by Denise Mina
She kept her head down, holding her hood shut over her mouth, and jogged across the road. Cold water squelched between her toes. She’d have wet feet for the rest of the day and would have to pack the boots with toilet paper when she got home and leave them by the fire.
Naismith must have been quick off the mark. The back door to the van was locked by the time she reached it and the chassis juddered as the engine rumbled into life. She ran around to the driver’s window and banged on it, afraid she might have waited in vain and ruined her monkey boots for nothing.
From inside the cab Naismith smiled down at her, his quiff a little askew from being caught in the rain. He wound down the window a little, pumping hard with his elbow, and shouted into the street,‘Refreshers?’
Paddy smiled up into the rain, letting go of her hood so that it slipped back a little, the rain running down her face.
‘I saw the ice-cream van,’ she shouted. He looked puzzled.
‘The van,’ she shouted again, pointing to the lane. ‘It doesn’t stop there. I wanted to ask ye about it.’ He frowned down at her.
‘He doesn’t stop there,’ she repeated.
He shook his head and pointed to the passenger door, holding his mouth up to the open window. ‘Cannae hear ye. Come in a minute.’
Paddy nodded and ran in front of the van, the white headlights giving detail and texture to the black river coming down the hill. She opened the passenger door, stuck one foot onto a chrome-trimmed step built into the side of the van and pulled herself up into the cab.
It was warm inside and still smelled of fresh morning rolls. The seats were thick, cream-coloured leather.
‘Oh no, my duffel coat’s drenched.’ She pulled the wet material away from under her. ‘I don’t want to wet your seats.’
‘Good leather doesn’t mind wet so much. It’s the cheap stuff that hates the wet.’
He reached across her chest to the door, his elbow coming just too close to her tits to make her feel comfortable, and pulled the door shut behind her. He saw her stiffen away from him and retracted his arm quickly back towards the wheel, upset that he had frightened her.
‘I’m not … I didn’t mean that,’ he said, suddenly embarrassed. ‘I was just shutting the door.’
‘Oh, aye,’ said Paddy, feeling she had wrongly accused the nice man. He looked so crestfallen and ashamed that she felt she should offer him a feel of her tits just to show she didn’t suspect him of trying to cop a feel.
‘Well.’ He tried to smile, but looked miserable and nervous. ‘Anyway, what can I do ye for?’
‘Yeah, listen, I waited for the ice-cream van and it doesn’t stop there.’ She pointed up the road again.
He looked blank and she suddenly realized that he hardly remembered her.
‘I was asking ye about the Baby Brian Boys the other evening, I don’t know if you remember.’ He shook his head a little. ‘I said they had no reason to pass the Wilcox house and you said the ice-cream van stopped there and they’d’ve come down to buy penny chews. D’ye remember?’ ‘I remember ye bought a packet of Refreshers.’ She shook her head. ‘Sorry, you must talk to a hundred people a day. I watched, and it turns out that the van doesn’t stop there at all, but I wanted to ask ye if it used to, ye know? Like, maybe the ice-cream guy– Hughie you said his name was?’
She looked at him and he paused for a beat before nodding.
‘Yeah, did Hughie used to stop there? Did he change his routine because the wee boy died and he felt bad or something?’
A fat drop of rain fell from Paddy’s hair, racing down her face and dripping off her chin.
Naismith looked startled, as if he was seeing her for the very first time. ‘Good God in Govan, you are absolutely soaked. Here.’ He flicked on the cab light and looked for something on the floor.
The inside of the cab was a work of art. The covers of 45 records had been taped around the inside of the windscreen: Jerry Lee Lewis, Frankie Vaughan, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, colourized pictures of young men, their teeth laughably white, their lips a camp pink. The pictures were held to the window by a mesh of Sellotape, yellow and crusty after years in the sun. At the right hand of the windscreen, just where the driver’s eye would fall most often, was a pastel drawing of a blond Jesus in a blue dress, smiling kindly at the circle of small children gazing up at him.
‘This is a wee palace,’ said Paddy, enjoying the big leather chair moulding around her body, watching him feel under his seat.
He sat up and smiled. ‘It is, aye.’ He handed her a brown, stale-smelling towel, sewn double along one seam, like a pocket.
Paddy dabbed at her hair politely, avoiding her mouth and nose, and pointed at the religious picture. ‘I didn’t have you down for a holy roller.’
He nodded, looking straight ahead, watching the rain fall onto the windscreen. His eyes flickered down the street, checking each door for customers. ‘Born again,’ he said quietly. ‘I’d led a worthless life before and maybe will again, but through the grace of God I have known peace.’
It sounded like a load of Protestant codswallop to her but he seemed sincere enough, if a little melancholy. Bornagains were usually a bit more upbeat about the experience. She imagined she saw him blink away a tear before he spoke again.
‘Hughie may have changed his routine. I don’t really know.’ He lifted a hand and ran his pinkie nail between his two front teeth. ‘I don’t really know.’
Paddy smiled, and looked at the towel in her lap. ‘I wondered because, see, if the van stopped further down there when the baby went missing then the boys’d probably go around the back and not even pass the Wilcox house.’
She played with it, rolling it around her finger, a long, golden strand of hair so thick it was almost coarse, retaining its gentle wave despite being pulled tight. She was enjoying the familiar texture before she realized what it was. She’d know it anywhere. It was one of Heather Allen’s hairs.
Still staring forwards, eyes zigzagging from door to door, Naismith raised his hand above his head, moving slowly, trying not to startle her. He found the switch without looking and turned off the cabin light. Softly his arm dropped, his fingers alighting on the steering wheel. They sat still together, Paddy’s eyes fixed on his face. Orange street lights filtered through the rain on the windscreen. His features looked as if they were melting. ‘So maybe he changed his route,’ he said softly. Her face was frozen. ‘Maybe.’
He turned to look at her and she could see that he was sad. They looked clear into each other’s eyes for the smallest moment, Paddy’s eyes pleading with him not to touch her, Naismith regretful but resolved to do what he had to do.
‘You’ll catch your death walking home in this weather,’ he said stiffly. ‘Let me drop ye off somewhere.’
He started the engine before she could speak, releasing the handbrake and engaging the clutch. The van slid forwards a foot into the black future but Paddy’s suddenly scrambling fingers felt along the door behind her, jerking the handle down. She threw her weight against it and dropped backwards out of the cab into a wet void. As she fell, turning her head to see where she would land, she felt Naismith’s hot fingertips brush her ear.
She made contact with the ground two feet before she expected to, landing heavily on the side of her leg, twisting it and dropping the brown towel into the road. She was winded, lying in a flowing inch of rain water, conscious of an ominous numbness in her knee, when behind her she heard the handbrake crunch on and the driver’s door fly open. A scalding burst of adrenalin brought her to her feet but her knee wouldn’t straighten and she fell. She rose again on all fours, springing forwards, hands slapping on the wet ground, through soft mud on the grassy verge, out to the main road and over to the deserted bus station without remembering to check for traffic.
She had never run so fast in her life, never been more completely in her body. Her
wet feet squelched in her boots, toes pushing her forwards against the wet ground, heading down into the town. When the feeling came back into her knee there was a burn and a sharp, shooting pain that ran up to her hip. When she felt tired or her lungs began to sting she felt the rain hitting her ear. She imagined it was Naismith’s fingers and ran on, heading towards the only human sound she could hear: the chanting in George Square.
She bolted past the side entrance to Queen Street station and down, turning the corner and finding herself behind a line of policemen forming a cordon against protesters on George Square. Their black woollen tunics had soaked up the rain and they glistened like beetles’ shells. The marchers had just arrived in the square, a mixture of angry militant Republicans and frightened civil rights marchers, flowing along the metal barriers like cattle at market, hemmed in by a black fence of policemen linking arms. At the far end of the square she could see a line of mounted policemen cutting off an exit road, their rain cloaks tented over the horses’ bodies. She ran over to the line of policemen and touched the back of one of them. ‘Please, help me.’
He turned and looked at her, letting go of his neighbour and grabbing her elbow, tugging her in front of the line. His eyes were open a little too wide. He seemed frightened and excited in equal measure. ‘I’ve been attacked.’
He leaned into her and shouted in her face,‘Get in front of the barrier!’
She was in front of him and moving in the direction he had asked her to go when he quite unnecessarily shook her, making her topple to the side on her bad knee. He was smiling. Paddy backed off towards the frightened mob, skirting the metal barriers and heading away from the front line. She was right to get away. By the time she reached the corner of the square and looked back it was a riot. A section of the march had burst its banks and everyone was running from something. Hooves clattered on the tarmac and Paddy saw waves of people, terrified and hanging onto one another, dragging friends away by their jackets and coats, holding arms over their heads for protection. Policemen billowed around the corner, batons raised at the people running away, hitting and dragging them backwards into the panic. She backed off, limping up the road, heading towards the office. She could phone home from there at least, tell her mum she had been attacked and ask her to come and get her. She could call the police as well and get some of the old geezers to sit with her until someone came to help her.
The rain had slowed to drizzle as she circled back towards the office, coming at it from the unlit back of the car park. Ahead of her she could see that the canteen was dark and the news-room lights were only on at one side of the room. The brightest of the beacon lights were outside the Press Bar. A guy in a sports jacket and slacks came out of the door and paused to look up at the unfriendly sky. He could have been any one of the ugly, ridiculous men but she’d never been more pleased to see anyone. He wrinkled his nose at the threatening sky, carefully checked the change in his pocket and turned back, going inside for just one more, until the cold rain went off a little more.
Paddy limped after him, smiling as she stepped onto the dirt edge of the car park. Her knee was burning, not just the skin now but the bones. She stopped. She was suddenly cold, subconsciously aware of a blackness, a shape in a space that was rarely filled. The grocery van was parked in the dark far corner of the car park, all its lights off.
She backed off into shadow and looked. He was sitting back in the cab, his face in shadow, his arms crossed, watching the front of the building. He knew where she worked.
II
Paddy saw the white Volkswagen parked outside and knew Terry was in his flat. The knowledge that she was about to see a friendly face made her cry as she hurtled past the third floor. When Terry opened the door her dignity crumpled and she stood, hands limp by her side, sobbing with fright. He gave her a warm jumper to put on and a dry towel for her hair. He pulled off her boots and tights, cleaned the dirt out of her cut knee with a warm flannel and made her a cup of black tea. It had to be tea because his flatmates had taken to locking their coffee away in their rooms and he’d forgotten to steal any from work. He packed her boots with newspaper to soak up the worst of the rain, sat down close to her on the side of the bed, then put on both bars of the electric fire to heat her up. He gave her some dry bread to eat from his suitcase table. The bread filled a hole but, through some forgotten accident of proximity, tasted faintly of fish.
Instead of braving a city-centre police station on this evening of evenings they decided to phone and tell them about Naismith, but the pay phone in the hall wasn’t working and the public box six floors down was broken too. They decided to go and see Tracy Dempsie to ask if the grocery van had been anywhere near her house when Thomas had disappeared, but they didn’t do anything about that either. They decided to write a long article about Thomas Dempsie, but stayed sitting on the side of Terry’s bed, sipping black tea, Paddy’s damp thigh pressed against his.
Terry put the black and white portable on and they watched the news. A red-faced presenter announced the headlines and the march only made the fifth item. One hundred and fifty protesters had been arrested after trouble broke out in Glasgow during a pro-IRA march; police suspected the involvement of organized groups. There was no mention of the hunger strikes, no mention of the mounted policemen hemming the crowd in. Even the local news brushed over it, showing footage of a very drunk man crumpled in a doorway while a pair of police horses walked calmly past the camera, the officers smiling down at the public they were there to serve.
‘Truth’s a rare commodity these days,’ said Terry, his knee pressing sharply against her thigh.
‘It’s justice that’s rare,’ said Paddy. ‘Truth’s relative.’ They were sitting, pretending to look at a scar on his hand, when Terry suggested lying down. Paddy had guessed what he was going to say and got nervous, interrupting him to point to a pile of car magazines and say something sarcastic about them. She had to wait for another ten minutes of irrelevant small talk before he suggested it again. They lay on their sides facing each other because the bed was too small to do otherwise. Paddy gathered her hands in front of her chest defensively and Terry lay with his head propped on one arm, the other resting along the line of his body.
‘Hello, Mary Magdalene,’ he said softly.
She cringed at the cheesiness of his approach and raised her hand, waving as if to someone twenty feet away. ‘Hiya!’ she shouted. ‘Hiya, how’re ye?’
She saw a flash of annoyance on his face and his hand shot forward, holding the waving hand by the wrist, pulling it down to the bed. She suddenly saw herself, lying on a stranger’s grubby bed without her ring. She rolled forward and kissed Terry on the lips, not unguarded and provoking like she would have been with Sean, but explorative, a careful taste of him. He held her wrist tight as he returned the kiss, his mouth pressing hard, graceless somehow, grazing his lip along the sharp edge of her teeth. He let go of her arm and his hand hovered above her. It landed softly on her hip, too low to be innocent. The heat from his palm swept through her, warming her chest and neck and gut. She kissed him again, touching him, putting her hand under his T-shirt, feeling skin and hair and smelling him around her in a cloud.
He was tugging her jumper over her head when she thought of Sean sitting on the back step to her mother’s kitchen. She thought of him looking down their garden to the lonely, windswept tree. She saw his hand land gently on hers. The skin on his knuckles was perfectly smooth, that’s how young he was.
Terry’s damp fingers scumbled across the skin on her bare stomach. Her rolls of fat seemed to multiply under his hand. He asked her what she liked and she said everything was great, lovely, just there, yeah, but she felt nothing but the facts of their movement, the scratching blanket, the fingers hooked inside her. He lay on top of her, leaving a trail of cooling saliva on her neck, and she sighed as she supposed she should, breathing faster when he did, acting and knowing she was acting, wondering if he knew. T
he blanket slid off them and her legs and feet were cold. She blankly bided her time until it was over. Terry tensed, suddenly covered in a thin film of sweat which cooled instantly into a cold wash. She didn’t want to touch him.
‘That was great,’ panted Terry, slithering out of her.
‘Yeah.’ She breathed heavily as if she had been carried away too.
He lay next to her, catching his breath. She tried not to touch him and stared at the ceiling. There was nothing to it. She was relieved. Her virginity was no longer a giant, weighty gift. She didn’t have to find someone to bestow it on. It was gone. Sean was gone.
‘Terry?’ She nudged him, needing some company. ‘Hey, Terry, what time is it now?’
But Terry was asleep. Paddy slipped a finger between her legs and looked at it. She didn’t see any blood. Terry didn’t even need to know what had happened.
III
Two deep, vibrant orange bars glowed across the dark room. The electric fire sported little empty ash zeros where they had lit cigarettes against the bars. The curtains didn’t shut properly and even lying in the bed Paddy could see into the flats opposite, watching as a man readied himself for a Saturday night on the town and a woman made dinner for a thin man.
Terry slept for twenty minutes like a dead man, and when he woke up he told her a lot of gossip about the people at work. Kevin Hatcher, the drunken pictures editor, was only twenty-eight and had once won an international photography award for a photo essay about nomadic tribes of the Gobi desert. Richards had stood for election as a Communist Party member. Tony Benn spoke on a platform with him and everything. Paddy was amazed. Then they had a long, pleasant argument about the relative value of Tiswas and Swap Shop, killing time before they had to be grown up again. He stroked her shoulder, looking at it with half-shut eyes, then leaned down to let his lips rest against the skin.
