Relaxing into her company, Mrs. Simnel gestured towards the ornamental brasses and asked if Paddy would mind her carrying on. No; Paddy even offered to help, but there wasn’t a spare set of rubber gloves under the sink, so she just had to sit there, nibbling biscuits and watching as the woman dabbed Brasso onto the metal and conjured blackness out of nothing.
Mrs. Simnel had never been a witness to anything else before and was a little uncomfortable at coming forward. She was surprised how well mannered the police were. She’d expected them to be rather more thuggish, frankly, the officers lower down the ranks at least. As she made the snobbish observation her eyes fell on Paddy’s cheap black crewneck. She blinked, forgiving herself the offense, and shifted the emphasis. They made her a cup of tea before they went in to see the line of boys and gave it to her in a china cup, with a biscuit, an iced ring, of all things. Wasn’t that dainty? A pink iced ring. Not what you’d expect from big burly men at all.
She was the perfect witness, recalling details and colors and times exactly, as though she had been rehearsing all her life for this one moment. And she didn’t for an instant seem like a woman who was short of attention.
“Those boys who did this,” she said sadly. “Those boys are only ten years old. It makes me shiver to think about it.”
“Yes, their backgrounds are very deprived,” said Paddy, hoping to temper her attitude to them if nothing else.
“I know. They told me that the dark-haired one had never been to a dentist. Not once in his entire life.” She put down her cloth for a moment. “It must hurt, to have those teeth. And the diet you’d need to make them so… I couldn’t finish my biscuit.”
It hit Paddy like a cold wash. “You couldn’t finish the iced ring?”
“No,” said Mrs. Simnel. “I just put it down on the saucer. I mean, it must hurt to have such bad teeth. Even if the parents can’t take the child to the dentist, why don’t the schools do something?”
Paddy pretended that her father was picking her up at the bus stop on Clarkston Road. Mrs. Simnel waved her off, wishing her good luck with the project and her exams. As Paddy walked to the end of the street she heard the woman closing the storm doors firmly behind her. She should hurry home or she’d miss Sean if he phoned about their Valentine’s date tomorrow, but she didn’t know where the buses ran to from here and she was numbed by Mrs. Simnel.
She walked past the bus terminus and under a railway bridge, following the road over the high crescent of Prospecthill. It was a leafy bump of land, one of two neighboring hillocks overlooking the broad valley plain. At the crest of the hill she paused, hands in her pockets, looking out over the lights of the Friday-night city. She mapped her way around the distant streets using the red neon sign on the Daily Record building as a starting point.
This time last week Heather Allen was alive and had parked her car in Union Street over there. Paddy had walked down to Queen Street station that night; she could just see its illuminated fan of glass. She had taken the train to Steps and stood by the tracks. This time last week Mrs. Simnel had gone to the police about the boys she saw on the train. They gave her tea and biscuits before she went in to pick them out of a lineup, casually mentioning Callum Ogilvy’s bad teeth to her and the fact that he’d never been to a dentist. She must have known Callum the moment she saw him. They’d primed her just as carefully as Abraham Ross had been primed. The police were determined to put the boys alone on the train, and Paddy couldn’t understand why.
TWENTY-SEVEN . RED-HOT SPITE DATE
I
Sean didn’t call, and now there was no card. Paddy stared so hard at the bare doormat that she could see small grains of mud and dirt between the brown bristles. Her hot feet began to stick to the plastic floor protector. She cursed her stupid fucking soppy bastard card. It became bigger and bluer and more italicized the more she remembered it. Ashamed of hoping and afraid of being seen, she ran back upstairs to her bedroom.
II
It was quiet in the town. The streets emptied under a heavy sky, shoppers hurrying home before the hunger strikers’ march began or the heavy rain came on again. She watched down the road, facing into cold rain, resisting the urge to pull up her hood because it made her look so young and unsophisticated. Thoughts of Sean made her throat ache. She couldn’t stand it if he abandoned her altogether. She was frightened of herself without him.
A filthy white Volkswagen Beetle peeled off from the thin traffic and pulled into the bus stop. The whitewall tires were caked in gray dirt and the front fender was rusted and painted over with a watery white treatment. Terry leaned an elbow on the passenger seat and smiled up at her. She pulled open the door and climbed in.
“I thought you might not be there for a minute.”
She struggled to shut the creaky door behind her. “Why?”
“’Cause of the rain.” He pointed to the gray sky.
He was nervous too, and she liked it.
She looked up through the windscreen. “Is that where rain comes from?” she said, trying to tease him but sounding sarcastic.
Terry restarted the car. The engine was old and tired, one of the wheels was making an oddly intense ticking noise, and the gears crunched like a mouth full of gravel, but still Paddy marveled at someone near her age having the money to buy a car.
“This is the coolest motor I’ve ever been in,” she said, pleasing him and making up for sounding like a bitch.
They looked away from each other, each smiling out the window. Paddy hoped she was seen out on her spite date, that someone would tell Sean and he’d feel as upset and frightened and jealous as she did at the moment. She had considered and rejected the possibility that Sean was seeing someone else: it wasn’t his style, he was too self-righteous.
Terry slowed for a red light at George Square, and they saw steel barriers cordoning off the central space in preparation for the postmarch rally. They weren’t the usual barriers, keeping marchers on the central concourse and safe from traffic; they were corridors for funneling marchers through, keeping them on the roads and away from sidewalks. Angry vandals had already managed to spray-paint slogans on nearby buildings. A bank straight in front of them had UP THE PROVOS across a window; another hand had added MUST DIE in red. The rival slogans made the square look like the venue for a battle of the bands more than the site of a political rally.
Terry drew a wary breath in through his teeth. “It’s going to be mental. They’re busing Ulster Defense militants in from Larkhall.”
He said it as if he knew the area. Paddy smiled at the dashboard of his car and his expensive leather jacket.
“Are you from Larkhall, Terry?”
He glanced at her. “No.”
“Whereabouts are ye from?”
He hesitated. “Newton Mearns.”
“Fancy,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound bitchy again, because she meant it.
Newton Mearns was intimidating nice. It was a prosperous, middle-class area on the far south side of the city, with nice houses in big grounds and a lot of cared-for gardens. Even the roads were full of vegetation. Paddy and Sean had been out for a day there once, looking for a nice pub Sean had heard about from some workmates. They couldn’t find the pub and were back at the bus stop on the opposite side of the road within twenty minutes. Paddy kept her hood up while Sean smoked a fag and threw stones at cows. They were relieved when the bus arrived to take them back to the city. They never went there again.