“How did you get invited to that?” she asked, trying to mask her mean-spiritedness. “Did Farquarson ask you to go?”
“McVie said I could tag along for a couple of hours. I’m thinking of writing a piece about the calls car shift for the poly paper.”
It was all Paddy could do not to roll her eyes. Heather wrote the same two pieces over and over: she wrote about being a student journalist for the Daily News, and about being a journalism student for the poly paper.
“Yeah, all right, then.” She tried to act casual. “I’d like to come.”
But Heather could tell she was pleased. “Don’t get too excited, though. I might drop out if the article doesn’t pan. I’ve to meet him in the car outside here at eight.”
She pushed herself off the windowsill and walked off, trailing smoke through the newsroom. She had left a long blond hair on the sill. Paddy picked it up and wound it around a finger, watching after Heather as she sidled through the tables, her tight little bottom drawing the eyes of the men she passed.
Paddy slid clumsily off the windowsill, lifting her legs high to avoid ripping the back of her black woolly tights on the metal ledge. The tights were going baggy at the knee already and they’d come straight from the wash that morning.
III
Farquarson’s office door shut for the two o’clock editorial meeting and everyone in the newsroom relaxed into an unofficial break or started making personal phone calls. One of the news desk boys took the call.
“Brian Wilcox is finally dead,” he announced, hanging up the phone.
Someone in the room said “hurray” faintly, and the other journalists laughed.
Keck nudged Paddy. “You have to pretend to laugh,” he said quietly. “It’s what we do when these things happen.”
Paddy tried. She pulled the sides of her mouth wide, but she couldn’t smile convincingly.
“You don’t have to,” Dub muttered across Keck’s face. “It’s not essential to lose your humanity, it’s just useful.”
Sulking, Keck responded to a hail, leaving them alone on the bench. The journalist who had taken the call about Brian ripped the sheet off his pad with a flourish and stood up, striding to the door of Farquarson’s office, rapping on the window and opening the door.
“They found Brian Wilcox’s body,” he said. Paddy could hear Farquarson shout a loud, sincere curse. No one wanted a brand-new headline in the middle of an editorial meeting. “They strangled him and left him at the side of a railway line near Steps station.”
Paddy nodded at Dub. Steps was miles away, far too far for the boys to walk from Townhead. “An adult took them there.”
Dub shook his head. “You don’t know that.”
“Bet ye any money.”
“Any money it is, then.”
Through the open door, Paddy heard Farquarson cursing and ordering this schedule to be moved, that to be dropped, the police statement for page one, telling someone to get JT down to Steps with a photographer. “Check that those kids are still being held, and tell one of the boys to get me a large whisky from the Press Bar.”
A features subeditor stuck his head around the door and looked at Paddy. “Did ye hear that?”
Nodding, Paddy stood up and headed for the stairs.
Down in the bar, McGrade was quietly filling up the back shelves with tiny tinkling bottles of mixers. Two journalists were warming up the table for the lunchtime rush. McGrade gave her a large Grouse when he heard it was for Farquarson and wrote it down in the big blue book he kept under the counter.
When she got back upstairs everyone in the newsroom was either out or on the phone. Farquarson was sitting alone at his desk with his head in his hands. She slid the drink between his elbows and he glanced up gratefully.
“Let me know when you’ve finished, Boss. McGrade’ll want his glass back.”
“Thanks, Meehan.”
“Um… Boss? Me and Heather Allen are going out in the calls car with George McVie, if that’s all right? Just for a couple of hours, for work experience.”
Farquarson smiled wryly into his drink. “McVie’s awful nice, isn’t he? Check with the Father of the Chapel first, make sure it’s okay with the union. And Meehan? Calls car is a hard shift, night shift is hard. George may be… lonely. Keep your hand on your ha’penny when you’re with him.”
She nodded.
Father Richards was in the canteen eating a Scotch pie crowned with beans and smoking simultaneously. The cut under his eye was healing, but he was still having to manage without his glasses. His face looked raw without them.
“Ah, here she is,” he said when he saw Paddy standing at the side of his table. “Chair to the Union of Catholic Mothers.”
Paddy ignored it. She explained that McVie had invited Heather Allen, who in turn had invited her. Richards dropped the fork to his plate with a loud clatter and took a lascivious draw on his John Player Special.
She held up her hand. “Stop. I don’t need you telling me. I’m well warned about him by Farquarson. I just want to check the union isn’t bothered about it.”
“Why would the union bother about McVie trying to ride two birds at once?” said Richards, and he laughed until his face was pink.
Paddy crossed her arms and waited patiently until he had finished. “Can I go, then?”
“Aye,” said Richards. “Please yourselves. If ye were my daughter, I’d say no.”
To cover her excitement Paddy pointed at his eye. “I hope ye got that sore eye from the last woman ye laughed at.”
He drew lugubriously on his cigarette and ran his gaze all over her. “You’re the last woman I laughed at. Would you like to hit me?”
The words were innocuous, but she felt uneasy, as if he were propositioning her somehow.
“No,” she said, threatening him in the only way she knew how. “But I’d like to take your job.”
EIGHT . AND PEOPLE ARE ARSEHOLES
I
George McVie was not allowed to drive the calls car. He wasn’t even allowed to sit in the front seat next to Billy, because during one of their arguments he’d gone for the wheel and almost killed them both. Neither he nor Billy spoke to the other in the conventional sense. McVie grunted when he wanted to follow up a radio call; sometimes he shouted when he wanted Billy to call back to the office for a photographer; other than that they said nothing. They had been working nights together for five months and were ready to kill each other.
Billy, with his shoulder-length wet-look perm, was already in the car, tuning the radio and putting his fags on the dashboard, making sure he had change for the burger van. McVie, dressed in a crumpled raincoat and cheap acrylic pullover, stood by the car under a heavy gray sky.
“What d’you mean, she’s not coming?” He glowered across the roof of the car at Paddy with exhausted baggy eyes.
“She isn’t coming out in the calls car tonight, but I asked Farquarson and Father Richards, and they both said it would be fine if I come.”
She tried to smile, but he wasn’t buying it. He looked from her to the building, to the newsroom window and Farquarson’s office, as if expecting to see his boss there, standing at the window, laughing down at him while fucking Heather Allen himself.
“Farquarson said for me to come,” she repeated.
McVie looked at her again, just to be sure that Paddy was indeed as dumpy and not-Heather as he had originally thought. He tutted bitterly, leaning across the roof of the car to her. “Right, you, I’ve got a lot to do tonight. Don’t talk over the radio calls and stay in the car when we get anywhere. I’m not babysitting you all fucking night. Just fucking shut up and we’ll get on fine.”
Paddy stood back, exaggerating her astonishment. “Listen you to me. There is absolutely no call for that sort of rudeness. I’ve been perfectly polite to you, haven’t I?”