by Denise Mina
Mass was conducted by her hairy-nosed confessor. He spoke throughout in the priestly four-step, a punctuation free method of delivery that bleached all interest and meaning from his words:
And now we see
That God so loved
The world that he
Gave his only begotten
Son for our sins
Suddenly Miss Stenhouse was in the aisle conducting the children with her fingers, bringing a boy and a girl out of each side to walk up to the altar rail and kneel down. Paddy followed the finger, clip-clopping up to the rail in her white sandals, and knelt on the velvet cushion.
Father Brogan approached, flanked by the altar boys. She was glad he would be there. She hoped he’d get scars on his neck. An altar boy held a silver plate under her chin. ‘Body of Christ.’
She amen’d, shut her eyes tight, squeezing a panicked tear from her left eye, and opened her mouth to receive the Holy Eucharist. It melted quickly in her hot mouth. The priest moved off but Paddy stayed on her knees, eyes shut. Miss Stenhouse had to tap her on the shoulder to get her to move.
She crossed herself and went back to kneel in her pew. She grinned at the girl next to her. They giggled high and fast for no particular reason, pushing a prayer book back and forth along the seat while the priest gave the adults communion.
Outside, Paddy had her photo taken many times. Mary Ann got a shot of her cape and then their mother took them to the Cross Cafe for a double nugget ice cream. And Jesus didn’t do anything. Paddy watched for him at school and at mass. She waited for their dog to die or her parents to fall ill. She waited for weeks. It was after tea on a particularly bad-tempered day. Paddy and her sisters were hanging listlessly around their living room, climbing over furniture, being mean to one another because they were trapped indoors, frustrated by heavy rain. Their mother was busy in the kitchen and the radiogram was tuned to a local station, turned up loud to drown out the noise of the bickering children. It was the first item on the Scottish news. Paddy Meehan had been convicted of murdering Rachel Ross. He had been sent to live in a prison for the rest of his life.
Mary Ann looked at Paddy. ‘What have you done?’
Caroline nodded. ‘You killed a lady.’
Paddy tipped her head back and screamed at the ceiling. When Con Meehan arrived home after work he sat down in the big chair and pulled his sobbing youngest daughter onto his knee, holding the newspaper open and making sure she was nice and comfy so he could read to her. He read the description of the court, the who-said-what, the technical things she couldn’t possibly understand, rolling through it in a boring voice to calm her. Mr Paddy Meehan had given a speech in the court, he said. He had stood up and talked to them after they found him guilty. ‘I am innocent of this crime and so is Jim Griffiths. You have made a terrible mistake,’ he had said.
Paddy sniffed and wiped her nose dry with the back of her hand. ‘Is it right, Daddy? Did they make a mistake?’
Con shrugged. ‘Might be, Sunshine. We all make mistakes. And Mr Meehan is a Catholic as well.’
‘Are the people who put him in prison Orange Men?’
‘They might be.’
She considered this. ‘But he didn’t do anything wrong.’
Con paused. ‘The prisons are full of innocent men. Mr Meehan’ll have to stay there until they admit it.’
Paddy thought about it for a moment. She began to scream again.
‘Oof, for petesake.’Con stood up, letting her slide messily off his knee to the floor. ‘Trisha,’ he shouted, climbing over her and heading for the kitchen. ‘Trisha, come and do something with her.’
While he was out of the room Mary Ann snuck over to Paddy, who was screaming on the floor. She stroked her hair clumsily. ‘Don’t cry, Baddy,’ she said guiltily, using Paddy’s baby name. ‘Don’t, Baddy-baby, don’t cry.’
But Paddy couldn’t stop crying. She cried so much that she threw up her macaroni and cheese.
V
The ongoing drama of Meehan’s imprisonment unfolded slowly as Paddy grew up. She read and reread every article and interview, watched the Panorama documentary twice and visited the sites of the case: the High Courts in Edinburgh and Ayr and the bungalow in Blackburn Place where Rachel Ross was murdered. She read Chapman Pincher’s account of Meehan’s trip to East Germany and planned to travel behind the Iron Curtain herself one day to see if she could find corroborating evidence that he had ever been there. The British government said he was a fantasist and had been in an English prison the whole time.
Paddy didn’t stop believing in Jesus but she didn’t trust him. Unable to conceive of a world without a central story, she substituted Meehan’s, forming it in her mind, replaying his passion and sentence, tracing the build-up to his conviction, trying to shoehorn sense into the mess of his life. Meehan became a noble hero to her, maligned and defamed in a thousand different ways. She drew huge life lessons from the myth and emulated qualities she projected onto him: stoic loyalty, righteousness, dignity and perseverance. He was released because of the work of a campaigning journalist, so she became a journalist. She gave talks about the case at school and changed her status from pleasant fat girl to intellectual heavyweight.
It was always the myth that fascinated her, never the real Meehan. The real Meehan was morally awkward, compromised by a life of petty burglary, a sour temper and a bad complexion. Now he was back living in Glasgow, hanging around bars in the city centre, spilling his story to anyone who would listen, ruining her. Several journalists had offered to introduce her but she didn’t want to meet him. She had to face the uncomfortable truth that Meehan wasn’t a nice man and he wasn’t trying to help anyone but himself.
13
Grocery Vaughan
1981
Every light in the Wilcox house was on and all the curtains sat open, spilling light out into the dark street. Paddy stood on the opposite pavement, her breath crystallizing into speech bubbles, wondering why she had come. She wasn’t a journalist, she didn’t have a legitimate reason for being there. She was just a stupid fat girl who was afraid to go home and face her mother.
The front of the house was a grey rectangle with a big window on the ground floor and a brown front door. In front sat a little rug of muddy garden, tufts of grass left in the corners where Brian’s shoes hadn’t worn it away. Surrounding the garden was a fence of three metal ribbons, painted green and chipped. Wee Brian could just have climbed through the bars and wandered off to the busy motorway slip road nearby. Anyone might have picked him up.
Paddy had been to the swing park and it confirmed everything she thought she’d noticed a couple of nights ago. It was tucked well into the middle of the housing scheme and Callum couldn’t have found it accidentally. Even if he had he wouldn’t have wanted to play there: it was a kiddie swing park with few attractions for older boys.
She thought of home and a ball of acid flowered in her stomach. She sagged against the street light. If she’d had any money she would have gone to the pictures for the night.
Across the road she saw a flicker in the window. Gina Wilcox was standing in the corner of her living room. She was looking at her hands and Paddy saw that she was holding a cloth, kneading it. She looked like an ordinary slim young woman cleaning her house, but even from a hundred yards across the road Paddy could see that the woman’s eyes were as red as a summer sunset.
Gina stood still, pulling at the cloth for a moment. Her hair was brown and dank, and as she reached up and flattened it Paddy saw why. She must have been working cleaning products into it all day, cleaning, cleaning, trying to wipe away the knowledge that her baby wasn’t coming back.
An old-fashioned navy-blue grocery van with purple and white writing on the side travelled slowly down the hill behind her. It passed by, pulling up at the kerb a hundred yards away. The hand-painted declaration on the side of the van announced that i
t was a mobile grocers owned and operated by Henry Naismith, Esquire. The door on the back of the van was covered in colourful stickers from fruit importers and biscuit companies. Stuck over the top, wind-scorched and peeling in one corner, was a band sticker declaring FRIEND OF BILLY GRAHAM.
In the quiet of the evening she could hear the gentle ratchet sound of the handbrake being pulled tight and then a tinny music-box rendition of the first three bars of ‘Dixie’ from a little horn on the roof. Someone was moving around inside the van, jostling it, and a light inside flickered uncertainly. The door opened and Paddy could see a man unfolding a step to the street. Inside, the light found its note and brightened as the man stood up. He was slim with sharp sideburns and a greying mini-quiff. Approaching customers chased him back up the steps. Inside the van he pulled down a wooden shelf to form a counter between himself and the outside world.
An orderly queue gathered around the steps, a crowd of five women and a man. The women nodded to one another and passed pleasantries, ignoring the man who pretended to count the change in his hand. Paddy knew that van steps were a woman’s arena as much as a pub was a man’s. Friendships were made in the queue, gossip exchanged and reciprocal childcare organized.
She stayed well back and waited as they bought bread and glass bottles of fizzy juice; some asked for soap powder; others were just after the wooden penny sweet tray the man proffered like a Tiffany’s display. She waited until the crowd thinned before approaching.
The van smelled of soap and sweets. The man serving wore a grubby white grocer’s coat with yellow action streaks around the pockets. Across his neck was a red slash scar from a long time ago, the soft skin puckered around the shiny stripe.
He smiled expectantly at her. ‘What can I do ye for?’ ‘Packet of Refreshers, please.’
He reached over to his right, so sure of his stock that he didn’t need to look at the shelves, and put the glittery packet of fizzy sweets on the counter.
‘OK, li’le lady. Anything else catch your eye? A loaf? A bottle of ginger?’ He pointed to the glass rows of fizzy drink and winked at her.
She grinned at his fake American accent. ‘Listen, can I ask ye this: those boys who were arrested for …’ She didn’t know how to phrase it. ‘For hurting Baby Brian. Did they know anyone on this scheme?’
He pulled her change from his money belt and narrowed his lips. ‘Those filthy wee buggers. I say give them to the women’s prison, they’d know what to do with them.’
It didn’t sound like a very good plan to Paddy. She frowned, and he saw it.
‘No,’ he corrected himself,‘you’re right, you’re right. We need to forgive.’
‘Aye, right enough,’ she said awkwardly, moving the conversation on. ‘Anyway, were they visiting someone here?’ ‘I heard they were at the swing park.’
‘Yeah, that’s what I heard. I was just wondering because it’s kind of out of the way. Could they have been visiting someone?’
The van man shrugged. ‘I dunno. If they’d been at a house someone would know about it. Everyone here sees everything. Why are you asking?’
‘Dunno.’ She picked the change up off the counter. ‘Just wondering about it. Seems funny, know what I mean?’
He looked suspicious. ‘You don’t live here, do you? What are you doing here?’
‘I’m a journalist at the Daily News,’ she said proudly, and immediately remembered Farquarson’s warning. ‘My name’s Heather Allen.’
‘Right?’ He looked her up and down. ‘A journalist, is it? I tell ye what, could it be the ice-cream van? Maybe they were passing and heard the van coming. It stops outside the wee boy’s garden.’
‘Really?’ She was glad he hadn’t pressed her about her career.
He shooed her out onto the pavement and lifted his fold-down counter, following her down the step to show her. ‘There.’ He was peering past Gina Wilcox’s house. ‘See the wee lane?’
Paddy couldn’t see it at first. She had to strain her eyes through the soupy dark to see the double railings along the far side of Gina’s garden. There was a lane down the side of it.
‘That lane leads straight to the main road. The ice-cream van stops just there.’ He indicated the kerb across the road from Gina’s house. ‘Stops there at the back of twelve every day and then at half four again.’ He looked at her. ‘That’s when the wee man went missing, eh?’
Paddy nodded,‘Aye, back of twelve right enough. Don’t know if those boys’d have money for a van though.’
‘Aye, well, Hughie keeps a penny tray for the poorer weans.’ She wondered how he knew so much about it and he saw the questioning look. ‘We fell out about it,’ he explained. ‘The penny tray was my idea in the first place. His rounds are earlier than mine so he takes all the custom. He’s a snipey bastard.’
She pointed at his quiff. ‘Were you a Teddy boy, then?’ ‘I am a Teddy boy,’ he said indignantly. ‘Ye don’t stop being what ye are because it’s out of fashion.’
She looked at his feet and only then noticed his drainpipe trousers and crêpe soles. ‘God, you’re very loyal to your style.’
‘And why not? Tell me this: who’s as good as Elvis now? Who can sing like Carl Perkins these days? None of them.’ Paddy smiled at his abrupt energy. ‘So I suppose.’
‘What’s your favourite Frankie Vaughan song?’ She shrugged. ‘Don’t know any.’
He was disappointed. It had been a test question, she could tell. ‘Ye don’t know any Frankie Vaughan? Not know “Mr Moonlight”? Young folk today, I don’t know. Do you know what he did for this city?’
‘Aye, I know, that I know.’ The crooner Frankie Vaughan had been so appalled at the levels of violence when he played Glasgow in the fifties that he met the gang leaders and appealed for them to hand in their weapons. He became a totem for peace but was mostly now remembered by those who had caused the trouble in the first place.
‘You young ones, yees don’t know music at all. I bet you’re one of they punkers.’
Paddy laughed. ‘Punk was a hundred years ago.’
‘Drug music, that’s what it is. Frankie should come back here and set them right.’ He did a little tap-dance move, raising a hand, extending a foot, and they laughed together in the soft dark. Paddy wished she didn’t ever have to go home.
The van man waved her off and closed up his back door, driving off up the street and leaving her alone.
She wandered up the road, chewing through the frothy Refreshers, and looked into the alley. Beyond the houses and the small back gardens she could see the yellow lights of the main road and the bus stop from Barnhill. The boys could easily have got off there and wandered through to the van. She hadn’t read the scheme properly at all. She was wasting her time.
14
Mary Ann is Laughing
I
As Paddy walked to the train station she felt all her future hopes fade. She was too naive to make it as a journalist. She should have known Heather would use the story. Any good journalist would have, anyone who wasn’t destined to spend the rest of their career writing obituaries or fashion tips about hemlines and tweed. She’d never make it. She’d have to marry Sean and raise a hundred pyromaniac kids like Mrs Breslin.
The platform for the low-level train was crammed with people. Paddy joined the end of the crowd of commuters gathered on the stairs. Standing in the dull subterranean light, resting her hip against the damp railing, she tried not to speculate about her mother’s or Sean’s reaction to her when she got home. All around her on the stairs people were reading papers with headlines about the Baby Brian Boys. It would be particularly hard, she thought, to be a child in trouble with no-one to defend you but Callum Ogilvy’s mother.
Paddy couldn’t recall her name but she remembered the woman well. After the funeral mass for Callum’s father the mourners had gone back to the Ogilvy house. It was dark and dank
and poor. Wallpaper had been pulled off in the hall and living room and left on the floor. By way of a drink, Sean’s Auntie Maggie had dished out whisky from a bottle she had brought herself. There weren’t any glasses in the house; they had to use chipped mugs and pastel plastic children’s beakers. Paddy’s beaker hadn’t been washed out properly and a crescent of dried milk floated to the surface, clouding the whisky.
Callum’s mother had long, straggly hair that hung from a centre parting over her face, slicing away cheekbones and jaw, leaving her as nothing but a pair of wet eyes and bloodless lips. Sometimes her face would slacken, her mouth would fall open and she would weep, exhausted. She helped herself to other people’s cups from the table, getting drunk quickly, disgracing herself. Sean said that she’d been like that before the father died, she’d been like that for a long time, and everybody already knew about it. The mourners had stayed on just as long as was polite and all left at the same time, lifting from the dirty Barnhill house as suddenly as a startled flock of birds.
Paddy had a grudging respect for irresponsible mothers. It wasn’t much of a job. Every mother she knew was anxious and fretful and never any fun at all. She tried hard to be respectful of Trisha, tried to appreciate and thank her for all she did, but couldn’t stop herself sniggering along when Marty and Gerald made fun of her. Every mother she knew worked unlauded all their lives, ageing before anyone else in the family until the only thing that differentiated them from old, old men was a perm and a pair of earrings.
The train arrived and the commuters pressed forward, carrying Paddy along on the flow of bodies. She wished she could turn back and run up to Albion Street and hide in the office. She was one of the last people to squeeze through the carriage doors before they shut.
As the train pulled away from the platform she imagined herself, wearing smart clothes and a miraculous half foot taller, swaggering into glamorous rooms with a cinemascope stretched body, asking pertinent questions and writing important articles. All the fantasies felt hollow this evening. She had an ominous sense that a shadow had marked her, that everything was fated to go wrong from here on in. Luck could curdle, she knew. The train pulled out of the dark station, dragging her homeward, delivering her to her people.
