Belfast Girls Page 9

  An anxious face at one of the upstairs windows disappeared and, a moment later, Timmy was opening the door.

  “Up here,” he said.

  Sheila followed him along the hall and up the narrow flight of stairs to the second floor.

  Timmy’s flat was like most student digs, but with a large front room. On the shabby old sofa Mary was stretched out full length, breathing heavily. Sheila went over to her.

  Mary’s face was very red and her breathing sounded strange. All of a sudden Sheila felt frightened.

  “What was she on?” she asked, trying to keep her voice steady.

  “Different things,” Timmy answered vaguely. “She had her own stuff, I didn’t ask. There was some shit, we all had that, but that was ages ago. Everybody else finished tripping and went home a couple of hours ago, but Mary had had some tabs as well, I’m not sure what, maybe E, and she just seemed to conk out round about the time everyone was going.

  If I’d realised, I’d have made some of them stay and help, but it was only when I came back from letting the last people out that I found her lying there like that. I thought she’d just sleep it off, but then I got worried. I’m glad you’re here,” he finished with obvious relief.

  Sheila, she thought to herself, wasn’t glad. But in a way that wasn’t true – she was glad someone responsible was there even if she would have preferred it to be someone else. Perhaps she could do something. Timmy was clearly helpless.

  She bent over Mary, felt her pulse, listened to her breathing, then she shook her a little but with no result.

  “Right. This has gone far enough. I know you don’t want Mary’s parents to find out, Timmy, but you should have had the sense to realise that Mary needs help. Go and call a doctor – quick!”

  Timmy gaped at her, then, obeying the autocratic note in Sheila’s voice, he went obediently to the phone which was outside his door on the communal landing.

  It was a coin box and Timmy had no more change.

  Sheila felt like screaming as his worried face re-appeared round the doorway asking for money.

  Hurriedly she searched her pockets for small coins, and at last the call was made.

  Then there was nothing to be done but wait.

  The doctor, not best pleased at being called out in the evening, was inclined to be irritable at first, but as soon as he saw Mary this changed. He said very little, examined her briefly, and then went to ring for an ambulance.

  Sheila went in the ambulance with Mary to the hospital. It seemed somehow important not to leave her with strangers. Timmy stayed behind. He had promised the doctor to ring her parents and let them know the name of the hospital.

  At the Royal Victoria Hospital, where Mary was taken, people wanted Sheila to answer questions, to tell them what drugs Mary had taken.

  “I don't really know,” she kept repeating to different nurses or doctors. “I wasn’t there. I don’t really know. She used to be my friend but I haven’t seen her for ages. I only got there a few minutes before we rang the doctor. I told Timmy to ring as soon as I saw her. I don’t know what she had taken – Timmy mentioned heroin.”

  The nurse or doctor would nod gravely and hurry away, to be replaced a few minutes later by another one who would ask the same questions.

  In between this, Sheila sat forlorn in the waiting room on a hard chair beside a table covered in out-of-date magazines and Readers Digests.

  She didn’t feel like reading anything.

  Presently, she was joined by a couple who she remembered vaguely as Mary’s parents. John’s parents, too. The woman was smartly dressed with tinted blonde hair which had probably once been as fair as Mary’s own.

  They both looked bewildered, unable to take in what was happening.

  Each time a fresh person came to ask Sheila the same questions, she tried, when she had done her best to give answers, to get an answer in turn to the only question which she could think of, the only one which mattered.

  “Will she be all right?” she kept asking. “Will she be all right?”

  And one after the other, the people whom she asked would shake their heads and reply as if it was some sort of stock answer, “We’ll just have to see. It’s too soon to say. We’ll just have to see.”

  It was after midnight when a doctor in a white coat and with a stethoscope round his neck, which gave him the artificial air of someone in a TV programme, came in and called Mary’s father out to speak to him privately.

  Sheila waited with the woman who was Mary’s mother.

  After a while, the father came back in. His face showed nothing but he went to his wife and put his arms round her.

  “It’s all over,” Sheila heard him say. “She’s come round. She’s going to be all right.”

  They went out together, the man’s arm still around his wife. Sheila sat on. Presently a nurse, passing the waiting area, noticed her and came in.

  “Didn't someone tell you?” she asked. She was a kind-looking, plump, middle-aged woman.

  “Tell me what?” Sheila asked. She knew the answer. For some reason she needed to hear it in words.

  “It’s okay, pet,” said the nurse. “It’s good news. Your friend came round half an hour ago. She’ll be okay.”

  Sheila looked at the nurse and was unable to speak.

  “Okay, pet,” the nurse repeated. “You’d better go home now. There’s nothing here to wait for. You can’t speak to her tonight. If you need a taxi, there’s a phone just round that corner down the corridor.”

  Kathy’s car was still sitting outside Timmy’s flat. It was within walking distance although they had come in the ambulance. Sheila went out and walked across town until she came to it then drove home. She felt a curious numbness.

  How could Mary so nearly have been dead?

  The world seemed to be wrapped in cotton wool. Everything seemed very far away.

  She wasn’t going to faint or anything stupid like that. She just didn’t seem to be in very close touch with reality. After a while, she drove slowly and very carefully home. She parked the car, went into the house, and went straight up to her room. In the last few hours, the whole world had changed, and yet there were the books about Milton just as she had left them when Kathy called her to the phone.

  Sheila sat down on the bed and found that she was crying as if her heart was breaking.

  Chapter Twenty

  That same March, Phil put into action a plan which had been in her head for some time and moved in with Davy.

  She told her parents that she would be living in a shared house with some friends and they inquired no further. She was never sure if they really believed in the friends, supposedly female, or if they simply turned a blind eye for the sake of peace.

  Davy, who had graduated last year with the sort of good degree which opened the door to him for research as he had hoped, had left the small, badly furnished room in the house off Ormeau Road and taken a more up-market flat, self-contained, in Thomas Street. It was still not one of the more expensive residential areas, for even as a post graduate student Davy’s income would not run to much, but it was private and good enough for the time being. It was also within reasonable distance of the University.

  Phil had spent her time trying not to know what Davy was doing. She had made up her mind to accept him as he was, without preconditions.

  But as the situation worsened and the loose cannons among the ex-paramilitaries more and more turned into gangsters, and shootings of rival drug dealers became a commonplace, it became harder and harder to pretend that this had nothing to do with herself and Davy.

  There was one particularly horrifying day when the news seemed to consist of nothing but drug trafficking and stories of illegal immigrants forced into prostitution.

  Phil sat curled into a miserable ball in the largest and softest of the armchairs in the flat, listening to the news on the radio and wishing Davy would come back.

  She was half listening and half dreaming, wondering when it would
all end, when she caught a familiar name.

  “Crackle crackle …” said the radio, “Tomas Peter O’Dade, aged twenty three, of Malone Avenue, Belfast, was shot and killed today by masked gunmen believed to be involved in the trafficking of heroin. O’Dade, who was dead on arrival at hospital, is believed to have been a drug dealer himself on a smaller scale and to have been involved in a number of incidents concerning drugs where ... crackle crackle crackle ..."

  Phil leaned forward and turned off the radio. She felt numb. Tomas O’Dade. He had been one of Davy’s closest friends since before Phil and Davy had met. It must be the same Tomas O’Dade. The age and the address put it beyond all doubt. Phil could not cry. She was beyond that easy relief. It was so horrible that someone she had known, someone Davy knew so well, was lying dead and himself responsible, if the report was true, for so much misery in other lives.

  Only a few years ago, he had still been at school – they had all been at school – with no vague premonition of what so short a time would bring.

  It was impossible. So Phil reflected with the surface of her mind. Underneath something worse stirred and refused to be entirely pushed down. It could just as easily have been Davy.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Spring came round again, lighting up the candles on the chestnut trees, smothering the cherry and apple trees with soft pink and white blossom, scenting the air with the smell of newly cut grass. In pursuance of her good resolutions, Sheila sat with her feet up in the Reading Room at the Students’ Union quietly eating a Chocolate Flake and getting to grips with Samson Agonistes.

  There was a noise of clattering feet at the far end of the room and Gerry Maguire appeared.

  Sheila looked up.

  She had a class test tomorrow and the last thing she wanted was to be interrupted.

  But it seemed clear from his smiles and gestures that Gerry had been looking for her, had seen her, and was now heading in her direction.

  Gerry, now a final year law student, had changed noticeably in the last couple of years. He had grown and matured, and would have impressed someone meeting him for the first time as a responsible, adult person fully in control of his life.

  Sheila, however, was quite aware that beneath this surface stability there still lurked the old, reckless boy, the rule-breaker, she had known since childhood, and his first words confirmed the suspicion generated by something in his expression that Gerry was up to something again.

  “Sheila, honey, am I glad to see you!” he greeted her, in something which, while clearly intended as a take-off of an American accent, suffered in dramatic impact from the need to whisper.

  A tall, blond boy with gold rimmed glasses looked up from the next carrel and frowned angrily.

  “Shush!” he said.

  “Shush!” said Sheila in turn, putting her finger on Gerry’s mouth.

  “Ooh – sexy!” he said, grinning. “All right, I’ll shush, but you’ll have to come on out of this morgue, I need to speak to you.”

  Sheila shut her book resignedly and followed Gerry out. The Union bar, which sold beer and low alcohol wine, was nearby. Gerry seized Sheila’s hand, and propelled her inside.

  “Sheila,” he began, as soon as they were sitting at a table in a convenient alcove with lager for Gerry and Coke for Sheila in front of them, “I’ve had a brilliant idea. Now, stop me if you don’t like it –”

  “Stop,” said Sheila.

  “– don't mess – Sheila, have you ever thought of entering a Beauty Contest?”

  Sheila looked at him.

  “No,” she said.

  “Seriously. The heats for Miss Northern Ireland are about to be run. The cash prizes are amazing – well, compared to grants! You would walk it, Sheila, no question. Wait –” he held up his hand as Sheila tried to speak, “– what I thought was, if I do all the organising for you, sort of like an agent, then you might think of paying me a 10% fee out of your winnings. I’ve had my eye on a second hand car for ages but I couldn’t think how to get the money together – but this would be a cinch. If I did all the agent’s side of things for you, I could feel I’d really earned the fee and we’d both be happy!”

  “Gerry, if you were depending on a fee from my winnings you’d be waiting a long time for your car,” Sheila said, shaking her head to clear it.

  “No, really, Sheila, you’ve always underestimated yourself. There’s no question, you’d be up there in the top three at the very worst. Give yourself a chance, girl!”

  Sheila, about to laugh, caught the gleam in Gerry’s eye and suddenly paused.

  Was it such a crazy idea?

  The money would be very nice to have. And if Gerry did all the organising, it wouldn’t interfere with her work.

  Could she possibly have any chance of winning?

  Accustomed all her life to thinking of herself as unattractive, Sheila had just begun over the past few years to realise that some people thought otherwise.

  Who was right?

  If she entered this Beauty Contest and got, say, through the first heat at any rate, it would prove to herself once and for all that she could be considered pretty.

  But – a Beauty Contest? People like them, Kathy would have said, just didn’t have anything to do with such vulgar things. It was against all the rules.

  Sheila suddenly found herself consumed by a fierce longing to show everyone that she could do it, to prove that she was attractive not just to a few weird people but to the official judges in these matters. It was a bit like taking an exam – once you had passed it, everyone had to accept that you were good at that particular thing.

  If she didn’t enter, she would never know for sure.

  “Well, Gerry,” she said. “Tell me more. What would I have to do?”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The preliminaries for the Miss Northern Ireland Beauty Contest were to be held in a hotel outside the city in nearby Lisburn. Contestants were to present themselves there at 10.30 in the morning which seemed like a strange time to Sheila.

  “It’s because this is just the selection round,” explained Gerry, waving the letter he had received in response to his application in Sheila’s name. “They just use this as a weeding out stage. They’ve already decided you may be a possible on the strength of your photo, and now they need to see you in person. After you pass this round, there’ll be a series of heats and then the final.”

  “How am I to get out to Lisburn for this preliminary by 10.30 am?” asked Sheila. “I could take a train or a bus, I suppose, but supposing it rains and I get soaked on the way? It won’t be a very good start.”

  “No problem,” Gerry said, “I’ll borrow my Da’s car. Now, what are you going to wear?”

  They ran through Sheila's wardrobe, discarding one item after another. This was too dull, that was too old fashioned.

  In the end, they went out together and bought brown, shiny, satin very short shorts with a low bib and teamed them with a green top with tiny buttons down the front which Sheila had always liked, and which Gerry pronounced acceptable provided several buttons were left open to give a more plunging neckline.

  Phil had a pair of green stiletto heeled shoes which were still at home and Gerry made Sheila borrow them to complete the outfit.

  Sheila put the lot on and said, “I look like a tart.”

  “Rubbish!” said Gerry enthusiastically. “You look great! Magic!”

  Sheila smiled weakly. Inwardly she wondered what John would think if he could see her.

  He had always been particular about what she wore, forbidding her on one occasion to go out with him in a mini skirt which she had planned to wear to the pictures, and frequently buttoning up her blouses at the neck when, to Sheila's eye, they were already quite respectable.

  A shiver of defiance ran through her.

  “Who cares!” she thought, not for the first time. “John doesn’t care about me – why should I worry what he would think with all his silly rules?”

  It
seemed a long time since the days when she had been so happy, when she had been seeing John regularly.

  It was over a year since that catastrophic row on the river bank.

  At first she had hoped desperately to make it up. She had written to him saying how sorry she was. On one humiliating occasion, over six months ago now, just before Christmas, she had phoned the house and asked to speak to him and, after a pause, Mary had come back on the line and told her that John was out.

  Sheila knew that Mary was lying.

  Although she knew that it was from motives of kindness, and although Mary tried to keep up a friendly, chatty conversation and pretend that nothing was wrong, Sheila could not manage her own end of it.

  She rang off abruptly. She found that she was shaking violently, mostly with anger.

  John had written her off because she didn’t fit in with his own image of what she should be.

  He had never cared for the real Sheila, only for his own idealisation of her.

  Okay, then. She would put John’s ideas behind her. From now on she would be herself. And if John didn’t like it, tough for John! She accepted that it was over. John had finished his degree course now and had taken up the post he had been promised with the BBC as a trainee journalist. He had gone out of Sheila’s life, and the more she could accept that the better. She really thought about him very seldom these days,

  She told herself. The beauty contest, when it came along, was one more way of showing John Branagh how little she cared now for his opinion.

  * * *

  The preliminaries went off very successfully. Sheila and Gerry turned up at the hotel at the right time and, after Sheila had walked up and down for the panel of judges and had answered a few simple questions, they were told that she was through to the first heat and would be given details of the time and place within the next few weeks.

  There were a number of heats but each contestant would take part in only one and the eight finalists would be the heat winners.