When the Lights Come on Again

by Maggie Craig

  He was even known to smile at his wife these days, usually over something funny Hope had said or done. The little girl had connected them again, given them a focus, allowed them to carry on some sort of family life together. For their granddaughter’s sake.

  Liz’s own relationship with her father remained a distant one. Correction, she thought. We don’t have a relationship. Not one worthy of the name.

  ‘And have the two of you resolved your differences?’ she demanded now of her grandfather. He shrugged.

  ‘We’re never going to be best pals, but we did have a long conversation last New Year’s morning. It might have been the whisky talking, of course, but we got some things sorted out.’

  ‘So what did the two of you fall out about in the first place?’

  There was a pause, and a curious look passed over Peter’s face. ‘It’s best left alone, lass.’

  ‘No,’ Liz insisted. She stopped dead in the middle of the pavement, forcing him to stop too. ‘I think I’ve a right to know. It affected me, after all. Wouldn’t you say?’

  He turned to face her slowly and with obvious reluctance. ‘You’ll mind that he and I had an argument around the time your granny died?’

  ‘Yes.’ She remembered it well: the raised voices and the slammed doors, her mother in tears and completely distraught. ‘But Eddie and I never knew what it was about.’

  ‘Jenny was in the back bedroom,’ he said, his voice very soft. ‘It was the morning of the funeral. Your mother had come downstairs before we set off for the cemetery to... to pay her last respects.’ His voice had gone husky, and he had to swallow before he could go on. ‘She was that fond of your granny, you know?’

  ‘I know,’ said Liz gently, putting a comforting hand on his arm. ‘And Granny loved her too.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘and you too, pet. She had lost three of her own children. Bruce was sailing the seven seas and Bob was on the other side of the world. Your father...’

  His mouth tightened and the sentence went unfinished. ‘You and your mother and Eddie... well, you were all very precious to my Jenny. And to me,’ he said. ‘And to me.’

  Unable to speak, Liz squeezed his arm. Her grandfather gave her a faint smile. Then he shifted his gaze to something he saw over her shoulder.

  ‘Your mother began to sob. Your father told her to pull herself together, that he hoped she wasn’t going to behave like that at the service and at the graveside. He didn’t want her disgracing the family in public.’ Peter’s voice had grown very dry.

  Liz looked up at him, but he seemed unwilling to meet her gaze, his eyes focused on something only he could see. ‘I asked him what kind of a man he was, that he could stand dry-eyed by his own mother’s coffin, that he could watch his wife breaking her heart over it and offer her no comfort. I asked him why he had no heart. I told him he was the one who was a disgrace to the family.’

  Peter paused, and swallowed again. There was pain in every word that he spoke. ‘I told him I was ashamed to call him my son.’ He stopped, his face working. Liz saw anguish there. She saw something else too. Regret.

  ‘Och, Grandad,’ she breathed, gripping his arm once more. ‘Och, Grandad.’

  He looked at her at last. There was more to come. His voice was so quiet she had to strain to hear the words. ‘And I told him his mother had been ashamed of him too, because of how hard he was on his family. Especially you, Lizzie. Especially you.’

  Liz remembered another conversation she’d had with her grandfather. Your father has strong feelings, he’d said. About a lot of things. Don’t we all? she thought bitterly. Don’t we all?

  Her words were clipped. ‘And now you think it’s up to me to forgive him? Don’t you think that’s asking a bit much?’

  ‘I’m asking you to have a bit of understanding, lass. Because you’re capable of it. He’s not.’

  Liz’s voice was bitter. ‘He shuts himself off from me, but he’s opened up to Hope.’

  Peter’s piercing gaze saw far too much. ‘And are you a wee bit jealous of that?’

  She watched her father that afternoon, saw the smile on his face as her mother played peek-a-boo games with Hope, looked on when the little girl clambered up on to his lap, the smile growing as she laughed up at him. Liz wondered if he’d ever been like that with her. She searched her memory and came up with one long-lost image of being hoisted up on to his shoulders.

  She seemed to remember they’d both been laughing then. Had they been watching a launch? The Queen Mary perhaps? No, it must have been earlier. The recollection was of herself as a much smaller child - before she had contracted the scarlet fever.

  Watching his face now as he looked at Hope, Liz wondered if her grandfather might be right Was she jealous?

  Troubled by the thought, she was restless and unhappy when she took her leave of her family after the party. About to head back for Riverside station, she turned the other way instead, obeying some inner compulsion to walk up to the ruins of the Holy City houses. She would get the train back to Partick from Singer’s and then take the tram along. It was growing foggy. She didn’t want to have to grope her way all along Dumbarton Road.

  She loved Hope so much. The thought that she might be jealous of the attention her father was giving her little niece was an extremely uncomfortable one.

  Sometimes Liz felt as though she were two separate people. There was the cheerful and competent student nurse MacMillan, calm and efficient, always ready with a joke or a comforting word. And then there was wee Lizzie, so terribly lonely when so many of the people she had cared for were gone.

  As she reached what remained of the Holy City, she forced down the lump in her throat. She stood staring at the rubble, at the sheer bloody mess of what had once been homes full of families. It had taken weeks to bring all the bodies out. Some had never been found - or at least never identified. Liz tried not to think too much about that.

  No one was entirely sure how many people had died in the Blitz. Officialdom, with the justification of not wanting to spread gloom, despondency and panic, had deliberately underestimated the numbers, quoting a figure of five hundred deaths. One of the rescuers who’d lived through those terrible nights responded to that with a bitter question. ‘Five hundred? Which street do they mean?’

  Despite the devastation wrought - only seven houses in Clydebank had escaped damage of some description - the town was rising from the ashes. Buildings which could be saved were being repaired and rebuilt. Industry was recovering, getting back into production. In some cases that had happened astonishingly quickly. John Brown’s and a few other places had been working again only days after the Blitz. The German bombs had done great damage, but people told each other gleefully that Jerry had missed a hell of a lot as well: the Singer’s clock, for one thing. It had come through the onslaught intact, a symbol of survival.

  And because it was Clydebank, people found things to laugh at. There had been government compensation for losses sustained in the bombing. Some folk had worked out very quickly how to milk the system. As Annie Crawford had drily remarked, ‘You’d never have guessed there were so many pianos in Clydebank.’

  On her last visit home, Liz had bumped into Nan Simpson. She’d been up in arms about the compensation too. ‘Her downstairs from me claimed for window blinds. That woman never had blinds on her windows in her life!’

  All of that passed through Liz’s mind as she stood in the rubble. It was all mixed up together - life and death, laughter and tears. She was visualizing it too, the horror of the Blitz, the Gallaghers singing and teasing each other, Marie and Brendan arguing incessantly about which part of Ireland they were going home to, Finn stealing the gingerbread and getting away with it, Conor’s pride in his faithful companion.

  Then she saw Helen and Eddie on the day of his graduation. Her big brother had been so handsome in his hood and gown, love and tenderness in his eyes as he had looked at Helen in the brown georgette dress. What an effort it had been getting the inde
pendent Miss Gallagher to accept that!

  She thought of Mario. Would they ever see each other again? Maybe not in this world...

  He’ll not be an atheist now. Helen’s voice was ringing round her head, happy because she was going to be reunited with Eddie. Oh, God, she missed them all so much!

  Turning to leave, her eye was caught by a flash of yellow. Curious, she picked her way through the rubble. Clinging on to a rough piece of masonry, in much less earth than you would think it needed to survive, was a daffodil, flowering bravely in the misty March air. A fragment of blue earthenware pot still stuck to it. It had to be one of Helen’s.

  Liz stood for a moment, remembering the pots of flowers which had dotted the Gallaghers’ living room. That had been so like Helen, brightening up her surroundings, making the best of things, never complaining about the hand which fate had dealt her.

  Liz reached for the daffodil, then stopped herself. She should leave it here, a tiny memorial to the brave girl who had been her friend. Eyes blinded by tears, she stumbled back to the main road. She was cold. Terribly, terribly cold.

  She shouldn’t have taken the short cut. It was a stupid thing to have done, but she was anxious to be on time for Adam, now a senior house officer at the Infirmary. They had agreed to meet outside the nurses’ home and go for an early evening drink and a bite to eat somewhere up Byres Road.

  As if the blackout wasn’t enough, the fog was now a pea-souper, blanketing everything in thick yellow folds. Her wee torch, carefully pointed downwards so she didn’t get yelled at to ‘Put out that light!’, wasn’t making much of an impact. Liz coughed, and drew her woollen scarf further up around her mouth.

  The trouble with fog was that it disorientated you - made familiar surroundings unfamiliar. She’d hopped off the tram at the front entrance to the University on Dumbarton Road. Instead of going the long way round to meet Adam, along to Church Street and then up and around, Liz had decided to cut through the hospital complex, past the Andersonian Institute and round behind the ophthalmology department.

  That ought to have brought her round the back of Outpatients and then out on to University Avenue, but she’d taken a wrong turning somewhere. She suspected she was near the mortuary. That was a happy thought.

  From somewhere in the gloom came a rustling noise. Liz gave a little shriek, and jumped.

  ‘Is there anybody there?’

  Her words bounced back off the walls. The narrow beam of her torch didn’t illuminate much either. The rustling noise continued, transformed now into a kind of scuffling sound. A rat, of course. What else? Liz shuddered, remembering how they had appeared from everywhere in Clydebank after the Blitz, flushed from their tunnels and nests by the bombs and the noise.

  She quickened her step. The sooner she found Adam, the better. It felt so lonely out here.

  There must be lots of people mere feet away from her, but they were inside the buildings which rose around her like the walls of some giant cavern. Those walls were thick, built to last. There were wards above her head but their windows would be tightly shut against the night and the fog, the blackout blinds securely in place. Liz knew they were there, but the patients and staff inside would have no idea that she was out here.

  Unbidden, she heard a voice in her head. It was one of the student nurses, a girl from the Outer Isles. When Liz had once confessed that walking past the mortuary gave her the creeps, the girl had chided her gently, her accent as soft and lilting as Sister MacLean’s.

  ‘Och, no, Liz, you shouldna worry about that. Dead people will never hurt you.’

  She’d meant to be comforting. The memory of her words was having entirely the opposite effect.

  Liz shivered again, quickened her step, and walked into something solid and warm. Not something. Someone. Could it be Adam, come looking for her? Instinctively, she reached out for him - and felt herself roughly grabbed and spun round, her torch pulled from her grasp and flung to the ground. Its narrow beam was extinguished immediately. A male arm clamped itself hard across her throat and shoulders, hurting her. Not Adam, then.

  Thirty-eight

  ‘Want to hear a joke?’

  It was four years since she’d heard that voice, but she’d have recognized it anywhere. Horrible, unwanted memories swamped her, rendering her incapable of speech, struggle or resistance.

  ‘I spotted you coming down the stairs at Partick,’ said Eric Mitchell. ‘You didn’t notice me on the tram, did you now? Or following you up through here?’ His voice sank to a hiss. ‘And little Lizzie always thought she was so clever.’

  The words dripped malevolence.

  His hand was on her neck, his fingers caressing her flesh. She tried not to shrink from his touch. If she kept calm, maybe he would too. Not do what she feared was on his mind. Panic threatened to overwhelm her.

  Then a picture of Hope popped into her head. Somehow the thought of her little niece gave her strength.

  ‘Sure. I’d like to hear a joke,’ she said. Her voice sounded perfectly level. That was funny. Funny peculiar, that was, not funny ha-ha.

  ‘Sensible girl,’ he said. His voice was a growl of soft menace. ‘Heard the one about the new utility knickers?’

  ‘No,’ she whispered, ‘I haven’t.’

  His lips were touching her ear. ‘One Yank and they’re off,’ he murmured. ‘Only in your case it would be an Eyetie, wouldn’t it?’

  She had heard the joke. She’d thought it mildly funny at the time. It didn’t seem at all amusing now.

  ‘Wouldn’t it?’ Eric Mitchell asked in a louder voice, his hand tightening painfully on the bones in Liz’s neck. ‘What’s wrong with a good Scotsman, eh?’

  Anger boiled up in Liz. Four years she’d put up with him. And for at least two of those years she’d had to be constantly on her guard. Two years of being nervous and jumpy every minute of the day. She’d had enough of being Eric Mitchell’s victim.

  ‘Nothing,’ she snapped. ‘Only I can’t seem to see one right now.’ She knew where one was, though. Probably only a few hundred yards away. Would he have started to worry about her yet? Come looking for her?

  ‘You can’t see anything,’ said Eric Mitchell silkily, ‘and neither can anyone else. No one’s going to hear you if you scream either. Not on a night like this, with all the windows closed.’

  Liz squeezed her eyes tight shut in the blackness. St Jude, can you get me out of this one?

  His hand was moving. He pulled her scarf out of the way, began unfastening the top buttons of her coat. His fingers, cold and rough, were in the V-neck of her blouse...

  A tiny torch beam played over Liz’s face.

  ‘You know, I really don’t think the young lady wants you to do that.’

  Buckling at the knees with sheer relief, she felt Eric Mitchell’s hold on her slacken as he turned round to face Adam, but if he had recognized the voice as belonging to his boss’s nephew there were no signs of it.

  ‘Fuck off, pal. Mind your own business.’

  ‘Afraid I can’t do that, pal,’ said Adam. ‘You see Miss MacMillan is a friend and colleague of mine and I really think you should take your filthy hands off her. Right now. And you’re on hospital property too - without, so far as I can see, any valid reason to be here.’

  He sounded his usual languid self. Perhaps that was why Mitchell was caught so much by surprise when Adam lunged forward and grabbed Liz by the arm. He swung her round behind him with such force that she crashed into the wall, banging her elbow painfully against the stonework.

  It made her head swim for a moment, and in the confusion which followed she was aware of two punches being thrown, then the sound of running footsteps. She could hear heavy, laboured breathing. It was her. Beside her, someone else’s breath was also coming too fast.

  ‘Adam?’ she said into the fog. ‘Please tell me it’s you who’s still here.’

  ‘It’s me,’ he said grimly. ‘I don’t know where my bloody torch is though.’

  Liz
reached for him, patting the darkness with her hands and finding his face.

  ‘You’re bleeding!’ she gasped.

  ‘Ten out of ten for diagnosis. Come on, let’s get inside and shed some light on the subject.’

  ‘He could have had a knife,’ Liz said sternly ten minutes later.

  ‘Well, he didn’t,’ replied Adam, looking remarkably cheerful for a man who’d just taken a punch. ‘Ouch!’

  ‘Keep still, then. How can I clean you up if you won’t stay still?’

  ‘Och, you’re so sympathetic, Nurse,’ he grumbled. ‘No wonder Sister MacLean used to make you clean floors and lavatories all the time and never let you near the patients.’

  ‘My turn,’ he said with some satisfaction when she’d finished with him. ‘Where’s the damage?’

  ‘Only my elbow, I think.’ Liz rolled up her sleeve and let him have a look at it. ‘You did that’ she said lightly, ‘but I’m rather glad that you did.’

  ‘Mmm.’ He cleaned it and applied some ointment then put his hands on her shoulders and peered anxiously down into her face. ‘Are you really all right, Liz?’

  ‘Yes, of course I am,’ she said brightly. In fact she felt full of beans. She’d been miserable a couple of hours ago; now she felt absolutely great. Strange. A surge of adrenaline because she’d narrowly escaped a fate worse than death?

  ‘You look very thoughtful,’ said Adam.

  ‘Mmm. I expect I do.’ She smiled up at him.

  ‘Right,’ he said briskly. ‘Do you want to go to the police station now or tomorrow morning?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Liz, you’ve got to report it!’

  She’d given him the whole story whilst she’d attended to his injuries. He had listened without comment, but she’d seen the tightening around his mouth, known without him having to spell it out that he was outraged by what she’d had to put up with while she was working at Murray’s.

  She bit her lip. ‘Do I have to report it? Don’t you remember that woman we had in A and E who’d been raped and beaten up by her boyfriend? I worked with Eric Mitchell for four years. I didn’t make a single complaint about his behaviour. Not an official one, at any rate. Can you imagine what they would make of that?’