Does Your Mother Know? (17 page)

Suddenly, she stopped and stared ahead. “I will sell the effing house and the land, you can bet on it, but I’ll no sell to that woman. I’m going to see if some dirty old Norwegian wants it for a snog shop. She wouldn’t like that one bit. Poor bloody Andy. Did you see him? He’s finally given her both his balls. She’s had one of them for a long time, but now she’s got two. Oh god. Oh god.”

We were at the hotel now, and she shoved open the front door and went in. I followed.

CHAPTER TWENTY

Lisa headed across the deserted foyer to the dining room and bar. The door was locked, and she impatiently rattled the door knob and rapped on the glass pane. Mairi appeared on the other side and unlocked the door.

It didn’t matter that they spoke to each other in Gaelic. The ageold conflict that resurrected itself before my eyes didn’t need translating. Mairi, the older sister, the sensible one; Lisa, the wild one, who didn’t have the right social graces and always got her way. The German couple I’d seen the night before appeared at the top of the stairs on their way out for a spot of sightseeing. Mairi stepped back.

“Come in here.”

We went in and Lisa immediately headed for the bar, saying over her shoulder. “I need a whisky. D’you want one, Chris?”

I didn’t have a chance to answer, because Mairi set off after her sister.

“You are not going to drink at this time of day.”

Lisa took down a bottle of Scotch whisky from the shelf behind the counter, but Mairi was right behind her and she snatched at it. Lisa held on and they both released a torrent of Gaelic words. I was still at the door, pinned down by social niceties. However, in a physical struggle between a nine-months-pregnant woman and a younger, stronger gardener, there was no contest. They had got themselves
ludicrously wedged in the narrow space behind the counter. I went over to help.

“Let go, Lisa, this isn’t safe. Your sister is pregnant.”

“In case you hadn’t noticed,” said Mairi.

Lisa’s eyes met mine. Her pupils were dilated and there was a fleck of spit at the corner of her mouth. Abruptly, she released her hold on the neck of the bottle, but the movement caught Mairi off-balance and the bottle slipped out of her hand and smashed on the floor. The sweet, sharp smell of whisky stung my nostrils. Mairi yelped and bent over to see what was happening to her shin. A sliver of glass had bounced up and cut her. Nothing serious, but there was trickle of blood. She snapped at her sister, and I knew she’d said the time-honoured, “Now look what you’ve done.”

“Oh shit,” said Lisa.

Mairi straightened up and gasped. “Ow!” She pressed her hands against her stomach. There was real pain in her voice.

“It’s nothing. I’ll get you a plaster,” said Lisa, still in angry-little-sister mode.

“Ow!” Mairi glared back. “That was a contraction, idiot. My labour’s started,” This was in English. She needed a witness.

She moved out from behind the counter and, suddenly, water gushed from between her legs, as if she had lost control of her bladder.

“What the... ” She stared down at the puddle of fluid that had formed at her feet. “Oh no!

Seeing what was happening brought Lisa back into adulthood.

“Oh God. Mairs, your water’s broke.”

Mairi rolled her eyes impatiently. “Brilliant. Good observation.”

“Where’s Colin?”

“I don’t know, he went out a couple of hours ago.”

“And he didn’t think to mention where he was going, of course.”

This wasn’t the time to be sidetracked about the ongoing delinquency of Mr. MacLeod.

“We’d better get you some help right away,” I said. “Do you want me to call an ambulance?”

“She’s planned to have a home birth,” said Lisa.

“Let’s get hold of your midwife, then. Can you make it upstairs?”

Mairi shook her head. “I think I’m going to be sick.” And she was, heaving convulsively all over the floor.

“I’ll get a cloth,” said Lisa as she rushed back to the bar for a dishcloth.

“Soak it in cold water,” I told her, and I grabbed a couple of table napkins from a nearby table and held them to Mairi’s mouth. I got her into a chair.

Lisa raced back with the cold cloth.

“Put it on the back of her neck.”

Mairi was alternately leaning forward to spit out bile and straining back in the chair for relief from her labour cramps.

“Lisa, go and phone the midwife! Tell her to get here right away!”

Lisa bolted.

“You might be more comfortable walking,” I said to Mairi and, when she nodded, I helped her to her feet. She clutched my arm and we began a decidedly un-Austen-like walk around the room.

“Are you sure you don’t want to go to the hospital?”

“No. I’ll hang in. We’ve planned for a home birth. I was looking forward to it.” She gave a wry smile. “Please God, though, I don’t want to deliver in the bloody bar.” Another contraction seized her and she bent over, pulling me with her. “Ow, ow.”

Lisa came flying back into the room. “Gillian’s on her way. I phoned Norman to see if Colin was there, but he hasn’t seen him. He said he’ll call around.”

Mairi started into another “Ow” that transmuted into a long drawn-out howl. She was gripping my hand so hard it hurt.

“Let’s get her jeans off,” I said to Lisa. “The baby might come soon. Can you get a clean tablecloth we can put on the floor?”

“Thank goodness you know what you’re doing.”

I did not share her confidence. As cops, we all had fundamental emergency training, but the one time I’d had first-hand experience of a delivery assist, the baby died. I wasn’t going to make that mistake again.

I got Mairi to lie down on the tablecloth, and Lisa managed to remove her jeans and underwear. Mairi was finding it impossible to keep still and thrashed from side to side, groaning.

However, the answer to all our prayers came hurrying into the room. Gillian, the midwife. She was on the stocky side, middle-aged and grey-haired, the kind of sensible, brisk woman who immediately inspires confidence.

“Little wretch couldn’t wait, eh?” she came over to Mairi. “When did you have your last contraction?”

“Now,” said Mairi, and I saw the ripple down her stomach and she did her “ow, ow, ow” cry again.

The midwife crouched down beside her. “I doubt you want the bairn to make his entrance in here. Let’s get you on your feet and up to the bedroom. Wrap the cloth around her. All right Mairi, stand up, then Lisa will get you under one arm and I’ll get the other. Fast as you can make it. When a contraction comes we’ll stop, but I do want to get you upstairs. Perhaps you can open the door for us,” she said to me.

Mairi leaned her head on her sister’s shoulder and the little procession proceeded upstairs. I let them go; I was the stranger here. I went back into the dining room. At the least I could clean up for them.

I located a bucket and mop and a bottle of disinfectant and set to work. The mingled stench of vomit and liquor was depressing-ly familiar, as was my task of cleaning up the mess. Joan had gone through a particularly bad period when I was fourteen, just before I went to live with the Jacksons. Most days I’d come home from school and find her passed out on the couch. There was invariably cleanup to do. I wrapped the broken shards of glass in some newspaper and dumped them in the wastebasket.

As I said, I’d had experience with an impromptu delivery once before — and it wasn’t a good one. I was a young constable on the night beat in Toronto. We received a call that a woman was acting strangely down in Nathan Phillips Square, which was in front of the city hall. It was deep winter, and we found the woman pacing up and down, making grunting sounds. I tried to talk to her but
no luck. She was both stoned and mentally challenged and she ignored me. A small crowd of late-night skaters gawked at her.

“I pissed myself,” she kept repeating. “I pissed myself.”

I’ve never forgotten that image of her large, wide face as she stared in bewilderment at what was flowing down her fat legs. It was late, almost the end of my shift, and I was tired and irritable.

“What’s your name? Where d’you live?”

No coherent answers, only louder cries. “Come on, we’ll take you home,” I said, and I tried to get her into the cruiser, where at least we could talk in relative comfort. She resisted violently and my partner, Joe Csonka, got out of the car and came over to help me. That really set her off, and she swung at him. I grabbed her arm, pulled it behind her back, and snapped on the cuffs, forcing her to the ground. It was only then I realized she was in the last stages of pregnancy. She was so bundled up in a stained winter parka that it wasn’t at all obvious. Somebody in the crowd guffawed. There’s always one. We radioed for an ambulance, but they took a long time to get there while I did what I could to comfort the woman. Finally, the paramedics arrived, brusque and unsym-pathetic. Even as they were loading her into the ambulance, one of them was tugging off her pants. When I followed up on the case a couple of days later, I found out the infant had died from birth complications. Probably nothing to do with the rough struggle, but I had been troubled by the memory many times. The baby had not been born into love and the mother received no tenderness.

After my cleanup, the bar area had a pleasant, tarry smell from the disinfectant. Other than the stirring of painful memories, it hadn’t bothered me to wipe up the barf. I’d been a front-line cop for seventeen years and, if you are going to survive at that, you have to get used to every known variation of bodily fluid. I’d even been able to assess what Mairi had had for lunch. Automatic response. You never knew when you’d be called on to make a report on what had been emitted.

I was stowing away the mop when Lisa came in.

“I thought I’d come and clean up the mess.”

“I did it already.”

“You did! Oh my God, thanks a lot.”

“You’re welcome. I was glad to make myself useful. I’d have boiled water if needed. How’s Mairi doing?”

“She’s all right. After all the urgency, she isn’t even fully dilated. The baby might not come for another couple of hours.”

“Did Colin arrive?”

Lisa looked away. “No. We can’t locate him.” She grimaced at me. “I could cheerfully wring his neck. He’s a selfish twerp as far as I’m concerned, but she would marry him, wouldn’t she?”

Her feelings didn’t jibe with Colin’s expressed fondness towards his sister-in-law.

“You’d think he’d know enough to stay in close touch with Mairi at the stage she is,” I said, girls in agreement.

“Ha! The Hebridean men are in the dark ages when it comes to these matters,” she scoffed, her tone full of experience. “Babies are the women’s realm. The men stay out of it until it’s over.”

“Colin was responsible for creating the baby just as much as Mairi, though.”

I get self-righteous about this issue.

Lisa frowned at me. “Dream on. That’s true in theory, but you can’t expect a man to have the same feelings as a woman when all he’s done is shot his load for twenty seconds and she’s the one who’s carried a living creature in her guts for nine months.”

Anatomical inaccuracy aside, Lisa had a point, and one that had been made many times before. As an officer, I’d had my fill of trying to get young stallions to claim the results of their two-minute flings.

She took a package of cigarettes out of her back pocket. “Do you mind?”

“Hey, it’s your place.”

She lit up and dragged hungrily on the cigarette. “This is my last one. I promised Mairi I’d quit.” She ran her free hand through her hair. “I wanted to apologize for that little scene earlier. It was embarrassing. Truth is I’m on the wagon, and Mairi can’t let go of being Big Sister.”

“You’ve had trouble with alcohol, I take it?”

“You could put it that way. Trouble — yes, I’ve definitely had trouble. Another way of putting it is that I’ve been a drunk most of my adult life.”

More lung-filling drags. She looked so wretched, I felt a rush of sympathy for her. I liked Lisa, brat that she was.

“Are you in a program now?”

“No. I just decided to quit. When Mairi got pregnant, actually. I want to be a sober aunt, set a good example and all that.” She waved the cigarette in the air. “Same goes for this.”

“Hey, I believe in the importance of role models.”

Her eyes met mine. “Do you have nieces and nephews yourself?”

“No. I’m an only child. But I do have a goddaughter.”

“I bet you’ll be a good role model to her.”

“Thanks. I hope so.”

With vigour, she stubbed out her cigarette. “Goodbye forever, ciggies. I’d better get back to the momma.”

“Let me know what happens, will you? I’ll be out for dinner, but then I’m here.”

She wrinkled her eyes at me. “Another date with Sergeant Gillies?”

“I don’t know about a date, but we’re going out for dinner together.”

“Did he ask you?”

“Er, yes.”

“That’s a date then. He must be interested in you. I haven’t known Gill to go on a date for two years. Anyway, have a nice time. See you. ’Bye.”

She left and I quivered around for a bit. A date! What the hell was I going to do with that? A date with a very attractive man who just happened to live several time zones away. Wasn’t that just my luck?

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Gill and I went for dinner to a hotel just up from the Duke. The carpet was a riot of overblown roses, the upholstery on the stiff chairs was a completely different pattern of lush vegetation, and the heavy drapes were vigorously floral. All of the wood was the colour of malt vinegar. In the background, a tape was playing bagpipe music. As a visitor, I found it charmingly authentic. The waitress was a woman of advanced years, who acted as if she’d rather be at home with her feet up. It was like being waited on by your grandmother, and I had to resist the impulse to jump up and help her with the tray. I might have, except I thought she wouldn’t like it. The food was unmemorable, except for the odd fact that they served toast (cold and crisp) instead of dinner rolls. I tried to wash that down with a half-pint of dark British ale, which as far as I was concerned could have been a meal in itself.