G03 - Resolution (3 page)

“D’ye want a coffee?” she asked.

“Naw,” he said, “I’m going to the library. I’ll just sort ye out and go.”

Unzipping the bag, he lifted six boxes of duty-free Embassy Regal cigarettes onto the table. “I haven’t got any Superkings just now but I’ll bring some tomorrow.”

Maureen nodded. “This sleeve’s a bit battered,” she said, lifting one box and looking at the smashed corner.

He took it back and tutted at it. “Fuckers,” he said lethargically. “They shouldn’t give me shit like that. If ye can’t use them, give them back to me on Monday and I’ll refund the difference.”

“No, no, don’t worry,” said Maureen, conscious that she was already getting the cigarettes at cost price as a special favor. “I’ll smoke them. When’s your exam?”

“Tuesday morning,” he said, taking out a cigarette and lighting up.

“That’s handy, then, because the wedding’s on Wednesday.”

“Oh, God, yeah,” he said. “I forgot about that.”

He pulled some blue pouches of rolling tobacco out of his bag but Maureen waved them back in. “We’ve got loads of those. There’s a guy up the lane selling them fifty pence cheaper.”

“How can he afford that?”

“Well,” said Maureen, “he’s not on a stall, he’s got no overheads.”

“He’s a wee bastard whatever his story is,” said Liam.

Tired, they gave each other token smiles.

“No word about Una, then?” said Maureen quietly.

“No,” said Liam, clamping the cigarette between his teeth as he zipped up the bag and walked out to the hall.

“Do you want that table?” she said, pointing to the telephone table by the door. It wasn’t nice — the wood was cheap and the varnish was chipped — but it was tall and thin and perfect for a telephone in an unobtrusive corner.

Liam tilted his head and looked at it. “What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing. There’s just too much stuff in here.”

“Ye sure?”

“Aye.” Maureen lifted the phone onto the floor and kicked the dusty phone books out of the way.

Liam hooked his arm underneath, lifted the table and struggled backwards out of the front door. The leg got caught in a stray strap from the sports bag and yanked it off his shoulder. He climbed over the bag, smashing the table off the door frame. The sharp sound ricocheted off the close walls.

“Keep it down,” whispered Maureen. “It’s only half eight.”

“Sorry.” Liam smiled, closing an eye against the stream of smoke from his cigarette. He bent down to lift the bag and cracked the leg off the concrete floor. “Shit. I’ll see ye later,” he said, and walked down the stairs, inadvertently banging the tabletop off the iron banisters, leaving a trail of smoke behind him.

Back in the kitchen she finished her coffee and filled her cycle bag with the sleeves of cigarettes. She packed in as many as she could and hoped it would be a busy day at the market. Maureen needed to sell a lot of sleeves: she owed the Inland Revenue six thousand pounds’ inheritance tax.

The day before he died Douglas had deposited fifteen thousand pounds in her bank account. Their brief and pointless affair had weighed heavily on him and the money was a tainted apology. It was an uncomfortable legacy, making Maureen feel like Douglas’s deepest regret. She had spent it as quickly as she could, buying clothes and takeout, handing lumps of it to anyone who’d take it and finally paying off a chunk of her mortgage. She was down to her last grand when Douglas’s wife, Elsbeth, got in touch. She was settling his estate, and because it had been given within the seven years before his death, the money was liable to inheritance tax. Elsbeth wasn’t about to pay it for Maureen. If Maureen didn’t pay the six thousand, the tax man could sell her house from under her. In the two months they had been selling the cigarettes Maureen had managed to save two and a half thousand quid. They’d have made more if they weren’t smoking so much of the stock.

An irresponsible driver out in the street hooted the horn three times, waking up anyone not keeping time to their clock. Maureen nipped into the kitchen, looked out of the window and saw a dirty white van in the street. Leslie was riding the clutch impatiently, sliding the van up and down the hill. Maureen picked up the cycle bag, pocketed her fags and sunglasses and locked the front door on the way out.

The close was quiet and cool. Radios and televisions murmured behind the doors as everyone breakfasted and got ready to meet the day. Maureen pulled the close door open and a wall of heat hit her, making her hair prickle to attention. She slid on her shades. They were a cheap Ray-Bans imitation and sat so close to her face that her eyelashes brushed the glass. She opened the back door of the van and put the bag in, slamming the door shut and pausing to make sure it didn’t fall open again. Then she clambered into the front seat and did up her belt, tying the long strap and the short strap together in a knot. It was an old van. “Hiya,” she said chirpily.

Leslie was miserable, the pink tinge to her eyes exacerbated by the rose-tinted glass on her sad-eye shades. “Hiya,” she said, scratching her cheek with her thumbnail and looking as if she might cry.

Leslie was dressed in a pair of pink denim cutoffs and a green running shirt. She rarely drove her motorbike now that they had the van. Maureen was used to seeing her in her leathers all the time and she’d forgotten Leslie’s flair for throwing on horrible clothes and making them look like a daring statement. She had thick black hair, cut short, with a life and will of its own, large dark eyes and the righteous air of a very angry mother taking on the school bullies. She had perfect shoulders, fat-free arms, and radiant skin that made Maureen secretly jealous.

“I’ve … I’ve split up with Cammy,” she said, and sighed at the wheel.

Maureen was finding it hard to keep acting surprised. Leslie and Cammy had split up three times this month alone. “Really?” She tried to think of something to say that she hadn’t already said about it. “How’s he taking it?”

Leslie nodded indignantly at the wheel. “Well, he knows I’m serious this time, that’s for sure.”

“Are ye serious this time?”

“Maureen,” rebuked Leslie, “I’m doing my best here.”

“I know,” said Maureen, “I know.”

Leslie wrestled the wheel left and pulled out. “And I’m not bringing him to Kilty’s brother’s wedding either,” she said. “I’ve told him.”

“Oh,” said Maureen, secretly pleased. “Have you told Kilty?”

“No, but I will.”

“Because it’s about fifty quid a head at Cameron House.”

“I’ll tell her, I’ll phone her. Anyway, tonight,” said Leslie, stopping at the lights, “we’re sorting his stuff out and he’s giving me the keys back.”

“God, that serious, is it?” said Maureen, trying to sound encouraging.

“That serious. He’s suffocating me. I can’t stand it anymore. If I’m in the loo too long he thinks I’m having an affair.”

Maureen didn’t like Cammy and the feeling was mutual. They snipped at each other when they were in company and sat in a chilly, stubborn silence when they were left alone. Cammy was a contrary little shit. He blamed his bullying temper on the oppression of the Irish Catholic workingman. Leslie was Protestant and, although not a natural candidate for ancestral guilt, she believed him. Maureen and Liam were Catholic and told her that Cammy’s patter was a load of paranoid rubbish, that their generation was untouched by anti-Catholic prejudice, and sectarianism was nothing more than a football fan’s accessory now. Still, Cammy maintained that history had dealt him a cruel blow. Maureen was sure that Leslie would have finished with him long ago if she had still had her job at the Scottish women’s shelter. Being a house manager had given her a focus, a role to play in the good fight, and she was restless and unfulfilled since being sacked.

Behind the van the driver of a red truck hooted.

“Keep your hair on, ya postie bastard,” said Leslie, and jerked the old van into first gear.

Beyond the designer shops and glass cathedral shopping malls of Glasgow city center, across a broad and windy car park, stood the ancient flea market called Paddy’s. Anything could be bought there, from secondhand underpants to office furniture. Trapped between the river and a high railway viaduct, it made the shoddiest car-trunk sale look as orchestrated as Disneyland. The market consisted of a ramshackle series of stalls set up in the dark tunnels under the disused railway line. In good weather hawkers would set up in the uneven alleyway outside, some on trestle tables, some spreading their goods over blankets laid out on the cobbles. It was a lawless place and the decency of the hawkers set the standards. Duty-free fags and cheap drink were okay, as was out-of-date mayonnaise and sectarian regalia. Hard-core pornography had to be kept hidden and, whatever they were selling, the junkie dealers were hedged in at the end of the lane by the river, away from everyone else.

Paddy’s was named in honor of the last major wave of itinerant immigrants to Glasgow and operated as a cultural port of entry with each new group of incomers coming to buy cheap goods or make a small living. As they became known at the market and introduced their own customs and marketing opportunities, gradually, usually grudgingly, they became integrated.

In times past the market had been much bigger but the railway above was disused now and three of the tunnels had been shut down because of galloping damp. The spare ground in front of the lane, where the poorest hawkers gathered, had been clawed back by the council for an extension to the High Court. The council tax had risen and everyone knew that Paddy’s was dying. The council was proposing to lift the cobbles from the lane and sell them to a new development. The flea market was being asset stripped.

Leslie eased the rickety van slowly down the cobbled lane at the back of the market, climbed out and knocked on the big wooden door three times. After a short pause, red-faced Peter, an obese man with a heart condition, swung the door wide, pinning it open. Maureen and Leslie lifted the cardboard boxes of cleaning products from the back of the van and carried them to their stall.

It was just inside the back door, across the tunnel from fat Peter and wee Lenny. Peter sold batteries, crockery and secondhand videotapes. Lenny was a TV repairman who’d been sacked from Radio Rentals on the grounds that he was, indeed, radio rental. He took his smelly dog, Elsie Tanner, everywhere with him. Lenny had found Elsie in Ruchill Park, just behind the Co-op, hungry and homeless. She just ran out of a bush at him and he had no choice but to take her home with him. It didn’t trouble Lenny that a hungry dog was unlikely to hang about in a little-used public park when there were bins aplenty fifty feet away. It was obvious to everyone but Lenny that he had stolen someone’s dog.

Maureen set up, arranging the bleach, the squeezy and the dusters on the stall. They hardly ever sold any of the cleaning products’, they were just a cover for the duty-free fags — the bleach bottles were getting dusty, a sure giveaway. Maureen opened a packet of dusters and gave the bottles a wipe, shielding Leslie from view. Leslie opened the cycle bag, took out the sleeves of cigarettes and placed them carefully in the green council wheelie bin that always sat near the back door. If the police found the cigarettes they could deny all knowledge of them: the worst that would happen was that their stock would be confiscated.

The tunnel seemed particularly damp today, contrasting bitterly with the warmth of the sunny lane outside. Leslie went off to park the van. When she came back in she found Maureen wiping down bottles of Toilet Duck and singing along to the cheeky, staccato beat of “It’s a Kind of Magic.”

“It’s a Home Gran Gotcha.” Leslie handed over one of the jerseys they kept in the cab for damp days in the tunnel.

“God,” said Maureen, realizing she had been singing. “I don’t even know I’m doing it.”

Together, they peered accusingly down the tunnel to the tapes stall. The woman standing behind it was a white-haired sixty-year-old with gold sovereign rings on every finger. She dressed in trainers and one of the rustling, baggy Kappa tracksuits all the kids were wearing. Giving her age away, she drew brown, single-line arched eyebrows high on her forehead above the frames of her glasses like Joan Crawford. She sold bootlegged tapes of CD albums on a stall financed by her well-to-do son and played tapes on her ghetto blaster all day long. They were mediocre mainstream ballads and rock anthems, songs the listeners didn’t realize they loved until they heard them out of context, without the prejudice of packaging or association. Maureen and Leslie found themselves singing along to Jim Diamond, Queen and the Quo, knowing all the words, feeling uplifted until they realized who it was.

Maureen and Leslie unfolded their little canvas picnic stools and sat, Maureen facing the entrance to the tunnel and Leslie the wheelie bin, watching for robbers. Leslie kept her sad-eye shades on to hide her sad eyes. Maureen gave them a squashed Regal each and took out her chrome oval lighter. The flint jammed and she had to pull the backside off the lighter, unscrew the spring and put the flint back in before she could get a light. The strip-down and rebuild took thirty seconds because she’d done it so often.

Leslie kicked her ankle and made a sad face when she looked up. “Oh,” she said pathetically, “I think I’d feel a bit better if I had a fried-egg roll.”

Maureen laughed. “You go,” she said. “I’m always going.”

“But I’m having a trauma.”

“So am I.”

“What’s your trauma?”

“My pal’s bossing me around.”

“That’s not as sad as a relationship failure,” said Leslie.

“It could result in a relationship failure,” said Maureen seriously.

Leslie looked away wistfully. “If only someone cared.”

Maureen stood up. “All right but you’re going tomorrow.”

She was walking towards the mouth of the tunnel, checking her pocket for change, when a hand shot out and grabbed her roughly by the shoulder, spinning her round. Home Gran was behind her, peering down her bifocals. Maureen had never seen her so close up before. The puff of white hair had a yellow nicotine smudge at the front and the crosshatched wrinkles on her cheeks looked like dueling scars. Today she was modeling a beige tracksuit with black trim. “You,” she said and took Maureen’s hand. Surprisingly strong, she swung Maureen between the stalls to behind her tape counter, maneuvering her by twisting her wrist like a rudder. “You’ve got a degree, haven’t ye?”