by Denise Mina
10
The Eastfield Star
I
The snowflakes were just as heavy as the day before but dissolved where they landed on the wet ground. Paddy tightened her scarf around her head, keeping her hood up, and trudged up the steep hill to the Eastfield Star.
The Meehan family home was on a tiny council estate at the south-eastern tip of Glasgow’s sprawl. The estate had been built for a small community of forty or so miners working the now defunct Cambuslang coal seam. From a central roundabout of houses, the five legs radiated out with six houses on each, some containing four flats, some freestanding with five bedrooms to accommodate large, extended families. Built in the cottage style, the houses had low-fronted gable ends, sloping roofs and small windows. The Meehans lived in Quarry Place, the first prong to the left on the Star. The two-storey house was low and built so close to the soil that every room was slightly damp. Paddy’s mother Trisha had to bleach the skirting in the hall cupboard every three months to get the mould off it. Grey, eyeless silverfish had colonized the bathroom carpet, making a five-second pause necessary between flicking on the light and entering the room, giving them a head start in their slither off to dark places. Theirs wasn’t a large house: Paddy shared a bedroom with Mary Ann, the boys got separate rooms after their sister Caroline’s wedding, and their parents had a room.
Each of the Eastfield houses had a decent amount of land around it, a few feet of front garden and a hundred-foot strip at the back. Mr Anderson on the roundabout grew onions and potatoes and rhubarb and other sour things that children wouldn’t steal to eat, but the rest of the gardens were just scrub land, bald brown grass in the winter and thicker grass through the summer. Wooden fences hung to the side and weeds grew freely between the paving stones. They were only two or three miles from the centre of Glasgow, close to wide open fields and farms, but the families who lived on the Star were city people, workers in heavy industry, and didn’t know how to tend gardens. Most found the persistent encroachment of nature bewildering and a little frightening. A tree had somehow grown at the bottom of the Meehans’ garden. It had started growing before they arrived and they’d mistaken it for a bush until it really took off. No-one knew what kind of tree it was but it got bigger and branchier every year.
Hunched against the falling snow, Paddy walked carefully up the quiet road to her family house, passing the garage, swinging open the garden gate and stumbling over the brick the Beatties from next door kept the garage key under. The free-standing garage was built on the Meehan side of the fence but the Beatties had somehow annexed it over the years, using it to store unused furniture and boxes full of toys and mementoes. Con Meehan had never agreed to let them have it but pretended he had to avoid an argument.
Con’s horror of confrontation had shaped his life more than his choice of wife, more than the city or times he lived in, more than his job at the British Rail engineering works. It was why he had been passed over for promotion all his life, why he never got on in the unions despite being an articulate and politically sincere man, and why he had never once, not even in his heart, questioned the teachings of the Church. Paddy took out her keys and opened the door to the home-smell of wet coats and warm mince. She dipped her finger into the holy water font inside the door and crossed herself before sitting on the bottom stair, unlacing her boots and peeling off her thick tights. She hung them over the banister and tripped through to the living room.
Con was lying on his side on the settee, watching the news, his hands tucked between his knees, still bleary after a pre-tea nap. ‘Hello, hello. How’s you?’
‘Aye, Dad.’ Paddy paused and touched his hair with her fingertips. Demonstrations of affection made her father uncomfortable but she couldn’t always stop herself. ‘Good day.’
‘Good girl.’ He pointed at Mrs Thatcher on the telly. ‘This balloon’s up to no good.’
‘She’s a creep.’
Paddy paused to watch for a moment as the local news came on. The top item was a report about Baby Brian’s body being found. The footage showed a short green bank of land with a tiny square white tent erected on it and a lot of uniformed policemen standing around looking serious.
Paddy opened the door to the small kitchen. Her mum turned and smiled politely. ‘Thank God you’re home safe,’ she said formally, indicating company.
Sean was sitting at the table eating an enormous plate of black mince and nylon-orange turnip. Amazed at himself, he pointed at the plate with his knife. ‘This is my second tea tonight.’
‘He’s been waiting for nearly an hour,’ said Trisha indignantly. Trisha believed that women should wait for men and never the other way around, which was part of the reason Caroline had settled for such a lazy husband. Paddy sat down at the table as her mother spooned white cauliflower soup speckled with black pepper into a bowl and set it down in front of her. ‘If this weather keeps up all the works’ll be off and I’ll be tripping over the lot of you for the next couple of days.’
Paddy commiserated but knew her mother’s lifelong dream was to have five housebound children with voracious appetites. ‘I’ll be going into work anyway.’
Sean reached for a slice of buttered bread from the plate in the middle of the table, stretching his legs as he did so, wrapping his ankles around Paddy’s. She felt a pang of guilt when she saw the grapefruit in a red net bag sitting on the window sill. She decided just this once to enjoy her food. She could start again tomorrow.
Trisha assembled a dinner of mince, mashed potatoes and turnip and put the plate by Paddy’s elbow as she finished off her soup. ‘Take a bit of bread.’ She nodded at the plate of buttered half slices on the table. ‘Ye need to build up your strength after being out in that.’
‘I’m hardly going to fade away, am I?’ said Paddy, glancing at Sean.
Trisha looked at Sean. ‘Oof, you’re not going to start all that rubbish about being fat again, are you?’
‘Mum,’ said Paddy, talking to Sean again,‘I am fat. I just am.’
‘Paddy,’ said Trisha firmly,‘that’s puppy fat. It’ll disappear in a couple of years and you’ll be as slim as the rest of them.’ She turned away quickly, as if she didn’t believe it either.
Sean dipped his bread in the gravy on his plate and looked confused when he noticed Paddy scowling at him. He could have stood up for her at least, she thought.
II
Inside the back door Trisha was cleaning the dishes and putting the kitchen to bed for the night. None of the Meehan family smoked so Paddy and Sean had to stand on the back garden step for Sean to have a cigarette.
They were wrapped up well in scarves and woolly hats, standing shoulder to shoulder under the sheltering lip above the kitchen door, watching the blizzard through half-closed eyes. It was starting to lie. A delicate net of white flakes covered the black ground. Giant flakes hurtled sideways and up, floating into Paddy’s mouth and nose, getting stuck on the underside of her eyelashes and melting into her eyes. Sean lit his cigarette inside his jacket, pinching the filter between his thumb and forefinger, keeping the cigarette safely cupped in the cage of his hand. ‘Sean, I need to tell you something.’
Sean stared at her, the tenderness in his eyes rapidly cooling into fear. ‘What?’ She considered backing out. ‘What?’ he insisted.
She took a deep breath. ‘I saw a photo of the wee boys who killed Brian Wilcox. I think one of them’s Callum Ogilvy.’
He stared at her and blinked. ‘Get tae hell.’
‘It was him. I looked and looked at it. It had his wee teeth and his hair. It’s him.’
‘But the Ogilvys live in Barnhill. Those boys were from Townhead.’
‘No, the baby was from Townhead.’
Puzzled and anxious, Sean searched her face for signs that she was making some sort of bizarre joke. He looked away and took a deep draw on his cigarette.
‘A mob forme
d outside the station where they were being held so they moved them. I saw a photo taken through the window of a police van.’
He wiped his face with a big hand, rubbing it hard across his eyes to wake himself up. ‘How good a picture could it have been?’
‘It was good enough.’She tried to take his hand, watching him calculate the possibilities.
‘That’s stupid.’ He pulled his hand away. ‘We’d have heard. They’d have phoned us, wouldn’t they?’ ‘Would they?’
He considered the possibility and his voice dropped. ‘Did they kill that baby?’
Paddy felt she’d said enough. ‘I don’t know exactly, I just know they’re in custody.’
‘So it might be nothing?’
She lied to make it easy on herself. ‘Might be nothing at all.’ She pressed his hand again.
Satisfied that he had made her back down, he flicked the ash from his cigarette into the pristine white snow. ‘Who did you give me a dizzy for last night?’
She was surprised at his hurt tone and touched his elbow. ‘Ah, no, Sean, I didn’t blow you out, I didn’t. I couldn’t go to the pictures because of work. I got a chance to do something.’
‘So, you just stayed at work alone, did you?’
‘Actually, I went out in the calls car.’ She thought back over Mr Taylor’s living room and the moment in the alley when she waved to the policeman in the bright kitchen window.
‘Yeah, see?’ said Sean, suddenly caustic. ‘I wouldn’t actually know what a“calls car” is because I don’t work there.’
‘It’s just a car that drives around and goes to the police stations and the hospitals to pick up stories. It’s got a radio in it.’ He didn’t seem very interested so she tried to be more specific. ‘We went to a gang fight where this guy had jumped out of a window and before that to a house where this guy killed himself to upset his girlfriend. Can ye imagine that?’ He didn’t answer. ‘The story was in the paper today, just a few lines, but being there … it was …’ She wanted to say fascinating, that it was exhilarating, that she could do that every night for the rest of her life, but she curbed it. ‘Interesting.’
‘That’s disgusting.’ He took a sulky draw on his cigarette. He sounded so mean she didn’t know what to say. She looked away down the snowy garden. It was like this between them more and more now. They were all right with other people there, then they’d hold hands and feel close and wish they were alone, but as soon as they were, they’d bicker.
‘It was an interesting night.’ She leaned out beyond the shelter, into the slowing blizzard. ‘I wasn’t supposed to go but I asked and they said it was all right.’
‘You’re so ambitious,’ Sean said reprovingly.
‘No, I’m not,’ Paddy snapped back.
‘Yes, you are.’
‘I’m not that ambitious.’
He took a drag on his cigarette. ‘You’re the most ambitious person I know. You’d cut me in half for a leg up.’
‘Piss off.’
He twitched a bitter little smile. ‘You know it’s true.’
‘I might be ambitious but I’m not ruthless. That’s a different thing.’
‘Oh, now you are ambitious?’
‘I’m not ruthless.’ Paddy petulantly kicked snow off the step. ‘I’ve never done anything for you to say that about me.’
They stood on the step looking out, each silently continuing the argument.
‘Why can’t you be content to rub along like the rest of us?’ He sounded so reasonable.
‘I’m just interested in my job. Is that wrong?’ She understood why it made him angry: Sean wanted them to stay in the same place near the same people for the rest of their lives, and her ambitions threatened that. Sometimes she wondered if he was going out with her, a dumpy girl half as attractive as himself, because he could count on her to be grateful and stay.
‘And you’re competitive,’ he said, as if confessing his own flaws reluctantly. ‘I am not.’
‘Ye are, everyone knows you are. You’re competitive, and to be honest,’ he added, dropping his voice to a confidential mutter,‘it frightens me.’
‘For Godsake, Sean—’
‘If it was a choice between me and your job, which would you choose?’
‘Bloody hell, will ye drop it?’
He threw his cigarette into the garden, to the spot where he always threw his cigarettes. Underneath the snow Paddy knew there were roll-up dog ends from last year’s long hot summer, when they had both just left school and clung to each other. She’d just started at the Daily News and didn’t know if she would be able to hack it. Over that was another layer of ash and filters from the rainy autumn when Sean had started work and had a bit of money for real fags. And over them were the Christmas cigarette ends, when they’d sat on the step in the dark with a blanket over their knees and cuddled together; where Sean proposed after lunch on Boxing Day. All that closeness had evaporated since they’d got engaged and Paddy couldn’t understand where it had gone.
Sean kept his eyes on the lonely thin tree at the end of the garden. ‘I worry that you’re gonnae leave me.’
‘Oh, I’m not gonnae leave ye, Sean.’ Paddy fumbled for his hand, callused and swollen from hard work, and lifted it to her mouth. She kissed the well of his palm as hard as she could. ‘Seanie, you’re my sweetheart.’
He cupped his free hand around her cheek and they looked at each other sadly.
‘You are,’ she said adamantly, not sure who she was trying to convince. ‘You’re my dear, dear Sean and I’ll never leave you.’ But even as she said it she was wishing it were true. Her throat was aching. ‘Come upstairs with me and we’ll have a winch, eh?’
He looked at his feet. She kissed his hand again. ‘Sean, I shouldn’t have said that about the boy, I don’t know what I saw. Come up with me.’
She tugged his sleeve encouragingly, opening the back door, afraid to let go of Sean in case he disappeared off into the snow for ever. She held on tight and pulled him through the door, leading him into the warm.
III
The bedroom door was blocked by a large wardrobe so that the room had to be entered sideways. Beyond it were two single beds with a narrow aisle in between. At the foot of each bed sat a set of drawers where the girls displayed their most prized possessions. Paddy had a jar of clear green Country Born hair gel next to all the crap Sean had bought her: a bottle of Yardley perfume; a ridiculous neck ruffle to attach to her clothes for an instant New Romantic look; a little model of two teddy bears wrestling each other, wearing capes cut out of J-cloths and silver electrical wire belts Sean had made during an idle morning at work. Mary Ann kept her eye shadows on top of her chest of drawers, set out in little troops of blues and greens and pinks. She had a lone black one that Paddy bought her for her birthday and she sat it at the front, next to the chewy blue eyeliner pencil she always used.
Paddy had a poster of the Undertones above her bed. It was the first picture she had ever seen that mirrored her own life: a lot of cheaply dressed, ill-nourished people squashed into a small living room with a picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall. Mary Ann preferred pictures of dewy-eyed heart-throbs: Terry Hall and sad-eyed Patrick Duffy looked down on her side of the room.
With seven adults smashing around the place there was very little privacy in the Meehan household. To make it worse, Paddy and Mary Ann’s bedroom door was first at the top of the stairs so anyone coming up could hear what was going on. Invariably, when Paddy and Sean got into heavy winching someone would come up and interrupt them, but tonight everyone was out and Trisha and Con were downstairs watching a never-to-be-repeated programme about the miraculous visions at Medjugorje. They were as close to alone as they had ever been.
‘I’m the Man’ dropped down the record player spindle as Paddy sat down next to Sean on the bed. She didn’t want to lose him. She wa
nted to make a great, reckless, beautiful gesture to bind them together so that he couldn’t slip out of her life while her attention was elsewhere.
They sat on her bed and kissed softly. She put her hand on his chest, pressing lightly, urging him to lie back. ‘No, Paddy,’ he murmured. ‘Your folks might come in.’ She smiled as she kissed him and pressed again, catching him off balance, toppling him back a little.
‘No,’ he said sharply, slapping her hand away, bouncing back to vertical.
He started kissing her again, not expecting her to mind being so bluntly corrected. But she did mind. Hiding her annoyance, Paddy let her hand rest on his thigh until he was comfortable with it, kissing him gently, rubbing her nose on his cheek and very slowly stroking up his thigh. He flinched, so she slowly moved her hand back to his knee, keeping it there until he was comfortable before moving it again. She reached the seam of his crotch. ‘Don’t,’ he said, letting her continue. ‘Don’t.’ He was very hard, she could feel it through his trousers, and she liked that she could do that to him. Groaning, Sean yanked her hand away and crab-walked his legs around the edge of the bed away from her. He was panting. She reached out for his arm but he slapped her away. ‘No.’
He was bent over and she didn’t really know why. She didn’t understand the geography of men’s genitals. She’d seen a cross-section in a biology text book. The teacher refused to teach the module on religious grounds because it contained information about contraception. She told them which page of the text book it was on, as if they needed to be told, and gave them an hour to read through it in silence. Paddy knew that everything was arranged differently when men weren’t naked, cut in half and perfectly side-on.
‘You shouldn’t do that,’ he whispered.
‘Why?’
‘I might not be able to stop myself.’
‘Do you have to stop yourself?’ He didn’t answer. ‘Maybe I can’t stop myself either.’
He smirked and went back to nursing himself. ‘We agreed to wait. What if your mum came in?’
