Resolution

Chapter 4

Outside the kitchen window the morning sky was as clear as a baby's conscience. Below, at the base of Garnethill, the slip road to the motorway was clogging up and the heat began to rise from the dawning city. Maureen sipped her coffee and shuddered compulsively, remembering the sleepy vagueness in her limbs just before the alarm. She looked out at the blackened silhouette on the horizon. It was the jagged tower of an old fever hospital, built a mile away from the city. Around it, peering over the shoulder of the hill, she saw the smashed onion domes on the smaller buildings, looking like caved-in heads.

Maureen had been dreaming about her stomach splitting open again, about Michael being in the room, touching her with razor fingers, making her bleed between her legs. It was getting worse – it was getting worse because he was out there somewhere. Acknowledging the fear tripped her mind to the image of Michael lying on the floor.

She kept thinking of a dark room. She shut her eyes. He was lying on his side ten yards from her, his breathing labored. Maureen's face was sore down one side, smarting from a punch or fall. She walked over to him, raised an arm for balance and brought the heel of her boot down on his head, again and again, felt the cracking of bone shudder up her leg, again and again, until Michael was dead.

She opened her eyes and looked at her trembling hands. She could try to imagine what it would feel like, to see if she could do it, but she would never know before the time came. She stopped herself, rubbing her eyes hard, reminding herself that there had been no phone call in the night: her sister Una's baby wasn't born yet. She had one more day of grace before the wars.

She took her coffee into the living room and put the telly on to drown out the noise in her head. An earnest local news reporter was standing in a park, sweating in a heavy woolen suit. He warned the public to stay indoors or use a high-factor sun cream. The piece must have been filmed at lunchtime. The grassy hillside behind him was carpeted with pink and red bodies slathered in baby oil. Over his left shoulder a team of sunburned topless men, lying on the grass, raised their lager cans to the camera, waving fags and laughing, the living embodiment of a uniquely Scottish cavalier disregard for health.

As she watched the morning news, Maureen's bare feet felt the powdery dust on the floorboards and her toes recoiled, pressing the flaking grit against the soft skin. She had left the stains from his blood unpainted, hoping somehow that it would help her assimilate Douglas 's death. It hadn't. Before she could begin to take in what had happened she was forgetting Douglas 's face and his manner, forgetting what she'd seen in him, forgetting everything but the shock and revulsion when she found his body. His eyes were the last image to slip her memory. When she saw him now, smiling and blinking slowly, she didn't know if she was remembering him or the memory of him. The heat was lifting his blood out of the wood, forming a brown dust that gathered in the still corners. Everything that was ever Douglas was slithering away.

In the bedroom, she pulled on a fresh T-shirt and a pair of baggy jungle shorts that hung low on her hips, pressing and wriggling her blood-dusty feet into a pair of trainers. Hearing her brother's soft, familiar knock at the door, she walked out to the hall. Liam would be the first to know if the baby was born and although she was expecting him, she looked out through the spy hole for clues about Una. Liam was standing on the landing, his sports bag in one hand and his college bag in the other. His shades couldn't hide a face still puffy with sleep. She opened the door and let him in.

"All right, Mauri?" he said, his voice taut with sleep and flecks of morning phlegm. He pulled off his glasses and followed her through to the kitchen, sitting the sports bag on the table.

"D'ye want a coffee?" she asked.

"Naw," he said, "I'm going to the library. I'll just sort ye out and go."

Unzipping the bag, he lifted six boxes of duty-free Embassy Regal cigarettes onto the table. "I haven't got any Superkings just now but I'll bring some tomorrow."

Maureen nodded. "This sleeve's a bit battered," she said, lifting one box and looking at the smashed corner.

He took it back and tutted at it. "Fuckers," he said lethargically. "They shouldn't give me shit like that. If ye can't use them, give them back to me on Monday and I'll refund the difference."

"No, no, don't worry," said Maureen, conscious that she was already getting the cigarettes at cost price as a special favor. "I'll smoke them. When's your exam?"

"Tuesday morning," he said, taking out a cigarette and lighting up.

"That's handy, then, because the wedding's on Wednesday."

"Oh, God, yeah," he said. "I forgot about that."

He pulled some blue pouches of rolling tobacco out of his bag but Maureen waved them back in. "We've got loads of those. There's a guy up the lane selling them fifty pence cheaper."

"How can he afford that?"

"Well," said Maureen, "he's not on a stall, he's got no overheads."

"He's a wee bastard whatever his story is," said Liam.

Tired, they gave each other token smiles.

"No word about Una, then?" said Maureen quietly.

"No," said Liam, clamping the cigarette between his teeth as he zipped up the bag and walked out to the hall.

"Do you want that table?" she said, pointing to the telephone table by the door. It wasn't nice – the wood was cheap and the varnish was chipped – but it was tall and thin and perfect for a telephone in an unobtrusive corner.

Liam tilted his head and looked at it. "What's wrong with it?"

"Nothing. There's just too much stuff in here."

"Ye sure?"

"Aye." Maureen lifted the phone onto the floor and kicked the dusty phone books out of the way.

Liam hooked his arm underneath, lifted the table and struggled backwards out of the front door. The leg got caught in a stray strap from the sports bag and yanked it off his shoulder. He climbed over the bag, smashing the table off the door frame. The sharp sound ricocheted off the close walls.

"Keep it down," whispered Maureen. "It's only half eight."

"Sorry." Liam smiled, closing an eye against the stream of smoke from his cigarette. He bent down to lift the bag and cracked the leg off the concrete floor. "Shit. I'll see ye later," he said, and walked down the stairs, inadvertently banging the tabletop off the iron banisters, leaving a trail of smoke behind him.

Back in the kitchen she finished her coffee and filled her cycle bag with the sleeves of cigarettes. She packed in as many as she could and hoped it would be a busy day at the market. Maureen needed to sell a lot of sleeves: she owed the Inland Revenue six thousand pounds' inheritance tax.

The day before he died Douglas had deposited fifteen thousand pounds in her bank account. Their brief and pointless affair had weighed heavily on him and the money was a tainted apology. It was an uncomfortable legacy, making Maureen feel like Douglas's deepest regret. She had spent it as quickly as she could, buying clothes and takeout, handing lumps of it to anyone who'd take it and finally paying off a chunk of her mortgage. She was down to her last grand when Douglas's wife, Elsbeth, got in touch. She was settling his estate, and because it had been given within the seven years before his death, the money was liable to inheritance tax. Elsbeth wasn't about to pay it for Maureen. If Maureen didn't pay the six thousand, the tax man could sell her house from under her. In the two months they had been selling the cigarettes Maureen had managed to save two and a half thousand quid. They'd have made more if they weren't smoking so much of the stock.

An irresponsible driver out in the street hooted the horn three times, waking up anyone not keeping time to their clock. Maureen nipped into the kitchen, looked out of the window and saw a dirty white van in the street. Leslie was riding the clutch impatiently, sliding the van up and down the hill. Maureen picked up the cycle bag, pocketed her fags and sunglasses and locked the front door on the way out.

The close was quiet and cool. Radios and televisions murmured behind the doors as everyone breakfasted and got ready to meet the day. Maureen pulled the close door open and a wall of heat hit her, making her hair prickle to attention. She slid on her shades. They were a cheap Ray-Bans imitation and sat so close to her face that her eyelashes brushed the glass. She opened the back door of the van and put the bag in, slamming the door shut and pausing to make sure it didn't fall open again. Then she clambered into the front seat and did up her belt, tying the long strap and the short strap together in a knot. It was an old van. "Hiya," she said chirpily.

Leslie was miserable, the pink tinge to her eyes exacerbated by the rose-tinted glass on her sad-eye shades. "Hiya," she said, scratching her cheek with her thumbnail and looking as if she might cry.

Leslie was dressed in a pair of pink denim cutoffs and a green running shirt. She rarely drove her motorbike now that they had the van. Maureen was used to seeing her in her leathers all the time and she'd forgotten Leslie's flair for throwing on horrible clothes and making them look like a daring statement. She had thick black hair, cut short, with a life and will of its own, large dark eyes and the righteous air of a very angry mother taking on the school bullies. She had perfect shoulders, fat-free arms, and radiant skin that made Maureen secretly jealous.

"I've… I've split up with Cammy," she said, and sighed at the wheel.

Maureen was finding it hard to keep acting surprised. Leslie and Cammy had split up three times this month alone. "Really?" She tried to think of something to say that she hadn't already said about it. "How's he taking it?"

Leslie nodded indignantly at the wheel. "Well, he knows I'm serious this time, that's for sure."

"Are ye serious this time?"

"Maureen," rebuked Leslie, "I'm doing my best here."

"I know," said Maureen, "I know."

Leslie wrestled the wheel left and pulled out. "And I'm not bringing him to Kilty's brother's wedding either," she said. "I've told him."

"Oh," said Maureen, secretly pleased. "Have you told Kilty?"

"No, but I will."

"Because it's about fifty quid a head at Cameron House."

"I'll tell her, I'll phone her. Anyway, tonight," said Leslie, stopping at the lights, "we're sorting his stuff out and he's giving me the keys back."

"God, that serious, is it?" said Maureen, trying to sound encouraging.

"That serious. He's suffocating me. I can't stand it anymore. If I'm in the loo too long he thinks I'm having an affair."

Maureen didn't like Cammy and the feeling was mutual. They snipped at each other when they were in company and sat in a chilly, stubborn silence when they were left alone. Cammy was a contrary little shit. He blamed his bullying temper on the oppression of the Irish Catholic workingman. Leslie was Protestant and, although not a natural candidate for ancestral guilt, she believed him. Maureen and Liam were Catholic and told her that Cammy's patter was a load of paranoid rubbish, that their generation was untouched by anti-Catholic prejudice, and sectarianism was nothing more than a football fan's accessory now. Still, Cammy maintained that history had dealt him a cruel blow. Maureen was sure that Leslie would have finished with him long ago if she had still had her job at the Scottish women's shelter. Being a house manager had given her a focus, a role to play in the good fight, and she was restless and unfulfilled since being sacked.

Behind the van the driver of a red truck hooted.

"Keep your hair on, ya postie bastard," said Leslie, and jerked the old van into first gear.