Garnethill

Chapter 7

She went to her work the next day suspecting nothing. It was a miserable damp Saturday and the ticket booth wasn't busy; even the phones were quiet. Liz was on better form. She told Maureen a funny story about a long-dead uncle's nervous alopecia.

Mr. Scobie was out so they took turns using the phone and wandering off to the toilet for a skive. Liz went off to the loo with a newspaper and Maureen lifted the phone. Liam wasn't at home so she left a message on the machine. She had barely hung up when he phoned back. The police were talking to everyone they knew, he was worried someone would let something slip about him.

"Did they speak to Mum?"

"Yeah," said Liam. "She was as pissed as fuck. I was waiting downstairs for her. I dunno what she did but they couldn't wait to get her out of there. She kept shouting 'Habeas corpus!' I could hear her downstairs."

"Alcoholism – the Secret Disease" giggled Maureen, quoting the name of a pamphlet they had been given at school. A well-meaning guidance teacher, Mr. Glascock, had called them out of class and took them to the counseling suite. He told them about a support group for the families of alkies called Al-Anon and gave them pamphlets. They thanked him for his concern and said yes, they would definitely come and see him if they needed someone to talk to. They ripped the piss when he left.

The school had found out that Winnie was an alkie when the headmistress phoned her about Liam's disruptive behavior in class. Winnie staggered up to the school, told the school secretary she was a wanker and fell asleep in the waiting room. She couldn't be wakened. George had to come and get her, carrying her out of the school and into the car, still snoring her head off. The teachers stopped giving them a hard time after that, they looked on them pityingly and made allowances when they didn't do homework. It was insulting, the way they spoke to them, as if their lives were pathetic and always would be, as if they couldn't help themselves. Maureen would rather have been treated as a bad child than a sad one. Liam's defiance was more ambitious: he strove to be.

"I saw her yesterday," said Maureen. "She actually asked me if I did it."

"I think you should stay the fuck away from all of them," said Liam soberly. "For a while, at least, until this is over."

"Do the police know about your business-"

He interrupted her. "No. That's not for the phone really, pal," he said.

She apologized. "Did you think about what I said, the time thing?"

"Yeah, Mauri, it's garbage."

"What about the cupboard thing?"

"I'd tell them about that. Ye don't want them finding that out from someone else. How's your head?"

"Yeah, the usual. Bursting."

Liz came back and it was Maureen's turn for a skive. She locked herself into a toilet and smoked a fag, thinking her way around her flat again, sitting in her bed drinking a coffee, standing in the morning sunlight looking out of the window in the living room. She was coming back into the office by the side door as Liz took the "back in five minutes" sign down and lifted the blinds.

Two men were standing outside, waiting. Maureen stopped. There was something wrong with the picture: they were too close to the window, bending down, looking under the blind as Liz lifted it. The nearest man was wearing a lime green woolen suit under a black overcoat. The second was dressed in a multicolored ski jacket and holding a camera with a long lens. He lifted it slowly to his face, as if he were stalking a nervous bird, and pointed it at Liz. The man in the lime suit shoved a fist holding a dictaphone under the window and barked at Liz, "How do you feel about your boyfriend's murder, Miss O'Donnell?" The photographer was snapping pictures of her. The man with the dictaphone shouted again, "Did you murder him, Miss O'Donnell?"

Liz came to life. She rammed the change tray hard into the soft skin on the journalist's wrist. He yelped but held on to the dictaphone. She slammed the tray quickly backward and forward, cutting bloody parallel ridges into his hand as he tried to pull it out. The second man took photographs of her doing it. She stuck out her tongue and made a mad, angry face at him.

Gathering her wits, Maureen slid along the wall to the window, leaned over, and pulled down the blind. She stood still and Liz sat silently, listening together, afraid to move, as the men cursed and banged on the window and the side door. After a while they stopped.

"They won't really be away," whispered Liz. "They'll be across the road or something."

At Maureen's suggestion they shut up the office, left by the goods entrance and pissed off to the pictures for the afternoon. They saw a miserable film about a man who ran around shooting people.

"That was fucking rubbish," said Maureen, when they got outside.

"Oh, I liked it," said Liz, "I think he's dishy." Liz offered to cover Monday for Maureen, she owed her a shift anyway.

"That'd be great, Liz, I need a couple of days off in a row."

It was getting dark already and the streets were Saturday tea-time quiet, when families gather together to watch crap telly and unpack the shopping. Even Benny's close was silent, she couldn't hear any of the usual noises of TVs or children shouting. It felt dead.

Benny had left a note on the coffee table saying that he was at an AA meeting and would be back later. Maureen turned on all the lights in the flat, put the television on in the living room and tried to think about anything that wasn't Douglas. The house began to close in on her.

She started to make something to eat, not because she was hungry, just to keep herself moving. She found some bread but couldn't see any butter in the fridge.

The phone rang. She dropped the slices of bread and galloped over to it. It was Winnie. She was trying to disguise her drunkenness with a posher accent. Some journalists had been telephoning her.

"Don't say anything, Mum, please, and for God's sake don't give them any photos."

"I did not say anything," said Winnie. "And don't you talk to them either."

"I'm hardly going to, am I?"

"Well, sometimes people do things, things they wouldn't usually do, when things get… a wee bit…" She forgot what she was talking about.

"You're pissed, then?" said Maureen.

Winnie couldn't summon the energy for a fight. "How dare you," she said, and dropped the receiver. She mumbled something about Mickey. Maureen could hear footsteps and then George asking a question in the background.

He picked up the phone. "Hello?"

"Hello, George, it's me."

"Oh, did you phone her?"

"No, she phoned me."

"Oh. She's a bit… a bit tired. She was trying to phone you at work this afternoon but couldn't get an answer."

"Oh, there's something wrong with the switchboard. She'd have been put through to the back office," said Maureen. It was a good lie, made up on the spur of the moment, but her voice was too high, she was talking too fast.

"All right, then," said George irrelevantly, and hung up.

She ate some dry bread dipped in milk, the best cure for an acid stomach, and sat in front of the television, flicking from station to station, trying to find something engrossing. The programs were so asinine that not one of them could hold her attention for longer than thirty seconds.

If Benny would come home they could watch telly together. She could phone Leslie but she would have to talk about everything; she couldn't face that right now.

Maureen jumped when she heard the door. It was a polite rat-rat-rat, not a familiar knock. She walked apprehensively into the hallway, hoping to fuck it wasn't the police, and peered out of the spy hole.

She had never seen him before. He was in his midtwenties, dressed in a green bomber jacket and jeans with his hair greased back off his face. He was standing casually at the door, contrapposto, looking directly at the spy hole, as if he knew she was there looking out at him.

Her hand was on the latch when the letter box opened slowly.

"Maureen," he whispered, his voice a smug, nasal drawl. "I know you're there, Maureen, I can hear you moving."

Suddenly terrified, she flattened herself against the wall and slid away from the door.

"I can still hear you moving," he said. "Are you going to open the door?"

"Who are you?" breathed Maureen, a thin film of sweat forming on her upper lip.

"Open the door and I'll tell you." He tried the handle.

"Fuck off."

"Go on."

She heard him stand back and snort. He must be able to hear every move she made: the door was very thin. He tiptoed down the stairs and out of the close. Maureen tried to breathe in properly. She heard steps in the close and he tiptoed back up the stairs.

He leaned into the letter box again. "Still there?" he whispered.

She looked around the bare hall for a weapon and lifted a framed photograph off the wall. She could smash it and shove a bit of glass through the letter box, into his face, into his eye maybe, and then she could phone the police.

"Are you still there?" He tittered and let the letter box snap shut. Maureen dropped the picture. It landed corner down on the carpet and the glass fell out of the frame intact. It was Perspex. "Carol Brady sent me here."

The name took a minute to register.

"She wants to meet you tomorrow."

"Where?"

"Anywhere you like. Why not make it over lunch? That's nice and civilized."

Maureen thought for a moment.

"The DiPrano," she said. It was an expensive seafood restaurant in town. She'd look like an idiot if she suggested somewhere small-time.

The letter box opened again. "What time?"

Maureen didn't know what time it opened. She didn't want to be in the middle of lunchtime rush.

"Two o'clock."

The letter box slid shut.

Maureen could hear him walking lightly down the stairs. She waited in the hall in case he came back. She waited for a long time.

Moving very slowly, she made up the settee bed and climbed in, closing her eyes and pretending to be asleep. It was only after Benny had come home, made himself something to eat and gone to bed that Maureen moved. The right side of her body was numb.

She dreamed of breakfast served after Sunday mass. It always felt like a treat because they were hungry: they couldn't eat before taking Communion. Hot, sweet tea, back in the days when everyone took sugar, bacon-egg rolls and the short-worded papers the children could read, the ones with the sex scandals in them. The family were sitting around the front room the way they used to, half-dressed for mass, with the fragile and uncomfortable bits of clothing taken off and put in their rooms: velvet jackets that would stain with the bacon fat, itchy tights and stiff shoes. They were all adults now, except for her father, who was just as she remembered him, thirty-four years old and twice as big as any of them, sitting in the best armchair, next to the window.

Maureen was lying on her back by the side of his chair. Only Michael knew she was there and he didn't look at her. She was wearing a prim flannelette nightie with a high neck, buttoned right up, tight around her throat. It had been rolled up carefully from the hem, leaving her naked from the waist down. She couldn't get up because her back was stuck to the floor. Without taking his eyes off the paper he reached down to touch her. She tried to get up, flailing her arms and legs wildly like a dying spider, but then her gut split open and a pain seared through her abdomen, making her lie still and shut her eyes.

She woke up at eleven-thirty feeling more tired than when she had fallen asleep, threw on her jeans and the Anti Dynamos T-shirt and went to the newsagent's to buy some cigarettes. A blurry photograph of Liz was on the front page of a dirty Sunday. She was looking straight into the camera and pulling a face. Maureen's name was underneath the picture. She could see herself, from the neck down, in the background, reaching over to pull down the blind.