Denise Mina: The Dead Hour

The train arrived and Paddy swung the suitcase onto the carriage for her. Mary Ann climbed aboard and stood between the open doors, looking out at her wee sister. Paddy couldn’t hold back anymore. She started to cry.

“Good-bye.”

Silently, Mary Ann grinned and raised a hand and began to cry herself.

“Say hello to God for me,” called Paddy.

The doors slid shut between them but Paddy held Mary Ann’s eye as the train slid off into the future.

She stood on the platform watching the tail of the slow train creeping down the track, hoping Mary Ann would be happy; that she was wrong to be worried; that she wasn’t about to break her poor mother’s heart.

She walked to Rutherglen in the rain to get to the chemists’. Luckily the pharmacist was no one she knew. She took the package over to the public toilets behind the Tower Bar. It was freezing, because the door was always left open, and smelled of carbolic soap and urine.

Ten o’clock mass would be coming out soon. When it did there would be a queue of women with pelvic floors ruined from carrying too many children, running over after the fifty-minute mass, but not yet.

Paddy locked herself in the far cubicle and took the stick out of the packaging, reading the directions and following them to the letter. She didn’t dare watch it during the four minutes but stood with her forehead pressed against the cold wall, begging a favor of a God she hadn’t spoken to since she was seven.

Outside the cubicle she heard approaching voices, familiar women’s voices. Mass was out and everyone she knew would be gathering outside. She’d have to talk to them when she came out, act natural whatever the result. She didn’t know if she would be able to.

Daring herself, she turned and looked at the white stick on the cistern. Two faint blue lines had formed, one in each window.

There was no mistake about it: she was pregnant.

Denise Mina is the author of Deception, the Garnethill trilogy, and Field of Blood, where Paddy Meehan made her first appearance, prompting the Boston Globe to claim: “Every once in a while, an author creates a stunningly original character. Denise Mina has done it in Field of Blood. ” She lives in Glasgow, Scotland, with her family.