Field of Blood

He stared at her and blinked. “Get tae hell.”

“It was him. I looked and looked at it. It had his wee teeth and his hair. It’s him.”

“But the Ogilvys live in Barnhill. Those boys were from Townhead.”

“No, the baby was from Townhead.”

Puzzled and anxious, Sean searched her face for signs that she was making some sort of bizarre joke. He looked away and took a deep draw on his cigarette.

“A mob formed outside the station where they were being held, so they moved them. I saw a photo taken through the window of a police van.”

He wiped his face with a big hand, rubbing it hard across his eyes, trying to wake himself up. “How good a picture could it have been?”

“It was good enough.” She tried to take his hand, watching him calculate the possibilities.

“That’s stupid.” He pulled his hand away. “We’d have heard. They’d have phoned us, wouldn’t they?”

“I don’t know. Would they?”

His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper.

“Did they kill that baby?”

Paddy felt she’d said enough. “I don’t know exactly, I just know they’re in custody.”

“So it might be nothing?”

She lied to make it easy on herself. “Might be nothing at all.” She pressed his hand again.

Satisfied that he had made her back down, he flicked the ash from his cigarette into the pristine white snow. “Who did you give me a dizzy for last night?”

She was surprised at his hurt tone and touched his elbow. “Ah, no, Sean, I didn’t blow you out, I didn’t. I couldn’t go to the pictures because of work. I got a chance to do something.”

“So, you just stayed at work alone, did you?”

“Actually, I went out in the calls car.” She thought back over Mr. Taylor’s living room and the moment in the alley when she waved to the policeman in the bright kitchen window.

“Yeah, see?” said Sean, suddenly caustic. “I wouldn’t actually know what a calls car is because I don’t work there.”

“It’s just a car that drives around and goes to the police stations and the hospitals to pick up stories. It’s got a radio in it.” He didn’t seem very interested, so she tried be more specific. “We went to a gang fight where this guy had jumped out of a window and before that to a house where this guy killed himself to upset his girlfriend. Can ye imagine that?” He didn’t answer. “The story was in the paper today, just a few lines, but being there… it was…” She wanted to say fascinating, that it was exhilarating, that she could do that every night for the rest of her life, but she curbed it. “Interesting.”

“That’s disgusting.” He took a sulky draw on his cigarette.

He sounded so mean she didn’t know what to say. She looked away down the snowy garden. It was like this between them more and more now. They were all right with other people there. Then they’d hold hands and feel close and wish they were alone, but as soon as they were, they’d bicker.

“It was an interesting night.” She leaned out beyond the shelter, into the slowing blizzard. “I wasn’t supposed to go, but I asked and they said it was all right.”

“You’re so ambitious,” Sean said reprovingly.

“No I’m not,” Paddy snapped back.

“Yes you are.”

“I’m not that ambitious.”

He took a last drag on his cigarette before throwing it away. “You’re the most ambitious person I know. You’d cut me in half for a leg up.”

“Piss off.”

He twitched a bitter little smile. “You know it’s true.”

“I might be ambitious, but I’m not ruthless. That’s a different thing.”

“Oh, now you are ambitious?”

“I’m not ruthless.” Paddy petulantly kicked snow off the step. “I’ve never done anything for you to say that about me.”

They stood on the step looking out, each silently continuing the argument.

“Why can’t you be content to rub along like the rest of us?” He sounded so reasonable.

“I’m just interested in my job. Is that wrong?”

She understood why it made him angry: Sean wanted them to stay in the same place near the same people for the rest of their lives, and her ambitions threatened that. Sometimes she wondered if he was going out with her, a dumpy girl half as attractive as himself, because he could count on her to be grateful and stay.

“And you’re competitive,” he said, as if confessing his own flaws reluctantly.

“I am not.”

“Ye are, everyone knows you are. You’re competitive, and to be honest,” he added, dropping his voice to a confidential mutter, “it frightens me.”

“For Godsake, Sean-”

“If it was a choice between me and your job, which would you choose?”

“Bloody hell, will ye drop it?”

He threw his cigarette into the garden, to the spot where he always threw his cigarettes. Underneath the snow Paddy knew there were roll-up dog ends from last year’s long hot summer, when they had both just left school and clung to each other. She’d just started at the Daily News and didn’t know if she would be able to hack it. Over that was another layer of ash and filters from the rainy autumn, when Sean had started work and had a bit of money for real fags. And over them were the Christmas cigarette ends, when they sat on the step in the dark with a blanket over their knees and cuddled together; where Sean proposed after lunch on Boxing Day. All that closeness had evaporated since they’d got engaged, and Paddy couldn’t understand where it had gone.

Sean kept his eyes on the lonely thin tree at the end of the garden. “I worry that you’re go

“Oh, I’m not go

He cupped his free hand around her cheek and they looked at each other sadly.

“You are,” she said adamantly, not sure whom she was trying to convince. “You’re my dear, dear Sean and I’ll never leave you.” But even as she said it, she was wishing it were true. Her throat was aching. “Come upstairs with me and we’ll have a winch, eh?”

He looked at his feet. She kissed his hand again.

“Sean, I shouldn’t have said that about the boy. I don’t know what I saw. Come up with me.”

She tugged his sleeve encouragingly, opening the back door, afraid to let go of Sean in case he disappeared off into the snow forever. She held on tight and pulled him through the door, leading him into the warm.

III

The bedroom door was blocked by a large wardrobe, so that the room had to be entered sideways. Beyond it were two single beds with a narrow aisle in between. At the foot of each bed sat a set of drawers where the girls displayed their most prized possessions. Paddy had a jar of clear green Country Born hair gel for spiking her hair next to all the crap Sean had bought her: a bottle of Yardley perfume; a ridiculous neck ruffle to attach to her clothes for an instant New Romantic look; a little model of two teddy bears wrestling each other, wearing capes cut out of J-cloths and silver electrical wire belts Sean had made during an idle morning at work. Mary A

Paddy had a poster of the Undertones above her bed. It was the first picture she had ever seen that mirrored her own life: a lot of cheaply dressed, ill-nourished people squashed into a small living room with a picture of the Sacred Heart on the wall. Mary A

With six adults smashing around the place, there was very little privacy in the Meehan household. To make it worse, Paddy and Mary A