Lipstick like war paint. Jewelry like armour.
Outside, the men in the pub are noisy. Cups are banged down hard in drunken fists, quarrels are broken out. The acrid fumes of animal fat and unwashed bodies curl in and under the door to the bathroom, where Polly stands silent before a dim mirror, at war with herself and the growling need for a cigarette. Her hands have pruned from all of her washing: there is no more blood on them, but she still feels the sticky rot of it against the jutting of her bones. Fuck, what good is cleanliness when the stain is inside? Polly reaches up one trembling hand to touch the harsh lines of her cheek, trying to remember that she is still here. That she has not yet dissolved into the air along with the gunshot that had ended him.
Remember. Remember.
There is a sachet inside the pocket of her coat – of a cloying lavender smell – one that she had bought years ago in an attempt to strangle out the staleness of Small Heath. Lavender: a flower for mourning, for remembrance. The irony isn’t lost on her.
In the smoky darkness of the lavatory, Polly thinks of Inspector Campbell. She thinks of his cold, leering smile as he devoured her, and then she replays the moment she pulled the trigger – remembers how the recoil of the gun jolted up her arm, the finality of it all in his vacant eyes as he went reeling, hot blood gushing from the whorish wound. The satisfaction she expected is elusive. Killing him hasn’t killed her shame. It is never enough – this is what she feels, and that is what torments her.
The others will call this murder justice, Polly knows, for what he did to her. They will call it justice or they will call her filthy. Her own son calls it humiliation; he calls her harlot. But she had done it for him, in the end – had sold herself for his freedom because like hell she’ll let him rot in that cell. Twelve years had been enough of a separation – like hell she’ll let her child slip through her fingers again. She loves him, and she knows him – these are the locks of hair that she had spun herself, those are the eyes that she had once suffused with light. She loves him and will love him no matter how many times he spits in her face.
These thoughts are not kind; they fester. Clutching the ledge of the smudgy sink, Polly squeezes shut her eyes – but there is no asylum in the dark. She sees Campbell there, too: hangdog and desperate for a few more years of breath in his black lungs as the bullet found him. Not fearful but surprised – like he had never considered that she could end him. Gypsy Fenian Slut, he’d called her. Christ’s sake, the bastard had it coming. Still, it doesn’t feel enough. She wants to drag his body around Small Heath fifty times with a horse cart until the corpse is bloody and unrecognizable and fouled with dust. You ruined me. You ruined my son. And you ruined us.
An insatiable need to expel all of this anguish consumes her. She needs to smoke her life away or she will die. She longs for that fetid tar to coat her insides – the wanting wraps its tendrils around her throat like a chokehold and Polly fumbles for the packet in her pocket. With shaky fingers she sets one alight. And breathes in. The flame flickers as an orange glow at the end of her paper delight, and relief washes over her in torrents.
In the sink is a torn piece of spare paper that fell out when Polly grasped at her pack of cigarettes. She finds a pen in that same pocket, and, with a fag bit between her teeth, the words come like a flood. She writes about the silence that had swallowed her after Campbell’s assault, the way she’d swallowed it in turn, swallowing it so deeply she thought it might kill her. She writes about the anger, the shame, the nights she’d sat submerged in the same bathtub trying to claw herself out of her misery for the family. She writes about the gun, too, cold and heavy in her hand, and the way she’d walked away with a blood stain on her dress. When she is finished, Polly folds the paper deliberately into a square and tucks it into her lavender sachet. It feels absurdly like burying something, a ritual she doesn’t fully understand but performs anyway.
I am still here.
Polly stands straighter, slams the door to the lavatory closed, and rejoins the men in the pub, with their sweaty faces and black eye-pits and wet mouths that flare, half-dark, half-flame. Then she orders for herself a glass of Cognac.
***
Michael is waiting for her outside of the pub. She sees his silhouette and does a double-take, coiling back into herself and stopping abruptly in her step. The cigarette hangs loosely from her mouth. Her son is dark against the pale glow of the streetlamps, but he steps forward – he steps closer. Good Lord, he’s still here in this godforsaken city with its stench burrowed in his hair and clothes.
“Mum,” His voice is worn and distant, and the word passes through her like a blade, “I –”
Polly stands in front of him and her lips thin. She remembers what he said to her when she went to him that day he was getting taken out of prison. The guards told me what you did, they thought it was funny. Maybe it is. She remembers, too, how he dismissed her when she unloaded all that money onto his desk, when she told him she loved him.
“What the hell are you doing here, Michael?”
There is an apology in his eyes, she sees, but he knows better than to offer her sympathy and he knows better than to make things right with soft words.
“Tommy told me you’d be here. I came to see you.”
Polly exhales a cloud of smoke and snubs the fag out on the brick wall beside her. “You shouldn’t be here. I told you to go to London.”
Michael stops a few feet away, his eyes studying her face as if trying to decipher the lines there. "I didn’t come to argue, Mum."
She's not sure if she wants to fight or fall apart. What has happened to them? What has she done wrong? Polly’s never been good at showing weakness, so she crosses her arms stiffly in front of her chest and stares right through him. "What d’you want then?" The words come out harsher and more defensive than she intended, but they feel like the only armor she has left.
“I just – don’t know.” He says, and she hears the strain in his voice moments before it breaks her heart, “With Major Campbell… I didn’t want you to have to make that choice.”
They both know what he is talking about.
“I just…”
He’s struggling for the right words, but Polly doesn’t need him to explain. She knows, in the way mothers do, that it’s guilt, regret, and maybe something else too: a need for reconciliation, for her to tell him everything is going to be alright, even when she knows it won’t be.
“Just come inside,” Polly says after a long pause. “I’ll buy you a gin. You’ll catch something awful if you stay out here.”
***
Brandy runs down her throat like fire. Michael is a drinker, too, and he drowns himself in gin. The heave in the pub has subsided; the big shadows have gone back to being bodies of men, shouting, crowding in close shoulder-to-shoulder. She orders him a hearty meal for his hearty appetite: a steak and kidney pie loaded with thick gravy and mashed potatoes. Polly sips her second glass of alcohol as he scarfs down his food; she is fond of this overabundance in him of the animal nature, which reminds her of youth and passion, as well as who she herself had once been – twenty-something and half in love with everything.
“You always eat like you’re starving.” says Polly, softly enough that it doesn’t cut.
He looks up, startled, forehead glistening with a faint sheen of sweat. For a moment he contemplates this, and the corners of his lips quirk up into something like a smile. “Maybe I am.”
Starving – for what? She doesn’t ask. For peace? For forgiveness? For a life that doesn’t feel like a punishment? Her son is in front of her – solid and tangible and real – after all those years of existence robed in the mulberry shadows of her dreams, and she still can’t quite believe it. His fork scrapes the last bit of pie from the plate.
“So,” she says finally, breaking the silence. “You’ve been skulking around Birmingham all this time.”
Michael doesn’t pause mid-bite, doesn’t meet her gaze. “Didn’t feel like going to London.”
“No?” Her voice hardens just slightly. “That’s funny, because that’s exactly where I told you to go.”
Now he glances up, and there’s something defiant in the way he meets her eyes, so like his father in the throes of his own youth, except less reckless fury and more deliberate resistance. “I’m not hiding, Mum.”
Polly lights another cigarette, leaning back against the seat. Her sharp gaze doesn’t waver. “You think you’re not? Then why’d you come running back to this place, crawling into its gutters?”
He peers at her with half a mouthful of steak, and his jaw tightens as if swallowing down something heavier than food. “You.”
The word is like a punch in the gut. Polly flinches imperceptibly, taking a long drag of her fag. She has always wanted better for him. Someone better, someplace better. She is only hauling him through the mud and through her sins.
“What’re you saying, Michael?”
“I’m saying I’m staying.” His gaze when it meets hers once more is fierce, even. “I’m not a boy anymore, Mum. I can do more than you think.”
Polly scoffs out a half-laugh that feels more like a grimace. “You really think you’re ready to get your hands dirty?”
“I know I am. I’m not afraid.”
She lets the silence stretch between them like a canyon, her dark eyes boring into his as if she can see all the way down to his bones. She wants to tell him that fear isn’t what makes a man unfit for this life. It’s the lack of it. The way it hollows you out and leaves nothing but steel and spite where there should’ve been flesh and love.
“Stubborn bastard.” She mutters, but there’s no heat in her voice – only the ghost of a smile that doesn’t quite reach her eyes.
Michael downs the rest of his drink. “Runs in the family.”
An exhale. The smoke rises as plumes from the tip of her fag, curling up toward the ceiling. The men in the pub are unaware of what is happening in their midst; they continue to shout one another down in boisterous arguments and raise their mugs in drunken toasts. Polly looks at her son and sees in his eyes – unapologetically – both the boy she remembers and the man he is trying to become. It is extraordinary – this gulf at which he is attempting to reconcile his two sides, his two stories, the future and the past. Polly sits quietly in the stillness that surrounds her, despite the noise that the men make, and contemplates this.
“God help you, Michael,” she murmurs at last. “Because no one else will.”