Field of Blood

I

Paddy’s weekend was as poor and friendless as she could remember. She spent the whole of Saturday skulking around the big library in town, keeping out of the house, reading old newspapers about the Dempsie case that told her nothing she didn’t already know.

She hadn’t realized the degree of local animosity towards her until she passed Ina Harris, a vulgar woman she knew to be a friend of Mimi Ogilvy’s, on her way home from the library. Ina turned quite deliberately and spat at Paddy’s feet. She was hardly an arbiter of good ma

When Paddy opened her drowsy eyes on the Sunday and saw the two cups of hot tea on her side table, she thought for a moment it was a normal weekend. Con’s only chore around the house was to make the Sunday-morning cuppas and deliver them to the bedrooms, easing everyone up and getting them ready for ten o’clock mass. Paddy blinked, feeling especially excited about seeing Sean at chapel. It was only when she recalled why seeing him meant so much to her that she remembered it wasn’t a normal time.

She sat up in bed, sipping her tea, thinking about all the disapproving Ina Harrises she would have to face today. Sean would be there and would ignore her. Her family wouldn’t speak to her, and everyone in town was watching her and whispering about her crime. Mary A

She listened as everyone in the house took their turn of the bathroom. Mary A

Paddy lay in bed, still wearing her pajamas, reading L’Etranger, a book Dub had lent her, because she knew the French title would upset her father. She heard the scuffle and whispers at the bottom of the stairs, followed by Con’s tread. He stopped outside, knocked, and opened the door, looking around the room expectantly. She wanted to sit up and challenge him, say something incendiary that would make him speak to her and have a fight for once in his pathetic life. But she didn’t. She sat in bed with her eyes fixed on the page, slowly slipping under the covers, protecting her father’s dignity at the expense of her own.

Con snorted angrily twice and left, shutting the door to the room tight to show how a

A calm fell over the house. Paddy listened just to make sure no one had been left behind. They were really gone. She was alone in the house for perhaps the first time in ten years. Even if no one else was in the house, Trisha was usually in the kitchen or at least near it. Paddy threw back the covers and bolted downstairs to the phone.

Mimi Fucking Ogilvy answered in her best Sunday voice.

“Is Sean there?”

“Who may I say it is?”

“Can I speak to Sean, please?”

Paddy could feel Mimi’s tiny mind grind out a thought before she hung up on her.

Paddy waited in the hall, sitting briefly on the stairs, knowing that Sean would have been in the house getting ready for mass and would have heard the phone ring. He’d know it was her: no one else he could possibly know would need to phone on a Sunday morning, because they were all on the way to the chapel and would see each other anyway. He wasn’t going to call her back. She checked her watch. He would have left to get to mass now. He wasn’t calling back.

Back upstairs she threw on some clothes and took off her engagement ring, leaving it sitting by her bed, knowing her mum would come in to make the bed while she was out and would see it there. She hoped it would worry her.

She ate a quick breakfast of cereal. She could have made six boiled eggs, but the grapefruit were all off, and the chemical reaction didn’t work without them. Filling her canvas bag with biscuits, she set off for the town, hurrying to get the train past Rutherglen station before mass came out. She didn’t want to run into half the congregation. Sitting on the train, Paddy looked at her chubby hands dispassionately. She liked them better without the poor ring.

In town she bought a ticket to an afternoon showing of Raging Bull, not because she wanted to see it, but so that she could tell Sean she had already seen it if he asked her later. She didn’t want him thinking she would wait around for him all the time. She felt like a friendless idiot, handing her single ticket over to the usherette. Unprompted, Paddy told her that her friend who had been coming with her was prone to illness and wasn’t well enough to come and that’s why she was alone. The usherette was hungover and dressed like a bellhop, in a washed-out red-and-gray uniform. She let Paddy finish her excuse and then silently pointed the way upstairs with her ticket skewer.

Paddy sat near the back, calculating that fewer people would be able to see her there, and opened her handbag of biscuits. One hour into the film she realized that she had never enjoyed a movie as much in her life. She wasn’t wondering what Sean thought about it or making jokes or checking that she got her share of the sweets, she was just enveloped by the music and the dark. She even forgot to eat.

II

She arrived back in Eastfield a full hour before anyone could reasonably expect their tea to be ready. It was too painful to go and sit in her bedroom before tea as well as after. The curtains were thick in the living room window, and the settee was too low to see anyway, but she could tell from the quality of the blueness of the light that the telly was on. A head stood up from an armchair- one of the brothers- and went into the kitchen. She had another whole night of internal exile ahead of her.

Sneaking past the front gate, she lifted the garage key from under a brick. If her dad saw the light on he’d think it was their neighbors, the Beatties, and stay well away. As she pulled it open, the garage side door concertinaed a thin black carpet of mulch.

The air inside was cold, a damp cloud hanging over everything, eating into her fingertips and ear lobes, carrying the cold into every corner. Paddy kept her coat on and sat down in a slightly moist brown armchair. She finished the biscuits in her handbag, eating them one after another as if it was a chore.

The Beatties had managed to pack a wild amount of stuff into the Meehans’ garage. They had erected a set of precarious shelves from bricks and odd planks of wood against one wall and had stacked cardboard boxes full of bric-a-brac on them. Paddy stood up, picking her damp tights off the backs of her legs, and looked through the boxes, the soft cardboard coming apart in her hand when she tried to tug it.

The Beatties went on foreign holidays and got to keep toys from when they were younger. The Meehan children were made to give theirs away to charities just when they stopped playing with them but before they lost all proprietorial sense over them. In one box they had stored a Union Jack biscuit tin from the Silver Jubilee and a cheaply framed picture of the Queen as a young woman, holding on to the back of a chair. Black speckled mold grew across her long pink skirt.