IV
Trisha was alone in the house when Paddy got in, and the atmosphere was worse. She dished up a bowl of broth and a plate of mince with peas and spuds and left Paddy alone to eat it, going off to sit in the living room to watch the news. Paddy could see her through the serving hatch, sitting in the armchair, her neat brown hair shot through with wild gray. She was pretending to listen to a news report about the Maze Prison hunger strikers, as if the world outside Rutherglen Main Street didn’t terrify her.
Paddy would have gone to the movies, but she didn’t have any money. She considered using her Transcard and taking the two-hour circular route around the city on the 89 just to worry Trisha but knew it would be a petty revenge. And the bus might be cold.
She finished eating and got up, putting her plates in the sink, meaning to wash them later as a penance, but her mother got out of the chair and silently came into the kitchen, slipping between Paddy and the sink, running the hot water and beginning to wash the plates and cutlery briskly. Paddy skulked away into the living room.
She couldn’t be bothered watching the news. She twisted the channel dial to ITV and sat down before the picture had resolved itself. It was a quiz show. A saccharine host was asking a portly woman from Southampton questions about her tiny bespectacled husband, trapped in a soundproof booth and smiling like a baby sitting in warm shit.
Sean would be eating his tea right now. His mum would be smiling and chatting away to him, telling him the news of the day and who had died in the parish and whose grandchild had said a clever thing. Paddy could phone and tell him she missed him. She could try to say sorry again.
She waited until her mum had walked through the living room and climbed the stairs to the toilet, then nipped out and dialed Sean’s number.
Mimi Ogilvy could hardly speak when she asked for him.
“Please, Mrs. Ogilvy, I’ve got something important to tell him.”
She hadn’t finished the sentence before Mimi hung up.
V
Mary Ann came up to bed earlier than she normally would and silently went about her business, going to the bathroom with her wash bag and coming back dressed for bed, sorting out her clothes for the morning and putting her dirty underwear in the laundry bag at the side of the wardrobe, all the time letting off incontinent little laughs as she pottered around the room.
She turned off the light by the door, but instead of getting into bed she climbed over her own bed and sat on Paddy’s, pulling out a pack of cards from behind her back and a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps. She tugged Paddy out of bed and over to the window, made her sit down, and pulled the curtain over their heads. Lit by moonlight, Mary Ann opened the packet of crisps for them to share and dealt them a rummy hand of seven cards each. Down at the bottom of the garden the lone tree waved softly in the breeze, silver moonlight glinting off the few leaves.
They played for almost an hour, laughing silently when the crisps made a crunchy noise in their mouths, keeping score in Paddy’s notepad. Mary Ann mimed out the additions every time they moved on to a new hand, scratching her head and making a puzzled face, writing down ridiculously wrong numbers in her favor. Paddy let her go through her play each time, enjoying it more and more. They kept the real score on the back page.
They stayed there long after their eyes had begun to sting with sleep, playing together, their faces next to the windowpane, damp and cold, their overheated feet in the bedroom, smothering comradely giggles. The silent games would become a ritual, a nightly statement of loyalty that bound them to each other for decades ahead.
SEVENTEEN . THE CALLOUS CARS
I
The features writer was struggling to whip up a credible moral panic piece about Joe Dolce’s novelty single signaling the final demise of the English language when the phone rang, giving him an excuse to turn away from the page.
“Nope,” he said, running his eye over the sheet in the typewriter. “Heather Allen doesn’t work here anymore.”
The man on the phone seemed surprised. He had met her yesterday, he said, in Townhead, and she told him she worked at the Daily News.
“Yeah, well, she’s left now, pal.”
“Would you have another number I can reach her on?” His voice was gruff but his accent careful and affected.
“Nope.”
The man sighed into the phone, sending a ruffle of wind into the journalist’s ear. “It’s just… it’s really important.”
The features writer’s attention span was broken anyway, and the guy sounded genuinely desperate. “Well, I know she works at the polytechnic newspaper. Ye could phone them.”
“Thank you,” said the man. “That’s brilliant.”
II
He phoned the polytechnic several times, always refusing to leave a message, always asking just for Heather Allen, when would she be in, is she still not there? I’ll ring back, he said. It’s her I want.
It was late afternoon before Heather came into the Poly Times office. She was in a furious mood. She hadn’t told anyone about her dismissal from the News. Even her parents didn’t know. A latent sense of decency had stopped her from telling them about the syndicated piece. She’d known at the time that she would feel rotten for doing it, had weighed up the pros and cons, and decided that in the long term the benefits would outweigh the guilt. But she’d been wrong. She hated herself for betraying Paddy, and she’d lost her job. She felt enough of a shit without having to deal with her father’s disapproval.
The Poly Times was a two-bit operation. Their office was a small room on the first floor of the students union block, furnished with a single table, three chairs, and a phone. Two walls of shelving held four years of back copies and all the financial records and minutes of all the committee meetings there had ever been. Lots of people applied to work on the paper, but they only printed twice a year and there just wasn’t that much to do. They managed to freeze out most of the interested parties by being cliquey, intimidating, and unfriendly, which left them with a core staff of about six. One of Heather’s duties as the editor was trawling through the unsolicited articles students submitted to see if any of them were printable.
Despite posters up all over campus declaring the upcoming deadline, there weren’t very many submissions in the red wire basket. The office wasn’t empty, though: a couple of committee members, both greasy headbangers, both supernaturally ugly, were standing by the telex machine trying unsuccessfully to send something off. Heather ignored them, hoping they’d feel uncomfortable and leave.
She claimed the entire worktable by putting her bag on one side and the red wire basket on the other, using one chair to drape her coat on and another to sit in. One of the metal boys called over to her that a guy had been phoning for her all morning.
“Someone from the Daily News?” she said hopefully.
The boy shrugged. “He didn’t say where he was from.”
On reflection, Heather realized that the call couldn’t have been from the News. If they had wanted her back, someone would have phoned her at home last night. Anyway, they wouldn’t reverse the decision. No one went against the union. She settled back into her black mood and began pulling submissions out of envelopes and folders, piling them up.
She was halfway through reading a second-year’s travelogue about interrailing around Italy when the phone rang.
“Heather Allen?”
“Yeah.”
“I met you last night, do you remember?”