by Denise Mina
She threw herself across the settee and grabbed the phone, pulling it towards her as she sat up.
‘Don’t phone him, Leslie,’ said Maureen, as she dialled.
‘Wait till ye calm down a bit.’
Leslie shot her a filthy look and carried on dialling.
‘Mum?’ she said, gesturing to Maureen to sit down next to her. ‘Aye. Yeah. Listen, that Katie McIntyre, is she pregnant?’ She glanced at Maureen. ‘How far gone?’ She looked at Maureen again. ‘Four months? Aye, yeah, I will, yeah. Goodbye.’
Maureen could hear Isa’s distant voice still wittering through the receiver as Leslie hung up.
Leslie stood up and lurched into the kitchen. The sudden sound of crockery smashing was accompanied by screams and curses. Maureen knew she should go in and calm her down but she thought Leslie probably didn’t want calmed down and, anyway, Maureen was afraid of getting hurt. Having run out of crockery, Leslie swerved out of the kitchen and ran into the bathroom. Maureen could see her back as she ripped a new toilet-roll holder from the wall and turned her attention to a matching towel rail, pulling off a big lump of plaster. She sat down heavily on the edge of the bath, sobbing and holding her face, her fingers digging into her scalp. Maureen went over and put her arms around her but Leslie shook her off. ‘Don’t fucking cuddle me,’ she spluttered. ‘I’m too fucking angry to get touched by fucking anyone.’ And she went back to sobbing.
They had been back in the house for an hour, Leslie sobbing and periodically getting up to break things, Maureen sipping vodka and trying not to become alarmed. She went into the kitchen and cleared up all the broken plates. She had been giving Leslie a Barbie crockery set, piece by piece, for years, and it was all shattered on the floor among the plain plates and glasses. Leslie had opened the cupboards and swept everything out of them, even the pots. She stormed back in and found Maureen cleaning. She stamped on an almost intact serving bowl, smashing it to small bits.
Maureen could see Leslie was either calming down or tiring herself out. They had smoked a cigarette while sitting in the same room and Leslie stood up. ‘We should go,’ she said.
‘Leslie, are you all right to drive?’
‘I need to drive.’
‘No, ye don’t. We could get a cab.’
‘I’m fine,’ said Leslie, picking her helmet off the floor. ‘We need the bike. How else are we going to watch Michael?’
Maureen phoned Kilty from her house. Kilty had spent the day searching the Net for information about students coming from Poland to brothels in Britain. She had cancelled Josh at the last minute and arranged a rematch for Tuesday night but was afraid he wouldn’t turn up because she couldn’t think of a decent excuse and he’d probably just think she was a head-do. She didn’t really care. Did Maureen know that a lot of these women thought they were coming over to work as waitresses and chambermaids?
‘I don’t think that matters,’ said Maureen. ‘What else did ye turn up?’
Kilty said that the gangs who recruited them didn’t always keep the women. Sometimes they sold them to another gang and the women had to work for nothing to pay off the debt. It took years sometimes and the going rate was fifteen thousand pounds. If the police caught the women they treated it as a local matter and just deported them back to their country of origin. Deporting the women meant there was no witness against the gangs and no case. ‘And guess what? Remember ye couldn’t work out why McGee is so attached to Poland? I’ll tell ye: trafficking isn’t an offence in Poland.’
‘Fucking bastard.’
They had to kill a couple of hours before meeting Kilty. Leslie used the time to mope and smoke, looking wistfully out of windows and periodically locking herself in the toilet to cry. Maureen saw her glaring at the phone a couple of times, as if it was a direct line to Cammy.
37
Calm Down, Leslie
They were sitting side by side like the three wise monkeys, watching the door and not knowing what to do. They had been there for a while and the cold stone step was numbing Maureen’s bum. Across the square the Park Circus Health Club was busy. Punters arrived and left. They were middle aged men, out for their Sunday-night fuck. Mostly they were alone but a couple of twosomes arrived, smiling hard as they jogged up to the door. A fat man with thin legs arrived in a car and paused on the top step before pressing the bell, wringing his hands with his elbows bowed to the sides.
‘What’s he doing?’ asked Kilty.
‘Taking his wedding ring off,’ said Maureen. Leslie sighed heavily.
‘You all right, Leslie?’ said Kilty.
‘No,’ she said.
Kilty took Leslie’s hand, squeezing it hard and holding on to it. Maureen could see it made Leslie uncomfortable but she didn’t want to yank her hand away so she left it, glancing at it a couple of times, wishing Kilty would get off her. Eventually she had to offer her a fag to make her let go.
They watched the man press the bell. The door opened and they saw the body-builder inside, leaning against the wall, smiling and greeting the man with an outstretched hand.
‘My stupid fucking father,’ whispered Kilty.
‘He didn’t know, Kilty,’ said Maureen. ‘He wouldn’t have told us if he knew.’
‘Yeah.’ Leslie rubbed her back. ‘He didn’t know.’
‘Piss off,’ said Kilty gently, knowing they were trying to be kind. ‘All it takes is a glance at the fucking newspapers. These poor women think they’re coming here to study—’ ‘I think they know what they’re coming here for,’ said Maureen.
Kilty seemed disappointed. ‘Why do you think that?’ ‘That’s what Candy III said, really. She said they get their passports taken away and made to work for nothing.’ Maureen could tell that Kilty had a problem with it. ‘But why would Ella fall out with her son about that, then?’
‘Ella was a pro herself,’ said Maureen. ‘We might have trouble seeing how wrong that is but Ella wouldn’t.’
It was dark now and the grassy hills in the park had turned a velvet blue. The rusting iron gates leading into the park hung idly from their struts. Maureen thought of Ella’s bitter son Si, furious at what his mother did for money, never thinking what she was giving up for him, never wondering at the resourcefulness it took to do that. Candy II wasn’t bitter, and look at her life. She thought of bitter Una, sitting in her big house with a healthy baby and a brand-new car at her door. And she thought of herself and her past, of all the golden moments that had passed unappreciated because she was bitter too. The one thing they had in common was their victim hood, and that mantle was a negation of all the wonder in life, a licence to brutalize without compunction. She wondered if she was using it to kill Michael, if it seemed inevitable simply because she wanted to do it so much. Back across the road, the light in the doorway flickered, and as Maureen looked up she imagined a school assembly lineup, with Si McGee and dead-eyed Tonsa sitting on a parquet floor next to Candy II, gleefully spitting mucus covered Kinder eggs over the floor towards a row of angry teachers.
Across the square the door opened and shut. The bodybuilder looked straight at them as he walked down the steps, and ran a slow, graceless jog over to them, swinging his overworked arms. He stopped in front of them and looked along the line as if he was memorizing their faces. Maureen nodded at him and went back to staring at the door. ‘What are you girls doing out here, then?’ he said, sounding jolly and friendly.
Maureen jerked a thumb at the house behind her. ‘Locked out,’ she said.
He laughed, thinking it was a joke, and stopped when he saw that she wasn’t joining in. ‘Come on,’ he said, reaching forward and cupping his hand under Leslie’s elbow, lifting her, ‘time to go home.’
Skinny as she was, Leslie turned on him. ‘Get your fucking hand off me,’ she spat, wringing her arm free and stepping back. She had her finger in his face, a stiff, angry finger, and she was shoutin
g. ‘Do you own this street, do ye, eh?’ She didn’t give him time to answer. ‘Do ye own this fuck street and everyone in it, do ye? Your fucking street, is it?’ She was close to hitting him, they could all tell. He backed off. ‘Calm down.’ He looked at Maureen for support.
‘You fucker. You fucking fucker.’ Leslie was screaming at the top of her voice. Lights flicked on in front rooms around the quiet square. ‘You’re running a fucking brothel over there. D’ye batter them if they won’t work for ye? Do ye?’
The body-builder had been nice for long enough. He pressed his lips together. ‘Calm down,’ he said, telling her this time. He reached for her roughly, grabbing her arm, holding her tight. Kilty, seated three feet away, launched herself, landing mouth first on his wrist, biting him as hard as she could. Yelping, he let go of Leslie who seemed to have grown two feet taller than any of the rest of them.
Her mouth was a thin, furious line, her voice low and hard. ‘The man’s not born that can raise his hand to me,’ she said, and punched him on the side of the neck. They hardly saw her hand go out, just retract, heard the sound of skin slapping hard against skin and the body-builder went down like a bag of bricks.
‘What the fuck . . .’ said Maureen.
‘I’m afraid I’ve lost my temper,’ said Leslie, with supernatural calm. ‘Perhaps we should leave.’
They were buzzing with nervous excitement as they queued to get into the all-night café.
‘I enjoyed that,’ said Leslie, standing tall and proud, her eyes open a little too wide. ‘Can’t we just go back to Maureen’s?’
‘No,’ snapped Kilty disapprovingly. ‘I think we should stay out until you’ve calmed down.’
‘Dunno why you’re so snotty about it,’ said Leslie aggressively. ‘You bit him.’
‘I was defending you,’ said Kilty. ‘Anyway, there’s no food in hers. I haven’t eaten since yesterday.’ She poked Maureen hard in the ribs. ‘And you look like Bobby Sands.’
‘Give it a rest,’ said Maureen, and nodded at Leslie. ‘She’s already had a go at me today.’
It was a strange café, furnished with old school desks and a curvy bit of a church pew. Two avocado-coloured baths took up valuable floor space and had plants growing in them for no good reason. It was kept busy with the waves of homebound pub-goers, clubbers and lost loners who just couldn’t sleep. Kilty ordered a whole lot of things from cups of cocoa to eggs Benedict and they dutifully handed their menus back to the exhausted waitress.
‘What was all that stuff?’ asked Leslie.
‘Calming food,’ said Kilty, getting a pink Powder Puff Girls notebook out of her handbag and flipping it open. ‘We need to calm down and think about what we’re going to do about this.’
‘I don’t want to calm down,’ said Leslie. ‘I enjoyed that.’ Kilty took out a pen, clicked it open and wrote an elaborate ‘1’ in the tiny margin. ‘We need to think. What are our goals here?’
‘What d’ye mean?’ Leslie asked.
‘What are we going to try to achieve? It’s better if we work that out before we come up with a plan.’ Then she explained, ‘Social work post-grad, course 101.’ They saw the logic.
‘I want to bring that bastard McGee down,’ said Maureen.
‘I want to help the women in there,’ said Leslie reproachfully, and Maureen realized that she should have said that too.
‘Right.’ Kilty wrote slowly, in a jagged but precise hand. Then she looked up. ‘I want to make my dad wake up,’ she said, waited for them to nod and jotted it down as the hot chocolate arrived.
Maureen ate her Flake with showy gusto, spooning warm cream into her mouth and swallowing it as if she was enjoying it. Leslie was taking her out on the bike to look for Michael after this and the last thing she wanted was heavy food but she ate to reassure the others. All three looked at the notepad and the three points, nodding and thinking about it as they drank milky chocolate.
‘If,’ said Kilty ponderously, ‘trafficking isn’t an offence in Poland, and McGee’s name isn’t on anything here—’
‘We don’t know that,’ interrupted Leslie. ‘What about Ella’s court case?’
‘That’s not evidence, that’s an allegation,’ said Kilty succinctly. ‘And if he’s fly enough to traffic from Poland because it’s one of the few countries that isn’t a signatory to any convention, you can bet your arse he’ll have kept his name off the sauna licence.’
Leslie stirred her chocolate, coaxing the settled cocoa powder from the bottom.
‘If his name isn’t on anything,’ continued Kilty, ‘what can we do? We can’t go to the police. They’ll tell us to piss off.’ They all thought about it, each trying to think of alternatives to going to the police.
‘We could blow him up,’ said Leslie stupidly.
‘Yeah.’ Kilty looked at her askance. ‘I think you should get back with Cammy before ye kill someone. Leaving your commando tendencies aside, goal two is get the women out.’
They couldn’t think of anything for that either and were feeling discouraged as the food arrived at the table. Kilty got the waitress just to put it all in the middle and they tried to share it but everyone wanted the eggs and it turned into an unsightly scramble.
‘God,’ said Leslie, ‘that was gorgeous.’
‘Taste the Croque Monsieur,’ said Kilty, pointing her to a golden toastie. ‘They make it with butter.’
‘The problem with helping the women,’ said Maureen, ‘is what do we do? Do we get them out and send them home?’
‘Yeah,’ said Kilty. ‘Otherwise we’d need somewhere safe for them to hide from Immigration and the bastards who brought them over here. We don’t have those kinds of resources.’
Leslie sat back. ‘I’ll go in with a gun and get them out, if that’s what it takes.’
‘Look, you can’t use being angry with your boyfriend to shoot up a licensed premises,’ said Kilty, as if she’d been involved in a tremendous amount of paramilitary activity. ‘You might remember the good times half-way through and then where will ye be?’
‘Standing in a brothel with a gun and a whole lot of foreign women?’ said Leslie, as if she’d really thought about it.
‘How would ye get the women to leave with ye? What would you say to them?’
‘That I’d come to rescue them and if they came with me they’d be safe—’
‘In Polish? Or Latvian?’
‘Oh.’ Leslie looked deflated.
‘And what about afterwards? What if they want to carry on working? Would you take them to your house?’
‘They can’t stay with me, even if they’re not working,’ said Leslie firmly. It seemed a strange line for a mad bomber to stand firm on. ‘I’m gonnae . . . I need my space,’ she said, and looked shifty.
Maureen leaned across the table. ‘What about upsetting your dad? Couldn’t you just tell him?’
‘Nope,’ said Kilty. ‘He’d just do what he always does and say I was mad. Anyway, getting one lot of women out probably won’t even cost Si that much money.’
‘See,’ said Maureen, ‘I don’t think he really cares about the money.’ ‘Why?’
‘Well, think about it. He’s a poor scholarship boy at a Catholic school, his mum’s a prostitute and the other boys probably know that, his sister’s a psycho. He doesn’t want money. The money is a side issue. He wants respectability.’ Leslie shook her head. ‘How can this even be happening in this day and age? It’s un-fucking-believable.’ ‘Yeah,’ said Kilty. ‘They count on that, like the child prostitution racket. I read today that lone child immigrants seeking asylum routinely go missing in the UK. The cops think they’re being prostituted and used to make pornography by organized gangs but they can’t find them. Who’d believe that?’
‘No one,’ said Maureen.
‘No one,’ said Leslie miserably. ‘And even if they did they�
��d roll their fucking eyes and do nothing.’
Sitting on the back of the bike, holding on to Leslie’s waist, Maureen shut her eyes and wished herself anywhere else. She felt sick and dizzy, and suddenly aware of her bare legs and arms and the danger of the night traffic. If they crashed and skidded on the tarmac she’d be skinned alive. The possibility still seemed more inviting than their destination. Leslie had agreed to help her watch Michael but had no idea what Maureen was planning. She pulled up at a junction, flicking the bike into neutral and kicking down the stand. Her voice was muffled through the helmet. ‘Ye’re hurting me,’ she said, working her fingers into Maureen’s clenched fists, making her relax her grip. ‘Sorry.’
‘Just loosen it a bit.’
The front of the house was dark again and Una’s Rover was parked outside the front door. They stood behind the strip of communal garden in the street for twenty minutes, watching the lights in the hall through the open living room door, but saw no movement. ‘Let’s go round the back,’ whispered Leslie.
‘Wait here a bit.’ Maureen was afraid she’d be sick again and shame herself in front of Leslie who’d just KO’d a brick shit-house.
Leslie elbowed her hard. ‘There’s nothing going on here.’
Maureen pushed her elbow down. ‘Wait a bit, though.’
Leslie, still bristling with adrenaline, pushed her arm. ‘What’s the point in us standing here—’
The close door opened and Una stepped out into the street, followed by a small, bald man. Maureen froze, holding on to the chicken-wire fence. Una had gained a lot of weight since they had last seen her, and her haircut was worse from the front than the back. It stuck up at the top and hung over her ears. She was wearing purple leggings and a giant pink T-shirt. She raised her hand and pointed at the car. The lights flashed and beeped and she walked round to the driver’s seat. Michael was shuffling and looked as if something demeaning had just happened to him. As he reached forward to open the door Leslie grabbed Maureen’s arm and pulled her away to the bike parked on the corner. She had to lift Maureen’s leg to get her on the bike and slammed the helmet on her, banging the top of her head so hard it rang and buzzed. They took off, following the Rover at a distance.
