The Field of Blood (14 page)

Gina stood still, pulling at the cloth for a moment. Her hair was brown and dank, and as she reached up and flattened her hair Paddy saw why. She must have been working cleaning products into it all day, cleaning, cleaning, trying to wipe away the knowledge that her baby wasn’t coming back.

An old-fashioned navy blue grocery van with purple and white writing on the side traveled slowly down the hill behind her. It passed by, pulling up at the curb a hundred yards away. The hand-painted declaration on the side of the van announced that it was a mobile grocer’s owned and operated by Henry Naismith, Esquire. The door on the back of the van was covered in colorful stickers from fruit importers and biscuit companies. Stuck over the top, wind scorched and peeling in one corner, was a band sticker declaring FRIEND OF BILLY GRAHAM.

In the quiet of the evening she could hear the gentle ratchet sound of the hand brake being pulled tight and then a tinny music-box rendition of the first three bars of “Dixie” sounded from a little horn on the roof. Someone was moving around inside the van, jostling it, and a light inside flickered uncertainly. The door opened and Paddy could see a man unfolding a step to the street. Inside, the light found its note and brightened as the man stood up. He was slim with sharp sideburns and a graying Elvis-style mini-quiff. Approaching customers chased him back up the steps. Inside the van he pulled down a wooden shelf to form a counter between himself and the outside world.

An orderly queue gathered around the steps, a crowd of five women and a man. The women nodded to one another and passed pleasantries, ignoring the man, who pretended to count the change in his hand. Paddy knew that van steps were a woman’s arena as much as a pub was a man’s. Friendships were made in the queue, gossip exchanged, and reciprocal child care organized.

She stayed well back and waited as they bought bread and glass bottles of fizzy juice; some asked for soap powder; others just after the wooden penny sweet tray the man proffered like a Tiffany’s display. She waited until the crowd thinned before approaching.

The van smelled of soap and sweets. The man serving wore a grubby white grocer’s coat with yellow action streaks around the pockets. Across his neck was a red slash scar from a long time ago, the soft skin puckered around the shiny stripe.

He smiled expectantly at her. “What can I do ye for?”

“Packet of Refreshers, please.”

He reached over to his right, so sure of his stock that he didn’t need to look at the shelves, and put the glittery packet of fizzy sweets on the counter.

“Okay, li’le lady. Anything else catch your eye? A loaf? A bottle of ginger?” He pointed to the glass rows of fizzy drink and winked at her.

She grinned at his fake American accent. “Listen, can I ask ye this: those boys who were arrested for …” She didn’t know how to phrase it. “For hurting Baby Brian. Did they know anyone on this scheme?”

He pulled her change from his money belt and narrowed his lips. “Those filthy wee buggers. I say give them to the women’s prison, they’d know what to do with them.”

It didn’t sound like a very good plan to Paddy. She frowned, and he saw it.

“No,” he corrected himself, “you’re right, you’re right. We need to forgive.”

“Aye, right enough,” she said awkwardly, moving the conversation on. “Anyway, were they visiting someone here?”

“I heard they were at the swing park.”

“Yeah, that’s what I heard. I was just wondering, because it’s kind of out of the way. Could they have been visiting someone?”

The van man shrugged. “I dunno. If they’d been at a house someone would know about it. Everyone here sees everything. Why are you asking?”

“Dunno.” She picked the change up off the counter. “Just wondering about it. Seems funny, know what I mean?”

He looked suspicious. “You don’t live here, do you? What are you doing here?”

“I’m a journalist at the Daily News,” she said proudly, and immediately remembered Farquarson’s warning. “My name’s Heather Allen.”

“Right?” He looked her up and down. “A journalist, is it? I tell ye what, could it be the ice-cream van? Maybe they were passing and heard the van coming. It stops outside the wee boy’s garden.”

“Really?” She was glad he hadn’t pressed her about her career.

He shooed her out onto the pavement and lifted his fold-down counter, following her down the step to show her. “There.” He was peering past Gina Wilcox’s house. “See the wee lane?”

Paddy couldn’t see it at first. She had to strain her eyes through the soupy dark to see the triple railings along the far side of Gina’s garden. There was a lane down the side of it.

“That lane leads straight to the main road. The ice-cream van stops just there.” He indicated the curb across the road from Gina’s house. “Stops there at the back of twelve every day and then at half four again.” He looked at her. “That’s when the wee man went missing, eh?”

Paddy nodded. “Aye, back of twelve, right enough. Don’t know if those boys’d have money for a van, though.”

“Aye, well, Hughie keeps a penny tray for the poorer weans.” She wondered how he knew so much about it, and he saw the questioning look. “We fell out about it,” he explained. “The penny tray was my idea in the first place. His rounds are earlier than mine, so he takes all the custom. He’s a snipey bastard.”

She pointed at his quiff. “Were you a Teddy boy, then?”

“I am a Teddy boy,” he said indignantly. “Ye don’t stop being what ye are because it’s out of fashion.”

She looked at his feet and only then noticed his drainpipe trousers and crepe soles. “God, you’re very loyal to your style.”

“And why not? Tell me this: Who’s as good as Elvis now? Who can sing like Carl Perkins these days? None of them.”

Paddy smiled at his abrupt energy. “So, I suppose.”

“What’s your favorite Frankie Vaughan song?”

She shrugged. “Don’t know any.”

He was disappointed. It had been a test question, she could tell. “Ye don’t know any Frankie Vaughan? Not know ‘Mr. Moonlight’? Young folk today, I don’t know. Do you know what he did for this city?”

“Aye, I know, that I know.” The crooner Frankie Vaughan had been so appalled at the levels of violence when he played Glasgow in the fifties that he met the gang leaders and appealed to them to hand in their weapons. He became a totem for peace but was mostly now remembered by those who had caused the trouble in the first place.

“You young ones, yees don’t know music at all. I bet you’re one of they punkers.”

Paddy laughed. “Punk was a hundred years ago.”

“Drug music, that’s what it is. Frankie should come back here and set them right.” He did a little tap dance move, raising a hand, extending a foot, and they laughed together in the soft dark. Paddy wished she didn’t ever have to go home.

The van man waved her off and closed up his back door, driving off up the street and leaving her alone.

She wandered up the road, chewing through the frothy Refreshers, and looked into the alley. Beyond the houses and the small back gardens she could see the yellow lights of the main road and the bus stop from Barnhill. The boys could easily have got off there and wandered through to the van. She hadn’t read the scheme properly at all. She was wasting her time.

As Paddy walked to the train station she felt all her future hopes fade. She was too naive to make it as a journalist. She should have known Heather would use the story. Any good journalist would have, anyone who wasn’t destined to spend the rest of their career writing obituaries or fashion tips about hemlines and tweed. She’d never make it. She’d have to marry Sean and raise a hundred pyromaniac kids like Mrs. Breslin.

The platform for the low-level train was crammed with people. Paddy joined the end of the crowd of commuters gathered on the stairs. Standing in the dull subterranean light, resting her hip against the damp railing, she tried not to speculate about her mother’s or Sean’s reaction to her when she got home. All around her on the stairs people were reading papers with headlines about the Baby Brian Boys. It would be particularly hard, she thought, to be a child in trouble with no one to defend you but Callum Ogilvy’s mother.

Paddy couldn’t recall her name but she remembered her well. After the funeral mass for Callum’s father the mourners had gone back to the Ogilvy house. It was dark and dank and poor. Wallpaper had been pulled off in the hall and living room and left on the floor.

By way of a drink, Sean’s Auntie Maggie had dished out whisky from a bottle she had brought herself. There weren’t any glasses in the house; they had to use chipped mugs and pastel plastic children’s beakers. Paddy’s beaker hadn’t been washed out properly, and a crescent of dried milk floated to the surface, clouding the whisky.

Callum’s mother had long, straggly hair that hung from a center parting over her face, slicing away cheekbones and jaw, leaving her as nothing but a pair of dead, wet eyes and bloodless lips. Sometimes her face would slacken, her mouth would fall open, and she would weep, exhausted. She helped herself to other people’s cups from the table, getting drunk quickly, disgracing herself. Sean said that she’d been like that before the father died, she’d been like that for a long time, and everybody already knew about it. The mourners had stayed on just as long as was polite and all left at the same time, lifting from the dirty Barnhill house as suddenly as a startled flock of birds.

Paddy had a grudging respect for irresponsible mothers. It wasn’t much of a job. Every mother she knew was anxious and fretful and never any fun at all. She tried hard to be respectful of Trisha, tried to appreciate and thank her for all she did, but couldn’t stop herself sniggering along when Marty and Gerald made fun of her. All the mothers she knew worked unlauded all their lives, aging before anyone else in the family, until the only thing that differentiated them from old, old men was a perm and a set of earrings.

The train arrived and the commuters pressed forward, carrying Paddy along on the flow of bodies. She wished she could turn back and run up to Albion Street and hide in the office. She was one of the last people to squeeze through the carriage doors before they shut.

As the train pulled away from the platform she imagined herself, wearing smart clothes and a miraculous half-foot taller, swaggering into glamorous rooms with a pan-scope stretched body, asking pertinent questions and writing important articles. All the fantasies felt hollow this evening. She had an ominous sense that a shadow had marked her, that everything was fated to go wrong from here on in. Luck could curdle, she knew. The train pulled out of the dark station, dragging her homeward, delivering her to her people.

It was raining hard by the time the train reached Rutherglen, washing away the pretty remains of the snow. Paddy followed the crowd up the steep stairs to the covered bridge.

A crowd of drunks were gathered outside the Tower Bar, a backstreet pub with an entrance next to the public toilets. A recent patron of possibly both establishments was trying to zip up his bomber jacket, attempting again and again to dock the pin in the eye, swaying with the effort of concentration. Another man, the father of a boy she had been at Trinity with, was carefully watching the action, hugging a carryout of two beer cans. Paddy was glad she had her duffel coat hood up— he might have recognized her and tried to speak to her. Eventually the man carrying the party tins lost patience, cut across the straggling crowd coming from the train, and headed up the narrow alley to the Main Street, hurriedly followed by the drunk dresser, yanking his jacket straight.

Rutherglen Main Street’s pavements were broad, a reminder of the market past of the town, when its royal charter set it up as a rival to the nearby village of Glasgow. Little of the original town remained. The long winding tail of West Main Street, lined with drovers’ cottages and pubs built when Mary of Guise was on the throne, had been knocked down and tarmac’d to make a large new road to other parts of the Southside. In the course of one development, Rutherglen had gone from an ancient market town to an intersection.

Men and women from Castlemilk, the new housing scheme just up the road, would come down to find Republican and Unionist pubs, or pubs that sold drink in the big quarter-gill measures instead of the English eighth. Rolling down the hill to Rutherglen was always less problematic than rolling back up again; after lunchtime and evening closing the Main Street was littered with drunks sleeping on benches, collapsed on pavements, or wide awake and causing grief in shops.

Paddy passed bus stops where waiting workers spilled out onto the road, peering up the street through the rain, watching anxiously for the right number. She passed Granny Annie’s dark house and headed up to Gallowflat Street.

Sean lived in a ground-floor tenement flat. Like Paddy, he was the youngest of a large family, but all his siblings had married and left home, and he was the last one left. His mother was a widow and had swapped her council house for the three-bedroom flat she found easier to keep. When she wasn’t at home fussing around her precious Sean, she poured all her extra energy into fund-raising for the White Fathers’ African missions and other charities. Natural disasters were her favorites.

Through the living room window, Paddy could hear the Nationwide theme coming from the Ogilvys’ television. The kitchen window was steamed opaque and propped open with a can of beans; the smell of cabbage and pissy boiled washing powder seeped through the narrow opening. Paddy stopped outside the close, resting one foot on the stair, and took a breath. This was best, coming here first. Sean might even come home with her and show her mum that the Ogilvys weren’t angry. She thought of Sean’s face and felt a great burst of love. She’d never wanted to see him more. She walked up the close and took a breath before pressing the bell.

Mimi Ogilvy opened the door and let out a muted eek when she saw Paddy. She had always pretended to like her prospective daughter-in-law because she was a Meehan, but she had confided in Sean that she didn’t approve of Paddy having a job with career prospects. It made her seem fast.