Exile (3 page)

“Smoke?” said Jan.

“Two minutes,” said Maureen, and went back to staring at a chapter in the housing-law textbook. It didn’t make any sense. A regulation had imported a double negative into the legislation. She was crap at this. When they had given her the job it was because of Leslie and the posters, not because she had shown any capacity to map housing legislation or write summaries. The few reports she had submitted were politely bounced back for revision by the committee and she knew their buoyant faith in her was flagging.

In anticipation of the funding cut, the Place of Safety Shelters had moved to the cheapest city-center office in Glasgow. It was an ugly, gray, windowless room. The funding cut had been deferred because of the poster campaign but the PSS stayed there, saving their money as best they could, getting ready for the hard times ahead.

The poster campaign was one of the few selfless things Maureen had done with Douglas’s money. Leslie didn’t tell the committee they were doing it. They plastered the city with the posters in one long night, working from west to east and finishing at dawn. Not many people phoned the funding committee number at the bottom of the poster to protest. The picture was quite obscure and most people didn’t know what it was about but, still, the funding cut had been deferred for six months. Everyone in the office had been speculating about the posters after the decision was announced; Leslie called a meeting and admitted responsibility. She told them that her pal had masterminded the scheme, paid for it all herself, and now she’d like to work for them on a voluntary basis if they could find a place for her. They saw that Maureen had a degree and gave her the housing job. She’d been a hero two months ago — everyone in the office wanted to talk to her. The desk she shared with Jan was right by the door and she could hardly get a full hour’s work done on any given day because women kept stopping by for a chat. She had a lot more time now.

Work was a reluctant ten-minute stroll from Maureen’s house. She hated the ugly office, the endless river of broken women they had to turn away, and her occasional strained run-ins with Leslie. Once or twice in every working day Maureen wanted to get up and walk out but she stopped herself. She’d be letting Leslie down if she chucked it and she was doing something that mattered. She could stay for a short while, until the money ran out. So she was spending her days trying not to cry in front of Jan, avoiding Leslie and writing reports on housing-law regulations with exceptional incompetence.

Jan stood up from her chair and pulled on her coat.

“Benny Hedgehog?” she said, picking up her fag packet.

“Naw,” said Maureen, taking one from her own. “I’ll just have a Silkie.”

They made sure they had a light and headed downstairs to the street.

Staff weren’t allowed to smoke in the gray open-plan office. The air conditioning didn’t work well so the committee had decided that only the waiting women could smoke. Jan and Maureen spent large portions of their days downstairs trying to think of something to say to each other. Cliques of exiled smokers are usually intimate and pleasurable, coming together as they do in ten-minute bursts of addicts’ camaraderie. At the PSS Maureen found herself spending a lot of time with Jan and other women in whom she had no interest, trying to participate in conversations without crying, grasping for the appropriate response when Jan upped the friendship gears with whispered confidences.

“You all right?” asked Jan, as they took the first flight of stairs. “You look a bit pale today.”

“I need a fag.”

“I think you’re getting the flu.” Jan lowered her voice. “Did ye hear about Ann?”

“Ann?” said Maureen.

“Ann Harris, remember? She came to us, she was all cuts and bruises and didn’t want to go to Casualty. She moved into Leslie’s shelter.”

Maureen did remember Ann because of her peculiar coloring. Ann’s pink skin clashed with her yellow hair, making her look angry or ashamed or on the verge of throwing up. She wore a big yellow-gold identity bracelet that accentuated the discord, as if she were decorating the mistake. Maureen had noticed that wearing big jewelry was a feature of the very rich and the very poor for essentially the same reasons. But she remembered Ann most vividly because so few women came in after a bad beating. For most the decision to leave was a long, slow dawning.

Ann had come in wild-eyed and badly beaten, smelling like a long binge on cheap drink, asking for the pictures to be taken before she was even assured of a place. The Criminal Compensation Board photographs were always offered to the women. They provided evidence for interdicts and criminal prosecutions. Usually the women didn’t want proof, they just wanted to get away and feel safe, but Ann wanted them. She didn’t want to prosecute, she said, just wanted a record, just in case. She sat next to Maureen on one of the plastic chairs, waiting to be interviewed, and then waiting again for Katia to set up the camera. She sat staring at the floor, taking the fags Maureen offered her, smoking around the split on her bottom lip. The swelling was as thick as a thumb, like a localized collagen implant.

“Well,” continued Jan, “she’s disappeared.” She looked shocked, as if the end of the story had come as a complete surprise to her.

“She’s probably lying drunk somewhere,” said Maureen.

“No,” said Jan, “because she emptied her locker and she’s gone.”

“Well, she’s left, then,” said Maureen. “What’s surprising about that? Lots of women leave without saying anything.”

Jan had heard the story from someone else and they had been very surprised. She didn’t remember why but she knew that they were. She opened the glass door and slipped out into the street, feeling sure she had forgotten part of the story.

Katia’s pillar-box-red hair bobbed out of the doorway and Maureen was tempted to turn round and go back upstairs.

“Oh, hi,” said Katia, leaning out. “How’s it going?”

Katia was very pretty with a perfect figure and Krazy-Kolor red hair, which she wore in bunches.

“Not bad,” said Jan, huddling in next to her.

The deep doorway was the best spot for winter smoking. A vent at the back exhaled warm air from a bakery, carrying the sweet smell of hot bread. It was only big enough for two people, and Maureen had to stand in the cold, wet street, huddling her face in beside them so that she could catch a light in the windless vacuum.

“Hi, Maureen,” said Katia. “Are you not talking to me?”

Maureen bared her teeth.

“I think she’s coming down with a flu,” said Jan kindly. “My dad’s got it.”

“Yes.” Katia let off an asinine smile and touched Maureen’s cheek. “You look very pale.”

Maureen lit her cigarette very suddenly, half hoping she might burn Katia’s hand, and sucked all the badness down, away from her mouth.

“Bloody freezing,” said Jan, nodding and stamping her feet.

“Yeah,” said Katia, pulling up the furry hood of her parka, watching Maureen all the time, “freezing.”

A lorry backed up in front of them, deafening them with a loud reversing beep, and Maureen took a deep draw.

“And how’s the lovely Vikram?” asked Katia, when the lorry had come to a standstill.

“Fine,” said Maureen.

“Good,” said Katia tartly. She saw that the conversation wasn’t going anywhere and sucked the last life out of her cigarette, flicking the butt out into the road. “See ye later, then.”

Neither Jan nor Maureen answered her. Katia went back inside.

“I don’t know why,” said Jan, looking guilty, “but I don’t like her very much.”

Maureen huddled next to her in the coddling calm of the doorway. “Me neither.” She had been nursing a caustic resentment of Katia since Vik’s band played Nice and Sleazy’s. Katia and Maureen had passed each other in the office; they didn’t know each other at all. Vik sat Maureen at the girlfriends’ table and Katia spotted her from the bar. She slipped lithely between the tables, sat next to Maureen and shouted over the music that she didn’t expect to see her here, did she like the band? Yeah, Maureen did like the band. Katia had been following them for ages, she’d heard their session on the radio, and she’d taken their first band pictures for them. Through innuendo and references to other brilliant nights Katia made it clear that she had gone out with Vik very recently and was surprised that Maureen had managed to nip him. When Vik came over at the end Katia made a big play of kissing him and hanging on his neck. Maureen sat at the table, pulling her coat tight around herself, affronted at being roped into a demeaning competition over a boyfriend she’d only known for a minute and a half.

“You do look pale, though, Maureen,” said Jan.

“I’m fine, really.”

“You might get the flu.”

“Honest, Jan, I’m fine.”

“Dad’s half dead with it,” said Jan. “It’s a bad bug.”

“Yeah, I need another fag. Have ye got your packet with ye?”

Jan dished them out and saw the tremble in Maureen’s hand as she lit it.

“I think you’re right,” said Maureen, “I think I am getting the flu.”

“Maybe you should take a few days off.”

Pedestrians scuttled past them, carrying shopping, hurrying to work, and Maureen looked out of the doorway. Every face was potentially Michael’s. She didn’t know what he looked like now; all she remembered about him was that he was twice as tall as the rest of them. He knew what she looked like. He would have seen her graduation photo hanging on Winnie’s wall. She thought her way around the streets of Ruchill, trying to imagine where the council would have put him. She could see the tower from her bedroom window. The hospital was an STD clinic with a needle exchange in the gatehouse. Maureen had been to the hospital once for an HIV test, one of the worried well, and the nurse had told her that it had been built on the isolated hill overlooking the city because it was a fever hospital. During the height of one epidemic the wards held a hundred at a time, she said — they were top to tail in the beds, dead for hours before they could clear them out. Ruchill was a burned-out, boarded-up area with no shops and a notorious pub built from concrete slabs, painted black with high, mean windows. It looked like a machine-gun nest and she thought Michael might drink there.

Maureen and Jan had finished smoking but stood about in the freezing cold, warming the backs of their heads on the baker’s vent, watching the traffic pass.

“I can’t be annoyed with this today,” muttered Maureen.

“I know what ye mean,” said Jan.

They left the warm doorway, climbing the stairs slowly and shedding their coats.

It was late afternoon, minutes before the house managers’ meeting was due to start, and Leslie swaggered in through the double doors wearing her leathers and carrying her crash helmet. Leslie’s hair was short and dirty and stuck up like a windswept hamster’s. Her skin was sallow, her big round eyes were black, and she was always mistaken for taller than she was. She walked into every room as if she were there to get her money.

“All right, Mauri?” she said, and nodded, surprised and apparently pleased to see her.

“All right yourself?” said Maureen.

Leslie glanced at Jan. She leaned over Maureen’s desk and muttered, “What ye doing later?”

“Nothing.”

“Come for something to eat?”

“Aye,” said Maureen, blushing with pleasure.

“Let’s go to Finneston,” said Leslie, and stood up. “I’ll get ye when I’ve finished. Did ye hear about Ann Harris?”

“I did, aye.”

Leslie was about to say something but she noticed Jan watching her and stopped herself. “I’ll get ye on the way out, then,” she said, and strode off to her meeting.

Jan smiled uncomfortably at her desk, irritated that Leslie had excluded her. Maureen could have explained that Leslie didn’t mean to be rude, she just was rude, but Jan might come around the desk for a chat so she left it. Jan tried a pleasant smile. “Leslie’s always taken a personal interest in Ann, hasn’t she?”

“Oh, yeah,” said Maureen, shuffling her papers.

“I heard she asked the committee for Ann to be placed in her shelter, is that true?”

Place of Safety Shelters was broke and the house managers were all working to aspirational budgets. No one asked for new residents: they tried to palm them off on one another.

“Dunno,” said Maureen, puzzled. “Dunno about that.”

She went downstairs to the toilet for a private smoke and a think.

Chapter 5

ANN

Ann hadn’t been seen for a month. She had left the shelter five days after Christmas and never come back. The other women in the shelter weren’t worried. They thought she’d gone back to her man. The kids were still with him and it must have been hard for her to stay away, especially over Christmas. The police weren’t worried either. They took her man’s word for it that he hadn’t seen or heard from her. But Leslie was worried. Ann had left behind a bundle of photographs. They were childhood pictures, birthday and anniversary snaps. Young Ann with workmates in a factory. Ann sitting up in a hospital bed smiling softly down at the newborn in her arms as if the whole world lay there. Among them was a Polaroid of a big man standing in a school playground. He wore a camel-hair coat and brown Reactalite glasses. He was grinning and holding the hand of a sullen six-year-old boy. Maureen came to a series of badly focused pictures that were all the same size and shape: Ann with a sore lip and some other women in front of a Christmas tree with Leslie behind them, her arm raised in mid-gesture, the flash turning her pupils a demon red.

“These are in the shelter at Christmas, aren’t they?” asked Maureen.

“Yeah,” said Leslie.

“How did ye get the women to stand for a picture?”

“I just asked them if they wanted to be in it.” Leslie shrugged. “It’s Christmas Day. We try and keep it as normal as possible.”

It was late. The meeting had run over and the other house managers had hurried home quickly to warm houses and hungry children, leaving Maureen and Leslie alone in the office. They were sitting on the edge of Maureen’s desk, listening as the wind whistled up the stairwell, tapping illegal fags on the floor and stepping their ash into the carpet. Leslie was in a different mood now, efficient and formal after her meeting, and she wouldn’t look at Maureen.