The Field of Blood (10 page)

Sean reached for a slice of buttered bread from the plate in the middle of the table, stretching his legs as he did so, wrapping his ankles around Paddy’s. She felt a pang of guilt when she saw the grapefruit in a red net bag sitting on the windowsill. She decided just this once to enjoy her food. She could start again tomorrow.

Trisha assembled a dinner of mince, mashed potatoes, and turnip and put the plate by Paddy’s elbow as she finished off her soup. “Take a bit of bread.” She nodded at the plate of buttered half slices on the table. “Ye need to build up your strength after being out in that.”

“I’m hardly going to fade away, am I?” said Paddy, glancing at Sean.

Trisha looked at Sean. “Oof, you’re not going to start all that rubbish about being fat again, are you?”

“Mum,” said Paddy, talking to Sean again, “I am fat. I just am.”

“Paddy,” said Trisha firmly, “that’s puppy fat. It’ll disappear in a couple of years and you’ll be as slim as the rest of them.” She turned away quickly, as if she didn’t believe it either.

Sean dipped his bread in the gravy on his plate and looked confused when he noticed Paddy scowling at him. He could have stood up for her at least, she thought.

Inside the back door Trisha was cleaning the dishes and putting the kitchen to bed for the night. None of the Meehan family smoked, so Paddy and Sean had to stand on the back garden step for Sean to have a cigarette.

They were wrapped up well in scarves and woolly hats, standing shoulder to shoulder under the sheltering lip above the kitchen door, watching the blizzard through half-closed eyes. It was starting to lie. A delicate net of white flakes covered the black ground. Giant flakes hurtled sideways and up, floating into Paddy’s mouth and nose, getting stuck on the underside of her eyelashes, and melting into her eyes. Sean lit his cigarette inside his jacket, pinching the filter between his thumb and forefinger, keeping the cigarette safely cupped in the cage of his hand.

“Sean, I need to tell you something.”

Sean stared at her, the tenderness in his eyes rapidly cooling into fear. “What?”

She considered backing out.

“What?” he insisted.

She took a deep breath. “I saw a photo of the wee boys who killed Brian Wilcox. I think one of them’s Callum Ogilvy.”

He stared at her and blinked. “Get tae hell.”

“It was him. I looked and looked at it. It had his wee teeth and his hair. It’s him.”

“But the Ogilvys live in Barnhill. Those boys were from Townhead.”

“No, the baby was from Townhead.”

Puzzled and anxious, Sean searched her face for signs that she was making some sort of bizarre joke. He looked away and took a deep draw on his cigarette.

“A mob formed outside the station where they were being held, so they moved them. I saw a photo taken through the window of a police van.”

He wiped his face with a big hand, rubbing it hard across his eyes, trying to wake himself up. “How good a picture could it have been?”

“It was good enough.” She tried to take his hand, watching him calculate the possibilities.

“That’s stupid.” He pulled his hand away. “We’d have heard. They’d have phoned us, wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know. Would they?”

His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper.

“Did they kill that baby?”

Paddy felt she’d said enough. “I don’t know exactly, I just know they’re in custody.”

“So it might be nothing?”

She lied to make it easy on herself. “Might be nothing at all.” She pressed his hand again.

Satisfied that he had made her back down, he flicked the ash from his cigarette into the pristine white snow. “Who did you give me a dizzy for last night?”

She was surprised at his hurt tone and touched his elbow. “Ah, no, Sean, I didn’t blow you out, I didn’t. I couldn’t go to the pictures because of work. I got a chance to do something.”

“So, you just stayed at work alone, did you?”

“Actually, I went out in the calls car.” She thought back over Mr. Taylor’s living room and the moment in the alley when she waved to the policeman in the bright kitchen window.

“Yeah, see?” said Sean, suddenly caustic. “I wouldn’t actually know what a calls car is because I don’t work there.”

“It’s just a car that drives around and goes to the police stations and the hospitals to pick up stories. It’s got a radio in it.” He didn’t seem very interested, so she tried be more specific. “We went to a gang fight where this guy had jumped out of a window and before that to a house where this guy killed himself to upset his girlfriend. Can ye imagine that?” He didn’t answer. “The story was in the paper today, just a few lines, but being there … it was …” She wanted to say fascinating, that it was exhilarating, that she could do that every night for the rest of her life, but she curbed it. “Interesting.”

“That’s disgusting.” He took a sulky draw on his cigarette.

He sounded so mean she didn’t know what to say. She looked away down the snowy garden. It was like this between them more and more now. They were all right with other people there. Then they’d hold hands and feel close and wish they were alone, but as soon as they were, they’d bicker.

“It was an interesting night.” She leaned out beyond the shelter, into the slowing blizzard. “I wasn’t supposed to go, but I asked and they said it was all right.”

“You’re so ambitious,” Sean said reprovingly.

“No I’m not,” Paddy snapped back.

“Yes you are.”

“I’m not that ambitious.”

He took a last drag on his cigarette before throwing it away. “You’re the most ambitious person I know. You’d cut me in half for a leg up.”

“Piss off.”

He twitched a bitter little smile. “You know it’s true.”

“I might be ambitious, but I’m not ruthless. That’s a different thing.”

“Oh, now you are ambitious?”

“I’m not ruthless.” Paddy petulantly kicked snow off the step. “I’ve never done anything for you to say that about me.”

They stood on the step looking out, each silently continuing the argument.

“Why can’t you be content to rub along like the rest of us?” He sounded so reasonable.

“I’m just interested in my job. Is that wrong?”

She understood why it made him angry: Sean wanted them to stay in the same place near the same people for the rest of their lives, and her ambitions threatened that. Sometimes she wondered if he was going out with her, a dumpy girl half as attractive as himself, because he could count on her to be grateful and stay.

“And you’re competitive,” he said, as if confessing his own flaws reluctantly.

“I am not.”

“Ye are, everyone knows you are. You’re competitive, and to be honest,” he added, dropping his voice to a confidential mutter, “it frightens me.”

“For Godsake, Sean—”

“If it was a choice between me and your job, which would you choose?”

“Bloody hell, will ye drop it?”

He threw his cigarette into the garden, to the spot where he always threw his cigarettes. Underneath the snow Paddy knew there were roll-up dog ends from last year’s long hot summer, when they had both just left school and clung to each other. She’d just started at the Daily News and didn’t know if she would be able to hack it. Over that was another layer of ash and filters from the rainy autumn, when Sean had started work and had a bit of money for real fags. And over them were the Christmas cigarette ends, when they sat on the step in the dark with a blanket over their knees and cuddled together; where Sean proposed after lunch on Boxing Day. All that closeness had evaporated since they’d got engaged, and Paddy couldn’t understand where it had gone.

Sean kept his eyes on the lonely thin tree at the end of the garden. “I worry that you’re gonnae leave me.”

“Oh, I’m not gonnae leave ye, Sean.” Paddy fumbled for his hand, callused and swollen from hard work, and lifted it to her mouth. She kissed the well of his palm as hard as she could. “Seanie, you’re my sweetheart.”

He cupped his free hand around her cheek and they looked at each other sadly.

“You are,” she said adamantly, not sure whom she was trying to convince. “You’re my dear, dear Sean and I’ll never leave you.” But even as she said it, she was wishing it were true. Her throat was aching. “Come upstairs with me and we’ll have a winch, eh?”

He looked at his feet. She kissed his hand again.

“Sean, I shouldn’t have said that about the boy. I don’t know what I saw. Come up with me.”

She tugged his sleeve encouragingly, opening the back door, afraid to let go of Sean in case he disappeared off into the snow forever. She held on tight and pulled him through the door, leading him into the warm.

The bedroom door was blocked by a large wardrobe, so that the room had to be entered sideways. Beyond it were two single beds with a narrow aisle in between. At the foot of each bed sat a set of drawers where the girls displayed their most prized possessions. Paddy had a jar of clear green Country Born hair gel for spiking her hair next to all the crap Sean had bought her: a bottle of Yardley perfume; a ridiculous neck ruffle to attach to her clothes for an instant New Romantic look; a little model of two teddy bears wrestling each other, wearing capes cut out of J-cloths and silver electrical wire belts Sean had made during an idle morning at work. Mary Ann kept her eye shadows on top of her chest of drawers, set out in little troops of blues and greens and pinks. She had a lone black one that Paddy bought her for her birthday, and she sat it at the front, next to the chewy blue eyeliner pencil she always used.

Paddy had a poster of the Undertones above her bed. It was the first picture she had ever seen that mirrored her own life: a lot of cheaply dressed, ill-nourished people squashed into a small living room with a picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall. Mary Ann preferred pictures of dewy-eyed heartthrobs: Terry Hall and sad-eyed Patrick Duffy looked down on her side of the room.

With six adults smashing around the place, there was very little privacy in the Meehan household. To make it worse, Paddy and Mary Ann’s bedroom door was first at the top of the stairs, so anyone coming up could hear what was going on. Invariably, when Paddy and Sean got into heavy winching, someone would come up and interrupt them, but tonight everyone was out and Trisha and Con were downstairs watching a never-to-be-repeated program about the miraculous visions of Saint Bernadette. They were as close to alone as they had ever been.

“I’m the Man” dropped down the record player spindle as Paddy sat down next to Sean on the bed. She didn’t want to lose him. She wanted to make a great, reckless, beautiful gesture to bind them together so that he couldn’t slip out of her life while her attention was elsewhere.

They sat on her bed and kissed softly. She put her hand on his chest, pressing lightly, urging him to lie back.

“No, Paddy,” he murmured. “Your folks might come in.”

She smiled as she kissed him and pressed again, catching him off balance, toppling him back a little.

“No,” he said sharply, slapping her hand away, bouncing back to vertical.

He started kissing her again, not expecting her to mind being so bluntly corrected. But she did mind. Hiding her annoyance, Paddy let her hand rest on his thigh until he was comfortable with it, kissing him gently, rubbing her nose on his cheek and very slowly stroking up his thigh. He flinched, so she slowly moved her hand back to his knee, keeping it there until he was comfortable before moving it again. She reached the seam of his crotch.

“Don’t,” he said, letting her continue. “Don’t.”

He was very hard, she could feel it through his trousers, and she liked that she could do that to him. Groaning, Sean yanked her hand away and crab-walked his legs around the edge of the bed away from her. He was panting. She reached out for his arm but he slapped her away.

“No.”

He was bent over and she didn’t really know why. She didn’t understand the geography of men’s genitals. She’d seen a cross section in a biology textbook. The teacher refused to teach the module on religious grounds because it contained information about contraception. She told them which page of the textbook it was on, as if they needed to be told, and gave them an hour to read through it in silence. Paddy knew that everything was arranged differently when men weren’t naked, cut in half and perfectly side-on.

“You shouldn’t do that,” he whispered.

“Why?”

“I might not be able to stop myself.”

“Do you have to stop yourself?” He didn’t answer. “Maybe I can’t stop myself either.”

He smirked and went back to nursing himself. “We agreed to wait. What if your mum came in?”

Paddy reached out to him, sliding her hand over his thigh. “I don’t want to wait,” she blurted.

Sean looked at her and snorted a laugh, bending over his lap again.

“I don’t want to wait, Sean.”

He was shocked. He sat up, staying on the other end of the bed, and looked at her. “Well, I do. I want it to be special when we get married. I want to know it’s the first time for both of us.”

Shame, as pernicious and sticky as napalm, rippled through her. She should want to wait. She shouldn’t want to touch him, shouldn’t want any of it, because she was a girl. Her virginity would never be hers to give, only his to take.

Sensing her resentment, Sean reached across to her forearm, pulling her over the bed towards him. He held her tightly by her shoulders in a restraint position, pinning her arms to her sides. “You mean so much to me, Paddy. You mean the world to me. Do you know that?”

“I know.”

“And you’re a little sexpot,” he said, trying to be kind about the transgression. “What are you?”

“I’m a sexpot,” she said miserably.

He heard the fury in her voice, saw her pinched face, and knew it wasn’t okay. Slipping his hand around the back of her neck, he pressed her face into his chest so he didn’t have to look at her anymore.

“No,” he said firmly. “You’re a little sexpot.”

She was covered in a gentle sweat of sheer terror. They would never, ever forgive her. Sean, her dad, everyone— they’d think Paddy had sold the story. They’d never believe it wasn’t her.