The Last Breath

by Denise Mina

  She lifted the rusted wire hanger holding her mother’s garden gate shut and stepped down the narrow path. The garage where she had imagined Terry off on his travels was just to her left, damp green lichen growing over the small high windows. She thought about going in there for a moment, just to look at all the damp boxes and the chair she used to sit in, but knew she’d start crying and might not be able to stop. It was the tiredness. And the shock. It had been a shock seeing an old friend dead. Seeing anyone with a hole in their head was a shock.

  She fitted the key in the lock and opened it as quietly as possible. Her mother’s house smelled perpetually of dampness and baking, a scent that, to her, conveyed certainty and stability. The smell hadn’t changed a ripple since her father died. It was as if he’d never given off a smell.

  She dipped her finger in the holy water font hanging by the front door and crossed herself. Her mother liked to see her doing it. Although she had made it clear that she wasn’t going to church and didn’t want Pete baptized, her mother took the holy water habit as a sign that one day she might return to the bosom of the chapel, confess her sins to a gnarled old arse of a priest and accept that she was, indeed, a bad girl who made the baby Jesus cry. Paddy let her think it. That she wasn’t even prepared to take communion and had had a child out of wedlock was hard enough for her mother.

  Paddy’s post was propped on the window sill. She flicked through it: credit card offers, flyers for catalogues, a couple of requests for money from charities, and one flimsy white envelope, coffee-stained in the upper corner, with her name and an approximation of the address. She put her finger under the flap and ripped it open.

  A single sheet of creamy paper and handwritten words:

  Now offering 5ok for Callum O. exclusive.

  Ring me,

  Johnny Mac.

  She stroked the figure with her fingertip and then crumpled the note in her fist, squeezing it tight, as if the words could be wrung from it, shoved it into her pocket and climbed the stairs. She could sleep soon, catch a few hours before mass.

  She stopped at the top step, listening. No one was awake yet. Alone in the quiet of the morning, she sensed more than heard the breathing behind the doors. Ahead of her was her parents’ old room. She could hear Trisha’s faint nasal whistle. To Paddy’s left was her old bedroom. BC and Pete now shared it every Saturday night, taking the single beds she and Mary Ann had left behind. Paddy fitted her hand on the worn wooden egg handle, turned it silently and opened the door just enough to slip her head round and look in.

  Pete was curled up, brown blankets and a lip of white sheet curved around the line of his little body, lying so still that she had to watch his chest to be sure he was breathing.

  She relaxed, letting her burning eyes droop half shut as she leaned her cheek against the edge of the bedroom door.

  She forgot about Terry and Aoife and John Mac’s letter. She forgot about her job and Burns and Callum Ogilvy. She forgot everything in the world but the essential, glorious fact of her son: safe, nearby and breathing in and out.

  5

  Callum

  It was a gentle tap at the door, two beats, and then the guard walked on to the next cell door, his knuckle drumming the same call on the steel followed by his steps again, another two-beat call. His signal. It was Haversham.

  Callum jack-knifed upright in his bed, sweat prickling at his temples. Haversham didn’t often work the isolation block but when he did he always did his knuckled call, telling them he was there. He didn’t need to bang on the door any more or whisper abuse through the tray slit. All it took for them to get the message was a tap. I am here, it said, I can see you.

  Haversham was on when a prisoner in the isolation block cut himself and bled to death. There were rumours that he had watched the prisoner through the Judas hole and seen him die, not raising the alarm until it was too late.

  The footsteps were heading back up the corridor, coming towards him, tapping two doors down. When Callum got out the world would be full of Havershams. A mob’ll find ye. The papers will tell them where you are. Rip ye to ribbons and no one’ll blame them.

  A mind can only hold one thought at a time.

  Callum peered across the early morning gloom and reread the graffiti scars on the wall. I fuck Harry. JS+B. John Harrison is a supergass, the missing ‘r’ floating above the last word, angrily scored deeper into the plaster than the rest of the letters. Other than that, the carving was meticulously done: the ‘s’s perfectly curved, not just straight lines joined together to form a Hellenic ‘s’. Fuelled by resentment and the desire to tell the world what he knew, the writer had worked into the rock-hard plaster, past the five layers of deep green paint. The green was faded below, like time, like memory, lighter and lighter. Callum’s own message went all the way through, gouged through to the brick. He had curved his letters too.

  It was an old prison. Victorian. The isolation cells were small and even nastier than the main block, Mr Wallace told him. Callum’d never been in the main block himself. For the full three years he’d been in the adult prison they’d kept him here because This place is full of nutters, Mr Stritcher told him, of nutters who’d like to make their name killing you. Hurting you. Men with nothing going for them, he said, as if Callum had something going for him. He was famous and that was something. Not a good thing but something.

  Haversham was outside his door, looking in at him. Callum could hear his breath, razored with spite, hitting the metal, a slow hiss through sharp teeth.

  Leaving us, are ye? Think that wean’s mother won’t find ye? Cunt. Think ye can walk out of here and live a life?

  Callum got out of bed and stood facing away from the door, his trembling hands balled into fists. Don’t listen. Don’t react. It’ll go on longer if you react.

  A mind can only hold one thought at a time.

  When he left here he would walk from his cell, through his door and turn left. Down the corridor, past three cell doors, green and chipped, to the exit. Eleven steps.

  They’d shout goodbye to him as he passed, the men behind the chipped green doors. Hughie, C3, had raped a girl, a really young girl, but seemed nice enough when you met him. Tam in C2 had killed his wife, which wouldn’t put him on protection normally because the main block was full of guys who’d done that, but she was just about to have a baby and it had been in the papers. And the last cell, C1, a quiet man who wanked all night, groaning animal noises but never speaking when the window warriors shouted at him to shut the fuck up. He wouldn’t say goodbye. Mr Wallace said he wasn’t well and shouldn’t be here. C1 might be James for all Callum knew. James with a different name. They’d been keeping them apart throughout their nine-year sentence, but maybe it didn’t matter now, if James was mental. There weren’t that many places to keep the two of them.

  The papers’ll find you, in your new house. Tell everyone.

  Past the cell doors. Eleven steps. Through the big door that opened inwards, out to the corridor where the officers on watch sat and read the paper. Smells from the kitchens came through the wall, smells so strong you could lick them from the air. The softness of sponge, sulphurous egg, the warmth of mince, onions. They ended last year’s riot with onions. The officers got the guys down from the roof by frying onions at the bottom of the stairs and fanning the smell up to them. Sometimes the corridor smelled of burning.

  Cunt.

  Everything smelled the same when it was burning.

  You baby-murdering cunt.

  Twenty-six steps, along the kitchen-smelling corridor to the big grey metal outside door and out into the yard, the bright grey sky above him. He could feel his irises ache at the sharp slap of light as the door opened. He would have that sky above him all the time soon, his eyes straining to cope with the painful brightness of it.

  Ogilvy? They’re already looking for ye, they’ll find ye, take pictures, print them.

  The bright sky above the yard and the wind coming off the sea. Even with the thirty
-foot wall around the prison the salty wind managed to sneak in, skirling around the corners of the yard, sweeping leaves into tidy little heaps against the wall. The sea was just over the wall and the air had a bitter salty tang that stung chapped lips. Standing at the door to the yard the wind was only at head height, blustering the top of his head but not touching the face, an unseen hand ruffling his hair.

  Ogilvy. Ogilvy. They’re offering big money.

  More than anything else, he had missed being touched. Sometimes he hesitated by his cell door after exercise to make them reach for him, the press of a hand on the back, on the arm, a soft cuff across the back of the head. Some prisoners were beaten by screws for doing things wrong but Callum was a sheep, followed gently wherever they led him, and they knew what to expect. He never had the guts to give them cause, but he understood the urge to defy them, to get beaten, just for the touch.

  Your pal James, he lost an eye last year.

  Lies. Haversham lied all the time.

  In the infirmary up in the Big House. Came out of isolation for a bad leg and some cunt got him with a pencil.

  James. Callum saw his eyes smouldering in the dark, the cold night wind cutting between them and the baby in the grass. The story had been told so many times, to him, by him, with him, by police when they questioned him, by the social workers, by the psychiatrists who came and went, by the papers. So many tellings, he couldn’t remember which was true any more.

  James was my only friend. The man took us there in the van, with the baby. We battered him with stones and strangled him until he died and then we stuck sticks up his bum because I’m a pervert, eh? I’m a fucking filthy pervert. I probably think about it when I’m alone, masturbate and think about it.

  James was my only friend. In the van, I was glad we were picking on the baby because we weren’t picking on me. James strangled him and the baby messed himself. I ran up the hill and James did things to him. We hit him with stones before he died. Hitting is nothing. Hitting means nothing. Prisoners hit you, parents hit you, screws hit you. What’s wrong is for me to hit you. I don’t think about it when I masturbate. I see women, bits of women, tits and cunts, disjointed pictures from magazines. It doesn’t take much. I was scared before the night, sometimes, but since the night I’ve never stopped being scared.

  I thought James was my friend but he wasn’t. I take full responsibility for what happened. The baby was crying and James held his throat to make him stop. We fiddled about with the body to make it look like someone else. I am sorry for the family, for the baby’s mother and family. I am sorry for what I have done. I will try to live a good life in the future. My dream is to work in a factory and live within a loving family structure.

  Everyone liked the last version best but ten years later all the different versions of the night had become as true as each other.

  When he remembered it, when he was alone, all he recalled were James’s black eyes smouldering as they stood over the tiny body crumpled in the wet grass, of the cold wind on his face as he stood on the verge looking back at the van, and behind him James making noises, sniggering, pulling things around to suit himself.

  When he remembered it now, Callum stood on the blustery verge and looked at the grass in front of him. It was trampled deep into the mud from the feet of all the people who had been there, the psychiatrists, the social workers, the guards who asked questions kindly and then sold the story to the newspapers, other prisoners who’d ask about it, sly, interested in details they shouldn’t be asking about.

  Cunt.

  Haversham was getting tired of Callum’s back. He tapped the door again, making his point, and shuffled off to taunt Hughie.

  Callum carried on his walk. From the door he stepped into the yard, straight across the yard to the guard block, around the concrete path at the side, staying off the grass. That would take thirty steps, maybe thirty-something. He had never been that way before. Along the grass to the door out. They would have to wait at the door until it buzzed open. The guards wouldn’t have keys for that door in case they were taken hostage. Security zones. Inside the door it would be warm, they’d have the heating on high for the guards. There would be a waiting room probably. Plastic chairs probably. Posters maybe. And beyond that an unknowable number of steps to the main doors. Through one. Locked behind him. Next door and out, out to the eye-aching brightness and the unbridled wind salting him. Out, out into a world full of Havershams.

  No one would come with him through the final door. He would be unsupervised for the first time since he was ten. He didn’t know what he would do.

  He looked back at the messages on the grey wall.

  Supergass.

  Callum’s own message was finished. Took him months. He curved all four ‘s’s, gave curvy tails to the ‘g’s and ‘y’, spelled it right. It was finished now. He could leave now. Callum’s own message:

  Everything smells the same when it’s burning.

  6

  Bang Bang

  I

  With his soft Dublin accent, fine, long face and green eyes, Father Andrew was an Irish mother’s dream. He was fresh from seminary when he came to St Columbkille’s. Eager to make the Good News accessible to young people, he made everyone use his first name, introduced guitars to mass, made self-conscious teenagers mutter inaudible bidding prayers. The parish was elderly and didn’t like the unfamiliar. They revolted, complaining to the Monsignor, and soon Father Andrew’s radical reforms were curtailed to occasional mentions of already-out-of-date pop stars in his sermons and wearing a cassock with a rainbow embroidered on the back. Paddy saw defeat in him nowadays. She’d have felt for him more if he gave fewer sermons about the evils of unmarried, working mothers, homosexuality and sex before marriage.

  Opening his arms, he raised his eyes to the giant plaster Jesus dangling over the altar. ‘Go in peace, to love and serve the Lord.’

  The organist launched into the opening bars of ‘How Great Thou Art’ and Paddy found herself singing along in the strange, strangled falsetto she only ever used in chapel. Pete giggled at her side and she nudged his head with her elbow.

  Before the altar, the priest and altar boys formed an orderly group, processing down the central aisle, gathering the congregation in their wake. Pete ducked out of the pew as the procession came past, desperate to be near the chubby greasy-haired altar boy who was his hero: BC, named for his grandfather. None of the family could bear to say his name since Con senior died. Baby Con’s name had changed as suddenly as the family dynamic.

  Because the boys stayed at Trisha’s on Saturday nights it would have been difficult for Paddy to insist Pete didn’t go to mass. As well as avoiding conflict with her mother she had a superstitious fear that organized religion might hold some romance for Pete in the future if she didn’t cram it halfway down his throat as a child. He wasn’t baptized and hated the dreary rigmarole of mass, but he still wanted to be an altar boy like his cousin. He wanted to be everything like his cousin. He shuffled ahead of her in the aisle, ducking between clustered families to get closer, keeping his adoring eyes on BC’s back.

  Paddy held on to his shoulder, following him through the throng, afraid of losing him.

  Ahead of them, standing between the doors, Father Andrew was holding an old woman’s hand, steering her by the wrist out of the door, dismissing her with a blessing. His eyes were on Paddy, willing her to him. He had already developed the faintly despising attitude to his parishioners that many older priests had. They were as cynical as strippers, some of them.

  Beyond the doors and Father Andrew, Paddy could see Sean Ogilvy out in the warm sunshine. Sean Ogilvy, teetering on his tiptoes to look back in for her, dressed in his Sunday suit, his dark hair receding from his face.

  Father Andrew reached across the throng and grabbed Paddy’s hand as she came past, reeling her in through the crowd. ‘My dear Lord, what’s this I’m reading about in your headline today?’

  ‘Oh, well.’ She broke eye contact and
tried to move on, to Sean.

  ‘Please, God, it’s not true.’

  But Father Andrew had a firm hold of her hand. ‘Please, God.’ He looked imploringly at her. ‘Please, please, God.’ Then added, as he always did, ‘I’ll pray for you, Patricia.’ He ruffled Pete’s hair. ‘And you, son.’

  If Pete hadn’t been with her she’d have kicked Father Andrew’s shin and passed it off as a mistake. Instead she dipped her eyes. ‘And I’ll pray for you, Father.’

  At the top of the steps Pete wriggled out from under her hand and ran over to Sean’s four kids. They were younger than him and therefore not as interesting as BC, but he could boss them and they loved him, especially now that he’d moved across the city and they didn’t see him all the time. Mary, the oldest, and Patrick hung on his arms, gurgling with delight at his presence.

  Around the women a puddle of children gathered, dazed from the boredom of mass, holding on to their mothers’ legs, staring at each other or trying to eat stones from the ground.

  Sean took Paddy’s elbow and pulled her aside. He looked grim.

  ‘Tomorrow morning, OK?’ he whispered.

  ‘Tomorrow?’

  He rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t tell me you can’t come.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said, shaking her head, ‘I can come, I can come. Just didn’t think it would be so soon. There was a journalist up at my door last night asking about his release. He asked if he was going to stay with you.’