Slip of the Knife

I

Paddy stood by the doors for a moment, clutching the envelopes from the clippings library. The morning newsroom was empty. Everyone was packed into Bunty’s cubicle for the editorial conference. Admin staff and the dregs and strays were rattling around and, although it was almost two hours after his shift had finished, Merki was still there, strutting, pleased with himself, offering cigarettes and prompting people to acknowledge his article the day before.

Just then Bunty’s door opened and the conference emptied out into the newsroom, eds and subs spilling out to the desks, journalists heading purposefully for the doors or phones to follow up the stories they had been assigned.

Merki trotted over to a desk and claimed his place at the keyboard, notebook propped up against the monitor, fag packet and lighter at his elbow, ready to bang out a story. She made her way over to him, standing shoulder to shoulder with him. She was a full head taller, and she wasn’t tall.

“Merki, where did you get that story, about the gun?”

Without turning to her, he scratched his neck. “That would be telling, wouldn’t it?”

“Yeah, because none of the other papers ran it or picked up on it, which made me think, you know, single source, known only to you. If anyone was confirming it they would have run it too. Did you cross-check it with anyone?”

Merki grinned. “You’re jealous of me and my success.”

They stood together and laughed. Merki was pretty funny: he had a face like a bag of spanners, worked nights, and she made four times his salary for eight hundred words a week.

Paddy looked over his left shoulder and the Monkey appeared, scowling when he spotted her. She stepped away as he waved her over to Bunty’s door. She held up a finger to the Monkey and picked up a phone, dialed 9 for an outside line, and rang directory inquiries, covering her mouth so Merki wouldn’t hear her asking for the number of Scotia Press. The exchange was deep in the heart of the West End.

The woman answered as if she’d been expecting her call. “Yah?”

“Ah, hello, this is Paddy Meehan from the Scottish Daily News here. I wondered if I might come over later and talk to you about Terry Hewitt?”

Reluctantly, the woman gave her the address, told her not to come in the next three hours and to ring the bell firmly. Paddy thanked her and hung up.

The Monkey wasn’t smiling as she approached. He held the already open door to Bunty’s office and bowed as she passed on the way in.

Bunty was sitting with his elbows on the table, his index fingers steepled against his mouth. He looked up at her. She had never seen him quite as white before.

“Sit.”

Paddy shut the door behind her, leaving the Monkey outside, and took the nearest chair. The table was ten feet long; they were sitting at either end and it still felt too close.

Bunty sat forward. “Callum Ogilvy. Is he out?”

He left the name hanging in the air between them. It wasn’t clear whether it was an accusation, a story suggestion or a reproach. She could bluff it, tell him an outright lie, but big lies rarely went well for her. The porous paper on the clippings envelopes was suddenly damp from her damp hands. She put them on the table.

“Bunty-”

He had her column copy on the table in front of him. “And this flimsy crap is all you bring me.” His voice rose suddenly, his words tumbling over each other in their hurry to get out. “Where’s the bite in this? Say it was the Provos or say it wasn’t. And Misty doesn’t use semicolons. What the fucking bloody hell am I paying you for?” He wasn’t a habitual user of bad language, didn’t understand the rhythm of it, and it sounded desperate. “At the prison: you were seen.”

“Look, there’s been another attack.” She was matching his speed, talking louder than she normally would. “Kevin Hatcher, our old pictures editor. I saw Merki’s article but just because they found a gun doesn’t mean it’s confirmed either way. Someone threatened me at my house. My son-” God, she was personalizing it, making it emotional. She hadn’t meant to. “They threatened me, at my house.”

But Bunty had barely heard her. “You were outside the prison. It’s all over Glasgow. Everyone knows. I look like a bloody fool.”

“But this other story, it’s going to be huge, boss. When Terry and Kevin were in New York – There’s an IRA guy, McBree.”

“I could lose my job.”

His voice was so loud she felt the glass walls on the cubicle shudder and a silence fell in the newsroom outside. A red flush rose up his cheeks and his eyes seemed to deepen in their sockets.

Paddy’s mouth opened, her brain disengaged, and to her astonishment she said, “I visited Ogilvy. I’m working him.”

“For me or for McVie?”

“For you, boss, of course for you.”

Bunty’s red fog ebbed and subsided. His lips reappeared at his mouth. He blinked at the desk. Outside, the noise of the newsroom resumed.

“He’s not out?”

“Ah.” The second she said Callum was no longer in custody a scrum of journalists would form outside Sean’s house. She hoped they hadn’t asked the prison service about Callum’s whereabouts. “Not to my knowledge.”

“Bring me six hundred words on your visit to Ogilvy in the next two hours or I’ll sack you and tell every single person in this business why. Out.”

“OK.” She stood up, wondering what the fuck she had said that for. She’d even called him boss. She hadn’t called an editor boss in five years.

The Monkey must have been listening to the entire conversation because he opened the door from outside for her to leave. Paddy picked up her envelopes and walked out.

The Monkey pointed her over to a small space at a computer on the features island. “You can use that desk there.”

People wandering around the room watched her, as she walked uncertainly over to the desk and sat down, setting her clippings envelopes in a tidy pile.

The Monkey was watching her too so she reached forward and switched on the computer. The monitor gave a green yawn and flickered to a DOS prompt.

She couldn’t write up a fictitious visit to Callum. It was checkable; other journalists would look at the prison visitors’ book and see her name wasn’t in it. If she wrote the truth about the release, Sean would never forgive her-she had accompanied him as a friend, not a reporter. I have a life, she reminded herself, beyond my job: I have a life. Callum was volatile, living in Sean’s house with his children and his wife, and he didn’t want to be written about. If he saw her name on an article he’d be sure to blame Sean.

The Monkey was watching so she directed the DOS prompt to take her into a word-processing package.

II

The feet were back again. Callum had watched them for two hours yesterday and now they were back. He could see them as he stepped into the street, watched them from the corner of his eye, and turned to the right, heading in the opposite direction from the way he had gone yesterday morning. He resisted the urge to look back at the man, to see where he was watching. He’d find out soon enough.

He walked on, head up, staying calm, not drawing the man’s eye, until he had passed a garage forecourt and an old kirk and come to a bend in the road. Only then did he cross the street to the right side, the side the man was on.

Callum didn’t know this area but he took an educated guess and skirted around the block, looking for ways into the back court and the flooded midden. It was a red-sandstone quadrangle of tenements, old-style, not cleaned up like a lot of the buildings he had seen on the drive in. Black soot still coated the stone, thickest against the top floors. The glittering red stone showed on the ground floor, where the rain had run it off. It was tenements as he remembered them, Glasgow as he knew it as a child: black and forbidding.

He found an open close mouth and looked through. There was the bin shed, there was the puddle where the children had been playing yesterday. The man would be around the corner, standing in a close that ran at a ninety-degree angle to this one, looking out into the street. And he’d be bored now, thinking about other things, his guard down.

Callum’s mouth felt dry as he flattened himself against the inside wall and looked out into the back court. Bright sunlight sliced the yard in half, glinting off the puddle and the upended skeleton of a pram. Swarms of midges hung in the air. It was a school day, but the children would be coming home soon. Elaine had taken the babies off in the pram, setting off early, she said, to pick up messages before she went to get the kids from school. She wouldn’t even know he’d slipped out of the house but he had only fifteen minutes until the back court was overrun with children.

He looked up. Windows were open all around the square, kitchen windows. He could see taps in front of one window, a clothes pulley on a ceiling. Somewhere a radio crackled an old show tune.

He stepped out onto the dirt floor, tiptoeing, keeping against the wall and in the shadows, and crept around to the close door.

There he was, Rat Shoes, standing fifteen feet away from him, leaning on the close mouth, tipping his head back to drain a can of Coke as he watched the street. Callum could see his own bedroom window, the curtain pulled up at the corner where he had kept watch over the street all night.

A man walked past on the other side of the road and Rat Shoes followed him with his eyes. Callum used his toes to slip his shoes off his feet, leaving them where they fell. His stockinged feet absorbed the bitter chill from the concrete beneath him. It was cold here, damp; the sun hadn’t touched here.

He took a step forward, testing, seeing how alert the guy was. Luckily the guy was looking out into a bright street and Callum was coming from the shadows. He took another step and then another but still Rat Shoes looked out into the road, shaking his can of Coke to see if it was finished, finding a small splash and tipping his head back again.

Callum was three feet behind him and the guy didn’t know. He had a ponytail, glasses, he was taller than Callum and his clothes looked expensive, a nice red-checked jacket open to a red T-shirt, baggy jeans, rat shoes.

In prison, in the first prison he ever went to, the opportunities for fighting were kept to an absolute minimum. No one was allowed to be alone with anyone else for any length of time. All the cells were single cells, because the inmates were all so young the authorities didn’t want them sharing, in case they’d fuck each other or kill each other or get gay or something, he didn’t know. But fights broke out just the same, people fell out, met guys from rival gangs. It all went on just the same but everything, from the shouting of abuse to the physical fighting, had to happen in tiny slivers. Sudden wars were won while queuing for food. A wee guy died once in a three-minute library call. They had to develop techniques for it. They called it “a sudden.” A sudden war, a sudden marking of a young man’s face, a sudden rape, a sudden kill.

Callum brought his hands together, making a fist of them, and raised them over the guy’s head. He opened his mouth to take a silent deep breath and brought his fists down.

A sudden punch carried all his weight onto Steven Curren’s temple, swinging back so that the force made him fall into the dark of the close, swinging sideways so that his head ricocheted backwards on a diagonal, smashing off the close wall and leaving a trail of blood as he slid to the floor.

Callum put his hands under Steven’s arms and dragged him back so that his feet weren’t trailing out into the street. He reached into his jacket and took his wallet, not because he wanted it, just to cover himself, and backed off down the dark passageway.

He skipped across the yard, grabbing his own shoes, keeping in the dark, and stopped when he got to the close he had come in through. He ripped the Velcro open on the wallet and took out the notes, twenty quid, leaving the rest in place and dumping it in the dark.

As he stepped out of the close into the sunshine he felt elated. Fingering the notes in his pocket, he made his way back to Sean’s house, slipping back in the front door he had left open and taking his place on the corner of the bed. He lifted the edge of the curtain, smiling, panting as he looked out to the bright street.

Three children wearing their school uniforms and eating sweeties came up to the dark close and found him. They stood staring down at him, prodded him with a foot while one of them ran across the road. A woman came and then the police. Steven Curren stirred and stood up, holding his head where he had hit it on the close wall. He felt for his wallet. Behind Callum, out in the hall, the door opened to the flat and the house was suddenly flooded with the cries and calls of children.

Callum stood up, looking for a sense of satisfaction inside himself. He didn’t feel it. He fingered the notes again and felt stupid, sorry for the three kids who’d found the guy in the close, sorry that they’d seen the blood on the wall.

He went out to see his family.