Exile (6 page)

They sat in silence until the waitress came over with their drinks on a rubberized tray. “Whiskey and lime for you,” she said, placing the glass in front of Maureen, “and a vodka and soda for yourself.”

Leslie took the drink and ordered their food. Maureen watched her make eye contact with the waitress and smile, fresh and open-faced. She hadn’t seen her look like that for a long time. The waitress finished writing their order and backed off, leaving them alone together with the miles between them.

“Okay, so her man says he didn’t hit her,” said Maureen, trying to kill the fractious pause. “Suppose he’s telling the truth? Could someone else have hit her? Maybe a boyfriend?”

Leslie looked incredulous. “Fucking hell, Maureen. The men never admit to hitting these women, but that doesn’t mean they don’t do it.”

“No,” said Maureen, feeling slighted, “but she’d hardly tell us a story that complicated, would she? She’d just say it was her man. If she had a boyfriend she could be with him now. Why didn’t she bring her weans when she left?”

“Well, I don’t know,” Leslie said sarcastically. “Maybe running away with four kids is more complicated than running away alone.”

And that one snide comment was enough. Maureen could be home in twenty minutes if she walked. “What are you in a fucking nippy mood with me for?” she said.

Leslie didn’t answer.

“You’re always in a fucking bad mood these days,” continued Maureen. “Ye never want to see me or talk to me or do anything.”

Leslie lit a fag and looked out of the window, her mouth slackening as if she was going to speak. Maureen took a mouthful of whiskey and sat back. She waited, only half expecting an answer. Leslie scratched her nose and looked over her shoulder for the waitress.

“I think the least we can do is go and ask her man about it. He lives in the big scheme,” said Leslie, magnanimously letting Maureen’s difficult mood go. “I’d go myself but if he was hanging about the office he might have seen me.”

He could just as easily have seen Maureen at the office, but that didn’t seem to have occurred to Leslie.

“Where does he live?” asked Maureen.

Leslie pointed over Maureen’s shoulder. “Over the road.”

“And you want me to go?”

“We’re here now. Just don’t go into the house. If he looks like trouble just run like fuck.”

“I don’t like this,” said Maureen.

Leslie misunderstood and thought Maureen was telling her she was scared. She hated it when Maureen admitted to being frightened: she was letting her down, leaving the door open and letting the fear in. “You’ll be fine.” She sniggered. “He’s puny.”

“He looks beefy enough in the photo,” muttered Maureen.

Leslie looked at her. “What photo?”

“The picture.”

Leslie was still puzzled.

“The Polaroid she left behind,” said Maureen. “The one with the wee boy in the school playground.”

Leslie thought about it. “Oh,” she smiled, spontaneous and honest, “that’s not him.”

They looked at each other. Leslie knew what the guy looked like but she’d never met him. She had asked for Ann as a resident when she was on a tiny budget. She let Ann get pissed and smash around the house when she’d put others out for less and she wasn’t about to tell Maureen why. Maureen finished her whiskey. “You’re lying to me, Leslie,” she said quietly, “and I know you’re lying. If I get my face kicked in because of it I’ll never forgive you.”

Leslie could tell her the truth now but she didn’t. “He’s a skinny guy,” she said, looking at the table. “Really skinny. I promise.”

Maureen nodded. “Anything else you can be arsed telling me?”

Leslie shook her head at the table.

“Well, give us the fucking address, then.”

“You don’t need to go now, your food’s coming.”

“I don’t want it, you have it.”

Leslie pulled a scrap of paper out of her pocket with an address Biroed on it. Maureen snatched it away, stood up and pulled on her damp scarf.

“You’ll want a proper drink when you get back.” Leslie smiled hopefully. “I’ll wait in the Grove. I’ll have a drink ready for ye. I’ll drive ye home.”

“Do what ye like,” said Maureen, and left.

Chapter 8

JOHN

She stopped on the edge of the pavement, waiting for a break in the traffic. Fat, freezing lumps of rain began to fall, seeping through her hair to her scalp, sending a shocked chill down her spine. She felt in her pocket for her stabbing comb, a metal one with a sharpened handle that Leslie had given her to use in self-defense. She found the head and grasped it, giving it a little squeeze, pressing the teeth into her palm to comfort herself. The sharp point was making a hole in her new coat pocket but she liked to keep it with her.

The scheme loomed over the street. Brilliant spotlights beamed skyward from the high roof, alerting passing helicopters and blinding pedestrians at a glance. Maureen couldn’t recall ever having heard a story about the scheme. Bad schemes had elaborate mythologies, tales of rapes and crucifixions, of vicious gangs and gangster families and neighbors dead for months behind the door. Good schemes, like good families, had no history. A giggling couple in their forties stopped farther down the pavement. The woman wore a thin dress and had the man’s jacket over her shoulders, as if she’d come out for a drink in June and had been caught out by the change of season. The traffic thinned and Maureen crossed over.

The entrance to the flats was down a set of stairs and across a concrete-slabbed yard. At the base of the block a row of shops sat boarded up and empty. Only the solicitor’s and a cut-price fag shop were doing any business. Maureen picked her way across the uneven paving stones, avoiding the treacherous puddles, and opened the door into a white-tiled foyer. The lift call button had been melted with a lighter. She pressed it and a distant red light signaled to her from behind the lumpy blackened plastic.

She looked at the address on the scrap of paper. Leslie had scribbled “thanks” at the bottom, as if Maureen were a vestigial friend doing her a favor, an unhappy reminder of the gray time before Cammy and the bracing breeze in her cleavage. The lift arrived and she stepped in, pressing the button for the second floor. As the doors slid shut she was engulfed in a cloud of dried ammoniacal urine. Someone had been pissing in an ambitious arch, trying and failing to reach a felt-tipped IRA slogan on the wall. A wet cloth would have wiped it off but he probably didn’t have one handy in his trousers. The doors opened on the second floor and she stepped out quickly, anxious to escape the sharp smell.

A gray concrete veranda stretched away from the lift, overlooking the busy main road. The long gallery of front doors was interspersed with small bathroom windows glazed in mottled glass. One or two of the doors had been customized, painted and fitted with fancy doorbells and alarms, letting the neighbors know that it was a bought house. Number eighty-two had not been customized. The door had been painted with thin red gloss a long time ago. Time and the weather had dried it, lifting the luster, cracking and flaking it off the wood. The bell had been ripped out of the door frame, leaving an empty socket in the joist.

Maureen chapped lightly, glancing down the corridor and reminding herself where the stair exit was. The door opened a crack and a tall, skinny man looked out at her. His eyes were open a little too wide and underlined by dark purple hollows, lending him the look of a startled pigeon. Leslie had been right: he wasn’t the robust man in the Polaroid, he was a lifeless sliver of a man. He blinked, glancing behind her to see if she was alone. “Aye?” he said, brushing his thinning hair back from his face, tentative, expecting trouble.

Maureen smiled. “Is Ann in?”

“She doesn’t live here anymore.”

“D’ye know where I could get a hold of her?”

From deep inside the house came the noise of something falling heavily onto a solid floor and a child began to wail. The gray man took a deep breath, turned back into the flat and left the door to fall open. The living room was bare, the grimy hardboard floor dotted with offcuts of carpet. The wallpaper had been ripped off, leaving papery patches on the gray plaster, and in place of a sofa stood a plastic child’s stool and a worn brown armchair. The house was a testament to long-term poverty. Maureen thought of Ann and wondered how many desperate schemes had been hatched and abandoned here, how many fights about spending, how many distant relatives and lapsed friends had been considered for a tap. A blue sports bag sitting against the far wall caught her eye. The green and white sticker looped around the handle seemed familiar and troubling somehow. Intrigued, Maureen stepped into the hall, pulling the front door shut behind her.

The man was standing over two tiny boys with Ann’s clashing pink skin and fluffy yellow hair. They were babies, much younger than the boy in the Polaroid, and were thin, their rib cages visible under their skin, their baby fat eaten away by need. The man had been in the middle of changing them into their nightclothes when Maureen knocked. They were standing close to each other, chewing furiously on their dummies, their little button eyes flicking nervously around the room. The older brother was three at most and knew he was in trouble. A skin-colored Tupperware beaker lolled on the floor, the hardboard discolored by a spill of red juice. The man grabbed the boys and slapped the back of their legs, keeping time with the blows as he shouted, “All — fuckin’ — day — ye — been — windin’ — me — up.”

The boys raised their faces to the ceiling and bawled, their dummies sitting precariously in their open mouths as they found each other and held on tightly. Maureen hovered uncertainly in the doorway. “Are ye just looking after the weans yoursel’?” she asked.

He turned and shouted at her, exasperated, “I’m doing the best I can,” he said. “Their fucking ma’s no’ here, is she?”

“D’ye know there’s a nursery down the road?”

The man paused. He didn’t know why she was telling him that.

“If you’re not working,” she said, “and you’re looking after them on your own, you’d have a good chance of getting them places.”

Apparently unfamiliar with good news, the man looked worried.

“Ye’d get some time on your own,” she added, wondering about the blue sports bag, wary of looking straight at it.

“Aye?” he said, watching his babies as they forgot what they were crying about and began to pull at a newspaper on the floor. “What’s your name?”

“Maureen. What’s yours?”

“Jimmy.”

He tried to smile at her, sliding his lips back, but his face was too tired to pull it off. He had threateningly sharp teeth, which slanted backwards into his mouth. They looked like a vicious little carnivore’s, naturally selected because they slid deeper into the flesh when the victim resisted.

“I’m going fucking mad here.” He picked up an old pair of Mutant Ninja Turtle pajamas from the cold floor. “What d’ye want Ann for?”

“I owe her some money,” she said.

“You taking the piss out of me?” He said it as if everyone did and he was past caring.

“No.”

“You owe her money?”

Maureen nodded uncertainly. Jimmy knelt down and started to dress the smallest boy, tugging him into his pajamas. The boy chewed his dummy, holding his daddy’s jumper.

“Why are ye really looking for Ann?” he said.

“What makes you think I’m lying?”

Jimmy displayed his sharp little teeth again. “Ann owes everyone on this scheme money. If ye ask me, that’s why she’s off. Last I heard she was living with the Place of Safety people.”

“Place of Safety?”

“Aye.” His voice dropped to a whisper. “She telt them I’d hit her.”

It was painful to watch a man so ready to take a punch.

“Did ye hit her?” she asked.

“No.” He was adamant and Maureen was pleased. “I never hit her. Nor anyone else.”

Maureen thought of him slapping the children, but then remembered that children don’t count as people. She leaned against the wall and felt the sandy texture of plaster rubbing into her shoulder. She stepped back and propped herself against the door frame. “Why would Ann say you hit her if ye didn’t?” She noticed herself changing her accent to speak to him, paring down her language, as if Jimmy was so thick he wouldn’t understand if she spoke normally. She hated herself.

“I don’t know,” said Jimmy, squeezing the child into a pair of tight pajama bottoms. “The police said she’d had a doing. Maybe she wanted to hide.”

“Did ye send her a Christmas card?”

“A card?”

“Yeah.”

Jimmy looked blank and Maureen guessed that he didn’t have an extensive Christmas-card list.

“What are ye asking me these things for? Who are you?”

If he was going to turn nasty now was the time to do it. Maureen was glad she was near the front door and had a five-foot start on him. She mentally rehearsed opening the door and running along the balcony to the stairs. “I work for the Place of Safety,” she said quietly.

Jimmy looked at her and nodded softly. “We’ve had hard times,” he said, “but… Ann knows … I can’t believe she’s going about saying that about me. I’d never hit her. You won’t believe me.” He turned away from her, patted his son’s bottom to let him know he was finished changing him and held out his hand for the older boy to come. The children swapped places on the strip of rug.

“I do believe ye, Jimmy,” she said, and she meant it.

“Ha,” he said, as if he’d never really laughed. “Thousands wouldn’t, eh?”

He looked at her, genuinely expecting a response to an inappropriate cliché. Maureen couldn’t imagine a suitably bland response. “If you didn’t hit Ann,” she said, “can ye think of someone who would?”

“Take your pick. There’s hard men up at this door every night in the fucking week looking for her. I’m left paying her debts while she’s off gallivanting with the child-benefit book. They’ve even threatened the wee ones in the swing park,” he said, yanking his son’s pink little body into worn pajamas. “All I know is that she left here without a mark on her.”

“When did she leave?”

Jimmy thought about it. He thought for a long time. He remembered that one of the boys’ birthdays was on 15 November and Ann wasn’t there for it. But Jimmy had money for presents so he figured that he’d probably had the child-benefit book that week. Ann had disappeared from Finneston around 10 or 11 November.