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TWENTY-SEVEN. ENJOYING THE SLIDE
I
It was dark outside. Paddy and Dub had been everywhere they could think of, up to Springburn, where Callum came from, on the off chance he’d managed to get a train and bus up there, back down the road for a scour of Rutherglen and the fields around it, following the bus routes from the main road nearby, to a local supermarket that opened late, into a couple of cafés that were brightly lit and a pub that stood out cheerily against the dark because of the red neon FOOD sign in the window. As Dub pointed out, Callum wasn’t off looking for a good time, he was hiding. He would be hiding in a dark ditch somewhere, not going into the obvious places. Paddy knew one thing for sure: she didn’t want to be the one to find him. He was scary enough with the lights on.
She told Dub about her conversation with Burns and how he wasn’t feeding Pete properly.
“It’s only one night, you’d think he could cook him something once.”
“Yeah,” said Dub. “Maybe I’ll phone him.”
“Let him phone you.”
They drove past Sean’s street, stopping and peering down the road to see the hordes parked up outside the house. Photographers stood in groups, their bags at their feet, fingering their cameras and looking bored. Journalists stood separately. She knew the scatter pattern well enough: clusters of the genial ones, gathering around to swap lies about their wages and expense accounts and all the coups they nearly had, the loners hanging about on the fringes, telling themselves lies and coming up with schemes to trounce the others and get the story. A large television van was parked up on Sean’s side of the road, a massively tall transmission aerial sticking out of the top. She could already imagine the complaints from the press journalists: the van would be in their view, spoil the pictures. But that was why it was there, to get the logo in any of the pictures that got published and show that STV were on the scene too.
Dub suggested they get fish suppers and park to eat them and she realized how hungry she was. She hadn’t had any lunch, just the biscuit at the publisher’s house. No wonder she felt so ropy.
Rutherglen was her old stamping ground. When she dated Sean they often went to the Burnside café to pick up fish suppers for his mum and brothers. It faced onto a dark, hilly park full of old trees and they used to hand in the order and then go across and snog behind a tree for ten minutes while the man cooked their food.
She parked across the road and Dub said he’d get them if she waited in the car, so she asked for a battered haggis supper with lots of vinegar and a can of juice. He mugged a sad face at her. “No veg?”
“Batter is made from veg.”
The café was empty. Paddy watched through the car window as the bored proprietor chucked chips into plastic trays, wrapping them expertly in white-and-brown paper, picking the haggis from a display shelf sitting above the fryers. That meant the haggis had been fried earlier in the evening. That meant it would be dried out. She was cursing to herself, imagining the rubbery casing around the meat, when she looked over to the park and saw something move behind a tree. A head, a big head, the right height for Callum as well.
Paddy looked at Dub, a long strip of cool buying her nice chips to share after a hard day of misery and grim. She chewed her tongue hard and looked back out into the park. It would be getting cold soon: the heat from the day was leaving the earth and there wasn’t any cloud cover. Fuck him, she thought, fuck him. He’s a creep and I’ve had a hard day, but her hand found the door handle and she got out into the street, hoping he’d see her and run for it. She stepped out of the street light into the shadow of the trees and cleared her throat.
“Is that you?”
Whoever it was slipped back behind the tree.
“’Cause if it is you, Sean’s very worried and we’re out looking for you.” She looked back at Dub handing a fiver over the counter, the parcels tucked neatly into a flimsy blue plastic bag hanging from his hand.
“We’re getting chips.”
Her heart sank as Callum peered skittishly around the trunk of the tree. He must be hungry. For the sake of Sean she waved him over to her. “Come on.”
“I can’t go back. They’re all over the place.”
“OK, get in the car and we’ll eat the chips and think of something.”
Dub was surprised to find Paddy getting into the car with a bulky young stranger but he managed to defer his curiosity until they were inside. They could tell Callum had been crying. He had managed to get dirt on his face and there were clean tracks where the tears had fallen, smeared where he had wiped them away. She looked at him in the dark and remembered the terrified wee boy in a hospital bed nine years ago.
She introduced Dub to him, him to Dub, and they opened the chips. The haggis supper was too big for her anyway so she halved it with him and Dub donated a third of his fish, giving Callum his can of Irn-Bru. Callum thanked them through a mouthful of sausage, cramming chips into his mouth, explaining that he’d only had a cheese sandwich and he was starving. The chips were sweet and salted to perfection and they sank into the easy camaraderie of hungry people enjoying a good meal.
Dub finished first, gave a satisfied sigh, wiped the grease from his mouth with a paper napkin, and looked at Callum, still eating on the backseat.
“What are we going to do with you, my friend?”
“We can’t take him to ours,” she said.
“How no?” Callum was sitting in her warm car, his mouth was full of her di
“Because journalists were coming to our door looking for you before you even got out, and someone smashed the door in and pissed on our beds today. You want to sleep on that?”
Callum wasn’t sure whether to believe her but he looked to Dub and he confirmed it with a wrinkled nose. “We were lucky, though. I mean, they didn’t shit on them.” The way he said it was so ridiculous that Paddy started laughing and couldn’t stop: it sounded as if the guy had given them the option of one or the other. She laughed and looked at Callum, who was frowning at Dub until he caught Paddy’s eye and started laughing too, like a sad child out of practice, opening his mouth wide and pumping laughs out of his face. Dub was used to being laughed at. He had been a comic for a long time before he became a manager and he took it as a compliment, smiling and nodding at them, saying “it’s true” every so often. It reminded Paddy of her father. One of Con’s loveliest traits had been his willingness to be the butt of jokes; he let the children laugh at him when he was silly, smiled when other men ridiculed him.
When the hilarity had died down Dub turned to Callum, eyeing him as if he was measuring him up for a new suit. “Where are we going to keep this guy safe, then?”
Paddy looked back at Callum. He already looked nicer, softer and less wary of her. “Uff, I don’t know. Can’t take him to the Ogilvys’, or ours.”
“What about my mum and dad’s?”
Dub managed comedians for a living. The closest he had ever come to real danger was defusing an ego. His parents were indulgent but Paddy didn’t think they would appreciate him arriving with a famous murderer looking for a bed. And they only had two bedrooms, which meant that Paddy and Dub would be dumping him and leaving again. Callum was pleased by the suggestion though, possibly because it made him sound trustworthy.
“They are quite elderly,” Paddy said reluctantly, “a bit stuck in their ways, Callum. I don’t know if you’d like it there.”
“I like family units,” he said hopefully.
His face looked calmer now he wasn’t hungry, traces of the laughter still showed in his eyes, and as he leaned forward to answer them he held on to his shins, bending eagerly forward like a child discussing his Christmas present.