Exile by Denise Mina

farther down the pavement. The woman wore a thin dress and had the man’s jacket over her shoulders, as if she’d come out for a drink in June and had been caught out by the change of season. The traffic thinned and Maureen crossed over.
    The entrance to the flats was down a set of stairs and across a concrete-slabbed yard. At the base of the block a row of shops sat boarded up and empty. Only the solicitor’s and a cut-price fag shop were doing any business. Maureen picked her way across the uneven paving stones, avoiding the treacherous puddles, and opened the door into a white-tiled foyer. The lift call button had been melted with a lighter. She pressed it and a distant red light signaled to her from behind the lumpy blackened plastic.
    She looked at the address on the scrap of paper. Leslie had scribbled “thanks” at the bottom, as if Maureen were a vestigial friend doing her a favor, an unhappy reminder of the gray time before Cammy and the bracing breeze in her cleavage. The lift arrived and she stepped in, pressing the button for the second floor. As the doors slid shut she was engulfed in a cloud of dried ammoniacal urine. Someone had been pissing in an ambitious arch, trying and failing to reach a felt-tipped IRA slogan on the wall. A wet cloth would have wiped it off but he probably didn’t have one handy in his trousers. The doors opened on the second floor and she stepped out quickly, anxious to escape the sharp smell.
    A gray concrete veranda stretched away from the lift, overlooking the busy main road. The long gallery of front doors was interspersed with small bathroom windows glazed in mottled glass. One or two of the doors had been customized, painted and fitted with fancy doorbells and alarms, letting the neighbors know that it was a bought house. Number eighty-two had not been customized. The door had been painted with thin red gloss a long time ago. Time and the weather had dried it, lifting the luster, cracking and flaking it off the wood. The bell had been ripped out of the door frame, leaving an empty socket in the joist.
    Maureen chapped lightly, glancing down the corridor and reminding herself where the stair exit was. The door opened a crack and a tall, skinny man looked out at her. His eyes were open a little too wide and underlined by dark purple hollows, lending him the look of a startled pigeon. Leslie had been right: he wasn’t the robust man in the Polaroid, he was a lifeless sliver of a man. He blinked, glancing behind her to see if she was alone. “Aye?” he said, brushing his thinning hair back from his face, tentative, expecting trouble.
    Maureen smiled. “Is Ann in?”
    “She doesn’t live here anymore.”
    “D’ye know where I could get a hold of her?”
    From deep inside the house came the noise of something falling heavily onto a solid floor and a child began to wail. The gray man took a deep breath, turned back into the flat and left the door to fall open. The living room was bare, the grimy hardboard floor dotted with offcuts of carpet. The wallpaper had been ripped off, leaving papery patches on the gray plaster, and in place of a sofa stood a plastic child’s stool and a worn brown armchair. The house was a testament to long-term poverty. Maureen thought of Ann and wondered how many desperate schemes had been hatched and abandoned here, how many fights about spending, how many distant relatives and lapsed friends had been considered for a tap. A blue sports bag sitting against the far wall caught her eye. The green and white sticker looped around the handle seemed familiar and troubling somehow. Intrigued, Maureen stepped into the hall, pulling the front door shut behind her.
    The man was standing over two tiny boys with Ann’s clashing pink skin and fluffy yellow hair. They were babies, much younger than the boy in the Polaroid, and were thin, their rib cages visible under their skin, their baby fat eaten away by need. The man had been in the middle of changing them