The Dead Hour

I

It was black night outside the train window. Paddy took the same journey to work every day but found herself seeing it for the first time because Trisha was there.

As she sat across from her mum on the quiet commuter train she wondered who had answered Vhari Burnett’s phone when Mark Thillingly called her. It could have been Lafferty or the good-looking man at the door. And why had Thillingly called Vhari and felt the need to lie to Diana about it? It didn’t sound as if they were having an affair. It sounded as if Burnett and Thillingly were in a lot of trouble, as if he was phoning her to warn her, to tell her what had happened to him in the car park, to tell her to run. Wondering about the relationship between Burnett and Thillingly reminded her of her hot breath wetting Burns’s neck. She looked quickly away from her mother.

Trisha saw Paddy frowning and squirming and smiled, leaning across the aisle to pat her knee. Paddy smiled back reflexively. Her mum looked lost outside her house or the chapel or Rutherglen Main Street, her clothes slightly threadbare. She was wearing a stiff beige raincoat and Paddy could see a cross-hatched patch on the sleeve where she had scrubbed a mark away. Below the hem she wore thick tights over swollen ankles and little black sensible walking shoes that made her look old and spent.

And Trish was well aware of being outside her usual orbit. As she watched the moonlit landscape passing the window, anxious little thoughts would flare in her eyes, suppressed immediately with a blink and a glance at her handbag. Paddy guessed what she was thinking: she had the bus fare home in her purse. Whatever happened she could still get back. Paddy had already moved further out into the world than her mother ever would.

“The buffet car’s open,” said Paddy.

“Don’t be daft.” Trisha frowned and looked inquiringly down the aisle. “This train’s only going into town. There’s no buffet car.”

“Is that right?” Paddy reached into her pocket and pulled out a crumpled white paper bag. “Where d’ye think I got these, then?” She stretched the neck open and handed the bag of her mum’s favorite sweeties to her.

Trisha grinned into the bag. “Lemon Bonbons.” The golden light from the sweets lit up her chin like a buttercup.

“Lemon Bonbons.” Paddy smiled back.

Trisha offered a couple of times but Paddy insisted she was on a diet, and anyway, they weren’t her favorites, they were for Trish. It wasn’t hard to resist. Her teeth still ached from her binge in the morning.

It was dark in Argyle Street as they emerged from the low-level train platform, the street wet and glistening from a shower they had missed on the way in. The Evening Times seller had parked his stall under the lip of the shop opposite and Paddy found herself half-listening for the headline: a football special. A bedraggled man in a rain-warped wool overcoat approached them with his hand out and a desperate alcoholic look in his eye. Trisha linked arms with her daughter, anxiously steering her away from him.

She shrank during the walk through town. Paddy felt the pangs of fear rippling through the muscles on her arm. She had meant the night to cheer Trisha up, not scare her. Every person dressed in party clothes made her draw closer to her daughter, pulling her sleeve, veering her out to the curb to stay in the light, and always just one degree of fright from throwing her arm out and hailing a bus to take them home.

The crowds were gathering outside the City Halls. They found their way through the chatting happy crowd gathered outside and bumped into Mary O’Donnagh inside the door. Mary was the chief chapel groupie at St. Columbkille’s, one of a number of women who did unpaid work at the chapel and graded themselves according to their closeness to the priests. Rarely seen without a pinny, this evening Mrs. O’Donnagh was dressed in navy blue slacks and was sporting a big set hairdo like a hairy halo.

“Oh, Mary,” said Trisha politely, “isn’t your hair lovely?”

Mary touched her head and smiled coyly. “Our Theresa did it for me. Ye must go to her, Trisha, she’s great.”

“I will, I will, I will,” said Trisha, so adamantly that even Mary knew she wouldn’t.

Paddy saw Trisha relax as they moved in through the crowd of women. Accompanying men were occasional and stayed on the edge of conversations, holding the coats, patiently waiting for their wives.

Their seats were in the balcony. As Paddy sat down and looked to the stage she could see the center circle filling up with a sea of women just like her mother, shedding cheap coats onto the seats, bri-nylon tops in pastel shades underneath. The stage was already dressed with a drum kit, a table of props, and a couple of guitars on stands. Above it hung a sagging banner with brown writing on a white background: THE ALL PRIESTS HOLY ROADSHOW.

Trisha sat forward in her chair and looked excitedly down at the crowd, occasionally spotting people she knew and pointing them out to Paddy, identifying each by the tragedies that had befallen their family. Mary O’Leery-son has multiple sclerosis; Katherine Bonner-husband died of a stroke and brother run over by a train; Pauline Trainer-parents died of flu two days apart, always had a limp at school, and a brother with TB. They weren’t allowed to touch her in case they caught it.

The lights went down to a recording of Holst’s The Planets. The audience bristled, sitting back in their seats and giving an excited collective titter. Four shadows walked onto the stage and the lights rose to uproarious applause.

Four ordinary-looking men of different ages were scattered around the stage, clutching instruments. Each of them wore a priest’s collar and nondescript black slacks and jersey. The man at the front raised his hands to wave a hello and the audience cheered as they started into a version of “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling,” slipping quickly into “A Mother’s Love’s a Blessing.” Paddy had to admit that they knew how to work their audience.

What followed felt like a very long evening to Paddy. The priestly band split up, and one of them came back on to do poor stand-up comedy with rotten material. He told a slightly off-color joke about a baby born on the wrong side of the blankets, but the audience laughed because he was a priest so it must be all right, then. Whenever Ireland or Irishness was mentioned a spontaneous round of applause would erupt and roll around the auditorium, as if the homeland were a thousand desert miles distant instead of forty-five minutes away on a ferry. A skinny young priest who hadn’t been in the band came on and did a poor Elvis impersonation, leaving the stage to a gale of appreciation.

It was warm in the auditorium, the heat from the crowd below rising up to the balcony, and Paddy found herself getting sleepy and half thinking about Thillingly being dragged out of the water, the black river running out of him and down the cliff as he lay in the cold grass, graceless; married Burns and the other policeman making jokes about him minutes after his soul left his body; and the jagged bank ripping his face open.

Paddy nodded off in the dark warmth, enjoying the close press of women around her and Trisha, content for once, at her side. She woke up as the lights rose for the interval, with Trisha rustling in her handbag for bonbons, and Paddy knew that Thillingly hadn’t hurt Burnett or even been at her house the night she died. He had committed suicide because of what had happened in the car park, because of some humiliation, some small scuffle that related to Vhari. To an uncluttered mind it was an obvious conclusion, and if it was obvious to her it was probably obvious to everyone else. That’s why Sullivan was going behind his bosses. That’s why he was asking her to meet him in dark alleys outside the morgue. Someone was working hard to steer the Burnett murder inquiry away from the good-looking man in suspenders at Vhari’s door. This was the story that would get her off the night shift, the story she was going to write up for Ramage.

The lights went up in the hall, a flock of desperate women with weak bladders bolted for the loos. Most people stayed in their seats, saving their tired legs the worry of getting back up the stairs again. The consensus from the seats in front and behind them seemed to be that it was a very, very good show. Very good. Even better than last year.

Trisha chewed the last bonbon and looked despondently into the empty paper bag. “I don’t suppose ye brought another quarter of bonbons for the interval?”

Paddy acted indignant. “Is nothing enough for ye, woman?”

They giggled about it until the lights went back down and the second half of the show began with a priest in sunglasses singing a Roy Orbison medley.

On the way back to the train station afterward, as they walked down the dark streets, staying close to the others all heading home to Rutherglen, Paddy found herself feeling for the Burnett funeral photograph in her pocket, stroking it with her finger, yearning to break away from the cautious crowd. In the Eastfield Star Caroline would be sulkily watching television in the living room, the boys would be out, and Mary Ann would be praying upstairs or reading an improving book: she didn’t watch telly anymore. No one would have done the dishes after tea and Trisha would don her pinny and start cleaning as soon as they got in.

Paddy felt the pull of the town and wanted to go to work, wondering what her city was throwing up tonight.