Chapter 23
Liam had a crick in his neck and was hung over and sorry. He was sitting on the burst settee and nursing a mug of strong coffee with his neck bent at an awkward angle, looking up at her, unshaven and repentant.
"You called me a prick," said Maureen.
"Sorry. Mum phoned for you." He said that Winnie was drunk and being abusive and hunting for Maureen.
"Can't we screen the calls on your answer phone?"
He turned his entire torso as he looked for his fags on the settee. "The police took it away," he said. "They only needed the tape. I think they took the machine out of spite." He spotted them on the floor, bent down carefully and took one out of the packet. He caught her eye as he lit it and threw the packet to her.
She took one. "We could go to mine," she said, "and get my answer phone."
"Will the police let you go in?"
"Yeah, they've said I can go home."
"Have you been back yet?"
"No."
"Let's go," he said, levering himself off the settee.
It wasn't raining so they left the car and walked down to Garnethill, climbing the steep hill to the flat. Liam was sweating by the time they got to the top of the stairs. "God," he said, "I'm so unfit."
She put the key in the lock and opened the door. Liam reached out to stop her going in. "I'll go," he said, wiping the sweat from his glistening forehead. "I'll check it out."
She waited outside, picking at the thick chewy gloss on the door frame. When he came back out to give her the okay his face was white with shock.
Maureen stepped nervously into the hall. Liam had pulled the living-room door shut. It was warm in the flat-the neighbors downstairs must have their heating on. The salty smell from the living room was high in the halclass="underline" she tried to breathe short shallow breaths so that it wouldn't get deep into her lungs. The paintwork on the hall cupboard was marked by sticky strips where the tape had been. A note was lying on the floor; it had been folded in half and shoved under the door. It was from Jim Maliano across the landing, telling her to knock on his door when she got back, he had made too many lasagna portions and they wouldn't fit into his freezer, did she want some? She pressed the Play button on the answer phone and handed the note to Liam. "Is that the prick across the landing?" he said.
"Yeah, but he's not a prick now. I like him."
"I didn't know you liked lasagna that much," he said, turning his upper body to her, handing the note back.
"Naw." She smiled. "Remember, he was kind."
Liz had called her, could Maureen phone her back. Someone called Danny wanted her to call him at a Glasgow city-center number. The call was followed by three put-downs. Maureen didn't know anyone called Danny. Liz phoned again, please phone her.
Another mystery caller asked her to phone him at an Edinburgh number. His call was followed by another put-down.
She rang the number for Danny and was welcomed to the Alba Newspaper Group. She hung up. The mystery caller from Edinburgh was from a news agency.
Liam listened with her. "Vermin," he said.
She unplugged the answer phone and wrapped the flex around it.
"I thought you were going to get cleaners in here," said Liam, glancing nervously at the living-room door.
"Yeah, but it's not covered by the insurance."
"Fuck, you're going to have to do it yourself?"
"Yeah."
"I'll give you a hand cleaning it up," he said reluctantly.
"You've got your own house to worry about. I think I'd rather do it alone anyway." It might have been the void left by her lapsed Catholicism but important events prompted her need for ritual. Certain things had to be done in certain ways to mark the end of the cycle of events; like secular voodoo, it helped to resolve matters, signifying and punctuating.
When she had come home from hospital she sat in the hall cupboard where Liam had found her and burned her hospital ID wristband and a photograph of her father in the grill pan. She got drunk on cherry brandy and dragged the mattress off the bed onto the floor, playing Beethoven's Ninth as loud as she dared and battering the mattress with her fists, working herself into a mindless frenzy, biting it until her teeth and jaw ached. Luckily, all the rips were on one side of the mattress. She turned it over when she put it back on the bed. She didn't tell anyone about it: to the uninitiated all ritual is laughable and meaningless. She had a feeling that it would take a lot of ritual to resolve Douglas.
"Let's get the fuck out of here," she said.
"Good idea," said Liam, and slipped into the close as soon as it was polite to do so.
Jim Maliano must have been looking out through his spy hole. When Maureen stepped into the close he threw open his door and leaped out. Liam jerked his head up in surprise and yelped.
"Sorry," said Jim, embarrassed at his unnecessarily dramatic entrance, "I didn't want to miss you."
Liam rubbed his sore neck and muttered "Prick" under his breath.
"How are you, Jim?" said Maureen.
"Fine," said Jim, wondering if he had misheard Liam. "How are you?"
"All right," she said.
Jim wasn't much taller than Maureen. He was slim except for a perfectly round belly, like a large prosthetic breast shoved up his jumper. Maureen wanted to like Jim, he had been so kind to her, but in the cold light of day he wasn't very likeable. His jumper was tucked fussily into his jeans and there was something irritatingly meticulous about the way he did his hair. It looked as if he had carefully bouffanted it over a bald patch on his crown, but he wasn't balding. And his Italianism seemed affected; like a dull man accentuating a single feature as a substitute for a personality.
He rustled them into his cluttered kitchen and filled an espresso machine with fresh coffee grounds. Maureen and Liam sat down at a pine table littered with pale hot-cup stains. They watched tiny Jim fix the coffee.
"Thanks for the offer of the lasagna," said Maureen politely.
"My mum told me to do that," he said. "She said that's what neighbors do when there's a death." He blushed vibrantly and apologized for mentioning that.
"Not at all. I appreciated the note, Jim, it was kind of you."
Jim turned back to the coffee machine, now spluttering the treacle liquid into cups. He opened a cupboard and took out a set of saucers and a side plate. "There was a policeman outside your door for days," he said, lifting a packet of amaretto biscuits out of a food cupboard. "The journalists arrived in the close the day after it happened. They were here all last week, asking everyone about you. I didn't think they could print anything about a court case that was coming up."
"There might not be a court case," said Maureen. "They haven't got anyone for it yet."
"Oh, that's great," he said, looking relieved. "I knew it wasn't you." He put the plate of amaretto biscuits on the table. They were individually wrapped in blue, red and green tissue paper, twisted at the ends like big sweets.
She was trying hard to like him, if only he weren't so affected. She asked him to describe the journalists and recognized the two men who had taken pictures of Liz. "They came to see me at work," she said. "We had to shut the office because of them."
"Yeah, those two were the worst," said Jim, handing them each a cup of coffee and standing on the other side of the table as he sipped his. "They knocked on old Mrs. Sood's door for ten minutes one night. She was terrified. I think the police should have told them to stop it, I mean, there was an officer outside your door the whole time, it wouldn't have taken much effort." He leaned forward and took a biscuit, unwrapped it delicately and bit through the middle. It wasn't big enough to warrant more than one bite. Maureen wanted to stand up and ram the rest of it into his mouth. "It's a good job you didn't come up yourself," he said, "or the journalists would have caught you."