Exile (9 page)

She threw her fag into the gutter and opened the thick glass door. The stairs were black with dirt and rain. She could almost smell the ruined women, Katia’s smugness and Jan’s dull stories. She didn’t want to be here or meet Leslie but there was nowhere else for her to hide. She could sit in the house and worry about the letters, listening to Winnie on the answering machine. She could go to the shops and see Michael’s face everywhere and feel guilty for buying things she didn’t need. She took the stairs slowly, trying to prolong the journey.

The job-shares were handing over to one another and the office was bustling. Three downcast women waited on the hard chairs by Maureen’s desk. She managed to hang up her coat before Jan spotted her.

“Hi,” said Jan, going to the trouble of getting up and coming over to her. “How are you?”

“Oh,” said Maureen, trying to smile, “lots of work to do.”

She sat down at her desk and took a random file out of the drawer, pretending to pore over it, trying to shake Jan off. Jan picked up her mug. “Maureen, you look even paler today,” she said. “Coffee?”

“That would be lovely, thanks, Jan.”

Jan offered the waiting women a cup but they refused. She went off to the coffee room. Maureen took out her fag packet and handed it to the first woman in the line, motioning to her to pass it along, and went back to pretending to read the file. She didn’t watch them — she didn’t want them to feel self-conscious if they were short and needed to take one. When her packet came back to her it was six fags short. She looked at the trio of women. They were smoking hard and staring at the floor.

She took a different file out of the drawer and tried to lose herself in the wording of a statutory clause. All she had to do was get through today and avoid speaking to anyone. She stared at the same sentence for fifteen minutes, thinking vaguely about all the minor disputes all over the world, and all the idiots who fell out with their friends and thought it mattered when nothing meant anything anyway. Jan came round the desk and handed her the cup of coffee before opening her fag packet and passing it to the first of the waiting women. “The police phoned here,” she said, “looking for your pal Leslie.”

“Who?”

“The police. They asked to talk to her.”

“But why would they phone her here? She doesn’t even work here.”

“Dunno,” said Jan.

“Did they leave a name?”

Jan shrugged. “Just said the police.”

“Did they ask for Leslie by name?”

“Dunno,” said Jan, reaching over and taking her fag packet back from the last woman.

“Who did they speak to?”

“Katia.”

“Cheers, Jan,” said Maureen, but Jan wasn’t listening to her. She was staring at the two lonely fags left rattling about in her packet.

Katia wasn’t at her desk. She was in the stationery cupboard, chatting to Alice, the funding coordinator. They were making arrangements to go to a nightclub at the weekend. Katia had been there loads of times and knew the doorman. She said she could get Alice and her boyfriend in for free. Alice saw Maureen standing by the door and stepped aside to include her in the conversation, but Maureen held back until they had finished talking and caught Katia on her way out. “Can I have a word?”

“Sure,” said Katia. “Come on over to my desk.”

Katia had done well with her space. A partition wall closed off her corner desk from the rest of the ugly room. Her filing cabinet was decorated with photos of herself looking just lovely, standing with attractive pals in a kaleidoscope of thumping venues. “What can I do for you?” she said, settling into her chair, her suede miniskirt riding up her perfectly geometric thighs.

“Well,” said Maureen, trying to sound casual, “I heard the police phoned today and you spoke to them.”

“Yes,” said Katia.

“I heard they asked for Leslie.”

“Did you?”

“The thing is, I’ve been …” She didn’t know how to word it without sounding like trouble. “… I’ve been getting visits from a policeman.”

Katia sat forward and looked at her. Maureen spotted a spark of self-interest in her eyes, instantly smothered with treacly concern. “Are you going out with the policeman?”

Maureen was getting annoyed now. “No, Katia, he’s been harassing me.”

“Oh,” she said. “Have you reported him?”

“I don’t want to report him. I just want to know if it was the same policeman who phoned for Leslie. Did he gave a name?”

“Well, it was a woman who phoned, actually. How is he harassing you?”

“It just — it doesn’t really matter.”

“No, please.” Katia reached out to take her hand and Maureen almost felt the saccharin sear. “Would you like to talk about it? It must be very upsetting for you.”

Suddenly Maureen began to cry big belting sobs and Katia fell to pieces, standing up and knocking her seat over, banging the filing cabinet and sending a shower of flattering photos to the floor. “Listen,” she said, scrabbling about the floor, picking up the pictures, “shall I … will I go and get someone? Here are some tissues.” She handed Maureen a box of pretty Hello Kitty tissues, making her cry harder.

“Would you like a cup of tea? Shall I phone Vikram?”

“God, no!” said Maureen, with such force that a bubble of snot appeared at her nostril. She wanted Katia to go away, just go away, until she got herself together. “Just tea, hot tea.”

Katia scuttled away, leaving Maureen alone behind the partition. She managed to slow the crying and dried her eyes. Whatever she had been crying about didn’t seem half as bad when Katia wasn’t there. A final lovely photo of Katia left its Blue-tack moorings and fell from the filing cabinet to the floor. The filing cabinet held the CCB photos. Maureen stood up and opened a drawer quietly. Ann’s surname was Harris and she found the file in the top drawer. It was a brown envelope, stiff with photos. She shoved it up her jumper, turning it sideways, tucking it into the waistband of her jeans, and sat down again, startled by what she had done. She didn’t know if she’d done it to spite Katia or for Leslie or to fuck up her job even more so she could leave.

By the time Katia came back with a mug of milky tea, Maureen had stopped crying and, as well as taking the photographs, she had stolen most of the Hello Kitty tissues too.

“Better?” asked Katia.

“I’m sorry,” said Maureen, dabbing her nose with the second-to-last tissue. “I just, I got upset.”

“Who’s the policeman who’s harassing you?”

“It’s a guy. I met him a few months ago …”

“He’s from Glasgow?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, it was nothing to do with him, then. This phone call was from the Met in London.”

Maureen stood up. “Right. Good,” she said, crossing her arms in front of her to cover her tummy. “Thanks.”

“That’s all right. Please think about reporting him, will you?”

“Yeah. I will.”

“How’s Vik?”

Maureen moved over to the edge of the partition, wanting to get away before Katia realized that she had a strange package up her jumper. “Fine,” she said. “He’s fine.”

Katia stepped in front of her. “Maureen, do you resent me?”

Maureen was a little surprised. “Do I what?”

“Do you resent me because of Vik?”

Maureen looked at her blankly. “Why would I?”

“Well”—Katia rolled her head toward the floor—”you know we went out?”

“Yeah, I knew that.” Maureen felt a pang of jealousy coming from nowhere.

“About a month ago.” Katia looked at her knowingly.

Maureen had been seeing him for a month, just over a month, and Katia knew that. Maureen wanted to say that she didn’t give a shit, that she wasn’t even fucking sure she was going to live through the afternoon. “I need to go now,” she said.

Katia held the cup towards her as a peace offering. “Won’t you drink your tea?”

“I don’t take milk,” said Maureen, and walked straight out of the office, picking up her coat and fags on the way out, leaving her files scattered on the desk. She was never going back there.

The rain was coming down sideways, cascading down the sandstone buildings, running in small ardent rivers in the road and pooling around the drains. Pedestrians pulled their hoods up and ran to get out of the weather, clustering together for shelter in the doorways, watching out of shop windows, waiting for the storm to pass. Maureen felt an unaccustomed creamy calm. She had the whiskey and she had decided. She was never going back to the Place of Safety.

Her boots squelched noisily. She jackknifed as she climbed the steep hill, staring at her feet, watching the rain bubble up through the lace holes. The close smelled damp and crumbling. Heat from the lower flats crept under front doors, warming the upper flights, making her numb ears tingle.

The answering machine had tales to tell: it blinked nervously, full of Winnie’s venom. Maureen took her boots off in the kitchen and emptied them carefully into the sink, peeled the stolen envelope of CCB photos from her damp belly and left them on the table. She dried her wrinkled white feet with a towel, rubbing hard to get the feeling back. The whiskey bottle was sitting in the plastic bag. She lifted it out, enjoying the clak-clak-clak as the lid came off, and filled a half-pint tumbler. The brimming glass sat on the table, distilling the gray light from the window, turning it amber. She watched the drink out of the corner of her eye, flirting with it. Whatever happened in the next few hours she had all of that whiskey to deaden it, a Scottish petit mort. If only she could feel this way all the time, the anticipation of comfort excluding other thoughts. She drank, gulping three big mouthfuls before stopping for breath. She lit a fag and inhaled, sucking the smoke deep into her lungs, and then drank again, more slowly this time.

The answering machine was winking at her. She wandered out to the hall, pressed “play” and closed her eyes, feeling the alcohol seep through her, lining her head, softening everything. Winnie cried pitifully and reminded Maureen that she had given her life. “I am thinking of you and missing you … I love you.” She hung up slowly. Past the bleep she’d called again, drunk and angry, to tell Maureen that she was a wee shite. The machine beep-beeped and rewound. The thought of Jimmy’s carnivorous teeth floated into her mind. She took another drink and watched the machine, until the memory of the big bottle in the kitchen brought her round.

Far below the kitchen window the traffic was moving slowly on the motorway, wriggling out of the brutal hole of the city. She looked across to the north side and saw the jagged tower of the Ruchill fever hospital stabbing at the sky. It was watching her, looking into her house. She hugged the bottle like a new best friend and picked up the glass and her fags. As she passed the answering machine in the hall she swung her free fist, punching the machine hard, knocking it noisily to the floor. The blow tingled deliciously on her knuckles.

It was dark in the living room, dark enough for the bloodstains on the wooden floor to melt into greasy shadows. Maureen sat still on the settee and thought about her dream the night before. The flat had seen a lot of blood. Douglas’s stains were still on the floorboards, dark discolorations like patches of itchy varnish. She couldn’t bring herself to paint over them. It would be like saying he’d never been there. Douglas’s death had hit her hard. The aftermath of a violent death is different from normal grief. There is none of the usual tidying up, pumping the veins full of glue, dressing the corpse for a dinner dance, pretending that it all makes perfect sense and God will care for him now. There’s blood and shit and matter everywhere, faces ripped off, limbs missing and the realization that life is brutal and meaningless, that everyone is only a split skin from spilling into death.

She lit another cigarette, finished her drink, and watched the rain slow outside the window. It had almost stopped. She refilled her glass and walked across the room, opened the window wide to the wall and sat down on the windy sill. The rain fell softly onto her face, and the wind whipped her hair. The few people in the street below were oblivious to her.

She swung her leg over the ledge into the void, smoking hard and listening to the purr of the city below. She couldn’t see Ruchill from here and no one in Ruchill could see her. Ash fell from her fag into the air, disintegrating in the high wind. She swung her bare foot through the air, banging it against the outside of the building. A small shard of sandstone crumbled off the wall and tumbled through the air, spinning slowly as it fell the five stories to the pavement below. It shattered with a light clack and the noise bounced away down the narrow street, echoing off the facing block of flats. The phone rang out in the hall and the battered answering machine intercepted it. Winnie sobbed and told her some fucking thing or other — I love you
you’re a shit, come and see me
I’ll never see you.

The rain came on again, splattering against her leg, pattering against the floorboards in the living room. She’d known a lot of people and didn’t remember liking any of them. She looked down. It was just a short drop. But Jimmy had nothing, and she had eight thousand pounds of Douglas’s money left. She could leave a note in the living room, tell them to give Jimmy everything, but Winnie would rip it up. The banks were still open: she could take it all out and drop it through his door. But she might not come back to this point, this part of the windowsill. She dropped the rest of her cigarette out of the window and watched it spiral slowly as it fell. The whiskey was making her warm.

It was nice out here with the wind and the rain, and Maureen closed her eyes. She saw Pauline Doyle sitting in a big chair, arms outstretched, inviting her to a break in the tedium of coping, and Maureen slid softly to her. She was falling forward, slipping into space, her limp body yielding to the air, but then Pauline turned into Ann Harris, reaching out to her, grabbing her by the hair, her grin splitting the scab on her swollen lip, the flesh red and raw beneath it. Maureen sat up suddenly, grabbing hold of the window frame, and shoved herself back into the living room.

She landed on the base of her spine and stood up unsteadily, rubbing her bruised coccyx, grunting and panting with the pain. She stopped and looked around the living room, sniggering nervously, feeling as if everyone she’d ever known had been watching her. Blushing and ashamed, she shut the window tight and went into the hall to phone Liam.