Exile

Chapter 32

Maureen woke up at six o'clock and found the television still on at her feet. She hadn't dreamed of anything but still couldn't get back to sleep. She knew Sarah would be uncomfortable if she wandered around the house on her own so she stayed in her room and had another bath. After watching half an hour of Stock Exchange news on breakfast TV her sense of probity gave way to her desire for a coffee and a fag. She put the dirty dishes from last night's dinner on the tray and crept quietly downstairs to the kitchen.

The Aga had cooled during the night but still gave off a little warmth and Maureen pulled a chair over to it, sitting with her hip against it, hanging over the griddle with her cup of coffee. Sarah had left a bundle of Jesus pamphlets on the table. Each had a catchy title on the cover and mesmerizingly bad drawings of Aryan Jesus telling some black people what to do, Jesus having a laugh with some sheep, baby Jesus chortling in a manger. Sarah had never been into religion, as far as Maureen knew. She vaguely remembered her referring to her family as high Church of England, implying that in some way this was Catholicism by another name.

The windows at the back of the kitchen looked out onto a long, immaculate lawn with deep borders, cloaked in freezing fog. Sarah's life must be an aesthetic delight; she must cast her eye over lovely things every day. Maureen had been so busy keeping her head above water that she had forgotten the significance of having beautiful things around her, things she wanted to touch and look at. She thought of Jimmy and the paucity of charm in his life, the incessant nag of need and want. The child-benefit book had been cashed and she felt sure that Moe, the Giro Magnet, would know something about it. Maureen was still sure Jimmy hadn't done it. He said he'd only been in London for a day and the mattress still bothered her.

She searched all the cupboards and set the table for a formal breakfast. She warmed the teapot and put out thick-cut marmalade and cereal bowls. She brought two small camellia blossoms in from the garden and put them in a glass of water, sitting them on the table as a centerpiece. The red flowers clashed with the blue striped Cornishware, making the table look Christmassy and cheerful.

Carrying her fags and Vik's lighter, she pulled open the back door and stepped out into the restful garden, lit a fag and looked around her. In the very far distance she could hear the distant rumble of a city making its way to work. The milky fog was lifting from the ground, floating above the grass, rising up to meet the morning. Maureen inhaled and felt the nicotine trickle into her system, tickling her fingers, opening her hair follicles, placating the angry rims of her eyes, kicking her into the day. She looked back into the kitchen and saw a three-foot-high pile of old newspapers tucked away into the recess by the back door, awaiting recycling. She finished her fag quickly, rubbing it out on the stone step, and binned the ragged filter.

She lifted out all the Evening Standards for the previous week, Monday to Monday, and took them over to the clear end of the large table. She skimmed through, looking for some mention of the murder. It would have taken the police a few days to identify Ann and trace her back to the shelter. They had phoned the office looking for Leslie on Tuesday so Maureen checked last Thursday's edition but found nothing. She went back and checked the Friday edition again and found nothing. She checked Monday, poring over the smallest story, trying to get a lead. She was reading a tiny story about an art fair when she looked up to rub her eyes and spotted it: "Bike Crash Leads to Gruesome Find." A guy on his way to work had been involved in a motorbike accident and landed on a mattress on the riverbank with a body inside it. The man had no comment but a member of the Thames division said that the body matched the description of a missing woman. The police were treating the woman's death as suspicious. The next day's edition named her as Ann Harris, a woman reported missing by her sister only days before. Maureen tidied away the papers and went back out to the garden for another smoke.

She found it bizarre that Moe had reported Ann missing. Ann didn't live with her, she had been missing before, and Maureen knew a bit about the reality of living with a drinker. If Ann was away on a binge, and the police found her and brought her back, she'd be looking for money and bringing trouble. Mood swings and grandiloquent claims went with the territory in alcoholic families and Ann saying she was running for her life was probably a monthly occurrence. If Moe was screwing the brew she definitely wouldn't want to draw official attention to herself. It didn't make sense for Moe to report her missing.

Sarah appeared at the kitchen door in a man's old tartan dressing gown and the exploding leather slippers. "Good morning, good morning," she said. "Oh, you've set the table?"

"Sarah, you've been so sweet to me." Maureen stood up. "I'm making you breakfast this morning."

Sarah all but clapped her hands with glee. "Oh, how lovely," she said, and sat down at her place while Maureen made the toast. They were halfway through breakfast when Sarah put her fingertips on the bundle of Jesus pamphlets and pushed them across the table to Maureen. "Why not have a read while you're eating?" she said.

Maureen smiled. "You're fucking joking, aren't you?" she said, and the atmosphere deteriorated from there.

Maureen was on the wrong train. She got off at London Bridge and began the long walk to Brixton. It was only nine o'clock and she didn't have much to do before she met Kilty Goldfarb again. As she walked she looked up at the office blocks, a thousand windows with forty, fifty workers behind each of them every day of the week, each one trying to believe that they were the central character in the big movie. She watched the tube sucking people underground, saw the busy buses and the individual cars jammed bumper to bumper, saw the stream of pedestrians overspill from the pavement into the road, heads down, pretending that no one else existed, as if the knowledge of their number was too much to bear. And it was. Maureen was utterly convinced of her own insignificance.

She walked through the underpass at the Elephant and Castle, enjoying the sense that nothing really mattered, not the truth about the past, nor whether they believed her, not Winnie's drinking or Vik's ultimatum. It was the perfect place to escape from a painful past. She could waste years at home trying to make sense of a random series of events. There was no meaning, no lessons to be learned, no moral – none of it meant anything. She could spend her entire life trying to weave meaning into it, like compulsive gamblers and their secret schema. Nothing mattered, really, because an anonymous city is the moral equivalent of a darkened room. She understood why Ann had come here and stayed here and died here. It wouldn't be hard. All she had to do was let go of home. She would phone Leslie and Liam sometimes, say she was fine, fine, let the calls get farther apart, make up a life for herself and they'd finally forget.

She heard the noise and continued walking, expecting it to pass her, but it remained constant and she realized that it was the pager. Liam wanted her to phone him at home. Her pulse quickened at his name, as if she had been lost and reclaimed immediately.

"Come home right now."

"What?"

"Maureen, Neil Hutton's been found dead. He was assassinated."

Maureen frowned. "Like what? By a sniper?"

"He was shot up the arse. I think even Mossad would have trouble making that shot."

"But I've just this minute got here."

"Look, the way they killed him is a warning about something, and until we know what it's a warning about, you have to come home."

"Keep your knickers on, Liam. I'm asking her older sister about her debts and stuff like that – I'm not getting into a drugs war."

Liam sighed and she could feel him thinking hard. "Please, Mauri," he said quietly, "please come home."

"What is it really? Is it something to do with Michael?"

"No," he shouted. "It's about Hutton!"

"Don't you shout at me."

"You wanker!" shouted Liam. "They shot him up the fucking arse, Maureen."

"God, keep the head. I'm not doing anything dangerous down here."

"Maureen, if she was muling for him and you're asking about her they'll kill ye!" Liam sounded almost hysterical. "They shot him up the arse, Mauri. Think what they'd do to you." It took four pounds in small change for Maureen to convince Liam not to panic, that Sarah's house was safe and she would be home really soon, next couple of days tops. He made her promise that if she got a scare of any kind she would phone him, he'd book a flight on his credit card and she could be home within three hours.

"I've got loads of money," she said. "I can book it myself."

"And listen," he said, "don't mention my name to anyone. Don't even tell anyone your name."

"Why?"

"They might connect us with each other."

"Right," she said, smiling." 'Cause we're the only two O'Donnells in Britain."

Liam paused so long that she thought they had been cut off. "Hello, Liam? Liam, are ye still there?"

"You have no idea," he was muttering, almost to himself, "no fucking idea what goes on."

Maureen passed the door, trying to look inside and anticipate the clientele, but the small windows had been back-coated with orange reflective plastic and any apparent movement inside was actually a reflection of the street. She opened the door and walked in, standing tall, trying to make an impression. The pub split into two rooms just inside the door with a continuous bar running through both. To the left was a room for the serious drinkers, with tables and ashtrays and little else. The room on the right had pictures on the wall and a dartboard, closed over like a traveling altarpiece. The pub smelled strongly of stale cigarette smoke tainted by an industrial lemon scent. Maureen remembered the smell from her time working in the Apollo box office. It was industrial spray sold in gallon containers, guaranteed to cover any smell. The cleaners at the Apollo used it when members of the public messed themselves or spilled milk on the soft furnishings.

Maureen went into the social room and sat down at the bar, shaking off her overcoat, waiting for the barman to get round to her. Sunshine spilled onto the tiled floor, forming little yellow puddles and showing up the filthy grouting. The wooden bar was badly scarred with fag burns and water marks. She could see through the arch into the serious-drinking room. A lone man sat crouched over his beer, asleep, his dirty brown anorak pulled over to one side by the weight of loose change in his pocket. She couldn't see his face. The less serious room was empty. It was eleven thirty on a Saturday morning and the drinking day had yet to begin.

She lit a cigarette as the barman came round the corner and asked him for a lemonade and a whiskey in separate glasses. He was middle-aged, black, dressed in jeans and a blue silk shirt open at the neck, displaying little hairy Afro bobbles on his chest like a dot-to-dot puzzle. He poured the lemonade from the gun, drew a tiny measure of whiskey from the optic and put the two glasses on the bar. Maureen lifted the lemonade and sipped. The oily mixer syrup swirled in the water, catching the light. He was watching her, wanting to talk, busying himself with the hopeless task of cleaning the bar top. Finally, he nodded at the untouched whiskey and asked her if she was waiting for someone.

"No," said Maureen, between gulps of flat lemonade, "I just came in because I'm thirsty."

It was pretty unlikely. The Coach and Horses was a different world, not a small deviation from the street. He wiped the taps near to her, rubbing them with a ripped beer towel, and caught her eye three or four times.

"You worked here a long time?" asked Maureen, trying to sound casual.

He said he'd been there two or three years, then went back to cleaning the bar and glancing at her. She picked up her whiskey. There was hardly anything in the glass, just enough to discolor the bowl. She felt sure she was being ripped off. Maybe that's why he was watching her. "It seems a shame to mess a glass with a measure that small," she said.

"You just come from Glasgow?" the barman asked.

Maureen nodded.

"Yeah," he said. "A lot of the pubs up there sell whiskey in quarter-gill measures. In here we sell them in an eighth."

"Is that legal?"

"Oh, yeah." He grinned at her. "We charge the same as well."

"Bet you don't get many Scots in here."

"Actually, we do, 'cause we do the Tennent's." He illustrated his point by gesturing to a pair of lager taps.

"Ah," said Maureen, smiling and pretending she gave a shit.

They had nothing else to say. Although keen to chat, the barman seemed incapable of saying anything that didn't bring the conversation to a grinding halt. Maureen looked around the room.

"You're just off the train, aren't you?" he said.

"Aye." She tried smiling at him again. "Why? Because I didn't know the whiskey measure?"

"No," he said, indicating her overcoat. "They always dress too warm, just off the train."

Maureen held out her hand. "Maureen O'Donnell," she said.

He shook her hand with a limp squeeze. "Hello," he said, neglecting to give his name.

She suspected that he did know better. She let go of his hand and picked up her drink again. "Lot of Scots come in here, do they?" she said.

"Yeah, they do."

"Bet I'd know half of them, as well. Does Neil Hutton ever come in here?"

The barman sneered as if she had told him a dirty joke. "No."

"What about Frank Toner?"

"Who?"

"Frank Toner – big guy, wears glasses?" She pulled out the Polaroid and showed it to him. "See that guy?" she said. "Does he come in here?"

"Why?"

She tucked away the photo in her pocket. "I was told to meet him," she said.

The barman twisted his mouth to the side enigmatically as he pushed the dirty flannel over the bar. Maureen watched him for a minute. She didn't like him at all. She flattened her cigarette in the ashtray and slid off the stool, picking up her coat.

"He drinks in here," said the barman quietly.

"Most nights?"

"Some nights."

Maureen held up the photocopy of Ann's face. "Is that his girlfriend?"

The barman flinched from the picture. "No," he said, watching the bar as he cleaned it.

"How can you be so sure?"

He thought about it. "Maybe"-he puzzled over it-"maybe she was his girlfriend. I don't keep track."

"Was?"

"Eh?"

"Well," said Maureen, "I said 'she is' and you said 'was.'"

He looked her in the eye. "I 'aven't seen her for a while."

"Oh," said Maureen. He knew Ann was dead and he wasn't planning to tell Maureen. "But you saw them together?"

He shrugged and smiled to himself. "Long time ago, before Christmas. Maybe she was his girlfriend…" He glanced up at her. "… maybe."

"Did she come in here?"

"She used to come in a lot. Came in with him. Then she came in on her own just after Christmas. She was wasted." He shrugged again.

Maureen waited for a moment but it was obvious that he didn't know anything else. She wrote her pager number on a sheet from her notebook, put it on the bar and covered it with a fiver. "Wet the tip of your tongue with that," she said, trying to sound pleasant but coming over as fly. "I'll see ye again." Then she walked out of the pub into the shaming sunshine, leaving the smoky lemon behind her.