Exile (5 page)

After Liam found her in the hall cupboard in Garnethill and carried her into hospital wrapped in a blanket, whispering comfort and baptizing her with his tears, Leslie was the first person to visit and she kept on coming. She worked her shifts at the shelter around visit times, bringing magazines and nice food and spending time with her. But even Leslie couldn’t stop the dreams or the fear or the panicked terror or the screaming at night. Winnie came to visit, sobbing loudly, drunk and drunker, attracting pitying glances from the patients. Una came to visit and brought Alistair. They smiled nervously and left quickly. Marie, their oldest sister, couldn’t make it up from London. Busy time at the bank.

Maureen had been in hospital for weeks when Alistair came to visit alone. He betrayed his promise to Una and told the doctors that this had happened before. Maureen was ten when the family found her locked in the cupboard under the stairs. Winnie jimmied it open and pulled her out by her leg as Marie and Una stood by. Maureen had a long bruise on the side of her face and when they gave her a bath they found dried blood between her legs. No one knew what had happened but Michael left Glasgow for good, taking the checkbook, and never contacted them again. Winnie didn’t have to tell them it was a secret: the children knew instinctively. No one had mentioned it again until Una took Alistair into her confidence and he took it upon himself to tell Maureen’s doctors.

It made sense of everything — Maureen’s horror of people stealing into her room when she was sleeping, of the smell of drink in a certain light, of the dreams of prying fingers and hush and fumble in the dark. He had panicked when he saw the blood. She remembered the fist on the side of her head, the blankets of white behind her eyes, being lifted and locked in and left alone with the smell of blood, hoping she would die before he got back. When the fresh horror of the hospital and the breakdown subsided, what hurt her most was that in her memory Michael hadn’t been responding to an uncontrollable urge. The abuse was half-hearted, as if he was just having a go, just road testing a fresh form of dissipation.

Since the day Alistair came to see the doctors in hospital Maureen had always believed that Michael had made her bleed by ripping her inside with a ragged fingernail. It wasn’t until later, much later, when she attacked Angus and he had shouted it at her, that she considered the other possibility. Angus said that Michael had raped her. The dreams and the signs all pointed to it, and in her heart she knew it might be true. It shouldn’t matter, she told herself — it hurt and she bled and that was all. She was a child, and children don’t perceive sex as centering on penetration. Priests and lawyers and gynecologists do, but children don’t. The possibility that he raped her shouldn’t make any difference but it did, it mattered terribly. The possibility violated her in ways she couldn’t name.

Winnie had made it clear at the hospital that she didn’t believe Michael had abused Maureen, and Maureen dearly wanted her to be right. It was easier to believe that she herself was wrong and leave the world intact. She slid back into darkness like sand into the second chamber. And all this time Leslie came, as inexorable as a lava flow. She got Maureen to write a list of the reasons why she wasn’t making it all up. She brought books about surviving and articles about families’ reactions to disclosure. She told Maureen that she wasn’t the only one who didn’t want to believe it: no one wanted to; no one wanted to know about abuse.

Maureen was at a disadvantage because Leslie had seen her at her lowest point. She saw Leslie pity other patients, avoiding them, grimacing openly as Pauline walked towards them in the grounds wearing shorts. She had never once looked at Maureen like that but, then, Pauline was hard not to pity. Admitted to the hospital weighing five stone and aiming for three, Pauline could never bring herself to tell the police what her father and brother had been doing. If her mother found out it would kill her. She had been discharged for all of two weeks when a woman out walking her dog found her in the scraggy woods near her house. She was under a tree, curled up into a ball, her face covered by her skirt. She had dried spunk on her back and the police thought she had been murdered until they found the letter in the house, a vague, heartbroken ramble about bad feelings and difficulty coping.

Leslie hadn’t come to the funeral, she had said she wouldn’t be able to keep her mouth shut, and they had all decided not to tell her mother. It had been Pauline’s only ambition. Her mother cried so hard she burst the blood vessels in her eye. The father stood next to her on the bench, squeezing her shoulder when her sobs became too loud. The brothers wore cheap suits and hurried to get outside and have a fag, missing the lineup by the door. No one at the funeral knew which of the brothers had been raping her. Pauline never told. The family huddled in the pub after the service, silently sipping whiskey and smoking hard. Liam insisted on buying the father a pint and slipped two tabs of acid into it. Months later, they heard through the grapevine that the father had gone mad with grief and had been hospitalized himself.

Leslie relished that small, vicious gesture. In all the time Maureen had known her, Leslie had always talked lovingly about direct action and how she’d like to blow this up and stab that one and lead the revolution. The only time either of them had attempted anything was when they came up against Angus Farrell. Angus had killed Douglas and a dear man called Martin but they couldn’t turn him in. He had done it to cover up his systematic rape of the women on the ward at the Northern psychiatric hospital, knowing that none of the deeply damaged women could give credible evidence against him. Maureen and Leslie went after him themselves, luring him to the tiny seaside town of Millport on the Isle of Cumbrae, but Leslie lost her bottle at the last minute, saying she knew she’d freeze if she had to do anything but sit with Siobhain. Maureen had attacked Angus alone.

They had all that history between them, knew so much about each other, and Maureen felt sure they would get over Leslie’s bad-choice boyfriend. It was Hogmanay before she finally realized that Cammy wasn’t a blip, that their friendship was really dying.

Millennium Hogmanay was not Liam’s most auspicious social outing. There was a bad dry on, and demand for party drugs was exceptionally high. It seemed that everyone in Glasgow wanted to celebrate two thousand years of the Christian message by getting completely out of it. Liam had retired from dealing several months before; he still had a lot of contacts but even he couldn’t get a deal. Unused to drinking without chemical enhancement, he got completely off his face by half ten.

Liam had never hosted a party before; he’d only recently admitted to having access to the rest of the house. During his dark dealing days, he had left the first floor of the four-story town house as worn and dirty as it was when he bought it. He kept the partition at the foot of the stairs to give his many dodgy visitors the impression that upstairs was a separate flat. He had been raided during the investigation into Douglas’s murder and the police had scared the living shit out of him. They brought dogs and ripped up the floorboards. They strip-searched him and his girlfriend. They talked to all his neighbors and told them why they were there. They emptied every cupboard in the house, tipped over every box and container. It was a long time afterwards before he told Maureen that they’d found his scuddy mags under his towels in the bathroom. They weren’t anything special but they showed them to Maggie and made her look at them. He didn’t need to explain to Maureen why it hurt him so much. They’d searched her house too, found her vibrators and gone to the trouble of leaving them in a neat pile. She hadn’t had a carefree wank since.

Liam retired almost immediately afterwards. He managed to get back into university to study film, despite having accepted several grant checks before dropping out of law school years before. He spent his free time between lectures renovating the house. It was beautiful. He unnailed the wooden window shutters so that they worked again, stripped the flock wallpaper and painted the bare plaster vellum yellow. The carpets, sticky from thirty years of shuffling feet and a thousand small spills, were lifted, the floorboards sanded and varnished. He bought a job lot of Victorian armchairs in an auction and the millennium party was his chance to christen the house. Leslie arrived at ten past eleven with Cammy.

Cammy had all the equipment: he was tall and slim and blond but nature had played a cruel joke and made him an idiot. He smeared his fringe into a spiky comb on his forehead, wore a football top over straight-leg denims and had a recurring spot on the back of his neck that required urgent medical attention. Intimidated by the grand surroundings, he decided that Maureen and Liam were massively over-privileged parasites. He asked Liam whether his daddy had left him the house and Liam, pissed and unaware of the accusatory tone, laughed like a drain and said, yeah, that was right, his da gave it to him. Then Leslie took off her biker’s jacket. Liam took in her change of style and asked why she was dressed like a whores’ shop steward. Leslie’s offense was lost in the memory of the night because Liam went on to greater glories. He chucked Maggie twenty minutes before the bells, saying she was too good for him, too good, and anyway, he was still in love with Lynn. Lynn heard him and was furious, said he’d made her look like a scheming cow, and she told Maggie that she’d never go out with him again. Unconsoled, Maggie locked herself in the only functioning toilet, causing a fifteen-minute queue and an inch of urine in the back garden.

Half the party saw in the new century waiting in a queue with their legs crossed.

Leslie and Cammy left Liam’s Hogmanay party at one o’clock, a gesture with the same social connotations as a slap in the face with a dueling glove. At the door on the way out Cammy went to the trouble of telling Maureen that he wished they’d gone somewhere else. She said she wished he had too.

Maureen knew she must have done things wrong, that Leslie wouldn’t treat her like a prick without justification, but she couldn’t think her way through a day at work, much less six months of casual comments. She suspected that Leslie was disappointed and embarrassed by her performance at the shelter. Their friendship was dying and Maureen was too distracted by the past to make it right.

Chapter 7

DRIFTWOOD

They were on the edge of the city center, in what used to be one of the busiest docks in Britain. The area had withered, the houses were run-down and the few shops were transient and dilapidated. Leslie parked the bike around the corner, out of sight of the I so that she could drink and drive without being reported. She kicked down the stand, bending down to chain the bike to a lamppost, leaving Maureen standing alone on the pavement.

Misty, unforgiving rain fluttered nervously around the head of the streetlights. Across the busy road stood a row of tenements with a twenty-four-hour grocer’s on the corner. A huge gray concrete housing scheme loomed above the roof, the little square windows framed with cheap curtains. Designed as a series of reclining rectangles, the flats zigzagged along a straight line, joined end to end by lift shafts, like a futuristic city wall peopled by a plebiscite who could be spared in the event of an attack. The wall blocked the wild south wind from the street and squally vortexes had formed in the vacuum, sweeping the litter back and forth. On fine summer evenings plastic bags hovered twenty feet above the tenement for hours at a time, trapped in updrafts and crosswinds. Maureen flapped the skirt of her coat open and shut, trying to shake off the worst of the weather.

“Is that a new coat?” asked Leslie.

Maureen nodded.

“Nice,” said Leslie. “Douglas’s money?”

“Yeah.” Maureen smiled. “From rags to bigger rags.”

Leslie blanked her and put the helmets in the luggage box, clipped the padlock shut and led Maureen round the corner. They opened the door and stepped into the Driftwood restaurant, leaving the damp night behind them.

The Driftwood looked like a lifelong dream swallowing a redundancy check. It was a tiny room with big windows onto the dirty street, little tables covered in wax cloth and candles in Perrier bottles. It served tempting fusion food but charged next to nothing because it was in exactly the wrong place. Maureen and Leslie were the only paying customers. A chef in a T-shirt and checked trousers sat at a table near the bar, reading a tabloid and eating a bowl of soup. A pretty blond waitress fluttered across the floor, whipping the menus from behind the bar as she came towards them. “For two?”

“Yes, please,” said Maureen.

She sat them at a table by the window. The convection heaters were blowing as hard as they could but Maureen and Leslie had to keep their coats on. The waitress apologized for the cold and promised them that the place would heat up soon. “We’re not long opened,” she explained, and took their drinks order.

Maureen looked around at the tasteful orange walls and the candlelit tables. Behind the bright bar the waitress danced their drinks ready in a series of bunny dips and graceful swoops. “How did ye find this place?” she asked.

“I come here with Cammy.” Leslie looked at the menu. “The goat cheese salad’s nice.”

“I’ll have that, then,” said Maureen, shutting the menu without reading it. She didn’t want to eat, couldn’t be arsed fighting with Leslie about it, and a cheese salad seemed as good a thing to leave as anything else.

“I think I’ll have a steak,” said Leslie. “Keep my strength up.”

She smiled at Maureen, a weak and guilty smile, and Maureen thought she’d save her the bother of working around to it. “Why are we really here?” she asked.

“Well”—Leslie looked hopefully at the waitress but the drinks weren’t ready—”it’s not just for steak. It’s Ann. See, her man said he didn’t hit her and he didn’t write to her, says he never lifted a finger.”

“Leslie,” said Maureen wearily, “what’s the fucking deal with Ann? Will you just tell me?”

“He said he didn’t hit her,” repeated Leslie firmly.