Denise Mina - Slip of the Knife

“No.” Mary Ann touched her hair again. “I was home.”

Soup was Trisha’s secret language. Trisha’s soup meant love and home; it meant a mother managing on a poor income, passing on good nutrition to the children; it meant concern. If Trisha’s life had been a musical she would have ended up with all three daughters living a hundred yards from her, raising a dozen well-behaved children between them and gathering every morning to make soup together, to her recipe. As it was, her eldest daughter was divorced and living miserably with her; Mary Ann was a nun, which was good, but made soup from a sack of dried ingredients, which was terrible; and her youngest bought overpriced soup from delicatessens. Sending soup was a reproach to a daughter who couldn’t be trusted to look after herself or feed her illegitimate son properly.

Paddy took it and put it in the fridge. “We’ll have this later. We’ll have it tomorrow.”

Dub sat back down in his seat. “Or we’ll leave it in the fridge until it gets smelly and then chuck it down the toilet.”

Pete giggled because Dub had said toilet.

Mary Ann was shocked at the suggestion, frowning at her empty plate. Paddy sat down next to her, keen to change the subject. “What were you doing home anyway?”

Dub dropped a lump of overcooked red pasta onto Mary Ann’s plate. She looked down at it, the fusilli swirls reluctantly letting go of each other, tumbling down to the cold plate. Usually Mary Ann giggled at everything-a dog running past, a pencil dropped, an incongruous turn of phrase, anything could set her off-but tonight she wasn’t giggling. Tonight she looked down at her dinner settling on the plate and sighed like a grown-up.

Dub and Paddy looked at each other.

Paddy sat down next to her and took her hand. “What?”

Mary Ann shook her head as if she was trying to dismiss an unpleasant thought.

“Is Mum ill?”

“No.” She picked up her fork and prodded at her food.

“Are you ill?”

“No.”

An uncomfortable silence settled over the table. It was Dub’s favorite dinner and he ate as quickly as he could. He shoveled the food into his mouth, washed it down with a pint glass of apple juice, and then excused himself, taking Pete with him, leaving Paddy and Mary Ann alone, side by side at the table. Exiled to the living room, the men put the television on loudly, letting them know they weren’t listening.

“So?”

Mary Ann hadn’t eaten much. She moved the food around slowly, chasing a swirl halfway around the plate and leaving it there. She put her fork down. “Don’t want it.”

If a plate of stewed puppy had been served to her she would usually eat it, out of piety and gratitude. Paddy realized with a start that she hadn’t prayed over the dinner before she began eating either.

“Mary Ann, what is going on?”

Mary Ann didn’t move. She sat still, staring at the food as tears dropped onto the table, and then she turned to look at her sister.

“I’m in love. With a man. He loves me.”

“Who?”

“Father Andrew.”

“At St. Columbkille’s?”

She nodded unhappily, touched her mauled hair again with her fingertips, and cried. Paddy touched it: it was as soft as a baby’s. “Did they do this to you because of that?”

But Mary Ann was crying so hard she couldn’t speak. Paddy dabbed her cheeks with a sheet of kitchen roll they were using for napkins but it did no good. The tears weren’t about to dry. She wanted to ask a hundred questions, tell her that Father Andrew was a creep, that she should never have been a nun in the first place, but those were things she wanted to say, not things Mary Ann needed to hear.

“Did you tell Mum?”

Mary Ann touched her head again.

“Did you tell your Mother Superior?”

She mouthed “no” and carried on crying.

Paddy didn’t know what to do. She dried her sister’s face again, squeezed her hand for a while, and then dried her face once more. “D’ye want some soup?”

Mary Ann spluttered a laugh through the veil of wet, finally catching her breath in short, painful gasps. She used her own napkin to dab at her face.

“Do the two of you have any kind of plan?”

Mary Ann folded the kitchen roll into a neat square and blew her nose, wiping it hard, dragging her nose to the side as if she was punching herself in slow motion. She couldn’t look at Paddy. “We don’t talk…”

Paddy was shocked. Father fucking Andrew, two years out of seminary, forcing his will on the parish and touching Mary Ann in ways she had no defense against. Paddy wanted to jump in the car and go over to the parish house and beat the living shit out of him. She wouldn’t, for Mary Ann’s sake, but it was exactly what their brothers would do if they found out.

“Don’t tell Mum.” It wasn’t much by way of comfort but it was the best she could come up with.

Mary Ann started crying again, not from the pressure of love this time, Paddy thought, but foreseeing all the pain and shame she’d bring to the family.

She took her sister’s wet face in her hands. “Listen, Mary Ann, listen, you can’t hurt Mum more than we have. Trisha’s strong, she’s really strong. Caroline’s divorced, Pete’s a bastard, the boys don’t even go to mass anymore.” Somehow, adding Mary Ann’s love affair to the list of their mother’s wounds wasn’t helping to calm her down. “I’ve got some cigarettes. Will we smoke a cigarette?”

Paddy got up, pulled the packet out of her handbag, brought over an ashtray, and lit one, handing it to her sister. Sometimes, when they were younger and Sean smoked around them a lot, the girls would share a cigarette. Mary Ann didn’t inhale but liked holding it, touching it to her lips like a movie star, flinching when a stray tendril of smoke got up her nose.

Now, she took the little cigarette, going cross-eyed as she held it to her mouth, and inhaled the longest draw Paddy had ever seen. Half the fag was gone. She held the smoke in her lungs, her chest barreled out, and she exhaled expertly over Paddy’s head.

The sisters looked at each other. Paddy was astonished. For the first time in their lives Mary Ann wasn’t playing the giggling little girl. She was a woman now.

Holding her eye, Mary Ann put the filter to her lips and sucked again, drawing the remaining life out of the cigarette, leaving it a gray, crumbling shell. She held the smoke in her chest for an unfeasibly long time and then blew it out to the side, pausing at the end, turning to her sister and blowing two perfect smoke rings at her, raising her eyebrows to emphasize her point.

Paddy started laughing and couldn’t stop. Blindly, she slapped the table, knocking her plate to the floor, her fork bouncing off a chair and clattering onto the tiles.

The phone rang out and she looked up, expecting to see Mary Ann’s face split in a silent howl, but Mary Ann wasn’t laughing. She bit her top lip and stabbed at the ashtray with the cigarette, her eyebrows rising and lowering in a silent argument.

McVie didn’t bother with hello. “Memorial service, Thursday. Big deal. Ten a.m. at the cathedral. You’re speaking.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Everyone’ll be there.”

“Everyone who?”

“Everyone.” She heard him ruffle a sheet of paper. “Have you seen Merki’s article?”

She turned to the wall. “Merki’s got a byline?”

“Go and get tomorrow’s edition of the News. They’ve found the gun.”

She hung up.

Mary Ann had helped herself to another cigarette and held her head in her hands, the contaminating smoke curling up to the pulley of Pete’s clothes drying above her head.

“Put that fag out,” Paddy said firmly. “We’re going for a drive.”