She looked down and saw Shug Grant whispering to the man next to him. They both sniggered and avoided looking at her. A sexual slur about her, not thinking about Terry or who he was or what he meant his life to be, just there because everyone else was, and there would be drink afterwards.
“Some of us are here because we loved Terry. Some of us are here because our editors said we could get the morning off.” A nervous titter rolled around the church. They could see she was looking stern, staring down at Shug. She was famous for losing her temper and going beyond what was appropriate, and they could see that she was angry. “But I’m here because of what Terry represented to me. He worked on a bigger scale than most of us here. He went to war zones, conflict zones, did hard reporting on a world stage.”
Paddy could sense the atmosphere plummeting. She knew she should tell a funny story, make herself popular by lightening the mood, but all she could see was Terry as a young man standing at the end of his parents’ driveway, looking into the fireball engulfing their car. And Pete, asleep in a bed she had never seen, with a bad man outside the door and herself miles away.
The security forces would blanket the whole episode with rumors and drip feeds to hungry journos like Merki. McBree would come for Pete again and next time he’d hurt her son, to hurt her. The best she could do, what Terry would have done, was draw the fire to herself. She began to weep but her voice remained steady.
“Terry was killed over a book he was writing, executed on a dark road late at night, shot in the back of the head. The official word is he was mugged. If you believe that, if this audience believes that, then journalism is dead. He was killed by a man called Martin McBree, a high-ranking Republican. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.” A ripple of consternation feathered the crowd awake. Merki sat up and attempted a casual laugh but no one looked at him.
Paddy’s voice weakened. She leaned into the microphone to be heard. “Terry would have stood here and said that. He made me proud to be a hack. He was the best of us.”
She stepped away from the lectern, crying, ashamed that it wasn’t really for Terry, and walked back to her seat to a hesitant round of applause.
A guy in a khaki jacket got up from the pew behind, carrying copious notes, and took her place.
McVie leaned over to her, talking out of the side of his mouth. “What the fuck was all that about? Cheer us all up, why don’t you.”
She elbowed him gently in the ribs.
“No,” he whispered, handing her his handkerchief. “It was good. Really good. Very Terry.”
The khaki man had come from London to speak. His accent was posh and public school, which immediately made everyone hate him. He claimed to be a great friend of Terry’s. Referring back to Paddy’s speech, he implicated himself on a grander world stage, which compounded the audience’s prejudices. Then he told a couple of stories about Terry and himself at significant world events, in Gaza, then in Lebanon, the point of which seemed to be that he was there, and filed his copy before Terry, who had trouble getting things down on paper. He made a horrible allusion to Terry having sex with a fat woman whose children were waiting in the next room. He slunk off to a silence an audience at the Glasgow Empire would have thought harsh.
Two or three other local journalists tried their hand, one to talk about Terry’s capacity for drink, another to tell a story about them investigating corruption at a grayhound track and trying to get a urine sample from a dog, which went down well.
Last up was McVie. He slid past Paddy and took his time getting up there, pausing to rest a hand on either side of the lectern and look down his nose at the crowd, letting them know he was in charge.
It was an after-dinner speech but no worse for that. He made some sweeping statements about the nature of journalism, told three perfect stories about quips Terry had made, none of them hugely funny, but they were well delivered and stormed with the audience, who were ripe for a laugh.
He finished on a rousing note: sales were dropping across the board, Terry Hewitt might well be remembered as the last of a dying breed. No one had funding for foreign journalists now and papers were in danger of turning into nothing but daily bingo games and holiday giveaways. It was up to them to make sure that didn’t happen through their dedication and commitment. Then he invited everyone back to McGrade’s for a toast.
Paddy wondered how commitment could trump a lack of funding but no one else seemed to. The crowd rose for him, applauding him for organizing the event and bringing his boyfriend as much as for his call to arms.
McVie got back to his seat. The organ struck a note and the cathedral emptied as suddenly as a toilet flushing.
But Paddy, McVie and Ben lingered, looking at the Ayr United wreath at the base of the altar.
When the clatter of feet behind them died down Paddy whispered to McVie, “How can dedication stop the decline?”
McVie sighed and looked down at his legs as they stretched out in front of him, flexing his ankles. “It can’t,” he said. “Nothing can.”
II
Paddy knew that if she went roaring over to Pitt Street and demanded to see Pete before his tour of the cells he’d know something scary was happening, that the man in his father’s house had been there for him, not for Sandra’s jewelry. So she and Dub went to the Press Bar.
McVie had put three hundred quid behind the bar and ordered McGrade to line up whiskey shots all along it, just to start the drinking off on a nice, mental note. Most of the attendees were Protestant and had never been to a wake. They didn’t understand that the idea was to drink until the misery evaporated and tell stories about the dead person, remember them as a companion, celebrate their life. All they knew was the tradition was Irish so they’d better get hammered and fight each other. And so they did.
By the time Paddy nudged the car into a far corner of the full Daily News car park the noise from the bar was deafening and the crowd had spilled out into the street. She stood next to Dub, looking at the shabby brown-tiled exterior, at the men smoking on the step outside and the general hubbub, and decided, fuck it, they’d go and wait in the lobby at Pitt Street until a decent amount of time had passed. At least they’d be near Pete then. Paddy was pulling out of the dusty car park when she saw the khaki man crossing the road in front of her, heading towards the bar.
She wound down her window and shouted over to him but he didn’t hear her, just kept his head down and sidled through the crowd at the door.
Dub nudged her. “Go on after him. I’ll park.”
“Sure?”
“Go on. I’ll park the car and wait.”
The khaki man was at the bar when she got in, the only person there with no one to talk to, standing uncertainly with a whiskey shot in his hand as the choppy crowd drank their way to gale force. She kept her head down and made for him.
“Hello,” she said, refusing a whiskey from McGrade.
“Oh, hello.” He gave her a look as if she’d interrupted something terribly important. “You were the first speaker, weren’t you? Very good. Moving. Great speakers, the Scots.”