“Heather?” she whispered in case anyone in editorial heard them.
Heather’s hushed voice came from inside one of the far cubicles. “Paddy?”
“Heather, it’s Paddy.”
After some rustling of material and a flush, the door opened and Heather peered out. “What’s wrong?”
Paddy took a deep breath and held it in. She sat down on a hand towels bin, drinking in deep, calming breaths.
“What’s going on?”
Paddy shook her head, aware that she was half enjoying the drama.
Heather patted her arm. “Let’s have a ciggie, that’ll calm you down.”
She took one for herself and gave one to Paddy, bending over to light her up with a book of matches from Maestro’s, an intimidatingly trendy nightclub Paddy had never been to. For the first time in her life Paddy inhaled smoke.
“God.” She grimaced, rolling her tongue around her mouth. “God, that’s… I feel sick.” She lifted her hand to the sink.
“No!” Heather took the cigarette back from her fingers. She pinched the hot tip into the sink and tapped the loose tobacco out of the end, twisting the empty paper into a little point. She filed the amputated cigarette back in the packet. “Is it a long story?”
Paddy shrugged and nodded.
“Just hang on, then…” Holding her cigarette above her head, Heather trotted into a cubicle and dragged out a blue sanitary towel bin, trailing the smell of flowers rotting in ammonia across the floor. She sat down on the soft plastic bin, making its sides bulge. “Okay. I’m ready.”
Paddy smiled at the sight of her sitting on the stinking bin just to get eye level. “You need to promise you won’t repeat this to anyone.”
Heather crossed her heart and frowned. “You’re very serious.”
“I was up in Kevin Hatcher’s office and I saw some photos of the Baby Brian Boys. I know one of them.”
Heather gasped. “You lucky bitch.”
“He’s Sean’s wee cousin.”
Heather sat back. “You bloody lucky cow.” She grabbed Paddy’s sleeve. “Look, you could do a piece about the family, about the background. God… I bet you could even get it syndicated.”
“No, I can’t.” Paddy shook her head. “Sean’d never talk to me again, and my family’d disown me. They don’t approve of talking to outsiders about family business.”
“But, Paddy, if you get a syndicated story out of it you’ll be published all over the country. It could be your calling card. You could make brilliant contacts in other papers.”
“I can’t use the story.”
Heather tipped her head to one side and narrowed her eyes, pretending it was against the smoke, but Paddy could tell that she was envious of her. She relished the novelty of it.
“I can’t, Heather. Sean’ll be gutted when he hears about this. They just left those kids up there with that crazy mother. I mean, they’ll feel terrible. You would, wouldn’t you? Anyone would feel terrible. And he’s got five brothers and sisters. One of them’s wilder looking than the next. I met the wee guy at his dad’s funeral. He’d fallen into a machine at the St. Rollox works in Springburn, drunk. He was all chewed up.”
“You should use the story, Paddy. It’s unprofessional not to.”
“No, I just can’t.”
Heather looked faintly disgusted, but Paddy knew she couldn’t do it. The Ogilvys were a good family, they did voluntary work, they cared for their neighbors and were meticulous in their devotions. She wished she had never seen the picture and didn’t have to be the one to tell Sean. She felt suddenly queasy as she remembered the amount of arctic roll she had eaten at Granny Annie’s laying-in.
“He was going on about our engagement party the other night.”
Heather exhaled slowly, shifting her weight on the bin. A corner of the soft plastic buckled slowly beneath her, and Paddy realized that mention of the engagement was one inadvertent triumph too many. Heather avoided her eye and took a draw on her cigarette, tipping her head back. Her blond hair slid off her face.
“I broke my diet really badly. That’s what made me think of the engagement. I can’t stick to it at all.” She smirked at herself. “I think I’m actually getting fatter.”
Heather went back to her cigarette.
“The egg diet?” said Paddy. “You know it? I haven’t done a poo for a week.”
Heather half smiled at the floor, so Paddy tried harder, telling her about Terry Hewitt asking who the fat lassie was in the Press Bar.
“Terry Hewitt’s a knob,” said Heather spitefully, “a complete fucking nob. He fancies himself so much. Did you see him in the newsroom earlier, trying on Farquarson’s coat while he was down here on editorial?”
“No.”
“He stood on a chair so everyone could see him. It was pathetic.”
A fleck of Heather’s spittle hit Paddy on the top lip. She resisted the urge to wipe it away.
“Give us that half cigarette,” she said, “and I’ll try again.”
Paddy tried to smoke it, pulling silly faces and making herself the fool for Heather, trying to get them back on an even keel. Heather smiled politely and let her make an arse of herself. Eventually she stood up.
“You should use the story.”
“I can’t,” said Paddy, ashamed of her soft heart.
“Fine.”
Heather stood up and ran the end of her cigarette under the tap. She threw the smelly stub of it into the sanitary bin, checked her hair and lipstick in the mirror, and said “See you later” as if she hoped they’d never meet again.
Paddy watched the door swing behind her. Now she had no one.
TEN . THE EASTFIELD STAR
I
The snowflakes were just as heavy as the day before but dissolved where they landed on the wet ground. Paddy tightened her scarf around her head, keeping her hood up, and trudged up the steep hill to the Eastfield Star.
The Meehan family home was on a tiny council estate at the southeastern tip of Glasgow’s sprawl. The estate had been built for a small community of forty or so miners working the now defunct Cambuslang coal seam. From a central roundabout of houses, the five legs radiated out with six houses on each, some containing four flats, some freestanding with five bedrooms to accommodate large, extended families. Built in the cottage style, the houses had low-fronted gable ends, sloping roofs, and small windows.
The Meehans lived in Quarry Place, the first prong to the left on the Star. The two-story house was low and built so close to the soil that every room was slightly damp. Paddy’s mother, Trisha, had to bleach the skirting in the hall cupboard every three months to get the mold off it. Gray, eyeless silverfish had colonized the bathroom carpet, making a five-second pause necessary between flicking on the light and entering the room, giving them a head start in their slither off to dark places. Theirs wasn’t a large house: Paddy shared a bedroom with Mary Ann, the boys got separate rooms after their sister Caroline’s wedding, and their parents had a room.
Each of the Eastfield houses had a decent amount of land around it, a few feet of front garden and a hundred-foot strip at the back. Mr. Anderson on the roundabout grew onions and potatoes and rhubarb and other sour things that children wouldn’t steal to eat, but the rest of the gardens were just scrub land, bald brown grass in the winter and thicker grass through the summer. Wooden fences hung to the side, and grass grew freely between the paving stones.
They were only two or three miles from the center of Glasgow, close to wide-open fields and farms, but the families who lived on the Star were city people, workers in heavy industry, and didn’t know how to tend gardens. Most found the persistent encroachment of nature bewildering and a little frightening. A tree had somehow grown at the bottom of the Meehans’ garden. It had started growing before they arrived, and they’d mistaken it for a bush until it really took off. No one knew what kind of tree it was, but it got bigger and branchier every year.