Field of Blood

I

Sean didn’t call, and now there was no card. Paddy stared so hard at the bare doormat that she could see small grains of mud and dirt between the brown bristles. Her hot feet began to stick to the plastic floor protector. She cursed her stupid fucking soppy bastard card. It became bigger and bluer and more italicized the more she remembered it. Ashamed of hoping and afraid of being seen, she ran back upstairs to her bedroom.

II

It was quiet in the town. The streets emptied under a heavy sky, shoppers hurrying home before the hunger strikers’ march began or the heavy rain came on again. She watched down the road, facing into cold rain, resisting the urge to pull up her hood because it made her look so young and unsophisticated. Thoughts of Sean made her throat ache. She couldn’t stand it if he abandoned her altogether. She was frightened of herself without him.

A filthy white Volkswagen Beetle peeled off from the thin traffic and pulled into the bus stop. The whitewall tires were caked in gray dirt and the front fender was rusted and painted over with a watery white treatment. Terry leaned an elbow on the passenger seat and smiled up at her. She pulled open the door and climbed in.

“I thought you might not be there for a minute.”

She struggled to shut the creaky door behind her. “Why?”

“’Cause of the rain.” He pointed to the gray sky.

He was nervous too, and she liked it.

She looked up through the windscreen. “Is that where rain comes from?” she said, trying to tease him but sounding sarcastic.

Terry restarted the car. The engine was old and tired, one of the wheels was making an oddly intense ticking noise, and the gears crunched like a mouth full of gravel, but still Paddy marveled at someone near her age having the money to buy a car.

“This is the coolest motor I’ve ever been in,” she said, pleasing him and making up for sounding like a bitch.

They looked away from each other, each smiling out the window. Paddy hoped she was seen out on her spite date, that someone would tell Sean and he’d feel as upset and frightened and jealous as she did at the moment. She had considered and rejected the possibility that Sean was seeing someone else: it wasn’t his style, he was too self-righteous.

Terry slowed for a red light at George Square, and they saw steel barriers cordoning off the central space in preparation for the postmarch rally. They weren’t the usual barriers, keeping marchers on the central concourse and safe from traffic; they were corridors for funneling marchers through, keeping them on the roads and away from sidewalks. Angry vandals had already managed to spray-paint slogans on nearby buildings. A bank straight in front of them had UP THE PROVOS across a window; another hand had added MUST DIE in red. The rival slogans made the square look like the venue for a battle of the bands more than the site of a political rally.

Terry drew a wary breath in through his teeth. “It’s going to be mental. They’re busing Ulster Defense militants in from Larkhall.”

He said it as if he knew the area. Paddy smiled at the dashboard of his car and his expensive leather jacket.

“Are you from Larkhall, Terry?”

He glanced at her. “No.”

“Whereabouts are ye from?”

He hesitated. “Newton Mearns.”

“Fancy,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound bitchy again, because she meant it.

Newton Mearns was intimidating nice. It was a prosperous, middle-class area on the far south side of the city, with nice houses in big grounds and a lot of cared-for gardens. Even the roads were full of vegetation. Paddy and Sean had been out for a day there once, looking for a nice pub Sean had heard about from some workmates. They couldn’t find the pub and were back at the bus stop on the opposite side of the road within twenty minutes. Paddy kept her hood up while Sean smoked a fag and threw stones at cows. They were relieved when the bus arrived to take them back to the city. They never went there again.

Terry’s eyes slid towards her. “Newton Mearns isn’t all posh,” he said, as if he knew what she was thinking. “Some parts of it are quite rough, you know.”

“Is that right? You from the rough part, are ye?”

He didn’t answer. It wasn’t going very well. She was trying to be jokey, but she was tense and kept sounding like a snidey know-all.

“I’d like to nip home first.” He glanced at her. “Is that okay?”

“The Mearns is miles away.”

“No, I’ve got my own place. I’m just around the corner.”

Paddy was so impressed she covered her mouth to stop herself from gasping a sarcastic comment. He had a car and his own flat. His parents must be millionaires.

The old car rattled up through the town to Sauchiehall Street, home to drunken students, cinemas, and curry houses, and parked outside a newsagent’s. Terry pulled the keys out of the ignition with a flourish and turned to face her.

“Want to come up?” He saw her reluctance and added, “Just be for a minute. I’ve been working all morning. I want to change my top.”

She tried not to say the first thing on her tongue, which was piss off. Eastfield girls would be wary of entering a boy’s house if his parents were out. Terry didn’t seem embarrassed to be asking her, though. Maybe in Newton Mearns girls went in and out of boys’ houses all the time and were just good friends. They probably played tennis together and spent time in conservatories, eating fresh fruit. His breath brushed two hairs from her forehead.

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see your gaff.”

It was a dingy close with a worn wooden balustrade and a filthy concrete floor. Dirt gathered along the base of the walls. The front doors to the flats became increasingly grotty from landing to landing, and by the third floor they were either chipped and battered or blank pine replacements for those that had been kicked in during drunken arguments. An overhead roof window flooded the filthy stairwell with bright daylight so that every dirty corner was crisp and visible, every brown smear on the walls so vivid she could almost taste it. She kept close to Terry, who was bounding up the stairs ahead of her.

“Why do you need a car,” she asked, finding herself breathless halfway through the steep climb, “when you live so near work?”

“I only use the car to impress women.”

Surprised and flattered at being called a woman, and the subject of anyone’s attempt to impress, she laughed and lashed out, punching him on the thigh.

Six up, on the top-floor landing, two big doors faced each other across a jumble of bicycle parts and a brown corduroy armchair. Terry took a stern bunch of keys to a cardboard front door that would have blown open in a stiff breeze.

The hallway didn’t have any lights in it. More bikes were parked behind the door, and every available surface was covered in posters of rock bands: the Floyd, the Quo, Thin Lizzie.

“God,” said Paddy quietly. “Wake up to the eighties.”

Terry led her to a door at the back, undid the padlock on it, and used a long key for the mortise lock below the handle. As the door to his room opened she was struck by a beguiling smell, a mixture of musky sebum and lemon- concentrated scent of big, dirty men.

If Terry was a millionaire he wasn’t making a show of it. His bedroom was long and narrow. A single window at the far end stared straight into the top-floor windows of the mean little tenement opposite. Between his unmade single bed and the sink, a paper suitcase did for a table. Terry kept some tins of beans and corned beef on it, sitting next to an open waxed-paper packet of white bread and a tub of cheap margarine. The bedsheets were orange, the blankets a grubby cream. He had no hanging space for clothes, so he had carefully balanced ironed shirts on hangers from the picture rail around the room. A spindly spider plant on the bookshelf seemed to be slowly lowering its young to the ground, eager for them to escape.

Stepping deep into the room so that Paddy had to follow him, Terry opened a drawer and took out a clean white T-shirt, folded with the front flat as if it was shop-new. He let his leather jacket slide down his arms to the floor, untucked his white work shirt, and undid the top three buttons. He put his hand to the fourth and wavered.

“For Godsake,” she said. “I’ve got two brothers. I’ve seen men without their shirts on before.”

Terry raised an eyebrow. “But my nipples are unusually beautiful, Patricia, and you’re only flesh and blood.”

Paddy giggled and looked away, watching him in her peripheral vision as he yanked the shirt over his head without unbuttoning it. He stepped towards her quickly, a sudden outrage on his face, and shouted, “Don’t look at me!”

His arms were too thin, but his chest was covered in tufts of soft, black, curly hair, arranged in a handsome T shape, the tail of it disappearing into the waistband of his trousers. His nipples were deep pink, the hair radiating away from them like eyelashes, making his chest into a startled face. She grinned and watched him pull on his fresh T-shirt. She wished Sean could see them.

“Didn’t your parents mind you moving out?”

“Ah,” said Terry, lifting his jacket from the floor. “They died. In a car accident.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m…” He shook his head. “Stupid. I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“Why not?”

Embarrassed, he screwed an eye shut and shrugged. “People don’t really want to know about stuff like that. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“The fusty man-smell in here makes me more uncomfortable.”

He smiled weakly at her and glanced away.

“I am sorry about your folks. It must have been a bit crap.”

He nodded at the floor. “That’s exactly what it was. It is. A bit crap. Why have you stopped wearing your engagement ring?”

As they locked up the room and walked slowly down the stairs, Paddy told him about the shunning, about Sean shutting the door on her, and her midnight games with Mary Ann. By the time they’d reached the car, Terry knew more about what was going on in her family than Paddy’s own mum.

He opened the passenger door for her. “He didn’t phone back?”

“Not once.” She climbed into the seat and waited until Terry was in the driver’s side. “Wouldn’t even come to the phone when I called him. Nothing.”

“He sounds like a spineless wee shite.” He started the engine. “But I would say that, wouldn’t I?”

For the first time in her life, Paddy felt like a full-grown woman.

III

Barnhill was a brutal landscape. The barren little hill of low-slung houses sat tight against the windy hill, cowering from swooping gangs of black crows. It was hemmed in to the east and west by high-rise flats soaring thirty stories up into a big gray sky. The high flats were built with asbestos, tissue, and spit; victims of running damp, they were popular with no one but shit-machine pigeons. To the south, between Barnhill and the city, sat the sprawling St. Rollox engineering works, which had supplied train carriages to half the Empire. The two institutions went into decline hand in hand, and gradually the surrounding land was abandoned, left littered with chemical residues and bits of scrap, contaminated and useless.

Barnhill itself was little more than a circuit of five or six long streets of identical houses, a squat row of shops with a turret at the corner, a post office, and a school. The recent recession showed in the area. The shopping bags the women carried were all from discount shops, and men, white faces crumpled against the brazen rain, gathered outside the bookies and the pub, too broke to go in.

“This place is a shithole,” Paddy said.

“It’s not that bad,” said Terry, who would never have to countenance living there.

He pulled the car out onto the bleak Red Road. The road dipped between two soot-blackened walls and suddenly they were around the corner from the house. Paddy slid down in her seat, imagining that Sean and all the Ogilvys would be standing around in groups on the curb as they had been on the day of Callum’s father’s funeral, dressed in sombre blacks and grays, saying good-bye to Callum Ogilvy’s mother, making hollow promises to see her again soon.

The Ogilvy house was on a sharp hillside. Crumbling concrete steps led up to it, and the grass in the steep front garden was knee-deep. Paddy wasn’t certain that she would be able to remember which house it was, but someone had helpfully aerosoled FILTH OUT on the wall at the bottom of the garden.

The living room window was boarded over. The house might have been abandoned, but the front door was opened a little and bits of plastic toys were scattered across the front garden, while a stuffed pink thing with balding patches lay on a cushion of lush green grass, soaking up the rain. As they cruised slowly past the house Paddy saw a small leg in brown flares sticking backwards out of the front door, swaying on the toe as if a coy child had turned back into the house to ask a question.

Paddy sat back deep in her seat, watching the sad house pass. Quite suddenly the weight of her family and Sean’s disapproval seemed justified. If women didn’t conform, this is what happened. She would end up in a rundown council house with a hundred starving children and no extended family to help out during the hard times. It took her a tearful moment to remember that she hadn’t done anything wrong.

She turned and looked at Terry, desperate to think about something else. He was looking ahead, unaware of her for the moment, thoughtlessly slacking saliva around with his tongue. The sound made her stomach warm.

“What are you smiling at?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

They were driving down a short connection between two long roads when they saw what they were sure was the other Baby Brian Boy’s house. It was on the ground floor of a four-in-a-block cottage, and below the window, starting from the ground, a sooty trail sprang up the brickwork where someone had tried to set a fire. Fresh putty was still unpainted where the window had been replaced, light still catching a linseed-oil glisten. Even before the vandalism, Paddy could see, it wasn’t a wealthy home. The curtains were faded and dusty, the patchy grass was overgrown in the front garden, and the drive up to the door was so potholed that it couldn’t have been used by a car in a long time.

Terry gunned the engine. “Let’s go to Townhead and see the layout there.”

The rain came on as they drove down the broad dual carriageway through Sighthill. The high flats there were monolithic walls of homes, standing sentry on the summit of a small hill. The only other feature in the area was a large cemetery, not high Victorian but a poor person’s cemetery of small gravestones marshaled into neat rows. The wind pushed the rain sideways, into the faces of the pedestrians, catching the legs of people cowering in bus shelters. It took eight minutes in the car to cover the distance between the Baby Brian Boys’ houses and the Wilcox home. By the time they arrived in Townhead the rain had stopped, leaving the streets dark and glistening.

Even with the car windows up and the noisy engine running they could hear the hunger strikers’ march three blocks away. Hundreds of male voices shouted in unison, chanting through the silent city. Paddy had been on nuclear disarmament marches, where the noise was less aggressive, the chanting mellowed by women’s voices, but this sounded different: they sounded like a wild army. Every so often a call would go out and be answered by the mob. Whichever way they turned, the sound seemed to be getting closer.

Following Paddy’s directions they found the Wilcox house and pulled up by the sidewalk. A few small bunches of posies had been added to the display of drooping yellow ribbons on the railings. Apart from that the house looked the same as it had when she’d come with McVie, but the streets were deserted. Even though it was Saturday the children on the scheme had been forbidden to play in the street because of the trouble there would be in town. A wave of sound rolled up the hill from the march.

“I like this,” said Terry. “I like cruising around with you, playing at journalists.”

She nodded. “So do I. I’ll be Bob Woodward.”

“I’ll go Bernstein, just this once.” He smiled. “D’you ever wonder how those guys felt as they fell asleep at night? They didn’t just report miscarriages of justice, they corrected them. How cool is that? That’s what I want to do.”

“Me too,” said Paddy, breathless and startled at how perfectly he had articulated her lifelong ambition. “That’s all I’ve ever wanted to do.”

They looked at each other, for once nothing between them, eye to eye. She couldn’t look away, didn’t want to in case he was going to say something, and he stared back. They sat there for a moment, stuck like dogs, panic rising in Paddy’s throat, until they tore their eyes away, cleared their throats, and caught their breath. She thought she heard him mutter an exclamation, but was too embarrassed to ask what it was.

“Look.” Her sudden voice filled the car, and she pointed ahead to Gina’s house. “There’s the alley to the swing park.”

“Is it? Yeah? Is that it? Did they come down here?”

“No one saw them, but the police still think so.” She turned to look at him but lost her nerve and stared at his ear.

They heard it before they saw it, high-pitched and carried on the cold air, less a tune than a collection of notes. The ice-cream van was coming. From front doors and gardens small children began to appear on the pavements. Paddy turned in her seat, watching back down the road to where they were gathering in the car park. Something about it bothered her.

The queue was small for a Saturday afternoon. A young mum with a baby on her hip and a dirty-faced toddler, chaperoned by an older sister, watched the road expectantly, the young excited at the proximity of sugar, the older ones drawing together, glancing around, defensive and careful because of what had happened to poor Brian Wilcox.

Terry sighed. “Shall we go?”

It was then that Paddy realized what was wrong with the scene. Gina’s house was up the road. The children were all waiting in completely the wrong place. The grocery-van man had told her that the ice-cream van stopped in front of Gina’s house.

The music got louder as the van turned the corner, the tinny tune bouncing off the flats and rolling up the street towards them.

“Eh?”

She looked at Terry. He was waiting for an answer.

“Eh, what?” she said abruptly.

“Eh, shall we go?”

She looked back down the road. The ice-cream van might have moved its stop position. It might have been thought insensitive to keep stopping outside the Wilcox house. Maybe they didn’t want the association and moved down the street.

“Hang on a minute.”

She opened her door and stepped out into the street, shutting the car door behind her, looking for someone to ask. A small blond boy in a blue anorak was running towards her on his way to the small crowd at the van.

“Son,” she said.

He ignored her and continued to head past her to the van and the quickly dissipating queue.

“Son.” She stood in his way. “Wee man, I’ll give ye tenpence.”

The boy glanced at her and slowed. He was skinny, and the lip up to his nose was chapped raw.

Paddy took the big coin from her pocket. “Does the ice-cream van always stop down there?”

“Aye.” He held out his hand.

“Did it always, or just recently?”

“Aye, always.” He licked at his raw top lip with a dexterous tongue.

“Did it not used to stop up there?” She pointed back at Gina Wilcox’s.

The boy put his hands on his hips and huffed up at her. “Missus, I’m not missing that van,” he said definitely.

Paddy gave him his coin and he belted off down the road. Terry was watching her, frowning from inside the car. She held up a finger and walked down towards the ice-cream van. By the time she was halfway there the engine had started up and the van was moving off, leaving the satisfied children eating happily. Paddy watched the van pass Terry’s car and the Wilcox house, drive up out of sight, and reappear again on the cross, heading over to Maryhill. The music wasn’t sounding, and it wasn’t stopping again anytime soon.

She turned back to the kids. The boy in the anorak was clutching a quiver of Curly Wurlys, pointing at Paddy and explaining his wealth to another child.

“Did that ice-cream van ever used to stop there?” She pointed back towards the Wilcox place.

“Nut,” said the parka boy, and the wee girls around him confirmed what he said.

“It stops here,” said a plump girl in glasses.

“It always stops here,” said a bigger girl.

Paddy nodded. “What time does your grocery van come on a Saturday?”

The children looked blankly at one another. It was a ridiculous question. Most of them were far too young to tell the time, never mind predict patterns in retail provision.

“Is it in the afternoon? Is it soon?”

“Aye, soon, but his sweets are mostly rubbish,” said the parka boy, misunderstanding the purpose of her interest.

Paddy thanked them and walked back to the car, opened the door, and held on to the roof, hanging in. “Terry, listen, I’m going to go into town from here. I need to get home, really. Is that okay?”

He frowned and nodded at the window. “Sure, fine. Get in and I’ll drive you down to the station.”

She patted the roof twice and glanced up the road. “Aren’t you going back to the office to finish up?”

“Finish up what?”

“Finish up what you were doing earlier.”

“Oh.” He smiled, shaking his head a little too adamantly. “Yeah, I could, yeah. I’ll do that, yeah.”

He had a pleading little look in his eye. Paddy couldn’t stop herself. She knelt on the dimpled plastic seat, leaned over, gave him a perfectly soft kiss on his cheek, and pulled back before he could do anything with it.

“I’ll see you later, Terry.”

She slammed the door as he answered and never heard what he said in return. She walked off down the road, cutting across a bit of lawn, heading into the heart of the housing scheme.