‘Mum?’ Cara Connolly shouted as she walked in the door of her mother’s flat, a one-bedroom on the second floor of a tenement building that had seen better days, just two minutes’ walk from Pollokbrae Baths. The whole area had seen better days, a deterioration that was not helped by the growth of slum landlords. Entire families, mostly immigrants and refugees, being housed in one room, with poor ventilation, ineffective heating and dangerous wiring, was depressingly common.
The newspapers were full of articles saying that the council were going to get tough on the landlords. But Cara would believe it when she saw it.
Stretching along the street, the ground-floor apartments were all shops. But there were none of the artisan coffee establishments offering sourdough bread and quinoa that had sprung up in the more gentrified areas of the city. These were mostly charity shops, pound shops, betting shops and tatty pubs, all with signage in primary colours. The sign over the shop just to the right of the entrance to her mother’s building had bright-red lettering with a fluorescent yellow background, and the window was full of hand-written notices offering cigarettes and beer at ‘knockdown’ prices.
As she walked into the passageway that led to the stairs and her mother’s flat, Cara looked up at the building, and saw dirty windows, satellite dishes, and large-leafed plants growing out of the cracks in the stained masonry. Inside the close, as she approached the stairs, she could see that it was cleaner than the last time she visited. Mum must have got the neighbours organised. But the plaster was still cracked in the corners, and a pipe was leaking just above the back door, creating a large, foul-smelling puddle they’d all have to negotiate when going out into the back green to hang out their washing.
Inside her mother’s flat, the picture improved. Everything was second-hand, but it was all scrupulously clean – a result of her mother’s favourite pastime. And there she was, on her knees in the kitchen, scrubbing brush in hand as if she was trying to work off the pattern in the linoleum.
‘You’ll not get it any cleaner, Maw.’
Helen Connolly looked up and gave Cara a half-smile. ‘There’s nobody will say I’ve got a mucky house, doll.’
‘Aye, cos it’s cleaner than a nun’s wimple.’
Her mother narrowed her eyes. ‘Is that something rude? Cos I’ll no’ have a daughter o’ mine using nasty words.’
Cara rolled her eyes. This was all part of her mother’s rehabilitation. Since she’d come off the various substances that had haunted most of her adult life she’d also taken to cleaning up her use of language. As if using more socially acceptable words would help her to sustain the habit of better behaviour.
Helen slowly and carefully got to her feet as if she was dutifully bearing a hundred-kilogram weight on her shoulders – her conscience, thought Cara. She groaned and steadied herself against the side of the fridge with one hand while she rubbed at both knees with the other. ‘Old age doesn’t come itself, doll, neither it does.’ She looked at Cara and beamed, displaying a misshapen row of brown and yellow teeth. ‘Lovely to see you, Cara. To what do I owe this pleasure?’
Cara assessed her mother’s face and tone for sarcasm. She couldn’t help herself. When her mother was on drugs she was the passive-aggressive queen, and Cara, prior to the last 398 days always anticipated a response of that flavour. To find that her mum had turned into this caring, pleasant, cleaning machine was a constant and welcome surprise. And her being clean for that number of days was a major achievement.
‘Your hair’s lovely. You had it done?’ Cara asked.
It wasn’t really. It was cropped close to her skull apart from a wiry brush at the top, and dyed a harsh blonde that made her mother’s bony face look even paler. But still, she was continuing to make an effort and that in itself deserved praise.
Helen raised a hand to the side of her head and patted it, obviously pleased that her daughter noticed. ‘You don’t think it’s too short? Mrs McGarrity thinks it’s too short.’
‘It’s lovely.’ And overtaken with a rush of tenderness Cara leaned forwards and kissed the papery veined skin of her mother’s cheek.
‘Oh, don’t be doing that.’ Helen stepped back, waving her arms in the air. She was still struggling to get used to being hugged. Though, judging by how pink her face had turned, she was delighted.
As Helen lowered her hands, one sleeve remained rucked up and Cara could see the scars on the inside of her mother’s arm. They were long healed, Cara remembered angry raised skin, seeping with infection.
Reading her daughter’s look, Helen hastily pulled the fabric down. ‘Cup of tea? How about I make us a cup of tea?’
‘A glass of water will do, thanks,’ Cara said, in the vain hope that her mum would take a seat and relax.
‘Nonsense. I’ll no’ have it said that my daughter came to my house and didn’t even get a cup of tea. Go through to the front room and I’ll get it sorted.’ With that she shooed Cara out of the kitchen.
Cara always left her mother’s house exhausted. She knew the constant activity was how her mother coped. For most of her life it had been drugs, but now it was the bustle and busyness of the everyday. Cara knew she cleaned for a couple of her elderly neighbours and didn’t take a penny for it. ‘Keeps the demons at bay, doll,’ she had offered one day in a rare moment of honesty. The past was firmly in the past and nothing good would come from digging through it. That was the belief Helen had learned at the knee of her grandmother.
In the front room, which was really at the back of the building, Cara walked over to the window and looked down on what was optimistically called The Back Green. It did have grass, once upon a time, but now the communal garden space was nothing more than a communal dump. Empty beer cans, gaudily coloured plastic bags, and cigarette butts were everywhere, and Cara counted two mattresses, half a child’s cot, three wheel-less bikes, a car battery and a black, inside-out golf umbrella.
‘Please don’t start,’ Helen entered the room carrying a tray. ‘I spoke to a woman at the council and they’re sending a man round.’ It was a common argument between them. Cara asserted that no one should have to look out on that mess, and threatened to call the council. Her mother, terrified that someone at the council offices would take against her always replied that a man was coming out.
Still, it had been worse. Cara had come to visit three months ago to find her mother out the back cleaning a lump of human faeces off Mrs Kelly’s windowsill on the ground floor. ‘I heard the toilet was blocked on the top floor,’ her mother had explained with an apologetic look. ‘They’ve been on to the landlord and he’ll not do nothing. An’ the council says it’s not their job.’
‘For crying out loud. You can’t be living somewhere where folk throw their shite out of the window. This isn’t the sixteenth century for Christ’s sake.’
Furious that her mother had to perform such a task, and feeling weirdly culpable, Cara got on to environmental health, the police, the local newspaper and local radio station, and something was done. As a result Helen became sure she was a marked woman. ‘Folk are different to me now, doll,’ she’d said. ‘So next time let us sort it out in our own way, eh?’
She’d accepted her mother’s stance, knowing where it came from and that there was nothing she could do to alter it. Being in her line of work she saw it every day. It came from being born into generations of poverty and the belief that, as far as society was concerned, you were at the back of the queue. For everything. It was so deep-seated for some people it was all but passed on genetically. You were born worthless and you would die worthless: Cara was certain this was coded into her mother’s DNA.
How Cara escaped it was a conundrum.
‘What you got on, then, doll?’ Helen asked as she poured the tea. It was only then that Cara noticed there was only one mug on the tray.
‘You not having any, Mum?’
‘No, I’ve got…’ She left the room and returned seconds later with an armful of bed linen. ‘…Mrs Donnolly’s ironing to do. The wee soul has terrible arthritis, so she has. Can’t even push the plug in.’
‘Mum, will you not join me and have a seat? You’re making me dizzy with all this running about.’
‘I’m fine, thanks, doll.’ She left the room again and came back in with the ironing board and the iron. ‘Just you sit there, enjoy your tea. Have a biscuit as well. You’re far too skinny.’ Helen’s face grew pained. ‘I wish you would eat better, doll.’
‘Mum, I eat properly. You’ve nothing to worry about on that score.’
‘It’s all that fitness stuff you do. Makes you skinny. Men like a woman with big hips,’ Helen said as she bent down to plug in the iron.
And there it was. At twenty-eight she was still single. An age when more than a few of Helen’s neighbours’ daughters would be on to their third child.
‘Yeah, well,’ Cara countered. ‘I’m really not caring what men want.’
‘And all that fighting stuff you do. It’s not very ladylike.’
Cara exhaled and closed her eyes, fighting to maintain her patience.
‘Every time, Mum. Every single time.’
‘What?’ Helen assumed an expression she judged would get her into heaven.
‘I’m skinny. I need to get a man. I need to stop the martial arts.’ Cara stared her mother down, but then felt terrible when the older woman was the first to turn away. ‘Can we please move past this, Mum? I like the way I am, and I’m perfectly happy being single, okay?’
They both knew there was more to Helen’s concern about the taekwondo. The seed of that lay in Helen’s abject failure to protect her daughter while she spent the better part of a decade and a half face-planted in the local drug scene.
Helen had funded her habit by bringing in a long line of what Cara’s brother Sean jokingly named her ‘gentlemen callers’. One of them spotted a pubescent Cara and tried it on. Cara, with the help of Sean, who must only have been about ten at the time, fought him off. This became an almost nightly occurrence, until, seeing a notice at the local community centre for ladies self-defence classes, Cara joined up, found she had a facility for controlled violence, went on to join a taekwondo club and learned to fight off drug-addled men with ease. There was one man, on the evening of her English exam, upon whom she unleashed the full force of her new skills. Word got out that Nellie Connolly’s daughter had serious skills and had broken a grown man’s arm, and she was rarely bothered again.
‘Still,’ Helen said after a few moments silence, ‘it would be nice to have a grandson one day.’
Cara laughed. ‘What are you like?’
Helen spat on the face of the iron, heard the resultant sizzle, and placing a flowery pillow case over the board she began to run the iron over it.
‘Imagine having a bedroom with that in it.’ Cara made a face.
‘She’s got matching curtains as well,’ Helen whispered, as if the owner was within earshot. Both women laughed, a free and unrestrained piece of music, and in the weaving of those notes Cara felt a rare and deep connection that she once thought she would never share with this woman. It was a shame she was going to have to spoil it.
‘Mum,’ she said after a long pause. ‘It’s about Sean.’ They never spoke about her only sibling, now just over two years dead. ‘I think I know who killed him.’