The Last Breath

by Denise Mina

  ‘Shite.’ Sean looked around to see if he’d been heard uttering a curse word in the chapel yard. ‘I need you there, you know everyone, you’ll be able to spot them in the car park. I don’t know all the faces, you know?’

  Elaine was looking at them so Paddy gave her a wave. Elaine was holding baby Mona on her hip and had Cabrini strapped tightly into a stroller. She was standing with another mother, equally laden. Elaine had qualified as a hairdresser and always managed to keep herself looking good. She had a short brown bob at the moment, a break from her usual blonde hair. Paddy envied her slim frame, especially after four pregnancies, but she was so decent and straightforward that no one who knew her could fail to like her. She waved back to Paddy, the tight muscle in her jaw cutting sharply across her cheek.

  ‘Seany, you don’t have to do this.’

  He looked at Paddy’s chin, his hand still clamped over his mouth. It was going to happen. He had volunteered to assuage his conscience and now it was actually happening. Callum Ogilvy, the notorious child-killer, was coming to live in his tiny house with himself, Elaine and their four children.

  ‘I do need to,’ he said, sharply. ‘That’s the thing, I do need to do this. He won’t get out otherwise. But we’ll both be in deep shit if the News management hear about it and we don’t give them the story. You don’t need to do it.’

  ‘I do. It’ll be something selfless to tell my son one day. I pass up a chance.’

  Sean smiled at her. He hadn’t driven her anywhere for a long time and they both missed it.

  ‘Elaine knows it’s tomorrow, does she?’

  ‘Of course she does.’

  Together they looked over at Elaine, who bumped the baby up her hip and ground her teeth. She sensed their eyes on her and looked back at them, suddenly rocking the buggy back and forth. Cabrini’s arms shot up in surprise. Paddy sensed that Elaine was trying to comfort herself, not Cabrini.

  ‘And she’s all right about it, is she?’

  ‘She’s fine.’ He didn’t sound very convincing.

  ‘Fucking hell, Sean, you were lucky when you married that woman. I wouldn’t have done it.’

  Sean looked at his wife and nodded. ‘I know that,’ he said, ‘I know.’ He didn’t sound very convincing.

  ‘Terry Hewitt was murdered,’ Paddy blurted, surprised again to find herself tearful. ‘I had to look at the body, they said it was the Provos.’

  ‘Hewitt? That fat guy you chucked me for?’

  ‘I didn’t – oh, for fucksake, let’s not get back into that.’

  Her words choked her and Sean softened. ‘Sorry.’ He pulled her out of the crowd to the side of the chapel and the shadows. ‘Was he investigating something in the Six Counties then? I thought he did Africa.’

  ‘No, he was killed in Scotland. Out on the road to Stranraer.’

  He stepped away from her. ‘The Provos’d never do that. Not a journalist. Not here.’

  ‘Well, that’s what the police said.’

  ‘Phff, what do they know? Our boys’d never do that.’

  ‘Come on, Sean, don’t be naive, they’re kneecapping teenagers for selling hash.’

  ‘They’re maintaining order.’ Sean still believed the Easter Uprising was a week ago, that the Troubles were about goodies and baddies, and that an Irish Catholic with a gun could have nothing but God and the good of mankind on his mind. He was a season-ticket holder for Celtic and went to the Tower Bar on Sunday afternoons to sing rebel songs with all the other armchair revolutionaries. ‘The RUC can’t be trusted to police those areas …’

  ‘Shut the fuck up. It’s just – it’s the last thing I need right now with Callum getting out. You wouldn’t believe the pressure I’m under.’ She felt the note in her pocket. ‘The Express offered fifty thousand pounds for an exclusive. Maybe Callum should do one interview? Maybe that would get them off his back. Give him a bit of money to get going.’

  ‘He doesn’t want to,’ said Sean. ‘I think he should but he doesn’t want to.’

  Elaine was waving Sean over to her. He dropped his foot down one of the steps and turned back. ‘I’ll pick you up at six?’

  ‘Six a.m.?’

  He wrinkled his nose. ‘I know. Sorry about Terry. I know you liked him.’

  ‘It’s a bit more complicated than that, but thanks.’

  II

  Condensation streaked the window on to the messy back garden. The grass was two foot tall, almost obscuring a rusting twin-tub, gathering around the trunk of the tree at the far end.

  The babble from the radio and the crackle of the frying pan drowned out the noise of the two boys at the table. BC was breaking his fast and Pete was having a second bowl of cornflakes so that he didn’t feel left out. Caroline sat across from them, ignoring everyone, reading a magazine about hairdos. Five places were set at the table that used to hold seven. She couldn’t remember how all of them used to fit in here.

  Trisha broke three eggs into the frying pan. ‘And was this the boy who used to phone here all the time?’

  ‘Aye. Terry. You met him once. ’Member he came here with his pal’s van to take my old desk out of the garage? Dark hair, a wee bit fat.’

  Trisha kept her voice low so the boys wouldn’t hear. ‘And what was that boy to you?’

  ‘Just a friend.’

  ‘Why did he call all the time then?’

  ‘Dunno. Well, he’d been abroad and didn’t really have any pals when he came back. He was lonely, maybe.’

  Trisha gave the frying pan an angry little shake.

  ‘Why did they ask you to go and see his body then?’

  Paddy shrugged, trying to be casual about it, but one of her shoulders got stuck up around her ears and betrayed her. ‘I just knew him from way back. We started at the paper at the same time.’

  Behind them the boys were squabbling over the free toy from the cereal box. Without looking, Trisha called over her shoulder, ‘It’s BC’s shot, son. You got it the last time.’

  ‘But that’s the one I want.’ Pete crossed his arms tight and scowled, a tiny despot planning a coup. ‘I’m the one that likes dinosaurs.’

  BC waggled the cheap toy at Pete, taunting him. Paddy and Trisha smiled at the frying pan, keeping their faces from the boys.

  ‘Give it to him,’ Caroline ordered her son, always quick to take a side against him.

  ‘Shots each,’ said Trisha, ‘or I’ll keep the toy for myself.’

  Using the wooden spatula, Trisha splashed hot fat over the top of the eggs and dropped her voice again. ‘I mean, the boy surely had some family.’

  ‘Terry had no one,’ said Paddy, adding, by way of explanation, ‘He was a Protestant.’

  Trisha smirked: it was an old country joke about non-Catholics, designed to appeal to Trisha’s prejudices, about how Protestants neglected to breed like rats and didn’t all live on top of each other. ‘You’ve got me down as a right old greenhorn, don’t ye?’

  ‘Ma, I’ve got you down as class on a stick. ’Member the time you dressed the pig up in a tuxedo?’

  Trisha smiled into the pan, corrected herself and gave Paddy a reproachful look. She had taken to widowhood with a wizened vigour and was prone to tutting at anything resembling good fun or high jinks. Without the timidly tempering cynicism of her husband she was more devout now, and since Mary Ann had taken her vows she wouldn’t hear a word against the Church. It left a chasm between them.

  The eggs were done, the potato scones and bacon browned, so Paddy picked up the plates and poured the hot water warming them into the sink, dried them with a tea towel and held them out to her mother.

  ‘Terry put me down on his passport as his next of kin. That’s why they came to me.’

  ‘And the police said the Provos killed him?’

  ‘Yeah. “All the hallmarks”, they said.’

  ‘God help us,’ muttered Trisha, her voice little more than a breath now, shielding it from the boys. ‘God help us if that’s true.’

 
; She glanced fearfully at the table and fixed on Pete. ‘Maybe you should think about giving him his daddy’s name,’ she said, still believing that young Catholic men could be arrested for having a name that sounded Irish.

  ‘I don’t think even the Met are rounding up five-year-olds, Ma. Terry was just a friend.’

  Trisha didn’t look at her as she dished the breakfast on to the plates and put the pan back on the cooker, clenching her jaw to silence herself.

  ‘Honest.’

  They stood, stiff, Trisha looking at the plates in Paddy’s hand and Paddy looking down at her mother. Not long ago Paddy would have been looking her straight in the eye but Trisha was shrinking. Now she could see the top of her head, the grey roots under the gravy brown, loose hairs creeping out from the Elizabeth Taylor set she had done every Monday at Mrs Tolliver’s house.

  Trisha wouldn’t catch her eye because she suspected that Paddy had slept with Terry. Since Pete was born her mother had suspected Paddy of sleeping with every man she mentioned and her disapproval wasn’t just an intergenerational values clash: she believed that Paddy would go to hell for her sins, that the rest of the family would spend eternity in heaven, staring at an empty chair if they didn’t nag and disapprove and vilify her enough.

  Compared to her mother Paddy had put it about, but not by much. She’d developed the habit of denying everything.

  The boys were fighting again, this time about who was reading the cereal packet.

  BC laughed joylessly. ‘You can’t even read yet.’

  ‘I can so read.’

  ‘Ye can’t read. Read it to me then, go on.’

  ‘I can so read!’

  ‘Go on then, read it out, if ye can read.’

  Without looking up, Caroline told BC to shut up.

  Trisha tipped her head to the table, telling Paddy to put the plates down, and then followed the turn of her head, swinging towards the table without looking at her. She poured two cups of tea from the steel teapot, setting one in front of Paddy’s place.

  The boys had reached an impasse. BC was elaborately reading the back of the cereal packet and rubbing his cheek with the plastic dinosaur, a faded smile on his chubby face – just enough to upset Pete, not enough to get into trouble. He sighed contentedly, as if to say that everything he had ever dreamed of was here: the toy, the reading of the cereal packet, everything. Pete had his arms crossed up near his nose, was about to hide his face in his arms and curl over the table and cry.

  ‘Son.’ Paddy touched his arm. ‘You can choose what we’re doing this morning.’

  Too late, she realized what he was bound to say.

  Pete looked at her hopefully. ‘Really? I can choose?’

  Anything but not that, she wanted to say, we’re not doing that. But if she forbade him she’d have to explain why and telling a five-year-old that her friend had been shot in the head was beyond her.

  ‘Yeah. Go ahead.’

  To her right Trisha tutted under her breath. She didn’t approve of doing things children liked. She thought it would ruin them.

  Pete’s tiny tight fists rose from the nest of his arms. ‘Lazerdrome!’

  ‘OK, pal.’

  Pete threw his head back and silently mouthed a big hurray, observing Trisha’s rule about not shouting in the house.

  ‘Ruined,’ muttered Trish through a mouthful of egg and bacon.

  III

  Throbbing music filled the dark room, disguising the shriek of trainers on the rubber floor and squeals of excitement. Paddy was crouching on one of the wooden walkways, keeping her body behind the partition so that she couldn’t be shot from the ground.

  The memory of Terry’s BCG stabbed at her throat. Somehow her relationship with Terry was getting confused with the seagull in Greenock: a big ugly threat that wanted something from her that she didn’t have.

  She heard a scream and turned to look down the dark walkway. Through the smog of dried ice she could just make out a strip of tiny coloured lights, red through to yellow. There was a child down there and they’d just been shot.

  Every person in the room had a pack strapped to their front and back, little light sensors on it to pick up the beam of the bulky laser guns they all carried. Shoot someone and their pack went off for thirty seconds and you got points. Her job here was to lose by a higher margin than Pete and be good about it, to show him it didn’t matter. She had thought it might freak her out after seeing Terry, being here among excited children shooting each other, but it was just an electronic version of tig.

  Pete was down there somewhere, on the floor, chasing other kids or hiding, sneaking along a wall, the pack too big for him really, banging off his thighs when he raised his legs to run or climb a ladder.

  They came here all the time and Pete always played the same game. He liked to run around as much as possible, fodder for the bigger kids who lay in wait in the good vantage points. She loved it that he was reckless but if he had played cautiously she would have cherished that too.

  Her pack vibrated and gave off a little wind-down tune. She turned to see a smug boy of BC’s age standing behind her. ‘Looserrr,’ he drawled.

  She tutted and stood up straight, knowing her pack was off and she couldn’t be shot again for a while. ‘Oh dear,’ she said, being good about it, ‘I’m rubbish at this.’

  But her assassin wasn’t listening. He sauntered past her towards another set of lights twinkling in the dark, shot his laser gun at the target and she heard a pack sighing the death jingle. She recognized Pete’s groan in the dark. ‘Looserrr.’

  ‘Is that you?’

  He walked over to her. ‘I’m getting shot all the time,’ he whined.

  ‘Everyone gets out sometimes.’

  He dropped his head and his shoulders sagged with disappointment. Together they looked over the top of the walkway at the scurrying figures below. Somewhere a pack sang sadly in the darkness. ‘Looserr.’

  ‘I don’t think that boy’s very nice,’ she said, but Pete was watching the floor and didn’t answer.

  Sweat beaded his face. He pushed the hair back from his forehead, the sweat making his fringe stand up in a spiky tiara.

  ‘This is a good laugh, eh?’

  ‘Aye.’

  She wanted to reach out and kiss him but contented herself with touching his shoulder with her fingertips.

  Paddy had been ambivalent all the way through her pregnancy. She was unsure about her fitness to be a mother, whether she could love the baby, whether she should have had an abortion and waited for the right man. But she didn’t believe in the right man, didn’t think she’d ever want to get married and thought Pete might be her only chance to have a child.

  From the moment he was born she knew she’d done the right thing. His fingers, his toes, the wrinkled promise of his testicles, every detail was hypnotic. It was like living with a pop star she had a crush on. For the first year she had a compulsive need to kiss him. Being in another room, even waking to his screams in the burning-eyed middle of the night, her heart rate rose at the thought of seeing him. The rest of life was nothing but a hollow interval until he was there again.

  Her intensity worried her. She could only imagine how hard Pete would have to fight to shake her hand from his shoulder. She’d have done it for him but she didn’t know how.

  Standing next to her now, he raised himself on tiptoes, looked out over the ridge and turned back to her smiling. ‘Hey, Mum, guess what?’

  ‘What?’

  Grinning, he raised the barrel of his laser gun and shot her in the chest. ‘You’re hit again.’ Both their packs had come back on and she hadn’t noticed.

  ‘Ya wee bissom!’

  He laughed and ran away.

  ‘Hey,’ she called after him in the dark, ‘I’m not feeding you for two days.’

  ‘My dad’ll feed me,’ he called back.

  IV

  George Burns knocked on the front door like a hungry bailiff with a short temper. He didn’t even bothe
r with a hello when Paddy opened it but swept into the hall, tutted at the boxes still scattered on the floor and looked around for Pete.

  ‘Hi, Sandra.’ Paddy held the door open further and invited his wife into the flat.

  Sandra was blonde, tall, and so thin she could have opened letters with her chin. Her rigorous grooming routine verged on manic and always made Paddy think of unhappy zoo animals that lick the same spot over and over until they go bald.

  ‘Paddy.’ Sandra dipped at the knee, making herself smaller, an apologetic smile twitching at the corner of her lipsticked mouth.

  ‘Come on in.’ Paddy took her warmly by the elbow and brought her into the flat. ‘Did you have a nice weekend in Paris?’

  Sandra’s eyes skittered around the floor. ‘Nice. Good weather. Lovely hotel room—’ She stopped abruptly, pressing her lips tight together, as if the words were fighting behind her lips. Paddy could imagine what the words were: he’s furious, get me out of here, I’m hungry all the time.

  Paddy regretted having a baby to Burns. He was a nightmare to negotiate with and wasn’t a particularly warm father. Keeping her options open, she’d tried to muddy the father issue but Pete had popped out a perfect model of his dad: thick black hair, wide green eyes and the telltale dimple on his chin. And there was Burns at visiting time, the clay and the mould. When Pete was hospitalized with pneumonia Burns visited once a week and brought the four-year-old bunches of flowers.

  ‘Where is he?’ Burns was already brisk and impatient to get away. He usually saved it until he was bringing Pete back.

  ‘He’s just getting his new Transformer.’ Paddy spoke slowly, calmingly. ‘He wants to show it to you.’

  ‘Is Dub in?’

  ‘Naw, I haven’t seen him today.’

  ‘Tell him I was asking for him.’

  Pete arrived then at the door to his bedroom, already wary, sensing the atmosphere among the adults. Dumbly, he thrust the blue-and-red plastic robot out at them.

  ‘Show your dad what it does, though.’

  Without a word, Pete pulled a robot head here, clicked the legs that way and held the truck out for inspection. A brittle silence descended on the hall.