Hope Dies Last

by Deborah Finn

  January 28th 2005

  Marilyn is standing by the railings inside the deserted park. A low mist settles on her hair and clothes, on the hospital blanket that is wrapped around the baby asleep in her arms. He is three days old. His face is furrowed and while he sleeps his fingers curl and uncurl in slow motion.

  Marilyn is watching Martin’s house. Martin Halton has gone to work but his wife, Beth, is still at home and it is Beth she has come to see. She has never spoken to Beth, but she has seen her, and something in her serious, pointy face looks right. Is this a mistake? Marilyn crushes the thought before it can bloom into panic, punching all the breath out of her chest. What she is about to do is enormous and irretrievable. It is too big for thinking now.

  She presses her nose against the baby’s head and inhales the curdled sweet smell of him. It hurts where they stitched the tear. It feels like she is falling to pieces.

  Cars flash past, strobed through the railings. Marilyn wishes everything would slow down. But she knows what she has to do next; she has practised this. She will walk up the path to the house, knock on the door, and Beth will answer. She will hand her the baby. She will give Beth the baby. She will give... Marilyn’s heart is beating too fast and the edges of her vision start to darken. She presses her forehead onto the solid, cold railing and exhales through pursed lips.

  The baby stirs in Marilyn’s arms and she pulls the blanket over his head, shielding him from the damp. He shouldn’t be out here. He should be inside in the warm, with someone like Beth, with her nice house and her husband and everything a woman could want; everything, except a baby.

  Beth wants a baby. Marilyn knows because she saw her at the social work offices going into an adoption workshop. And Marilyn had recognised the man she was with. Martin Halton.

  Beth had stared at Marilyn and her pregnant belly, and the idea had come as clearly as if she had said the words aloud. Marilyn would give her baby to Martin Halton and his pointy-faced wife. Marilyn would choose, not the social workers, with their manila folders and their bland courtroom talk. And for a moment, Marilyn had felt elated and powerful.

  But she doesn’t feel powerful now. She is shaking. She starts walking across the grass to the path, to the open gateway and out along the pavement until she is facing the house. She takes a step into the road and a car whips past, horn blaring. She feels the slap of the air. She grabs the baby’s skull and presses it into her chest. She crunches her teeth together, wincing, crushing back the near miss as it tingles down to her fingertips, the baby’s head smashed against the wing mirror.

  Marilyn steps back onto the pavement and breathes hard. Her eyes catch a movement and she sees Beth looking down from her bay window. Beth looks at Marilyn, and then she turns away as if the sight of them means nothing to her. Marilyn feels smacked by rejection.

  Don’t you want him? Her eyes fill with tears. She shakes her head. She is being stupid. She doesn’t know; that’s all. She’ll want him when she sees him. Marilyn looks at the road, checking the traffic, looking and listening, hardly trusting her own senses. When she is sure, she crosses the road. She opens the gate and walks up the path to Beth’s front door.

  One - March 19th 2015

  Lester Gallagher looked at the screen of his phone. “I have to take this,” he said to the TV researcher lad. He swung round on his seat as he lifted the phone to his ear. “Becca, hen,” he said. “I’m waiting on my interview. This better be urgent.” He listened intently. From the corner of his eye he could see the boy drumming his fingers on his clipboard. They were sitting at the edge of the set. Guys were wheeling lights into place around the early evening news desk.

  “Aye, OK, that’s a problem alright,” he said. “Change the flight to the afternoon and let the guys know.” He went to close the call and in his side vision caught the researcher pimping up his big fake smile. “And Becca,” he added, “this shirt you got me is for some wee weasel of a guy. Neck size 16, OK?”

  He closed the call. He turned back to the researcher.

  “Have you got time for me now?” the young man asked. His cut glass accent was at odds with his scruffy jeans and hipster stubble.

  Gallagher laughed, shaking his head. Where did they get them from? “Aye, right,” he gestured. “On with it!”

  “It was in the east end of Glasgow that you grew up?”

  Gallagher nodded, just as a make-up girl appeared at his shoulder.

  “In and out of foster care,” the researcher quoted with a wistful tone.

  Gallagher laughed. The boy sounded like he was talking about a stray dog. Gallagher turned to the make-up girl and pointed at the disk of panstick in her hand. “Hen, that is orange,” he said. “You know I’m standing for parliament, not auditioning for Funny Girls?”

  The girl laughed. When she spoke, she had an Australian accent. “Hey, I’m a professional,” she said. “You’ll look like a proper man when I’ve finished with you.”

  “Do I not look like a proper man now?”

  They both laughed. “If it’s not too much trouble...” the researcher interrupted.

  Gallagher’s head snapped back. “I think we’re done, laddie,” he said.

  The researcher held his gaze for a moment then flipped his clipboard closed and stalked off.

  Gallagher laughed. “Artistic temperament,” he said to the girl who was smearing him with grease.

  “There’s a lot of that,” she agreed.

  Gallagher eyed her as she started dusting him with powder. “You seeing the world?” he asked.

  “That was the plan,” she said. “Manchester wasn’t exactly on my list, I have to say.”

  “Don’t knock it,” Gallagher said. “This is a great city. I could show you a good time here.”

  “Yeah?” the girl asked. “I might take you up on that.” She arched an eyebrow and swiped his nose with her dusting brush.

  “If you’ve made me look like a clown, you’re in big trouble,” Gallagher said.

  She shrugged, like the kind of girl who enjoyed big trouble then she turned and walked away slowly. Gallagher watched in admiration as she swished her neat little arse from side to side.

  A flurry on set took his attention. Sally Baxter: queen of the local news! She whipped across the set, ignoring the minions. She was tall and somehow mannish, Gallagher thought, despite the high heels and make up. When you watched her on the telly, behind the news desk, she looked like a petite little thing, all lip gloss and French manicure. Now she bore down on Gallagher and grabbed his hand in a firm shake.

  He stood up and held her hand between his two. “Sally!” he said warmly.

  She kept her eyes on his while pressing a finger to her ear and listening intently. “Yes,” she said, three times. Then she dropped her hand and shook her head. “It’s chaos,” she said to Gallagher. “You’ve been prepped?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She turned away and shouted. “Rachel, where’s my backrest?” She turned back to Gallagher, putting a hand to the small of her back. “It’s killing me,” she said. “Now this is how it’ll go: I’ll speak to camera, we’ll roll the VT for two minutes then it’s back to the studio. We’ve got three minutes. You’ve been through the questions with Larry, yeah?”

  That would be the prima donna with the clipboard, Gallagher thought. He shrugged. Sally Baxter grabbed Gallagher’s wrist and led him across the set towards the lights. She leaned her head towards his in a confidential fashion. “I heard there might be a little bedroom trouble with the opposition, huh?”

  “I couldn’t possibly comment,” Gallagher said.

  Sally Baxter swiped him. “I just bet you couldn’t,” she said. “There’s your seat.” She stepped over some cables and settled herself on the leather chair behind the curved news des
k. Gallagher watched a transformation occur as her back straightened, her shoulders lowered and she lifted her face to the cameras. Her skin seemed to glow, all that grimy panstick wiped out by the lights.

  A scrawny bloke in a check shirt was hunkering down in front of them, miming a countdown, and Gallagher felt someone fiddling with his microphone. A kid was meddling with the wiring, and now here was Sally Baxter talking. What happened to the intro music?

  “...the last in our profiles of parliamentary candidates in our area. And tonight we have Lester Gallagher; a man who’s proud to have come up the hard way and made it to the top. Gallagher Holdings’ value is currently estimated at £600m, though rumours of a flotation are apparently wide of the mark. Let’s see how he made those millions, starting out from a cramped tenement flat in the east end of Glasgow.”

  The scrawny bloke made a circling movement, like dialling an old fashioned telephone, and everyone came back to life. Rachel rushed in with Sally Baxter’s backrest, microphone kid reappeared at his shoulder, and beyond it all, Gallagher could see the VT rolling on a monitor.

  Jesus! That was his street. The street he’d grown up on as a kid. The front door. It looked just the same. The same filthy bottle green. And for a second, he was eight years old again, his mother was yelling at him to get out because she had ‘company’; the kind of company that turned up in the afternoon with a bottle of vodka and a ten pound note. He almost expected her sunken-cheeked face to appear. And he wanted her to be there, still alive, wanted to shove it in her face: look at me, ma, I’m on the telly. The VT switched to the forecourt of Car Go Round, his very first business, looking a lot more flash these days.

  “Why can’t I hear the audio, Sally?” he asked.

  “The viewers can hear it,” she said.

  Well, that wasn’t really the point. He wanted to know what they were saying. Now the shot was of Manchester. Gallagher felt a strange hollowing in his chest. He was twenty three when he’d come to Manchester and he’d switched from cars to shops, anything cheap: ratty little tattoo bars, greasy cafes, tanning salons, holding it all together by the skin of his teeth. But he’d been happy enough at the time, hadn’t he, working his way up? The final shot flashed up, an agent’s board on a city centre office block: Acquired by Gallagher Holdings.

  And then the scrawny bloke was holding up his hand, lowering his fingers one by one. The minions disappeared into the shadows and Sally Baxter primped her jacket before squaring off to the camera.

  “Well, so much for the past, but what does the future hold for Lester Gallagher? Will his journey take him further south, as far as the Palace of Westminster perhaps?”

  She swung round to face Gallagher, leaning forward. There was a flirtatious light in her eye, he thought. “Lester Gallagher, you’re not ashamed of your humble roots? They’ve made you the man you are today?”

  “Aye, that’s right, Sally,” he said. “I’ve come from literally nothing. I’ve worked my way up, with no help from anyone. And if I can make this kind of success, then anyone can. That’s the key: hard work. People need inspiration, not handouts.”

  “Handouts? By that you mean support for the unemployed and the disabled?”

  She smiled at him. He noticed the whitened line of her teeth. “Now, Sally,” he said, with a warning note. “People who genuinely need support are getting support.” He sliced his hand decisively. “But most people would rather be at work. Wouldn’t you? Wouldn’t we all? And the fact is we can’t afford to spend money we’re not making.”

  “So you’d support cutting funding to health and education? You think our nurses should accept a pay freeze?”

  He shook his head. “Sally, I didn’t say. But if we’re to repair this economy, then we all have to tighten our belts. We have to balance the books and investors need to have the confidence that we can do that. Hard working families...”

  “So you put investors first?” she cut in. “And then you mention hard working families second. Those are the priorities of your party?”

  Her eyes seemed to bulge at him, unamused and imperious. Gallagher knew it was just a job to her, but she was trying to make him look a fool. He suddenly had an image of what it would be like to share a breakfast table with this castrating bitch, looking over the top of the newspaper as she complained about the coffee being scalded. He bared his teeth in an imitation of a smile.

  “Sally, where do you think prosperity comes from? Where do jobs come from? Jobs come from people making investments. We need people who have the vision and ideas, we need people with the courage to invest in those ideas, and we need people to work hard to make it a reality. We’re all in it together.”

  She laughed at him, just a quick bark of laughter, but it was there. He felt the heat rising up under his collar.

  “I’m sure a lot of us wish that was true,” she said. “But in reality we have international banks rolling over, these so called investors are being bailed out by the hard working people, and to add insult to injury, your party inflicts austerity measures on the very people who are suffering the most, while big business gets the slate wiped clean. That’s what most people think of when they think of investors like yourself, Mr Gallagher.”

  She held his eyes, and he could see the laughter there. This was a game to her, and she knew she’d scored a hit. For a moment, everything seemed to slow down. He replayed her voice, slurred in slow motion. For a moment, he hated her. Then he clicked back into real time.

  “I didn’t know you spoke for most people, Sally,” he said. “The champagne media lifestyle isn’t quite real life, you know.” He glanced to the side, as if he was in a bar, inviting people to laugh along. “Now, if you went out there and spoke to people like I do, every day, then you’d find out that most people have got the sense to know there’s been one almighty crash and we’re building our way back out of it, saving where we can, investing wisely in projects that make a difference.”

  “So investors like yourself, you swoop in to save us all? The people of Manchester should be grateful to you?” she asked.

  Gallagher shook his head, as if she was a slow learning child. “That’s not what I said, Sally. I’ll say it again: we’re all in this together. Manchester is a city of great industry and it’s always had a tradition of hard work...”

  “And yet you’d turn it into a city of retail and leisure. Your name has been closely associated with the controversial Hallowfield development, hasn’t it?”

  “Oh, there you go again,” he said, waving his hand as if to brush away smoke. “You call it ‘controversial’ and you try to make a story out of nothing. This is a fantastic development. It’s going to revitalise a neglected zone, making opportunities for small businesses. This is good news for our city and it’s something we should all be celebrating.”

  “And Gallagher Holdings celebrating more than most?”

  That beaky look was back, her eyes narrowed. Did she have something? Gallagher leaned back in his chair and spread his hands in a gesture of openness. “Gallagher Holdings has an interest in the project, if that’s what you mean. There’s no secret there. I’m proud to be involved with this project. I believe in it passionately. I’m proud to be part of the future of this city.”

  Sally Baxter nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, our sources tell us that you’re heavily invested in this scheme. In fact, our business analyst tells us that Gallagher Holdings is exposed on this project.” She leaned forward again, mouding her face into a look of enquiring innocence. “So, if this project fails, could it be a turning point in the rags to riches story?”

  Gallagher felt his lips cracking as he smiled. “I’ll say it once more, Sally. This is a great project, a model for development in Manchester, and Gallagher Holdings is proud to be part of it.”

  She nodded in conclusion, gave him a big, wide no-hard-feelings smile. “Thank you, Lester Gallagher.” She swivelled away on her chair and started talking to camera, finishing off the segment. Microphone boy came and unclipped him
and a skinny girl with pigtails and square glasses came and led him off set.

  Gallagher felt an unfamiliar fogginess in his head. He tried to rewind the conversation. Had she made him look bad? Steve, his election agent, was waiting in the corridor. He had a mobile clamped to his ear. He shut the call down as Gallagher approached.

  “Gallagher Holdings is exposed?” He stared hard at his right-hand man. “Where did she get that?”

  Two

  Marilyn wrenches an opening into each new morning, as if she is squeezing her head through a polo-neck top. The world does not welcome her arrival into wakefulness, it makes no space for her. All the time she is pushing and pulling; pulling back the heavy grey tarpaulin of sleep, pushing through the thin air of her bedsit to reach the kettle, pulling the hairbrush through her long red hair. She arrives at work exhausted by the routine effort of brushing her teeth and fastening her shoes.

  At work, they stand in rows, ironing and steaming, bagging up the pressed clothes, hanging them back on the rack. Marilyn works near the back of the room, where the quiet ones go. Some of the women talk and laugh as they work. They have flocked together at the front, chattering amidst the foliage of party gowns and dress shirts.

  Marilyn knows everyone by name, and there are perhaps twenty women who work there, as well as Paul, who is deaf. He seems cheerful to Marilyn. He is brisk and sprightly in his work, and always ready to smile when the women at the front lark about. No-one there knows any sign language, apart from gesturing with a big T at tea-break time. Marilyn wonders if Paul is lonely all day. He doesn’t look lonely.

  The television is always on. It is mounted high up on the front wall. You can’t exactly watch it, because you need to look at what you’re ironing, but if it’s something simple, a big cotton shirt, then you can keep glancing up. The mid-morning news is on when Marilyn hears the once-familiar voice. She freezes, her grip tightening on the iron. Then she very deliberately puts the iron into its holder and lifts her head, daring her eyes to focus on the screen. Yes, it’s him. He’s addressing a crowd and they’re laughing, cheering. Then the reporter is talking, and now here he is being interviewed. He turns to talk right into the camera. His mean blue eyes seem to punch through the screen right into her. Marilyn grips tight onto her workstation until the feeling has passed, and she knows he cannot see her. But she can see him; still the same cockerel jauntiness, his big barrel chest held up by his strutting little legs.