Field of Blood

Terry drew a wary breath in through his teeth. “It’s going to be mental. They’re busing Ulster Defense militants in from Larkhall.”

He said it as if he knew the area. Paddy smiled at the dashboard of his car and his expensive leather jacket.

“Are you from Larkhall, Terry?”

He glanced at her. “No.”

“Whereabouts are ye from?”

He hesitated. “Newton Mearns.”

“Fancy,” she said, hoping she didn’t sound bitchy again, because she meant it.

Newton Mearns was intimidating nice. It was a prosperous, middle-class area on the far south side of the city, with nice houses in big grounds and a lot of cared-for gardens. Even the roads were full of vegetation. Paddy and Sean had been out for a day there once, looking for a nice pub Sean had heard about from some workmates. They couldn’t find the pub and were back at the bus stop on the opposite side of the road within twenty minutes. Paddy kept her hood up while Sean smoked a fag and threw stones at cows. They were relieved when the bus arrived to take them back to the city. They never went there again.

Terry’s eyes slid towards her. “Newton Mearns isn’t all posh,” he said, as if he knew what she was thinking. “Some parts of it are quite rough, you know.”

“Is that right? You from the rough part, are ye?”

He didn’t answer. It wasn’t going very well. She was trying to be jokey, but she was tense and kept sounding like a snidey know-all.

“I’d like to nip home first.” He glanced at her. “Is that okay?”

“The Mearns is miles away.”

“No, I’ve got my own place. I’m just around the corner.”

Paddy was so impressed she covered her mouth to stop herself from gasping a sarcastic comment. He had a car and his own flat. His parents must be millionaires.

The old car rattled up through the town to Sauchiehall Street, home to drunken students, cinemas, and curry houses, and parked outside a newsagent’s. Terry pulled the keys out of the ignition with a flourish and turned to face her.

“Want to come up?” He saw her reluctance and added, “Just be for a minute. I’ve been working all morning. I want to change my top.”

She tried not to say the first thing on her tongue, which was piss off. Eastfield girls would be wary of entering a boy’s house if his parents were out. Terry didn’t seem embarrassed to be asking her, though. Maybe in Newton Mearns girls went in and out of boys’ houses all the time and were just good friends. They probably played te

“Okay,” she said. “Let’s see your gaff.”

It was a dingy close with a worn wooden balustrade and a filthy concrete floor. Dirt gathered along the base of the walls. The front doors to the flats became increasingly grotty from landing to landing, and by the third floor they were either chipped and battered or blank pine replacements for those that had been kicked in during drunken arguments. An overhead roof window flooded the filthy stairwell with bright daylight so that every dirty corner was crisp and visible, every brown smear on the walls so vivid she could almost taste it. She kept close to Terry, who was bounding up the stairs ahead of her.

“Why do you need a car,” she asked, finding herself breathless halfway through the steep climb, “when you live so near work?”

“I only use the car to impress women.”

Surprised and flattered at being called a woman, and the subject of anyone’s attempt to impress, she laughed and lashed out, punching him on the thigh.

Six up, on the top-floor landing, two big doors faced each other across a jumble of bicycle parts and a brown corduroy armchair. Terry took a stern bunch of keys to a cardboard front door that would have blown open in a stiff breeze.

The hallway didn’t have any lights in it. More bikes were parked behind the door, and every available surface was covered in posters of rock bands: the Floyd, the Quo, Thin Lizzie.

“God,” said Paddy quietly. “Wake up to the eighties.”

Terry led her to a door at the back, undid the padlock on it, and used a long key for the mortise lock below the handle. As the door to his room opened she was struck by a beguiling smell, a mixture of musky sebum and lemon- concentrated scent of big, dirty men.

If Terry was a millionaire he wasn’t making a show of it. His bedroom was long and narrow. A single window at the far end stared straight into the top-floor windows of the mean little tenement opposite. Between his unmade single bed and the sink, a paper suitcase did for a table. Terry kept some tins of beans and corned beef on it, sitting next to an open waxed-paper packet of white bread and a tub of cheap margarine. The bedsheets were orange, the blankets a grubby cream. He had no hanging space for clothes, so he had carefully balanced ironed shirts on hangers from the picture rail around the room. A spindly spider plant on the bookshelf seemed to be slowly lowering its young to the ground, eager for them to escape.

Stepping deep into the room so that Paddy had to follow him, Terry opened a drawer and took out a clean white T-shirt, folded with the front flat as if it was shop-new. He let his leather jacket slide down his arms to the floor, untucked his white work shirt, and undid the top three buttons. He put his hand to the fourth and wavered.

“For Godsake,” she said. “I’ve got two brothers. I’ve seen men without their shirts on before.”

Terry raised an eyebrow. “But my nipples are unusually beautiful, Patricia, and you’re only flesh and blood.”

Paddy giggled and looked away, watching him in her peripheral vision as he yanked the shirt over his head without unbuttoning it. He stepped towards her quickly, a sudden outrage on his face, and shouted, “Don’t look at me!”

His arms were too thin, but his chest was covered in tufts of soft, black, curly hair, arranged in a handsome T shape, the tail of it disappearing into the waistband of his trousers. His nipples were deep pink, the hair radiating away from them like eyelashes, making his chest into a startled face. She gri

“Didn’t your parents mind you moving out?”

“Ah,” said Terry, lifting his jacket from the floor. “They died. In a car accident.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No, I’m…” He shook his head. “Stupid. I shouldn’t have told you that.”

“Why not?”

Embarrassed, he screwed an eye shut and shrugged. “People don’t really want to know about stuff like that. It makes them uncomfortable.”

“The fusty man-smell in here makes me more uncomfortable.”

He smiled weakly at her and glanced away.

“I am sorry about your folks. It must have been a bit crap.”

He nodded at the floor. “That’s exactly what it was. It is. A bit crap. Why have you stopped wearing your engagement ring?”

As they locked up the room and walked slowly down the stairs, Paddy told him about the shu

He opened the passenger door for her. “He didn’t phone back?”

“Not once.” She climbed into the seat and waited until Terry was in the driver’s side. “Wouldn’t even come to the phone when I called him. Nothing.”

“He sounds like a spineless wee shite.” He started the engine. “But I would say that, wouldn’t I?”

For the first time in her life, Paddy felt like a full-grown woman.