Peter May - Runaway

There was no one around. No movement, no sign of life, except for lit windows punctuating black spaces. I know now, of course, that good, working people lived ordinary lives in these blocks. Were born, and lived and died here. Played, fought, laughed, made love, as well as the best of a deteriorating environment. But to us, in the dark and the rain that night in 1965, it seemed alien and hostile.

Maurie found the entrance to Rachel’s stairway near the far end of Moynihan and we escaped the rain into a scarred and gloomy stairwell that smelled of urine. The lift was only big enough to take two, and so we decided to climb the stairs to the third floor. The smell of urine gave way to the perfume of stale cooking, cabbage and onion, and drains — a low, unpleasant note that seemed to permeate the entire building.

We passed along a dimly lit corridor to Rachel’s door near the far end. Her flat was on the interior side of the development. Some idiot with a can of spray paint had left his signature along most of the length of the wall.

Maurie knocked on the door, and after a brief wait we heard a girl’s voice come from the other side of it.

‘Who is it?’

‘It’s Maurie.’

The door opened, and she almost flew into his arms. He was as much taken aback as we were. She buried her face in his chest, her arms reaching around his substantial girth to squeeze the breath out of him.

‘Oh, Mo, I’m so glad you’re here.’

Her voice was muffled, almost lost in the damp of his jacket, and it wasn’t until she stepped back that I really saw her face for the first time.

There are many ways to describe a moment like that. Most of them mired in cliché. I could say that time stood still. Or that my heart pushed up into my throat and very nearly choked me. And in their own way these things would be true. I had butterflies in my stomach, and my mouth was so dry I could barely separate my tongue from the roof of my mouth. So I could be forgiven a little hyperbole.

When I first met Jenny Macfarlane, there had been an instant and powerful attraction. I had wanted her to be my girl. But at the risk of sounding like Jeff and his Veronica, this was different. I knew, beyond any shadow of doubt, that this girl would mean more to me than any other in my life. I knew it then, and I know it still today, fifty years on. But in the words of the song from a 1969 Rolling Stones album, Let it Bleed , you can’t always get what you want.

Of course, I didn’t know that then.

Her face was thin, and very pale, as if she hadn’t eaten much, or had suffered a recent illness. But her eyes were huge. The deepest, warmest brown, a mirror of the chestnut hair that fell in unruly ropes over her shoulders. She just made you want to protect her. From all the darknesses of the world. She wore a long-sleeved, close-fitting white smock over bell-bottomed jeans and brown boots. She was a skinny girl, but not skeletal. She carried flesh on her bones in the right places, and there was something almost classy about her. Elegant. She wore not a trace of make-up, and didn’t need to. Her lips were dark and quite full, in contrast to her long, thin nose, and her jawline was so well defined it was almost elfin.

Her relief at seeing Maurie was tangible, and her emotion welled up to moisten those big brown eyes, so that they soaked up and reflected almost every ounce of light in this whole dismal place.

We all stood back a little, feeling like intruders, embarrassed and unwilling witnesses to a very personal moment. She hardly noticed us.

Then she glanced nervously along the corridor before ushering us inside. ‘Come in. Quick. You don’t want to be seen out here.’

We shuffled into the flat after Rachel and Maurie like sheep, and she closed the door carefully behind us. Through an open door on the left I saw an unmade bed, street light from the window falling across a tangle of sweat-stained sheets. From the hall she led us into the living room, where glass doors opened on to a cluttered balcony that looked out into the very heart of the Quarry Hill development. It seemed that half the flat had spilled out on to the balcony, bags of rubbish, broken bits of furniture, the detritus of a life in disarray, all piled up like debris washed ashore after a storm. The balcony itself gave on to a joyless view of other apartments, lights burning in countless windows, other people’s lives spooling out behind glass like so many private movies. Short ones, long ones, sad ones, happy ones.

But there was nothing happy about this apartment. It was a car crash of a place. We had to wade through an accumulation of old clothes, the flotsam and jetsam of lives in chaos, just to get out of the hall. There was a foul smell in the flat, and rising above it the unpleasant odour of paraffin. I saw an old paraffin heater sitting in the corner of the room, and thought that probably explained the tracks of black condensation that stained the walls and windows.

The mouldy remains of half-eaten meals littered a Formica-topped table.

‘Jesus!’ Maurie voiced all of our thoughts in a single oath. ‘How can you live like this, Raitch?’

I saw tears well up in her eyes again.

‘It’s not my choice, Mo. It really isn’t. It’s not my home, it’s Andy’s. And whichever of his friends decide they’re going to crash for the night. There can be eight or ten people sleeping over, some nights. You have to step over bodies just to get to the loo.’

Maurie shook his head in confusion. ‘So why do you stay?’

‘Like I said, I don’t have a choice. If I tried to get away Andy would come after me. I’m not his girlfriend, I’m his property. And where would I go? What would I do? I don’t have any money.’

Jeff said, ‘You told Maurie you could get your hands on some cash, Raitch.’

She glanced at Jeff, and I could tell immediately that she didn’t like him. One look was all it took to convey a whole history that the rest of us knew nothing about.

‘I know where it is. I just can’t get at it.’

‘What do you mean?’ Maurie said.

Without a word she led us back out through the hall and into the bedroom I had glimpsed on the way in. The smell in here was sour. Body odour and feet. On a bedside table there was a candle and, laid out on a dirty handkerchief, a syringe, a small round metal container, a strip of stained blue rubber about fifteen inches long and other, unidentifiable bits and pieces. Although I had never witnessed anything like them, I knew instinctively these were the accoutrements of the heroin addict. It was startling to see them laid out like that, as if they were everyday things in everyday use. And in truth, they probably were. But I was distracted by Rachel dropping to her knees at the side of the bed and reaching under it to slide out a small trunk secured by a large padlock.

‘This is where he keeps his stuff. And his cash.’

‘His stuff?’ I said.

And she looked at me, I think, for the very first time. There was a moment, I am sure of it, that mirrored for Rachel the moment when I first set eyes on her. I can still see and feel it clearly in my mind, although I wonder now if it wasn’t exaggerated in my imagination, and imbued in later years with the memory that I have of it today.

‘The stuff he sells,’ she said.

‘Drugs?’ Maurie seemed shocked.

She nodded. ‘H.’

‘He’s a dealer?’

‘And user.’ Her brave face crumpled just a little before she caught herself. ‘He’s started making me take it, too.’

She pulled up her sleeve to reveal the bruises and scabbing around the injection sites in the crook of her arm. The stunned silence in the room seemed to affect her more than anything else. As if serving, somehow, to bring home to her just how far she had fallen. We were her peers. Middle-class kids from a south-side Glasgow suburb, staring at her with the same horror she would have felt herself in other circumstances.