Richards had annoyed her. She kept rerunning the conversation in her head, thinking of better, faster retorts, reshaping her speech so that it better reflected his. She had made the point well, she thought, even though Terry Hewitt’s remark had ruined the effect entirely.
Classic failed-Pape mistake.
The phrase rolled around her mind, catching its tail, rolling and repeating in the lug-bugga-lug rhythm of the bus. She knew all about replacing the central text. At least Richards’s substitution had made him more useful to the world. She couldn’t tell any one of the people she loved about the black hole at the heart of her faith. She couldn’t tell Sean, her fiancé, or her favorite sister, Mary Ann, and her parents must never know, it would break their hearts.
Downstairs the bus swung on the sharp turn into Rutherglen Main Street, hurrying to catch the green light. Paddy was on her way to the rosary at Sean’s dead grandmother’s house, ready to perjure herself once more.
Granny Annie had died aged eighty-four. She wasn’t a warm woman, or even an especially pleasant one. When Sean cried for her Paddy knew he was really grieving for his father, who had died of a heart attack four years before. Despite his broad shoulders and deep voice, he was a boy at eighteen, still eating lunchtime sandwiches made by his mum and wearing the underpants she left out for him at night.
The old woman’s death was a big event in Rutherglen. Some nights the rosary was so busy that a portion of the mourners had to keep their coats on and stand in the street, praying towards the house. As they chanted the prayers for the repose of Annie’s soul, the young kept their voices low while the older ones sent up their sighs in Irish accents, copying the priests who had taught them.
Annie Ogilvy had been brought to Eastfield in a handcart in the dying years of the last century. Paddy’s family, the Meehans, arrived from Donegal in the same year and had stayed close to the Ogilvys ever since: religious duties and odd immigrant habits bound the two families together, and the limited job opportunities for Catholics meant that most of the men were workmates in the mines or foundries.
Annie grew up in Glasgow but always affected an Irish accent, as was the fashion among immigrant girls in her day. Over the years her accent got thicker, shifting a few miles every year, from a Dublinesque soft brogue to a strangulated Ulster gargle. In her old age her children took her on an Irish coach tour and found that no one there could understand her either. All her tastes and songs and cooking, although distantly related to things in Ireland, were reproduced nowhere. Annie yearned her whole life for a fond remembered home that never was.
The presence of the corpse in the house gave Paddy the creeps, and she stayed well away from it. When they settled down for prayers she sat on the front room floor, facing the settee, each night staring at a different configuration of puffy legs in support stockings, mottled blue papery skin chopped into links by pop-sock rims.
The bus was approaching the end of the Main Street. Paddy finished her egg and stood up, making her way downstairs. It was an open-backed bus and the cold, windy night battled hard with the warmth from the heated cabin. Paddy put a foot on either side of the pole, resting her hip against it, letting her weight swing her out of the open back of the bus into the windy void. Crosswinds whipped her short hair, making it even messier. She could already see the crowd gathering in front of the small council house across the road.
She wasn’t through the garden gate before someone caught her arm. Matt Sinclair was short and fifty and wore glasses with dark lenses.
“There’s my wee girlfriend there,” he said, eyes like dead televisions. He shifted his fag into the other hand and took Paddy’s hand, pumping it hard. “I was just talking about you.” He turned and addressed another small, smoking man behind him. “Desi, here’s wee Paddy Meehan that I was telling ye about.”
“Oh ho,” said Desi. “You’ll be interested to meet me, then: I know the real Paddy Meehan.”
“I am the real Paddy Meehan,” said Paddy quietly, moving towards the house, wanting to get inside and see Sean before the prayers started.
“That’s right. I used to live in the high flats at the Gorbals, and Paddy Meehan’s wife, Betty, she lived on my landing.” He nodded adamantly, as if she had forcefully expressed disbelief. “Aye, and I knew his pal, Griffiths.”
“Who’s that?” asked Matt.
“Griffiths was the mad guy with the gun, the shooter.”
“And was he a spy as well?”
Desi blushed around the eyes, suddenly angry. “For Godsake. Meehan was never a spy. He was nothing but a bloody hood from the Gorbals.”
Matt kept his lips tight and his voice low, looking around the crowd. “Here, mind your language. We’re at a rosary.”
“Sorry.” Desi looked at Paddy. “Sorry, dear. But he wasn’t a Soviet spy. He’s from the Gorbals.”
“Spies don’t have to be toffs, do they?” asked Paddy, trying to be respectful even though she was correcting him.
“Aye, they need an education. They need to speak different languages.”
“Anyway,” Matt said, looking at her as he spoke, “the Daily Record said they framed him for the Ross murder to discredit him, because he was a spy.”
Desi blushed again and spluttered indignantly, “They were repeating what Meehan said, and no one believes him anyway.” He raised his voice angrily. “What would a common thief have to tell the Soviets?”
Paddy knew. “Well, he knew the layout of most British prisons, didn’t he? That’s how they helped their spies escape, because he told them how.”
Matt looked interested. “So he was a spy?”
Paddy shrugged again. “He might have sold secrets to the Soviets, but I think the Ross investigation was just incompetent. I don’t think one had anything to do with the other.”
Abandoning reasoned argument, Desi raised his voice. “The man’s a known liar.”
“Aye.” Matt looked at Paddy blankly, wishing, she sensed, that he had never introduced her to his volatile friend. “Well, he’s back living in Glasgow, I hear.”
She nodded.
“Living up in the Carlton. Drinks in the town.”
She nodded again.
Calmer, Desi tried to reclaim his place in the conversation. “How did ye end up named after him, well?” He looked at Matt to deliver the punch line. “Do your parents hate ye?”
Matt Sinclair tried to laugh, but the phlegm in his lungs gurgled and made him cough. “Desi, man,” he said solemnly when he had recovered, “you’re awful funny.”
“I was six years old when the other Paddy Meehan was arrested,” Paddy said. “And everyone calls my mum Trisha.”
Now reconciled, Matt and Desi nodded in unison.
“So,” said Desi, “you got stuck with Paddy?”
“Aye.”
“How d’ye no call yourself Pat?”
“I don’t like that name,” she said quickly. Building on the success of a joke about the Irish homosexual Pat MaGroin, some of the older boys at school had nicknamed her Pat MaHind, a name she hated and feared for its unspecified sexual connotation and her uncontrollable blushing when they shouted it after her.
“What about Packy?”
“Hmm,” she said, hoping they weren’t going to say anything about black people. “I think that word means something else now.”
“That’s right,” explained Matt knowledgeably. “A Paki means a Indian now.”
Desi nodded, interested in this useful information.
“It’s rude to call someone that,” said Paddy.
“Big Mo that runs the laundry,” explained Matt, “he’s a Paki.”