Jane Renshaw - Watch Over Me

‘Course I’m fucking able to –’ goes Jed.

‘Okay Da, okay.’ Ryan smiles. ‘Kids call him Father Jack. Wee rascals.’

‘Ah… Hmmph. Well. I think, in the circumstances, we’ll be able to offer you the option of a caution rather than involving the courts. Now, you don’t have to accept the caution, which will be entered into the record, including the Police National Computer. You can go to court if you so wish. And you don’t have to decide right now. You may wish to take legal advice.’

‘Naw naw,’ goes Ryan. ‘You’re fine. Caution’s fine.’

‘Mr Johnson?’ He looks at Jed.

‘Aye,’ goes Jed.

‘That’s barry,’ goes Travis. ‘We have to sign it, eh? God, I could recite what’s on that form so I could –’

‘Aye, I think we’re all fine with cautions, thank you,’ goes Ryan. ‘And please pass on our apologies to the family and wee Bekki. We’re hoping when she’s eighteen maybe she’ll get in touch, but we understand that’s her decision.’

‘And you understand that the court order prohibits any contact in the meantime?’

Ryan’s nodding. ‘It wasnae that we were intending making contact. It just happened, eh? We hold our hands up but. Da shouldnae have spoke to Bekki. God, I wish he hadnae, causing trouble and that. Poor wee lassie. We only want what’s best for Bekki, you know?’

Belter.

And as the polismen are getting out their forms and that, and Travis is going, ‘Naw, I dinnae need to read it, I’ve seen it afore,’ Ryan turns and gives me a wee wink.

That boy’s something else so he is.

When it’s his turn to sign, he squeezes onto the settee next the twelve-year-old and goes, ‘Cosy,’ and signs the form and then he goes, ‘You’re Raymond Bain’s laddie, eh? I was at the school with your cousin Isla. Went with her a while. What’s Isla up to these days?’

The laddie’s got a beamer on him so he has, and the other polisman is getting up and giving him evils, and the laddie jumps up off the settee and goes, ‘She’s fine, aye.’

‘God I was mad for Isla. Right clever wee bint. She went the university?’

‘Aye.’

‘Computer sciences, aye?’

‘Naw, geography. She was gonnae do comp–’

‘Thank you, Mr Johnson,’ goes the other polisman. ‘We’ll see ourselves out.’

I give it a wee minute and then I’m out the kitchen and high-fiving Travis and going to Ryan, ‘ Vulnerable adult , oh God, vulnerable adult ,’ and me and Ryan and Travis are pissing ourselves and Jed’s like that: ‘I’ll give you fucking vulnerable , ye wee bass, I’ll give you fucking vulnerable .’

And aye, you can see it in his bangstie wee eyes, he’s going radge, but he’s no fit for the boys and hasnae been for years, and Ryan’s in his face giving it ‘Oh aye, Da, go on then, you fucking old vulnerable bastard,’ and Jed’s raging so he is, kicks the door on his way out the room, and Travis is giving him the finger.

What goes around comes around, eh?

Saskia’s house looked different in the daylight. It was a 1960s semi in a nice area in the north of Glasgow, on a housing estate circling a wooded hill. There were lots of grassy areas and a small park across the road from the house, complete with a children’s assault course. A view of the distant hills of the Highlands from the front door. You’d be able to hop in the car and be climbing a Munro in less than an hour.

But the white paint on the wood cladding was peeling, there were weeds all up the path, and the doorbell didn’t seem to work.

Neil tried it again, then pounded on the frosted-glass door.

‘Try to stay calm,’ said Flora.

But it was so hard, having to rethink everything they’d believed. The way Beckie had been when she came to them, that traumatised, withdrawn little girl – had she been nothing more than a child wrenched from the people she loved, a child who didn’t understand why they didn’t come for her, why she had been abandoned to yet more strangers?

A figure appeared behind the glass. The door was opened by a tall thin man in bare feet, with an incongruous little beer gut nudging at his T-shirt. He had the pasty, spotty complexion of someone who never saw daylight.

She barely recognised him as Saskia’s husband.

‘Hello. Is Saskia in, please? It’s…’ Flora realised that they’d had different names last time they’d met. ‘It’s Alec and Ruth Morrison.’

His shoulders slumped. ‘Beckie’s parents.’

‘Yes. Look.’ Neil grimaced. ‘We’re not here to make a scene. We just need to talk to her. Please.’

‘She’s not here. We’re not together any more.’ He reached behind him. ‘She’s renting a flat in Haghill. This is the address.’

A dank, deeply shadowed close led from the street between a warehouse and the high wall of a tenement. The concrete underfoot was slimy with algae and slippery, and littered with wrappers and Lucozade bottles and cigarette ends. Flora’s foot crunched on a piece of broken glass. On the wall was a grubby sign with an arrow on it and ‘Nos 34a−h, 35a−h’.

The close ended in a tiny courtyard surrounded by high tenements which must never get the sun. There were two doors faced with hardboard and painted blue. The one on the right, Number 34, was tattered along the bottom as if a large animal had been gnawing it.

What an awful place to have to live. But Flora couldn’t summon any pity for Saskia.

She pressed the buzzer for 34g.

After a long moment: ‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Saskia? It’s Flora and Neil. Parry. We need to talk to you – is that okay? Can we come up?’

As the door buzzed open, Neil said, ‘I guess we could go back to Alec and Ruth Morrison, couldn’t we? Now they’ve found us, now they obviously know who we are –’

Flora shook her head. ‘Let’s just leave it for now. Beckie doesn’t need any more upheaval. She’s just got used to being Beckie Parry.’

The stairwell was lit by a flickering fluorescent light. The windows on each half-landing were so grimy it was impossible to see through them. But the stairs themselves were clean enough, and on the first landing someone had put a sad little loop of fabric bunting above a door painted a tasteful powder blue.

Flora looked up the stairwell. It spiralled up and up, several more stories. A lot of these high old tenements had been demolished in the Glasgow slum clearances, but many remained. When this tenement had been built in the Nineteenth Century, each household would probably have had just one room – ‘single ends’, they’d been called, with a range and a sink and a bed recess, with communal toilets out the back or, later, at the bottom of the stair, to be shared among them all.

Now the single ends had been put together to make flats, just two households on each landing rather than six or eight.

Saskia’s flat was on the top floor. She stood in the doorway watching them ascend to the landing, and any thoughts Flora had had about Saskia choosing to live here because of an interest in social history vanished. She looked terrible – hair greasy and in need of a cut, fleece and leggings wrinkling on a frame that had shrunk several sizes since Flora had last seen her. Her feet looked huge in matted brown faux-fur slippers.

‘Hi,’ she said flatly. ‘If you’ve come for an apology – I’m sorry. Really I am.’

‘No,’ said Flora. ‘That’s not why we’re here. I understand why you did it. We both do.’

Not true. Neil was completely baffled and outraged by what Saskia had done.

‘Can we come in and talk?’

‘Place is a mess.’ But she held the door open for them.