Garnethill

Chapter 20

She got off the bus outside a large chemist's shop in the town center. It was on three levels and sold everything from face cream to home electrolysis kits. Maureen had a weakness for cosmetics, even the pseudoscientific face creams that made mad claims. She knew that surgery couldn't really come in a tub, that cream would have to be sold as a medicine if it did anything but moisturize, but still, when she felt bad, a good temporary solution was a face mask and a new tub of miracle face cream or a hair dye.

She wandered up and down the aisles, pausing at displays, reading packets, and settled on a dark hair dye that would condition and moisturize, and a face mask she'd used before. The mask was too harsh for her skin, it left it red and sore, but the cream came out of the tube black and turned bright orange as it dried. It always gave her a buzz.

Back at the house Benny had left a note on the coffee table in the living room to say he was speaking at an AA meeting and would be back at eight. Maureen started the bath running, took two clean white towels from the linen cupboard in the hall and locked the bathroom door. She stripped off, pinned her hair on top of her head and put the face mask on, spreading the black cream evenly over her face and neck. It had a pleasing rubbery texture. She sat on the edge of the toilet seat as she waited for the bath to fill and rubbed her lingers together, gathering the residue of the face mask into a gluey lump, rolling the warm black grape into the soft hollow of her palm.

She thought about Douglas, not shoddy, lying Douglas but the kind, compassionate man she'd been training herself to forget. She could understand him giving Siobhain money because of the Northern but Maureen hadn't been raped when she was there. Apart from Winnie, nothing bad had happened while she was in there. She thought about Shirley's suggestion that Douglas had been fucking someone in his office at the Rainbow. It seemed wildly out of character for Douglas. He had been so concerned with differentiating their relationship from that of a therapist who fucked his patient. He used to talk about it a lot. But, then, he hadn't mentioned that recently either so it could have been him. The bath was full. She turned off the taps.

Her face was rubbery and orange. Rolling her fingertips up her neck, she gathered the edge of the mask and pulled it off whole. Every pore on her face was tingling. The bathroom was foggy with steam as she slipped into the deep bath, sliding down until only her nose and tits were sticking out of the water, thinking of poor Ophelia. The scratches on the back of her neck bristled as the water hit them.

She stepped out and dried herself with the crisp, clean towel. The hair dye was the darkest she'd ever used: it wasn't Goth black but it wasn't a kick in the arse off it. She was shaking the bottle when she realized that she would ruin the white towels if she used them.

She chucked some clothes on and went into the hall, looking for an old towel in the airing cupboard, but there weren't any. Benny had some scabby ones, Maureen had seen them. She went into his bedroom, knelt down by the chest of drawers, pulled open the bottom one and rummaged, feeling for a towel texture. The drawer was filled with big winter jumpers and odd socks. Her hand landed on a glossy piece of paper. She nearly pulled it out before she realized it was a pornographic magazine. She shoved it back in, bristling with embarrassment, and pushed it to the very back. She felt something hard and flat and plastic lying on the floor of the drawer. She pulled back a jumper and looked in. It was a CD: it had been set into the corner of the drawer on the floor so that it didn't get lost in the jumble. She lifted it out, recognizing the two-tone corner before she saw the front of it. It was the Best of the Selecter CD. It was the CD she had left on the bedroom floor up in Garnethill; it even had the crack on the corner of the plastic cover.

She put it back where she had found it, covering it over with the same jumper and odd socks, and went back into the bathroom.

She combed her hair into a ponytail and hacked through it with a pair of nail scissors.

It was half-seven.

She listened at the bathroom door. The flat was still. She left a note on the kitchen table saying she'd stay at Leslie's tonight, and made her way down to the Great Western Road, taking a backstreet route she had never known Benny use.

Liam had more or less lived there for three years so she remembered the phone number. Lynn had moved; the guy who answered gave her an Anderston number.

"Hello, Lynn?"

"Aye," said Lynn cautiously.

"Lynn, it's me, Maureen O'Donnell."

"Mauri! How the fuck are you?"

They arranged to meet, under conditions of the utmost secrecy, in a large, busy cafe near Lynn's house.

LYNN WAVED HAPPILY WHEN Maureen walked through the door. She had naturally black hair and flawless pink velvet skin but her eyes were her crowning glory, black with a blue tinge that made them look like polished semiprecious stones. Her body was slight and wiry and if Liam was to be believed she was unusually agile. She had a deep, gruff voice from smoking twenty a day from the age of twelve. She was eating a bowl of carbonara made with cubed gammon. Expertly, she rolled a string of spaghetti onto her fork as Maureen sat down. "So what's this about, Secret Squirrel? And what have you done to your hair?"

"Cut it myself," said Maureen, sitting down.

"It's all uneven. You come to mine after we've eaten and I'll straighten it."

" 'S all right," said Maureen distractedly.

"No, it's not. There's all jaggy bits hanging down at the back. It looks like a mad wummin's fanny."

They sat in silence for a moment as Lynn chewed a mouthful of pasta. The creamy sauce gathered at the corners of her mouth; it looked like froth. Maureen looked around the room. Tourist posters of Italy had been pasted onto the wall: behind Lynn's head loomed an aerial photograph of Florence. The pictures were skirted with flags-of-all-nations bunting.

"Auch," said Lynn. "Let's just skip all these pleasantries."

"Aye," said Maureen.

Lynn looked her over. "I know about your boyfriend, Maureen. Is that why you're doing this silent, haunted thing?"

"Ami?"

"Aye."

"Don't tell anyone we've met, eh?" said Maureen.

"I'm not sure we have yet," said Lynn.

They sat in silence until Lynn had finished eating. She paid the bill. "Come on," she said, standing Maureen up and slipping her arm through hers. "Let's go back to mine and fix your hair."

Lynn was living in a big flat on Argyle Street, across the road from a twenty-four-hour grocer's. The house must have been very grand once: it had five large bedrooms and a massive communal kitchen with a walk-in larder. The ceilings were thirteen foot high with ornate cornicing. One of her flatmates kept a gang of giant, love-bombing cats. The minute they got through the door the cats started rubbing against their legs, and when Maureen sat down on one of the kitchen chairs three of them scratched and hissed at one another for the right to sit on her lap. "If you sit on that wee settee," said Lynn, pointing over to a green two-seater by the TV, "they can all love you at the one time."

Maureen sat on it and her knees were immediately covered with a carpet of purring animals. Lynn stood behind her, spraying her hair with a pump-action aerosol full of water. She combed Maureen's hair this way and that, snipping at the bottom with a pair of sharp hair scissors. "Oh, Maureen," she said. "You've hurt your neck."

"Yeah."

"It looks like scratches or something."

Maureen didn't answer. The cats writhed on her lap, purring and digging their claws into her legs, nesting her as if she were a blanket.

"It looks a wee bit raw," said Lynn carefully. "Will I put some Germolene onto it?"

"Please."

She went out of the kitchen and came back with a huge jar. "Nicked it from the work," she said, when she saw Maureen looking. She rubbed the smelly cream gently, gently, onto the ripped skin on the back of Maureen's neck. "How's it feel now?"

"Itchy."

"You should put some foundation on that, doll, or wear a scarf or something. It looks a bit frightening." She screwed the lid back on the tub, washed her hands in the sink, lifted the scissors and carried on trimming. "Now," she said, "tell us why ye phoned."

"I need a favor," said Maureen.

"Big one? Wee one?"

"It's just a question. I don't know if you'd know anyway. I want to find something out from someone's medical records."

"Is it a patient at my surgery?"

"Naw. Lynn, don't tell Liam or anyone else this, right?"

"Okay."

"I think Benny's been in my house."

"Benny? Of course Benny's been in your house."

"But I think he's been in my house recently, when the police wouldn't let me in. I think he's talking to the police or something, I dunno. I can't put it together."

She would have told Lynn about the migrating CD but she knew she looked a bit mad and Lynn would think that she gave it back and then just forgot.

"I think he might have known Douglas. The police told me he'd been arrested in Inverness a few years ago. They didn't bring the case to court, he was sent for psychiatric treatment instead."

Lynn stopped cutting. "I never heard about that," she said.

"Me neither."

"Did he get treatment in Inverness?"

"No," said Maureen. "It must have been in Glasgow. He's never been away for any length of time."

"Maureen, Benny might be a bit mental sometimes but I don't think he'd talk about you to the police."

"I don't know what to think about anything now."

Lynn started snipping at her hair again. "So what do you want me to do?"

"I need to know how to get access to his medical record. I want to find out who his psychiatrist was. I think it might have been Douglas."

"Maureen, you can't get to see someone else's record without their consent. It's illegal. You can't hardly get to see your own."

"Really?"

"Yeah, man."

She finished cutting and handed Maureen a mirror, holding another behind her so that she could see what she had done. "There," she said, "that's a nice haircut."

Maureen looked at herself. It was the shortest she'd had her hair in a long time. It made her look younger. Lynn danced around her, pretending to be a hairdresser, showing her the reflection from both sides, holding it at an angle so that Maureen couldn't see the cuts on her neck.

"It's not bad, is it?"

"I think it's lovely," said Lynn.

"Do you know a guy called Paulsa?"

"Bad Acid Paulsa?"

"That guy who came forward for Liam."

"Yeah, I know him. We went up to his house once."

"Where does he stay?"

"You know that big Unionist pub off the Saltmarket? Next close."

"Oh, aye."

Maureen suddenly realized she had been talking about herself since they met and she'd barely asked Lynn how she was. She grinned unsteadily. "Did you and Liam get it together again, then?"

Lynn looked embarrassed. "Yeah, a wee bit. What's this Maggie character like?"

"She's all right. Not much crack, though. Are ye going out together again?"

"Naw," said Lynn, picking lumps of hair off the back of the settee. "I don't think we will be either."

"How come?"

Lynn displayed a polite reticence and then told her, "Uch, you know, Mauri, I used to look at him and all I could see was sunshine. It's not like that now. He's a bit too angry for me."

"Yeah," conceded Maureen. "He's angry enough."

Lynn punched her gently on the chin. "Like all the rest of the fucking family."

Maureen pulled her coat on. "It was good of you to come and meet me there," she said. "I think I lost the place for a wee minute."

"Happens to the best of us," said Lynn. "You stay in touch anyway, eh?"

"I will, Lynn, I will."

She walked down through the town, feeling her father's breath on her neck all the way to the shelter.

Leslie met her in the hallway. She led Maureen out of the house quickly and spoke to her on the doorstep. She couldn't come home, she said. Her shift didn't finish for another three hours. "The police came to see me again, they asked me about the night we went to that pizza place. I just told them the right times, is that okay?"

"Yeah."

"Can I pick you up at Benny's?"

"No, no," said Maureen. "I'll come back."

Leslie could see that something was wrong with Maureen: she was pale and her eyes were unfocused. "Where are you going?"

"I'll just wander about for a bit."

Leslie rubbed her arm. "Look," she said, trying to make eye contact, "urn, go to the pictures or something, all right? Don't just wander off somewhere."

"Naw, I'm all right," Maureen murmured, and toppled off the outside step, wandering away with her hands deep in the pockets of her overcoat.

They had been there for a picnic once. Benny took Maureen and Liam down there – he had played there when he was a wee boy. It was a track of waste ground by the river, looking over to Govan and the shipyards, surrounded by run-down warehouses. It was probably a dangerous place to come at night, the motorway cut it off from the town and it was dark, but Maureen was tired of caring and she had her stabbing comb in her pocket. She lifted the chicken wire, crouched down and scrambled under it. She climbed to the top of a ten-foot-high concrete wedge sticking out of the river wall and sat down. Across the water she could see into the shipyards through an open slide door. Sparks from the welders' tongs flew in slow, red arcs. She pulled her coat tight against the mean river wind and lit a fag.

It was much darker now. The tide was coming in and the river flowed backward, slapping against the wall far below her feet. She thought about the ships passing down the river many years ago, taking emigrants to America, whole families of Scots lost to their own people forever. Lost to drizzling rain and a fifty-year recession, to endemic domestic violence and armies of drunk men shouting about football.

When she climbed down the rock and straightened her coat she felt taller somehow, as if, without trying to, she had floated across the dividing line between fear and fury.

She got there just in time to meet Leslie coming off her shift. She hadn't noticed before but Leslie had been crying. The appeal committee had notified them that morning that they would not allow them to make additional submissions. In the afternoon a husband had found the address of the house, come round and convinced his wife to move back home. "He broke her pelvis last time," said Leslie. "They only took the pins out last month."

"How the fuck did he do that?"

"He beat her with a baseball bat."

"I suppose everyone'll be going home if the appeal fails," said Maureen.

"Don't even say it," muttered Leslie, and handed Maureen a crash helmet.