The Walk Home (19 page)

“Go on. You get started on the walls. But you make them prettier than that, Okay?”

“Jozef!”

Tomas shouted from the back step:

“You hear that?”

The driver was outside in the delivery van, leaning on the horn as Jozef came down the front steps.

“Did you knock? I didn’t hear you.” He glanced at the time on the church clock, irritated; the man was late, but that was hardly his fault.

“I’ve been out here ages. I’ve been held up already this morning.” The man gestured with his head, over in the direction he’d come from.

He wasn’t Scottish, or not originally; brown-skinned, maybe Asian. He was suffering in the heat, in any case. He said:

“You help me unload, so I can get going.”

The driver opened the van doors on a stack of new radiators, but Jozef didn’t need more of those.

“We ordered thermostats only.”

“Christ’s sake!”

The man swore with a Glasgow accent, so he must have been living here a while. He slammed the van doors shut, and the noise brought Tomas outside, Stevie too, a few paces behind.

“Everything all right?” Tomas made himself broad on the bottom step, but Jozef stood him down:

“Just a mix-up. A traffic hold-up.”

“Not traffic,” the driver cut in. “It was a marching band. Bloody idiots. I took a back route to be fast, and then I got stuck. Three cars behind me, idiots in front. Hear them?”

He put a hand up to them all to be quiet, and sure enough, there it was: music to march to, just like the man said. Jozef turned to Tomas, who nodded because he’d heard it, and then up to Stevie on the top step, who shifted a little, as though under scrutiny.

The driver stood and regarded them a moment, taking in who he was dealing with: two grey-haired Poles and a skinny Glasgow boy in badly patched trousers. He kept his eyes on the boy especially, before he turned back to Jozef:

“Your first summer here, am I right? It’s like this every July. Like we’re in bloody Belfast. You ask him there.”

He pointed at Stevie.

“Ask anyone local. That band out this morning, they’re only bloody practising. Next Saturday, first July weekend, that’s the big one, right?”

He directed his question up the steps, but Stevie was turning
his back, retreating into the house, so then the driver shook his head, dismissive, and passed Jozef a returns form.

“They’re not even allowed to march today, you know that?”

He spoke low, as though for Jozef’s ears alone.

“They have their big parade next Saturday, they hold up the city, the whole day. Make their noise, make everybody annoyed. They’re not allowed on the street before that.”

“What’s he saying now?”

Tomas stepped forward but the man was getting into his van again, still shaking his head, as though he had no more time for them. He pointed up to the doorway, empty now.

“Like I said. You should ask that boy.”

Stevie was in the big room when they got inside, wiping down the walls ready to render them, buckets and tools already beside him. Tomas asked:

“What was all that about?”

“Nothin tae dae wae me, pal.”

The boy wrung out his cloth, keeping on with the task at hand. Jozef thought he and Tomas should be doing that too, back in the kitchen, but Tomas wasn’t satisfied.

“The driver said we should ask you. Why?”

No reply. So then the three of them were quiet. Jozef wasn’t sure they would get more out of Stevie this morning, or that he wanted to hear more either; it seemed like there was always more about this boy than he’d bargained for. He said:

“We’ve all got lots to get through.”

No profit in making things complicated.

“Just one more week, then we’re all out of here, yes?”

This was directed more at Tomas, but it was the boy who nodded.

He was still working, and forbidden or not, the band was still marching, rattling away, off in the distance. Stevie glanced behind him, sharp, at the open window. He strode across and pulled it shut, then went into the kitchen to refill his buckets.

Brenda worried about Lindsey. It had taken all her good offices to get the girl talking to Graham. Promises had been made, Graham had given his word, Malky had even fetched his drum from the lockers in the snooker club. It sat unused these days, shut in Brenda’s hallway cupboard, but the girl and Stevie were still living in her spare room. It had been weeks now.

Malky had got Graham coming round, morning and evening, thinking it might help if he lent a hand, getting Stevie up for school or putting him to bed. But Graham couldn’t push it too far because Lindsey was quick to take offence.

“What’s he doing here again?”

She’d point at him in the doorway, saying:

“I’m not wanting help. Not his kind anyhow.”

She was hurtful; back to the hurt young thing she’d been when she first arrived from Ireland.

Lindsey claimed she still had cleaning jobs, but Brenda wasn’t so sure that was true any more. She’d been such a busy thing, full of bright purpose, but it seemed like days could pass now, with her just sitting on the sofa, face uncertain, pale against the cushions. She’d be there when Brenda left for work, and still there when Brenda got back, like she had nothing to do, nothing to put a hand to, until Stevie came in from school.

The girl had her stumped: Lindsey didn’t want Graham doing too much for the boy, but it was like she didn’t know what to do for Stevie either. Brenda remembered how she used to hoik him about on her hip, carrying him with her from job to job, room to room, while she sorted and tidied and hoovered. Now Lindsey stared blank-faced at her son when he came in the door; taken aback, like it had slipped her mind how much he’d grown.

Stevie was still skinny, most likely he always would be, but his arms and legs were long now, not long till he’d be in secondary, and he’d lost that soft boy’s face, it had been replaced by sharper angles in his young brow and cheekbones. When he sat at the table he was all shoulder blades and elbows, and he was always hungry, shovelling his platefuls in a hurry, too big for sitting on her lap. Lindsey sat across from him at mealtimes, like she didn’t know what to make of him.

Brenda had done the same, four times over, and she knew how it felt: like you’d lost something that used to be your own.

So she told her:

“Boys grow up, so they do.” One night while they were clearing the table, and she gave the girl a small smile, as much to say she’d survived it.

“They come back tae you, hen. In their ain time. Still the same, but different as well. Us mothers, we just have tae wait it out.”

Brenda meant it as a comfort, that she’d wait it out with her.
Only Lindsey was looking at her from across the table, plates in hand and her small face helpless, like she couldn’t see herself cope with that. It was just too hard, all of this: marriage and motherhood, the scheme and band, the hooded man, and no wee boy to hold on to, nothing that was hers, she shook her head:

“I never meant for him to grow up here.”

“I know that.”

“Time’s gone so fast. I should never have let it go past.” Lindsey said it like she’d failed him. “Maybe I’m no cut out.”

“Ach.” Brenda put down the glasses, held out her arms, telling her: “Course you are. You’re Stevie’s Mum, you’ll do what’s best for him.” As much as to say that’s what mothers did.

But Lindsey shook her head again:

“You and yours maybe, aye. Not mine.”

It gave Brenda a start, that lost look she gave her: the girl’s Mum had gone, she’d left her, and with that father as well, which was just about the worst thing. So Brenda nodded. She let her arms fall, and then they both just stood there a moment.

“Sorry, hen.”

“Don’t be. You’ve no need.”

The girl sighed, and Brenda hoped she might let herself be held now: all these years Lindsey had been here, Brenda thought she’d been making life better for her, that they all had. Only here she was now, saying:

“They grow apart. Kids and their parents.” Blunt-voiced, speaking from experience. “It’s part of life’s pain. That’s what Eric says.”

It was an Eric way to put it, an Eric way to look at it, right enough. So then Brenda stepped over and pulled Lindsey close.

“Don’t heed my brother too much, will you?”

It had started to frighten her, how much Lindsey spoke like him.

The girl was too much like Eric at his lowest ebb, and Eric’s was just about the only place she went these days: he still had her looking through his sketches.

Her brother had a gift, Brenda had always known it, even if his pictures were mostly too dark for her to like. He saw the dark in things, in people, and it wasn’t that she thought he was wrong to draw it, she just wouldn’t want that on her walls.

“Hard tae look at the world like that.”

She told Lindsey as much, a few days later, when it was just the two of them out to get the messages. Brenda wanted Lindsey to get out more, and not just to Eric’s, so she chivvied her to come on chores at least, up and down the scheme steps. No sense sitting inside, getting nowhere but lower; Brenda even had half a mind to take her cleaning, like she had in their early days.

Back then she’d been glad that Lindsey went to her brother’s. The girl had been a friend to him, but Brenda wasn’t at all sure Eric could do the same in return.

“Dinnae get me wrong, hen.”

Brenda loved him, and dearly, but she knew he wasn’t to be relied upon, not in life’s tight spots:

“He just gets caught up in his own mind.”

Forewarned was forearmed, so she told Lindsey while they walked: how the worst of Eric’s episodes was after Franny died, but it wasn’t the first time he got ill.

“That was when he was still at school. Daen his Highers. He tellt you this?”

Lindsey shook her head, squinting a bit, and Brenda shifted her bags from hand to hand, saying:

“Didnae think so. Best you know, but.”

All his teachers predicted high grades and proud achievements, but when it came to his exams, he couldn’t write, couldn’t put a thing down on the paper, not a word or a number.

“Eric never tellt anywan at the time either.”

Even when it happened in every subject. He just sat in the hall and watched the clock, and when the exams were over and done with, he wouldn’t leave the house.

They stopped a moment at the corner; Brenda to catch her breath, and give her carrying arm a rest, and Lindsey to ask:

“So then what?”

“Ach, weeks it went on for.”

Silence from Eric, worry and fury from her parents. They never called on any doctors, and Brenda didn’t know if that was out of ignorance or shame, but she tried explaining to the girl just the same: how her parents had always got up and got on with life, through everything. Dispossession, emigration, war and shortages, rehousing.

“Far worse than a few exams.”

“Might have guessed.” Lindsey nodded, picking up Brenda’s shopping, like she already knew where this was going. “Papa Robert never was for understanding. Good thing Eric got away from him.”

Only Brenda hadn’t meant to blame her Dad. That wasn’t what she’d been after. She even felt for him, looking back, especially to when the results came in, and all the money he’d scraped together for Eric’s High School years came to nothing. So she told Lindsey:

“It wasnae that, hen.”

The girl was walking ahead, and Brenda fell into stride beside her:

“My parents. It was beyond their ken, aye?”

Eric had gone to the good school and got beyond them, the
whole family, even before he left Drumchapel. And they’d thrown up their hands first, they’d despaired. But then they’d just got on with the days, because the days kept coming: work and meals and chores and sleep.

“Dae you see?”

Brenda wanted Lindsey to understand, how it was with Eric: that he’d long had these episodes and the family had to learn to weather them, not be taken down by them as well.

“Best no get yoursel pulled under,” Brenda told her.

It wasn’t the nicest thing to say about her brother, and Brenda wasn’t sure; maybe the girl thought she was being disloyal. Lindsey stuck by Eric, she didn’t like to hear bad about him. But Papa Robert hadn’t always done the wrong thing by him, and Brenda thought she had the girl’s ear now, so she told her: