Mary always wished she could be a fly on the wall during one of her guys’ escapades, like the time Dean McBride fell asleep on the bookie’s counter mid-armed robbery. Right now, she was a fly on the window of her second-floor tenement, looking down at John Paul O’Donnell as he rummaged through the small bins in the back drying green. Mary sipped her wine as he contemplated the large bin, stretching on tiptoes and leaning in. His feet left the ground as he reached over, and Mary anticipated what happened next – that his food-filled backpack would tip him further than intended. She chuckled as Glasgow City Council’s best swallowed head, arms and torso, the legs wriggling skywards. Mary thought about tossing something at him, but she thought a can of tuna would kill him and she couldn’t think what else to throw. Also, Mary’s special talent had never been throwing. She was good at spitting, however. At uni, she could spit into Roddie’s mouth from six feet. If she was spitting gum or a peanut, her record was nine. She missed those romantic courtship days more than Roddie did.

His legs had stopped wriggling. Perhaps his head was trapped in a bucket. She was about to go down when his legs stretched wide apart and sprung backwards, and he landed on the ground, gymnast style.

Mary opened the window. ‘Oi, dickwad. It’s not there.’

He did a three-sixty at the hundred or so windows surrounding the pretty courtyard before settling on Mary. ‘Mary, doll! No, no, I was just…’ Once again, he decided against lying. ‘It’s really not?’

‘It’s really not.’

John Paul gave the thumbs-up and scaled a stone wall he need not have scaled, considering the gate was open.

18

K and Lil were best served separately. Every time Mary made the mistake of inviting them both to an event, which she did every six months or so, the night was a disaster. Mary couldn’t work out why. Lil had arrived first, bearing typically thoughtful gifts of wine, dairy milk, menthol cigarettes and a trash magazine called Wizz. ‘The woman on page thirteen has worse boob sweat than you.’ Lil always said the sweetest things.

K was panting when she reached the second landing because she was at least fifteen and a half stone. Fifteen and three-quarters, Lil reckoned. There was a spa day riding on who was right, if they could only get it out of her; but after the first attempt to be a girl group went sour (jeans shopping, oops), K advised them that if either skinny bitch ever talked about weight again she would cook them in a pit oven and eat them, bones and all.

They would never talk about weight again, not in front of K, anyhow, so not tonight. K had brought an agenda for tonight, in fact, which involved Mary having a large drink and letting it all out.