‘But you’ve had all that the Department say they can give you.’
‘Aye, fair enough, I’m getting better at the cooking and that.’
‘So, you had difficulty coping with Kylie when she was on her own and now you’ve got another child on the way. How do you think you’ll manage with two?’ She knew she was pressing on the knife, but their opponents would show no mercy.
‘We’ll get on fine, I ken whit I’m doing noo. The twa of them’ll play wi’ each other and Kylie can look after the babby, help wi’ its bottle an’ all, gie it boiled sweets ’n other treats.’
‘You don’t think it’ll be more difficult giving Kylie the care and attention she needs with a new baby in the house?’
‘I’ll hae Ron there to help me too, mind.’
‘Ron?’
‘My husband, Ron Davie.’
‘I thought he’d left, I thought you’d split up for good this time?’
‘Naw, naw. We’ve got back tigether, he’s in the hoose the noo. He’ll gie us a hand, he’s the dad after all.’
Flora looked enquiringly at the solicitor to see whether she had been aware of this development, but she shook her head, signalling her own surprise at the change in Mrs Davie’s household.
‘And does Ron still think it’s okay for Kylie to be adopted?’
‘Aye. He says it’ll gie us mair time for the wee un when it’s born.’
‘And is that true?’
‘Eh… aye, but Kylie’ll be a guid wee helper. She can help wi’ the nappies and everything.’
‘Is she out of nappies yet, Kylie herself?’
‘Naw. I took them off her the once but she jist made a mess, so I put them back.’
With every question the impossibility of successfully defending the action became more certain, as time after time the mother had to rely on her mantra, ‘But she’s ma bairn and I love her’. No one could doubt the truth of the statement. The woman, despite her intellectual inadequacy, was fighting with every tool available to her to try to keep her child. She had refused to give up ‘the bairn’ in the face of heavy pressure from the Social Work Department to do so, she had defied her violent husband and, somehow, she had managed to contact a solicitor and explain her predicament to the professional. Her genuine affection for her child shone through, like an unquenchable flame, but it could not compensate for her total lack of competence in the most basic childcare. Flora’s only armaments were to be bows and arrows backed up, maybe, with slings and stones; the Council, her opponents, were in possession of pump-action machine guns and full body armour. The sheriff would have heard it all before, and after the pathetic creature had been given her chance to sway the court the order to free the child for adoption would be granted. Mrs Davie would go on to have her next baby and, in all probability, an application would be made after a few years by the local authority for a freeing in relation to it, and so on and so on, until one day Mrs Davie would have her tubes tied. Unthinkable for Mr Davie, or his replacement, to have the snip and, of course, contraception doesn’t work unless you have the wit to follow the instructions.
Flora walked home in the company of Katie Mann. Nothing more than chance had led to this; they were both going out through Door Eleven of Parliament House and heading for home in the New Town at the same time; but no better companion could have been chosen by kind fate. Katie suffered from intractable verbal diarrhoea, and for a conversation to continue only the occasional nod or shake of the head was required; she would do the rest, gliding from one long, complicated digression to the next, rarely returning to her starting point, the momentum of her enthusiasm making her overshoot it time and time again. The first topic, as they crossed Parliament Square, was fox-hunting, and they progressed to hair dye, the Isle of Man, the sleeping partner of the last Accountant of Court and, finally, the closure of the local clap-clinic, seamlessly and with minimal input from Flora. Digression followed digression in Katie’s endless chatter, and Flora allowed the torrent of words to flow over her until, finally, they parted on Queen Street.
The phone rang. It was Maria. ‘You alright?’
‘Yep. I survived Lord Lawford, and apart from an undignified episode over lunch with Colin Harvey I managed to keep the tears at bay. How did you get on in Glasgow?’
‘Fine, really. The professor behaved himself in the witness box, no mad speculation about suffocation despite the views he expressed at the consultation. The other side’s expert witness hadn’t seen all the child’s records or any of the professor’s reports, and wasn’t familiar with any of the latest literature. He must have been duffed up horribly in a court somewhere, as he was afraid to answer any questions in cross-examination and just kept repeating that he’d made it all clear in the examination-in-chief. Since he was so unashamedly partisan, I reckon he deserved everything he got. We’re back tomorrow, but we’ve only got one witness left. The sheriff wants written submissions, so we’re reconvening after Christmas for them. All in all, better than I could have hoped for. I’ve prepared the stuff for tomorrow already, so I wondered whether you fancied going to a film?’
‘I’d love to but I can’t. I promised Rattrays that I’d get a Note on the Line of Evidence to them in a case that’s already gone off the rails once, and I’ll have to do it tonight as I’ve got two consultations tomorrow, so I won’t have a moment then. What were you thinking we’d see anyway?’
‘I don’t really know, I’m open-minded. Maybe that arty Japanese ghost story or, possibly, the science fiction one about female humanity being descended from aliens as opposed to apes… You could choose. Go on, change your mind?’
‘No, I must keep my nose to the grindstone. I haven’t been getting through as much work as I should, as I keep thinking, obsessing, about David, but I’ll have to sort myself out. Mortgage to pay, bank manager to nurse, self to feed.’
Flora returned to her desk. The written pleadings in the case, the Closed Record, made stomach-churning reading for anyone not familiar with the world of food production:
‘The pursuer, Mrs Duff, worked in the evisceration department of the chicken processing factory. Prior to about 1999 there were eight different stages in the evisceration process, namely, transferring, cropping, vents, drawing, gizzards, lunging, neck cutting and neck cleaning. Transferring involved reaching up and hanging up chickens on shackles at shoulder or neck level. Cropping involved the taking of the windpipe and crop of the bird. Vents involved cutting the bird up the back passage with scissors and a vent gun. Drawing involved the removal of the insides of the bird using a drawing stick. Gizzards were where the gallbladder, liver and gizzards were removed. Lunging involved the use of a suction gun to remove the lungs. Neck cutting secateurs were used to cut the neck. These processes were carried out on a production line moving at the rate of about seventy birds a minute. In the latter part of 1985 the defenders installed neck cleaning, cropping and evisceration machines. Later they introduced transferring machinery. Following the introduction of this machinery the jobs in that department consisted of the following, namely neck slitting (involving the cutting of the chicken necks with knives), cropping, transferring, back-up (involving operatives putting their hands inside the bird and with a twisting motion pulling out the innards. This was required only when the machinery was faulty), lungs (involving pulling lung remnants off, the bulk of which had been previously extracted by machines), gizzards, skinning (involving the use of a “whizzo”), cleaning insides, neck cleaning and autotransfer.’
A plan of the premises had thoughtfully been provided with her papers showing machines described as ‘featherators’, and equipment which included ‘the blood bath’. The case was worth buttons, a repetitive strain injury producing a two-week episode of carpal-tunnel syndrome in a woman on the edge of retirement. Tens of thousands of pounds had already been spent by the Legal Aid Board on pursuing it, and many more would have to be expended before the woman was rewarded with her paltry compensation. Reminding herself of the steady stream of work provided to her by the pursuer’s agents, Flora attempted to rouse some enthusiasm for the case. She had just begun to apply her mind to the identity of the witnesses required for the proof-Mrs Duff herself, her three colleagues and their supervisor, the ergonomics expert, the orthopaedic consultant-when the doorbell rang. She left her study and went to answer it, thankful for the interruption; probably Maria calling to check up on her or trying to tempt her to go for a drink. She looked at her watch: nine-thirty pm, too late for the cinema.