pacing the small grey cell for ten minutes when a surly female guard of about forty brought in a tray. She had blonde hair and very blue eyes but didn’t look at him as she laid the tray on the bed and turned away quickly, locking him in again. The meal consisted of greasy grey saltfish still in the tin, dry black bread and lemon tea. The fish was inedible but he ate all the bread and drank the bitter tea. The moment he pushed the tray away along the bed the same female guard opened the door and gestured for him to follow her out.
The corridor was low and plain with pipes along the top of the wall. Including his own cell, there were only three doors off the corridor. The guard led him to one end, paused at a big grey steel door and knocked. Metal slid against metal and bolts were pulled into place. The window slid open and a male guard looked them over, checking carefully behind them before opening the door and letting them through. They followed an open staircase down one flight, their footsteps sounding tense and shrill, littering against the concrete. One floor down they stopped at a door, knocked and waited. A smaller, oblong window opened, also metal, and a handsome guard in a smart pale-blue uniform looked out at them. He shut the window abruptly and pulled the heavy metal door open to let them through. When they stepped out of the stairwell they found themselves in what appeared to be a rococo palace. The high-ceilinged hallway was duck blue, trimmed with gilt detailing and white plaster tracery. The floor was a deep mahogany parquet that deepened the noise of their footsteps, making them purposeful and dignified. The woman guard led Paddy across the hallway to a fifteen-foot-high double door flanked by uniformed military guards. She paused outside, pulling her tunic straight, touching her hair.
On her signal the two guards reached across and opened both doors at once like the start of a Hollywood dance sequence. It was a ballroom. The ceiling was painted with gods and women and fat babies, all set in trompe l’oeil gold frames. Three long windows at the far end of the room would have led out into a garden or a balcony but they were blocked out with black-out blinds, disguised behind dirty net curtains.
Facing Meehan in the middle of the room sat a long table with seven people at it, all dressed in mufti, their erect posture and cardboard haircuts making it obvious they were military. To his left-hand side sat three typists at a separate table, two of them young and pretty, the third old and dried up. Rolf and the lieutenant, made small by their surroundings, were perched on seats against the other wall. The young lieutenant was not doing the interpreting this time; he had been replaced by a stocky woman in a belted dress with thin black hair scratched up into a bun the size of a small chocolate. A man with a grey complexion and bushy black eyebrows sat in the middle of the centre table. His head and body were square, like a cube balanced on a larger cube. He had an air of amused authority about him, like a judge with so much power he didn’t need to be intimidating. He drawled loudly in Russian, his deep voice booming around the large room, and the interpreter turned to Meehan.
‘You are invited to sit,’ she said, pointing to a dirty canvas and metal chair.
Meehan sat down. He felt very exposed. He was in the centre of the room, everyone was looking at him, and his chair didn’t have any arms.
The square man nodded at him and spoke for a long moment. The woman said:‘You claim that you have come to give us information on British prisons. You want to help us to free imprisoned comrades in the West. Why would you do this?’
‘I’m a communist myself,’ said Meehan. ‘I’ve had sympathies that way for many years. Since I worked in the Glasgow shipyards.’
She told the important man what he had said and he spoke again, holding Meehan’s eye.
‘Yet you are not a registered member of the party in your country,’ relayed the woman.
‘Aye, well,’ shrugged Meehan, thinking that, actually, that probably did seem strange,‘I’m not much of a joiner.’ When he heard this the man smiled and spoke again, but his smile was forced.
‘If you are motivated by political sympathies,’ said the woman,‘why have you asked us to give you money for this information?’
‘I need a new start in Canada. I have a wife and children.’
The woman translated. The square man nodded and spoke again.
‘He says …’ The woman paused, wondering how to say it. ‘What are we to think of a communist who will not join the party and wants money for doing his duty?’
Meehan smiled weakly. He glanced at Rolf but neither he nor the lieutenant would look at him. They were going to kill him. The square man spoke again.
‘Do not feel threatened,’ the interpreter ordered briskly. ‘We are friendly to you.’
But Meehan felt sick. He thought of Betty and their disappointed children. He wanted to cry or pray, he didn’t know which. The square man leaned forward, looking furious now, and it took Paddy a minute to work out that he was speaking in English.
‘Is ver’ good,’ said the man, slurring as he worked his tongue around unfamiliar open English vowel sounds, ‘Glasgow Rangers– is ver’ good.’
Paddy Connolly Meehan nodded. Whether it was the fear or a loyalty reflex, he felt himself getting hot and said, ‘Glasgow Celtic better.’
The panel looked puzzled for a moment until square man laughed, and then they joined in nervously, glancing from side to side, almost believing at one point that they found it funny because the chain of authority demanded that they did.
Over the following few weeks they asked him over and over about British prison security, made him draw maps of the layout of all the prisons he had been in, and tell them about weaknesses in the window bars and acceptable methods of bribing guards. They presented him with a problem: how to get a two-way radio in to a prisoner who was under constant surveillance. Meehan suggested two identical transistor radios, one with the two-way facility and one without. If they delivered the special one to any other prisoner who wouldn’t be searched thoroughly and had the normal one delivered to the subject, a switch could be effected a few days later by anyone with a pass card. They made him go through the plan over and over again and apply it in detail to the layout of several different prisons.
Three weeks later Rolf and the lieutenant accompanied him back to wherever the hell they had been in the first place. They were in the air before Meehan felt he could relax. He had heard a lot of people come and go from the adjacent cells during the three weeks, heard women keening softly in the night and sobbing men being led away shouting in Russian dialects he didn’t understand, final, desperate words laden with regret– a woman’s name, perhaps, or a place. Meehan knew they wouldn’t be sending him on a plane if they intended to kill him. They would just have popped him there and then.
Rolf took out his old hip flask and gave them a vodka each. They sparked up Meehan’s cigarettes again and drank a toast to Scotland Yard. The young lieutenant looked to Rolf for permission and then he told Meehan that President Kennedy had been assassinated in Dallas a month ago.
II
It was a blindly sunny day and they were standing where half of East Germany wanted to be, on the right side of the wall at Check Point Charlie. Rolf had come too far over, Padd
y could tell by the agitated faces of the East German guards. They wanted to challenge him but couldn’t because of his rank. The British consulate, a small man with a brown trilby and an ill-fitting camel overcoat, was waiting by a large official car with little flags on the bonnet. He stayed ten feet away, avoiding coming over to them, waiting instead for Paddy to come to him, as if communism was contagious. In the car on the way there Rolf had given Meehan a cheque, cashable only in an East German bank. It wasn’t much money in the East, and outside it was worthless. All Meehan had for seventeen months of interrogation was two packets of cigarettes and a bar of chocolate. Two packets of fags and a bar of chocolate and handed back into the hands of the British authorities, who would question him endlessly before sending him straight back to prison to finish his sentence. The communists were sending him back as a carrier pigeon. They had put information his way so consistently he was sure it was wrong. Each of his many East German cell mates carefully passed on the same unsolicited information about guard-changing times and security measures.
They couldn’t drag it out any longer: the guards were getting narked and edging towards them. The time had come to part. Meehan put out his hand and Rolf shook it politely.
‘You are a clever man, Comrade Meehan.’ Two packets of fags and a bar of chocolate. Meehan saw a turn in his eye. He would never have suspected it before and would lie to himself about it for the rest of his life, but for that small moment he knew for certain that Rolf despised him. He thought Meehan was a cheap turncoat prick.
6
Shovelling Food In
1981
I
They could hear the burble of the gathering before they turned the corner to Granny Annie’s. All the lights were on, the front door sat open in welcome and the shadows pressing up against the front window showed how busy it was.
As Paddy came through the front door she dipped her finger into the holy water font hanging on the wall, but Annie had been in hospital for a fortnight and dead a week and the little sponge at the bottom had dried out. The contact left a sour stain on Paddy’s fingertips. She only kept up the habit because it pleased her mother so much when she witnessed it.
Someone’s auntie was doling out the entrance drinks from a table just inside the door, assisted by Paddy’s Gran Meehan, a small woman who had taken an abstinence pledge at the chapel twenty years ago and had neither enjoyed a drink since nor allowed a drink to be enjoyed in her company. The auntie pressed a glass with a smear of whisky into Sean’s hand and an inch of sweet sherry into Paddy’s. Afraid the sherry would interfere with the chemical reaction of the eggs and grapefruit, Paddy sipped, trying to mitigate the damage by not really enjoying it.
Annie had been a strict adherent to pre-Vatican II old-style Voodoo Catholicism, and it showed everywhere in the house. Holy pictures were hanging on every wall above the grab rails, novenas neatly tucked into the corners of toothy school photos of her grandchildren. A romantic plaster statue of St Sebastian, shot through with arrows and wilting in ecstasy, sat under a grimy glass dome on a window sill, and a chipped Child of Prague was on the mantel, tipped at an angle by the silver ten-pence coin placed underneath it, a fetish that would invite prosperity into the house. Apart from superstition, sanctimosity and a general distrust of Protestants, Annie’s only real weakness was the Saturday afternoon wrestling on the television. She had a signed photo of Big Daddy on the wall below the Sacred Heart.
Paddy wasn’t even in the living room proper before the first industrial-sized baking tray of gammon rolls came past her nose. She managed to resist, saying no, thanks, she’d just eaten as the bearer pressed her for the second time. A delicate white hand darted out over her shoulder, taking a roll and giggling a thank you. She turned to see her sister, Mary Ann, biting into the soft bread, her teeth sliding through the salt butter and sweet gammon. She giggled her appreciation, groaned and took another bite, eclipsing her mouth with the rest of the roll, ashamed that she was savouring food so publicly but then laughing again because she liked it. Mary Ann was shy and inarticulate but had made an eloquent language of laughter that required a practised ear. Unobservant people thought her a dolt. Her laughter was contagious: sometimes, as the swell and ebb rolled back and forth between them, Paddy thought that laughing with her sister was the purest form of communication possible.
Mary Ann took another bite, grinning as she chewed, and nodded to the door. Paddy turned to see Trisha and Con Meehan coming through the crowd, holding hands like teenage lovers. Trisha still French-combed her hair up into a high crowned bouffant for formal occasions. Behind her thick glasses her eyes were a beautiful shade of grey, so pale they looked silver in a certain light. Of all the children only Marty had inherited them; everyone else had Connor’s brown eyes. Con had a neat little David Niven moustache on his florid face and the same stocky build as Paddy. He was wearing an inappropriately jaunty dog-tooth jacket.
‘Dad,’ said Paddy, as Mary Ann laughed incredulously, ‘why, in the name of mercy, are you wearing that?’
‘Your mother gave it to me.’
‘He looks very sway,’ said Trisha, brushing an imaginary speck from his lapel.
A man next to them who had been at school with Sean’s dad leaned over to Con. ‘Are you selling nylons?’
The gathered company laughed at the weak joke and Con joined in, not uncomfortable with his position in the pecking order. Mary Ann laughed hard into Paddy’s hair. Their father was a meek man, a gentle little soul, always in the audience laughing at a bigger man’s jokes. They both loved it about him.
‘Well,’ Trisha bristled, small-mouthed and angry as ever, ‘you’re hardly a fashion plate yourself.’ And Con laughed away at that one as well.
II
An hour of small talk with a hundred relatives later and the singers were organizing their turns in the corner of the room. Paddy watched them conspire and wondered why they bothered: each always sang the same song anyway, choosing the one that best suited their voice. Trays of delicious food swayed above the heads and through the room.
Mary Ann was being silently chatted up by John O’Hara, the quietest boy in the parish. They sat close on the settee, ostensibly ignoring each other, backs stiff, each intensely conscious of the other. Mary Ann gave out occasional irrelevant laughing hiccups when tension caused John O’Hara to twitch his arm against her elbow. When Paddy couldn’t stand the silence a moment more she said she needed the loo, pulled her sleeve from Mary Ann’s frantic pinch and wandered off through the crowd.
Sean was in the kitchen doorway, nodding as a red-faced old union official ranted about the recession. The government wouldn’t dare, the old man said, pointing adamantly at Sean’s shoulder; they’d be provoking a national strike and the shipyards were central to the Scottish economy. It would be a catastrophe, he said, a disaster. You don’t remember before the war, you don’t remember what the Tories are really like underneath the consensus. Sean shook his head instead to see if that would mollify the old man. And you young ones, the man warmed to his subject, you don’t care, you don’t see what’s happening. It’s you who’ll pay. He pointed at them each in turn. It’s your generation who’ll end up on the rubbish heap. Paddy and Sean nodded in unison, wishing the old man would be quiet and go away. Having delivered his message and spotted a friend across the room, he did both. ‘Well,’ said Sean,‘that’s me told.’
He smiled down at her and over his shoulder she saw her oldest sister, Caroline, coming through the crowd carrying her baby son on her hip. She looked exhausted. Baby Connor bared his four new nipping teeth at Paddy, raised a hand and shrieked a greeting. A clear bubble formed at his nostril.
Caroline slipped the baby into Paddy’s arms. ‘God, take him off me before I hurt one or both of us.’
‘Where’s John then?’
‘He’s out in the hall somewhere,’ said Caroline. ‘I’ll go and find him.’
Sh
e left the room quickly, stepping lighter now she was alone.
Sean smiled to see Paddy with the fat baby. ‘Suits you.’
‘God, that John’s so lazy. I don’t know why she ever married him,’ said Paddy, pretending to talk about her sister’s marriage but actually sending him a message about theirs. ‘Hold him while I wipe his nose.’
Sean took Baby Connor in his arms, burring his lips against the baby’s face to make him smile, answering Paddy’s worries with unspoken promises. She took a paper napkin and wiped the bubble away, making Baby Con cry. Sean leaned over. ‘D’you fancy Raging Bull at the pictures tomorrow? It’s supposed to be quite good.’
Paddy didn’t particularly want to see a boxing movie but she said she would. She felt mean for giving him into trouble for John’s crimes. ‘Bet your Gran’d be pleased at the size of the crowd.’
Sean nodded and nuzzled his face into her hair, pressing the baby’s fat, powdery cheek against hers. ‘Everyone here’ll be at our engagement party in May. As soon as our name comes up on the council list and we get a house we can start working on getting one of these as well.’
Paddy smiled up at him, scrunching her eyes together so that he couldn’t see what she was thinking.
The baby weighed heavy on her hip and she used the excuse to go and find Caroline and give him back. She managed to lose Sean to the back bedroom where his uncles were singing rebel songs and drinking whisky.
She spent the rest of the night standing in the kitchen next to the oven, smiling at whoever talked to her, pretending to laugh along with the crowd. She forgot about Terry Hewitt and the spite that should have fuelled her and gorged herself on slices of fruit cake and arctic roll, swallowing before she’d finished chewing, shoving food into her mouth to quell the panic.
