Flesh Wounds (26 page)

‘I’m sorry, we’re closed the now,’ he said.

Jasmine made a point of gazing inside, where she could see roughly twenty people seated at tables or standing around the bar.

‘It’s a private function,’ he explained. ‘Family only.’

This was when she had to play her card, and in so doing cross a point of no return.

‘I
am
family,’ she said.

His features compressed into an expression of terse consternation; not mere puzzlement, but the aggressive certainty of someone who expected to know every face present at this gathering today.

‘My name is Jasmine Sharp. My mother was Yvonne Sharp.’

She could see the whole process in his eyes: information being sourced from some mental archive as he sought to retrieve the name, then the tiny but unmistakable flinch as he deduced the significance and possibilities presented themselves. Nonetheless, he still wasn’t quite getting there, and thus he still wasn’t quite ready to open that door.

‘I never met my father, because he died before I was born. But I’m told his name was Jazz.’

She tried to make it sound like she knew this was her all-access pass, but her voice faltered on the last word, feeble and appellant. This was the conversation her mother never wanted her to have, the world she had gone to extraordinary lengths to protect her daughter from.

The man on the door didn’t look like someone who was ordinarily rocked on his heels by anything less than a baseball bat, but he seemed slightly dazed by what she had just said. He stared at her, startled for a moment, then turned his head to look inside. Jasmine couldn’t see who he was looking to, but a few moments later a petite female figure emerged from behind a table and began pacing towards the entrance.

He held the door open for Jasmine now, looking at her as though he couldn’t be sure she was real, as if she might suddenly vanish and turn out to have been an apparition.

‘Jazz Donnelly?’ he asked.

Jasmine couldn’t confirm this, as it was the first time she had heard someone give her father a surname.

‘Hence Jasmine,’ she replied.

‘Jesus. I’d no idea. I’m Jazz’s big brother, David.’

He held out a hand, uncomfortable in the gesture as though aware of how inadequate and ill-suited it seemed to the occasion. Jasmine gave it the briefest and most awkward of squeezes. It felt warm against her skin, cold from driving. His hand was large and strong, but the grip was weak, reflecting the uncertainty of what was passing between them.

The petite woman had made it to the door. She looked early fifties, smart but a little over-dressed, especially for the time of day. She was lavishly made-up, but it couldn’t disguise tired eyes and a harshness to her features. She was smaller than Jasmine but exuded a latent aggression like it was a force field. This, she guessed, was Sheila Fullerton, the person she had come to see.

‘Sheila, this lassie says she’s Jazz’s daughter,’ David explained, sounding like he needed somebody else to judge the veracity of it for him. ‘Says her ma was Yvonne Sharp. Mind ay her?’

Sheila looked Jasmine up and down, cold scrutiny failing to disguise an almost fearful astonishment at what she was being asked to rule upon.

Jasmine decided to speak before the verdict was in.

‘Are you Sheila? Who worked here when my mum used to come in? It’s just … she told me absolutely nothing about those days, and I’ve heard you might be able to help.’

Sheila continued to stare, wide-eyed and a little stunned.

‘You say … Yvonne … Sorry,
was
… Do you mean your mum…?’

‘She died three years ago. But I gather she was born on the same day as Stevie Fullerton, and they used to come here together. He was your husband, right?’

The hubbub continued in the background, but in that moment it felt to Jasmine like she and Sheila were entirely alone, and locked in silence. She honestly had no idea whether she was about to be beckoned forth or frogmarched back out through the double doors.

Sheila glanced to David, then back to Jasmine.

‘Come on through,’ she said. ‘We’ll go somewhere quiet we can talk.’

Glen hefted a beige-coloured grille that he identified as having once been part of a vacuum cleaner, moving it from the chaotic melange in front of him and placing it carefully into a marked hopper. All around him, other inmates were carefully and unhurriedly getting on with the same thing, either side of four long tables piled high with smashed-up stereos, monitors, domestic appliances, toys and packaging.

All plastic. More bloody plastic.

Tons of it were delivered to the prison’s recycling workshop every day, to be hand-sorted by the inmates then sold on to a reprocessing firm who would refine it into pellets for re-manufacture. Given the sentence he was looking at, Glen estimated that if he worked here every day, by the time he got out he would have enough carbon offset points for a guilt-free trip to the moon.

He took in the scene of unfussy diligence all around, imagined what the well-meaning social reformers might make of it. To them it might prove that gainful and dignified employment was what all men needed, that they wouldn’t turn to crime if they were given a useful role and a shared sense of purpose.

Maybe, Glen thought, but you’d need to get to them early. After all, the gainfully employed didn’t suddenly turn to a life of crime simply because it paid better. Most criminals of Glen’s acquaintance had never known anything else. They were second- and even third-generation, people to whom it would never have occurred to look for honest work. They grew up looking at the world with different eyes, seeing different kinds of opportunities, different kinds of obstacles. They envisaged treasures behind every locked door yet imagined many of the open ones were somehow impenetrable to them.

These plastics could be reprocessed and turned into something else. It wasn’t so easy for the people sorting them. Glen understood that better than most. Where others had been conditioned by growing up with crime, Glen had been conditioned by growing up with violence. It had shaped him into an instrument that wrought more violence, an instrument from which ruthless men had profited. It shaped him so completely that he had lost sight of any other self he might have been.

That was until he had his epiphany, watching Yvonne playing Lady Macbeth at the Tron.

It was haunting, watching her so fully become someone else, an effect that served to further remind him that he had no idea who the real Yvonne was. She looked older, burdened, so dark and so consumed with an inner want, with anger and ruthlessness and a dozen other things that were not Yvonne at all. To Glen, it was spellbinding.

Then she drifted across the stage like she was disconnected from it, eyes open but dead, face expressionless.

‘Lo you! here she comes. This is her very guise; and, upon my life, fast asleep. Observe her; stand close.’

‘How came she by that light?’

‘Why, it stood by her: she has light by her continually; ’tis her command.’

‘You see, her eyes are open.’

‘Aye, but their sense is shut.’

‘What is it she does now? Look, how she rubs her hands.’

A sharply focused lighting gel bathed only her hands in red, and Glen watched with growing disquiet as he understood what she was trying to wash away: a stain that wasn’t there, and yet could never be cleansed.

‘Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him.’

As Yvonne rubbed her hands with increasing desperation, he saw the blood pouring from a hundred wounds. He saw it spilling on the floors of pubs, of restaurant kitchens, in living rooms, bathrooms, garages, alleyways, streets, gutters.

‘Here’s the smell of the blood still; all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand.’

So much blood. So very much blood, all spilled by his hands, his deeds.

Yet what set him on edge as he sat in the darkness of the theatre was not that he saw his reflection in Yvonne’s horror, but that he felt the scale of its
absence
in himself. As she rubbed her hands in the eerie red glow he apprehended the horror he ought to be feeling, but simply did not, could not.

Why did he feel nothing? He could feel Lady Macbeth’s guilt, feel moved by it though it was merely a fiction, but could not feel a revulsion of his own. Yes, there was guilt – a gripping, twisting, unsleeping torture – for what he had done, but not for the deeds themselves, not for any of those he had killed. He knew he could kill again – he knew he
would
kill again – and feel none of what Yvonne was depicting on that stage.

‘What’s done cannot be undone.’

He couldn’t change what he was, but he could change what he did. He had to put this instrument into the hands of men who might use it constructively. He had to pay the proverbial debt to society, but he chose to do it on his own terms. It was good enough for the big corporations.

He noticed one of the screws glancing his way a couple of times, then begin to make his way towards him. Glen wondered what kind of petty shit he was about to get picked up on, but instead the guy just told him to go and get a fresh bin for cable offcuts, as the one currently on the go was getting full.

The guard seemed strangely apprehensive about giving this order. It wasn’t as if Glen could refuse.

He put down the smashed computer printer he had just lifted and made his way towards the fire doors that led outside to a partially covered courtyard. This was where the empty hoppers and bins were returned to once the reprocessing firm had dealt with their contents. The big hoppers ran on castors, but various colours of wheelie bin were used for collating smaller items, such as discarded circuit boards and, in this case, lengths of wire and cable.

Glen was ambushed moments after the doors swung shut at his back. They converged from behind as he entered a narrow channel between two rows of skips full of unsorted plastic, appearing all at once, as though from nowhere.

Glen recalled his first real kicking at the feet of a young team in Gallowhaugh. ‘Polis boy,’ they had called him, in reference to his dad. They were led by a sadistic wee piece of work called Joe McHaffey, whose oldest brother ended up one of Stevie’s trusted lieutenants.

He remembered lying on the ground, cowering in a ball, the repeated impacts of his forearms being driven against his head. That wasn’t satisfying Joe, though.

‘His nose isnae burst yet.’

Glen would never forget those nasally wee words, as he instructed his mates to grab his arms and expose his face.

Joe wanted to see blood.

These guys were after much more than that.

Jasmine was led through the restaurant, conscious of a drop in the volume of discussion as those gathered noted the new arrival. She felt almost every eye in the place take her in, and from this rapidly deduced that everybody here knew everybody else. They were all similarly over-dressed for the time of day, though the women’s colours were generally sober. It looked like a wake, but she knew that Fullerton’s body would not yet have been released. This was some kind of informal memorial that was being hosted in the meantime.

Despite the upmarket décor and the name of the award-winning chef boasted on the menu she still couldn’t picture her mum in this place, even in its present incarnation. To put it politely, these were not her mother’s kind of people. It was a strangely paradoxical effect that to put a suit or a posh frock on certain individuals only served to emphasise the less presentable elements of their appearance. It was like prefixing the term ‘businessman’ with the word ‘legitimate’.

There were women drinking glasses of wine and men downing pints, and it wasn’t yet half-ten in the morning. Jasmine could smell the alcohol off the spillage traps on the bar and felt queasy. She recalled Josie’s voice whenever she encountered jakeys on the street supping Special Brew or Buckfast while she was still digesting breakfast: ‘I can’t say the sun’s quite over the yardarm.’

The mum who brought her up belonged to Josie’s world. How the hell did she ever end up in this one?

She was led to the brasserie’s compact but high-ceilinged private dining room, where several mirrors contributed to an artificial sense of space around the single long table. It was a neat trick, important not to make a group paying through the nose for the VIP treatment feel like they were being shoehorned in. Nonetheless, Jasmine feared she was going to be feeling pretty claustrophobic in here before the end.

Sheila pulled out a chair for her, significantly on the other side of the table from the exit, then sat down opposite. David, or ‘Doke’ as Sheila called him, remained standing against the wall, close to the door. Jasmine got the unmistakable impression that she was very much under scrutiny, and quite possibly under their guard.

Jasmine produced the photograph of her mum with Sheila’s late husband.

‘I believe you took this,’ she said, placing it on the table and turning it around to face her hosts.

She watched Sheila place a hand over her mouth at this ancient artefact that had found its way to her here and now as though through a wormhole in time. Doke leaned over to examine the photo also, letting out a surprised chuckle.

‘Jesus. I remember her right enough,’ he said, a tinge of pleasure creeping into his voice. ‘That’s Stevie and Nico.’

Sheila looked a little more haunted by the image, the sight of her late husband in his youth perhaps cutting a little too deep right then.

Her eyes lifted from the picture to regard Jasmine once more.

‘You don’t look like her,’ she said, but it sounded more like an observation than a scorn upon her claim.

‘She often said that. I’ve seen pictures of her as a younger girl: there’s more of a resemblance in those. People would sometimes say I must look like my father, but to be honest that usually led to her getting off the subject.’

Jasmine tried to picture Doke as a younger man, searching for a sense of what her father might have looked like.

‘We had no idea Yvonne was pregnant,’ he said. ‘She just disappeared.’