Mary Ann took another bite, grinning as she chewed, and nodded to the door. Paddy turned to see Trisha and Con Meehan coming through the crowd, holding hands like teenage lovers. Trisha still French-combed her hair up into a high crowned bouffant for formal occasions. Behind her thick glasses her eyes were a beautiful shade of gray, so pale they looked silver in a certain light. Of all the children only Marty had inherited them; everyone else had Connor’s brown eyes. Con had a neat little David Niven moustache on his florid face and the same stocky build as Paddy. He was wearing an inappropriately jaunty dog-tooth jacket.
“Dad,” said Paddy, as Mary Ann laughed incredulously, “why in the name of mercy are you wearing that?”
“Your mother gave it to me.”
“He looks very swish,” said Trisha, brushing an imaginary speck from his lapel.
A man next to them who had been at school with Sean’s dad leaned over to Con. “Are you selling nylons?”
The gathered company laughed at the weak joke and Con joined in, not uncomfortable with his position in the pecking order. Mary Ann laughed hard into Paddy’s hair. Their father was a meek man, a gentle little soul, always in the audience laughing at a bigger man’s jokes. They both loved it about him.
“Well,” Trisha bristled, small-mouthed and angry as ever, “you’re hardly a fashion plate yourself.”
And Con laughed away at that one as well.
II
An hour of small talk with a hundred relatives later and the singers were organizing their turns in the corner of the room. Paddy watched them conspire and wondered why they bothered: each always sang the same song anyway, choosing the one that best suited their voice. Trays of delicious food swayed above the heads and through the room.
Mary Ann was being silently chatted up by John O’Hara, the quietest boy in the parish. They sat close on the settee, ostensibly ignoring each other, backs stiff, each intensely conscious of the other. Mary Ann gave out occasional irrelevant laughing hiccups when tension caused John O’Hara to twitch his arm against her elbow. When Paddy couldn’t stand the silence a moment more, she said she needed the loo, pulled her sleeve from Mary Ann’s frantic pinch, and wandered off through the crowd.
Sean was in the kitchen doorway, nodding as a red-faced old union official ranted about the recession. The government wouldn’t dare, the old man said, pointing adamantly at Sean’s shoulder; they’d be provoking a national strike, and the shipyards were central to the Scottish economy. It would be a catastrophe, he said, a disaster. You don’t remember before the war, you don’t remember what the Tories are really like underneath the consensus. Sean shook his head instead to see if that would mollify the old man. And you young ones, the man warmed to his subject, you don’t care, you don’t see what’s happening. It’s you who’ll pay. He pointed at them each in turn. It’s your generation who’ll end up on the rubbish heap. Paddy and Sean nodded in unison, wishing the old man would be quiet and go away. Having delivered his message and spotted a friend across the room, he did both.
“Well,” said Sean, “that’s me told.”
He smiled down at her, and over his shoulder she saw her oldest sister, Caroline, coming through the crowd carrying her baby son on her hip. She looked exhausted. Baby Connor bared his four new nipping teeth at Paddy, raised a hand, and shrieked a greeting. A clear bubble formed at his nostril.
Caroline slipped the baby into Paddy’s arms. “God, take him off me before I hurt one or both of us.”
“Where’s John, then?”
“He’s out in the hall somewhere,” said Caroline. “I’ll go and find him.”
She left the room quickly, stepping lighter now she was alone.
Sean smiled to see Paddy with the fat baby. “Suits you.”
“God, that John’s so lazy. I don’t know why she ever married him,” said Paddy, pretending to talk about her sister’s marriage but actually sending him a message about theirs. “Hold him while I wipe his nose.”
Sean took Baby Connor in his arms, burring his lips against the baby’s face to make him smile, answering Paddy’s worries with unspoken promises. She took a paper napkin and wiped the bubble away, making Baby Con cry.
Sean leaned over. “D’you fancy Raging Bull at the pictures tomorrow? It’s supposed to be quite good.”
Paddy didn’t particularly want to see a boxing movie, but she said she would. She felt mean for giving him trouble for John’s crimes. “Bet your gran’d be pleased at the size of the crowd.”
Sean nodded and nuzzled his face into her hair, pressing the baby’s fat, powdery cheek against hers. “Everyone here’ll be at our engagement party in May. As soon as our name comes up on the council list and we get a house, we can start working on getting one of these as well.”
Paddy smiled up at him, scrunching her eyes together so that he couldn’t see what she was thinking.
The baby weighed heavy on her hip, and she used the excuse to go and find Caroline and give him back. She managed to lose Sean to the back bedroom, where his uncles were singing rebel songs and drinking whisky.
She spent the rest of the night standing in the kitchen next to the oven, smiling at whoever talked to her, pretending to laugh along with the crowd. She forgot about Terry Hewitt and the spite that should have fueled her and gorged herself on slices of fruitcake and arctic roll, swallowing before she’d finished chewing, shoving food into her mouth to quell the panic.
III
Five miles across town from Granny Annie’s in Rutherglen, in the front room of her small gray house in Townhead, Gina Wilcox sat in her immaculately clean living room. She had forgotten to put the heating on, and her breath hung before her like a soul leaving her body. She stared, dead-eyed, at the flickering television, waiting for word, vigilant and terrified for her baby.
SEVEN . FEARS ARE GROWING
I
Paddy was shielding her eyes against the sleet, standing at the side of Granny Annie’s open grave, watching a silken cord slither down the crumbling black soil wall, when she remembered that she had left the six boiled eggs she needed for her diet sitting in a saucepan at the side of the cooker. She’d be fat all day without hope of reprieve. She almost cursed out loud. Sean felt her stiffen next to him and mistook her agitation for empathy. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her near, tucking her head protectively under his chin, unaware that he was digging his fingers into the fat on her arm, reminding her that not only was she fat and shallow, she was fat and shallow and had horrible thick arms too.
II
She pushed open the doors and entered the newsroom, hanging her wet duffel coat on a hook by the door. Dub was already sitting on the copyboy bench. Keck, the head copyboy, was standing in front of the bench, uncertainly pivoting back and forth on one foot as Dub looked up at him distastefully.
“No,” corrected Dub with mock patience, “you’re not being funny. A joke or a quip are prerequisites to being funny. What you’re being is fucking obnoxious.”
Keck pulled the skin tight on his face, affecting nonchalance, and wandered off to the sports desk.