Slip of the Knife

I

It didn’t look very nice. The pasta had cooked too long and was soft and cloudy at the edges. Paddy dropped the contents of the sauce jar on it and stirred the pot. It still didn’t look very nice, but she knew she’d eat it. She put the lid on and took some ready-grated Parmesan out of the cupboard, setting the cardboard tub on the table.

Dub looked up from the free local paper, chewing his pen seriously. “ ‘Man’s best friend,’ three letters?”

She shrugged. “Jesus?”

She took plates and glasses out of the cupboard and set the table for four. Here, among the steamed-up windows, in the peaceful pocket of the house with all the workaday reminders of routine and pending chores, the threat of Callum Ogilvy and the horror of Terry’s death seemed faintly ludicrous.

She stood over the basket of fresh ironing on top of the washing machine, looking at the creases Dub had carefully worked into her office clothes and Pete’s spare uniform, telling herself not to think about it, just for the evening, until Mary Ann left. They saw little enough of each other and it was a shame to waste a whole evening on distractions.

The doorbell rang out a soft chime and Dub tried to stand up but banged his knees on the underside of the table. Paddy and Pete met in the hall, rushing for the door, a little throb of excitement in Paddy’s throat too. She let him get it.

Mary Ann was standing outside the front door, dressed in a plain blue button-down dress and carrying a plastic bag with a heavy tub in it, her blond ringlets newly and brutally cropped. She smiled wide, stepping into the hall, touching her head self-consciously. Pete wanted to touch it so she bent down to let him.

“Oh dear.” Paddy slipped her arm through her sister’s and tutted. “That is one terrible haircut. But you’re still prettier than me. It’s damnable.”

They came into the kitchen and found Dub standing proudly over the pot of hot pasta on the table as if he’d made it. He took the plastic bag Mary Ann offered him and pulled out a clear Tupperware box, setting it on the edge of the table. It was soup, yellow from the lentils, flecked with green peas and white chunks of potato. The lid wasn’t fitted on properly and a floury dribble had dried down the side. Pete pressed his nose against the box, trying to see through it.

“Soup,” said Mary Ann.

Paddy recognized the cut of the potatoes, the particular yellow tone Trisha got from soaking the dried split peas for two nights instead of one. She took it from Dub, disguising her irritation. “Did she come into the mission to give you this?”

“No.” Mary Ann touched her hair again. “I was home.”

Soup was Trisha’s secret language. Trisha’s soup meant love and home; it meant a mother managing on a poor income, passing on good nutrition to the children; it meant concern. If Trisha’s life had been a musical she would have ended up with all three daughters living a hundred yards from her, raising a dozen well-behaved children between them and gathering every morning to make soup together, to her recipe. As it was, her eldest daughter was divorced and living miserably with her; Mary Ann was a nun, which was good, but made soup from a sack of dried ingredients, which was terrible; and her youngest bought overpriced soup from delicatessens. Sending soup was a reproach to a daughter who couldn’t be trusted to look after herself or feed her illegitimate son properly.

Paddy took it and put it in the fridge. “We’ll have this later. We’ll have it tomorrow.”

Dub sat back down in his seat. “Or we’ll leave it in the fridge until it gets smelly and then chuck it down the toilet.”

Pete giggled because Dub had said toilet.

Mary Ann was shocked at the suggestion, frowning at her empty plate. Paddy sat down next to her, keen to change the subject. “What were you doing home anyway?”

Dub dropped a lump of overcooked red pasta onto Mary Ann’s plate. She looked down at it, the fusilli swirls reluctantly letting go of each other, tumbling down to the cold plate. Usually Mary Ann giggled at everything-a dog running past, a pencil dropped, an incongruous turn of phrase, anything could set her off-but tonight she wasn’t giggling. Tonight she looked down at her dinner settling on the plate and sighed like a grown-up.

Dub and Paddy looked at each other.

Paddy sat down next to her and took her hand. “What?”

Mary Ann shook her head as if she was trying to dismiss an unpleasant thought.

“Is Mum ill?”

“No.” She picked up her fork and prodded at her food.

“Are you ill?”

“No.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the table. It was Dub’s favorite dinner and he ate as quickly as he could. He shoveled the food into his mouth, washed it down with a pint glass of apple juice, and then excused himself, taking Pete with him, leaving Paddy and Mary Ann alone, side by side at the table. Exiled to the living room, the men put the television on loudly, letting them know they weren’t listening.

“So?”

Mary Ann hadn’t eaten much. She moved the food around slowly, chasing a swirl halfway around the plate and leaving it there. She put her fork down. “Don’t want it.”

If a plate of stewed puppy had been served to her she would usually eat it, out of piety and gratitude. Paddy realized with a start that she hadn’t prayed over the dinner before she began eating either.

“Mary Ann, what is going on?”

Mary Ann didn’t move. She sat still, staring at the food as tears dropped onto the table, and then she turned to look at her sister.

“I’m in love. With a man. He loves me.”

“Who?”

“Father Andrew.”

“At St. Columbkille’s?”

She nodded unhappily, touched her mauled hair again with her fingertips, and cried. Paddy touched it: it was as soft as a baby’s. “Did they do this to you because of that?”

But Mary Ann was crying so hard she couldn’t speak. Paddy dabbed her cheeks with a sheet of kitchen roll they were using for napkins but it did no good. The tears weren’t about to dry. She wanted to ask a hundred questions, tell her that Father Andrew was a creep, that she should never have been a nun in the first place, but those were things she wanted to say, not things Mary Ann needed to hear.

“Did you tell Mum?”

Mary Ann touched her head again.

“Did you tell your Mother Superior?”

She mouthed “no” and carried on crying.

Paddy didn’t know what to do. She dried her sister’s face again, squeezed her hand for a while, and then dried her face once more. “D’ye want some soup?”

Mary Ann spluttered a laugh through the veil of wet, finally catching her breath in short, painful gasps. She used her own napkin to dab at her face.

“Do the two of you have any kind of plan?”

Mary Ann folded the kitchen roll into a neat square and blew her nose, wiping it hard, dragging her nose to the side as if she was punching herself in slow motion. She couldn’t look at Paddy. “We don’t talk…”

Paddy was shocked. Father fucking Andrew, two years out of seminary, forcing his will on the parish and touching Mary Ann in ways she had no defense against. Paddy wanted to jump in the car and go over to the parish house and beat the living shit out of him. She wouldn’t, for Mary Ann’s sake, but it was exactly what their brothers would do if they found out.

“Don’t tell Mum.” It wasn’t much by way of comfort but it was the best she could come up with.

Mary Ann started crying again, not from the pressure of love this time, Paddy thought, but foreseeing all the pain and shame she’d bring to the family.

She took her sister’s wet face in her hands. “Listen, Mary Ann, listen, you can’t hurt Mum more than we have. Trisha’s strong, she’s really strong. Caroline’s divorced, Pete’s a bastard, the boys don’t even go to mass anymore.” Somehow, adding Mary Ann’s love affair to the list of their mother’s wounds wasn’t helping to calm her down. “I’ve got some cigarettes. Will we smoke a cigarette?”

Paddy got up, pulled the packet out of her handbag, brought over an ashtray, and lit one, handing it to her sister. Sometimes, when they were younger and Sean smoked around them a lot, the girls would share a cigarette. Mary Ann didn’t inhale but liked holding it, touching it to her lips like a movie star, flinching when a stray tendril of smoke got up her nose.

Now, she took the little cigarette, going cross-eyed as she held it to her mouth, and inhaled the longest draw Paddy had ever seen. Half the fag was gone. She held the smoke in her lungs, her chest barreled out, and she exhaled expertly over Paddy’s head.

The sisters looked at each other. Paddy was astonished. For the first time in their lives Mary Ann wasn’t playing the giggling little girl. She was a woman now.

Holding her eye, Mary Ann put the filter to her lips and sucked again, drawing the remaining life out of the cigarette, leaving it a gray, crumbling shell. She held the smoke in her chest for an unfeasibly long time and then blew it out to the side, pausing at the end, turning to her sister and blowing two perfect smoke rings at her, raising her eyebrows to emphasize her point.

Paddy started laughing and couldn’t stop. Blindly, she slapped the table, knocking her plate to the floor, her fork bouncing off a chair and clattering onto the tiles.

The phone rang out and she looked up, expecting to see Mary Ann’s face split in a silent howl, but Mary Ann wasn’t laughing. She bit her top lip and stabbed at the ashtray with the cigarette, her eyebrows rising and lowering in a silent argument.

McVie didn’t bother with hello. “Memorial service, Thursday. Big deal. Ten a.m. at the cathedral. You’re speaking.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Everyone’ll be there.”

“Everyone who?”

“Everyone.” She heard him ruffle a sheet of paper. “Have you seen Merki’s article?”

She turned to the wall. “Merki’s got a byline?”

“Go and get tomorrow’s edition of the News. They’ve found the gun.”

She hung up.

Mary Ann had helped herself to another cigarette and held her head in her hands, the contaminating smoke curling up to the pulley of Pete’s clothes drying above her head.

“Put that fag out,” Paddy said firmly. “We’re going for a drive.”

II

It felt strange bringing Mary Ann to the News building. Just sitting in the car with her felt like a bizarre clash of the two distinct halves of her life. Paddy didn’t really know who to be: Mary Ann’s giggly wee sister or the braying harridan she was for work. It would have felt more odd if Mary Ann had been acting like Mary Ann but she was quiet, worried, fretting. She kept touching her hair, looking for a strand long enough to lose her fingers in. The cut was so bad it looked as if her hair had been singed off.

“Wait here,” said Paddy, opening the door. The absurd thought occurred to her that Mary Ann might slip out and disappear forever in the dark of the car park. She swung her handbag onto her sister’s lap. “Get a cigarette out of there and smoke it. I’ll be two seconds.”

The delivery men were working hard, swinging bales of papers along a line into the vans, their rhythm interrupted by the sight of Paddy Meehan walking out of the dark night to take a copy from a burst bale that had been discarded to the side.

It was front page, with Merki’s name on it and a picture of the ditch Terry had been found in, strung along with police tape. A small inset photograph showed Terry as a young man, grinning cheesily at the photographer. She could see from the collar that he had his leather jacket on, the one with the red shoulder pads. She turned, walking back to the car, stroking the picture tenderly with her index finger, inadvertently smearing the damp ink and staining her hand.

The burning red tip of the cigarette flared in the windscreen as Paddy walked towards the car. She hardly knew this Mary Ann. She hadn’t yet taken her final vows so leaving the convent would be slightly less of a wrench, if that was what she wanted. But Father Andrew had. Paddy could well imagine the courtship, the looks and Mary Ann’s blushes, the stolen moments in chilly convent corridors, a brush of the hand, a longing look, and Father Andrew’s pasty arse as he pumped his cock into her sister.

She opened the door and fell into the driver’s seat, snatching the cigarette out of Mary Ann’s hand and throwing it onto the dirt floor of the car park. “Right, you. I need to know some things. How long has this been going on?”

From the habit of complying with barked orders, Mary Ann told her: nearly a year. They’d met when he came to say a special mass for the missions. They saw each other in secret. He didn’t want to leave the priesthood.

“Do you want to leave the convent?”

Mary Ann said she didn’t know.

“You can come and stay with me.”

Mary Ann didn’t answer and although Paddy would never say, she was a little offended. She flattened the newspaper out over the steering wheel and flicked on the cabin light.

Mary Ann muttered by her side, “Got any more fags?”

Paddy nodded at her bag.

“Finished,” said Mary Ann.

“We’ll stop in a minute and get some.”

Merki was back on form, no doubt about it. In perfect house style he reported that the police had found the gun used to shoot Terence Hewitt in the head, execution-style. Contrary to previous reports it wasn’t an IRA gun and they were now certain that the murder wasn’t anything to do with the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The gun had been found near the scene of the crime, and police ballistics had confirmed a match with the bullet used to kill Terence. They were now looking for a lone gunman and robbery was the suspected motive. The report was headlined as an exclusive.

“What’s this?” Mary Ann was trying to read it over her shoulder.

“In a leap and a bound he was free,” said Paddy. “The guy who wrote this hasn’t had his name on an article for ten months. He’s ambitious though. An unscrupulous source could get him to write that the Queen was a man if he thought it would get his career out of the toilet.”

She folded the paper in half and threw it onto the backseat.

III

Mary Ann cried in the car as they sat outside the convent, smoking in the dark. She tried to talk to Paddy but her feelings came out as a jumble of unconnected half sentences, absent verbs and missing nouns making a nonsense of a painful but familiar story of thwarted love. Paddy didn’t want to question her or make her clarify what she was saying; she did want to know the details but flinched from prying. At the same time, she suddenly felt she had her sister back, a woman who was the same age as her, instead of a child Bride of Christ who believed in miracles and fairy stories.

Paddy watched as she walked off to the convent gate, pressing the illuminated doorbell and giving her a last longing look as she waited for the answer. Mary Ann looked so pretty suddenly, with the ivy on the convent walls curling up around the door to frame her, her short blond hair lit from behind by the light on the buzzer; even the plain dress with its dowdy shirt collar and nasty buttons looked nice.

The door opened and the convent swallowed her once again.

Paddy drove away down the hill towards the West End. Stopped at a light, she imagined Mary Ann coming to stay with her, leaving the crushing gray conformity of the Church, and a flare of burning exultation exploded in her chest.

She threw her head back and screamed her sister’s name.

IV

She left the radio off, the television off and the door to her study open so that she could hear any noise at all outside the front door. Michael Collins wouldn’t come back, she knew he wouldn’t, not tonight anyway, although her instinct to scan the horizon for tigers had been strong since Pete was born. Every sharp corner, every fast car was a potential assailant. It made her police him and nag and put anything dangerous up high, and now write an inflammatory column about the Troubles with one ear to the door.

They’d left all of Terry’s things in the hall, keeping them separate in case the lawyer asked for them back. She’d moved the silver trunk behind the front door so that anyone breaking in would need to push it along the floor before they could get in. Even so, she’d sleep with her door open tonight.

Having finished her column, she got it down to within five words of the word count so the editors didn’t have the scope to chew it up too much, and lifted the phone to call it in. The male copy taker took her column down for her, clarifying a couple of lines, correcting her punctuation once with a polite question. When she was finished she thanked him, pretended she did remember him from Father Richards’s leaving do years ago, and hung up.

She should clean up the kitchen and get Pete’s gym kit ready so she didn’t have too much to do when she woke up in six hours’ time. She stopped for breath in the dark hallway, listening for the rhythm of Pete’s breathing but getting Dub’s narrow whistle instead. Terry’s portfolio was leaning against the wall with the yew box at its foot. She picked them up and took them into the kitchen.

Putting them both on the table, she went to Dub’s food cupboard and took out the giant jar of peanut butter, scooping a spoonful out and sticking it in her mouth before she could think about it, rolling her tongue around the spoon, savoring the salty sweetness, promising herself that she wouldn’t have another. Except one. She rolled the spoon around the inside of the jar, getting a gravity-defying spoonful and eating the top off it so it didn’t spill while she was fitting the lid back on.

She sat down. Terry’s box was lovely, well crafted and made from thick, flawless wood. She opened the lid. It was lined with lilac velvet, faded over time to a crisp brown. Most of the photos were of Terry, as a baby, as a toddler in a garden, Terry at Pete’s age standing proud and stiff in a brand-new school uniform, Terry as a chubby teen with his hair over his eyes, drinking Coke and laughing. The photos stopped abruptly when he got to seventeen, when his parents died. There were photos of his parents and some older ones, black-and-white, of an old lady grinning by a large oak mantelpiece, of his parents’ wedding. His mother had a bob and a shy smile. At the bottom of the box were small nameless mementos: a newspaper cutting about a school play with Terry’s name underlined, a cat collar with a flattened tin bell on it, a tiny piece of green ribbon holding two matching wedding bands together, his and hers.

His parents had died in a car crash. She kissed the dusty strip of ribbon and felt sad, whether for them or for him she didn’t know. If she’d been honest she might have admitted it was for him.

These were his most important family memories, she realized, which meant that the worn brown folder Fitzpatrick had in his office had something altogether different in it.

She dropped the pictures back in the box, shut it, and wiped the lid with her hand, setting it gently on the chair next to her, and turned to the portfolio.

It was black, graying because of the dust from the high-up cupboard in the flat, an exact copy of Kevin’s portfolio. Maybe they had bought them together. Terry always liked stationery. He used Moleskine notepads when he traveled-they’d found a box of the battered notebooks in the trunk.

She unfurled the elastic strap and opened the portfolio, slipping the sheets of photographic paper out of the cupped side and setting them flat on the table. A small Moleskine pad was tucked in at the back. Flicking through it, she read Terry’s jittery shorthand and realized that these were notes of the interviews of all the photo subjects, numbered up to forty, dated variously over a month last year. She looked back at the pictures. Senga- New Jersey. Billy- Long Island. The others were without the accompanying text, just bare photos, but they each had Kevin’s touch. Brilliant crisp light, sharp colors and a person in the foreground, smiling or not, beautiful or not, all relaxed, all honest and open faced.

There was one black face, a woman with an aristocratic African profile, standing on the sunny side of a long, narrow street of red-brick tenements in New York with fire escapes snaking up them. Quartz specks in the tarmac glittered in the sun. Her smile was crooked, as if she was trying to hide her teeth, and her hair was pulled up into waspish yellow and black braids that swirled around her head.

Whoever the woman was, Paddy assumed she’d made a happy transition to the States. There were so few black people in Scotland that the two black Glaswegians she knew of were minor celebrities. One was an academic from the West Indies who taught at Glasgow University and had married a fellow linguist. Another, younger man worked as a sound engineer for Scottish Opera and drank in the Chip. Kevin’s woman looked African and Paddy assumed she had been adopted by a well-meaning Scottish couple and escaped as soon as possible. She looked very young to be an expatriate.

Paddy was looking at the photo when her eye caught a detail in the background. If the picture had been smaller or the image less sharply defined by the slanted light in the street she wouldn’t have noticed it.

Michael Collins had been thinner then. He was two hundred yards behind the woman, leaning over the roof of a big green car. He wore a thin peach summer shirt, his trousers sitting slack on his hips, the sunlight flashing off his glasses. Collins wasn’t looking at the camera. In fact, if Kevin had been quick, he wouldn’t even have been aware that a photographer was taking a picture down the street at all. As he leaned over the roof of the car his mouth was open in a laugh, hair cropped tight to his head. Across, at the roadside passenger door, was another man, a fat man in a dark suit, his face obscured as he twisted and reached for the door handle.

Paddy sat back, elated. She had a photo of him. It was him in New York and some time ago, but it was a photo of him nonetheless, captured in a mundane moment, giving a friend a lift.

She checked Terry’s notebook for names, looking for any with an African flavor: Morag, Alison, Barney, Tim, none of them fitted with the black woman. But if she had been adopted, her parents might have given her a Scottish name. The Scots had colonized half of Africa on behalf of the Empire. For all she knew, Morag could be a common Ethiopian name.

She thought of Terry again, sitting in a bar, sweating, drunk, his arm around a hungry young girl, and shivered, shaking the thought away.

Kevin Hatcher would know who the woman was, where the picture was taken, maybe even the name of the man in the background or some information Paddy could use to trace him and protect herself and Pete. But it was one o’clock in the morning and it would be rude to phone.

Instead, she packed Pete’s gym kit and loaded the dishwasher. Instead, she washed her face, brushed her teeth. Instead, she went to bed feeling pleased that she had something to go on, a picture of Michael Collins.

She should have grabbed Pete and run.