Exile by Denise Mina Read Free Book Online

hadn’t had a carefree wank since.
    Liam retired almost immediately afterwards. He managed to get back into university to study film, despite having accepted several grant checks before dropping out of law school years before. He spent his free time between lectures renovating the house. It was beautiful. He unnailed the wooden window shutters so that they worked again, stripped the flock wallpaper and painted the bare plaster vellum yellow. The carpets, sticky from thirty years of shuffling feet and a thousand small spills, were lifted, the floorboards sanded and varnished. He bought a job lot of Victorian armchairs in an auction and the millennium party was his chance to christen the house. Leslie arrived at ten past eleven with Cammy.
    Cammy had all the equipment: he was tall and slim and blond but nature had played a cruel joke and made him an idiot. He smeared his fringe into a spiky comb on his forehead, wore a football top over straight-leg denims and had a recurring spot on the back of his neck that required urgent medical attention. Intimidated by the grand surroundings, he decided that Maureen and Liam were massively over-privileged parasites. He asked Liam whether his daddy had left him the house and Liam, pissed and unaware of the accusatory tone, laughed like a drain and said, yeah, that was right, his da gave it to him. Then Leslie took off her biker’s jacket. Liam took in her change of style and asked why she was dressed like a whores’ shop steward. Leslie’s offense was lost in the memory of the night because Liam went on to greater glories. He chucked Maggie twenty minutes before the bells, saying she was too good for him, too good, and anyway, he was still in love with Lynn. Lynn heard him and was furious, said he’d made her look like a scheming cow, and she told Maggie that she’d never go out with him again. Unconsoled, Maggie locked herself in the only functioning toilet, causing a fifteen-minute queue and an inch of urine in the back garden.
    Half the party saw in the new century waiting in a queue with their legs crossed.
    Leslie and Cammy left Liam’s Hogmanay party at one o’clock, a gesture with the same social connotations as a slap in the face with a dueling glove. At the door on the way out Cammy went to the trouble of telling Maureen that he wished they’d gone somewhere else. She said she wished he had too.
    Maureen knew she must have done things wrong, that Leslie wouldn’t treat her like a prick without justification, but she couldn’t think her way through a day at work, much less six months of casual comments. She suspected that Leslie was disappointed and embarrassed by her performance at the shelter. Their friendship was dying and Maureen was too distracted by the past to make it right.

Chapter 7
    DRIFTWOOD
    They were on the edge of the city center, in what used to be one of the busiest docks in Britain. The area had withered, the houses were run-down and the few shops were transient and dilapidated. Leslie parked the bike around the corner, out of sight of the I so that she could drink and drive without being reported. She kicked down the stand, bending down to chain the bike to a lamppost, leaving Maureen standing alone on the pavement.
    Misty, unforgiving rain fluttered nervously around the head of the streetlights. Across the busy road stood a row of tenements with a twenty-four-hour grocer’s on the corner. A huge gray concrete housing scheme loomed above the roof, the little square windows framed with cheap curtains. Designed as a series of reclining rectangles, the flats zigzagged along a straight line, joined end to end by lift shafts, like a futuristic city wall peopled by a plebiscite who could be spared in the event of an attack. The wall blocked the wild south wind from the street and squally vortexes had formed in the vacuum, sweeping the litter back and forth. On fine summer evenings plastic bags hovered twenty feet above the tenement for hours at a time,