Resolution

Chapter 37

They were sitting side by side like the three wise monkeys, watching the door and not knowing what to do. They had been there for a while and the cold stone step was numbing Maureen's bum. Across the square the Park Circus Health Club was busy. Punters arrived and left. They were middle-aged men, out for their Sunday-night fuck. Mostly they were alone but a couple of twosomes arrived, smiling hard as they jogged up to the door. A fat man with thin legs arrived in a car and paused on the top step before pressing the bell, wringing his hands with his elbows bowed to the sides.

"What's he doing?" asked Kilty.

"Taking his wedding ring off," said Maureen.

Leslie sighed heavily.

"You all right, Leslie?" said Kilty.

"No," she said.

Kilty took Leslie's hand, squeezing it hard and holding on to it. Maureen could see it made Leslie uncomfortable but she didn't want to yank her hand away so she left it, glancing at it a couple of times, wishing Kilty would get off her. Eventually she had to offer her a fag to make her let go.

They watched the man press the bell. The door opened and they saw the bodybuilder inside, leaning against the wall, smiling and greeting the man with an outstretched hand.

"My stupid fucking father," whispered Kilty.

"He didn't know, Kilty," said Maureen. "He wouldn't have told us if he knew."

"Yeah." Leslie rubbed her back. "He didn't know."

"Piss off," said Kilty gently, knowing they were trying to be kind. "All it takes is a glance at the fucking newspapers. These poor women think they're coming here to study-"

"I think they know what they're coming here for," said Maureen.

Kilty seemed disappointed. "Why do you think that?"

"That's what Candy III said, really. She said they get their passports taken away and made to work for nothing."

Maureen could tell that Kilty had a problem with it. "But why would Ella fall out with her son about that, then?"

"Ella was a pro herself," said Maureen. "We might have trouble seeing how wrong that is but Ella wouldn't."

It was dark now and the grassy hills in the park had turned a velvet blue. The rusting iron gates leading into the park hung idly from their struts. Maureen thought of Ella's bitter son Si, furious at what his mother did for money, never thinking what she was giving up for him, never wondering at the resourcefulness it took to do that. Candy II wasn't bitter, and look at her life. She thought of bitter Una, sitting in her big house with a healthy baby and a brand-new car at her door. And she thought of herself and her past, of all the golden moments that had passed unappreciated because she was bitter too. The one thing they had in common was their victimhood, and that mantle was a negation of all the wonder in life, a license to brutalize without compunction. She wondered if she was using it to kill Michael, if it seemed inevitable simply because she wanted to do it so much. Back across the road, the light in the doorway flickered, and as Maureen looked up she imagined a school assembly lineup, with Si McGee and dead-eyed Tonsa sitting on a parquet floor next to Candy II, gleefully spitting mucus-covered Kinder-eggs over the floor towards a row of angry teachers.

Across the square the door opened and shut. The bodybuilder looked straight at them as he walked down the steps, and ran a slow, graceless jog over to them, swinging his overworked arms. He stopped in front of them and looked along the line as if he was memorizing their faces. Maureen nodded at him and went back to staring at the door. "What are you girls doing out here, then?" he said, sounding jolly and friendly.

Maureen jerked a thumb at the house behind her. "Locked out," she said.

He laughed, thinking it was a joke, and stopped when he saw that she wasn't joining in. "Come on," he said, reaching forward and cupping his hand under Leslie's elbow, lifting her, "time to go home."

Skinny as she was, Leslie turned on him. "Get your fucking hand off me," she spat, wringing her arm free and stepping back. She had her finger in his face, a stiff, angry finger, and she was shouting. "Do you own this street, do ye, eh?" She didn't give him time to answer. "Do ye own this fuck street and everyone in it, do ye? Your fucking street, is it?" She was close to hitting him, they could all tell. He backed off. "Calm down." He looked at Maureen for support.

"You fucker. You fucking fucker." Leslie was screaming at the top of her voice. Lights flicked on in front rooms around the quiet square. "You're running a fucking brothel over there. D'ye batter them if they won't work for ye? Do ye?"

The bodybuilder had been nice for long enough. He pressed his lips together. "Calm down," he said, telling her this time. He reached for her roughly, grabbing her arm, holding her tight. Kilty, seated three feet away, launched herself, landing mouth first on his wrist, biting him as hard as she could. Yelping, he let go of Leslie, who seemed to have grown two feet taller than any of the rest of them.

Her mouth was a thin, furious line, her voice low and hard. "The man's not born that can raise his hand to me," she said, and punched him on the side of the neck. They hardly saw her hand go out, just retract, heard the sound of skin slapping hard against skin, and the bodybuilder went down like a bag of bricks.

"What the fuck…" said Maureen.

"I'm afraid I've lost my temper," said Leslie, with supernatural calm. "Perhaps we should leave."

They were buzzing with nervous excitement as they queued to get into the all-night cafe.

"I enjoyed that," said Leslie, standing tall and proud, her eyes open a little too wide. "Can't we just go back to Maureen's?"

"No," snapped Kilty disapprovingly. "I think we should stay out until you've calmed down."

"Dunno why you're so snotty about it," said Leslie aggressively. "You bit him."

"I was defending you," said Kilty. "Anyway, there's no food in hers. I haven't eaten since yesterday." She poked Maureen hard in the ribs. "And you look like Bobby Sands."

"Give it a rest," said Maureen, and nodded at Leslie. "She's already had a go at me today."

It was a strange cafe, furnished with old school desks and a curvy bit of a church pew. Two avocado-colored baths took up valuable floor space and had plants growing in them for no good reason. It was kept busy with the waves of homebound pub-goers, clubbers and lost loners who just couldn't sleep. Kilty ordered a whole lot of things from cups of cocoa to eggs Benedict and they dutifully handed their menus back to the exhausted waitress.

"What was all that stuff?" asked Leslie.

"Calming food," said Kilty, getting a pink Powerpuff Girls notebook out of her handbag and flipping it open. "We need to calm down and think about what we're going to do about this."

"I don't want to calm down," said Leslie. "I enjoyed that."

Kilty took out a pen, clicked it open and wrote an elaborate "1" in the tiny margin. "We need to think. What are our goals here?"

"What d'ye mean?" Leslie asked.

"What are we going to try to achieve? It's better if we work that out before we come up with a plan." Then she explained, "Social work postgrad, course 101."

They saw the logic.

"I want to bring that bastard McGee down," said Maureen.

"I want to help the women in there," said Leslie reproachfully, and Maureen realized that she should have said that too.

"Right." Kilty wrote slowly, in a jagged but precise hand. Then she looked up. "I want to make my dad wake up," she said, waited for them to nod and jotted it down as the hot chocolate arrived.

Maureen ate her Flake with showy gusto, spooning warm cream into her mouth and swallowing it as if she were enjoying it. Leslie was taking her out on the bike to look for Michael after this and the last thing she wanted was heavy food but she ate to reassure the others. All three looked at the notepad and the three points, nodding and thinking about it as they drank milky chocolate.

"If," said Kilty ponderously, "trafficking isn't an offense in Poland, and McGee's name isn't on anything here -"

"We don't know that," interrupted Leslie. "What about Ella's court case?"

"That's not evidence, that's an allegation," said Kilty succinctly. "And if he's fly enough to traffic from Poland because it's one of the few countries that isn't a signatory to any convention, you can bet your arse he'll have kept his name off the sauna license."

Leslie stirred her chocolate, coaxing the settled cocoa powder from the bottom.

"If his name isn't on anything," continued Kilty, "what can we do? We can't go to the police. They'll tell us to piss off."

They all thought about it, each trying to think of alternatives to going to the police.

"We could blow him up," said Leslie stupidly.

"Yeah." Kilty looked at her askance. "I think you should get back with Cammy before ye kill someone. Leaving your commando tendencies aside, goal two is get the women out."

They couldn't think of anything for that either and were feeling discouraged as the food arrived at the table. Kilty got the waitress just to put it all in the middle and they tried to share it but everyone wanted the eggs and it turned into an unsightly scramble.

"God," said Leslie, "that was gorgeous."

"Taste the Croque Monsieur," said Kilty, pointing her to a golden toastie. "They make it with butter."

"The problem with helping the women," said Maureen, "is what do we do? Do we get them out and send them home?"

"Yeah," said Kilty. "Otherwise we'd need somewhere safe for them to hide from Immigration and the bastards who brought them over here. We don't have those kinds of resources."

Leslie sat back. "I'll go in with a gun and get them out, if that's what it takes."

"Look, you can't use being angry with your boyfriend to shoot up a licensed premises," said Kilty, as if she'd been involved in a tremendous amount of paramilitary activity. "You might remember the good times halfway through and then where will ye be?"

"Standing in a brothel with a gun and whole lot of foreign women?" said Leslie, as if she'd really thought about it.

"How would ye get the women to leave with ye? What would you say to them?"

"That I'd come to rescue them and if they came with me they'd be safe-"

"In Polish? Or Latvian?"

"Oh." Leslie looked deflated.

"And what about afterwards? What if they want to carry on working? Would you take them to your house?"

"They can't stay with me, even if they're not working," said Leslie firmly. It seemed a strange line for a mad bomber to stand firm on. "I'm gonnae… I need my space," she said, and looked shifty.

Maureen leaned across the table. "What about upsetting your dad? Couldn't you just tell him?"

"Nope," said Kilty. "He'd just do what he always does and say I was mad. Anyway, getting one lot of women out probably won't even cost Si that much money."

"See," said Maureen, "I don't think he really cares about the money."

"Why?"

"Well, think about it. He's a poor scholarship boy at a Catholic school, his mum's a prostitute and the other boys probably know that, his sister's a psycho. He doesn't want money. The money is a side issue. He wants respectability."

Leslie shook her head. "How can this even be happening in this day and age? It's un-fucking-believable."

"Yeah," said Kilty. "They count on that, like the child prostitution racket. I read today that lone child immigrants seeking asylum routinely go missing in the UK. The cops think they're being prostituted and used to make pornography by organized gangs but they can't find them. Who'd believe that?"

"No one," said Maureen.

"No one," said Leslie miserably. "And even if they did they'd roll their fucking eyes and do nothing."

Sitting on the back of the bike, holding on to Leslie's waist, Maureen shut her eyes and wished herself anywhere else. She felt sick and dizzy, and suddenly aware of her bare legs and arms and the danger of the night traffic. If they crashed and skidded on the Tarmac she'd be skinned alive. The possibility still seemed more inviting than their destination. Leslie had agreed to help her watch Michael but had no idea what Maureen was planning. She pulled up at a junction, flicking the bike into neutral and kicking down the stand. Her voice was muffled through the helmet. "Ye're hurting me," she said, working her fingers into Maureen's clenched fists, making her relax her grip. Sorry.

"Just loosen it a bit."

The front of the house was dark again and Una's Rover was parked outside the front door. They stood behind the strip of communal garden in the street for twenty minutes, watching the lights in the hall through the open living-room door, but saw no movement. "Let's go round the back," whispered Leslie.

"Wait here a bit." Maureen was afraid she'd be sick again and shame herself in front of Leslie, who'd just KO'd a brick shit-house.

Leslie elbowed her hard. "There's nothing going on here."

Maureen pushed her elbow down. "Wait a bit, though."

Leslie, still bristling with adrenaline, pushed her arm. "What's the point in us standing here -"

The close door opened and Una stepped out into the street, followed by a small bald man. Maureen froze, holding on to the chicken-wire fence. Una had gained a lot of weight since they had last seen her, and her haircut was worse from the front than the back. It stuck up at the top and hung over her ears. She was wearing purple leggings and a giant pink T-shirt. She raised her hand and pointed at the car. The lights flashed and beeped and she walked round to the driver's seat. Michael was shuffling and looked as if something demeaning had just happened to him. As he reached forward to open the door Leslie grabbed Maureen's arm and pulled her away to the bike parked on the corner. She had to lift Maureen's leg to get her on the bike and slammed the helmet on her, banging the top of her head so hard it rang and buzzed. They took off, following the Rover at a distance.

Maureen shut her eyes, leaning her head on Leslie's shoulder, trying to take herself back to Vik. They were crossing the river at Jamaica Street when the anger in her belly stirred awake, swirling around her gut, mustering allies among the hormones. She sat up. They were on the Maryhill Road, heading up to where she knew he stayed. They passed Benny's house and she tried to see if his lights were on, but they were doing forty and whizzed under the railway bridge marking the boundary with Ruchill.

Three cars in front, Una took a left, disappearing off the road. Leslie followed her round the corner and suddenly came to the Rover, parked at the back of a shop. Leslie passed by just as Una opened her door, flicking on the internal light. Michael had on a white T-shirt with a Nike tick across the front, the soft material articulating his drooping belly and rounded back. Maureen wanted to lean across and grab him from the bike, forgetting who he was, thinking he was McGee or Angus or someone else. She wanted to grab him and drag him along behind her, skin him alive on the potholed road.

Leslie turned the block and rejoined the main road, following it back to the town. At a set of lights she wrestled with Maureen's clenched hands again, loosening them, digging at them with her nails unnecessarily.

Back in Garnethill, Maureen cracked the lid off a brand-new half bottle of whiskey and drank it. Leslie said she only had another couple of days on the antibiotics and watched her enviously, sipping a cup of tea. They hadn't bothered to put the lights on in the living room and the dark orange sky filled the window.

"Maureen," she said, "ye have to remember that the baby isn't you. It could be different this time. I mean, he's a hundred and ten years old and Una doesn't trust him to get a taxi home on his own. I don't think she'll be leaving him alone with the baby."

"I've seen her leave him with the baby," said Maureen. "I've seen her do it."

"Can't you be patient?" said Leslie quietly.

"Why would I be patient?"

"He's not going to live long, Mauri, he was having trouble walking."

Leslie nodded off on the settee and Maureen tiptoed into her bedroom. She sat on the end of her bed, drinking from the bottle as she looked out over the city to the blackened Ruchill Tower, drinking and thinking about skinning Michael.