I swung round towards the shower block and shop and there was Gizzy, standing at the open gate of the enclosure where the big Calor tanks were. She had her jeans and fleece on, Crocs on her feet, but she had a look of bed about her, her hair flat on one side, pale pink fluffy socks.
I rolled the window down. “See you about four,” I called over.
“Four on the dot,” she shouted back, her voice croaky, definitely pre-breakfast. “And don’t come dragging any weans.”
“If she didn’t sell sweeties,” said Ruby, twisting round to watch Gizzy out of the back window, “she’d be rubbish.”
“You have got your head screwed on tight, Tootie,” I said.
“Is that good?” said Ruby. “Sounds ouchy.”
“It’s very good,” I said. “Now, listen, Roobs. Don’t take any crap today. If anyone does anything that makes you feel crummy, you go and tell Miss Colquhoun, okay?”
“Like if Jay McVitie shows me his scab he’s pulled off?”
“More like… yeah, why not?” I said. Could she really have bounced right back already? Was she really not scared to be going back into school? Even the wet pants, never mind the dead mum, should still have been bothering her today.
Or maybe it was me. Maybe I had an aura around me that was strong enough to help a wee girl like Ruby going through what she was going through. When I got into work, I’d have believed it.
“Oh-ho!” said Dot. “Who is he?” I had done no more than come round the corner and take my keys out of my bag to open the door. She was waiting in the doorway, standing there in her good maroon moccasins and her good matching maroon coat buttoned to the neck and belted too. She always looked so trim. I hated to see her having to wait with chip bags blowing round her feet and nothing to read but graffiti. But dropping off Ruby and finding a place to park had slowed me down some.
“What? Who?” I said, blushing.
“Who me? Says you,” said Dot, mocking.
“What’s this?” said Steve coming up behind me.
“Couldn’t have been! Then who?” Dot sang. “Jessie’s got a boyfriend,” she said to Steve.
“Is that his car you came in?” said Steve. “I saw you parking at Whitesands when I was coming over the footbridge.”
“God almighty!” I said. “Who needs security cams?”
“Oh, he might be a keeper if he’s letting you borrow his car, Jessie,” said Dot as I got the door open and we all hustled in. “But it’s a right old waste of money driving in from Catherine Street and paying to park all day.”
Not to mention stopping off for more new socks and knickers on the way, I thought. In Dot’s world, where your shoes match your coat, there’s nothing about a new boyfriend that would make you come to work from anywhere but home, where all your clothes were. I slung my coat and bag behind the desk and went round putting the lights on for the day, took a duster with me, gave the shirt shelves a flick as I passed them. They were black enamelled metal, from a bankrupt art supply shop, looked great when they were clean (spotless, as Dot would say) but drew the dust like iron filings on a magnet. The pipes were starting to warm up, creaking and popping like old men’s knees at mass, and I carried on round past the kids’ section, the stands we’d scrounged from the garden centre in Castle Douglas when it closed down, meant for trays of annuals but perfect for babies’ tiny clothes, rolled pairs of socks like sugar bonbons, sets of vests tied together with ribbon-that was Dot-looking like those potpourri cushions you get in the useless tat department on the ground floor of Barbour’s-every posh department store probably, only I’d not been in enough of them to know. I stopped and ran my hand over a pair of Thomas the Tank dungarees and a matching jersey. Dillon would look cute in those. He’d suit blue with that white-blond hair of his. Then I heard Dot coming with the coffees and walked away before temptation got me.
“Everything okay in the Layette section, Jessie?” she said, putting down a mug with a jumbo scone balanced over the top of it, warm scones a la flour in your coffee-a Dot special.
“Layette is looking lovely, Dotty.”
“Dot,” she said. “Think I don’t know when you’re laughing at me, you young ones that know everything and what you don’t know isn’t worth knowing.”
But I wasn’t laughing. She hated being called Dotty as much as I hated being called Jess. Her brothers had called her Spotty Dotty when she was fifteen and only got to wash her hair once a week and it hung on her face, she’d told me. But why was that story that Dot had repeated a hundred times making me feel so freaked out now?
“Soooooo.” Dot had a way of nestling her folded arms in under her bosom that made me think of broody hens. “You’ve got yourself a nice lad at last.”
“He’s just a friend,” I told her, but I could feel myself blushing again, and she didn’t believe me.
“Another one!” said Dot. Steve wandered up with a bale of shirts that had been tried on and needed refolding now. Needed sniff-checked and then refolding. I could feel my heart hammering. I had promised to keep it quiet and had made Gus promise the same, but I had to tell someone.
“The same one,” I blurted out at last. Dot’s powdery face clouded. “Gus King. The sculptor. The one that’s wife just died.”
Dot’s face changed the way it does. Her eyebrows went up in the middle and down at the ends and her eyes went diamond-shaped and shiny. And it looked like her mouth had a drawstring round it, a tiny rosette of a mouth. A dot of a mouth.
Steve was standing with a shirt collar tucked under his chin, ready to fold the sleeves in and, with his mouth open and his eyebrows raised, he looked like a cartoon of surprise.
“What?” I said.
“Oh Jessie!” said Dot. “That poor girl!”
“No!” I said. “She didn’t know! God sake, that’s not how it was at all.”
“How can you be sure?” said Dot. “She killed herself. Oh Jessie!”
“Because-” I stopped. Because she was already dead when I met him, of course. But I couldn’t say that after telling them yesterday that he was my friend. “Because-” I tried again. “Because even though they weren’t happy, Gus loved his kids and he’d never have left them like his dad did, and he tried to make it work.”
“Can’t have tried that hard,” said Dot. “The poor girl flung herself off a cliff.”
“Drove off the road, and not because of anything Gus did,” I said. “It was finding out she was pregnant again that did it. She didn’t want to have another baby.”
“She was pregnant?” Dot whispered the last word. She always did. She whispered cancer and asylum seeker too.
“It’s actually more common than you’d think,” said Steve, back on social statistics where he was happy, back out of the mess of the heart. “Women are more likely to commit suicide while they’re pregnant than at any other time. More likely to be the victims of domestic violence too.”
“Thanks, Steve,” I said. “That’s a cheery thought to take through the day.”
“How could anyone take her own life and the life of an innocent baby?” said Dot.
“And her friend had left,” I said. “Her only real friend. Took off back to Poland without saying good-bye.” Of course, I had no idea if that was true; Ros might have come round with farewell balloons and a teddy bear that played “Goodnight Sweetheart” when you pressed its tummy. I was just trying to stop them thinking Gus had driven her to it.
“But what kind of woman kills herself over a friend when she’s got a husband and wee ones?” said Dot.
“Ah,” said Steve. We both turned to hear the words of wisdom, but he just nodded with a really full-on Steve look smarmed over his face.
“Ah, what?” I said.
“Loveless marriage, inability to fulfill traditional female roles, intense friendship with another woman, loss of friendship causing despair. I see.”