Paper Cup

Karen Campbell

Description

What if going back means you could begin again?Rocked by a terrible accident, homeless Kelly needs to escape the city streets of Glasgow. Maybe she doesn't believe in serendipity, but a rare moment of kindness and a lost ring conspire to call her home. As Kelly vows to reunite the lost ring with its owner, she must return to the small town she fled so many years ago. On her journey from Glasgow to the south-west tip of Scotland, Kelly encounters ancient pilgrim routes, hostile humans, hippies, book lovers and a friendly dog, as memories stir and the people she thought she'd left behind forever move closer with every step. Full of compassion and hope, Paper Cup is a novel about how easy it can be to fall through the cracks, and what it takes to turn around a life that has run off course.

Sujets

• Scotland
• Escocia

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 02 juin 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781838855116
• Langue: English

Extrait

Also by Karen Campbell
The Sound of the Hours Rise This Is Where I Am The Twilight Time After the Fire Shadowplay Proof of Life

First published in Great Britain, the USA and Canada in 2022 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
Published in the USA by Publishers Group West and in Canada by Publishers Group Canada
canongate.co.uk
This digital edition published in 2022 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Karen Campbell, 2022
The right of Karen Campbell to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 1 83885 509 3 eISBN 978 1 83885 511 6
I worry about the weather that’s to come.
Karine Polwart, Wind Resistance
To Dad
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Epilogue
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1
A flutter and a swoosh. A fairy-winged, tulle-wound woman waltzes with a chamber pot on her head. Birling in the rain. Teetering on her peerie heels, stumbling into, then onto a bench.
In memory of Jessie Keane who loved to sit here .
The bench is damp. Smells of pish. The girl shuffles into the corner. A bedraggled bride, who will wake in the morning with no memory of the grand denouement of her hen night, but with a long, moss-coloured smudge on the back of her skirt. She flexes her toes. Surveys George Square through bleary eyes. Glasgow girls don’t do insouciant walking home with heels in hands after a night out. Invariably the ground is wet or covered in sick, and there will be jaggy unmentionables poised to bite your flesh.
Her shoes fall on their sides, unable to support their own height now her stockinged feet are free. It is an elongated, solid bench she sits on, built to hold many citizens. The drizzle makes a gauzy sheen of lamp posts, buses. Around her, the square is magnificent. Tinsel Town gleams, the city moist and mobile. Glasgow is a living beast of sandstone and grit, of smart-mouthed sideways humour, of traffic cones as modern art and soaring grandeur and dear, dear green places, of glittery puddles reflecting Victorian statues – men, all men, and one torn-faced queen – of deer grazing by gravestones, of the Molendinar Burn and a gentle monk named Mungo, of chewing gum, pizza boxes, tumbled ginger bottles, multicoloured faces and fluttering doos. Pigeons. Hunners of them. It is a place that has welcomed her to its bosom as a dancer would drag you into a ceilidh, sweat-drenched, barely pausing for breath. Four years of study has brought her here: one MA (Hons), some decent friends, and a passable fluency in Weegie. She practised hard. Folk thought her Galloway accent was Irish at first – or worse, from Edinburgh.
The night rain, settling on her. Seeping. Home tomorrow. To her lilac and turquoise bedroom. To French toast, knitted slippers and a shelf full of Beanie Babies that her mother still dusts. The girl begins to cry. She’s lost her pals and her head hurts. The veil that drapes from the potty is held by an elastic band, which cuts into her forehead. Stupid, stupid thing. It’s meant to be lucky – a sign that she will soon be great with child. She cries even harder. Her ears ache – her hens have been banging the potty all night, even after they stuck it on her head. Her pockets jingle with the change they collected in the potty’s plastic bowels, demanding pounds for a kiss. Selling her for kisses, to all men, any men, in the pubs they visited, even out on the streets. One old boy said he’d need to take his teeth out first. She retches, tries to remove the potty, but her hands can’t make proper contact with her head. They slither and drag: there is something very wrong. Jesus, she’s had a stroke. She’s had a stroke and Connor is bound to call it off; who’d want a bride that canny even smile? Panicked, she tries to touch her face. Can’t feel anything beyond a dull, padded sensation.
Whorls of people pass, dancing in the dark. All of them strangers. One boy showers another with the remains of his kebab; a taxi driver shouts. Contained trees drip despondently. Tonight, the City Chambers flies the rainbow flag and is lit in pink.
The smell of urine increases. She isn’t that drunk, surely? A mass at the other end of the bench stirs. Lifts its head.
‘Shh. Sorry, mate,’ she says. ‘Go back to sleep.’
The tramp adjusts his hat. In the rainburst arc of street light, his hair is glowing, and she cries all the harder.
‘I’m sorry. Sorry, pal. Jus ignore me.’
The figure doesn’t move. He is a statue on her bench, as stoic and weathered as the stone poets and politicians who adorn the square. The girl’s voice echoes inside her body, swimming with all the cocktails and Chardonnay; it is loud and splashy, but surprisingly lucid. So. Her tongue works fine. Just her hands that are wonky.
‘I’m really happy – I am, I am. I’m just a wee bit emontional. Is my hen night, see. So. I’m great. But I canny find ma pals.’ She hiccups, and a taste of sick is left behind. Her feet are cold. ‘Bloody went for chips ’n’ cheese. The lot of them! No me. Am not blowing it now – I’ve lost two stone, y’know? Cause I’m getting married in the morning! Is why . . . this.’ She waves dismissively at her headdress. ‘Ach, it’s not tomorr . . . One week tomorrow . . .’ She pauses. ‘Nope. Today. Wow. Canny believe it’s so quick, is come round so quick, ah canny believe it. Cause you’re planning and planning for ages, then whoosh! Just like that, is here it is. And there’s so much to do, and this is meant to be my night out, let my hair down, y’know, and now I’ve got this stupid thing stuck on my head and my hands don’t work and my pals have went and left me. Even my sister, and she hardly knows Glasgow at all at all.’
The tramp hasn’t moved, she doesn’t think he has, yet he seems more huddled, cowed in on himself. The girl’s skin is clammy; freezing rods of rain run down her neck. She tries to focus on the figure, but he is blurred. A smelly blur of coat and . . . cardboard? Half man, half rubbish. She giggles at her cleverness. Swallows.
‘I love him. Connor. Know? I mean I really, really love him.’
Still the tramp does not move. That nasty taste, swilling in her mouth. Salt. She needs salt. She licks the back of her rained-on hand, but her tongue sticks. Her flesh feels thick and distant. Thick hands. Useless. All that rain, and the man just absorbs it. She closes one eye, to see the shape of him better. What must it feel like, to not go home tonight? To not get dry, or get a heat in you? Ach, but there will be places. Places for folk like these. There’s another one over there in the doorway of the Chambers. Or maybe it’s a lassie peeing? Hard to tell through the shadow and smudged, liquid light. No one has to sleep on a bench in the rain anyway, and anyway, even if they wanted to, the police would move them on. When they had the Commonwealth Games here. That had been so brilliant. You didn’t see folk on benches then. The sun had blazed and the streets were shining. Blue Saltires, blue sky. Even the Clyde seemed blue. It was as if they’d lifted the giant rug that Glasgow sprawled on, and swept all the grubby bits underneath.
‘My head hurts.’ She cradles the pot between her muffled hands. The weight feels as if it will break her neck. ‘Gonny feel like crap tomorrow. And am going back down the road. Two hours on a shoogly train. Just for the wedding, but. Not to stay. Stay in bloody Gatehouse? No way, José. Ow.’
She’s forgotten not to shake her head. George Square tilts violently. Yet the people walking and smoking and waving arms for taxis, they keep going about their business fine. She grips the arm of the bench. Braces her spine against its wooden slats. The cold and miserable wet slaps in, rendering her slightly sober.
‘Nobody’s even heard of it; I just say Dumfries now, even though that’s nowhere near. Like when you go abroad and they say where’s Scotland and you go, near— Oh!’
Through long spears of rain, she can see her tribe – ten strident woman, chucking chips, come screeching, seething towards their bartered bride.
‘Where the buggery hell were you?’ she yells becomingly.
‘Where were you?’ her tribe yell back.
The girl rises from her bench, forgets she wears no shoes. ‘Shite!’ Her tights, sooking puddle water. In tandem, her ballast at the other end of the bench also shifts; the tramp is throwing off his cardboard blanket, ruffling as if his rags are feathers. ‘How could you all just leave me, eh? I’m supposed to be the . . . Oh! I canny even get this . . . It’s stu . . .’ Great juddering sobs flooding, surprising her, but it isn’t the indignity of the potty stuck on her head, or that her feet are snagged and saturated – and they’re Wolford tights, not cheap . . .
‘I can’t get . . .’
‘You’ve still got your Marigolds on, you daft bint.’
Of course. Along with the potty and the fairy wings, they’d put her in a tutu and bagged her hands in rubber gloves.
No. It is the way the tramp is watching her, like he’s hungry. God, of course he is hungry, but it is not for food, she thinks, it is for her, for this blaze of action, for being in the centre of a whole, and laughing, and going into the warm – not for jealousy, no, it is instinct, it is the instinct of the lost, and she feels she can’t breathe because he has real eyes, proper ones that have a colour and everything, how they bore into her, reaching in with pale, hard determination.
The girl recoils. It is too human, this face, and she wants to get away; it’s why folk fling money at the