Slip of the Knife

I

It was five in the morning but, looking up from the car park, Paddy could see that the Daily News building was readying for the day. The long, black glass-and-chrome office building housed a print works downstairs with a glass wall looking into it. A stream of papers flew along the conveyor, print drying, the machine-gun clack-clack of the presses loud in the quiet of the morning. Van drivers gathered by the loading bay, waiting for the bales. Upstairs, on the second floor, the newsroom lights were off at the right-hand side of the room. The Doze Zone. When she worked the night shift they’d kept one part of the big room dark for those who wanted to sleep. Now the staff had been cut so much they only needed to use half the room.

The perpetual decline in Daily News sales meant a high turnover of senior editors, each of whom arrived in the job promising to reverse a global market trend and give the proprietors a better return. The easiest way to cut costs was by reducing wages. Paddy had left the News for a year. By the time she was poached back from the Herald a third of the staff were missing. To be fair, in the glory days of the sixties and seventies the staffing was breathtakingly flabby. Demarcation meant that a driver couldn’t load a van and a journalist wasn’t allowed to empty a bin. Ancillary jobs were so well paid that they were jealously passed from father to son.

When she started as a copyboy, defying the editors and skiving were considered art forms. Now everyone kept their heads down, aware that they were lucky to have survived each incoming editor’s cull, glad to be working in a shrinking market.

Checking her reflection in the rearview mirror, Paddy saw a face puffy from crying. She could pass it off as tiredness.

“I’ve just been woken up,” she told herself. “I was fast asleep and I’ve just woken up.”

She shivered, still too vulnerable to go in without her work face, without her armor. In another time she had been so inconsequential she could have hanged herself at her desk without exciting comment, but those days were long past. She was a name now, drew a big wage and was female.

Her column had started as part of the Herald Dab Sheet, given to her by a sympathetic editor when Pete had double pneumonia. She was glad of it at the time. A column meant she didn’t have to leave the hospital ward and could call her copy in from the pay phone in the lobby. Her opinions on outside matters were exactly what could have been expected from a mother watching her son struggle to breathe every day. Terror made her angry, ill-considered and blunt. She was so controversial they gave her the whole of page five, a banner byline of her name and a front-page name check. The News poached her back to upset their readers.

The column was herself on a bad-tempered rant. She had denounced a perfectly sincere actor who spoke at a political rally in support of a cause he knew nothing about. She once did a whole column about footballers’ taste in casual clothes (“Pigs in Knickers”). She was sometimes embarrassed by the stuff she wrote, like a temper hangover, but the column attracted support from all quarters. She had stumbled on a talent for articulating nationwide annoyances. Her embarrassment was soothed by an exponential rise in her wages and the opportunities it opened up for her. It led to local, then national, radio and on to TV appearances. She did a three-month stint on a Sunday morning TV magazine show, where the lighting made her look extra-fat and mad. People set their alarm clocks to watch it.

She’d wanted to call the column “Land of Sophistry and Mist,” after Byron’s observations on the nastiness of the Scots, but the Herald editor at the time (from Bristol-lasted five months) said it was pretentious, smacked of a knowledge of literature, and cut it to “Land of Mist” without consulting her. “Giving it Misty,” to those in the know, meant ignorant tub-thumping.

Fear had been her inspiration but Pete soon recovered. He was prone to chest infections, but no worse than other kids. Although she was now calm and content, once a week she had to dip back into that black lake. The level was getting lower and lower, so she stole: she sought out angry people, milked them for comment, starting fights in the Press Bar to get an angle on any current issue.

She was successful and knew how that would make colleagues talk about her. They speculated unkindly about her sexual behavior, her income, her home life.

Lauded for her bad-tempered ranting, she feared that she would wake up one morning and find she had morphed into Misty, that she would buy into her public image and actually start to think like that. She had seen it happen to columnists before.

She looked back at the building. Terry Hewitt had stood outside that door waiting for her once, a hundred years ago, his left foot resting on the wall behind him. He had looked up as she came towards him, a warm smile on his face. He had worn a leather jacket; she was impressed by that.

She had left Fort William in the middle of the night, driving at eighty along back roads to get away from him. His articles told how he had witnessed corruption and brutality, women raped and murdered, children mutilated, whole villages put to the torch. She remembered his article about a fifteen-year-old Angolan boy, shot between the eyes right in front of him. She had been naive to expect him to remain unchanged. Ridiculous.

The work face wasn’t going to come. She’d just have to go in anyway or miss the deadline for the late edition. Taking a deep breath, she reached for the door handle and stepped out onto the buckled concrete floor of the car park, locking the car behind her.

Delivery men loitered in the loading bay, looking up as she came towards them. They stopped talking and watched her walk to the staff entrance, their heads following her, moving as one curious animal. She could say hello to one of them, curry for a champion, but she didn’t have it in her this morning. She pushed the staff door open and stepped in off the street to the cold stone lobby. As soon as the door shut, one of them would say something derogatory, make a comment about the size of her arse or who she’d gobbled.

She let the door fall shut and then yanked it open again, leaning out into the street, staring straight at them. One of them froze with his mouth open, a chest full of breath, ready to comment.

“Who the fuck are you wankers talking about?” she drawled.

They laughed at her for catching them out.

She slipped back into the lobby before they could retort and climbed the stairs heavily, pulling herself forward, pausing at the doors to the newsroom. Flattening her dress, she affected a frown. Most states of emotional turmoil could be covered with a growl, she’d found, especially after her father died, when the grief often ambushed her.

She organized her face into a scowl, pushed the double doors open, and walked in, keeping her chin high.

The night shift started into action like an automaton during a power surge. They saw it was her and toned it down a bit. Light from computer screens filled the gloomy room, uplighting those sitting at their desks.

Merki Ferris, standing near the door, looked shifty and paranoid. He’d been exiled to the night shift for pissing off Bunty, their current editor. He was a cross-eyed trickster, had guile but no wit, could get into anywhere for an interview but then didn’t know what to ask. He was not an attractive man and it was hard to tell in the thin light whether he was smiling or grimacing.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, out of a habit of asking questions.

“Right, Merki?” She slipped past him.

The layout of the room had been changed to fill the gaps. In the old days the noise of typewriters and shouting filled the room, desks were positioned to fit with production needs, and everywhere had to be sidled to. Now the slimmed-down news, sports and features areas were farther away from each other, circular islands with flat electric typewriters and dirty-white plastic computers that pulsed cadaverous green light into the room. The editors had their own island now, away from the journalists.

Paddy walked across the room to a partitioned office for the senior editors. Outside the door she dipped at the knee to see in through the white venetian blinds behind the glass. Larry Gray-Lips, head of the night shift and king curmudgeon, was at his desk. She opened the door without knocking. Larry froze with a sandwich at his mouth, trying to remember whether Paddy Meehan had the clout to give them shit for not doing relay races from one end of the room to the other. He dropped his hand and looked worried.

“What?”

She picked up a schedule from his desk and pretended to read it. Larry put his sandwich down and leaned back in his chair, balancing carefully on two legs as he stared at her with the same languorous, faintly despising expression he always had. “Did you wake up and remember someone ye hated?”

“Nope.” She put the schedule down. “I’ve got a big news story.”

“You’re fucking joking.” He dropped his chair onto all fours. “For fucksake, we’re into feeding time here. Could ye not have come an hour ago?”

She shrugged, looking around the desk. “Just the way it happened.”

“Spit it out, woman.”

“Um…” She hesitated, poking around some papers on his desk. “Terry Hewitt.”

“What about Terry?”

“He’s been killed. Murdered.”

Larry didn’t speak or move. She stole a look at him. He was frowning at the desk, blinking quickly. He saw her looking at him and coughed for cover.

“Well.” His voice was lower. “Fuck me.”

Paddy nodded at the desk and bit her cheek. “I know.”

“No, I mean it.” Larry looked at her. “Fuck me.”

Each smiled weakly at the papers on Larry’s desk, glad of the respite. Quite suddenly the muscles on Paddy’s chin convulsed into a tight ball and she lost her breath.

“So.” She found her voice, higher and unsteady. “They found his body in a ditch. Word is-” she leaned down to whisper to him-“IRA hit.”

Larry opened his eyes wide. In nine years at the paper she’d never seen him do that. “You’re fucking joking. Here?”

“I know…”

“The Provos are killing people in Scotland?”

“Well, one anyway. ‘All the hallmarks of an IRA hit,’ said a source within the Strathclyde Police Force. The body was found out near Greenock.” He didn’t seem to realize the significance so she spelled it out. “Off the road to Stranraer, where the ferry runs to Belfast.”

“So was Terry just getting off the boat? Had he been in Ireland?”

“Dunno. He was found stripped naked in a ditch, single shot to the head.”

“Jesus Christ, this is huge.” Larry turned to his computer screen to see who was on. “Merki-”

“No.” Paddy put a firm hand on his desk. “I’ll write it. No byline, but I’ll do it.” Merki was a skilled hack and he’d want to know how Paddy had found out about Terry. If he caught a whiff of her personal involvement he’d tell Larry and they’d have her writing an emotive first-person account about identifying the body. They always wanted that, especially from female reporters.

Larry leaned back in his chair, picking bits of sandwich out of a molar and appraising her suspiciously. There was a time when no one in the press would volunteer to do a job without a byline. Even now it was still the custom to feign reluctance.

“What could you possibly have against Merki?”

“Nothing, just I know Terry. Knew Terry. By the time I’ve briefed him I could have written it.”

Larry hesitated.

“OK.” She threw her hands up. “Get Merki. Better than that: you do it. I’ll fuck off home to my bed.”

“Can you bang it out in five minutes? We’re due to set in ten.”

“No bother. When did you last see him?”

“Friday. He was drinking in Babbity’s. He had a book deal, was showing the check around to everyone. Two hundred quid.”

“Not much, is it? I got more than that for Shadow of Death and no one bought it.”

“Yeah, Terry’s was a picture book, not much text. Expensive to produce.”

“What sort of picture book?”

“Photos of people. Americans. Published by the Scotia Press, who the fuck are they?” Larry looked around his desktop, bewildered. “It’s definitely our Terry? Are they certain? It couldn’t be a mistake?”

For a second they looked one another in the eye, a clear moment of sadness and shock and loss. They had both known Terry Hewitt for a decade, since his parents’ death in a car crash, through his early promise and his trips abroad, had both taken private pride in his triumphs, and, knowing him again more recently, had seen him bloated and scouring for work. Paddy bit her cheek hard, crunching through a nipple of hard skin at the corner of her mouth. She could taste blood.

“Larry,” she growled, “just… don’t look at me. I need to hold it together until I get out of this fucking place.”

Larry nodded sadly. She turned to the door and raised her chin again.

“You’re fat and everyone hates you,” said Larry to her back, reminding her who she was supposed to be.

“Thanks, Larry.”

II

Paddy felt as if she was vibrating with the need to sleep. She watched her hand tremble as she opened the car door. The cul-de-sac was bare of cars, the neighboring house boarded up. Thick summer grass was growing wildly in the gardens, lush weeds flourishing through cracks in the pavement. The house next to the Meehans’ had stood empty since Mr. Beattie went into a nursing home. The roof sagged too, looking close to collapse.

She had grown up on the Eastfield Star, a small estate of council houses built for a mining community in the wilds between Cambuslang and Rutherglen. The houses were small and low, cottages with flats in them or larger for big families like her own.

The streets radiated off a central roundabout and had once been a nice area of good families. They should still have been. The houses were a little damp and the windows small but the basic stock was good. As the older residents died, they were replaced with less salubrious tenants who cluttered up their gardens with crap and had loud fights in the street. A drug dealer was rumored to live in one of the houses near the main road, but Paddy suspected that they were just young and prone to partying. If she made more money she’d move her mother out of there.

She lifted the rusted wire hanger holding her mother’s garden gate shut and stepped down the narrow path. The garage where she had imagined Terry off on his travels was just to her left, damp green lichen growing over the small, high windows. She thought about going in there for a moment, just to look at all the damp boxes and the chair she used to sit in, but knew she’d start crying and might not be able to stop. It was the tiredness. And the shock. It had been a shock seeing an old friend dead. Seeing anyone with a hole in their head was a shock.

She fitted the key in the lock and opened it as quietly as possible. Her mother’s house smelled perpetually of dampness and baking, a scent that, to her, conveyed certainty and stability. The smell hadn’t changed a ripple since her father died. It was as if he’d never given off a smell.

She dipped her finger in the holy water font hanging by the front door and crossed herself. Her mother liked to see her doing it. Although she had made it clear that she wasn’t going to church and didn’t want Pete baptized, her mother took the holy water habit as a sign that one day she might return to the bosom of the chapel, confess her sins to a gnarled old arse of a priest, and accept that she was, indeed, a bad girl who made the baby Jesus cry. Paddy let her think it. That she wasn’t even prepared to take communion and had had a child out of wedlock was hard enough for her mother.

Paddy’s post was propped on the windowsill. She flicked through it: credit card offers, flyers for catalogues, a couple of requests for money from charities, and one flimsy white envelope, coffee stained in the upper corner, with her name and an approximation of the address. She put her finger under the flap and ripped it open.

A single sheet of creamy paper and handwritten words:

Now offering 50k for Callum O. exclusive.

Ring me,

Johnny Mac.

She stroked the figure with her fingertip and then crumpled the note in her fist, squeezing it tight, as if the words could be wrung from it, shoved it into her pocket and climbed the stairs. She could sleep soon, catch a few hours before mass.

She stopped at the top step, listening. No one was awake yet. Alone in the quiet of the morning, she sensed more than heard the breathing behind the doors. Ahead of her was her parents’ old room. She could hear Trisha’s faint nasal whistle. To Paddy’s left was her old bedroom. BC and Pete now shared it every Saturday night, taking the single beds she and Mary Ann had left behind. Paddy fitted her hand on the worn wooden egg handle, turned it silently, and opened the door just enough to slip her head around and look in.

Pete was curled up, brown blankets and a lip of white sheet curved around the line of his little body, lying so still that she had to watch his chest to be sure he was breathing.

She relaxed, letting her burning eyes droop half shut as she leaned her cheek against the edge of the bedroom door.

She forgot about Terry and Aoife and John Mac’s letter. She forgot about her job and Burns and Callum Ogilvy. She forgot everything in the world but the essential, glorious fact of her son: safe, nearby and breathing in and out.