Slip of the Knife (19 page)

These were his most important family memories, she realized, which meant that the worn brown folder Fitzpatrick had in his office had something altogether different in it.

She dropped the pictures back in the box, shut it, and wiped the lid with her hand, setting it gently on the chair next to her, and turned to the portfolio.

It was black, graying because of the dust from the high-up cupboard in the flat, an exact copy of Kevin’s portfolio. Maybe they had bought them together. Terry always liked stationery. He used Moleskine notepads when he traveled—they’d found a box of the battered notebooks in the trunk.

She unfurled the elastic strap and opened the portfolio, slipping the sheets of photographic paper out of the cupped side and setting them flat on the table. A small Moleskine pad was tucked in at the back. Flicking through it, she read Terry’s jittery shorthand and realized that these were notes of the interviews of all the photo subjects, numbered up to forty, dated variously over a month last year. She looked back at the pictures. Senga—New Jersey. Billy—Long Island. The others were without the accompanying text, just bare photos, but they each had Kevin’s touch. Brilliant crisp light, sharp colors and a person in the foreground, smiling or not, beautiful or not, all relaxed, all honest and open faced.

There was one black face, a woman with an aristocratic African profile, standing on the sunny side of a long, narrow street of red-brick tenements in New York with fire escapes snaking up them. Quartz specks in the tarmac glittered in the sun. Her smile was crooked, as if she was trying to hide her teeth, and her hair was pulled up into waspish yellow and black braids that swirled around her head.

Whoever the woman was, Paddy assumed she’d made a happy transition to the States. There were so few black people in Scotland that the two black Glaswegians she knew of were minor celebrities. One was an academic from the West Indies who taught at Glasgow University and had married a fellow linguist. Another, younger man worked as a sound engineer for Scottish Opera and drank in the Chip. Kevin’s woman looked African and Paddy assumed she had been adopted by a well-meaning Scottish couple and escaped as soon as possible. She looked very young to be an expatriate.

Paddy was looking at the photo when her eye caught a detail in the background. If the picture had been smaller or the image less sharply defined by the slanted light in the street she wouldn’t have noticed it.

Michael Collins had been thinner then. He was two hundred yards behind the woman, leaning over the roof of a big green car. He wore a thin peach summer shirt, his trousers sitting slack on his hips, the sunlight flashing off his glasses. Collins wasn’t looking at the camera. In fact, if Kevin had been quick, he wouldn’t even have been aware that a photographer was taking a picture down the street at all. As he leaned over the roof of the car his mouth was open in a laugh, hair cropped tight to his head. Across, at the roadside passenger door, was another man, a fat man in a dark suit, his face obscured as he twisted and reached for the door handle.

Paddy sat back, elated. She had a photo of him. It was him in New York and some time ago, but it was a photo of him nonetheless, captured in a mundane moment, giving a friend a lift.

She checked Terry’s notebook for names, looking for any with an African flavor: Morag, Alison, Barney, Tim, none of them fitted with the black woman. But if she had been adopted, her parents might have given her a Scottish name. The Scots had colonized half of Africa on behalf of the Empire. For all she knew, Morag could be a common Ethiopian name.

She thought of Terry again, sitting in a bar, sweating, drunk, his arm around a hungry young girl, and shivered, shaking the thought away.

Kevin Hatcher would know who the woman was, where the picture was taken, maybe even the name of the man in the background or some information Paddy could use to trace him and protect herself and Pete. But it was one o’clock in the morning and it would be rude to phone.

Instead, she packed Pete’s gym kit and loaded the dishwasher. Instead, she washed her face, brushed her teeth. Instead, she went to bed feeling pleased that she had something to go on, a picture of Michael Collins.

She should have grabbed Pete and run.

THIRTEEN

YEAH

His neighbors were having a party. Back in his drinking days Kevin had been at many Monday night parties himself and knew how joyless they were. They were after-closing-time affairs, dragging through to the cold, damp morning, full of melancholy drinkers chasing a cheap carryout, banding together solely to consume. He remembered ten-hour nights when conversation was an irksome incidental. Badly coordinated women, who had lost their looks to wine and late nights, doing sexy dancing together while dead-eyed men looked on. Music was mortar to plug the silences. He never wanted to go back there. But tonight the occasional howl and whoop through the wall, the guitar music and the grim hubbub sounded warm and friendly.

The pain in his arm and chin were seeping away and, held still as he was, he could feel the certainty that everything was going to be fine pulse through his body.

His stomach disagreed. It convulsed, once, twice, and the grip on his chin tightened.

“Don’t fucking spew. You spew, you swallow, understand?”

He was holding Kevin’s mouth shut, a hard hand pressed tightly under his chin.

It was dark in the room. He’d left the lights off when he dragged Kevin in here and threw him into the armchair. The curtains were open. They were always open: Kevin didn’t mind people across the road looking in if they could be bothered. He could see out now, a couple with their backs to him watching telly in a soft light. A dark room. A man washing his hands at a kitchen sink.

The man had been kneeling on Kevin’s forearm for what felt like hours. He had lost the feeling in his fingers, in his wrist, and his elbow was pressed tight against the leather but it didn’t seem to hurt now. Nothing seemed to hurt now. Even his teeth, even his jaw, which the man had levered open with a chisel before he put the little paper packages into the back of his throat and forced the water in, making him swallow.

Kevin looked up at the steel-rimmed glasses, the orange streetlights from below reflected on the square lenses, and sensed that, of the two of them, his assailant was feeling worse than he was. The man was desperate and afraid. Sweating.

“Spew and you swallow.”

Kevin’s mood had turned as quickly as a loose feather in a high wind. He knew everything would be OK, whereas a moment ago he had felt helpless and trapped.

The heat came first, a burning heat to his face and chest. A veil of sweat slid across his eyes and the music next door was matched and overtaken by his own heartbeat thudding, faster and faster, pushing through his face. He couldn’t see.

Suddenly, his every muscle tightened to its fullest extent and he stood up, the small man sliding off his lap like a napkin. The man grabbed Kevin’s ankles but was powerless against the buzz of strength flooding through Kevin’s every sinew.

Smiling, a ray of all-powerful light himself, Kevin lifted his foot and stamped on his assailant’s hand. He heard the man cry out, curl into a ball at his feet, half under the coffee table, but Kevin didn’t care. It was wonderful not to care. He stamped again, missing him this time but it didn’t matter. He turned to the room. Light was bursting from every surface. The door. He should go to the door and get out.

He took three steps, a colossus striding forth, the cool night air caressing his hot skin, his chest leading the way, his heart bursting forward, pushing him out to the close, where it would be even colder, even better. He imagined his face pressed tight against the cold of the bare stone, absorbing the delicious tingling chill. One of the drunken neighbors shouted “yeah” and Kevin turned back at the living-room doorway, shouting back, his voice touching theirs through the wall.

Yeah.

An absolute communion of voices. Perfect. Something small was scrabbling at his feet, something grabbing, scratching, pulling at his legs, tugging him.

White light, cool light, flooded spontaneously out of the wall at him, glorious, thrilling. He shut his eyes for one second but forgot to open them again.

He was on the floor, on his side, his arm curled into a tight ball under his chin, his whole left side throbbing to the music. His face was wet.

In the sky above him a foot stepped over his head, a body moved, and a sole hovered above his face. Two orange squares of vicious brightness glinted down at him.

Kevin shut his eyes again.

A voice through a wall called to him, tugging him back to grimy rooms, to sticky settees and black Monday night parties full of the dead.

Yeah.

FOURTEEN

SLEEK RATS

Callum was exhausted. His room was small and dark and warm, warmer than any room he’d been in for a long time. Although it was summer they had the heating on and he couldn’t have the sheet over him without getting clammy. But the tiredness was partly because he hadn’t been alone for over nine hours. He didn’t think he would miss being alone so much.

It was a tiny room, half the size of the smallest cell he’d lived in. The single bed took up most of the floor and faced a bookshelf and a white plastic wardrobe with one door missing. He had to walk sideways to get around to the window.

Two of the kids had slept in here. Their bunk beds had been moved to the end of Sean and Elaine’s bed. The yellow wallpaper had bits of stickers on it, half a spaceship, a lion’s mane and legs, the face missing. In the corner Elaine had tried to wash off a scribble of black felt pen.

The window in Callum’s room looked out over the street. It’s better this way, said Elaine over dinner, because now the kids won’t get woken up with the noise of cars in the street. Better this way. As if she was trying to convince herself. She was slim for a mum of four, brown hair, shiny. When she bent forward at dinner her shirt fell open a bit and he saw her bra. Nearly jumped her there and then.

They’d lied about him to the kids. The oldest girl, Mary, told him while they were out of the room getting the wee ones bathed. You’ve been away in Birmingham, she said. You’ve got a lot of problems. She was tiny, hands so small they didn’t cover his palm. Everything she did was cute. When she spilled milk all over the floor it was cute. She smiled at him a lot, set an example to the others. The toddler, Cabrini, liked him too but the atmosphere was still tense. Elaine was nervous and Sean never took his eyes from him.

Who could blame them.

Callum sat up in the bed and dropped his feet to the floor, holding the curtain away from the wall with one finger, watching the cars speed past outside, craving the fresh cold radiating from the glass. A woman passed by, head down, jeans too tight for her, showing off all her lumps and bumps. He thought about masturbating to get to sleep but someone might come in and find him.

It was so warm, the curtains, the carpet and the heating on. He was used to walls breathing cold, to pulling the prison blankets around himself to stave off the chill. He didn’t know if he could stay in this heat; he could hardly draw a breath in it.

It was dark outside. Across the road, on the step of a close mouth, he saw something move and thought it was a rat. A couple of rats. But they were shiny, caught the orange streetlight, sleek. Feet. A pair of feet hiding in the dark doorway, shuffling to keep warm. Someone was watching the street.

Sweat prickled at the nape of Callum’s neck. His fingers began to tremble, making the curtain quiver. He dropped his hand but stayed where he was, trapped, tearful, panicked and alone.

He sat there all night, sleeping in small nervous bursts, his head lolling against the wall, craving the cold from outside the cluttered little flat.

FIFTEEN

THE SOUND OF MUSIC

I

The morning was bright as Paddy led Pete around the corner. The street was swarming with small children in red T-shirts and gray skirts or trousers, ready for the new school year. The children came from a poor catchment area and the uniform was minimal.

It was an old-fashioned primary school, the playground railed off from the street and the building arranged in a tall U around it. The two entrances were at opposite ends of the yard and carved into the stone above them were GIRLS and BOYS.

Pete stopped dead. “Mum! Gym kit!”

Paddy touched his backpack. “In here.”

He did a comedy phew, rolling his head in a figure of eight, showing the small hairs on the back of his neck, like Terry’s. She considered picking him up and running back to the car. Phone the school. Plead a cold. She could give in to her fears every day and keep him under her bed until he was eighteen.

A young man in a black tracksuit stepped out in front of them, crossing the road to the railings, pressing his face through, looking for a kid.

In the yard a blonde teacher, Miss MacDonald, was marshaling the children into groups of their own year in preparation for the lineup and roll call they took before the kids went into the school building. Out on the street parents were lined up along the railings, staring into the yard at their children, who were showing off their latest toys, making alliances for the fresh day, or chasing each other within the limited parameters of the group Miss MacDonald had put them in.

Suddenly, Pete slipped Paddy’s hand and bolted into the road. She leaped, grabbing his shoulder with a talon hand, spinning him so hard he almost fell to one knee.

“Mum!” He looked up at her, mouth hanging open in shock.

She saw herself, grabbing him to assuage her insecurity, keeping him from his life. Flattening his hair with her hand, she avoided his eye. “What have I told you about running into the road?”

“You hurt me.” He looked at her, demanding that she look back.

She busied herself straightening the straps on his backpack. “Just . . . be careful.”

He hit her hand away. “I am being careful.”

“I’m sorry. I got a fright when you ran out. Sorry.” Apologizing to a child—her mother would hate that. Never apologize and never explain, Trisha would say, which was all right for her: everything she did was explained by the Church or by teachers in the Catholic school. Paddy wanted Pete to grow up being able to question authority, but it was a lot more work than telling him to shut up and do what he was told.