Exile (20 page)

She was offended by Leslie’s good wishes and stopped cleansing Maureen to plant her tongue in her cheek and stare Leslie out. Maureen was being slowly blinded by the track lighting, and the sight of Maxine’s flared nostrils was interspersed with dazzling white blotches.

“That cream I’ve just put on ye,” Maxine said, when she turned back to Maureen, “has a special ingredient which opens the pores and lets them breathe”—she illustrated the effect, rolling her hands outwards—”and then contracts the skin”—hands rolling inward—”to protect against pollution.”

“Feels smashing,” said Maureen, wanting to be nice to any woman who could get her boss killed for being a squeaky annoyance.

“It is quite expensive,” warned Maxine, holding bottles of foundation up to Maureen’s face to get a color match.

“Much is it?” said Maureen, who had a weakness for cosmetic products promising voodoo benefits.

“Thirty-two pounds.”

“Well, I’m sold. Leave us out a bottle.”

“Okay,” said Maxine, excitedly, letting on that the job was commission. She turned to take a bottle off the shelf and Leslie made a frightened face behind her back. Maxine put the bottle into a bag and left it on the counter to embarrass Maureen into buying it even if she did change her mind. She had decided that Maureen was a mug with money and she wouldn’t stop talking about the products.

“It’s creamy, creamy, creamy, and will last from first thing in the morning to last thing at night without another application. That’s the amazing thing about this foundation.” She smeared thick tinted cream over Maureen’s face with a sponge, patting it under her chin. “It’s the most common mistake women make when applying foundation. They don’t blend it in at the neck, giving the face a masklike appearance.” She smirked. “We’ve all seen those women.”

Maxine accompanied her drug-dealer boyfriend to court and could have her boss killed, but everyone has standards and she would not tolerate the crime of badly applied slap. Maureen squinted hard, trying to look up at her. “D’you know Senga, Maxine?”

“Aye, I know a Senga. Flat nose?”

Maureen nodded.

“Aye,” said Maxine. “Poor wee Senga, she used to be no’ bad looking as well. She was in my sister’s class at school. Comes in here sometimes. Shameful what he done to her face.”

Leslie shifted to the other foot. “Who’s the guy in the Polaroid?” she said. “Is he Ann’s boyfriend?”

Maxine turned her attention to Maureen’s eyes, checking her eyelids for makeup. “Anyone’ll tell ye, his name’s Frank Toner. He’s a hard man. Lives in London. Have you got mascara on already?”

“Yeah.”

“I’ll take it off and let you try ours. It actually curls the lashes. Ye’ve got lovely blue eyes, so I’m going to use this”—she held up a loud, glittery blue eye shadow—”to pick out the color and highlight it. Your eyes really are your best feature. You should make more of them.”

Leslie leaned in, pretending to look at Maureen’s face. “Was Toner Ann’s boyfriend?” she repeated.

Maxine began to brush on the chewy black mascara and Maureen’s eyelashes felt as if they were being pulled over the top of her head. She let out a little squeal and blinked in panic.

“Takes a wee bit of getting used to,” counseled Maxine. “I don’t think he is her boyfriend, no. But then”—she paused and looked at her eye-shadow box—”maybe he is. Can’t see it, really.”

“Does he come up to Glasgow often?”

“How would I know?”

“Does he, though?”

“Don’t think so.”

Maxine penciled in Maureen’s eyebrows and applied the eye shadow, smudging it onto the skin with a brush.

They were huddled over Maureen’s face in a makeup scrum, drawing on her as she went blind. She felt she had been patient enough. “Who does he run with?”

Maxine didn’t like the question at all. She went away to the counter and fiddled with her brushes. When she came back she seemed very annoyed.

“Maxine,” said Maureen, “Ann’s dead.”

“Aye, and you’re the polis,” said Maxine.

“No.” Maureen tried to sit up but Maxine pushed her back with a firm hand on her chin. “We work at the Place of Safety Shelters. Ann was in there after she had the picture taken. She said she’d been beaten up by her man.”

Maxine harrumphed. “You work for them, do ye? The women’s shelters?”

“Aye.” Maureen tried to nod but Maxine held tightly on to her chin as if she were taking her head hostage.

“Both of yees?”

“Yeah,” said Leslie.

“Aye,” said Maureen, wishing to fuck she’d let go.

“Good,” Maxine said, freeing Maureen’s chin. “Good work. Need them. The shelters.” She stopped and put her brush down, picked up a pencil. “Her man never beat her up.”

“Was it Toner?”

“In a manner of speaking.” She stopped and ground her jaw. “No,” she said. “It wasn’t Toner but it wasnae her man either.”

“How do you know that?” asked Leslie.

“Hear things around, ye know.”

“Thing is,” said Maureen, “the police’ll arrest her man. He’s bringing up four weans himself and they’ll have to go into care if he gets done.”

Maxine started drawing lips on Maureen with a dry pencil. “There’s worse things than growing up in care,” she said quietly, being rough, poking Maureen hard. She put down the pencil and recomposed herself, picked up a lipstick and held it in front of Maureen’s face. “I’m using ‘Peach Party’ because of your coloring.” She said it like a threat. “It will match the blue of your eyes and still accentuate the mouth.”

“We’re not trying to do ye any harm,” said Leslie. “It’s just a shame if he goes to prison …”

Maxine slid her eyes to Leslie, glaring at her and shutting her up. Maureen had never seen anyone do that. Maxine finished painting Maureen’s lips with the Peach Party and stepped back without offering her a mirror. “Still want the maximizing cleanser?”

“Yeah,” said Maureen timidly. “Ye said ye hear things — do folk know where the shelter houses are?”

Maxine thought about it. “Some people, yeah.”

“Do you know?”

“How would I know?”

It was so obvious that she might have heard the address from Senga that neither Leslie nor Maureen bothered to contradict her. Maxine frowned at the bar code on the cream, looking guilty and pissed off. She tilled up and took Maureen’s credit card. “That Polaroid,” she said, staring at the screen on the till, waiting for credit clearance. “Burn it or something. Don’t show it around.”

“Why?” asked Maureen.

“Just don’t.”

A Big Issue seller shot Maureen a pitying look as they came out of the doors.

“How do I look?” asked Maureen.

“Like an angry monkey going to a disco,” said Leslie. “No, don’t wipe it off, keep it on, give Liam a laugh.”

Chapter 23

PERFECTLY

Liam looked down from the upstairs window as cold rain ran off their shoulders and dripped through their hair. He made a pretense of not quite recognizing them and turned back into the room to laugh at his stupid joke with someone else before disappearing. They saw him through the glass door, trotting down the stairs and padding towards them. He opened it and took the cigarette out of his mouth. “My God,” he said, staring at Maureen’s face. “What happened to you?”

“She fell into a makeup counter,” said Leslie.

Liam hung their wet coats on hooks, leaving them to drip onto the floor. It was cold in the hall; he couldn’t afford to have central heating installed, and removing the partition from the bottom of the stairs had created a shaft of drafty breezes cutting through the heart of the house. “Right,” he said. “Upstairs for towels and jerseys. There’s tea made already. Mauri, you get a couple of cups from the kitchen.”

“Will I bring biscuits?” she said, hopefully.

Liam rolled his eyes. “Okay.”

Maureen trotted off to the kitchen as Leslie followed Liam up the stairs. Liam was the only man Maureen had ever met who kept nice biscuits in his house. They were lovely sugarcoated ginger sponges with jam in the middle, made under a German name in Lowestoft. And he was the only human she had ever met who could have such lovely biscuits in his house until they went stale. Concerned by this potential wastefulness she made it her business to finish the packet whenever she was in his house.

The kitchen was small and bare with a rattly window looking out onto a long, thin, scrubby garden. Liam had done nothing to the kitchen apart from washing it down with sugar soap. The fridge was very old and the motor so emphatic that it made the floor vibrate. Anything left on the worktop or the table overnight would intermittently jig its way to the edge and throw itself onto the floor. Maureen washed her face in the sink, watching the orange milky water swirl and retreat in the chipped Belfast sink. She wished she were going home to Vik this evening, that things were all right between them and that he hadn’t made her face her future. She dabbed her face dry, picked up two cups and took the biscuits from the cupboard before making her way upstairs.

The front room had been Liam’s retreat while he was dealing. It was tall with two floor-length sash windows, wooden floorboards and pale blue walls. He had kept it sparse in the old days but now it was cluttered with his desk, a dresser, his two favorite chairs and the Corbusier lounger. It was colder inside the room than out and Liam kept a box of secondhand jumpers for anyone who wanted to sit in there during the winter. Liam and Leslie were laughing loudly and a familiar voice shouted over them, “And he had a bulldozer with a picture of Tammy Wynette painted on it.”

Maureen walked through the door and saw who was telling the story. Lynn was sitting in a tiny emerald green armchair under the window with a small red woolly jumper pulled over her clothes. “Lynn!”

“Mauri.” Lynn grinned and stood up, doing a silly high-legged run across the room to give her a kiss. “How are ye?”

“Not bad,” said Maureen, catching the brown jumper Liam threw at her. “You’re not in tow with this balloon again, are ye?”

“Well”—Lynn lowered her lids and smiled coquettishly in Liam’s direction—”mibi.” She sauntered back to the chair, enjoying Liam’s eyes on her tidy little body.

Embarrassed at witnessing such a graphic intimacy, Maureen pulled the jumper over her head and Leslie busied herself, pouring two cups of tea from the pot on the floor. They sat sideways in the dip in the Corbusier lounger, smashed into each other, sharing opposite ends of a towel to dry their hair.

“What possessed ye?” said Maureen, rubbing her hair with the towel.

“Well, Mauri”—Lynn slipped back into her chair—”I’m an old-fashioned Scottish girl and I think pity and fear are a healthy basis for a relationship.”

She grinned and Liam looked as offended as a novice nun in Amsterdam. “Don’t poke fun at our love,” he said solemnly, and Lynn cackled in the corner.

Lynn was the first girl Liam had ever gone out with. They had met at the Hillhead comprehensive Christmas disco when they were fourteen. Lynn came from a rough part of Shettleston; she wasn’t even at the school — she was only at the dance to stop her cross-eyed cousin, Mary Ann McGuire, from being bullied. Lynn had glided into the hall wearing eight-hole DMs, her shiny black bob swaying at the shoulders of her green silk minidress. Terrified that anyone else would nab her, Liam had run over to her and forgotten his lines. He stood in front of her, startled by her opalescent skin and black eyes, gubbing like a drowning fish. Had she been any other girl she might have laughed and broken his heart, but Lynn took Liam’s hand and led him onto the floor, holding it gently as they swayed to and fro, together, apart, together, apart, transfixed by each other. Kylie and Jason sang “Especially for You” and the assembled boys cursed Liam O’Donnell for the jammy wee shite that he was. Mary Ann McGuire was never bullied again. They were together for six years but Lynn didn’t like the dealing and she couldn’t cope with his anger. She said she was young and she wanted to have a laugh and watch television without a man shouting over the fucking news. It had been two years since Lynn had chucked him and a year and half since Liam had started seeing poor, dull Maggie with the perfect bottom and the whispery Monroe voice that made men want to kiss her and women want to punch her.

“What are you two doing here, anyway?” asked Liam.

Maureen put her hand into the bag of biscuits, taking as many as she could in a oner. “We need to ask you about someone,” she said, eating a little ginger heart whole. “Do you know a guy called Neil Hutton?”

Liam stared at her. “I don’t know him, but I know of him. Why are you looking for him?”

“We’re not looking for him, he’s just come up in conversation, that’s all.”

“Yeah, well, stay the fuck away from him, he’s mental. His nickname is Neil ‘Bananas’ Hutton.”

Maureen wrapped her cold hands around the hot cup and sipped her tea, feeling the heat seep through to the small bones in her hands. “And he’s a dealer?”

Liam nodded reluctantly. “Yeah,” he said. “Out the east end. Why?”

“Oh, it’s the east,” said Leslie, holding the warm cup to her cheek. “She doesn’t know him from the scheme, then.”

“Why?” repeated Liam.

Leslie thought the quickest way around Liam’s uneasiness would be to tell him the truth, so she sketched Maxine and the news report Senga had told them about and said that Ann had disappeared shortly afterwards. Maureen added that Senga used to visit Fraser’s and Leslie fiddled uncomfortably with the sleeve of her jumper.

“Doesn’t mean Senga told her where Ann was, though,” she said.

“Well, she’d probably tell,” said Maureen. “And that’s why she said everyone knew where the shelters were, to take the bad look off herself. But why would it matter whether Hutton knew where she was?”

“Did she owe him money on a deal or something?” asked Liam.

“No,” said Maureen. “She was a drunk, not a user. Would Hutton beat her up himself?”

“Definitely.” He pursed his mouth with disgust. “Hutton likes it. Likes the rough stuff, specially if he knows he can win.”

“What else is he like,” she said, “apart from mental?”

Liam thought about it. “He’s ambitious and he’s not a real dealer. He’s actually a gangster who deals.”