The Press Bar was painted a pragmatic tobacco / spilled beer yellow, furnished with small chairs and mean little tables covered with ashtrays and beer mats. Screwed tight to the walls were archive pictures of news sellers and pressmen holding up significant copies of the Chicago Tribune and New York Times: VE-day, Pearl Harbor, Kennedy’s death. The photos were from another time, another place, and largely irrelevant to Glasgow, but they represented a plea for loyalty to the bar’s principal clientele and the justification for its special license. It was one of the few pubs in Glasgow that didn’t shut at two thirty in the afternoon, but the bar was too far from the city center to attract passing customers, too close to the city to be anyone’s local, and relied on the News for all its trade. An adjoining wall divided the two establishments, and the absence of an internal entrance was often bemoaned, especially in the winter.
It was the only occupied table in the bar. The men sipped their elevenses under a slick of blue smoke. They were the early shift, men of indiscriminate age, all drunks and renegades who couldn’t be sacked because of their length of service. They did the bare minimum of work and did it quickly before hurrying off to the pub or the house or the desk where the next party was being held.
Today the head of the union, Father Richards, was penned protectively in at the center of the crowd, looking tired, being cheered along by them. Richards was rarely among the drunks. He was a good father to the chapel and had negotiated longer breaks and the right to smoke anywhere in the building, even in the print room. Beer fat around the middle, he had the prison pallor of a man who worked indoors all day every day. Usually he wore aviator glasses with a thick steel frame, but they were missing today, replaced by a long diagonal cut under his eye, perfectly tracing the line of the absent lens. Someone had punched him in the specs.
The laughter died down and the boys sat back. Paddy could feel them casting their attention around the room, looking for something, anything, to ridicule. She was usually immune because of her age and miserable position, but when drink was thrown into the mix they could turn on anyone. She braced herself, twisting her cheap diamond-chip engagement ring around her finger, willing the barman to finish with the beer pipes and serve her. Three seconds shrieked by. She could feel a preemptive blush starting on her neck. Her ring finger was getting sore.
One of the drinkers at the table broke the silence. “Fuck the Pope.”
The men laughed, watching a fragile Richards reach unsmiling for his drink. As his pint glass docked at his mouth a broad grin burst on his face and he poured the golden beer in, letting little rivulets tumble down his jowls. The men whooped.
Out of a reflexive sense of loyalty, Paddy disapproved of Richards’s saying nothing. Only ten years ago job adverts routinely carried codicils saying Catholics need not apply. Housing and schools were segregated, and Catholics wouldn’t feel safe to walk along certain streets in Glasgow. But here was Richards, sitting at a table of Protestants, siding with them against his own.
“I don’t care about the Pope,” shouted Richards. “I don’t care. He’s no friend of the workingman.”
Dr. Pete waited until the audience had calmed down. “We have nothing to lose but our rosaries.”
They laughed again.
Richards shrugged, showing he didn’t mind. Not one bit. Meant nothing to him. He took another drink and, sensing her disapproval, glanced at Paddy’s feet, drawing the gaze of the men to her, giving them her scent.
“You,” he said. “You a Pape or a Marxist?”
“Leave her alone,” said Dr. Pete.
But Richards pressed the point. “Pape or Marxist?”
They knew from her name that she was Catholic. She even looked bog Irish, with black hair and skin the color of a paper moon. She didn’t want to talk about it, but Richards pressed her.
“Are you religious, Meehan?”
The men were looking at their drinks, uncomfortable but not prepared to stand between them. It was between two Papes, it wasn’t their business. Paddy felt she’d better speak or they’d smell the fear.
“How does my conscience come to be your business?” Her voice was higher than she meant it to be.
“Will you attend mass tomorrow? Do you go to communion, confession? Do you drop your mite in the collection every Sunday and develop crushes on the parish priest?” Richards’s voice grew as he spoke. He was a little drunk and mistook speaking a lot for speaking well. “Are you saving yourself for your husband? Do you pray each night to bear children who’ll uphold the faith of our fathers?” He took a breath and opened his mouth to speak again, but Paddy interrupted.
“And what about you, Father Richards? D’you attend weekly meetings and demos? D’you contribute a portion of your wage to the revolutionary fund and develop crushes on all the young Marxist girls?” She couldn’t quite remember the shape of what he had said next, so she just got straight to the point. “Your job is basically interceding between the management on behalf of the shop floor. You go about enforcing rules and distributing money to the needy. You’re just a priest in a polo neck.”
Without really taking on board the content of what she had said, the men laughed at Richards for being slagged off by a woman, and a young woman at that, thumping him on the arm, egging him to retort. Richards smiled into his drink while Dr. Pete sat very still, looking at Paddy as if he had just noticed she existed. Behind the bar McGrade snorted affably, taking the picture editor’s tankard out of Paddy’s hand and filling it three-quarters full with 80 Shilling, topping it up with two shots of whisky.
“The shape of your beliefs is exactly the same as it was when you were practicing,” Paddy continued. “The only difference is that you’ve replaced the basic text. Classic failed-Catholic mistake. You’re probably more religious than I am.”
The door behind her opened suddenly, banging off the wall, and a gust of cold air blasted into the room, curling the gray smoke. Terry Hewitt’s black hair was shaved tight like an American soldier’s, cut right into the wood so that pale pink scars on his scalp showed through. It made him seem a little bit dangerous. He was plump with disproportionately short legs, but there was an air about him, an aura of dirty-bad man, that made Paddy’s mouth water when she dared to look at him. She imagined him going home every night to a comfortable house with parents who read novels and encouraged his ambition. He’d never have to worry about losing his monthly Transcard or wear cheap shoes that let in the rain.
“Hoi, Hewitt!” shouted Dr. Pete, waving his hand in front of his face. “Shut that door. This good woman’s trying to coax Richards back to the chapel.”
The men laughed as Paddy carried the pint to the door, calling after her to stay, Woman, save us all.
She turned back to them. “You know, one day all your livers are going to explode simultaneously and it’ll look like Jonestown in here.”
The men screamed with delight as Paddy backed out of the door. She was pleased. Being a lowly copyboy was a precarious position: a bad choice here or a vulnerable moment there could mark her out for a lifetime of bullying.
It was just as the door was swinging shut behind her that she heard Terry Hewitt ask, “Who is that fat lassie?”
II
She sat on the top deck, chewing through her third consecutive boiled egg as she looked down on the bustle in the street. It was a disgusting diet, and she wasn’t even sure it was working.
Outside, pedestrians were wrapped up warm, closing their faces against a needle-sharp wind that found its way through scarves and tights and buttonholes. The wind buffeted the high side of the double-decker bus on open stretches of road, making passengers grab at the back of the seat in front, smiling sheepishly around when their alarm passed.