AM02 - The End of the Wasp Season (13 page)

She sat back and knuckled her hot eyes. It was getting late. The room was dark and the corridor outside was quiet. She wanted to be home, in front of the telly, seesawing the settee with Brian. As a final chore she put in her earphones and called up the audio file for the 999 call.

If Sarah had just spoken five seconds earlier they could have saved her life.

But that wasn’t what happened.

The pause between Sarah dialing the number and speaking made the operator tag it as a silent call and put it through to the recorder. Silent calls were usually made by drunken teenagers or attention-seeking idiots, or by five-year-olds playing with the phone while their mum went for a bath. The recorder was a pragmatic, statistically based system that nearly always served to weed out time-wasters. Nearly always.

Morrow listened and heard Sarah’s soft voice in the far, foggy distance. She saw the cold, blank eyes of the coppers at the brief, waiting to get to their warm, safe homes.

She listened to the end of the 999 and then listened to it again. She found herself crying in the dark, not just for Sarah Erroll but for her own dead father and for JJ, for all the unloved and the unlovely.

When she had finished she dried her face, listening for noise outside in the corridor before slipping out of the front door of the station. She walked around the back of the giant planter pots, following the wall to her own car, parked in the black street.

She slipped into the driver’s seat and locked the door, flicked the cabin lights off and sat, ashamed, feeling raw and porous and stupid and pregnant.

Thomas was exhausted but wired. He’d had a shower and felt clean now, sitting on the sofa in his living room, watching TV in a towel, changing channel every thirty seconds, looking, for what he didn’t know.
Family Guy.
Something short. His burning eyes were busy on the TV, vague thoughts half-formed in his mind, thoughts he couldn’t have dealt with if he’d been alone with them, focused on them.

He watched a video of a rap collective, ugly guys in a mansion poolside, batting away beautiful strippers. He thought about his parents. To Thomas, Lars had always represented a great aching need to impress, an imminent performance that was doomed to disappoint. It had taken up a lot of his head space because he wasn’t great at anything much. Lars had told him many times that the biggest thing he’d ever be was Lars’s son. But now Lars was gone. All that head-fuck was over with. And Moira had been cold and distant, but she was here now, warm. If they never spoke again, if she took an overdose tonight in her rooms, Thomas knew he couldn’t have asked for more than this evening, chatting, making eye contact, her apologizing.

He knew he didn’t deserve either her warmth or the delight of Lars leaving. Two incredible strokes of luck, just after what he had done. It wasn’t right. Like Hitler winning the lottery.

He shifted a buttock on the damp itchy towel and changed channel. Sharks in murky blue water, mouths open, coming straight for the photographer, and he thought of Sarah Erroll at the top of the stairs, looking at her bare buttocks as she held the banister and dropped her foot to the first step, and the bump to his shoulder as Squeak came past him, his hand outstretched for her hair. Blonde hair. Lots of different colors of blonde, dark, yellow, traces of white and then pink and scarlet through it, clumps of hair hanging from Squeak’s fist where it came out when he pulled her back.

The trilling made him sit up and look around before he registered what it was. His mobile. Still in the duffel bag sitting next door, on his bedroom floor. Nanny Mary had dropped and left it, because she’d been called to see Moira and told she was sacked. Obeying the trilling, he padded through to the bag, lifted it out and saw the name on the screen: Squeak.

Thomas held the phone and looked at it as it rang. Squeak wanted to threaten him. It was pathetic. He was going to run through all of that again: you took me to the wrong house. Thomas didn’t want to talk to him. And yet the need to obey the ring tone made him stay looking at the phone, imagining Squeak in the toilet in his room in the dormy, sitting in the dark because it was after lights-out. He’d be sitting on the toilet: the bathrooms were small and it was the only place to sit down. They had to hand their mobiles into housekeeping at the start of term and got them back at weekends but Squeak had an illegal phone, an extra phone that he just used for looking up porn. He’d be sitting in the dark on the toilet, calling on his porn phone, waiting for him to answer.

Thomas pressed the green button and lifted the phone to his ear. “Man?” He was whispering too because Squeak could get in trouble having a mobile.

“Yeah, you there?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry about your old man?”

“Not really, no.”

“Hung himself?”

“Yeah. On his lawn.”

Squeak breathed a laugh at that, he knew about the lawn. “’Kin hell.”

“Yeah. Twat.”

“Twatster.”

Thomas looked into the next room, to the shark show: bloody water. “Twatmeister.”

Squeak breathed deep into the receiver. “Sorry about earlier.”

“Yeah.”

“I didn’t know, thought you’d ’fessed up to someone. Put me in it.”

“Fuck off,” Thomas said gently, picking at a mark on his bedroom wall.

“Yeah. Got a fright.”

“Nah, it was just…you know.” Thomas nodded, didn’t want to say it as if it was a big thing because it wasn’t to him. “Lars gone bye-bye.”

“Hmm.” Squeak understood. “We all right then?”

“Course. Happened today?”

He could hear Squeak smile. “Got eighty-nine percent in that Social Sciences prelim.”

“Fucker.”

“I know. Want to know what you got?”

“What?”

“Forty-six percent,” said Squeak, and laughed because it was pathetic. And Thomas laughed too. It didn’t matter. Social Sciences was a piece of shit subject anyway, but that’s not why Thomas was laughing. He was laughing because Squeak was giving him a hard time, taking the piss and it meant everything was all right.

“You smug fuck,” said Thomas softly. “I was dreaming of becoming a social scientist and you’re crushing my dreams.”

“Yeah,” Squeak smiled. “Anyway. Ella home yet?”

“Tomorrow morning.”

“Yeah, tell her I was thinking of her…” Thomas shut his eyes and cringed, knowing he was going to say something about her. “Just don’t tell her what I was doing while I was thinking about her.”

“Yeah,” warned Thomas. “Twelve fucking years old, man.”

“Hey.” Squeak sounded annoyed at being corrected. “I could marry her in Texas.”

“Still not right.”

“In Holland—”

“Not right, man.” Thomas took a stand. “She’s my sister. I hate her but she’s still my fucking…you know.”

“Yeah, well, fuck off.” He sounded a bit annoyed.

“Fuck off yourself,” said Thomas, telling him to drop it.

“Yeah,” he let it go, “fuck off…”

Squeak didn’t mean anything by it, he didn’t have a thing for young girls at all, Thomas knew that. If anything he had a thing for Nanny Mary’s age, and he meant it as a compliment. Fancying a bloke’s sister meant he wasn’t stuck with a pig or someone fat. But it bothered Thomas, Squeak talking like that, because he’d seen the things Squeak had on that phone, animals and anal and stuff, and he didn’t want any part of him in real life associated with that shit.

“Better go,” said Squeak and hung up before Thomas had the chance to say goodbye back.

Thomas dropped the dead phone onto the bed and looked at it, reproachful, as if it was Squeak’s porn phone. He spun on his heels and his eyes fell on Sarah Erroll’s bare buttocks as she held the banister and dropped her foot to the first step. He felt the bump to his shoulder as Squeak came past him, his hand outstretched for her hair. And then the hand in her hair, knuckles white because Squeak was holding so tight and her feet moving on despite her head staying where it was, and her falling back and slaloming down the stairs to the bottom, and Squeak crouched, still holding her hair until it came out in his hand, following her down to the bottom and looking back up to Thomas, excited, happy, as if he couldn’t believe his luck, as if every Christmas he’d ever had had come at once and he didn’t know how he had managed to be such a good boy as to deserve this.

Thomas looked at the phone on the bed and he felt sick again, a small echo of the sickness he’d felt looking at Squeak at the bottom of the stairs. A kind of heavy sadness, sickness that made the world sway and his head feel as if it was full of oil.

He had resisted the realization when they were on the stairs but he faced it now: if they got you down, anyone would do that to you. Anyone.

It was nudging eleven, too late for a visit, but Morrow was searching for a spark of comfort in a melancholy day and so she drove on.

The roads around Castlemilk were broad and straight, designed for the age of the automobile, but with a population who could only afford the bus. The wide streets weren’t used for anything other than mowing down toddlers and racing stolen cars so the planners had sprinkled them with deep speed bumps and extended the pavements to create traffic-calming swerves in the road. Morrow was taking it at ten miles an hour and it still felt reckless.

Passing the local police station, another solid fortress in brown brick, she pulled up a short steep hill and parked in one of twenty parking spaces. The flats looked scruffy and ominous, three high blocks watched the city. The glass column of each stairwell was lit in a different color, electric blue lights in the middle, orange and purple on either side. The vibrant-colored lights clashed with the winsome time-drabbed pastel of the outside walls: mustard, pea green, brown.

She stepped out of the car, thinking to herself that as well as visiting a witness alone, she had parked her private car in full view of the flats. She looked around. CCTV cameras were pinned onto lampposts at every corner. From where she was standing she could see more than ten and they all looked operational.

If anything happened tonight the bosses would know she’d come here alone in her own car. Still, she didn’t turn around and get back in but walked over to the middle block, checking her notebook for the flat number, pressing the buzzer before looking through the doors. The lobby was tiled white and as clean as an operating theater. Haranguing signs on the wall ordered the residents not to have dogs in their flats, not to dump rubbish in the lifts, not to graffiti. They didn’t seem to need much ordering around. Even the signs were nice and clean.

A young girl’s voice crackled “Hello?” on the intercom.

“Hello, is this Kay Murray’s flat?”

The girl turned from the intercom and shouted, “Mum! For you!”

Morrow smiled as she heard Kay’s voice approaching, “…bloody ask who it is instead of just bawling at me.”

But the girl stomped off and a door slammed shut.

Kay cleared her throat and spoke, “Aye?”

“Kay? It’s me.”

There was a pause.

“Alex?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh. Come up…”

The entry door buzzed angrily and Morrow pushed it open. Across the lobby she pressed the call button for the lift and the doors slid open into a warm orange light. The floor was clean, none of the plastic buttons were charred with lighters and there was just the faintest tang of disinfectant. It was an unthreatening environment but still, as the doors slid shut in front of her and the lift took off, Morrow felt a jolt in her stomach.

The doors opened again onto cold strip lights and a lingering smell from a takeaway curry bag left hanging on a door handle. The floor was vibrant pink with turquoise diamonds set out in a path. All the doors were turquoise with mottled glass panels, some lit, some dark. Morrow walked down to number eight.

Kay’s window had a ruffle of pink nets inside. It was an old door, a good sign: it meant she’d been there a long time, had paid her rent and no one had kicked it in. A shattered and patched door was a classic signifier of a problem household.

Morrow chapped and stepped back, waiting. Behind her, the lift doors beeped and she turned and watched the orange light narrow to a slit and disappear.

Without preliminaries, the front door flew open and a tall thin boy stood there, looking her up and down.

“Hello!”

Morrow forced a smile. “Is this Kay Murray’s house?”

He grinned at her polished shoes. “God, you really are a polis.” He leaned out and took her elbow, tugging her gently into the small hall and shutting the door. “She said she’d met an old pal from school and you’d became a polis. You really the same age as her? You look younger.”

“Oh, I’m all puffy because I’m pregnant,” she said, but she was pleased nonetheless.

The hallway was busy with empty cardboard boxes for detergent, washing powder, crisps, crackers, empty trays for washing-up liquid bottles and shampoo. They were stacked messily on top of each other, four or five high and shoved against the wall. Morrow thought briefly of shoplifting, truck hijacks and theft from employers. She stopped herself: she was here to see Kay, it wasn’t supposed to be official business.

The living room and kitchen doors lay open to her right. In front of her were three more doors, each decorated by the occupants: one was matte black, one painted pink with randomly placed glittery butterfly stickers and a greasy, balding bit of pink marabou wrapped around the door handle. The third was split down the middle, half Celtic green and half Rangers blue. The Celtic fan had used a felt tip to reclaim part of the border lands but the Rangers fan had smeared the green intrusion off with a wet cloth.

The bathroom door opened and Kay stepped out, her wet hair swept harshly back from her face. She had a tired purple towel around her shoulders, frayed at a corner, splattered with old spots of hair dye, and one of her ears was rimmed brown. She looked angrily at the boy and kicked at an empty box. “I keep telling you to take these things down but you just walk past them.” She smiled nervously at Morrow. “My pal’s got a Costco card.”

“Lucky you,” said Morrow.

“Aye, it’s great.” She clutched the towel at her neck and lifted an empty crisp box, sitting it on top of the others, kicking them against the wall. “We’ve got a club, buy in bulk and then split it up when we get back here. I don’t know if I’m saving any money or just buying more.” She gestured at the boy who had answered the door. “They’re right gannets. Just eat whatever I bring in. Food just evaporates. They’ve been necking a bucket of gefilte fish.”

The boy rolled his tongue out. “They’re disgusting.”

Kay rubbed at her hair with the towel. “Still eating them though.”

The boy was dark and handsome, had a commanding unibrow and blue eyes. Morrow could see faint traces of Kay about him but not much. Suddenly earnest, he asked Morrow, “Listen, seriously: how would I get to be a polis?”

Kay shook her head at Morrow. “Fuck’s sake.”

Morrow shrugged, not certain he was being serious. “Just apply. Phone them and ask how. You have to apply a few times though, so don’t get discouraged.”

He thought about it, seemed to arrive at a resolve: “I wouldn’t get discouraged.”

Kay looked embarrassed and said to Morrow, “As if they’d take you, anyway.”

“Why, what’s wrong with me?”

Kay tutted and stepped across the hall to the kitchen, rubbing her hair with the towel as she walked between them and flicked the kettle on. “Ye know fine.”

“Seriously, what’s wrong with me?”

Kay ignored the question. “Alex: tea?”

No police officer on duty would accept a cup of tea from a member of the public. It made the stay longer and you never knew what they would put in it, but Morrow said, “Aye, thanks.” As if to prove to herself that it wasn’t official.

The boy was still talking to her. “Defo. I’m gonnae phone and get a form. Mum, will ye help me fill it out?”

The pink bedroom door opened and a young teenage girl looked out accusingly. She was her mother’s double at the same age but chubbier than Kay had been and prettier for it. Morrow smiled warmly. “Hello.”

The girl looked suddenly shy and shut her door a little, half hiding her face.

“Your mum and I were pals when she was your age.”

“Oh.” Clearly not interested but too well brought up to let it show, her eyes strayed to the wall.

“She looked exactly like you, only not as pretty.”

The girl blushed, panicked and slammed the door shut. Her brother smiled and looked at the pink door, knowing his sister was listening. “She’s gorgeous, isn’t she? She doesn’t even know she’s gorgeous.”

Morrow was touched. The custom of complimenting children was relatively new in Scotland. She had never been complimented on anything until she met Brian, and it was far too late by then, she never really believed him.

Kay looked up and sighed. “Right, Joe,” she said gently, “you fuck off. We’re gonnae have a chat.”

“Oh, aye.” Joe raised his eyebrows suggestively at Morrow. “Old times? Gentlemen callers?”

“Sarah Erroll.” Kay looked sad.

“Oh.” Joe couldn’t think of anything funny to say about that. “Terrible.” He backed off to his wee sister’s door, knocking and walking in without waiting for an answer. They could hear him speak and the girl’s squeaky voice responding.

Kay reached into a cupboard. Morrow saw her take out a mug, look into it, flinch and put it back. She chose two from the back. The worktop was littered with giant packets of crisps and cakes, the sink clogged with used tea bags and everything smelled of cigarette smoke.

Morrow slumped in the doorway to the kitchen. “I hope it’s OK, me coming here?”

“Aye,” said Kay, “no problem.” But she was embarrassed and gestured at the mess. “I don’t get much more prepared for company than this.”

Morrow’s insincere response about the mess in her own house was lost in the rumble of the kettle.

She knew she shouldn’t feel sad for Kay. This house was a good house. The kids were talking to each other and to Kay, but she felt that they both recognized it as a depressing replay of the places they had grown up in. Homes full of ciggie smog and broken biscuits and unspoken anger, of reluctant affection and ridiculed ambitions.

Kay took two tea bags out of a giant packet of Tetley, dropped them into the cups and poured water on them. Morrow felt she had to say something positive. “He’s lovely, your Joe. Handsome.”

“Too charming. Gets in trouble.” She corrected herself, “No, they’re good kids. They’re nice to each other. Bodes well, I suppose.” She added the milk from a six-liter carton and put it back in the fridge. “Sugar?”

Morrow shook her head and Kay handed her the cup. “’Mon.”

Morrow followed her into the living room. A scuffed leather settee was stacked with clean, folded clothes arranged in neat rows. An ironing board was standing up in front of a boxy old television. Hung around the walls were a collection of clip frames of family photos. A lot of them had slipped behind the glass, giving the impression of an avalanche of family events and parties, school plays, of lives passing in a great, hurtling blur.

Morrow saw Kay’s eye flick anxiously to marks on the floor, to a greasy strip around the light switch where hand after hand had swiped it on their way out and in.

Kay put her cup down on the floor and looked for room for Morrow to sit down. Then, resentment telling in the jerky speed of her gestures, she carefully stacked the separated piles of ironing on top of each other, putting them on the ironing board, making a space for her.

Morrow kept her coat on, put her mug down on the floor and sat down.

Kay took the armchair, looked at her, seemed annoyed and looked at Morrow’s mug. “Is that too wet for you? Fancy four gross of shortbread with it?”

Morrow smiled. “Not really.”

“Multipack of Hula Hoops?”

“Naw, ’m fine.”

Kay held her hand up and waved a rainbow arc in front of her face. “All the flavors…”

“No thanks, I’m going home to my dinner anyway.”

“Late…aye.” She looked at Morrow’s stomach. “Important to eat right, eh?”

They ran out of things to say suddenly and Morrow felt awkward in a way she never did when she was on business. Kay gave into her mood and asked, “What’s really going on, Alex?”

“How d’ye mean?”

“Why are you here on your own?”

Kay knew the police always flew in twos. It troubled Morrow that she did. “I wanted to ask you about Sarah, what kind of person she was, stuff like that.”

“Background stuff?”

“Yeah, you know, background…”

But Kay narrowed her eyes at Morrow, staring too long, trying to read her.

Morrow kept her face straight. A smile would have looked sly. Morrow was working, she lived in a bought house, had a car. She had gotten away and Kay hadn’t. Morrow was worried that this was what she had come here for, not for comfort or nostalgia or to find out who Sarah Erroll was, but to measure herself against Kay, looking for cheap confirmation that, measured and weighed, she was doing better than her old friend.

Kay watched her unmoving face, seemed to recognize that she was being stonewalled and why. She blinked and began reeling mechanically through some facts: “Sarah was nice. She loved her mum, even though Mrs. Erroll was a cheeky cow. I liked Joy. That was her name, Mrs. Erroll. Joy Alice Erroll. Everyone called her Mrs. Erroll.” She put a leg straight out in front of her and rocked her bum off the seat, reaching up to the ironing board for her cigarettes and lighter. She opened the packet and looked at Morrow’s belly. “Mind?”

“Wire in.”

They smiled at that, each away from the other, because it was word-for-word a conversation they’d had a hundred times, a hundred years ago. Kay lit up, puffed hard and leaned down over the side of the chair for a dirty glass ashtray. She cradled it on her knee.

“Did Sarah have a boyfriend?”

“Never brought a boyfriend home. I know she was going with someone though. She’d get texts and…well, the way she smiled at the phone…” Kay remembered quietly. “Mother of teenagers. Makes you kind of psychic. Probably didn’t want him to meet her mother.”

“Was her mother difficult?”

“Auch, doesn’t take a difficult mother to make children secretive. They just are. Natural, isn’t it?” Kay thought about it and smiled. “But Joy was difficult, yeah, and bananas. Bad combination. If she didn’t hate him, he’d have hated her.” Then she squealed in a posh old lady’s voice, “Kay, you look absyolutely dredful! How very fat you are!”

“Did Sarah like her?”

“She loved Joy to bits. Even though she was confused Sarah loved her, and that’s unusual. She was an only child, you know?” Kay dropped her eyes, remembering, Morrow thought, that Alex herself was an only child, but that her relationship with her mother had been less than happy. “When it works it really works.”