The Tin-Kin (8 page)

Shirley would share a grave with Margaret, ‘Beloved Aunt. At peace since 1968.’ Shirley had only ever mentioned the aunt in passing. There were a few years spent with her in Aberdeen. Dawn reckoned this must’ve been in the mid to late fifties because she couldn’t remember Shirley ever not being there. She only remembered her coming back, and getting a present from her ‘new’ aunt. It was a stuffed panda, or maybe it was a black and white cat. She couldn’t remember now. Dawn was wondering where the toy had gone when Linda, who’d taken Maeve’s hand, snorted with laughter and leant over to whisper in Dawn’s ear.

Imagine the two of us side by side in the grave.

I’m going to be cremated and you’ll rot on your own, Dawn said.

Linda’s face tightened like a shrunken cardi and Dawn
realised she’d hit a nerve. She hadn’t meant to. It was only a joke. Even so she felt a pinch of guilty pleasure and imagined it, her own glee, locked up tight and festering. But Linda wasn’t going to let her get the last word.

I’m still the youngest, remember? I’ll get to watch you burn.

Linda smiled like a cat and Maeve looked between them and giggled, thinking something funny had been said.

Her sister had grown a sharper tongue. Dawn slipped her right hand under her left cardigan sleeve, drawing her fingers along the scars. Burns Warren gave her. They were less angry than they used to be, faded and gone smooth, shiny, pinched in the middle like snowflakes.

A sign at the church hall said ‘Bishopmill Knitting Circle. Cleanliness is next to Godliness. Wipe your feet!’ It was the circle Mother knitted in, and Dawn wondered if she’d written the notice. It was the kind of thing her mother would do, and Dawn felt sick at it. Her father’s father had been the last chuchgoer on either side of the family. God was a long-dropped stitch.

Someone was going to make a speech and a microphone was being tested, which seemed extravagant, given the few people that had bothered to show up.

Testing testing, one two, one two.

Maeve looked at her mother. See? she said.

Ahhh! said Linda. Sweet. And she turned to Dawn with a worried look.

Has she always done that angel thing? Is it normal?

In spite of the rain, the hall was stuffy with a funny, nurseryschool smell, disinfectant and sawdust. Two girls stood behind a table laid with coffee, tea, sausage rolls, sandwiches and shortbread, and they poured from tall flasks. The cups provided were too small to hold more than a few gulps, and the drinks went cold quickly. Folk stayed close, but not too close to the food, nervously stirring in sugar lumps. There was a tape player but
no tapes except for a children’s story collection and a country music compilation of Dawn’s, which they couldn’t use. It began with George Strait’s number, ‘Gone as a Girl Can Get’
.
Shirley would have laughed till her falsies fell out, but Dad and Mother certainly wouldn’t.

Maeve was starting to get crochety, sitting under an empty table with a cloth over it, refusing to get out and kicking away the plate of food Dawn set down.

She’s a fussy one, like you were, Mother said.

Dawn bent and swept up the crumbs. She didn’t want to argue, afraid to make a scene. She took Blue Scarfy from her handbag and passed it under the tablecloth, hoping Maeve would curl up and be quiet.

When someone in the kitchen shoved a first load in the dishwasher the noise was welcome. Crockery shook and clattered in plastic trays, echoing off the walls, and it encouraged people to talk. So, Dawn overheard, how did you know Shirley? And another loud voice was asking, what Varsity did you go to? She looked round the room for an empty chair or a friendly face, a seasick feeling in her head. The tea in her cup was stewed and already lukewarm. She was hoping to see Ally, but he and the woman had left, and Dawn found herself wondering when she would next get a chance to talk to him. A few times she’d tried picturing his expression, the way he’d looked at her the evening she’d gone round for the parcel. Something about it had been hard to bring to mind, but seeing him in the graveyard she’d remembered his face that night exactly, his motley suntan so human against the flat white shirt and his eyes dark in the evening light.

Dawn picked the thread of a conversation. Dangerous folk they are, dumping their rubbish. Violent, aye. The council is totally inept . . . Well, it’s nae wonder people do! Threatened my nephew and his pals. Can you believe it? Disgusting. Using the field as a
toilet
!

Dawn wanted to get Dad alone. She waited till Mother was
out the way, fussing at the table with the young waitresses, arranging empty cups on saucers and pushing the dirty ones aside, ushering them away.

How are you, Dad? Dawn asked, her first chance.

Ach, fine, fine. Where’s our Wee Maeve? he said. His face brightened, eyes casting round for her. How’s the flat? Any ideas for it? Eh? It’s a good size.

This was a habit of his, asking too many questions, or the same question more than once, never asking the question he really wanted to at all. There was something he couldn’t cough up.

Maybe I could gie you a hand with the clearing up? he said. It is quite a job. And ye don’t want tae take stuff up tae the tip at the moment, not by yerself. It’s right by thon gypsy site.

They were interrupted by the minister bustling up. He was halfway through a piece of finger food, crumbs down his black robe. Dad adjusted his posture, trying not to stoop. He wasn’t sure how to talk to these people. While he tried to make polite conversation, Dawn dragged Maeve out from under the table and they made their escape. Seeing them head for the door, Dad gestured across the room, lifting a pretend telephone to his ear. Dawn nodded, but she knew he wouldn’t get through, not with the wires hanging out of the wall.

Outside Shirley’s front door, Dawn shook her handbag upside down, littering the ninth step. Maeve was tired and Dawn was rattled, hot like the crockery coming out the dishwasher in the church hall. She’d gone and locked herself out. A Chapstick rolled over the edge of the steps and disappeared into an overgrown rhododendron never to be seen again. There was an open packet of travel tissues, her Walkman with its tangled headphones, a sticky, empty sweetie wrapper, a dozen chocolate raisins covered in grit and hair, ninety-two pence in small change, a tatty wallet, a lipstick, two biros, a small pack of broken crayons, a ratty-looking cheque-book, and a ticket for the
Glasgow Underground. 23 March 1992. The ticket was rolled into a cigarette shape, which probably meant that on that particular date she’d been trying, failing, to quit.

Dawn chucked most of the contents back in the bag, swept the chocolate raisins over the steps, wiped her brow and sat down.

Mummy’s locked us out.

‘Fishinfe,’ Maeve whined through several folds of Blue Scarfy. When she was grouchy she always sucked on the comforter and Dawn could never make out what she was saying. Dawn held back a scream. One of the raisins hadn’t quite made it to the edge. She flicked it and it sailed into the air, landing somewhere in the flowerbed. Maybe it would grow into a magic beanstalk and she could get the hell away.

Try the hanging basket! a voice shouted.

Dawn looked round.

Anne, a woman said. She was standing at the back door of the bottom flat.

We never had a chance to talk this morning.

Ally’s wife had changed clothes since the funeral. She’d put on too much green eyeshadow and a pink top with a slogan that read ‘Me! Me! Me!’ She came out into the garden followed by Kyle, and clipped him lightly over the ear, telling him to keep his new jeans out of the dirt. She was carrying a younger child, who started to cry. Anne looked up.

Kids! Bet you’re glad you stopped at one.

Something was smeared over the front of the baby’s dress. It looked like peanut butter. New on a half hour ago, Anne said, pulling roughly at the clothes. It’s just constant bloody washing.

Dawn remembered Maeve at that age, hours spent in the laundrette. There were bananas squished into pockets, jammy handprints, mud and slether and sick, and a tube of toothpaste half eaten and half smeared into Maeve’s hair, all over her clothes and up the wall. Much worse besides. But maybe
enduring the torture of the laundrette so early in life, the sweat and steam and constant roll of driers, was what made Maeve almost obsessively clean now. She worried about mud on the soles of her shoes, picked and pawed at her clothes at the sight of even a tiny stain or spill, and cried if her nose needed blowing. Blue Scarfy was the only exception. She wouldn’t allow it to be washed. Not after the terrible fate of Scarfy the Original, who had disintegrated in the machine. The only traces of it had been the iridescent green threads Dawn Sellotaped off the rest of the washing.

It didn’t take long to find the spare house keys. They’d been pushed deep into the compost under a clump of wilting ivy. There were five or six on the ring, all different shapes and sizes. Dawn cleaned each one in turn, Maeve wrinkling her nose and blowing on them for fun before they got a quick wipe with a tissue. Dawn would separate the two Shirley had used, the Yale and the Chubb, and then they would be through the front door again and she could make herself a cuppa.

It was in the middle of all that, before she even realised, that the key to the cupboard was finally in her hands. She was holding out the cold metal nib of it while Maeve pursed her lips and blew breath warm over Dawn’s fingertips. Dawn turned the key over. It was heavy given how small it was. She looked. Not a fancy thing, just like any iron key. But it was old. She had that strange feeling again, as if someone might be watching. She hurried to get into the house. She didn’t stop to take off her coat or worry about Maeve’s stiff new buckles. She went straight to the cupboard, still flustered at locking herself out but feeling something else now too. Sparks in her fingertips. She’d almost given up on finding the key. She’d been thinking of asking Ally for a tool to force the door, but now she didn’t need to. She knew this key was the right one, even before she slotted it neatly into the dark lock.

There was a splintering as the thick paint round the frame
began to crack. Yes! it seemed to say. Yes! She placed her other hand on the wall and pulled. Part of the door dislocated itself from its seal and Dawn got a first scent of the chill air captive inside. For several seconds she stopped, afraid of disappointment. Maybe Shirley had just been having her on, and the cupboard would actually be empty.

In that same moment a sharp gust of wind whooped down the chimney, the windows were pelted with a sudden rainfall, a gull shrieked from somewhere over the rooftop, and a car alarm went off. A girl in the street screamed, then laughed, and in the flat downstairs something was dropped or thrown. It shattered. With a bit of whingeing, Maeve had just managed to get her shoes off by herself, and now she crossed the hall.

I want fish fingers! she was shouting.

But the cupboard door would only take one sharp tug.

A black and white photograph fluttered free and landed at Dawn’s feet. Two wee girls with curly hair, dark as treacle. One of them was shy and pulling down the hem of her skirt. The other held her head high, not afraid to look straight at the camera. On the back was a message, a Chinese whisper in carefully placed letters. Dawn traced her finger along the words. ‘
Dearest Lolly
,’ she read, ‘
xxx.
’

Maeve was opening and closing the kitchen door, swinging it on its hinges.

She was moaning her numbers with each swing forward and back.

One. Two.

Dawn’s eyes filled with tears she couldn’t explain. The slope of the handwriting pulled at her like a road in an atlas, the lie of the land and the lives connected to it. These small faces were not ghosts. They were not make-believe.

   BRUISES   

Wee Betsy, 1954

When Daddy lifts me off the ground, Jugs grabs my hands and pulls me high onto the wooden seat of the cart. There’s just room for the three of us, me squeezed between the two men. We put the blanket across us to keep warm. Daddy takes the reins and we move off with a jolt, past the old mill and the stables where the road’s bumpy. My feet nearly touch the bottom of the cart now, but not quite, so I let my legs swing. To, and my toes scrape the slats, fro, and my heels do the same.