Exile (46 page)

Maureen headed farther up Brixton Hill. She turned, walking backwards and looking down to the lights of the high street. It was dark and the orange streetlights throbbed awake. She was leaving, she was going home, and the ugly streets and vile buildings and the men in pubs and the hungry beggars couldn’t keep her here. She hailed a cab. “Heathrow,” she said. “Can ye get me there for seven o’clock?”

“I can get you there for half six.”

Chapter 47

JIMMY, JIMMY

She didn’t know. She’d been thinking about it for days. She thought she’d already decided back at the house. She was going to tell Jimmy that Ann was alive because it wasn’t right for her to know and not tell him. But now, in the stippled, pissy lift, she’d changed her mind again. She remembered what Angus had said about the blood and how that one scrap of information had haunted her for months. Jimmy and the kids were just reaching some sort of equilibrium. If she told him, Jimmy might go looking for her, and Ann could end up on a murder charge with the rest of them. But at least the kids would have a mum, and a mum in jail is still a mum. She didn’t know.

Alan opened the door to her, but he wasn’t playing the helpless child anymore. He held the door tight to his face and looked out at her. “Whit d’ye want?” he said, eventually.

She wanted to say something unpleasant to him, pull him up about his manners or something, but she couldn’t find it in her heart.

“Why have ye got that on your neck?” he said, staring at her neck brace.

“I fell. Is your father in?” she said.

“Aye.” He didn’t budge.

“Alan, son, there’s nothing clever about being ignorant. Go and get your da.”

Alan’s eyes slid to the side, listening to the living room, and he pressed the door tighter against his face. “Da’s busy,” he said quietly.

“Hey,” Jimmy was shouting at him from the living room, “is that someone at the door?”

Alan sighed and looked at Maureen’s feet for a huffy moment before opening the door and slipping back into the house. Maureen heard him whisper something as the door fell open.

Jimmy was sitting in the big chair, changing the babies into their pajamas. “Oh.” He smiled. “It’s you. Hello.”

“Hello, you, yourself,” she said, and they grinned at each other as if it were Christmas and Santa were real.

He dropped the sweatshirts and climbed over the little people standing around his chair, coming towards her with a big smile. As he got closer she saw his uncertainty. He didn’t know whether to hug her or kiss her or what. He squeezed her shoulders, stood on tiptoe to reach across the plastic frame of the brace and planted a chaste little peck on her cheek. She stepped into the hall and the first thing that struck her was the damp warmth. “God,” she said, taking her hat off, “it’s warm in here.”

Jimmy pointed to a calor-gas fire standing in the middle of the room. It was on full and the babies were watching the little orange blanket of flames, mesmerized as if by television. “Eh?” said Jimmy, smiling.

“Oh, yeah,” she said. “Where did you get that?”

Jimmy nodded out to the hall. “Eh, out of the door money,” he said, a little embarrassed.

“Ye charging to get in here now?” she said, watching Alan standing in the kitchen doorway eating a margarine sandwich. She nodded to him. “All right, wee man?”

Alan looked irritated. He stormed past her out to the hall and up the stairs, leaving Jimmy shaking his head in exasperation. “That wee cunt,” he muttered. He looked at her. “I’ve telt him and telt him, we owe everything to you and Isa and wee Leslie, and he still won’t mind his manners.”

“But ye don’t owe us, Jimmy, ye don’t. You’re the one that does the hard work.”

Without seeming to have moved, the babies had somehow gotten closer to the fire. It was obvious that they had been told not to go near it; they were watching Jimmy’s legs out of the corner of their little eyes, their backs stiff with naughty apprehension. Maureen pointed to them and Jimmy swung round. “Get away,” he said, slow and threatening, raising his hand over his head.

The babies scuttled backwards, grinning and keeping their eyes on the gorgeous flames as they held on to the armchair. Maureen told Jimmy to finish dressing them, and would he mind if she went up to see Alan? Jimmy cringed. “It’s no’ very tidy.”

She climbed the narrow staircase to the cold landing. The bathroom door was lying open. The noise of an anxiously dripping tap and the sickly-sweet smell of mildew filled the air. The bedroom door had a Radio One sticker on it and a slit of light below. She knocked. Alan shouted that she couldn’t come in but she opened the door and called into the crack that she’d traveled all the way up the stairs to see his room. He didn’t answer her. The smell of baby pee and mildew mingled in the doorway. She opened the door a little more and looked in. Two sets of unmade bunk beds on either side of the room left a narrow three-foot strip of floor between them. The aisle was full of little shoes and clothes, broken secondhand toys and the tails of rough blankets. Alan sat cross-legged on the far lower bunk, watching the door like an angry convict. She should have decided before she came. “Are ye all right, son?”

“Don’t you ‘son’ me,” he said, furious but keeping his voice down so that Jimmy wouldn’t hear him. “I’m not your son. My mum’s dead.”

She looked bored. “Doesn’t mean that, anyway,” she said, staying in the doorway and checking out the comics on his bed. “It’s just a thing ye say. What do your pals call ye?”

“Mental Harris,” he said, his eyes flashing in the shadow. He was lying. Maureen had known kids like him at school. They probably called him Smelly.

“Well,” she said, “I’ll call ye … Alan.”

He almost smiled at that.

“D’ye like comics?” she asked.

He touched them with his fingertips and said aye, he did, and she stood there for a bit. She wanted to say that she’d been a sad and angry wee girl and she knew how he felt but she didn’t know. Even when Michael was hitting Winnie they’d always known that she could handle herself and provide for them. “Ye know, Isa and Leslie don’t mean ye any harm.”

“I don’t want anything from them,” he hissed.

She looked around the room. “Where’s John?”

“He’s at Granny Isa’s,” he said quietly.

John was sweet and handsome and loving. He was the nice one, the wee boy they’d want to care for. John wouldn’t understand until he grew up, he wouldn’t know what had happened, but Alan knew. Angry, ignorant Alan knew. She nodded at him. “You could come to mine one day,” she said, trying to sound casual. “I’ve got cakes and we could watch the telly and have tea and then I’ll bring ye back.”

He slapped his hand flat on the open comic in front of him, ripping the page, crumpling it in his fist. He threw it on the floor. “Don’t play with girls.”

He turned to the wall, digging his finger into a crumbling hole in the plaster. It was quite a big hole. It looked as if he’d been worrying it for a while.

“I’ve got a big brother,” said Maureen. “He could come as well.”

Alan stuck his finger into the wall, twisting on the bed to get the better look at it, turning his back on her. She waited. He dug deep, twisting his elbow wide to get a good hold, grunting. He was so unsympathetic she could have cried for him, for all the crews at school that would reject him, for all the exams he’d fail, for all the lassies that wouldn’t go with him, for Billy Harris chasing the girls from the dancing and Monica Beatty’s eye.

“Does your brother work?” asked Alan.

“He’s at university,” she said. “He makes movies.”

Alan stopped digging and swung around on the bed. “Does he make cartoons?” he said quickly, breathless at the possibility.

“No,” she said, wishing he did. “Just films.”

Alan looked disappointed and turned back to the wall. He dug and grunted again. “When?”

It was the smallest question she’d ever heard. “Tomorrow?” she said.

” ‘Kay.”

She shut the door behind her and took the stairs slowly, wondering how much more damage it would do to Alan if he found out Ann was alive. But Ann might come back in a few years time, just reappear one day, and a dead mother’s return would fuck anyone up.

Back downstairs Isa was everywhere. There was a light in the kitchen, the sink was empty and sparkling and a giant box of tea-bags was sitting on the clean worktop. Even the strips of offcut carpet had been rearranged into a block formation representing a rug, and the hardboard floor had been scrubbed clean, right up to the corners.

Jimmy had finished dressing the babies in matching sets of cheap but new pajamas. He was holding their dummies above their heads, hypnotizing them into standing still while he ambushed them with a wet flannel and wiped their faces. Maureen stood in the doorway and lit a cigarette as Jimmy picked up a baby in each arm and brushed past her. “Can I have one of them when I come back?” he said, gesturing to her fag.

“Aye.”

Jimmy took a deep breath and climbed the stairs. Alan would probably come back down as soon as the babies went to bed, and Maureen wouldn’t get a chance to speak to Jimmy alone tonight. She could put it off, it didn’t have to be tonight. Could be any night. She had wanted to talk to Leslie about it before she decided, but Leslie was still captive in Cammyland and she was such a loudmouth sometimes that telling her would be as good as making the decision.

“Give us one, then.”

Jimmy was behind her, rubbing his hands and staring at her cigarette. She handed him the packet. “That was quick,” she said.

He nodded, walked over to the chair and lifted the cushion, took out a box of matches and lit up. He turned off the fire and Maureen looked out into the hall. “Isn’t Alan coming down?”

“Naw, he likes to sit with them till they fall asleep.” He blew out a stream of smoke, holding his head back, standing tall. “A smoke’s just what ye need sometimes, isn’t it?”

“Aye.” She looked at her cigarette, as if it knew what the fuck to do.

Jimmy sat down in his chair. “What ye did for me and the weans,” he said, smoking and squinting at her, “I’ll never be able to thank ye for it. Ye were brave to go down there.”

“That’s not brave, Jim. Bringing up four weans on benefit, that’s brave.”

Jimmy looked into the dying fire. He took a draw and sucked it down, deep to the pit of his stomach. “I lied to ye,” he said, whispering so the children wouldn’t hear him. “I do miss her.” He took a deep draw. “I even miss her being sick and being missing. I miss her being in trouble and blaming me and hitting the weans and bringing parties back to the house and passing blood. I miss her. I miss her all the time.”

“She’s not dead, Jimmy.”

He shook his head at the floor and Maureen wondered if he’d heard her.

“I miss her,” he said.

“Jimmy,” said Maureen, “it wasn’t Ann. She’s not dead.”

Jimmy shuddered and closed his careworn eyes tight. “I miss everything about her,” he whispered.

Chapter 48

WHITE MARTYR

Siobhain’s face was twenty feet high and she stared angrily down at them. She was standing too close to the camera, her face spilling over the edges of the frame. “I am Siobhain McCloud, of the clan McCloud.” A self-conscious snigger rippled through the audience as the more insecure let their neighbors know they’d gotten the reference.

Siobhain stepped away from the camera. She was standing in her beige living room and all around her on the floor, on the big telly, on the sofa, on the windowsill, were her cutout pictures. There were pictures of babies in baths and dogs and food and models and readers’ pictures and home baking and top tips and holiday resorts. She told the audience that she had kept the pictures that pleased her and liked to collect them in books. She held open her album and Liam’s lighting brought the image to life. It was a picture of a horse-drawn wedding carriage with a grotesquely unattractive couple in full wedding regalia. The camera zoomed in on it. “This,” said Siobhain, “is Sandra and John from Newcastle on their happy day”—she turned the page—”and here is my favorite picture of a crab.”

Her delivery was strange and stilted. She was talking too loud and sounded simple. She showed the audience a picture of a plate of fish and explained about her people. They were Highland travelers. She described how they would dredge the rivers in the summer months, wading and looking through boxes, past the choppy surface to the still waters below, finding pearls and selling them in the cities. The camera turned to the painting above the fire and she told the story of her young brother, Murdo, and how he drowned in a shallow burn in the autumn and grief made her mother leave the land. She turned to a picture of an Italian holiday resort and pointed to the flag fluttering above a castellated battlement, explaining that according to the old church there were three types of martyrdom. Red was death, green was leading the life of a hermit in the woods and white martyrdom was exile, leaving the land and your people for the preservation of the faith. Her accent sounded thick and she didn’t look pretty at all. Her face was fat and her chin dissolved into her chest, leaving her with a small Hitch-cockian chin. “I look very fat in this,” she whispered indignantly to Maureen.

The other shorts had received a quiet ripple of applause but when the lights went up on Liam’s film everyone applauded, some politely, some sincerely. A couple of attention seekers at the back cheered and whooped. The audience stood up and began to file out. Maureen tried to look around for Lynn but her neck brace was restricting.

“I looked very fat,” said Siobhain, staring at the darkened screen.

“What did ye think?” Maureen asked Leslie.

“Went on a bit, didn’t it?” said Cammy, as if he wasn’t sitting in an art-house cinema wearing a Celtic Puffa jacket.

“Jesus Christ,” said Kilty Goldfarb, shaking her half-eaten Cornetto at him in exasperation. “It was nine fucking minutes long. What are you? Brain damaged?”

“Still,” said Cammy, uncomfortably, “I thought it did …” He looked away around the cinema, knowing he’d gotten it wrong.

“It went down well with the audience, anyway,” said Leslie, covering for him.