Field of Blood

I

They could hear the burble of the gathering before they turned the corner to Granny Annie’s. All the lights were on, the front door sat open in welcome, and the shadows pressing up against the front window showed how busy it was.

As Paddy came through the front door she dipped her finger into the holy water font hanging on the wall, but Annie had been in hospital for a fortnight and dead a week, and the little sponge at the bottom had dried out. The contact left a sour stain on Paddy’s fingertips. She only kept up the habit because it pleased her mother so much when she witnessed it.

Someone’s auntie was doling out the entrance drinks from a table just inside the door, assisted by Paddy’s Gran Meehan, a small woman who had taken an abstinence pledge at the chapel twenty years ago and had neither enjoyed a drink since nor allowed a drink to be enjoyed in her company. The auntie pressed a glass with a smear of whisky into Sean’s hand and an inch of sweet sherry into Paddy’s. Afraid the sherry would interfere with the chemical reaction of the eggs and grapefruit, Paddy sipped, trying to mitigate the damage by not really enjoying it.

Annie had been a strict adherent to pre-Vatican II old-style Voodoo Catholicism, and it showed everywhere in the house. Holy pictures were hanging on every wall above the grab rails, and novenas were neatly tucked into the corners of toothy school photos of her grandchildren. A romantic plaster statue of Saint Sebastian, shot through with arrows and wilting in ecstasy, sat under a grimy glass dome on a windowsill, and a chipped Child of Prague was on the mantel, tipped at an angle by the silver ten-pence coin placed underneath it, a fetish that would invite prosperity into the house. Apart from superstition, sanctimoniousness, and a general distrust of Protestants, Annie’s only real weakness was the Saturday-afternoon wrestling on the television. She had a signed photo of Big Daddy on the wall below the Sacred Heart.

Paddy wasn’t even in the living room proper before the first industrial-sized baking tray of gammon rolls came past her nose. She managed to resist, saying No thanks, she’d just eaten as the bearer pressed her for the second time. A delicate white hand darted out over her shoulder, taking a roll and giggling a thank you. She turned to see her sister Mary Ann biting into the soft bread, her teeth sliding through the salt butter and sweet gammon. She giggled her appreciation, groaned, and took another bite, eclipsing her mouth with the rest of the roll, ashamed that she was savoring food so publicly, but then she laughed again because she liked it. Mary Ann was shy and inarticulate but had made an eloquent language of laughter that required a practiced ear. Unobservant people thought her a dolt. Her laughter was contagious: sometimes, as the swell and ebb rolled back and forth between them, Paddy thought that laughing with her sister was the purest form of communication possible.

Mary Ann took another bite, grinning as she chewed, and nodded to the door. Paddy turned to see Trisha and Con Meehan coming through the crowd, holding hands like teenage lovers. Trisha still French-combed her hair up into a high crowned bouffant for formal occasions. Behind her thick glasses her eyes were a beautiful shade of gray, so pale they looked silver in a certain light. Of all the children only Marty had inherited them; everyone else had Connor’s brown eyes. Con had a neat little David Niven moustache on his florid face and the same stocky build as Paddy. He was wearing an inappropriately jaunty dog-tooth jacket.

“Dad,” said Paddy, as Mary Ann laughed incredulously, “why in the name of mercy are you wearing that?”

“Your mother gave it to me.”

“He looks very swish,” said Trisha, brushing an imaginary speck from his lapel.

A man next to them who had been at school with Sean’s dad leaned over to Con. “Are you selling nylons?”

The gathered company laughed at the weak joke and Con joined in, not uncomfortable with his position in the pecking order. Mary Ann laughed hard into Paddy’s hair. Their father was a meek man, a gentle little soul, always in the audience laughing at a bigger man’s jokes. They both loved it about him.

“Well,” Trisha bristled, small-mouthed and angry as ever, “you’re hardly a fashion plate yourself.”

And Con laughed away at that one as well.

II

An hour of small talk with a hundred relatives later and the singers were organizing their turns in the corner of the room. Paddy watched them conspire and wondered why they bothered: each always sang the same song anyway, choosing the one that best suited their voice. Trays of delicious food swayed above the heads and through the room.

Mary Ann was being silently chatted up by John O’Hara, the quietest boy in the parish. They sat close on the settee, ostensibly ignoring each other, backs stiff, each intensely conscious of the other. Mary Ann gave out occasional irrelevant laughing hiccups when tension caused John O’Hara to twitch his arm against her elbow. When Paddy couldn’t stand the silence a moment more, she said she needed the loo, pulled her sleeve from Mary Ann’s frantic pinch, and wandered off through the crowd.

Sean was in the kitchen doorway, nodding as a red-faced old union official ranted about the recession. The government wouldn’t dare, the old man said, pointing adamantly at Sean’s shoulder; they’d be provoking a national strike, and the shipyards were central to the Scottish economy. It would be a catastrophe, he said, a disaster. You don’t remember before the war, you don’t remember what the Tories are really like underneath the consensus. Sean shook his head instead to see if that would mollify the old man. And you young ones, the man warmed to his subject, you don’t care, you don’t see what’s happening. It’s you who’ll pay. He pointed at them each in turn. It’s your generation who’ll end up on the rubbish heap. Paddy and Sean nodded in unison, wishing the old man would be quiet and go away. Having delivered his message and spotted a friend across the room, he did both.

“Well,” said Sean, “that’s me told.”

He smiled down at her, and over his shoulder she saw her oldest sister, Caroline, coming through the crowd carrying her baby son on her hip. She looked exhausted. Baby Connor bared his four new nipping teeth at Paddy, raised a hand, and shrieked a greeting. A clear bubble formed at his nostril.

Caroline slipped the baby into Paddy’s arms. “God, take him off me before I hurt one or both of us.”

“Where’s John, then?”

“He’s out in the hall somewhere,” said Caroline. “I’ll go and find him.”

She left the room quickly, stepping lighter now she was alone.

Sean smiled to see Paddy with the fat baby. “Suits you.”

“God, that John’s so lazy. I don’t know why she ever married him,” said Paddy, pretending to talk about her sister’s marriage but actually sending him a message about theirs. “Hold him while I wipe his nose.”

Sean took Baby Connor in his arms, burring his lips against the baby’s face to make him smile, answering Paddy’s worries with unspoken promises. She took a paper napkin and wiped the bubble away, making Baby Con cry.

Sean leaned over. “D’you fancy Raging Bull at the pictures tomorrow? It’s supposed to be quite good.”

Paddy didn’t particularly want to see a boxing movie, but she said she would. She felt mean for giving him trouble for John’s crimes. “Bet your gran’d be pleased at the size of the crowd.”

Sean nodded and nuzzled his face into her hair, pressing the baby’s fat, powdery cheek against hers. “Everyone here’ll be at our engagement party in May. As soon as our name comes up on the council list and we get a house, we can start working on getting one of these as well.”

Paddy smiled up at him, scrunching her eyes together so that he couldn’t see what she was thinking.

The baby weighed heavy on her hip, and she used the excuse to go and find Caroline and give him back. She managed to lose Sean to the back bedroom, where his uncles were singing rebel songs and drinking whisky.

She spent the rest of the night standing in the kitchen next to the oven, smiling at whoever talked to her, pretending to laugh along with the crowd. She forgot about Terry Hewitt and the spite that should have fueled her and gorged herself on slices of fruitcake and arctic roll, swallowing before she’d finished chewing, shoving food into her mouth to quell the panic.

III

Five miles across town from Granny Annie’s in Rutherglen, in the front room of her small gray house in Townhead, Gina Wilcox sat in her immaculately clean living room. She had forgotten to put the heating on, and her breath hung before her like a soul leaving her body. She stared, dead-eyed, at the flickering television, waiting for word, vigilant and terrified for her baby.