Exile (18 page)

“How’s your brother?” she asked.

He was dumbfounded. “M’ brother’s dead’n’all,” he said simply, and swaggered away across the smoke-filled pub.

Maureen watched him. He was tall and broad across the shoulders, a powerful man with a shadow for a conscience.

Malki arrived back, clutching an empty glass. He didn’t move to sit down but stood at Maureen’s elbow, blocking the sight of her hands from the pub floor.

“Who did ye mean?” asked Leslie, leaning on the filthy table and pointing at him. “The big tall guy, scabby hands?”

Malki nodded.

“Cheers, Malki.” Maureen slipped him a tenner.

The moment the money touched the inside of Malki’s pocket they ceased to exist for him. He turned and walked away without a word.

“Let’s get the fuck out of here,” said Maureen.

They left, parting the crowd on their way out, and Mark Doyle’s hungry eyes watched them go, remembering their faces. Maureen walked so fast she was panting by the time they got back to the shelter.

Chapter 21

HERB ALPERT

Leslie drove carefully through the glistening city to Maureen’s house. Maureen didn’t want to go home, she didn’t feel comfortable in her flat, but she couldn’t stay out indefinitely and Mark Doyle had freaked her. Leslie stopped the bike outside her close and Maureen climbed off, opened the box and put in her helmet. “I’ll see ye in the morning,” said Leslie. “We’ll go and see Senga, see what she says.”

“Can we go and see Jimmy as well?”

“We’ll see.”

Vik had been sitting in his car for over forty minutes listening to Glen Campbell, smoking and wiping the mist from the window. He saw Maureen climbing off the bike and waited until the biker drove away before opening the door and getting out. He called to her and ran over as she was opening the outside door. “Hiya,” he said, smiling and panting from the exertion of jogging a hundred yards with lungs full of smoke. “How ye keeping?”

“Not bad.” She nodded and found her neck shaky and unsteady. Her shoulders were aching with tension.

“You don’t look well. Have ye been ill?”

“No,” said Maureen, opening the close door. “I’ve just had a strange night.”

She walked into the close, assuming he was coming up, but Vik waited, his black hair glistening with drizzle. “Are ye not coming up?”

He shook his head uncertainly. “D’ye want me to?”

She hesitated, not knowing what he wanted from her. “Well, yeah.”

Vik shrugged at her, his black eyelashes gummed together, the rain dripping from his chin.

“Vik,” she said, “why did ye come to see me if ye don’t want to come upstairs?”

Vik’s hair gel was emulsifying in the rain, running in little white rivulets down his jaw and neck. “I came to chuck ye,” he said gently. He wasn’t angry and he wasn’t playing a game — he was standing up for himself.

Maureen let the door fall shut. “Chuck me?”

“You don’t return my calls, when I chap the door you stand behind it and won’t answer.” She cowered. “Yeah, I could hear you behind the door. I felt ye looking at me—”

“Vik, I’d just been really sick and my brother was in—”

“Why can’t you introduce me to your brother?”

“I didn’t want to—”

“Is it because I’m black?”

She smiled and tried to look up at him, but the rain was heavy and he was standing with a streetlight behind his head. “You’d have to know Liam to know how ridiculous that is.” She squinted hard and saw him. He wasn’t smiling back.

“Maureen,” he said, digging his hands into his pockets, “you don’t introduce me to your friends or your family, you leave me standing behind the door. You treat me like a twat.” She thought back over the month and she knew he was right. When Vik’s cousin Shan had introduced them to each other in the Variety bar Maureen couldn’t believe her luck. Vik was tall and slim, his hair as black as Guinness, his eyes deep brown and adoring. That first night they’d gotten drunk and giggly together and fell back up the hill to her flat at closing time. Alone in the quiet living room, they found that they had nothing to say to each other. Vik was a quiet man. He only spoke when he had something to say and Maureen was too drunk to chat. Through a drink-sodden blur they mistook the heavy silence for sexual tension and started kissing. Twenty minutes later they were sweating and naked and panting on the bed, holding hands and staring at the ceiling, sobered by surprise. In the month they had been seeing each other they hadn’t talked about much — they went out with his friends to bars and listened to music or stayed in bed, but they didn’t exchange romantic histories or talk about anything. The relationship felt comforting but meaningless to Maureen. She opened her mouth to apologize but nothing came out.

“Yeah.” Vik stepped away from her. “G’night anyway.” He turned and walked to his car.

“Vik, please.” She followed him and found herself panicking. “My head’s full of battered shite, I don’t know what I’m doing half the time and then Katia said that she was seeing ye—”

“That was ages ago.”

“She said it was a month ago, when we started seeing each other.” She stopped and looked at her feet. “I felt funny about it.”

“Katia was two months ago,” he said, insulted. “And I only saw her for three days.” His hand was on the car door handle and he was leaving.

“Please.” She looked away, not wanting to watch his face while she said it. “Come up and have that bottle of wine with me, let me explain. At least let me explain. I don’t want ye to go away feeling bad.”

He hesitated and she saw his thumb pressing on the handle button. “I’m not a complete tit, ye know. I see what’s going on around me.”

“I know, I know that.”

He let go of the car door and stood up, looking down at her. “What d’ye mean, your head’s full of battered shite?”

She tried to smile but it didn’t work and she let it slide.

“What are ye thinking?” he asked.

She looked away to Ruchill, remembering blood splattering onto the window and nails scratching through the glass. “Sometimes,” she said, and stopped. “Vik, d’ye think life’s fair?”

“What the fuck are you on about?”

“D’ye believe that good things happen to good people? D’ye think your life is the one you deserve or something?”

Vik smiled nervously. “No,” he said. “Not really.”

“Sometimes I just feel all this striving and trying, it’s pointless. Life’s just a series of dispiriting humiliations and why bother.” She looked at him. “D’you never feel that?”

“See this?” He wagged his finger at her. “This is exactly why I don’t think we should go out anymore.”

“What?”

“This. You’re stuck in the big questions, Maureen. All you talk about is politics and truth and beauty and justice.” He hooked his finger into a big curl of hair on her cheek and lifted it to behind her ear. “You’re only twenty-four — lighten up, for fuck’s sake. Get a hobby or something.”

“Right,” she said indignantly, feeling that he hadn’t been listening at all. “And all you like to do is drink and play music in smelly wee clubs—”

“And what do you like?”

She opened her mouth to speak. She shut it again. It was a show-stopping question. She liked whiskey. And being in her house, alone. And fried food. She used to like art.

“See? Ye don’t like anything.” A fat drop of milky rain fell from Vik’s hair and landed on her forehead. He smelled nice, fresh, like oranges or something. She looked up and saw his dark eyes smiling into the distance, his jowls dripping milk onto the lapels of his good leather.

“Thanks for the flowers and the wine.”

His kind face split into an easy grin. “Aw, that’s all right.”

“Gonnae come up?”

He looked into Mr. Padda’s dark shop and thought about it. “Aye, all right.”

Vik locked the car and they climbed the stairs to the top floor, giggling and shoving each other off the top step because it was late and they should have kept the noise down. Maureen was sorting through her keys and fighting Vik off when the door across the landing opened. Her neighbor, Jim Maliano, was standing in his doorway with his peculiar hairdo, wearing an imperial purple dressing gown and burgundy slippers with embroidered monograms on the toe. Maliano routinely back-combed the top of his hair over his crown. It was a vain man’s device to disguise a bald patch but Maliano wasn’t balding and the reasoning for his hairdo was the source of intermittent speculation for Maureen. He had clearly been lying in bed when he heard them on the stairs and his strange mini-bouffant had separated against the pillow. Three indignant shafts of hair, sticking straight up like show plumage, trembled as he spoke.

“Will you keep the noise down?” he said, whispering loudly. “There are elderly people living in this close, sick people.”

“I’m sorry, Jim,” said Maureen, trying not to laugh.

Jim looked at Vik, waiting for an introduction, but Maureen wasn’t in the mood to humor him. “Good night, then, Jim.”

Jim looked at her again and slowly shut the door.

“Good night, then, Jim,” said Maureen, addressing his front door.

They heard him tiptoe away down the hall.

The living room was a terrible mess and smelled of hash and stale cigarettes. Vik opened the bottle of wine he’d left the night before but Maureen wasn’t up for it and made a mug of tea. They sat in the living room and Vik used the window of honesty to look through her records, slagging off the worst albums and nodding appreciatively at the good ones. Maureen had never understood the male obsession with music and record collecting. Liam had gone through it when he was a teenager, collecting the most obscure dance records he could find, listening to them once then boasting about them at parties. She liked a good tune but listened to the same things over and over until the novelty wore off, and could barely remember the names of three pop stars.

She was sitting on the settee, watching him flick through the vinyl singles, trying to push aside thoughts of Mark Doyle, when she spotted a pea-size bit of black on the floor.

“Where the fuck did ye get that?” asked Vik. “I can’t get a deal anywhere.”

“My brother left it by mistake. Will I roll a wee one?”

“You’d better not, he’ll be back looking for it. It’s like gold dust just now.”

“Naw, he’s got a big lump.”

Vik couldn’t have been more impressed if Maureen’s brother had been Howard Marks. He was crouched on the floor, smelling the lump to make sure it wasn’t an oxo cube, when she suddenly saw Mark Doyle wanking onto dead Pauline’s back. She frowned hard, closing her eyes and rubbing them to bring herself back round.

“Yeah, go on,” said Vik, handing the black to her with his band lighter. “Roll it up.”

Vik’s band had chipped together and given him a flattened oval chrome lighter for his birthday. It was a pleasing shape and sat comfortably in the palm. The band had spoiled the look by having “let’s get the rock out of here” engraved on it in reference to a dodgy album they’d found in Vik’s collection.

The heating had been off all day so Maureen brought out the duvet from the bedroom and they sat at opposite ends of the settee, facing each other with their legs tangled, keeping cozy, smoking gold dust and listening to Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. She watched Vik sipping his drink and willed the wine into his mouth, knowing that by the second glass he would have had too much to drive and he’d be staying over.

“Did ye really think I’d been unfaithful to ye with Katia?”

“She said it had been a month.”

“Katia’s a wanker. She wants to go out with me because I’m Asian and I’m in a band. She went out with the bass player for a couple of weeks. When he chucked her she kept coming to the gigs and pestering me.” He handed her the spliff.

She took a draw and felt the ticklish scratch in her throat, the warm sensation in her belly and the drowsy aftermath. “You must have encouraged her a bit,” she said. “You went out with her.”

“It was just one or two nights. I was pissed and to be honest I just thought, If she wants it that much I’ll give it to her.”

Maureen didn’t like the explanation — it made him sound nasty and careless. She couldn’t imagine herself shagging someone because he was pestering her. “I don’t think that’s very nice,” she said.

“Maureen,” he said, “I don’t think you can pull me up about being nice.”

She tried to smile but she didn’t really feel sorry. She didn’t want Vik. As she looked across the settee at him his geometric cheekbones caught the light and she knew she wanted Douglas back, or to go back to that time, or for it not to be now. The yearning caught in her throat and she had to cough to shift it.

“What you said about life being fair,” said Vik. “It’s an interesting question.”

“Don’t ye have some wisdom from the East to help me out?”

“Don’t ask me, hen, I’m frae Wishaw.” He sipped his wine. “Life isn’t fair.”

“I know that,” said Maureen. “But if it’s not fair, what’s the point? What’s the point in working hard if you’ll get run down by a bus or die of cancer or have rotten kids? Why be kind or holy or help people? Like, you’re kind to me and I’m not kind to you — what’s the point in you being nice to me?” She took a draw and held her breath as long as she could, ingesting the goodness.

“I’m nice to you because I’m a nice guy and I like your bum.”

Maureen smiled as she exhaled and Vik giggled. “Naw,” he said, reaching over for the spliff. “What’s the point of life? Well, little Maureen, it isn’t truth and beauty and justice, that’s for fucking sure. The point of life”—he held the spliff aloft, toasting her—”is to have a laugh with your pals.” He raised an eyebrow. “And take care of your mum. I have to say that or she’ll slap my legs.”

Maureen thought of Leslie sitting on the bike outside Isa’s, laughing with her fillings showing, and Liam coughing and snorting on the floor.

“I know ye have nightmares,” he said, taking a draw and looking at her. “I hear ye crying at night. What’s that about?”

She looked out at the black sky beyond the window and the white glow of the city, brimming at the sill like a vaporous tear. “When I was young,” she said, noticing that her voice had dropped, “I had a bit of, um, trouble.”