Everything She Forgot (14 page)

Richard stared at Angus for a moment or two then slapped a receipt book on the counter. He leaned so heavily on the page that the pen tore through to the carbon paper beneath.

Tam had returned to rolling down the shutters when Angus moved to leave.

“Thanks for seeing me when you were shutting up,” said Angus, loudly and for effect. “I'm very grateful to you.”

Tam nodded and then Angus leaned over and passed him his business card. “If you need to get in touch with me . . .”

Tam glanced at the card, then slipped it into his pocket. “Why would I want to do that?”

“In case you remember anything more. I have reason to believe that George McLaughlin has abducted a small girl. As a father, you might—”

“I told you I know nothing,” said Tam, nodding good-bye to Angus and turning away.

I
N THE CAR,
Angus checked the clock. It was just after six. Even if he drove continuously, it would be midnight before he was home. Glasgow was heavy. He sensed the weight of its baroque red sandstone and felt the leaden energy of the garage still surrounding him. He was a newspaperman and he knew it was his calling to mingle with the filth of the earth, but sometimes he felt besmirched by it. It was like gutting out the barn: one way or the other, it got under your fingernails.

Animals were so much purer than most of the human race. Angus remembered the barn when he was a child, and the comfort that the animals offered him: taking him into their fold and nurturing him. He had wrapped his arms around the warm necks of ponies and nuzzled their faces, taking the smell of them down into the deepest part of him. The animals had healed him. They had shown him love outside the coldness of his family: his father's indifference, his mother's criticism, and the house that stank of gutted fish.

He leaned forward and accelerated so that he was driving just below the speed limit, in order to get home as soon as pos
sible. Saturday evening and he had expected the roads to be clear, but he got stuck in a traffic jam before Dunfermline, and then there was an accident after Perth and again just before Inverness. By the time Angus pulled into Thurso, it was eight minutes to midnight. He was glad he had made it home in time. Technically he had been working, and it was immoral to do any kind of work, or indeed play, on the Sabbath.

The Sabbath was only for worship.

As he passed through the town, then turned off the main road and drove down the farm track to his house, Angus felt a heavy, sick feeling in his stomach. It was time for bed, but there was a minute or so left to put his mind at rest. He had to check on Maisie.

He got out of the car and opened the door to the house. All the lights were on, but there was no sign of Hazel. He pulled on his Wellingtons and walked down the path to the barn.

He heard Maisie before he saw her: long, agonized cries, deep and stirring as the low note on a viola. He broke into a run.

He was out of breath when he arrived at the barn, not because the distance was far but because he had run too fast. The familiar smell of the barn, sweet hay and dung, was laced with the bitter, iron smell of blood. When he went to Maisie's pen he saw she was on her side, her large eyes wide with panic. Hazel was kneeling, red-handed, at Maisie's tail. The concrete floor was splashed wet with her waters, and the straw was blackened with blood.

Angus looked at his watch. It was two minutes to midnight. Sometimes the Lord's grand design eluded him, yet he knew that it was not his place to question God's will.

“Get up,” he shouted to Hazel.
“Get away from her.”

Hazel stood. Her arms, the front of her cooking apron, her
knees, and the toes of her rubber boots were all covered in blood, so that she seemed a strange communion of homemaker and butcher.

“You're not to touch her.”

“You were away and she's in such pain. It's stuck. It's breech. I can feel its rear end. She needs the . . . the v-vet. Will you help her, Angus?”

“Did you do this? Did you interfere before her waters broke, out of your
ignorance
and your . . .
impulsiveness
?”

“I did nothing.”

“This morning you told me she was fine and now look at her . . .”

“She needs you . . . she needs a vet. Will you call?”

“It's the Sabbath,” Angus whispered so quietly that the words were only felt leaving his tongue, not audible.

“Will you help her though?” said Hazel.

Angus struck her across the face with the back of his hand. She stumbled under the blow and turned away from him, cowering against the barn wall. He was filled with pain and fear for Maisie and could think of nothing else. He didn't want Hazel in here. He didn't want her anywhere near the barn. It was the Sabbath and she had no right.

“You had
no right
,” he shouted, taking her by the neck and then driving her face into the wall. She buckled under the blow and put a hand to her nose.

A shovel, used for mucking out the barn, stood near the door. Angus picked it up with two hands. Hazel made no sound but ran for the door. He caught her before she got there, once between the shoulder blades and again in the small of her back. She fell under the blow, then curled up in the mud outside the barn.

Exhausted, chest heaving, Angus threw down the shovel and looked up at the moon.

He blinked and remembered being a child, locking himself in the barn on their farm. The barn was a place for exaltation and love, not pain and death. It had been the place where he felt safe.

“Why?” he screamed, a single, long, diaphragm-aching syllable that emptied him of air and hope.

Hazel began to crawl, in the mud, back to the farmhouse. Angus looked down at his hands and the shovel at his feet. He felt a shiver of shame. The force of the blows had jarred his shoulder and he realized that he had gone too far. Nevertheless, he turned his back on her and reentered the barn.

He could see that Hazel was right for once and that Maisie was in trouble. Angus looked at his watch—midnight—and then removed it. He turned his hand to the side and flattened his palm, fingers tight together like a swimmer, and then entered the heifer. He could feel the calf's rear before he was elbow deep. It was breech and it was stuck.

If it had been Monday, Angus would have called the vet and paid the emergency call-out fee; then, as he waited, he would have got down on his knees and slipped his hands inside her, pushing the calf farther inside in the hope of turning it. Maybe he would have been able to then find its feet, allowing him to slide it out of Maisie, timing his actions with her own muscular push. She would be silent, breathing heavily through flared nostrils, knowing that he was caring for her. The calf would slip out, blue and yellow, stuck with the gel and slime of the birthing.

Angus stood before Maisie and looked into her face, his right hand slick with her insides.

“It is the Sabbath,” he told her. “And the Sabbath is sacred. I have to leave you. I know that you can do this by yourself. It is God's will.”

Maisie let her head fall against the hay, her mouth open and her eyes half closed. Angus got down on his knees.

“You understand, my girl,” he said, making long, flat-palmed strokes on her velvet neck, “that I love you, but I also love God.” She jerked away from him. He wondered if a contraction had taken hold or the calf had shifted, or if she had heard and understood every word he had said and was, now, appalled by him.

There was a tremor in her abdomen and Angus could see the angle of the calf under her flank. Maisie bent her front leg, as if preparing to stand, but could not. She moaned again, so loudly that it caused the water in the metal trough to ripple.

Angus got up and ran outside. He ran toward the farmhouse, two hands pressed over his ears. By the time he arrived at the house, he was in tears. He covered his face and sank down on his knees into the mud.

“Dear God, give me strength,” he said, putting a hand to his face that smelled of Maisie.

It was God's will, but he had never felt so damned.

CHAPTER 14

G
EORGE GAVE
M
OLL A BIG SMILE. “
C
'MON BACK
HERE TILL
I
show you something,” he said, offering his hand.

She folded her arms.

George exhaled: she was hard work.

He offered his hand to her and after a moment's consideration she took it. He led her to the back of the car. The boot was open and the hunting knife was lying where he had left it. The blade of the knife reflected the moonlight. When she saw it, she bucked away from him. He held her wrist and pulled her into him.

He hunkered down and took her by the shoulders. “Listen to me. I'm not going to hurt you. I said I'd take you back and I will, but there's something I need to do, and you need to trust me.”

She dug her heels in, leaning against him, but when he looked into her good eye he saw that she might yield to him.

“You have to know that I won't hurt you. You
have
to understand that, but this has to be done before tomorrow, and we may as well do it now.”

“What?” she asked, blanching with fear. “What are you going to do to me?”

He let her go. “Turn around. Trust me.”

She hesitated for a moment, her good eye searching his face.

“Go on,” he whispered.

She watched him intently for seconds that seemed like minutes, then slowly turned around.

Her shoulders were raised in anxious expectation, as if a kitten might jump on her back.

He picked up the knife.

She rolled away from him and crawled backward, her mouth set and her brows lowered. “No,” she said. “What are you going to do?”

“I'm not going to hurt you. I just need to cut your hair a bit.” Moll sat up on the moss she was sitting in and stroked her long ponytail. “Cut my hair, why?”

“It's a wee bit long.”

“I like it that way.”

George stood up. It was as if, with every step, he had to reach deep inside himself to find the right way to charm her. In that sense, she was the most challenging girl he had ever met, apart from the nuns.

“Short hair's all the rage,” he tried, raising his eyebrows. “It's
very
with it. I'm just talking about a trim, mind, a wee shaving off, just to make you a bit more fashionable.”

Still sitting on the ground, Moll hugged her knees and stared at him.

“You know you want to.” She was still reticent.

“Listen to me,” he said, bending over so that he could look her in the eye. “I'm going to take you back, but right now there are people looking for you and looking for me, and so I just want to change the way you look a wee bit, so we're not so . . . obvious.”

“I don't want to change the way I look.”

“How long have you had that haircut?”

“Always.”

“Well, always is a long time. A change is as good as a rest, they say. Help me out. Shorter hair'll show off your pretty face.”

She clasped her hands and looked up at him, as if considering. George turned around, scanning the scene for inspiration. There was a dirty cloth in the boot of the car that George used for the windows or to get rid of excess grease. He picked it up and flapped it gallantly, like a barber's towel.

“If madam would like to sit on this fine chair,” he said, bowing and motioning to the hatchback, “I will be glad to give her a grand bouffant worthy of the greatest film star.”

Moll smiled, showing the gap between her teeth. George held out his hand and she got to her feet.

He lifted her up and set her on the boot of the car, then fussily tucked the greasy cloth around her neck as if it were a hairdresser's cape. “There we go. Is madam comfortable? Would madam like a glass of Irn-Bru while she gets her hair cut?”

Moll giggled and nodded.

George retrieved the bottle from the back seat and set it between her knees. She was about to open it and drink when he stopped her.

“Careful now,” he said, picking up the knife. “You can take a drink when I've done this, but now you need to stay still. You can't move an inch or it'll cut you.”

She heard the serious note in his voice and froze. He took her ponytail in his right hand. Her face was pale, and he worried again that he was frightening her.

“Nearly done now, madam.”

He knew he didn't have long. He cut her ponytail right
through—cutting close to the nape of her neck. He handed the hair to her.

“Hold on to that. You can keep it as a souvenir.”

He had expected her to cry again, or try to fight him, but she merely looked at the hair in her hands and said, “Why?”

“You'll see when I'm finished.” He used the knife to cut off the remaining long strands of hair. “Hold still. Hold really still, OK?” he said, with the knife against the nape of her neck.

She nodded her head.

“
Dear God, I said don't move.
Pretend you're a statue.”

She did as he had asked, straightening her spine and sitting tall and still, arms at her side. He cut as close to the scalp as he could, shaving through the hairs.

“Ow,” she said, but did not pull away.

“Does it hurt?”

“You're pulling my hair.”

“Sorry.”

“I like my long hair,” she whined.

“You know the great thing about hair?” he said as he worked. She shook her head and he tutted at her because of the movement, but she kept still and so he answered, “It always grows back. Hair's the easiest thing in your life to change. Hair's your chance to change without doing anything drastic, and why would anyone not want to change if they could?”

She looked up at him, brows raised quizzically.

When he was finished, he put the knife away and spun her around to inspect her. He lifted up her chin. Shorn, he could see the shape of her face better. It was the shape of her mother's face: high cheekbones and a pointed chin.

“You look great,” he said, smiling at her. “Do you wanna see?” She nodded and he led her around the car to the side mirror,
which he twisted toward her. She peered into it, smoothing the hair over her forehead.

“I look like a boy.”

George leaned down to peer into the mirror beside her. He wanted her to look like a boy, and he planned to buy her an outfit tomorrow to complete the look. The police didn't know who they were looking for, but they were looking for a tall man with a seven-year-old girl.

“I don't think you look like a boy. I think you look cool. I think you look like a dark-haired Annie Lennox.”

“Who's that?”

“A cool lady with very short hair.”

Moll looked back to the mirror and turned her head this way and that. “I suppose it doesn't matter. I'm ugly anyway.”

“Hey,” said George, sitting down in the back seat, taking her by the wrist, and dragging her gently into the space between his long legs. “You mustn't say that.”

“It's true. I have a weird eye and I'm . . .”

George pulled her into him and spoke close to her ear.

“Nothing about you is weird or ugly, do you hear me? You're my wee lassie.”

She looked up at him. Her hair was spiky, uneven and longer along the back of her neck and George thought she looked like an otter, although he would never have told her. “You're cool, and you're strong, and I think you look great. You're just the way I always knew you would be . . . I used to imagine meeting you. Did you ever think about me? About what I would be like?”

Moll considered for a moment, then nodded.

“What did you think I'd be like?”

“Taller.”

“I'm six foot three!”

“I thought you'd be taller, and thinner, more like my dad.”

“I'm taller than your new dad. I saw him; I'm sure.”

“But you're not thinner.”

“Not many men are.”

She was leaning against his thigh, looking at her thumbnail, making a teardrop shape with her forefinger and thumb. He put his arm around her.

“You're better than I ever imagined. I mean it. I told your mum when you were born I always wanted a wee girl, and I did. I didn't want for you to be taken away from me. I asked your mother to marry me, you know,
twice
. Did she ever tell you that?”

Moll shook her head, not looking at him.

“I got her a diamond ring and everything. I still have it.” George reached into the pocket of his jacket and opened the box. Moll stroked the diamond with her forefinger. “I asked her once in front of her parents, and a second time I got down on my knees in a park in Glasgow. That's pretty romantic, don't you think?”

She nodded again, and bit down on a yawn. He snapped the ring box shut and glanced at his watch. It was nearly nine.

He spread the traveling rug across the back seat and told her that she could lie down. He told her to take off her school sweater and use it as a pillow. When she was lying down, he took off her shoes and laid them at her side, noticing how long and thin her feet were. He shook off his jacket and covered her. He closed the doors, then reached into the front seat for his lighter and packet of Benson & Hedges.

He smoked a cigarette, leaning against the car and wondering what would happen now. As a child, his sister had told
him that the way to succeed was to surrender. “Just do what they say,” she had counseled him, referring to their older siblings, their father, or the nuns, but George had not been able to. His sister's sympathy for him had waned as he was repeatedly belted by the nuns, beaten by their father, and taunted and exploited by their brothers. In the end, even Patricia had turned against him. George's inability to listen to her had confounded her.

In the McLaughlin family he took his share, but being the youngest and his mother's favorite he had seemed able to coast below the main violence, although his mother had never been able to protect him fully. Nevertheless, he remembered the day when his sister gave up counseling him, his father broke his spirit, and he decided to run away where no one would ever know him; somewhere no one would recognize his face or know the family he had belonged to. He decided to start a new family, to raise children who loved him. Even now, it was this that George wished more than anything else: he wanted someone to love who would not kick him in the teeth. The money in the boot had never been an end in itself to George. It was his escape, nothing else.

G
eorge used his wrists to pick up his lunch box and started to walk home. His hands were swollen from a belting Sister Agatha had given him because he had been unable to write with his right hand. He was seven years old and had been punished from the beginning at school, because of his left-handedness, but this year Sister Agatha had taken it on herself to cure him of the bad habit. George walked with his head down, feeling his knees cold beneath his gray school shorts.

The brief space between home and school was usually when George felt most comfortable. The hours between three thirty and five were always his happiest. He would play football among the tenements, or he and the other boys would tease the girls who were playing peever, drawn roughly on the pavement with stones.

Sometimes the girls would chant at him:

Georgie Porgie, puddin' and pie,

Kissed the girls and made them cry,

When the boys came out to play

Georgie Porgie ran away.

George would mimic a dance as the girls sang, and then, as they finished, he would rush in and upset one of them. Sometimes he would steal a bow from a ponytail, or lift up a skirt, or take their skipping rope and run off with it.

A
RRIVING AT SCHOOL
and coming home were always the worst points of the day. He hated being at home, the dread of his father's return, and then the hours when his father was there, when George felt as if he were holding his breath, as if he might explode. Every act required so much concentration, and it was only a matter of time before George let go and drew attention to himself.

But then, he hated school too: the nuns, like black jellyfish floating around the classroom, ready to sting him at a moment's notice.

Now George struggled with the lock to the closed door, the key awkward in his purpled hands. He dropped his lunch
box in the hall, but managed to pick it up and take it into the kitchen, where his mother was staring into the fire, smoking.

He sniffed and she turned to him.

“There's a loaf there, take a slice with a pickled egg.”

His mother pickled her own eggs, which were kept in a pail at the bottom of the wardrobe. He used to love touching them with his forefinger, ducking their cold bald scalps and smelling the acrid vinegar from his fingertips.

But today his hands had been beaten into gloves. He knew he was unable even to cut himself a slice of bread, let alone eat a slippery egg.

“I'm all right.”

“What d'ya mean?” said his mother, turning. “You're always half starved.”

George stood at the door, sniffing. His nose was running and he licked it with the tip of his tongue.

“Do you want me to do it for you?” she said, exhaling and casting her cigarette into the fire. There was an opened pack of Woodbines on the table.

George sniffed again and his mother got to her feet. The kitchen smelled of stewed beef and turnip and he knew that they would have mince for their tea. She was in a kitchen apron, her arms blanched white as she took the knife and cut him a piece of bread.

Most of his friends' mothers had strong arms and fat, pink fingers. His own mother was thin and small and when she cut through the loaf the sinews showed on her lower arm. George was not sure why, but her thinness always made him feel sad.

She put the slice of bread on a plate and passed it to him. He kept his hands at his side.