"Your dad coming back to Glasgow's been hard on her," he said. "I think she's had to face a whole load of stuff she wasn't ready to look at."
"Like what?" said Maureen, resentful that Benny knew more about what was going on with her mother than she did.
"Her part in everything. The stuff she's responsible for." He sat back. "I shouldn't be discussing this with you – it's not my place to tell you what she's feeling."
"But you are."
"I am," Benny nodded, "because I'm evil."
As they walked back across the bridge to Paddy's, Maureen felt Benny's business card in her pocket and rubbed a finger across the embossed lettering. She wished she trusted him, wished that they could go back to evenings in Benny's house, watching videos and eating sweeties together. He'd worked for Angus before. In fact, there was no one in the city she could trust less than Benny right now, but he was funny and that always scrambled her instincts.
"Josh asked me out tonight and I said Sunday afternoon," said Kilty. "I didn't want to seem too eager."
"Good for you."
"I really fucking fancy him," said Kilty ardently.
"I'd never have guessed," said Maureen.
Chapter 28
Martha Street is a dead end. The steep hill leads to a pedestrianized area outside a students' union building, with large concrete bins of flowers and benches for the students to sit on while they eat their lunch, take disco drugs and end the night with a kebab. The road ended at a dowdy building coated in jagged gray Artex. It was the Public Register Office and the wedding suite. Leslie parked the bike outside and they climbed the steps to the door. Inside, the walls were paneled in fake walnut, so yellow and solid that it looked like the car ceiling of a homeless smoker. Through a second door they came to a wooden desk, barring public entry into the office proper. A tired, distressed-looking young man was waiting on a wooden chair just inside the door, his elbows on his knees, his head hanging limply between his hands.
There were three women in the office. Two elderly women sat across a desk from each other, eating supermarket sandwiches, taking the smallest mouthfuls and chewing them slowly. The third woman was sitting at a desk on her own. She was very overweight and wore a skirt and vest top, showing off arms as big as fleshy wings. When she saw Leslie and Maureen at the desk she glared accusingly at the two elderly women before standing up slowly and coming over to the desk. "Who's first?" she said loudly.
Maureen and Leslie looked at the man in the chair and, sensing something, he stood to wobbly attention. "I'm here to register a birth," he said, waving a yellow card and a bit of paper.
Maureen and Leslie took seats and waited for the man to finish his business. They looked around the room at the public information posters pinned to the far wall, listening to breathless cars negotiating the steep hill.
"Are ye sure we can get it here?" muttered Leslie.
"Nut," said Maureen. "It was just a thought. We might need to go through to Edinburgh."
"Will it have the cause of death on it?"
"God, I dunno, I'm just guessing. I've never seen a death certificate."
"Me neither."
It took ages for the woman to do the registration. She kept glancing at her colleagues resentfully and telling Maureen and Leslie that she wouldn't be long. Eventually, the man stood up straight, put something in his pocket and sloped out of the office. The portly woman looked behind her, stared at the others eating their sandwiches. They didn't look back. When she finally turned to face Maureen and Leslie, she was puce and couldn't bring herself to speak.
"Urn," said Maureen nervously, "I wonder if you could help us. We're trying to get a look at the death certificate of a woman who died a week ago in the Albert."
The woman nodded repeatedly, as if she was mentally nutting them. "I need details," she said.
"What sort of details?" asked Maureen, looking behind the woman to see if her colleagues had noticed the state of her. The pair sat facing each other, one taking minute nibbles, the other dabbing her mouth elaborately with a paper napkin.
"Date of death, name and age."
"I haven't got her age but I know the name and place and a date-would that do?"
The woman made her write it all down before telling them to wait and storming off to the back office. As soon as she was out of the room one of the elderly women started to laugh and the other reached across the desk and slapped her hand playfully.
They were on the benches outside the students' union, smoking cigarettes and calming down.
Maureen sighed. "Ella, ya wee shite," she said, hanging her head and taking another draw. She unfolded the certificate again and looked at it. "A fucking heart attack. Protecting him to the last."
Chapter 29
The office area behind the bus station was a quiet, reserved grid of imposing Victorian office buildings. Even the high summer sun couldn't penetrate the tall streets and most of the area was in shadow. At night poorly dressed women stood on the street corners under the gilt company clocks, waiting for men to come and choose them, before taking them up the delivery alleys, making money to score with.
It was after office hours on a Friday night and Leslie had arranged to meet her pal Joan in a pub across the road from her office. Apart from needing an introduction, Maureen wanted to talk to the woman alone but Leslie and Kilty had insisted that they come with her. They gave her a lot of daft excuses – they had nothing else to do, it would be nice to spend time together – but she knew that they thought she was wrong about everything and unfit to be out on her own.
The Attache pub would have been busy during the week, full of office workers delaying the return home. Dirt encrusted at the edge of the wooden floor and sticky beer-barrel tables testified to busy spells. It was deserted now because it was a sunny Friday evening and none of the regulars felt obliged to linger in the town.
Leslie's pal was already twenty-five minutes late and they had finished their lovely long, strong drinks. Maureen wanted to order another round but knew Kilty and Leslie would try to stop her.
"If," said Kilty, swirling the ice around the bottom of her glass with her straw, "she works with street prostitutes, would she know anything about a brothel?"
"Yeah," said Leslie. "She said that they often start off in those places or move up to them. They're the same women."
Kilty looked at her watch. "She's getting very late – are you sure she'll come?"
"I hope so," said Leslie, watching the door. "Thing is, she's the only one working there and she's on perpetual nights."
"She'll be asleep on a bus or something," said Kilty. "Why is she the only one there?"
"They're really underresourced," said Leslie. "No one wants to fund exit-from-prostitution schemes anymore. Everyone wants to facilitate, call them sex workers, give them health checks and licensed premises to work out of."
It didn't sound like a bad idea to Maureen but she guessed it would be undiplomatic to say so.
"That sounds like a good idea to me," said Kilty. "If you can't get everyone out isn't it better to look after them while they're there?"
Leslie looked at Kilty as if she'd shit in her pocket. "Most of these women are heroin addicts," she said. "Do you think they dreamed of becoming prostitutes when they were wee? It's a necessity because they're trapped. Half of them are paying for their boyfriend's habit as well."
"Yeah," said Kilty. "Well, what about the London Collective of Prostitutes? They're working women who have a union and everything. They want to carry on working and get it legalized. Do you think they're wrong?"
Leslie was getting annoyed but, feeling cocky because Kilty was there, Maureen decided to have her say. "There is an argument about autonomy," she said. "People do have the right to make choices."