“Right,” said JT, lowering his voice. “Don’t tell anyone.”
He dodged past her, sprinting into the lobby and up the stairs. Paddy chased close behind and got to Farquarson’s office just as JT shut the door. Through the slats on the venetian blinds she could see Farquarson explaining something, looking angry and irritated at JT, who was nodding excitedly, tapping the desk with his finger, suggesting a plan. The boy hadn’t been found dead; if he had they wouldn’t be excited, they’d be moving slower. Something else had happened.
Farquarson spotted Paddy standing outside the door and snapped his fingers at her, telling her to go and get the clippings. She watched for another moment, yearning for a taste of the glory, not knowing that JT and Farquarson were discussing a development in the Baby Brian case that would tear her cozy life apart forever.
FOUR . THE OFFICE FOR THE DEAD
It was four-thirty and the last slice of sun was perched on the horizon, the failing yellow light oozing through the dirty windows on the upper deck. In the back three rows teenage boys kicked at one another while diffident girls smoked and smirked and pretended not to watch.
Paddy sat alone, surreptitiously eating from a plastic tub. The three cold boiled eggs had been sitting in her bag in the hot office all day, and the texture was alternately rubbery and clay dry. All she had to chase away the aftertaste was a sour quartered grapefruit. She’d have the black coffee when they got back from the chapel. The diet had been scientifically worked out in America: three boiled eggs, grapefruit, and black coffee three times a day would build up into a chemical reaction that actually burned off fat at a rate of six pounds a week, guaranteed. She projected forwards to her goal weight. In just one month she could tell Terry Hewitt to go and take a flying fuck to himself. She imagined herself with an unspecified but better haircut, standing in the Press Bar, dressed in that size ten green pencil skirt she had optimistically bought from Chelsea Girl.
“Actually, Terry, I’m not fat anymore.”
It wasn’t very witty. It had the essence of what she wanted to say but didn’t sound very real.
“D’you know, Terry, on balance, I’d say you’re fatter than me now.”
Better, but still not very good. If the journalists heard her say that, they’d know she cared about her weight and she’d never hear the end of it.
“Terry, you’ve got a face like two buckets banging together.”
That worked. Paddy smirked to herself. She’d wear the green miniskirt, pointy-toed winklepickers, and a tight black crewneck pullover. An unforgiving outfit. She’d need to be really slim to wear that. She only ever wore black pencil skirts with woolly tights and sweaters baggy enough to cover her lumps and bumps.
Paddy knew she was fat before Terry Hewitt commented on it- she wouldn’t have attempted the disgusting Mayo Clinic Diet otherwise- but it hurt that her weight was the only thing he had noticed about her. The Scottish Daily News was a fresh audience, and without seventy-odd relatives preceding her she felt she could be anyone. She didn’t want to be the clever fat girl again in this new incarnation.
Finishing the last piece of grapefruit, she put the soft plastic lid back on the tub, dropping it into her bag, and cautioned herself: there’d be a lot of food when they got back from the chapel, mounds of cheese sandwiches, hot salty sausage rolls, rough-cut gammon on soft plain bread spread with chips of hard butter. She’d better avoid physical proximity to them if she was to stick to her diet. Nor should she approach the iced rings or moist coconut snowballs or jammy biscuits or butterfly cakes or the arctic roll. She was salivating wildly as a talon hand clutched her shoulder.
“You’re wee Paddy Meehan, eh?” The voice sounded like a man’s but for a single strain in the timbre.
Paddy turned around to face a woman with a face like a dried chamois. “Oh, hello, Mrs. Breslin. Are ye going to Granny Annie’s laying-in?”
“Aye.”
Mrs. Breslin had worked with Paddy’s mother in the Rutherglen Cooperative when they were both first out of school. She had seven children of her own, five boys and two girls, all of whom were considered a little bit scary by the other young people of the area. The Breslin kids were rumored to be responsible for the fire that burned down the Salvation Army Hall’s shed.
Mrs. Breslin lit a cigarette from the stub of her last one. “God rest her soul, wee Granny Annie.”
“Aye,” said Paddy. “She was a lovely woman, right enough.”
They avoided each other’s eye. Granny Annie wasn’t lovely, but she was dead and it would be wrong to say otherwise. Mrs. Breslin nodded and said Aye, right enough, so she was, God rest her.
“I hear you’re a journalist now?”
“Not a journalist,” said Paddy, pleased at the mistake. “I run messages at the Daily News. I’m hoping to become a journalist, though, one day.”
“Well, lucky you. I’ve got four out of school now, and not one of them can get work. How did you get that? Did someone put in a word for ye?”
“No, I just phoned up and asked if they were taking on. I’d done articles for the school paper and that. I gave them some things I’d written.”
Mrs. Breslin sat forward, her smoke-stinking breath smothering Paddy as effectively as a cushion. “Are they taking on now? Could you put in a word for my Donal?”
Donal carried a knife and had been giving himself tattoos since he was twelve.
“They’re not taking on anymore.”
Mrs. Breslin narrowed her eyes and turned her head away a fraction. “Fine,” she said spitefully. “Help me up. We’re there.”
Mrs. Breslin was fatter than Paddy remembered. Her shoulders and face were deceptively slim, but her buttocks were fantastically large: the shoulders of her pale green raincoat were halfway down to the elbows to accommodate her shape. Paddy watched down the narrow stairwell as Mrs. Breslin slammed from side to side while the bus took a corner, and wondered if she herself would be that fat after seven children, or as oblivious to the truth of what her kids were like.
The bus stopped in the middle of the street, blocking the traffic. Paddy helped Mrs. Breslin down the steep step to the road, leading her across the still traffic, snaking through the smoking cars.
Every Catholic in the neighborhood was wearing black and converging outside Granny Annie’s tiny council house. They climbed out of cars, walked around corners, came down the Main Street. Smoke and icy breath rose like steam from cattle as the frosty black tarmac glittered silver around them.
Fifty yards up the side street Mrs. Breslin saw someone she was more annoyed at than Paddy and went over to spoil their day.
Looking out for Sean’s flattop, Paddy waved to cousins across the road and accidentally caught the distant eye of Mrs. McCarthy, an overemotional neighbor who cried with joy whenever she saw Paddy. Mrs. McCarthy had done an unrequested month-long novena before Paddy’s interview at the Daily News and subsequently felt she had a claim on her, having effectively snagged her the job. Mrs. McCarthy mouthed “Thank God,” and Paddy nodded stiffly, grateful for the hand reaching for hers. Sean Ogilvy, tall and dark with ninety-degree shoulders, dipped at the knee and gathered Paddy’s hand into his.
“Bloody hell. I met stinky Mrs. Breslin on the bus, and then Mrs. McCarthy saw me. I got caught by bloody Matt the Rat last night and had to have the whole Paddy Meehan conversation again.”
“You used to love talking about that Paddy Meehan case.”
“Well, I’m bored of it now.” She avoided his eye and looked around the crowd, seeing that a lot of her own extended family were there. “I’m sick of knowing everyone and everyone knowing me.”