The teatime queue was already forming in Frattelli's. Dads bought five portions of chips on the way home from their work and singletons came looking for a hot meal. Maureen was relieved when Leslie ordered a fish supper for each of them and nothing for Cammy. She ordered a glass bottle of Bru as well and a Chomp bar each for their pudding. Maureen insisted on paying.
"Don't be daft," said Leslie. "It was my idea."
But Maureen muscled in front of her and handed over a tenner.
They put the flimsy plastic bag in the box and Leslie drove like a bastard up the hill to get home before the chips went soggy Cammy wasn't in and the house was dark, but he had left a scribbled note in the kitchen and Leslie read it, chuckled indulgently to herself, and looked up at Maureen as if she was surprised to see her. "He's at football," she said.
"Are you two living together, then?" asked Maureen, taking two scratched Barbie dinner plates down from the cupboard to sit the paper parcels on.
"Kind of. He lives with his folks but he spends a lot of time over here."
"Have ye given him his own key?"
Leslie glowered at her. She had always sworn she would never give a man a key to her house because she saw what happened to the women in the shelter. It was a routine trap. The women met a nice man, fell for him, and he gradually insinuated himself into their homes. They gave him a key for convenience and when he beat them the only practical solution was for the women to run away and leave him with the house.
"Nah," she said, unwrapping her supper and arranging the paper over the edge of the plate. "Mrs. Gallagher across the landing lets him in." She blushed and got two Barbie glasses out of the cupboard, unscrewed the lid of the ginger and meticulously poured them a glass each as Maureen watched.
"You gave him a key, didn't ye?"
"Yes," said Leslie, slamming the bottle down on the side. "I gave him a key. Happy?"
Maureen grinned at her. "I don't make up your fucking crazy rules, Leslie, don't get pissed off with me."
"Well, what are you having a go at me for?"
"Leslie," said Maureen, teasing her, "you're having a go at yourself."
Leslie huffed at her dinner. "I don't know. You give out all this advice for years and then when it happens to you, I don't know, I just feel so out of control around him."
"Yeah," said Maureen, unwrapping her parcel, "I know."
Leslie looked out of the window and crossed her arms. She looked terrified. "Sometimes"-her voice had dropped and she could hardly bring herself to say it-"I make his dinner for him coming home."
"Ooh," said Maureen, "that's a very bad sign. You'll be dead in a month."
"Is it a bad sign?" said Leslie anxiously.
Maureen saw she wasn't joking. "You've just fallen for someone. Enjoy yourself."
"But I don't feel like myself."
"That's what falling in love is. You lose control and you don't feel like yourself. It's supposed to be nice. Isn't it nice?"
"Did you feel this way about Douglas?"
Maureen picked out the brownest chips from her dinner, the withered twice-fried ones that tasted of caramel, and thought about it. She couldn't remember the relationship very well – all the softness and the fond good times were lost in the violent end – but she supposed she must have felt that way, and her behavior must have been just as confusing to Leslie. Douglas was married and old and a bit predatory. When she thought about it she could see how angry it must have made Leslie and she began to soften towards Cammy, but then she remembered that Leslie hadn't liked Douglas and had never been even passingly pleasant to him. "I suppose I did," she said, picking up her plate and glass and wrapping her pinkie around the neck of the sauce bottle. "My supper's getting cold."
Out on the veranda they climbed over the dead pot plants and sat on stained deck chairs, resting their plates on their knees and eating with their fingers. Small clouds of fragrant steam rose as they each broke into the battered fish, filling the veranda with the tantalizing smell of vinegar.
The veranda looked out onto a wide stretch of wasteland. Children from the scheme gathered there; the older ones stood talking to one another, watching over their younger siblings as they took turns at riding someone's mountain bike over and around the hillocks and splashing through the muddy puddles. Leslie was right about Frattelli's suppers. The fish was fresh and firm and the chips were crunchy.
"Good, isn't it?" asked Leslie, sinking her teeth through crisp batter to the soft and subtle fish.
"Lovely," said Maureen.
The light was failing. The burnished yellow sky was smeared with streaks of orange and thin cloud. Heavy black rain clouds conspired on the horizon. Maureen sat back and sighed at her dinner. "God, I don't know if I can eat all this."
"You'd better or you won't get your Chomp bar."
Maureen smiled out at the muddy hillocks and the big sky.
"Ye left that cheese salad the other night as well," said Leslie quietly. "Are ye eating?"
Maureen's eating habits were always a good measure of her mental state. She could never swallow properly when she got upset because her throat closed up. When she had had her breakdown she lost three stone and had to be fed soft food in hospital. "I'm eating fine," she said.
"How ye feeling, though?"
Maureen took out her cigarettes. "Sad. I feel very sad. I'm not angry or upset or anything, just very sad."
"Maybe you're grieving for Douglas."
"I feel as if I'm grieving for everything." She held out the packet to Leslie. "I keep fucking crying. I can't control it and it always happens at awkward moments like in the middle of a fight or in a shop or something."
Leslie took a fag from her and set her plate down on the floor, pulling up the collar of her biker's jacket to keep her warm. "If it's grief that's good," she said.
"Why?"
"It's healing and grief isn't infinite."
"Feels infinite."
Downstairs a rogue child sprinted across the ground, jumped on the mountain bike and cycled away from the waiting crowd, pedaling fast over the far hills. The angry mob of small kids ran after him, shouting at him and calling to their brothers and sisters to get him. The older children looked on, their arms folded, and did nothing.
"Hey," said Maureen, sitting up, "that wee bastard's just stolen the bike."
"It's his bike," said Leslie. "He got it for Christmas. The tiny team keeps taking it from round the back of his house. He has to steal it back at night."
Maureen sat back. "Have ye got that Polaroid of Ann's on ye?"
"Yeah," said Leslie, and pulled it out of her inside pocket.
Maureen looked at it in the light from the kitchen window. "Look," she said, and pointed to the wee boy's hand, "see the Christmas card he's holding? Could that be the card she got in the post?"
"I dunno, it's bigger than the envelope."
"He's only a wee boy, though. Maybe it looks big in his hand?"
Leslie squinted at it, flicking her ash on the floor. "Yeah, still bigger and it's got cotton wool on the front. Ann's card felt smooth and thin – it wasn't spongy. It was square."
"How square?"
She was explaining that the letter was only about as square as the Polaroid and weighed about the same as the Polaroid when she stopped and stared at it.
"Hmm," said Maureen. "What could it have been?"
Leslie smiled faintly and looked at the picture.
"But why would someone send her a photo of one boy?" said Maureen.
"Maybe he was her favorite?" said Leslie.
"Shut your eyes and feel it again."
Leslie did and felt sure it was the right size. "And it felt slippery inside," she said. "Like a glossy card."