Belfast Girls Read online

  When several more pushes had no effect, Sheila remembered her stiletto heels and kicked Ronnie Patterson sharply on the legs, meanwhile beginning to scream in good earnest.

  She didn't want to hurt him badly but, on the other hand, he seemed to have no reservations about hurting her.

  She was on the floor, struggling wildly, with the famous Ronnie Patterson on top of her tearing at her expensive hired dress, when she heard a furious hammering at the door of the room.

  “Help!” Sheila shrieked. “Help me, someone!”

  “Sheila!” a voice outside shouted. “Sheila, is that you in there?”

  “Yes!” Sheila shouted back. “Help me!”

  The door flew open.

  Gerry was standing on the threshold, looking red and belligerent.

  Behind him hovered an anxious looking figure with a bunch of keys whom Sheila recognised as the hotel manager.

  Ronnie Patterson looked round and blinked. He got slowly to his feet, saying nothing.

  Sheila scrambled up.

  She stood swaying for a moment, then rushed into Gerry's arms. They seemed very solid and comforting.

  Gerry, his arms round her in turn, patted her soothingly on her back.

  “Sheila,” he said, anger and worry making his voice rough, “are you all right? I should never have got you involved in this business. It was a big mistake. I didn’t realise the sort of thing I was letting you in for.”

  He glared at Ronnie Patterson who stood brushing himself down, and smiling.

  He seemed, incredibly, to have recovered his public image already and to be ready to laugh the whole episode off as a bit of a joke.

  A pay-off to the hotel manager, no doubt, in order to avoid bad publicity, and he would carry on as if nothing had happened.

  Except, Sheila thought, for the steadily growing rumours which would catch up with him one day.

  “But, Gerry,” Sheila said, “I won!”

  “I know you did, pet – you were great. I knew all along that you would. But it wasn’t worth all this.”

  “Yes, of course it was,” Sheila said. “It’s one of the best things that ever happened to me. I’m glad I did it, Gerry. I’ll always be grateful to you for suggesting it, and for encouraging me.”

  She leant over to kiss him, and then stepped back from his still supporting arms.

  “Mind you, I was never so glad to see anyone as to see you just now!”

  “All part of a manager’s job,” said Gerry flippantly.

  He looked at her doubtfully, still uncertain about her true reactions to the evening.

  “Come on,” said Sheila. “Let’s get away home out of here.”

  She smiled at him, slipped her arm into his, and propelled him out of the room amid the muttered apologies of the hotel manager.

  She thought, as she held onto his arm, still feeling very much in need of protection, that Gerry was a really nice person.

  What a pity she hadn’t fallen in love with him instead of with her other friend’s brother.

  Gerry had always been so kind to her.

  But she knew that he would never be more to her than a close friend, someone who she thought was almost as much her brother as Phil’s.

  She looked up at his worried face and smiled at him. What she had told Gerry was true. She said, partly to encourage him, but mainly because if she didn’t go on talking she would probably burst with the excitement of it all, “I feel like a million dollars!”

  “And you look like it, too!” Gerry said happily.

  “Gerry, I really think I’m going to burst, it’s all just so great!” Sheila told him.

  And, she thought, although she didn’t say so, to hell with John Branagh!

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  To Mary, slowly recovering from her overdose, living was a strange experience at first. She went back to Queen’s as soon as she could. She had decided to stop taking drugs. It was easier than she had expected. A revulsion rose up in her which made her feel physically sick at the bare idea.

  But to stick to her decision, she needed to cut herself off from her party friends.

  This was also easier than she had expected. They seemed to be avoiding her, perhaps unwilling to be identified with her by the authorities. She was on her own.

  The first weeks reminded her of her early days at Primary School when the sea of strange faces threatened to overwhelm her. She could hardly remember it, now. Ever since then, she had had the comfortable feeling of knowing at least someone wherever she went. Phil had been her friend through Primary School and all through the Dominican Convent days. Suddenly she had no friends.

  Mary, daring and adventurous, found that loneliness was a bad enemy. She seemed to herself to be a different person. It was as if her role in the play had come to an end and she was left standing in the centre of the stage, surrounded by people who knew their next lines, while she did not know what to do next; or in the middle of the playing field, completely ignorant of the rules of the game she was supposed to be playing. For so long, rules, for Mary, had been just a thing to be ignored.

  It took some time for the feeling to pass away.

  She had missed the end of the spring term and had come back into the last term of her second year.

  At first, she relied greatly on planned meetings with Phil or Sheila for coffee in the Students’ Union between lectures.

  Gradually, she began to make new friends.

  There were class tests due at the end of the term. Mary, panicking one day in a Physics lecture because she seemed to have lost an important chunk of notes which would be essential for revision, was searching frantically through her file when a neighbouring student tapped her on the shoulder.

  Looking round, Mary met a friendly smile.

  “If you need to borrow any notes, I can lend you whatever you need.”

  “Orla Greaves,” added the owner of the smile.

  “Oh – thanks, that would be great.” Mary smiled back. “I can’t think what I’ve done with them.”

  Orla looked at her gravely. “How about going down for a cup of coffee after the lecture and then we can decide what you need and sort something out?”

  They had almost completed the transaction when it occurred to Mary that Orla seemed strangely unaware that she would need the notes herself for the forthcoming test.

  “I’ll copy them and bring them back to you on Monday,” she promised eagerly.

  “That's fine,” said Orla off-handedly. “I’m sure you will.”

  Mary laughed. “Well, I will – but you don’t seem very worried. Suppose I don’t bother and you don’t have any notes yourself to revise from?”

  “Oh, I think I can trust you,” Orla answered. She looked at Mary seriously. “You seemed upset about having lost your own notes. I don’t mind taking the risk.”

  Mary looked at this strange girl.

  She had already noticed her in previous lectures, for Orla’s appearance was striking. She had a pale, smooth skin, with mid- brown hair cut to shoulder length which fell straight around her face. She wore clothes which to Mary’s eye seemed to have come from the second-hand clothes shops, shapeless dresses hanging to an unfashionable length.

  She was not exactly pretty but no-one could have called her plain. This was partly because of her wide, generous mouth, but mostly because of her eyes. A light, bright grey, set beneath thick black eyebrows which seemed to mark out her face as one which mattered, they burned with a fire which Mary could not put a name to.

  She thought of it as the face of a martyr – a twentieth century Joan of Arc.

  Over the term, Mary began to see more and more of Orla.

  She found Orla an interesting person, quite different from anyone Mary had known before.

  She had very little sense of humour. When Mary made a joke, Orla would look at her blankly, and then laugh, but only as if she knew that it would be an unnecessary unkindness not to do so.

  Her voice was strong, deep and yet mus
ical. She spoke seldom but, when she did, it was to the point.

  Mary talked to her about politics. Although Orla agreed with Mary about the state of the country, she could never be persuaded to go with Mary to any political meetings.

  “People need to change from the inside,” she said to Mary one day. “All the political agitation in the world won’t alter things if the tribal divisions continue. We need to stop hating each other and learn to forgive. Only God can teach people how to do that and He’ll only do it if we allow Him to.”

  Mary had never heard anyone say things like that before – or if she had, it had been people who she despised as woolly thinkers or smug hypocrites.

  But Orla couldn’t be put into that sort of category and dismissed.

  One day, when Mary was teasing Orla again to come to the New Ireland Society, Orla suddenly gave one of her rare smiles – a wide, charming smile which showed her even white teeth and gave her an unexpected beauty.

  "All right," she said. "Fair’s fair. I’ll go to your Society meeting, Mary, if you come with me to a meeting I go to every week. We meet in the Church of Ireland Centre but it’s not a denominational thing. Anybody who wants to can come – Catholics like you and me, and Protestants of all the different types you can name. I’d like you to come and see for yourself.”

  Mary hesitated. It didn’t sound like her type of thing at all. But as Orla had said, fair was fair. If she wanted Orla to come to her political meeting – and she really did, for some reason – then she ought to go to what, in her own mind, she labelled as ‘Orla’s religious meeting’.

  It need only be once, after all. And it might be quite interesting, at that.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  On a bright morning at the end of term, Phil wandered restlessly round the flat, barefooted and still wearing an old shirt of Davy’s which she had shrugged on when she got out of bed. Davy had gone early to the Ashby Institute where he had an experiment to work on for his Professor.

  Some vestigial instincts of housewifeliness prompted her to begin a little tidying. Davy, as usual, had left everything he used lying behind him. She picked up some items of clothing, folding some and dropping others into the basket for washing. Then she walked around for a while with a folded tee shirt in her hands, thinking about nothing and forgetting to put the tee shirt away. In the end, she pulled open a drawer at random, in the chest of drawers in the bedroom, and placed the tee shirt on top of its contents.

  As she was doing this, Phil noticed that there was something hard and bumpy one layer down. She lifted the top layer of tee shirts and found herself looking at a gun.

  It was a handgun. Not, Phil guessed, a particularly powerful weapon, in fact quite small. Phil stared at it for a few minutes, still holding the tee shirts she had lifted. She connected it, without any real evidence, with the man who had stayed over in the flat not long ago. But the stranger could not have put it in this drawer. He might have given it to Davy to look after and Davy had slipped it in there. Perhaps he had forgotten it.

  What was she to do now? Phil didn’t know. The gun might have been used in one of the punishment shootings or murders which regularly filled the news bulletins now. She had no way of telling. If it had not already been used in this way, there might be plans to so use it at some time in the future. It should be handed over to the police.

  If Phil took it and gave it to the police, perhaps by some anonymous means if she could think of any, would they be able to trace Davy’s connection with it?

  It seemed to Phil that this was the crucial point.

  She put the tee shirts into the drawer and shut it carefully. Then she went and made herself a cup of coffee, and sat down with her hands cupped round it while she thought.

  If there was any chance at all of the police tracing this gun to Davy, she could not give them that chance. On that question, she was not in doubt.

  If this gun was likely to be used to kill someone, then she needed to do something to prevent that. But what?

  If she told Davy that she had found it, what would his reaction be? Phil realised that she had no clear idea of that.

  Would it be possible to persuade him to hand it over, anonymously?

  Phil didn’t think so.

  Suppose she took it away and got rid of it herself? She could, for instance, throw it in the river.

  The trouble with that solution was that Davy would know at once that she had taken it. There was no-one else. So she might just as well speak to him about it.

  Back to square one. Phil felt lost. In the end, she stopped thinking. Dressing carefully and trying to distract her mind with thoughts of work, she went out to her lecture. It was lonely, in many ways, not having Sheila next door now. Phil had made many other friends, but Sheila was special. If she went home, and Sheila was there, Phil would be able to talk to her about the gun, perhaps. But at the thought of the gun, her mind squirmed away again, and she tried once more to blank it off.

  There was Mary, too. There had been a time when she could have talked to Mary about anything, but she had grown very far apart from Mary in the last two years. It was hard to remember when they had last talked together in any depth.

  Phil felt very alone. In the afternoon, avoiding her friends, she walked around Botanic Gardens looking at the new buds and smelling the sweet, powerful scent of the roses which were blooming freely. For a while she sat under a tree and watched some children and a dog racing about with a football.

  None of this seemed to help particularly. Finally, she went back to the flat.

  There was no sign of Davy, but Phil had her own key, and she let herself in. It was in her mind that she might collect up her possessions and think about going home for at least a few days. But she would go into the kitchen first and make herself a cup of coffee while she came to a decision.

  As she entered the kitchen, she stiffened. There was a smell of cigarette smoke in the air, but not from the type of cigarettes she and Davy smoked. This was a ranker, stronger smell. By the sink, an empty tea cup had been left, upside down, rinsed out, on the draining board. Phil knew it had not been there when she left that morning. It would not be Davy’s – he had his own mug which he always used, and which was hanging in its usual place by the wall cupboards.

  Phil discovered that her mind was now made up. Was she seriously planning to break it off with Davy? Even putting that thought into words gave Phil a sick feeling. No, that wasn’t what she intended. It was just that she needed to detach herself for a little from this place which had become curiously frightening.

  She wandered round the bedroom, gathering up the odds and ends of her belongings. The books would be the most bulky item, that and her notes. Perhaps she would not take those, just yet. It would be such a final step. Her clothes would go into one bag. She had kept very little in the flat.

  She stood for a moment looking at the chest of drawers. Finally, with a mental shrug for her stupidity, she pulled open the drawer, unable to resist the compulsion to check again that she had really seen a gun.

  There was nothing there but the shirts and underclothes.

  Although she knew that there had been no imagination, nothing but cold fact, in her previous sight of the weapon, Phil felt illogically as if a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. The gun had not vanished from the face of the earth, she realised. It was still around somewhere and might be used to destroy lives. But short of betraying Davy’s connection with it to the police – an impossible action – there was nothing left that Phil could do. She had no further decision to make now that the gun was no longer there to be handed in or disposed of.

  She gathered up her belongings and hurried out of the flat as if the devil himself were after her.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  The letter dropped through the Dohertys’ letterbox just after Sheila had left for the first lecture of the day some weeks into the new term. It was June in her second year with exams looming. All the hard work that she had been promising h
erself she would do ‘nearer the time’ was beginning to take on a dreadful urgency.

  It was a short day. After her second and last lecture, Sheila came straight home. It wasn’t worth hanging about for coffee. Instead, she would go to her room, sit at the new desk she had bought herself with some of her prize money, and really plan out a detailed scheme of work for her exam revision.

  The letter was lying on the hall table where her mother always scrupulously left her post unopened. Sheila picked it up and carried it to her room with an armful of books. Looking at it curiously as she went upstairs, she realised that the handwriting was unfamiliar.

  “Dear Sheila,” she read,

  “I saw you winning the Beauty Contest and a thought came to me. As you know, I am getting more established as a fashion designer. I’ve recently been promised more backing and I want to branch out a bit further. What I need most at the moment is a really striking model who is already in the public eye. I have a couple of girls who are trained, but from a public relations point of view they are nothing special.

  “How about it? The job’s yours if you want it. Any training you need, I can easily give you myself. If you are interested, we can discuss terms but I will happily pay the top of the market to get the model I want. Let me know quickly at the Belfast office address above.

  “Love,

  “Francis Delmara.”

  Sheila read it again. It still said the same thing.

  “Mum! Mum!” she called, then remembered that Kathy wasn’t at home. There was no-one in the house to tell.

  She rushed next door but, of course, Phil, as she knew, had moved in with Davy and Gerry was out, too.

  Sheila felt a mixture of excitement and frustration. Nothing like this had ever happened to her before and there was no-one to talk to about it.

  By the time Kathy arrived home from her afternoon’s shopping, Sheila had made up her mind.

  “I’m going to accept, Mammy,” she said. “I’ll regret it all my life if I don’t.”

  Kathy Doherty was at a loss. The feminine part of her was almost as thrilled as Sheila at the prospect. The sensible, forward thinking part, on the other hand, was horrified. What security was there in a job like that? And what about Sheila’s degree? She had been doing so well and Kathy had been looking forward to having a daughter who had graduated, and who was in a nice, secure, respectable job for life – teaching, most likely, she had always thought.