Still Midnight

9

Pat watched the Lexus headlights sweep across Malki’s face, bleaching him. It was a narrow road and Malki had to stand flat against the chapel wall to let the car turn in the street.

Pat could see the quiet content on Malki’s face, a soft smile. He had a pocket full of dough, rare enough, and he was going home excited, off to his bedroom to see his powdery white darling. She never failed Malki, never bored or annoyed him. Malki’s only problem was getting enough of her. True love, thought Pat, and he envied Malki that certainty. He had never gone out with a woman he didn’t have reservations about. He thought about the girl in the hall, jeans and T-shirt and everyone else in Muslim gear, and found himself warm at the thought of her.

Eddy drove on, sticking to the big roads. A car as smart as a Lexus would only ever pass through streets like these, never stop. It would draw the eye of anyone who saw it, stick in the mind.

Back on the motorway they took a cut-off for Cambuslang and drove along empty roads, through green light after green light, straight through sleepy Rutherglen to the broad winding road that cut straight through the south.

Eddy pulled off unexpectedly, took two turns into increasingly dilapidated streets. He slowed and cut the lights as they drew up into a dead end of boarded-up houses. Bushes grew wild over the pavements and roads. Not a single other car was parked anywhere and all of the windows were dark.

Pat’d assumed he’d know the hideout when they got to it but he’d never been here before. ‘Who’s…?’ He broke off, realising Eddy couldn’t say in front of the pillowcase.

Eddy steered a wide swing at a break in a bushy hedge, bumped up a steep concrete drive with a tectonically deep crack across it.

The sight of the house made Pat flinch. Stucco peeled off the front wall, window frames were splintered and peeling, the front door shored up with rotting leaves and litter. Between the house and the hedge was a knee-high sea of grass. In every dark window curtains were yanked shut, hanging heavy with grime and time.

Watching Eddy’s eyes in the strip of mirror, Pat saw him glancing resentfully at the house as he eased the car to the left, flattening the vegetation lapping at the side of the building. He stopped when the car was around the side of the house out of sight of the street, pulled on the handbrake and sighed angrily.

As if he thought Pat hadn’t noticed, Eddy turned to Pat and made that face, the face that said someone had let him down and someone was going to pay. Pat raised both eyebrows, keeping his face neutral, and looked away. Eddy had organised the hideout. If there was a fuck-up it wasn’t anything to do with Pat.

On balance, if Eddy was determined to shoot anyone, Pat would prefer that it wasn’t the pillowcase. Pillowcase had a family, a clean house, a daughter. Be better if it was the person who never washed their curtains.

Eddy opened the car door, stepping out next to the windowless side of the house and Pat climbed out on his side. They looked around. Down the short drive the other houses in the street were all sagging and rotting too, windows peeling and cracked. Straight across the road conjoined houses were boarded up with fibre glass. From their promontory they could see the roofs of houses and flats, street lamps in the distance throbbing orange into the night sky. Far to the left, a bus or a lorry cast its lights over the fronts of houses, cutting a road through the quiet dark.

‘Whose place…?’

Eddy ground his jaw towards the back seat. ‘Get this fucker out.’

Opening the door, Pat reached in and pulled the pillowcase out by the arm. It followed every direction passively, stepping out next to him. In the nervous excitement of getting away Pat hadn’t really noticed how small the man was. He only came up to Pat’s chest and he realised suddenly that this was why Eddy took him.

Pat let go of the arm. Free from touch, unsure what to do, the old man raised his hands to his shoulders, as if he was being held up by cowboys. His liver-spotted hands were swollen; Pat’s papa had hands like that.

From behind, Eddy jabbed a mean knuckle in the pillowcase’s back, between the shoulder blades, making him arch his back. Then he shoved, made it stumble through the vegetation, heading towards the back of the house. Eddy went after him and grabbed his elbow, swinging him roughly around the corner to the back door.

The back door was unlocked and opened with a yowl into a kitchen that reeked of mould. Eddy shoved the pillowcase in ahead of them, through a narrow corridor between stacked bags of weeping rubbish.

Pat thought the house was abandoned but noticed that the doorless units were strewn with fresh empty beer cans and full ashtrays, one of them still smoking lazily.

‘Smell.’ The pillowcase had spoken quietly, inadvertently, to no one. Pat smiled at that. It did smell.

Eddy glared at the pillowcase, as if it had insulted his house. Spitefully, he poked an index finger into its shoulder, making it think he had his gun out, bullying him through an open doorway into a living room.

A stone-cladding fireplace covered most of the facing wall, each plastic brick covered in its own layer of dust. A broken chair lay on its side. A settee was set against the wall and a thin, tinny whistle was coming from the sleeping figure on it.

Pat recognised him. It was Shugie. ‘Oh fuck me…’

Eddy glared at Pat, so angry that his top lip was white with tension.

Shugie had a shock of white hair, yellowed from ardent smoking. His swollen eyes were framed by wild white eyebrows. Legs and arms, skinny from lack of exercise, were attached to a beer-bloated barrel body.

Eddy had a fondness for Shugie that Pat never understood: the guy was a wreck, a mess and a bore. He had drunk so much for so long that even his stories sounded drunk. Tales about the old day bank jobs and getaways crashed out in mid-flow. But Eddy called him old school, saw a glamour in his wild past that Pat was blind to.

Eddy raised his leg and kicked Shugie in the side. The eyebrows came down but the old man didn’t stir. Eddy kicked him again, hard this time, right in the soft flesh below his ribs. Shugie frowned, let out a little groan, but still he didn’t move.

And then, as they stood watching him, a dark stain spread from his groin, a circle creeping outwards across his jeans.

‘God almighty,’ said Pat, averting his eyes.

Eddy shook his head. He took his embarrassment out on the pillowcase, shoving him off guard, making him stumble towards the hall and the front door.

‘Take it upstairs,’ ordered Eddy.

Pat raised an eyebrow and hissed a warning through his front teeth. Eddy had the good manners to drop his gaze. ‘Just so I can make the call…’ he muttered.

Pat let him stew, staring at Eddy who shuffled uncomfortably from foot to foot. ‘’F you don’t mind.’

Pat nodded and walked after the pillowcase, pinching his sleeve, pulling him across the path of the front door.

Covered in uncollected post, the carpet was shiny with trampled-in dirt. Pat didn’t want to touch anything. He kept his hands to himself as they walked up the stairs, wary of the sticky banister. Hands out, blind man’s bluffing, the pillowcase tentatively touched each step with his toe before taking it.

On the landing Pat opened a door. Bathroom, stench of piss and mildew. He tried the next door and found a dirty bedroom full of boxes and crap. Too many chances to find a weapon. He looked in the third door. A bare bed and scattered magazines.

‘In here,’ he said, softly guiding the pillowcase to the door.

‘You want me to go…?’ the pillowcase answered Pat’s whispered tone, as if they were the conspirators instead of Pat and Eddy. Pat liked that. ‘Aye, pal, you go in here.’

At the word of kindness he could feel the tension release from the old man’s arm, felt the give in his footsteps. Touched, Pat led him gently over to the side of the bed and turned him by the shoulders so that his back was to it. ‘There’s a bed right behind you. Sit down on it, put your feet on it and I want ye to stay there, OK?’

‘But, I have shoes on.’

Pat looked at the stained yellow sheet, at the creases on the linen. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that too much, faither.’

Blind, the old man reached his hands behind for the bed and lowered himself slowly. Pat helped him. ‘There ye are. Swing your feet up, that’s it. Shuffle over into the middle.’ The old man did as he was ordered. ‘That’s it,’ said Pat. ‘Now listen, don’t move from there.’

‘What if I need to… use a bathroom?’ The pillowcase’s face looked up at him from the bed, like a child afraid to sleep.

‘Um.’ Pat wanted to say just do it in here, because Shugie had probably pissed the bed often enough but he liked the association with order, wanted to distance himself from the mess of the place. ‘Bang your shoe on the floor and I’ll come and take ye.’

‘OK.’ The pillowcase crossed his hands in his lap. ‘OK.’

Pat stepped away, out the hallway and shut the door on the neat white figure sitting upright in the filthy bed.

He stopped outside the door, reluctant to go downstairs. If he wanted to go anywhere in the house it was back into the bedroom with the neat little man.

Outwardly his composure was still intact: Aamir sat still, his hands carefully crossed in his lap as orderly alone as he had been in the full glare of his captors. He wasn’t moving because he couldn’t move, his muscles were frozen, his throat felt as if it had been punched, as if a scream was strangling his Adam’s apple. He didn’t actually know if he would be able to move without being ordered to.

Testing his motor skills, he tapped a finger and found that he was shaking slightly but could move. He took a breath and opened his eyes. Through the pillowcase he could see a slight light from the left, perhaps a window, at waist height. They had been driving for two hours, perhaps one and a half, allowing for his fear, which made time go slower. In two hours they could have gone from Glasgow to Dundee, to Edinburgh and anywhere over in the east, to Perth perhaps, Stirling certainly.

Aamir had an acute sense of time, from working the shop for so long.

He tapped his finger again and suddenly saw Aleesha’s hand come apart, fingers hit the wall behind her, the newly bought Madinah clock, and the violent red spill down her forearm. And then he saw himself begging them, wobbling his head like a TV Asian, talking in broken English when he was fluent: please sir, me be good boy, let me go by, let me go by, British passport, sorry, sorry.

The red dust of the Kampala road was choking his throat. He saw again that arrogant swagger of the soldiers, their rifles slung across their peasant shoulders, their grins, their black features lost in the glare of their white teeth. And beyond them, his mother. She staggered out from behind the army van, not even crying, not even looking at where she was going, just falling forward and catching her weight on one foot then the other, her eyes were glazed, her mouth slack. She was clutching the hem of her yellow sari, holding it up so that the mud and dust didn’t mark it. On her seat, from her backside, wet, scarlet blood soaked into the material, blooming into a giant verdant flower as Aamir watched through the dirty glass of the taxi window. Aamir and his mother had British passports. It was a licence for the soldiers to do whatever they wanted to them.

Aamir survived. That was his skill. He took a breath. At the cost of his mother’s dignity, they escaped, and she never mentioned it again. For the rest of her life, in Scotland, Aamir had pitied and despised her for letting them, for buying his freedom with her dignity. Now it was his turn.

She knew he could never touch her again after that. In the dark, he reached across the hot plastic of the taxi’s back seat and took his long dead mother’s hand. In the filthy bedroom, on the piss-stained bed, he lifted her hand to his mouth and kissed her fingers.

Pat stepped into the living room and found Eddy gone. Shugie was snoring, frowning an unconscious protest at the piss prickling into his skin. From the kitchen came the tiny tones of a phone number being tapped into a key pad.

Eddy was standing in the dark, next to the sink, his phone blue-lighting one side of his face. He flared his nostrils at Pat, showing that he was disappointed at the mess as well. The phone was answered at the other end by an ominous silence.

‘Um, hello,’ said Eddy, nervous but hopeful. ‘Eh, it’s me.’

The house was so quiet Pat could hear the answer: ‘Say it’s done.’ The strangulated Belfast accent was crystal clear in the stillness of the kitchen.

‘It’s done,’ said Eddy, trying to copy his professional manner. ‘Got one guy. Old guy.’

A pause. ‘Old?’

‘Not actually the target. But another one, an old guy.’

Another pause. Not friendly. ‘Why not the target?’

‘Eh, he wasn’t there.’

‘Not there?’

Eddy was sweating now, looking to Pat for backup. ‘Eh, well no. But we got an old guy.’

‘How old?’

‘Um, sixties?’

An angry sigh fluttered into the receiver. ‘You said you were fit for this.’

‘We did, we got… Um… this old guy.’

‘I told you twenties.’

‘Well, he wasn’t there so… we got an old one.’

‘Not twenties?’

Eddy’s face tightened. ‘Um, we’ve got the old man.’

‘Any shots fired off?’

‘One. Pat. A hand injury. Nothing much.’

A sound from the other end, a groan or a huff or something, a muffled exclamation.

‘Sorry? I didn’t catch-’

‘ Yees are fucking amateurs.’

Eddy found himself listening to a dead tone. He sucked his teeth, flipped the phone shut and looked to Pat for comfort.

Pat pointed at the festering bin bags. ‘I am not fucking staying here.’