G03 - Resolution (13 page)

“Cheers.”

She shut the back doors and Leslie drove off down the hill.

The moment Maureen looked up she knew something was wrong. Her close door was jammed open, lying flat against the wall. No one staying there ever did that. It wasn’t a safe area and they had to keep the door shut all the time so that people thought they had a buzzer entry system. Someone who didn’t belong there was inside.

Maureen looked at the floor inside the close. Sometimes when he washed the stairs Jim Maliano left the door open to dry them, but the floor was dry today and dusty. She stepped into the close, stopped at the foot of the stairs and listened, the sweat on her face and arms suddenly chill. The noise of TV game shows and the high, excited voices of sports commentators whistled under the neighbors’ doors. She couldn’t hear anyone in the close but felt the still air moving a few floors up, heard the gentle scuff of material brushing against material. Quietly, she walked up to the first landing and stopped. Someone was up there. An alarming trickle of sweat escaped from her hairline, startling her as it ran down her cheek. She raised her hand, patting her face audibly, and the presence above her shifted at the noise. She considered going down again and slipping out the back. She listened. They weren’t all the way upstairs, they weren’t outside her door. The close had eight flats in it—they could be visiting anyone. She heard sudden footsteps, someone falling from foot to foot, coming towards her quickly, just round the corner.

He was watching his feet as he walked and his dark hair appeared before the rest of him. He looked up at her. “Hiya,” he said simply.

Maureen dropped the bag and a deep, joyous laugh gurgled up from her belly, an intoxicating blend of relief and delight. “Vik Patak, you gorgeous bastard. How the fuck are you?”

It was teatime. Beyond the drawn red velvet curtains Saturday traffic passed noisily a few blocks down, leaving the city center to catch its breath before the evening began. A soft light seeped in through the heavy curtains, the blue sky casting a pink and yellow sheen on the ceiling. Somewhere in Garnethill, beyond the bedroom window, a bird was hollering. Maureen stretched out, arching her back off the bed and grinning to herself. Vik caught a curl of Maureen’s dark hair on his toe and tugged it playfully. She looked at him, still smiling. “Ye okay?” he said.

“Oh, aye.” Wondering at skin so soft, Maureen placed her fingertips on his bare hip, the skin slick to the bone. She traced the tight dip of powder skin before the small swell of his belly. She didn’t even want a drink. “I’m glad you came to see me,” she said.

Vik rolled to face her, resting his head on her thighs. “Shan told me about that Farrell guy’s trial coming up. I came to see if you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” she said, resenting the intrusion of reality into the handsome moment. “Has Shan been called as a witness?”

“No, but he’ll be there.”

Vik’s cousin, Shan Ryan, had been a nurse in the Rainbow Clinic. He knew about Angus, had put the pieces together himself. He and Douglas had been swithering about what to do when Douglas was murdered. She didn’t want to think about that just now. “It’s nice to see ye again, Vik.”

“You could have phoned me,” he said reproachfully.

“I could have, I wanted to, but I didn’t think it would be fair.”

“Why not?”

She was a shit girlfriend, she knew she was, but she didn’t know how to say it without sounding as though she was prompting a denial or looking for reassurance. “Dunno, I just, I’m a bit distracted. ‘S not very fair on you.”

“You didn’t seem very distracted a minute ago. You were concentrating pretty hard every time I looked at ye.”

They smiled lazily at each other.

“It’s amazing, isn’t it?” said Maureen softly. “There’s a point when you’d sell your soul for a come and then two seconds afterwards you can’t really remember what happened, but the world isn’t half as bad as it seemed before and the light’s different and everyone means well.”

“God’s own medicine,” said Vik.

She looked at him. “I like it that you don’t make things into a drama.”

Vik knew what she really meant, that she didn’t want a scene or heartfelt declarations. “I do, sometimes.”

They looked at each other. The last time they had met like this it was winter — they had been boyfriend and girlfriend, going out, meeting his friends. She hadn’t liked it. Thinking back honestly, she wasn’t used to making all the compromises normal dating required. Because Douglas had been married she could tell him to fuck off when he annoyed her, and he’d still come back. She could refuse to see him when she didn’t feel like it and still maintain the moral high ground. She could indulge herself because mistresses have few duties. She wondered if Sheila was right, if it was just petulance and immaturity on her part that made a relationship seem impossible. Being brutal with herself, she thought it probably was. “Vik, I’m still not up for the whole full-on relationship.”

He placed his hand on her stomach, softly pressing the flat tips of his fingers into the skin, one after the other, as if he were playing her. “It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve just had one of those.”

“Oh.” It hadn’t occurred to her that he might have been off with someone else.

“Other women do find me attractive, ye know.”

“I know.” She nodded over and over. “I know.”

“Tell me you haven’t been out with other guys.”

She shrugged nonchalantly, said, “Oh, yeah, yeah,” and gave herself away. She hadn’t been out with anyone, hadn’t fancied anyone or thought of anyone but him.

When she looked up he was smiling and pleased. “I like that,” he said.

“Fuck off.”

But he was still smiling. “If ye haven’t been out on the ran-dan with loads of hunky men, what have ye been doing? Have ye been going to art galleries?”

She smiled back at him. “Naw, God, I haven’t done that in a while.”

“But you love looking at art.”

“I know, I should —”

“Ye should make time.”

“I should,” she said.

“My wee cousin takes me to exhibitions all the time and I kept expecting to see you there. She’s training to be a curator.”

“How do ye train to be a curator?”

“Master’s course in Belfast. She gets in everywhere free. You should do that.”

“I’ve got a job,” she said, and smiled ruefully, imagining herself in a big suit, with a CV and prospects.

“What’s your job?”

“I sell drugs to schoolchildren.”

Vik looked at her, half believing, until she reached across the bed and picked up her cigarettes, shaking them at him. “Down at Paddy’s,” she said, and he smiled.

They sat up, Vik shuffling around on the bed so they were sitting next to each other, bare hip to bare hip, looking out of the three-inch space between the red velvet curtains. “If you could look at any painting in the world,” he said, “what would it be and where is it?”

“Good one.” Maureen nodded, savoring the challenge. “The Demoiselles d’Avignon, in New York, or Matisse’s Arab Coffeehouse in the Hermitage.”

“Why the Coffeehouse one?”

“I dunno, because it’s so still. If you could see anyone play, who, where and when?”

“Obviously Elvis in Vegas, early seventies.”

“Not the Las or the Birthday Party?”

“Nah, I like hearing about their gigs but I wouldn’t want to have been there.”

She put the ashtray on the bed and reached over to light his cigarette.

“That’s my lighter,” he said, holding her hand and looking at it.

“Yeah, you left it here that last time.”

“You kept it.”

“Yeah.” She felt embarrassed. “It’s a good lighter.”

“No, it’s not, it’s crap. The flint chimney’s too wide. I thought I’d lost it.”

She dropped it into his hand, ashamed of how much store she’d set on it. “Well,” she said briskly, “you’ve got it back now.”

He smiled, lowering his head to look her in the face. “Maureen, did you do something romantic?”

She pulled her chin away. “What?” she said, sounding huffy. “Found your lighter?”

Vik took a draw on his cigarette, gazing out of the window. “You like me,” he muttered at the curtains. “You like me, ya sneaky wee bird.”

They sat smoking and smiling at the window, listening to children calling to one another in the street, the summer birds shouting and cars speeding past up the steep hill. She looked at his shoulder, a perfect sphere with dimples where the tendons attached the muscle to the bone. Two long dark hairs stuck out to the side like symbolic epaulets. He had been sunbathing with his shirt off, and the skin on his chest was darker than usual, glistening. Vik looked at her. “Are you going out tonight?”

“No,” she said, and immediately regretted it. Vik was in a band and had a large group of friends, none of whom she had anything to say to, none of whom had anything to say to her. She hated being a sidekick and sitting with the other girlfriends.

“Well,” said Vik, as Maureen calculated the relative excusing values of sudden sickness and a family trauma, “how d’you fancy a picnic?”

“What kind of picnic?” she said stiffly.

“You and me up the hills. Nice food, bit of a smoke?”

“Just us?” she said hopefully.

“Yeah.”

“Your band aren’t playing Hampden tonight, then?”

He stubbed out his fag in the ashtray. “Not tonight, no.”

The Campsie Brae is a steep ridge overlooking the city from the south side. It was as close to the country as Maureen had been for a long time. They skinned up and smoked on the way over, keeping the windows up on Vik’s Mini so that the car functioned as a giant bong. By the time they arrived they were giggly. Cars, large and small, old and new, were stopped along the dark country road, seeming abandoned until the headlights hit steamed-up rear windscreens and picked out shadows inside. Vik drove out onto the brae, moving away from an epileptic Honda Accord and over to the far side of the ridge. Below them lay the city, a carpet of yellow and red lights under a black sky. In the foreground were the high towers and small windows of Castlemilk housing scheme. As Vik stopped the car and pulled on the hand brake, the headlights picked out the nose of a shopping trolley thrown beyond the ridge. He tutted. “This isn’t the country, this is the city with nae hooses.”

Maureen grinned and handed Vik his bag of chips and gravy. “This is as close to the real country as I like to get,” she said.

“Why?”

“It’s scary out there. There’s no lights and the shops are rubbish.”

They laughed loud and long because they were spliffed, they’d just had sex three times, and they were together.

She sat up in the bed, watching him settle into sleep. It was too hot even for a sheet and his elbows were tucked into his sides, his hands modestly hiding his nipples, his cock lolling to the side when he shifted his legs. She said a soft good night to the child in the cupboard, feeling safe because Vik was here. As she looked at him she remembered all the transient boyfriends who had bridged the lonely gap between hard nights and harsh mornings. Still asleep, Vik’s hand fumbled anxiously to find hers and hold it. Tenderness on the hinterland of intimacy.

As Maureen woke up her first thought was of Ella, lying in the bed in the Albert with the sheet over her mouth and her red, vacant eyes. She sat up slowly, trying not to wake Vik. Yellow splinters of morning sun prickled around the heavy curtain and the air felt warm and sticky. She slid out of bed and went to the loo. Si’d be there again today, staring at Ella, frightening her, bullying his seventy-year-old mother. Maureen wanted to go and visit again, just to show him that Ella had a pal, someone who’d cross the town to see if she was okay. Back in the kitchen she made two cups of coffee and realized that she didn’t know what Vik took in his. She made an approximation of all the coffee variations: a bit of powdered milk and one big sugar, leaving it unstirred so that he could drink the first half of the cup if he didn’t take it.

Vik was still asleep, snoring gently, his face loose, his big hands clasped together on his stomach. She put the cups down on the side table and climbed back onto the bed, stroking his bristled cheek with her fingertips. “Wake up, Vik,” she whispered softly. “Your mum’s here and she’s absolutely furious.”

Vik was awake and sitting bolt upright within three seconds.

The day seemed especially bright as Vik drove her across town to the Albert. The white light breezed lazily, deflecting into the shadows, melting the sharp edges of the buildings. Maureen felt normal, sitting in the nice car with her handsome boyfriend and her formal clothes on again. She imagined being seen from the outside by some mystery viewer. She’d look happy, at peace, loved and cosseted, like a real person with a life and a future.

The smell of smoke and gravy lingered inside the Mini. They wound the windows down and sang along to Aretha’s “Natural Woman.” The song was miles out of both their ranges and they squeaked and growled, stopping and catching the tune whenever they could. The roads were quiet and Vik parked outside the hospital, switched Aretha off and turned to look at her. “Are you sure about the records?” he said, nodding to the stacks in the backseat. Maureen had given him her record collection. Her record player was broken and she wanted to get the dusty, pointless piles out of the house.

“Aye,” she said.

“I’ll give them back to ye later, if ye like.”

“I don’t think I’m going to want them.”

“They’re not all shit.”

They smiled at each other.

“I’m sorry,” he said, and paused. “I’m sorry things are the way they are with you. Ye seem happier.”

Maureen didn’t want to remember any of that when she was with him. “Mibi I am. Will ye come and see me again?”

“Well, Shan and I are coming to the trial next week.”

“But will ye come and see me afterwards, just yourself?”

Vik raised a salacious eyebrow. “Listen,” he said, “after the welcome I got last night, an Ebola quarantine wouldn’t keep me away.”

Through the open doorway to Ward G Maureen saw a young man in a suit in the center of the ward hammering out a plodding rendition of “Nearer My God to Thee” on an electronic keyboard. She remembered the holy rollers coming round her ward at the Northern on Sundays, and a particular Sunday when Angie, the tiny woman in the bed next to her, emptied a bottle of Lucozade into a box of Bibles.