Mimi Fucking Ogilvy answered in her best Sunday voice.
“Is Sean there?”
“Who may I say it is?”
“Can I speak to Sean, please?”
Paddy could feel Mimi’s tiny mind grind out a thought before she hung up on her.
Paddy waited in the hall, sitting briefly on the stairs, knowing that Sean would have been in the house getting ready for mass and would have heard the phone ring. He’d know it was her: no one else he could possibly know would need to phone on a Sunday morning, because they were all on the way to the chapel and would see each other anyway. He wasn’t going to call her back. She checked her watch. He would have left to get to mass now. He wasn’t calling back.
Back upstairs she threw on some clothes and took off her engagement ring, leaving it sitting by her bed, knowing her mum would come in to make the bed while she was out and would see it there. She hoped it would worry her.
She ate a quick breakfast of cereal. She could have made six boiled eggs, but the grapefruit were all off, and the chemical reaction didn’t work without them. Filling her canvas bag with biscuits, she set off for the town, hurrying to get the train past Rutherglen station before mass came out. She didn’t want to run into half the congregation. Sitting on the train, Paddy looked at her chubby hands dispassionately. She liked them better without the poor ring.
In town she bought a ticket to an afternoon showing of Raging Bull, not because she wanted to see it, but so that she could tell Sean she had already seen it if he asked her later. She didn’t want him thinking she would wait around for him all the time. She felt like a friendless idiot, handing her single ticket over to the usherette. Unprompted, Paddy told her that her friend who had been coming with her was prone to illness and wasn’t well enough to come and that’s why she was alone. The usherette was hungover and dressed like a bellhop, in a washed-out red-and-gray uniform. She let Paddy finish her excuse and then silently pointed the way upstairs with her ticket skewer.
Paddy sat near the back, calculating that fewer people would be able to see her there, and opened her handbag of biscuits. One hour into the film she realized that she had never enjoyed a movie as much in her life. She wasn’t wondering what Sean thought about it or making jokes or checking that she got her share of the sweets, she was just enveloped by the music and the dark. She even forgot to eat.
II
She arrived back in Eastfield a full hour before anyone could reasonably expect their tea to be ready. It was too painful to go and sit in her bedroom before tea as well as after. The curtains were thick in the living room window, and the settee was too low to see anyway, but she could tell from the quality of the blueness of the light that the telly was on. A head stood up from an armchair- one of the brothers- and went into the kitchen. She had another whole night of internal exile ahead of her.
Sneaking past the front gate, she lifted the garage key from under a brick. If her dad saw the light on he’d think it was their neighbors, the Beatties, and stay well away. As she pulled it open, the garage side door concertinaed a thin black carpet of mulch.
The air inside was cold, a damp cloud hanging over everything, eating into her fingertips and ear lobes, carrying the cold into every corner. Paddy kept her coat on and sat down in a slightly moist brown armchair. She finished the biscuits in her handbag, eating them one after another as if it was a chore.
The Beatties had managed to pack a wild amount of stuff into the Meehans’ garage. They had erected a set of precarious shelves from bricks and odd planks of wood against one wall and had stacked cardboard boxes full of bric-a-brac on them. Paddy stood up, picking her damp tights off the backs of her legs, and looked through the boxes, the soft cardboard coming apart in her hand when she tried to tug it.
The Beatties went on foreign holidays and got to keep toys from when they were younger. The Meehan children were made to give theirs away to charities just when they stopped playing with them but before they lost all proprietorial sense over them. In one box they had stored a Union Jack biscuit tin from the Silver Jubilee and a cheaply framed picture of the Queen as a young woman, holding on to the back of a chair. Black speckled mold grew across her long pink skirt.
Paddy sat in the cold armchair, looking around the room. If she had been a Beattie she could write an article about Thomas Dempsie and Baby Brian. She could say it was the anniversary of Thomas’s death, explain the Barnhill connection clearly, and let readers draw their own conclusion. She could do it if she didn’t care what her family thought. They were punishing her already, and she hadn’t done anything. She was suffering their wrath anyway, she might as well do the Judas deed. But she felt bad enough for having upset her mother when she hadn’t done anything. Heather Allen would do it, even if it were her family. She would grit her teeth and write the Dempsie article.
Forgetting for the moment that she had taken Sean’s ring off, she touched her ring finger with her thumb and experienced a momentary horror when she found her finger bare. The impression of it was deep on her finger: the red mark had faded, but the skin remained smoother where the band had been. She definitely liked her hand better without it.
By the time she got into bed that night, she noticed that she had changed her habit of twisting her engagement ring to stroking its silky absence fondly.
TWENTY-ONE . SADLY
I
Paddy sat on the bench in the newsroom, watching the editors filter back in slowly after the privilege of lunch, their tempers sweetened by a midday pint and a hot meal. The journalists, who had to make do with ten stolen minutes in the canteen or a sandwich at their desks, watched them insolently, feet up on desks, fags dangling from mouths, the antagonism between the two groups palpable. They hated each other because editors gave the orders and chewed up the journalists’ work, while the journalists produced and bitched about editors’ cuts, even when their copy had been improved a hundredfold, perhaps especially then.
A clump of editors were standing in the middle of the newsroom, sharing a final joke, when a flurry in the corridor caught everyone’s eye. William McGuigan, the paper’s chairman, as rarely seen in the newsroom as empathy or encouragement, made a dramatic double-doored entrance from the lifts. His large port-wine lips had deflated with age and lost their edges so that they reminded Paddy of an overripe fruit. He was flanked by five men, two in police uniform and three in plainclothes. One of them, a white-haired man in a pristine gabardine jacket, stood authoritatively out in front of the others, eyeing the room, suspicious of everyone.
The newsroom fell silent. The presence of so much authority made everyone feel as if they were about to be arrested and summarily put to the wall. Stuck behind the crowd, Dub climbed up on the bench and Paddy stepped up next to him.
As the focal point of a crowd at silent attention, McGuigan looked around, savoring the moment. “Gentlemen, these are police officers.” He flicked a hand at the uniformed officers and dropped his voice. “Something very sad has happened.” He paused dramatically.
The white-haired policeman stepped impatiently in front of him. “Listen to me,” he shouted, his delivery loud and functional, a lorry to McGuigan’s sports car. “A body was found in the Clyde this morning. Sadly, we have good reason to believe it is that of Heather Allen.”