Slip of the Knife (7 page)

“Can you bang it out in five minutes? We’re due to set in ten.”

“No bother. When did you last see him?”

“Friday. He was drinking in Babbity’s. He had a book deal, was showing the check around to everyone. Two hundred quid.”

“Not much, is it? I got more than that for Shadow of Death and no one bought it.”

“Yeah, Terry’s was a picture book, not much text. Expensive to produce.”

“What sort of picture book?”

“Photos of people. Americans. Published by the Scotia Press, who the fuck are they?” Larry looked around his desktop, bewildered. “It’s definitely our Terry? Are they certain? It couldn’t be a mistake?”

For a second they looked one another in the eye, a clear moment of sadness and shock and loss. They had both known Terry Hewitt for a decade, since his parents’ death in a car crash, through his early promise and his trips abroad, had both taken private pride in his triumphs, and, knowing him again more recently, had seen him bloated and scouring for work. Paddy bit her cheek hard, crunching through a nipple of hard skin at the corner of her mouth. She could taste blood.

“Larry,” she growled, “just . . . don’t look at me. I need to hold it together until I get out of this fucking place.”

Larry nodded sadly. She turned to the door and raised her chin again.

“You’re fat and everyone hates you,” said Larry to her back, reminding her who she was supposed to be.

“Thanks, Larry.”

II

Paddy felt as if she was vibrating with the need to sleep. She watched her hand tremble as she opened the car door. The cul-de-sac was bare of cars, the neighboring house boarded up. Thick summer grass was growing wildly in the gardens, lush weeds flourishing through cracks in the pavement. The house next to the Meehans’ had stood empty since Mr. Beattie went into a nursing home. The roof sagged too, looking close to collapse.

She had grown up on the Eastfield Star, a small estate of council houses built for a mining community in the wilds between Cambuslang and Rutherglen. The houses were small and low, cottages with flats in them or larger for big families like her own.

The streets radiated off a central roundabout and had once been a nice area of good families. They should still have been. The houses were a little damp and the windows small but the basic stock was good. As the older residents died, they were replaced with less salubrious tenants who cluttered up their gardens with crap and had loud fights in the street. A drug dealer was rumored to live in one of the houses near the main road, but Paddy suspected that they were just young and prone to partying. If she made more money she’d move her mother out of there.

She lifted the rusted wire hanger holding her mother’s garden gate shut and stepped down the narrow path. The garage where she had imagined Terry off on his travels was just to her left, damp green lichen growing over the small, high windows. She thought about going in there for a moment, just to look at all the damp boxes and the chair she used to sit in, but knew she’d start crying and might not be able to stop. It was the tiredness. And the shock. It had been a shock seeing an old friend dead. Seeing anyone with a hole in their head was a shock.

She fitted the key in the lock and opened it as quietly as possible. Her mother’s house smelled perpetually of dampness and baking, a scent that, to her, conveyed certainty and stability. The smell hadn’t changed a ripple since her father died. It was as if he’d never given off a smell.

She dipped her finger in the holy water font hanging by the front door and crossed herself. Her mother liked to see her doing it. Although she had made it clear that she wasn’t going to church and didn’t want Pete baptized, her mother took the holy water habit as a sign that one day she might return to the bosom of the chapel, confess her sins to a gnarled old arse of a priest, and accept that she was, indeed, a bad girl who made the baby Jesus cry. Paddy let her think it. That she wasn’t even prepared to take communion and had had a child out of wedlock was hard enough for her mother.

Paddy’s post was propped on the windowsill. She flicked through it: credit card offers, flyers for catalogues, a couple of requests for money from charities, and one flimsy white envelope, coffee stained in the upper corner, with her name and an approximation of the address. She put her finger under the flap and ripped it open.

A single sheet of creamy paper and handwritten words:

Now offering 50k for Callum O. exclusive.

Ring me,

Johnny Mac.

She stroked the figure with her fingertip and then crumpled the note in her fist, squeezing it tight, as if the words could be wrung from it, shoved it into her pocket and climbed the stairs. She could sleep soon, catch a few hours before mass.

She stopped at the top step, listening. No one was awake yet. Alone in the quiet of the morning, she sensed more than heard the breathing behind the doors. Ahead of her was her parents’ old room. She could hear Trisha’s faint nasal whistle. To Paddy’s left was her old bedroom. BC and Pete now shared it every Saturday night, taking the single beds she and Mary Ann had left behind. Paddy fitted her hand on the worn wooden egg handle, turned it silently, and opened the door just enough to slip her head around and look in.

Pete was curled up, brown blankets and a lip of white sheet curved around the line of his little body, lying so still that she had to watch his chest to be sure he was breathing.

She relaxed, letting her burning eyes droop half shut as she leaned her cheek against the edge of the bedroom door.

She forgot about Terry and Aoife and John Mac’s letter. She forgot about her job and Burns and Callum Ogilvy. She forgot everything in the world but the essential, glorious fact of her son: safe, nearby and breathing in and out.

FIVE

CALLUM

It was a gentle tap at the door, two beats, and then the guard walked on to the next cell door, his knuckle drumming the same call on the steel followed by his steps again, another two-beat call. His signal. It was Haversham.

Callum jackknifed upright in his bed, sweat prickling at his temples. Haversham didn’t often work the isolation block but when he did he always did his knuckled call, telling them he was there. He didn’t need to bang on the door any more or whisper abuse through the tray slit. All it took for them to get the message was a tap. I am here, it said, I can see you.

Haversham was on when a prisoner in the isolation block cut himself and bled to death. There were rumors that he had watched the prisoner through the Judas hole and seen him die, not raising the alarm until it was too late.

The footsteps were heading back up the corridor, coming towards him, tapping two doors down. When Callum got out the world would be full of Havershams. A mob’ll find ye. The papers will tell them where you are. Rip ye to ribbons and no one’ll blame them.

A mind can only hold one thought at a time.

Callum peered across the early morning gloom and reread the graffiti scars on the wall. I fuck Harry. JS+B. John Harrison is a supergass, the missing r floating above the last word, angrily scored deeper into the plaster than the rest of the letters. Other than that, the carving was meticulously done: the s’s perfectly curved, not just straight lines joined together to form a Hellenic s. Fueled by resentment and the desire to tell the world what he knew, the writer had worked into the rock-hard plaster, past the five layers of deep green paint. The green was faded below, like time, like memory, lighter and lighter. Callum’s own message went all the way through, gouged through to the brick. He had curved his letters too.

It was an old prison. Victorian. The isolation cells were small and even nastier than the main block, Mr. Wallace told him. Callum’d never been in the main block himself. For the full three years he’d been in the adult prison they’d kept him here because this place is full of nutters, Mr. Stritcher told him, of nutters who’d like to make their name killing you. Hurting you. Men with nothing going for them, he said, as if Callum had something going for him. He was famous and that was something. Not a good thing but something.

Haversham was outside his door, looking in at him. Callum could hear his breath, razored with spite, hitting the metal, a slow hiss through sharp teeth.

Leaving us, are ye? Think that wean’s mother won’t find ye? Cunt. Think ye can walk out of here and live a life?

Callum got out of bed and stood facing away from the door, his trembling hands balled into fists. Don’t listen. Don’t react. It’ll go on longer if you react.

A mind can only hold one thought at a time.

When he left here he would walk from his cell, through his door, and turn left. Down the corridor, past three cell doors, green and chipped, to the exit. Eleven steps.

They’d shout good-bye to him as he passed, the men behind the chipped green doors. Hughie, C3, had raped a girl, a really young girl, but seemed nice enough when you met him. Tam in C2 had killed his wife, which wouldn’t put him on protection normally because the main block was full of guys who’d done that, but she was just about to have a baby and it had been in the papers. And the last cell, C1, a quiet man who wanked all night, groaning animal noises but never speaking when the window warriors shouted at him to shut the fuck up. He wouldn’t say good-bye. Mr. Wallace said he wasn’t well and shouldn’t be here. C1 might be James for all Callum knew. James with a different name. They’d been keeping them apart throughout their nine-year sentence, but maybe it didn’t matter now, if James was mental. There weren’t that many places to keep the two of them.

The papers’ll find you, in your new house. Tell everyone.

Past the cell doors. Eleven steps. Through the big door that opened inwards, out to the corridor where the officers on watch sat and read the paper. Smells from the kitchens came through the wall, smells so strong you could lick them from the air. The softness of sponge, sulfurous egg, the warmth of mince, onions. They ended last year’s riot with onions. The officers got the guys down from the roof by frying onions at the bottom of the stairs and fanning the smell up to them. Sometimes the corridor smelled of burning.

Cunt.

Everything smelled the same when it was burning.

You baby-murdering cunt.

Twenty-six steps, along the kitchen-smelling corridor to the big gray metal outside door and out into the yard, the bright gray sky above him. He could feel his irises ache at the sharp slap of light as the door opened. He would have that sky above him all the time soon, his eyes straining to cope with the painful brightness of it.

Ogilvy? They’re already looking for ye, they’ll find ye, take pictures, print them.

The bright sky above the yard and the wind coming off the sea. Even with the thirty-foot wall around the prison the salty wind managed to sneak in, skirling around the corners of the yard, sweeping leaves into tidy little heaps against the wall. The sea was just over the wall and the air had a bitter, salty tang that stung chapped lips. As he stood at the door to the yard the wind was only at head height, blustering the top of his head but not touching the face, an unseen hand ruffling his hair.

Ogilvy. Ogilvy. They’re offering big money.

More than anything else, he had missed being touched. Sometimes he hesitated by his cell door after exercise to make them reach for him, the press of a hand on the back, on the arm, a soft cuff across the back of the head. Some prisoners were beaten by screws for doing things wrong but Callum was a sheep, followed gently wherever they led him, and they knew what to expect. He never had the guts to give them cause, but he understood the urge to defy them, to get beaten, just for the touch.

Your pal James, he lost an eye last year.

Lies. Haversham lied all the time.

In the infirmary up in the Big House. Came out of isolation for a bad leg and some cunt got him with a pencil.

James. Callum saw his eyes smoldering in the dark, the cold night wind cutting between them and the baby in the grass. The story had been told so many times, to him, by him, with him, by police when they questioned him, by the social workers, by the psychiatrists who came and went, by the papers. So many tellings, he couldn’t remember which was true anymore.

James was my only friend. The man took us there in the van, with the baby. We battered him with stones and strangled him until he died and then we stuck sticks up his bum because I’m a pervert, eh? I’m a fucking filthy pervert. I probably think about it when I’m alone, masturbate and think about it.

James was my only friend. In the van, I was glad we were picking on the baby because we weren’t picking on me. James strangled him and the baby messed himself. I ran up the hill and James did things to him. We hit him with stones before he died. Hitting is nothing. Hitting means nothing. Prisoners hit you, parents hit you, screws hit you. What’s wrong is for me to hit you. I don’t think about it when I masturbate. I see women, bits of women, tits and cunts, disjointed pictures from magazines. It doesn’t take much. I was scared before the night, sometimes, but since the night I’ve never stopped being scared.

I thought James was my friend but he wasn’t. I take full responsibility for what happened. The baby was crying and James held his throat to make him stop. We fiddled about with the body to make it look like someone else. I am sorry for the family, for the baby’s mother and family. I am sorry for what I have done. I will try to live a good life in the future. My dream is to work in a factory and live within a loving family structure.

Everyone liked the last version best but ten years later all the different versions of the night had become as true as each other.

When he remembered it, when he was alone, all he recalled were James’s black eyes smoldering as they stood over the tiny body crumpled in the wet grass, of the cold wind on his face as he stood on the verge looking back at the van, and behind him James making noises, sniggering, pulling things around to suit himself.

When he remembered it now, Callum stood on the blustery verge and looked at the grass in front of him. It was trampled deep into the mud from the feet of all the people who had been there, the psychiatrists, the social workers, the guards who asked questions kindly and then sold the story to the newspapers, other prisoners who’d ask about it, sly, interested in details they shouldn’t be asking about.