He looked around the floor. “But where?”
No part of the floor was any cleaner than anywhere else. She suggested seeing if they could find a broom and he liked that.
They found Callum in the front room, lifting the lid on the sloping piano. He tried a key but found it dead, tried the next and the next and the next until a faint twang came from inside the piano’s belly.
Seen from the inside, the room was a good size. There was no fireplace but a fat potbellied stove sat at an angle in the corner. One of its thin legs had sunk into the carpet, ripping a hole and pulling the chimney pipe from its shoring in the wall behind.
Dub held back at the door to the kitchen. “Smells revolting in here.”
Paddy wanted to point out that it was pretty though, the windows were nice, and then she wondered why she was trying to sell it to him. It didn’t matter if he liked it or not. They were only staying a night.
The other rooms were in no better state. A rudimentary bathroom had a blue plastic toilet with a horribly stained dry bowl. The window was broken and leaves had gathered on the floor and in the bath, mulching through the years. Ragged spiderwebs coated the break in the window.
Two bedrooms, both small, one with a fireplace and a dead bird in the grate. There was no broom.
It was a relief to get back to the civilized kitchen, where the smell of damp was tempered by the warmth of the barbecue fire.
Dub said he didn’t think he would be able to sleep at all in here because it was so dirty. Callum took the cardboard box down from the dresser, shook it to make sure nothing was hiding in there, flattened it, and used the edge to brush part of the floor clean for Dub’s head.
Paddy watched him, bent double in the flickering light, scratching at the floor to clear a space for someone he barely knew, enjoying the roughness of everything, adapting to his new life and not at all bitter, and she found herself thinking that if Pete had lived through what Callum had and was like this on the other side, she’d be quite proud of him.
Dub thanked him.
Callum unfurled the sleeping bags and sat down in his, zipping it up to his neck, expertly rolling his jumper into a small cylinder to make a pillow. He lay down with his hands behind his head, shut his eyes, and became still almost immediately.
Dub and Paddy sat up, drinking a can of juice in silence to let Callum sleep, passing it back and forth. Paddy lit a cigarette and Dub gave her a look that suggested she was adding to the smell in the kitchen.
“I like them,” she whispered.
Callum’s leg stirred in the dark. He wasn’t asleep at all. She looked over and saw that he was smiling in the dark. He’d misheard her. He thought she’d said, “I like him.” And she was glad.
Fully clothed, they stood up and tried to negotiate two people in one sleeping bag. They unzipped it and laid it out on the floor, putting the opening in the space Callum had cleared for them. Paddy lay down, Dub lay next to her, and they had to cling to each other to do the zip up.
She looked up at the warm orange light rippling across the ceiling, felt Dub’s heart racing beneath her hand, and fell asleep smiling.
TWENTY-EIGHT. THE DARKNESS IN SUBURBIA
Martin McBree looked back up to the dark windows of Paddy’s flat in Lansdowne Crescent. It hadn’t been hard to get the door open; it was only propped shut and when he got in he realized why: ransacked, the beds pissed on. No one was coming back here tonight. She was lost to him.
Back in the car, he lit a cigarette and started the engine. There was nothing for it but to go to option two. The nasty option. He had a grandson that age.
He pulled out of the crescent and made his way to the broad Great Western Road. It was three in the morning and very quiet. Taxis and the odd night bus sped along the straight road, making use of the clear stretch ahead of them.
He parked carefully in the street, reversing neatly into a space between two cars, nudging tentatively backwards and forwards until he was equidistant between the two. The first rule of a lightning strike: attract no attention.
He opened the car door and threw his cigarette end into the street, stepping out after it, the toe of his shoe crushing the scarlet tip against the tarmac. A double-decker night bus sailed past him, speeding down the incline of the hill. In the cold white cabin light the lone passenger’s pasty face looked drained and ill, staring blindly out into the dark, seeing nothing but his own reflection in the glass.
McBree hated Glasgow. He hated the plump women with their rasping accents, the aggressive undertone of the men in bars, the chatty shopkeepers who asked personal questions. New York wasn’t like that. In New York they told you about themselves, the women were handsome, the accent exotic and mellifluous. He smiled at the thought of New York, recalled the warm evenings and the smell of car fumes mingling with street food, being able to drink in bars without a soul raising the subject of politics.
In New York he changed how he dressed. Val asked him about it when he came home, said he looked cheap in his print shirts and loafers. She hated change. If she had her way they’d take the kids and go and live in the parish house with the gnarly old priests, but Martin had seen another life out there, a life devoid of the Church or the struggle, where a man could just be.
He smiled as he stepped onto the pavement. New York. Everything was brighter then and it wasn’t even very long ago. Over the cusp of the hill came an old man in a deerstalker hat and overcoat, dragging an elderly King Charles spaniel out for a stroll in the middle of the night. Incontinent dog or insomniac owner. Martin sank his hands into his pockets, keeping his head down, pretending to feel for house keys as he walked past the old man.
“Come on,” the old man muttered, attentive to his charge. He looked up to McBree, keen to engage with the only other soul in the street at that hour, but McBree kept his head down, frowning, preoccupied, a man on his way home. He strode on to the entrance to the estate.
In keeping with his training, he kept his eyes on the road in front of him, not glancing around. People who belong in a place don’t swivel their heads like lost tourists. In a familiar environment no one looks around. People walk blindly, thinking; most let their faces drop into a half scowl.
The road surface changed at the mouth of the estate, from the patched tarmac on the old main road to yellow brick, set in a hounds-tooth pattern, with matching slab pavements and an orange lip of bricks separating them. It was a new estate. The bricks had not yet had the time to settle into the ground and become irregular, no corners jagging upwards to trip the toe or wobbly slabs with secret puddles underneath to splash the shin. It was pristine.
He allowed himself an orientating glance upward. The map of the shallow streets was pretty clear but it was always possible to follow a pavement to the wrong corner, especially when it all looked the same. The houses were small and regular, expensive still because they were in a posh area but unremarkable nonetheless. The cars parked in the driveway showed the real income: big foreign cars, a sports car, all sitting next to freshly laid lawns living out their first summer. By next year the care of the owners would tell. The lawns wouldn’t be uniform then; some would flourish, others would die back to dandelions and alopecia patches.
The roads were ablaze. Yellow streetlights were dotted along the yellow pavement, their bulbs new, placed so that each pool of brightness formed a Venn-diagram overlap with the next. The houses had porch lights that remained on even when all the lights in the house were off. It was three in the morning and the place was bright as day.
A problem with new estates, and he had come across this before in Poleglass, was that they had no dark back alleys to skirt through and wait in. Here the houses had small rear gardens backing onto other small gardens, and nothing between them but a wooden fence. The back wasn’t an option.
He came up to the house and saw a shiny black Merc sitting in the driveway, glinting under the porch light. All the windows were dark.
