Exile (7 page)

“That’s a while back,” said Maureen. “Did she go straight to the Place of Safety?”

“I don’t know where she went.” He pulled worn sweatshirts over the boys’ pajamas. It must get cold in the concrete flat at night. “She came back at the start of December for Alan’s birthday. I was at the shops and when I came back she’d been and gone. She telt him she hadn’t been to visit because she was up and down tae London all the time. Could have been a lie, but …” He touched the smallest boy’s head. “There’s plenty on this scheme think I’m lucky because it’s only the drink she’s into.”

Maureen looked around the desperate room, at the filthy bare floor and the cold children and the skinny man bent over them. Jimmy was anything but lucky.

“Can I make ye a cup of tea, Jimmy?”

It had been a long time since anyone had been kind to Jimmy and he didn’t know what it meant. He looked up at her, trying to work out her angle. “There’s nothing worth thieving,” he said.

“I’m just offering to make ye a cup of tea.”

He looked her up and down, licked at the dried spittle in the corner of his mouth and smothered a lascivious smile. He thought she fancied him.

“Aye, hen. A cup of tea. I’ll put the weans to bed.” He hurried the children off, carrying the smallest boy on his hip and holding the other one’s hand, leading them out to the hall. He called back to her from the door, “Don’t use the milk, I’ll need it for the night feed.”

She could hear Jimmy out in the hall encouraging the child up the stairs. She looked around the dirty flat at the broken toys and the worn clothes discarded on the floor. She went into the ragged kitchen. The bulb didn’t work. Light from the street cast a dull orange glow onto the worktop. There was no kettle and no cooker, just a chipped portable grill with a single electric ring on top. Her eyes adjusted to the gloom and she saw a small scale-scarred saucepan in the sink. She filled it from the tap as the red ring came alive, livid in the darkness.

Back in the living room she crossed her arms. There was no TV in the room, no family photos, no books or ornaments or mementos, nothing that wasn’t essential and secondhand. They didn’t even have a radio. Next to the armchair sat a stack of free local newspapers. Jimmy had been tearing them into strips for use as toilet paper. She could hear him through the ceiling, coaxing the children into bed, when she suddenly remembered the blue sports bag with the troubling sticker. It was green and white and looped around the handle. She looked at it. It was a British Airways luggage sticker. Liam used to have them on his bags all the time when he was dealing. She crept over to it. The bag had been from London to Glasgow and the name, in tiny print on the fold, said “Harris.” It was dated less than a week ago. She stepped back and looked at it, trying to reason away the incongruity. Someone might have given him the bag, someone with his name, a family member, but the bag sat as if it had been emptied recently, the base flattened on the floor, the sides flapping open. The scenario made no sense. Jimmy had flown to London on an expensive airline when they were too poor to buy a kettle.

The water was spitting hot but she could only find one mug, with black rings of tea stain inside. She made tea, took it back into the living room, sat down in the chair and lit a cigarette. It was damp and cold in the room. She could hear Jimmy coming down the stairs, leaving the restless children calling for him, answering their pleas with a curt “Shut it.” He sauntered into the living room. He had wet his hair. Maureen stood up and offered him a fag. He took it, bending over her for a light. “You sit,” she said.

Jimmy lifted the mug and sipped, looking up at her as he sat down.

“Jimmy, why does Ann owe so much money?”

“Come on.” He smiled. “Come on, we’ll not talk about her.”

Jimmy didn’t want to talk about kids or Ann or money. He wanted a quick, fumbled fuck with anyone willing and a ten-minute pause in the incessant worry. He held out his hand to her and bared his sharp hunting teeth. Maureen pulled her coat closed. “I want to talk about her,” she said quietly. “That’s why I came.”

Long acclimatized to disappointment, Jimmy let his outstretched hand fall to the side of the chair. “She borrowed money for drink,” he said finally. “Then she borrowed to pay the loan and it got worse and worse and worse. Ann’s not a bad woman. It’s the drink. She’s different when she’s not drinking. When she drinks she’s a cunt.”

“Ye don’t think she could be dead, do ye?”

“I know she’s not. She cashed the child-benefit book on Thursday.”

“In Glasgow?”

“Dunno.” Jimmy sipped his tea despondently. “They don’t tell ye that at the post office, just that it’s been cashed and I can’t get it.”

“Do you think she’ll come back here?”

Jimmy shook his head into his chest. “She’s not coming back.” He sipped the tea, tipping the mug back and grimacing.

“D’ye know where she is?”

“She’s got a sister in London. Maybe she knows.”

“Could I phone her?”

“I dunno if she’s on the phone.”

“What’s her name?”

“Moe Akitza.”

Maureen wrote the sister’s name on a receipt from her pocket and showed Jimmy the spelling. “I think that’s right.” He smiled at her. “Mad name, eh? She married a big darkie.”

She knew if she pressed him he’d claim not to be prejudiced against anyone, except those grasping Pakis, of course. And the freeloading Indians. And the arrogant English. And the drunken Irish. And the suspiciously swarthy. “Well, Jimmy, thanks very much. It was kind of ye to talk to me.”

“Aye,” he said. “Well, I’m pressed as ye can see.”

They smiled at each other to pass the time. Maureen broke it off. “Ye really don’t know where she is, do ye?”

He looked into his empty mug and shook his head.

“D’ye miss her?” she asked.

Jimmy didn’t need time to think about it. “No,” he said, very sure and very sad.

Behind her the front door flew open, letting a cold slap of night air into the living room. Two wee boys with wet hair and filthy faces strolled into the room, their arms at forty-five-degree angles to their small bodies, strutting like miniature hard men. Their clothes were poor, even for scheme kids. Everything they were wearing had approximated to a dull gray color, the result of over-washing in cheap soap. Jimmy warmed and smiled when he saw them and his boys grinned back. “All right, Da?” said the older one. “Where’s our tea?”

Jimmy cupped a gentle hand around the back of the bigger boy’s head and swept him along into the dark kitchen. The younger one stayed in the living room and looked up at Maureen. He was the boy from the Polaroid photo, the boy holding the hand of the big man in the camel-hair coat, but he looked different close up: he had a little widow’s peak, his eyelashes were thick and long.

He looked at her expensive overcoat. “Are ye a social worker?” he asked, in a tiny voice.

“No, I’m a pal of your mum’s.”

His face lit up. “Mammy? ‘S Mammy coming home?”

“No, John,” Jimmy shouted. “The lady’s just looking for her.”

Maureen looked into the kitchen. Jimmy was standing in the shadowy kitchen with his son, spreading cheap margarine on Supersavers white bread. She turned her back to the kitchen door, hoping Jimmy wouldn’t hear her. “Son, did you get your picture taken with a man at school recently? In the playground with a big man with short hair?”

The boy nodded.

“Who was the man?”

The boy licked at the snotters on his top lip with a deft tongue. “It was picture for Mammy,” he said quietly, as if he didn’t want Jimmy to hear either.

“Was your mum there?”

“Naw.”

“Who took the picture?”

” ‘Nother man.”

“And did ye know that man?”

“Nut.”

“Have ye seen your mammy since your brother’s birthday?”

“Nut.”

“Thanks, son,” she said, and it struck her how small he was, how thin his skin was, how it was a quarter to ten at night and he was six and had just come in from playing in the street with his brother. She wanted to wrap him in her good coat and make him warm and take him away and feed him nice food and read to him and give him the chance of a life. She wanted to cry. The wee boy sensed her pity and knew she was sorry for him, for the state he was in and for his future. He frowned at the floor. She hated herself. “You’re a good boy,” she said, and stood up, ruffling his hair like a patronizing idiot. She cleared her throat and called into the kitchen, “I’m away, then, Jimmy.”

Jimmy didn’t turn to see her go. “Aye,” he said.

“I’ll come and see ye if I find her.”

“Don’t,” said Jimmy flatly, folding a slice of bread into a sandwich. “Don’t come.”

A scratched message on the back of the lift doors informed the world that AMcG sucked cocks. Maureen was glad to get out of the smelly lobby, glad to be away from Jimmy and his malnourished kids, eager to forget what she had seen. It was hard to look on poverty so all-pervasive that it even extended to his speech. She worked through the normalizing justifications: maybe Jimmy was lazy and deserved it; maybe he liked it — lots of people were poorer than him. But she had eight thousand pounds in her bank account and he had four kids and no kettle and she couldn’t think of a single thing that made that all right. She felt her father following her across the yard to the street, his glassy eyes watching from every dark corner. Her muscles tensed suddenly and she broke into a run. Jimmy was right. Wherever Ann was she wouldn’t come back here.

Chapter 9

FIGHT NIGHT

Jimmy Harris couldn’t hit a tambourine.” Maureen took a deep drink of her whiskey and lime and felt the thin skin inside her top lip shrivel in the concentrated solution. “Someone else must have beat her up.”

Leslie was sitting across the table picking at the picture on a sodden beer mat. They were in the Grove, a small pub below a block of tenements. It had been the bottom flat at one time and the layout was still discernible. The supporting walls had been knocked down and riveted cast-iron pillars stood in their place. The lights were bright and two large televisions flickered silently at either end of the fifteen-foot bar. The pub attracted a good-natured crowd of regulars — they milled around the room, talking and laughing, watching the horse racing with one eye while they chatted to their pals. Leslie had been thinking about what Maureen had said to her in the Driftwood and had worked herself into a filthy mood. Maureen thought Cammy would be waiting for her at home and Leslie would be anxious to get back before the boil on his neck exploded.

“What did he say?” Leslie asked casually, as if she didn’t really care, but Maureen could feel her fishing for something, something too private and precious to share with her.

“Nothing much.” She shrugged. “Ann owes money to loan sharks and he doesn’t think she’ll ever come back. She’s taken the child-benefit book and it’s being cashed consistently.”

Leslie sat up. “Is it?”

“Aye.”

Leslie thought about it. “Does that mean she’s cashing it?”

“Dunno. When did Ann turn up at the shelter?”

“December ninth,” said Leslie, without having to think about it. “Why?”

“There’s about a month-long gap between her leaving Jimmy and coming to us. She was up and down to London, seemingly.”

“Who says?”

“He says.”

“Aye.” Leslie was skeptical. “Why would you believe anything that bastard says?”

“Look,” said Maureen, “he’s just a poor fucking soul who knows nothing. She won’t go back there and he didn’t hit her either.”

“You could tell that from one meeting?”

But Leslie hadn’t seen the bare house, she hadn’t smelled the lift, couldn’t imagine the effort it must take for Jimmy to get up in the morning and manage all day. Maureen lit a cigarette, haunted by the image of Jimmy’s jagged teeth. “I think she had a boyfriend,” she said, “and she’s gone back to him and he hits her. She’ll be there now, pissing it up on the child benefit while that poor bastard feeds his kids on watery bread and margarine.”

Leslie sneered at her. “Why do you think he’s telling the truth?”

“Because if he was lying,” said Maureen firmly, “he’d give himself a better part.”

Leslie watched Maureen looking miserably around the pub, drinking quickly like she did these days, sighing heavily, as if she wanted to get away and be alone. Maureen had changed. Leslie knew she was nervous about her father being back in Glasgow but she was jumpy and moody and frightened of everything. They had been spending less and less time together and Leslie couldn’t see an end to it. Maureen didn’t like Cammy because he wasn’t polished and hadn’t been to university. They should have been closer now that they were working together but they weren’t. Maureen looked freaked out half the time and bored the rest of it, and she had a new boyfriend she hadn’t bothered to mention — Leslie had to hear it from Katia in the office. Leslie was beginning to think they had been too close, that it had been too intense before, with the poster campaign and Millport, and she’d seen a side of Maureen that frightened her. There was a fight brewing between them and she knew it would be a big fight. She took a drag and looked up. Maureen was watching the racing results. She was watching racing results rather than talk to her.

“What should we do now?” asked Leslie.

Maureen sipped her whiskey and looked at the racing results again. “You want to find Ann?” she said.

“Yeah,” said Leslie.

“Well, why don’t you check out the pubs around the shelter? They’ll have seen her.”

Leslie stared at her. She’d gone to Millport with her. She’d spent a summer in a mental hospital keeping her company, she had driven her around for weeks after Douglas was killed, and now Maureen was refusing to help her. “You really don’t give a shit what happened to Ann, do you, Maureen?”

Maureen sighed. “Give it a fucking rest, Leslie. She’s fucked off. Accept it. She fucked off and left her weans and her poor wee man to pay off her drinking debts.”

“Her poor wee man? I don’t fucking think so.”

“I know he didn’t hit her.”

“Because he seemed ordinary?” said Leslie, pulling rank. It was a basic article of faith at the Place of Safety Shelters that any man was capable of hitting any woman, and for her to suggest that Maureen was dismissing Jimmy because he looked ordinary was as good as calling her an idiot.