‘Mrs Connelly?’ Detective Close edged his way into the hall without being asked. ‘I’ve got some news,’ his voice was chipper, but was met with corner-to-corner silence, both women looking at him as if he had shit on the bottom of his shoes.
Mary sucked through her teeth, looked him up and down, and sighed. ‘You best come in then. I’ll make us a cup of tea.’ She shuffled up the hall, the police officer and Auntie Caroline following behind her. The boy’s door snaked open and John peeked his head out before snapping it shut again.
With the kettle on the back ring and a fag in her mouth, Mary felt like her old self. ‘Whit’s this big news then?’ She knew it was important not to plead, not to cry; she had done all these things and they had been no help. Pity was a guttural clearing of the throat, a foreign sound that police officers tended to practise around her. He stood at the kitchen door looking in at them, waiting for the right moment.
‘You better sit down.’ He strode into the kitchen, duck-ing under the arm of a jumper drifting like seaweed from the clothes-pulley above his head, dragged a chair from underneath the flaps of the kitchen table and spun it around to face Mary.
Auntie Caroline lifted the kettle from the back ring, slopped warm water into the teapot, swirled it around and flung the contents into the sink. Mary sat down as her sister busied herself searching for the caddy and, measuring a heaped spoonful of tea for each of them and one for the pot.
Detective Close dipped his hand into the side pocket of his coat. With finger and thumb he fished out a Moleskin notebook with a red pencil wedged into the binding that smelled faintly of Old Spice. He flicked it open, slapped through the pages, and licked his lips. The rattle of cups made him lose his place. He looked across at Caroline. ‘Milk, four sugars,’ he remarked. Flattening out the page he was looking for, he said, ‘It’s all a bit hush-hush,’ he said, ‘but we’ve found Alison’s anorak—’
‘My God! My God!’ Mary rocked backwards and forwards on her chair, holding her elbows tight to her chest. She whispered, ‘Is she alive?’
Caroline slapped a mug of tea down in front of her, forced her to meet her gaze. ‘Drink it. For the shock.’ She had put a good dash of brandy in it, a treacle-like substance hidden out of harm’s way behind the soup pot in the bottom cupboard.
One of Mary’s hands covered the other in her lap, trying to soothe it enough to lift the tea. Auntie Caroline’s cool hand found the back of her neck and held her head steady. She let her sip tea, bird-like, the rim of the mug pressed against her pale lips. She blinked with her eyes, her arms and legs trembling, to show that she had had enough.
‘We’ve no’ found a body.’ Detective Close chewed on his lower lip.
Auntie Caroline glared at him so hard he studied his notebook and began again. ‘We’ve not yet found Alison, just her anorak.’ Only then did he receive his prize of tea. She pushed the sugar bowl towards him.
‘Where was it?’ Auntie Caroline patted her sister on the shoulder.
‘It was in the cloakroom at her school.’ He seemed pleased with that, as if he had discovered it himself. He spooned sugar into his cup.
‘Who found it?’ Auntie Caroline asked.
‘One of the teachers.’ He slurped tea one-handed, his fingers flipping pages filled with spidery pencil notes. ‘A Miss Hone. All the children had gone home and she’d seen it sitting there on its peg.’
Mary stirred herself, sat up a little straighter, colour flooding back into her face. ‘When was that?’
He scratched at his chin. ‘A few days ago.’
‘And you didn’t think to tell me until now?’ Mary’s eyes glistened.
He gulped down some tea. ‘We had to establish it was her jacket. Forensics.’ He left that bit open, nodded sympathetically. Science was always a trump card to play in any case.
‘It’s got her name on it.’ Mary spat out. ‘Alison Connelly, I sewed the name tag on myself. You dragged the canal. Dogs everywhere. Sniffing up and down closes, sniffing peoples’ arses. God sake, you never thought to check the school she went to?’
‘What does it tell us now?’ Auntie Caroline asked in a more placatory tone, placing her hand on Mary’s shoulder.
‘It tells us that that morning,’ he weighed his words more carefully, his eyes shifting from one face to another, ‘she went to school as usual and somebody took her from St. Stephen’s.’
‘But is she alive?’ Mary asked.
He remained silent.
John waited until he heard the sound of the car choking and flooding into life before he ventured into the hall. He wanted to tell someone, anybody, about his dream. But when he saw Mum slumped like a ragdoll in the chair beside the fireplace, it seemed childish. He slipped into the more natural, lived-in warmth of the kitchen. It smelt faintly of fried onions and fag smoke. The tranny on the windowsill was jammed onto jaunty fiddle music accompanied by what sounded like somebody duelling in high Appalachian squeals as they sawed their own legs off. Auntie Caroline made him a cup of tea and a bit of toast slathered in margarine with a tang of orange marmalade, the way he preferred. She told him about finding Alison’s anorak before changing tack. ‘Hurry up and finish that or you’ll not be able to go to Holy Communion.’
His back molars stuck together on a burnt crust. Instead of saying he had not been to chapel since being sectioned in hospital, he spluttered, ‘I’m not goin’ to Mass. I’ve no’ been for years.’
A shake of her head showed her disappointment, but she snapped back, ‘Your mother’s not well enough – and we need all the prayers we can get.’ Her eyes caught his. ‘Don’t we?’
His head slumped. ‘Aye,’ he said, voice flaring, ‘but whit about those millions of Jews. You no’ think they were all praying their heids off during the war? And look where it got them.’
Auntie Caroline gave him one of her looks.
‘I’m no’ goin’ to Communion,’ he said.
‘Suit yourself.’ She picked up a dishcloth and turned her back to him, humming along with the more sedate Doris Day’s ‘Que Sera, Sera’ on the radio as she dried the dishes and stacked them in the cupboard.
John consoled himself with the thought nobody went to nine o’clock Mass but decrepit oldies. Outside the house, he hunched his shoulders and set the pace, not waiting for Auntie Caroline who toddled along behind him. As they got closer to the Kerr’s hedge he slowed, lingering, and slapped his hands over his mouth to warm them with his breath. ‘This was where I first spotted Lily.’ His chin moved a fraction and he talked out of the side of his mouth.
They stood close together in reverent silence. His aunt’s long winter coat protected her from the cold rain. The venetian blinds in the Kerr house were dubbed down, locked tight. In the distance, straight-lined rooftops shimmied through clouds, a rainbow and sunbeam strayed, finger-painting the flat-roofed council houses with an unearthly glow. A biting wind pushed them inch by inch closer together. A woman with a buggy trundled past them, the child under a protective bauble of plastic sheeting, shimmying in her bucket seat as far forward as buckles would allow, peering out at them with honest curiosity, turning her head as she passed, straining the straps, ready to jump out in her red wellies and claim the world.
‘We’ll be late,’ Auntie Caroline reminded him, nudging his elbow. They walked close together. ‘Did she ever say anything?’
‘Nothin’ much.’ Although there was no traffic, he let her loop her arm through his as they crossed Duntocher Road. They were almost the same height. ‘Just something about big people not being able to understand.’ He slipped loose of her grip when they reached St Stephen’s, turning sideways on the congested pavement, allowing a middle-aged couple to nip past them. A few reluctant churchgoers wearing Sunday best set themselves against the brick wall outside the grounds to sneak a final fag before going inside. His gaze drifted towards the school a few hundred yards behind the church, where his sister’s jacket had been found.
‘Any idea what in the hell Lily me
ant?’ he asked.
‘I’d need to consult Gloria,’ Auntie Caroline panted, slightly out of breath. ‘But I’d guess that as we get older the world becomes a much smaller place. Our beliefs harden. Children see what they see and we batter them and tell them not to.’ A stout, bearded man wearing a long plastic raincoat swished between them. The opening bars of the entrance hymn from the church organ spilled out, claiming them. Cigarettes were stubbed out and dropped. Smokers and non-smokers fell into single file, marching into the fenced-off hallowed grounds and the protective embrace of Sunday worship. The smell of beeswax polish and incense clung to the chapel. John dubbed his fingers in the font at the door, dabbed his forehead with holy water, and crossed himself: ‘In the name of the Father, And of the Son, And of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’
Auntie Caroline set the lead. With a crooked smile she negotiated her way past two men, clean-shaven and lantern-jawed pass-keepers in Sunday suits, holding out shallow collection plates lined with green baize and filled with loose change. She bumped through the double doors into the nave of the church.
Celebrants rested hymn books on top of the pews in front of them. Some of the pages were wedged open and the more spirited church members sang loudly and shrilly. The less biddable mimed, hiding behind organ accompaniment and the church choir’s rendition of ‘Walk with Me, Oh My Lord’. Back seat renegades whispered to each other. Everyone but the smallest child knew the drill: eyes front, no smiling, talk like John Wayne out of the side of the mouth.
John followed his elderly aunt with growing dread. She skipped past the back seats, disdained empty seats beside the pillars that framed the roof sixty feet above them, and kept going until she found an empty slot in the front row. It was close to the side altar dedicated to the Virgin Mary. This was the place where all the holier-than-holies liked to congregate, basking in the holy glow of Canon Martin looking down on them from the pulpit.
John knew the drill. He knelt, sat, stood and sang with the best of them. He listened to Canon Martin hectoring them to pray more for little Ally, to do more to bring her safely home, and put more money in the plate lest the church would fall round about them like soggy paper. John thought the likelihood slim. He grew bored and looked about. St Stephen’s was a modern red-brick building. Clear glass framed the choir stall above the entrance and flooded the seats below. Stained glass told pictorial stories older than words for children sitting nearby to decipher.
John let his mind drift during the long sermon after the Gospel. God was keeping an eye on them. That was usually how it went. Canon Martin’s story was no different. Distilling their dirty thoughts and deeds into something by the power of something called Grace. Presenting them with a new, sin-proof suit to wear and walk around in a shiny new self, cloaked in Hope.
Nodding off, John’s ears filled with a buzzing sound. He recalled the Old Testament reading, which Canon Martin had quickly skated over. Jacob in his tent by a river, wrestling with an angel, day after day. An angel that was flesh and blood and not straw and wings and feathers plucked from a children’s Christmas play. Jacob’s mortal body sweating and fighting, grunting, pushing hard against a body shaped by joy, struggling against the void of nothingness, finding eternity’s weight in a hip, and its weak spot in an ankle, and putting the angel on its back and holding it down, making it submit. He waited until Holy Communion and sneaked out the side door. He remained in the dark about how to find Lily, but he knew he had to try. That was the only way he would find Ally.
Day 55
Mary and Jo stood to the side of the hearse’s tailgate, exhaust fumes, fag smoke and aftershave wafting in front and behind them combining into a toxic mix. The nervous jingling of pocket change was like horses’ reins, a reminder of fellow mourners held in check, waiting for Joey’s last journey. Mary grasped Jo’s hand tightly. A peaching of lipstick on her daughter’s mouth, her plucked eyebrows and a fingertip of eye shadow re-minded her how grown up she was getting. Everyone searched the back of wardrobes for funeral attire, except for her brother Morris and his floozy, who did not turn up.
Mary opted for Joey to be buried, not cremated, or rather her sister Ruth played referee and settled on that choice. Mary briefly shut her eyes, determined not to cry again, her shoulders rising and falling, throat choking into her chest. After the inevitable delay, the arrival of Joey’s coffin had made the funeral real enough; he was shouldered out the door and into the hearse by John, wee Charlie, Lonnie and Joey’s cousin. Bird’s foot trefoil and speedwell poked up through the gaps in the slabs their feet shuffled over, new life seeking the sun. Watching Joey paraded around the back of a hearse by two guys in silk top hats and frock coats was a jump back into a different century and slightly surreal. No fuss, Joey would have appreciated that, Mary thought, but perhaps not the flowers – floral pillows and sprays on top of the casket, along with plastic wreaths with messages poking out of polystyrene that he would never read. Like him, they were all for nature’s bin. She kept losing track of things. But she needed the show of mourning to be over and done with so they could renew their search for Ally.
Canon Martin conducted the funeral mass in St Stephen’s at his own slow, steady pace. Mary, flanked by Jo and John, insisted on leaving a space at the end of the pew for Ally. Mary’s sisters, their partners and children took the pews behind them. Relations, friends, workmates and people who knew Joey, and even parishioners who did not know him, filled the other seats. People sprawled out from the pews and stood black against the white walls of the chapel.
John did not want to turn round and stare, but one of his fellow mourners had a rich baritone voice that soared above their heads and out-choired the choir. His rendition of the twenty-third Psalm made John’s head dip and he cried into the lapels of his borrowed jacket. He stood within touching distance of the coffin, choking on incense. The clanking of the thurible called to mind a childhood memory, the straining sound of the chains on the Erskine ferry on the Clyde crossing before the river coursed on to the yard where his da had worked. The old priest pontificated, said all the usual things about Jesus and God’s will. Before the consecration of the coffin, he asked that a special prayer be said for Alison, but it was the same old dogma heard week in, week out; year in, year out. His wheezing monotone voice and empty words sickened John. It felt as if Ally had been stuffed inside the coffin along with his da and he had nailed down the lid with banalities. John wanted to stand up, to scream and shout in protest; instead he bit his bottom lip, bowed his head and studied his hands.
A signal from the undertakers, who had ghosted up the aisle, and John and the other pallbearers lifted the coffin and took the weight on muscles not used to the strain, but by some miracle the body was light as a child’s. John kept his head down, his face blurry with tears. He carried grief down the aisle and the coffin outside into the waiting hearse.
He sat in the back of the hired car with his mum, facing a tearful Jo and Auntie Caroline. His auntie patted him on the knee. ‘You did well, son.’ They sank into a chauffeured silence, rain washing against the window, and studied people going in and out of shops, getting on with their lives.
Wind funnelled down from the Old Kilpatrick Hills and Dalmuir Crematorium, and the boneyard was a cold spot made colder. Joey’s grave had been dug, the kickboards a walkway on the grass, and the gravediggers, in fawn overcoats and work boots, stood a few feet away from their work. Mourners arrived in fits and starts. Cars were parked all along the path and on the muddy grass against the wall at the top of the graveyard, which separated the crop of the dead from the harvest of farmer’s fields on the other side. No room for manoeuvre, graves were pencilled in straight lines. Borders between old plots and new were marked by marble headstones, sunken stone, and a scattering of angels, weary with moss. Canon Martin came in his own car, a jalopy with only two doors. He was helped out of the passenger seat and along to the graveside by a balding, middle-aged, altar boy.
With the noise of the wind, and traffic from the n
earby dual carriageway, for most of those gathered it was a mime show – a game of watching the old priest turning pages of the missal and matching it with the mutter of moving lips. Soon it was time to drop Joey’s coffin into the cut trench. The undertaker handed John one of the cords for this duty. He distributed the other cords to men Joey had worked with in the yards, big, broad men bursting out of their suits, not scared to get their clean shoes dirty on the runnel of dirt at their feet. They took the job seriously. The man across from John, the biggest of them all, with a quiff and sideburns, gave him the nod when the time came to lower the coffin. They dropped the cords in and bowed their heads a fraction to each other at a job well done.
‘I was very sorry to hear about your da.’ The man with the quiff shook John’s hand. ‘He was a good man.’ He squeezed his fingers in a handshake. Hazel-brown eyes locked on his, steady as his gravelly voice. ‘And I was sorry to hear about your wee sister too. Bastards.’ He spat into the grave and introduced himself, ‘Bobby Rodgers. If there is anything I can do let me know.’
‘Cheers.’ John sounded unsure. Not because of anything that had been said, but he was sure he had spotted Janine’s braided hair swinging back and forth across her back as she walked away from the graveside.
He trotted through the crowd. People he knew vaguely bit their lips and nodded at him, and mourners he was distantly related to offered condolences and tried to catch him in conversation. He left them behind and caught up with Janine. She stood with her head bowed and hands tucked into the pockets of a smart navy jacket with flashy silver buttons in front of a mildewed wooden marker, which John realised was a tombstone. The council workers had left a skip on the path, creating a chicane. He slapped her on the back as if they had been playing a game of tig. She flinched when he touched her arm.
‘You came.’ He leaned across and pecked her on the cheek, making an awkward grab for her hand.
Lily Poole Page 22
