The Field of Blood (32 page)

“Aye.” He held out his hand.

“Did it always, or just recently?”

“Aye, always.” He licked at his raw top lip with a dexterous tongue.

“Did it not used to stop up there?” She pointed back at Gina Wilcox’s.

The boy put his hands on his hips and huffed up at her. “Missus, I’m not missing that van,” he said definitely.

Paddy gave him his coin and he belted off down the road. Terry was watching her, frowning from inside the car. She held up a finger and walked down towards the ice-cream van. By the time she was halfway there the engine had started up and the van was moving off, leaving the satisfied children eating happily. Paddy watched the van pass Terry’s car and the Wilcox house, drive up out of sight, and reappear again on the cross, heading over to Maryhill. The music wasn’t sounding, and it wasn’t stopping again anytime soon.

She turned back to the kids. The boy in the anorak was clutching a quiver of Curly Wurlys, pointing at Paddy and explaining his wealth to another child.

“Did that ice-cream van ever used to stop there?” She pointed back towards the Wilcox place.

“Nut,” said the parka boy, and the wee girls around him confirmed what he said.

“It stops here,” said a plump girl in glasses.

“It always stops here,” said a bigger girl.

Paddy nodded. “What time does your grocery van come on a Saturday?”

The children looked blankly at one another. It was a ridiculous question. Most of them were far too young to tell the time, never mind predict patterns in retail provision.

“Is it in the afternoon? Is it soon?”

“Aye, soon, but his sweets are mostly rubbish,” said the parka boy, misunderstanding the purpose of her interest.

Paddy thanked them and walked back to the car, opened the door, and held on to the roof, hanging in. “Terry, listen, I’m going to go into town from here. I need to get home, really. Is that okay?”

He frowned and nodded at the window. “Sure, fine. Get in and I’ll drive you down to the station.”

She patted the roof twice and glanced up the road. “Aren’t you going back to the office to finish up?”

“Finish up what?”

“Finish up what you were doing earlier.”

“Oh.” He smiled, shaking his head a little too adamantly. “Yeah, I could, yeah. I’ll do that, yeah.”

He had a pleading little look in his eye. Paddy couldn’t stop herself. She knelt on the dimpled plastic seat, leaned over, gave him a perfectly soft kiss on his cheek, and pulled back before he could do anything with it.

“I’ll see you later, Terry.”

She slammed the door as he answered and never heard what he said in return. She walked off down the road, cutting across a bit of lawn, heading into the heart of the housing scheme.

Paddy waited for almost forty minutes in the dark mouth of the lane beside the Wilcox house. It was a balding sliver of ground left between the two houses, worn into a single track by scuffling feet. Sometimes it seemed to Paddy that the whole of the built-up city was nothing more than a series of interludes between patches of abandoned waste ground and wartime bomb sites. Grass on either side of the path glistened, black diamonds trembling on the razor-sharp tips. The far end of the dark path blossomed into a brightly lit street, and across the road she could see the low picket fence around the swing park, empty now but lit by orange streetlights, dark shadows pooling under the swing seats and slides.

She smoked a cigarette to pass the time, thinking of poor Heather sitting on the bin and being annoyed in the editorial toilets. Paddy’d give anything to be back there again. She dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, watching her toe rub it into the soft mud, bursting the paper and spreading speckled tobacco shreds over the grass.

A movement at the far end of the lane caught her eye. The black outline of a woman, holding the hand of a small girl, was looking down into the lane, hesitant when she saw Paddy’s dark profile, androgynous and threatening.

“I’m waiting for the grocery van,” Paddy called reassuringly.

Still the woman waited, her hand tightening around the balled fist of the small girl. Paddy stepped back out into the light in front of the Wilcox house, and the woman moved towards her, muttering something to the child.

“Sorry,” said Paddy as she approached. “I didn’t mean to scare ye.”

Close up, the woman was younger than her beige mac and headscarf implied. She shot Paddy a disgusted look and yanked the child across her path, away from Paddy. She was right in a way: Paddy shouldn’t be hanging around in dark lanes frightening women and children going about their business.

“Is the fella Naismith’s van due soon?”

The woman didn’t look at her, but muttered aye, ten minutes. Might not be Naismith but. Sometimes his son drove it for him.

Paddy took the two unrequested sentences as forgiveness and watched the retreating back of the woman moving down the street. At most she was two years older than Paddy, already a mother and already pinched and angry.

She could see Sean at home, sitting in his mum’s hall, on the black plastic seat attached to the telephone table, holding the moss-green receiver to his ear, listening to the phone ring on the telephone table in her mum’s hall. Trisha would tell him Paddy wasn’t in, and then he’d be worried. He might not be bothered about contacting her, he might have decided to ignore her for another month beyond the family shunning. She didn’t feel she could predict him anymore, and it made her like him less but want him more. She looked up to find a black velvet stain racing across the sky.

The rainstorm came without warning, so heavy and abrupt that although she ran the hundred yards to a block of flats, the water running down the street was soon deep enough to reach over the sole of her boots and sneak in through the stitching. She stood in the doorway, holding up her hood with both hands, watching as the sky dropped cold slits of silver, obliterating the ambient noise from the motorway and the chanting of the protest marchers. The road surface was a rippling black sheet. The rain gathered at the bottom of the hill, bubbling around drains. Her feet were wet, her black woollen tights soaking up the water like blotting paper, distributing it evenly around her ankles.

She saw the headlights hitting raindrops first. Creeping along behind the twin beams, Naismith’s van felt its way along the road, meekly speeding up at the base of the hill to get clean through a deep puddle and stopping on the hill incline. The back door opened and Naismith himself peered out, getting a faceful of rain before ducking back in. From a nearby house a woman came running as fast as she could, head down, holding the neck of her overcoat tightly shut. Paddy waited in the doorway for a bit, until the customer might be finished and about to step down from the van. She didn’t want to wait outside in the rain.

She kept her head down, holding her hood shut over her mouth, and jogged across the road. Cold water squelched between her toes. She’d have wet feet for the rest of the day and would have to pack the boots with toilet paper when she got home and leave them by the fire.

Naismith must have been quick off the mark. The back door to the van was locked by the time she reached it, and the chassis juddered as the engine rumbled into life. She ran around to the driver’s window and banged on it, afraid she might have waited in vain and ruined her monkey boots for nothing.

From inside the cab Naismith smiled down at her, his quiff a little askew from being caught in the rain. He wound down the window a little, pumping hard with his elbow, and shouted into the street, “Refreshers?”

Paddy smiled up into the rain, letting go of her hood so that it slipped back a little, the rain running down her face. “I saw the ice-cream van,” she shouted.

He looked puzzled.

“The van,” she shouted again, pointing to the lane. “It doesn’t stop there. I wanted to ask ye about it.”

He frowned down at her.

“He doesn’t stop there,” she repeated.

He shook his head and pointed to the passenger door, holding his mouth up to the open window. “Cannae hear ye. Come in a minute.”

Paddy nodded and ran in front of the van, the white headlights giving detail and texture to the black river coming down the hill. She opened the passenger door, stuck one foot onto a chrome-trimmed step built into the side of the van, and pulled herself up into the cab.

It was warm in the cab and still smelled of fresh morning rolls. The seats were thick, cream-colored leather with brown piping trim.

“Oh no, my duffel coat’s drenched.” She pulled the wet material away from under her. “I don’t want to wet your seats.”

“Good leather doesn’t mind wet so much. It’s the cheap stuff that hates the wet.”

He reached across her chest to the door, his elbow coming just too close to her tits to make her feel comfortable, and pulled the door shut behind her. He saw her stiffen away from him and retracted his arm quickly back towards the wheel, upset that he had frightened her.

“I’m not … I didn’t mean that,” he said, suddenly embarrassed. “I was just shutting the door.”

“Oh, aye,” said Paddy, feeling she had wrongly accused the nice man. He looked so crestfallen and ashamed that she felt she should offer him a squeeze of her tits just to show she didn’t suspect him of trying to cop a feel.

“Well.” He tried to smile, but looked miserable and nervous. “Anyway, what can I do ye for?”

“Yeah, listen, I waited for the ice-cream van, and it doesn’t stop there.” She pointed up the road again.

He looked blank, and she suddenly realized that he hardly remembered her.

“I was asking ye about the Baby Brian Boys the other evening, I don’t know if you remember.” He shook his head a little. “I said they had no reason to pass the Wilcox house, and you said the ice-cream van stopped there and they’d’ve come down to buy penny chews. D’ye remember?”

“I remember ye bought a packet of Refreshers.”

She shook her head. “Sorry, you must talk to a hundred people a day. I watched, and it turns out that the van doesn’t stop there at all. But I wanted to ask ye if it used to, ye know? Like, maybe the ice-cream guy— Hughie, you said his name was?”

She looked at him and he paused for a beat before nodding.

“Yeah, did Hughie used to stop there? Did he change his routine because the wee boy died and he felt bad or something?”

A fat drop of rain fell from Paddy’s hair, racing down her face and dripping off her chin.

Naismith looked startled, as if he was seeing her for the very first time. “Good God in Govan, you are absolute soaked. Here.” He flicked on the cab light and looked for something on the floor.

The inside of the cab was a work of art. The covers of 45 records had been taped around the inside of the windscreen: Jerry Lee Lewis, Frankie Vaughan, Gene Vincent and the Blue Caps, colorized pictures of young men, their teeth laughably white, their lips a camp pink. The pictures were held to the window by a mesh of Sellotape, yellow and crusty after years in the sun. At the right hand of the windscreen, just where the driver’s eye would fall most often, was a pastel drawing of a blond Jesus in a blue dress, smiling kindly at the circle of small children gazing up at him.

“This is a wee palace,” said Paddy, enjoying the big leather chair molding around her body, watching him feel under his seat.

He sat up and smiled. “It is, aye.” He handed her a brown, stale-smelling towel, sewn double along one seam, like a pocket.

Paddy dabbed at her hair politely, avoiding her mouth and nose, and pointed at the religious picture. “I didn’t have you down for a Holy Roller.”

He nodded, looking straight ahead, watching the rain fall onto the windscreen. His eyes flickered down the street, checking each door for customers. “Born again,” he said quietly. “I’d led a worthless life before and maybe will again, but through the grace of God I have known peace.”

It sounded like a load of Protestant codswallop to her, but he seemed sincere enough, if a little melancholy. Born-agains were usually a bit more upbeat about the experience. She imagined she saw him blink away a tear before he spoke again.

“Hughie may have changed his routine. I don’t really know.” He lifted a hand and ran his pinkie nail between his two front teeth. “I don’t really know.”

Paddy smiled, and looked at the towel in her lap. “I wondered because, see, if the van stopped further down there when the baby went missing, then the boys’d probably go around the back and not even pass the Wilcox house.”

She played with it, rolling it around her finger, a long, golden strand of hair so thick it was almost coarse, retaining its gentle wave despite being pulled tight. She was enjoying the familiar texture before she realized what it was. She’d know it anywhere. It was one of Heather Allen’s hairs.

Still staring forwards, eyes zigzagging from door to door, Naismith raised his hand above his head, moving slowly, trying not to startle her. He found the switch without looking and turned off the cabin light. Softly his arm dropped, his fingers alighting on the steering wheel. They sat still together, Paddy’s eyes fixed on his face. Orange streetlights filtered through the molten rain on the windscreen. His features looked as if they were melting.

“So maybe he changed his route,” he said softly.

Her face was frozen. “Maybe.”

He turned to look at her, and she could see that he was sad. They looked clear into each other’s eyes for the smallest moment, Paddy’s eyes pleading with him not to touch her, Naismith regretful but resolved to do what he had to do.

“You’ll catch your death walking home in this weather,” he said stiffly. “Let me drop ye off somewhere.”

He started the engine before she could speak, releasing the hand brake and engaging the clutch. The van slid forwards a foot into the black future, but Paddy’s suddenly scrambling fingers felt along the door behind her, jerking the handle down. She threw her weight against it and dropped backwards out of the cab into a wet void. As she fell, turning her head to see where she would land, she felt Naismith’s hot fingertips brush her ear.