Chapter 33
Maureen was feeling confident and ready for anything. She knocked on the glass panel and stepped back. A shadow moved in the kitchen corridor and Liam opened the door. He didn't have a top on and had been sitting in the garden.
Liam's house was the one good thing that had come out of his foray into the underworld. It was a three-story town house in the middle of the West End, with high ceilings, magnificent windows and a stretch of garden at the back. In times gone by, the West End had been a tatty, cheap area to live. Students clustered together in damp old houses with boilers held together with sticky tape and glue. Men left drink-ruined marriages and came to live in bedsits here, trying to revive their glory days. It was a better area now. The housing boom meant that bomb sites and inches of spare ground were being developed into cramped flats for short, thin people with no possessions. Deserted shops and boarded-up garages had been taken over by sandwich bars and international coffee-shop chains. The bookshops had shut, replaced by designer clothing outlets.
When he was dealing Liam had left the downstairs of the house dirty and unaltered to discourage his sometimes desperate clients from trying to rob him. Since enrolling as a student he had become obsessed with renovating it. He used all his spare time to strip the flock wallpaper, bare the scored plaster and woodwork, filling the rooms up with a lot of chairs he bought in auctions. His obsession with chairs was getting to be too much: the place was beginning to look like a Quaker meetinghouse. He had left the garden and kitchen until last and had just started making inroads on them. Maureen had never known him to have any interest in gardening, much less skill at it, but the long, dry stretch of mud had sudden thin grass growing on it. Just outside the kitchen window a small herb bed had been planted with cuttings and sticks with pictures on them, proclaiming the potential. A seemingly ready-made shrubbery was flourishing at the far end.
They were sitting in the second-floor sitting room, above the noise of the traffic. The floor-length windows clipped the top of the roofs opposite but mostly they were filled with blue sky, textured with occasional puffs of white cloud, like living paintings. It was a blue room, kept plain and empty apart from the Corbusier lounger, the cracked leather chesterfield and the telly and video.
Liam handed her a mug of tea and pointed at the Jiffy bag on the floor. "It might be completely innocuous," he said.
"I know."
"It's probably a promo for Disneyland or something."
"Probably." Maureen didn't move to put the video into the machine but sat looking at the envelope, sipping her tea.
"But you don't think it is?"
"No." She sipped again. "He's the only person who sends me anonymous mail."
"It's not from the hospital, though, is it?"
"No. It was hand-delivered. He must know people on the outside."
"Okay," said Liam, slapping the back of the sofa. "I'll watch it."
SHE WAS ON STRICT orders to wait downstairs but found herself hovering in the hall, smoking a fag and trying to hear anything from upstairs. It would last about an hour, she guessed, from the big reels, or maybe even just half an hour. She could hear the floorboards creak as Liam walked to the video, the click of the tape being sucked into the machine. He walked back to the sofa and pressed play on the remote. She listened. There was no sound for about five seconds then suddenly Liam scampered out of the room and leaned over the banister. She looked up at him, turning a little circle on the stairs to see his face properly. His mouth was open and he seemed to be swaying. "Liam?"
He fell back heavily against the wall. Maureen put down her tea and ran up the stairs to find him hunkered on the floor.
"What is it?" she said, rubbing his back.
Liam coughed hard. Maureen fed her cigarette to him, holding it against his lips, and Liam inhaled a full centimeter. "Pauline Doyle," he said, exhaling thick smoke as he spoke. "On a bed."
"Pauline alive?"
Liam hung his head. "On a bed."
She had never thought of herself as more hardened than Liam but she could watch it and he couldn't. He was sitting downstairs in the front room, chain-smoking and sipping medicinal bourbon while Maureen watched Pauline on a Bed.
It was a small room with girlie curtains in flowery peach and a single bed. The bedstead was green velour. There were two people in the shot. Outside the window cars and lorries sped past on a distant dual carriageway. It was homemade, the date and time stamped in the corner of the screen, four months after Maureen's discharge from hospital. Pauline had been in the hospital recently, that much was clear, because she was over six stone. It didn't look like a rape. To anyone who didn't know Pauline, it was a normal, grubby home-made porn tape. Pauline sat on the single bed wearing a dirty red nylon bra and pants with scratchy lace trim, looking at the man's face apprehensively, trying to catch his eye, glancing occasionally at the video camera. A casual viewer, chugging along to the action, wouldn't notice the similarities between the skinny bird on the bed and the guy doing her, wouldn't notice that behind the apprehension she was asking him, please, not to hurt her.
Pauline's father touched her here and there, pointing her at the camera, showing it her flower and her wee tits, touching her in a way that communicated disrespect tinged with disgust. He did things just because he could do them, slapped her leg really hard with a belt buckle, showing how compliant she was. Pauline, unmoved by indignities she had experienced many times before, watched his face, looking for signals that it was all about to get much worse.
The father was talking to the camera but there was no sound on the tape. He seemed to be asking for encouragement, pausing with a knee on the bed and nodding at the viewer, turning Pauline over as if this were what had been requested, checking back for reassurance. He got his spindly old cock out and fucked her up the arse, flashing a smile at the camera. He didn't even have a full hard-on. Pauline was on all fours, her bony wee bum two-thirds to the camera, shuddering when his pelvis banged against her, absently watching the cars pass on the dual carriageway.
Maureen was on her third cigarette in twenty minutes. She was sitting forwards, her hands holding her face, tears spilling from her eyes as if they were trying to wash grit away. The father finished, pulled out, and while he was standing there, pointing at her, the shot zoomed in on Pauline's bum. The father lifted her by the hips and moved her a few inches across the bed like a dog being shown, so the camera could get a better shot of her genitals. Pauline didn't struggle, didn't even bend in the middle. This had happened before. Her hole was as dilated as a fifty-pence piece. The screen went blank.
Maureen didn't know much about video cameras but assumed the zoom wouldn't be remote. There had been another man in the room watching all of this, a man working the camera. Pauline's other brother was there and the father had been talking to him, nodding to him, asking him things. Maureen sniffed hard and wiped the hot tears from her face. Mark Doyle had grown up with these people. No wonder his skin was trying to rot away.
She stayed in the room for a while, watching the sunlight flicker on the varnished floor, the fervent blue sky over the rooftops opposite. She hadn't stayed in touch with Pauline after she got out of hospital and this was what had happened. Maureen should have had Pauline to stay in her flat, sleep on her floor, take her bed, even – she would have given her the bed if she'd known. But she had known, Pauline had told her: her father and brother had been raping her anally for years. She just hadn't bothered to imagine it. Pauline had refused to tell the police because she was afraid it would have killed her mother. Maureen knew now that she was right.
Liam called from downstairs. "Is it finished?"