Slip of the Knife

“I love you, son.”

But Pete had hung up.

Damage was saying something about the battery life. McVie came over and took her elbow, dragging her towards the church.

McBree had come for Pete, with a knife. She felt very cold, her breathing deepened, every muscle in her body was loading itself with oxygen, ready to coil and spring. She felt as if she could outstare the sun.

McVie dragged her into the cathedral. The internal walls were as black and forbidding as the facade of the church but it opened up to an arched oak ceiling and tall needled windows, jeweled with blue and red glass. McVie had gone to a lot of trouble. Big bouquets of lilies and white chrysanthemums, strung with red and blue ribbons, were hanging on both sides of the aisle with a giant wreath in white, red and blue sitting at the base of the altar. They were the colors of Ayr United, Terry’s football team.

Feeling nothing but cold, blind anger, Paddy followed McVie into the front pew. Ben, his precious, queeny boyfriend, was waiting for them. McVie would never admit to Ben, but here he was in plain sight, standing at the front of the massed mob of the Glasgow journalistic mafia. In a show of support, Paddy leaned over and kissed Ben’s proffered cheek, settling back in the pew and realizing that her lips were coated in face powder.

A minister came in and everyone stood up. The organ struck up a short tune, drowning out the sound of the singing, which was very ragged and rambling. The minister talked for a bit about life and death and why it was a shame, but not really, because of Jesus, and then, without warning, he stepped aside and looked at McVie, who looked at Paddy. Ben looked at Paddy. Everyone in the church looked at Paddy.

She wanted to drop her head back and scream but instead stepped out into the aisle, began to genuflect and then remembered it was a Protestant cathedral, getting a laugh when she bolted upright again.

She didn’t even know where to stand, but the minister held his hand out and guided her up the winding staircase to the pulpit.

The wooden platform groaned beneath her feet as she looked out at the expectant faces. Shug Grant, Keck, JT, Merki, McVie, a hundred and fifty men, some arseholes, some good souls, most both depending on the occasion.

She leaned into the microphone.

“Terry Hewitt was a friend of mine.” The words echoed around the hollow church.

It felt strange to say his name, to think of anything but Pete. He was safe at the moment and this was for Terry. Terry. Terry who wasn’t at all who she’d thought he was. He was an ordinary man who’d done his best with a lot of bad luck. But she’d made him into a paragon and then hated him for not living up to it. She couldn’t talk about that Terry, the real Terry, who came from a small home and belonged nowhere. She started again.

“Terry Hewitt was my hero. I was a copyboy at the Daily News and he was a junior reporter. He had a leather jacket.” That got another laugh. “He lived alone.” If anyone didn’t already know she came from a big Catholic family the aborted genuflection had told them, and they laughed at that too. “I didn’t know then why he lived alone, just that his parents had died in a car crash. He told me but you don’t really hear those things when you’re young. They died thirty yards from the house and Terry was the first on the scene. He was seventeen.” The pathos of the moment overwhelmed her. She paused, swallowing hard, getting a grip. “We spent a lot of time together when we were starting out. Well, most of you know,” she looked up again, “we went out together. But all we talked about was our work, what we wanted to do in our work, and Terry was going to change the world.”

She looked down and saw Shug Grant whispering to the man next to him. They both sniggered and avoided looking at her. A sexual slur about her, not thinking about Terry or who he was or what he meant his life to be, just there because everyone else was, and there would be drink afterwards.

“Some of us are here because we loved Terry. Some of us are here because our editors said we could get the morning off.” A nervous titter rolled around the church. They could see she was looking stern, staring down at Shug. She was famous for losing her temper and going beyond what was appropriate, and they could see that she was angry. “But I’m here because of what Terry represented to me. He worked on a bigger scale than most of us here. He went to war zones, conflict zones, did hard reporting on a world stage.”

Paddy could sense the atmosphere plummeting. She knew she should tell a funny story, make herself popular by lightening the mood, but all she could see was Terry as a young man standing at the end of his parents’ driveway, looking into the fireball engulfing their car. And Pete, asleep in a bed she had never seen, with a bad man outside the door and herself miles away.

The security forces would blanket the whole episode with rumors and drip feeds to hungry journos like Merki. McBree would come for Pete again and next time he’d hurt her son, to hurt her. The best she could do, what Terry would have done, was draw the fire to herself. She began to weep but her voice remained steady.

“Terry was killed over a book he was writing, executed on a dark road late at night, shot in the back of the head. The official word is he was mugged. If you believe that, if this audience believes that, then journalism is dead. He was killed by a man called Martin McBree, a high-ranking Republican. Don’t let anyone tell you differently.” A ripple of consternation feathered the crowd awake. Merki sat up and attempted a casual laugh but no one looked at him.

Paddy’s voice weakened. She leaned into the microphone to be heard. “Terry would have stood here and said that. He made me proud to be a hack. He was the best of us.”

She stepped away from the lectern, crying, ashamed that it wasn’t really for Terry, and walked back to her seat to a hesitant round of applause.

A guy in a khaki jacket got up from the pew behind, carrying copious notes, and took her place.

McVie leaned over to her, talking out of the side of his mouth. “What the fuck was all that about? Cheer us all up, why don’t you.”

She elbowed him gently in the ribs.

“No,” he whispered, handing her his handkerchief. “It was good. Really good. Very Terry.”

The khaki man had come from London to speak. His accent was posh and public school, which immediately made everyone hate him. He claimed to be a great friend of Terry’s. Referring back to Paddy’s speech, he implicated himself on a grander world stage, which compounded the audience’s prejudices. Then he told a couple of stories about Terry and himself at significant world events, in Gaza, then in Lebanon, the point of which seemed to be that he was there, and filed his copy before Terry, who had trouble getting things down on paper. He made a horrible allusion to Terry having sex with a fat woman whose children were waiting in the next room. He slunk off to a silence an audience at the Glasgow Empire would have thought harsh.

Two or three other local journalists tried their hand, one to talk about Terry’s capacity for drink, another to tell a story about them investigating corruption at a grayhound track and trying to get a urine sample from a dog, which went down well.

Last up was McVie. He slid past Paddy and took his time getting up there, pausing to rest a hand on either side of the lectern and look down his nose at the crowd, letting them know he was in charge.

It was an after-dinner speech but no worse for that. He made some sweeping statements about the nature of journalism, told three perfect stories about quips Terry had made, none of them hugely funny, but they were well delivered and stormed with the audience, who were ripe for a laugh.

He finished on a rousing note: sales were dropping across the board, Terry Hewitt might well be remembered as the last of a dying breed. No one had funding for foreign journalists now and papers were in danger of turning into nothing but daily bingo games and holiday giveaways. It was up to them to make sure that didn’t happen through their dedication and commitment. Then he invited everyone back to McGrade’s for a toast.

Paddy wondered how commitment could trump a lack of funding but no one else seemed to. The crowd rose for him, applauding him for organizing the event and bringing his boyfriend as much as for his call to arms.

McVie got back to his seat. The organ struck a note and the cathedral emptied as suddenly as a toilet flushing.

But Paddy, McVie and Ben lingered, looking at the Ayr United wreath at the base of the altar.

When the clatter of feet behind them died down Paddy whispered to McVie, “How can dedication stop the decline?”

McVie sighed and looked down at his legs as they stretched out in front of him, flexing his ankles. “It can’t,” he said. “Nothing can.”