Deviant (2 page)

Nieve reached inside and handed Abigail a small, framed Polaroid: colorful protesters in Glasgow’s George Square with
NO NUKES!
placards.

“That’s me at the very front, and that’s her, there, the pretty
one, third from the left in the second row. See? In orange and red? Same build as you?”

Abigail scrunched her eyes to look at the tiny red and orange protester.

“She has the same slender figure as you, see!” Nieve said. “Thank God for small favors.”

Nine-year-old Abigail could only confirm that the woman in the photo was indeed slim and that her features were regular. As for pretty, she couldn’t really tell.
This is my mother?
she remembered wondering.

Nieve was already dying then. And she knew it.

Abigail glanced at her grey Nike backpack at the foot of the bed. The photo was tucked in the side pocket. Apart from Nieve’s silver chain with the key on it—which Abigail had worn around her neck since Nieve’s death—it was the only memento she kept of anything remotely resembling “family.” She unzipped the backpack. Her fingers did not tremble. They were remarkably steady. She touched the frame, turned it around and opened it, retrieving the small piece of paper she’d hidden there several years ago: a cut-out photocopy of her mother’s face enlarged and enlarged again. Abigail had made the copy in the office of her fourth children’s home while the care workers were dealing with a fight in the girls’ bathroom.

It was a blur.

Her mother was a blur. An after-image.

Abigail grabbed her coat from the hall. Camelia was watching
Arachnophobia
. Abigail could relate; she’d spent many hours on the same couch watching the only DVD she owned:
The Shining
. A family of three, snowbound in a cursed hotel for the winter, forced to cope with Jack Nicholson’s terrifying descent into violent madness. Abigail had always loved it, though not because she felt trapped. She loved it for the wee boy, Danny. He had the “shining”: a psychic ability to read the future, see into the past, and communicate telepathically with those who had it, too. It was this power that enthralled—to be so close to someone that she could see the whole of that person’s mind, and that person hers. A nonsensical pipe dream. God, she wasn’t even close enough to anyone to communicate properly with words.

Camelia fidgeted at the hairy spider legs on the screen.

She should be nervous. Dirt-poor with a mother in desperate need of medical help, Camelia had posted on the web that she was seeking a job to support her family back in Romania. Within hours, she had a “boyfriend”: Billy, who fell in love with her sight unseen, compensated her for her ticket, picked her up at the airport, then dumped her at the hostel with an “I’ll be back shortly.” Camelia had been waiting on the sofa ever since.

Billy was very well-known at No Life. He was twenty-seven or so, with the stocky physique of a rugby player and the slang of a boy who’d stopped going to school not long after being toilet trained. No one ever called him a pimp, but he was. No one ever called him a human trafficker, but he was. Abigail had shared bedrooms with two of Billy’s previous “girlfriends.” One had died of an overdose. The other was still selling herself on Glasgow Green. Billy’s strategy was to meet girls online or at
the hostel, rootless and homeless and perfect little earners. He would get them hooked and send them off to the street.

He’d tried this routine with Abigail shortly after she’d arrived at No Life, offering a hit for free. She’d told him what he could do with himself.

Abigail stared at Camelia. The poor girl chewed a cracked fingernail, compulsively glancing out the window and checking the clock on her phone.

This isn’t my problem
.

O
UTSIDE IT WAS RAINING:
surprise, surprise. God, she hated this city.

“My mother is dead,” Abigail said out loud as she walked along the leafy street, wondering if this might make her feel something, anything. It didn’t.

“My mother is dead,” Abigail said again. She sloshed past the Kelvingrove Art Gallery. Apparently the man who designed this beautiful red sandstone building had killed himself afterward. They’d made it the wrong way around, rumor had it. Nonsense, obviously, as both sides were identical. If he’d killed himself, it wasn’t because of the building. It was because he wanted to. And at the end of the day, who wouldn’t?

“So she’s dead,” Abigail said out loud. “So what? Who gives a shit?”

Glasgow dripped onto Abigail as she walked the three blocks to the hospital. The rain coated her with memories. When she was thirteen, she’d asked the residential workers if she could have a picnic in Queen’s Park. Not only did it rain, but one of
her nobody friends slashed another of her nobody friends with the birthday cake knife. The whole gathering ended up waiting in Accident and Emergency for four hours. Yet the social workers couldn’t understand why she preferred to sit alone in her crap room and read.

In her second-to-last year at the residential school in Granoch, having learned quite a bit on her own, she asked if she could take chemistry
and
physics. But the timetables clashed. It was surprising they had the science subjects at all, considering some pupils her age were still reading
Spot the Dog
. In the Principal’s office, she argued calmly at first, then not so calmly, and then called the Principal a bloody idiot. As a result, she was banned from taking either subject. That night, she waited till it was dark and jumped out the dormitory window. She ran as far away as her legs would take her. The police found her a day later, sitting among the shattered glass of a vandalized bus shelter, drenched from the rain, and starving.

Will I die here
? she wondered. Soaked in a polluted drizzle? Would she be burnt in a crematorium overlooked by decaying high-rises? Would the wet clumps of her body ash be tossed to concrete?

The better question was: Why wouldn’t she?

Glasgow University bore down with its wise and unseen eyes. She had never been inside, but often she’d watched from the sidewalk as students strolled along stone-pillared open-air corridors. Straight-shouldered and purposeful,
they
were clean. Taken care of. They were part of the sandstone columns, manicured walkways, and antique wooden doors. Now she could
see their silhouettes in the cozy bar windows; now the grand spire of the university loomed over her from Gilmorehill, as if declaring: “
You will never come to me. You are just another abandoned Glaswegian. You are a care-leaver, a homeless teenager, and now, an orphan. You think you’re clever? Well you’re not. You will never read inside me
.”

Well, screw the university. Their loss. Screw the whole lot. Who’s to say there wasn’t some posh version of Billy getting rich girls hooked on smack in there?

She turned away, dodging puddles. She wondered if her mother’s body would still be at the hospital. She wondered if she would have to look at it.

“M
Y NAME IS
A
BIGAIL
Thom. My mother, Sophie Thom, died here last night. Apparently she left something for me.”

The receptionist tapped away at the computer before directing her up the stairs to the second floor and then to the nurses’ station in Ward B. There, Abigail repeated the above sentence, word for word.

“Can you spell that?” asked the pinched-faced nurse.

“Of course I can.”

The nurse didn’t find this funny. She was Scottish, after all. Scots didn’t find funny things funny. Scots liked to be miserable. Why else did they play the bagpipes? Why else did they drink and smoke themselves into early graves? Why else did they pledge undying love to crap soccer teams that failed at everything but religious bigotry?

“A-B-I-G …”

“Not you, your mother.”

“Oh. D-E-A-D.”

The nurse had typed three of the four letters into her computer before raising her eyebrows and looking up from above her cheap glasses. “I’m very busy.”

“It’s Sophie. S-O-P-H-I-E.”

“Last name?”

“Thom. T-H-O-M.”

“Just a moment.” The nurse tapped into the computer.

Abigail looked around her. Ten beds lined each side of the room, curtains in between, some drawn, some not. The beds were all occupied. All the women looked the same: withered, yellow, and 173 years old. Her mother had probably been in one of those beds. Which one?

“Follow me.”

The smell of antiseptic was even stronger in the private room than in the ward. Perhaps they doused the rooms of the dead with an extra bottle. There was a window at one end overlooking the murky River Clyde and its ominous ship-building cranes. There, below it, was a single bed under a buzzing fluorescent light and a sheet-covered body.

As if in a dream, Abigail walked to the head of the bed, lifted the sheet, and looked down at the face. She felt a flicker of the faintest recognition from the photo. But this woman was old, a stranger. Her eyes were closed. Her lashes were thick and black, no mascara. Her eyebrows were full, nice shape. Abigail stared. Her mother had plucked a little, yes, but not much. No need.

Hmm, so that’s where my tiny pinned-back ears come from
.
Had she tattooed lip liner onto her lips? They were full, and defined at the edges. Not thin Scottish lips at all. Exactly like Abigail’s, in fact. She could see from the shape of the sheet that her mother’s once-slim build was now emaciated, dead-thin.

She’d imagined meeting her mother many times. Never like this. Was she beautiful? Can a dead face be beautiful? Her hair was still a lovely, raven black. But mostly, she was dead, and, no, dead cannot be beautiful.

After gazing at the face for another ten seconds or so, Abigail turned and walked toward the door.

“Wait!” the nurse called, replacing the sheet. “She left you something, remember?”

Abigail stopped but didn’t turn around. The nurse retrieved a plastic bag from the bedside cabinet and handed it to her.

“Thank you,” Abigail choked out. And then she was hurtling through the corridor and down the stairs so fast that she had to lean against the brick wall of the hospital when she finally made it outside. Her breath came in heavy gasps. She realized she was clutching an old, thinning Tesco supermarket bag. There was something square and heavy inside.

Calming herself, she walked down the hill and across the road into the park. The rain had stopped, but she didn’t notice. Climbing over a fence into the woodland by the river, she found a spot under a tree and emptied the Tesco bag of its contents: a thick padded package about twenty centimeters square. Abigail laid the plastic bag on the wet grass, sat down on it, and examined the package. It was inscribed with a thick, black marker.

For my daughter Abigail Thom: URGENT!!!

She picked at the sticky brown tape and tore it off.

Money.
Jesus
. Abigail’s eyes widened. Her heart fluttered. British Pounds, lots of them, bundle after bundle after bundle of twenties.

One of the bundles fell to the ground. She glanced around the shadowy park, afraid that someone may have seen her—then scooped it up with trembling fingers and shoved it all back in the supermarket bag. She scrambled closer to the river and knelt in the mud, no longer worried about getting wet or dirty. The park was deserted. She unfolded the typed letter that had come with the package. Inside the letter was an American Airlines e-ticket. She gripped it as she read.

Her mother signed a squiggle at the bottom of the letter. A signature, in black pen.
No wonder she typed the letter
, Abigail thought. Her handwriting! It was terrible, almost illegible, with little flecks of ink everywhere. She must have been very sick. With all the shaky markings, it almost looked more like
Stophie Them
than
Sophie Thom
.