Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

  They had sat quietly together, Shuggie and his visitor, perched on the edge of the neat single bed and looking out on to the tenemented street. Protestant families were eating their dinners in front of televisions, and the charwoman who lived opposite was eating alone at her drop-leaf table. The pair drank in silence and watched the others go about their normal routines. Mr Darling kept his thick tweed coat on. The weight of him on the bed rolled Shuggie into his broad side. From the corner of his eye Shuggie watched the yellow tips of his thick fingers stab nervously at themselves. Shuggie had only taken a mouthful of the lager to be gracious, and as the man spoke to him, he could think only about the taste of the tinned ale, how sour and sad it tasted. It reminded him of things he would rather forget.

  Mr Darling had a considered, half-closed way to himself. Shuggie tried his best to be polite and listen as the man told him how he had been a janitor at a Protestant school that they had shut and merged with the Catholic one to save the council money. To hear him tell it, Mr Darling sounded more astounded that the Proddy weans should be running with the Catholic ones in peace than he was to find himself out of a job.

  “Ah jist cannae believe it!” he had said, mostly to himself. “In ma day a person’s religion said something about them. Ye came up through the school having to fight yer way there through bus-fulls of cabbage-eating Catholic bastards. It was something to be proud of. Now any good lassie will sleep with any dirty Mick as soon as she’d lie with a dog.”

  Shuggie pretended to take a light tug on the beer, but mostly he let it swirl around his teeth and trickle back into the can. Mr Darling’s eyes were searching the walls for a sign. Then he stole a sideways glance at the boy and asked, suddenly unsure of his audience, “So, what school did ye used to go to?”

  Shuggie knew what he was after. “I’m not really one or the other, and I’m still at the school.” It was true, he didn’t belong to either the Catholics or the Protestants, and he still did go to school, when he could afford to not be at the supermarket.

  “Aye? What’s your best subject then?”

  The boy shrugged. It wasn’t modesty, he generally wasn’t good at anything. His attendance had been patchy at best, and so the thread of learning was difficult to follow. Mostly he went and sat quietly at the back so that the education board wouldn’t come after him for truancy. If the school knew how he lived, they would have been forced to do something about it.

  The man finished his second can and quickly set about his third. Shuggie felt the burn of Mr Darling’s finger against the side of his leg. The man had set his hand on the mattress, and the little finger, with its gold sovereign ring, was barely touching him. It didn’t move, or wriggle. It just sat there, and that had made it burn all the more.

  Now Shuggie stood in the damp bathroom holding his parka closed. Mr Darling pulled at the edge of his tweed bunnet in an old-fashioned greeting. “Ah jist chapped to see if ye were around the day?”

  “Today? I don’t know. I have some messages to run.”

  A cloud of disappointment crossed Mr Darling’s face. “Miserable day for it.”

  “I know. But I said I would meet a friend.”

  Mr Darling sucked at his large white teeth. The man was so tall he was still straightening to his full height. Shuggie could imagine generations of Protestant weans lined up in single file and terrified in his long shadow. He could see now that the man’s face was flush, a line of drinkers sweat already on the edge of his brow. The man had been bent at the keyhole, Shuggie was sure of that now.

  “That’s a pity. Ah’m jist away to cash ma dole, might stop in at the Brewers Arms, then put a wee line on. But afterwards ah was hoping we could share a few cans. Mibbe watch the fitba results on the wee telly? Ah could teach ye about the English leagues?” The man looked down on the boy, he dug his tongue into his back molars.

  If he played it right, the man was always good for a few pounds. But it would take too long to wait on Mr Darling to cash his unemployment; to stoat from the post office to the betting shop to the off-licence and then home, that was if he found his way home at all. Shuggie couldn’t wait that long.

  The boy let go of the parka then, and Mr Darling pretended not to stare as the coat gaped slightly. But the man seemed unable to help himself, and Shuggie watched as the grey light in his green eyes dipped. Shuggie could feel it burn into his pale chest as the man’s gaze slid down over his loose underwear to his bare legs, the unremarkable, white hairless things, that hung like uncut thread from the bottom of his black coat.

  Only then did Mr Darling smile.

  1981

  SIGHTHILL

  Two

  Agnes Bain pushed her toes into the carpet and leaned out as far as she could into the night air. The damp wind kissed her flushed neck and pushed down inside her dress. It felt like a stranger’s hand, a sign of living, a reminder of life. With a flick she watched her cigarette doubt fall, the glowing embers dancing sixteen floors down on to the dark fore-court. She wanted to show the city this claret velvet dress. She wanted to feel a little envy from strangers, to dance with men who held her proud and close. Mostly she wanted to take a good drink, to live a little.

  With a stretch of her calves, she leaned her hipbone on the window frame and let go of the ballast of her toes. Her body tipped down towards the amber city lights, and her cheeks flushed with blood. She reached her arms out to the lights, and for a brief moment she was flying.

  No one noticed the flying woman.

  She thought about tilting further then, dared herself to do it. How easy it would be to kid herself that she was flying, until it became only falling and she broke herself on the concrete below. The high-rise flat she still shared with her mother and father pressed in against her. Everything in the room behind her felt so small, so low-ceilinged and stifling, payday to Mass day, a life bought on tick, with nothing that ever felt owned outright.

  To be thirty-nine and have her husband and her three children, two of them nearly grown, all crammed together in her mammy’s flat, gave her a feeling of failure. Him, her man, who when he shared her bed now seemed to lie on the very edge, made her feel angry with the littered promises of better things. Agnes wanted to put her foot through it all, or to scrape it back like it was spoilt wallpaper. To get her nail under it and rip it all away.

  With a bored slouch, Agnes fell back into the stuffy room and felt the safety of her mammy’s carpet below her feet again. The other women hadn’t looked up. Peevishly, she scraped the needle across the record player. She clawed at her hairline and turned the volume up too loud. “Come on, please, just the one wee dance?”

  “T’chut, no yet,” spat Nan Flannigan. She was feverish and arranging silver and copper coins into neat piles. “I’m just about to pimp out the lot of ye.”

  Reeny Sweeny rolled her eyes and held her cards close. “Ye have one filthy mind!”

  “Well, don’t say I didnae warn ye.” Nan bit the end off a slab of fried fish and sucked the grease from her lips. “When I am done taking all your menage money at these cards ye’re gonnae hiv to go home and fuck that bag o’ soup bones you call a husband for more.”

  “No chance!” Reeny made a lazy sign of a cross. “I’ve been sitting on it since Lent, and I’ve got no intention of letting him get at it until next Christmas.” She pushed a fat golden chip into her mouth. “I once held aff so long I got a new colour telly in the bedroom.”

  The women cackled without breaking their concentration on the cards. It was sweaty and close in the front room. Agnes watched her mammy, little Lizzie, carefully studying her hand, flanked by the bulk of Nan Flannigan on one side and Reeny Sweeny on the other. The women sat thigh to thigh and tore at the last scraps of a fish supper. They were moving coins and folding cards with greasy fingers. Ann Marie Easton, the youngest amongst them, was concentrating on rolling mean-looking cigarettes of loose tobacco on her skirt. The women spilt their housekeeping money on to the low tea table and were pushing five- and ten-pence b
ets back and forward.

  It bored Agnes. There was a time before baggy cardigans and skinny husbands that she had led them all up to the dancing. As girls, they had clung to one another like a string of pearls and sang at the top of their voices all the way down Sauchiehall Street. They had been underage, but Agnes, sure of herself even at fifteen, knew she would get them in. The doormen always saw her gleaming at the back of the line and beckoned her forward, and she pulled the other girls behind her like a chain gang. They held on to the belt of her coat and muttered protest, but Agnes just smiled her best smile for the doormen, the smile she kept for men, the same one she hid from her mother. She had loved to show off her smile back then. She got her teeth from her daddy’s side and the Campbell teeth had always been weak, they were a reason for humility in an otherwise handsome face. Her own adult teeth had come in small and crooked, and even when they were new they had never been white because of the smoking and her mammy’s strong tea. At fifteen she had begged Lizzie to let her have them all taken out. The discomfort of the false teeth was nothing when compared to the movie star smile she thought they must give her. Each tooth was broad and even and as straight as Elizabeth Taylor’s.

  Agnes sucked at her porcelain. Now here they were, every Friday night, these same women playing cards in her mammy’s front room. There was not a single drop of make-up between them. Nobody had much of a heart to sing any more.

  She watched the women fight over a few pounds in copper coins and let out a bored huff. Friday card school was the one thing they looked forward to all week. It was meant to be their respite from ironing in front of the telly and heating tins of beans for ungrateful weans. Big Nan usually went home with the winnings from the kitty, except for the times when Lizzie would have a lucky-handed winning streak and got a slap for it. Big Nan couldn’t help herself. She got jumpy around money and didn’t like to lose it. Agnes had seen her mother get a black eye over ten bob.

  “Haw you!” Nan was shouting at Agnes, who was engrossed with her own reflection in the window. “Ye’re bloody cheatin’!”

  Agnes rolled her eyes and took a long mouthful of flat stout. It was too slow a bus for where she wanted to go. So she filled her gullet with stout and wished it was vodka.

  “Leave her be,” said Lizzie. She knew that faraway look.

  Nan returned her gaze to her cards. “Might have known you two were in cahoots. Thieving bastards the pair o’ ye!”

  “I’ve never stolen a thing in my life!” said Lizzie.

  “Liar! I’ve seen ye at the end of a shift. Lumpy as porridge and heavy as oats! Stuffing your work pinny full of rolls of hospital toilet paper and bottles of dish soap.”

  “Do you know the price of that nonsense?” asked Lizzie indignantly.

  “Aye, of course I do,” sniffed Nan. “Because I actually pay for mine.”

  Agnes had been floating around the room, unable to settle. Now she nearly upended the card table with an armful of plastic shopping bags. “I bought youse a wee present,” she said.

  Nan usually wouldn’t have allowed the interruption, but a gift was free and she knew better than to pass that by. She tucked her cards securely into her cleavage, and as they passed the plastic bags around, each woman drew out a small box. For a while they sat in silence contemplating the picture on the front. Lizzie spoke first, a little affronted. “A bra? What am I wanting with a bra?”

  “It’s no just any bra. It’s one of those Cross Your Heart bras. It does wonders for your shape.”

  “Try it, Lizzie!” said Reeny. “Auld Wullie will be at you like it’s the Fair Fortnight!”

  Ann Marie took her bra from the box; it was clearly too small. “This bra isnae my size!”

  “Well, I tried my best to guess. I got a couple of spare, so mind and check all of them.” Agnes was already unzipping the back of her dress. The alabaster of her shoulders was shocking against the claret of the velvet. She unhooked her old bra and her porcelain breasts slid out; she slipped herself quickly into a new bra, and her breasts lifted several centimetres. Agnes dipped and spun for the women. “A fella was selling them off the back of a lorry down Paddy’s Market. Five for twenty pound. Pure magic, eh?”

  Ann Marie rummaged and found her size. She was more modest than Agnes, so turned her back to the room as she took off her cardigan and slipped off her old bra. The heaviness of her tits had left red strap welts on her shoulders. Soon all the women except for Lizzie had unfolded their dresses or unsnapped their work coveralls and were sitting in their new bras. Lizzie sat with her arms across her chest. The others, almost bare from the waist up, were running their hands along the satin straps and staring down at their own tits and cooing appreciatively.

  “This might be the most comfy thing I’ve ever worn,” admitted Nan. The bra was too loose across the back and was doing its best to hoist her enormous breasts off the shelf of her belly.

  “Now those are the boobs I remember from when we were lassies,” said Agnes approvingly.

  “Dear God, if only we had known then what we ken now, eh?” said Reeny. “I would have let any bastard that wanted a feel play wi’ them right then and there.”

  Nan rolled her tongue lasciviously. “Pure shite! You were never one to keep your hand on your ha’penny anyway.” She was already keen to get back to business and was pushing coins around the table again. “Right, can we all stop looking at oorsels like a bunch of stupit lassies.” She gathered the cards back up and started shuffling the deck. The women still hadn’t drawn up their tops.

  Lizzie tried to quietly burst the cellophane on a new cigarette packet. The other women were hawkish, growing sick of smoking harsh rollies and picking tobacco off the ends of their tongues. Lizzie sniffed, “I thought we were smoking our own?” But it was like eating ham hock in front of a pack of strays; they would give her no peace. She grudgingly passed around the fresh pack, and everyone lit up, enjoying the luxury of a manufactured cigarette. Nan sat back in her bra and held the smoke deep in her lungs as she closed her eyes. The air in the room grew hot and curdled again as the smoke swirled and danced with the paisley wallpaper.

  Now and then fresh air pulled in and out of the sixteenth-floor window, and the women blinked at the sharpness of it. Lizzie drank her cold black tea and watched as the women all descended towards the darkness in their moods. Fresh air always did this to the drunk. The light, gossipy energy was leaving the room and being replaced by something stickier and thicker.

  There was a new voice. “Mammy, he won’t go to sleep!”

  Catherine stood in the living room doorway with a look of exasperation on her face. She held her little brother on her hip. He was becoming too big to be held like that, but Shuggie clung to her tight, and it was clear how he loved the bony comfort of her.

  Catherine, sour-faced for sympathy, pinched at his wrists and pried him from her. “Please. I can’t handle him any more.”

  The little boy ran to his mother, and Agnes swept Shuggie up into her arms. There was the static crackle of nylon pyjamas as she spun him, content at last to have someone to dance with.

  Catherine ignored the fact that the women were sitting, half-naked, in new bras. She searched the debris of fish suppers. She preferred the smallest brown chips, the curly skins that spent too long in the fryer and became crispy in the hot fat.

  Lizzie smoothed her hand across Catherine’s hip. Everything about her granddaughter seemed meagre, somehow unfeminine. At seventeen Catherine was long-limbed and boyish, with waist-length, poker-straight hair and no real curves. Fitted skirts seemed a disappointment on her. Lizzie had an absent-minded habit of rubbing her hand over her granddaughter’s hip, as if this might cause some sudden femininity to raise up. From pure routine, Catherine pushed Lizzie’s fussing hand away.

  “Here!” said Lizzie. “Tell them about that smashin’ job ye’ve tain in the city.” She didn’t pause to let her granddaughter speak but instead turned to the women. “I’m that proud. Assistant to the chairman. That�
�s almost like being the gaffer yourself, eh?”

  “Granny!”

  Lizzie pointed to Agnes. “Well! That one thought she was going to get by on good looks. Thank fuck somebody’s got brains.” Lizzie crossed herself quickly. “I’ll gladly go up the confession for boasting.”

  “And swearing,” said Catherine.

  Nan Flannigan did not look up from her cards. “Now that ye’re working, doll. First thing to do is open two bank accounts. One for when ye take a man. The other one for yersel. And never fuckin’ tell him about it, eh.”

  The women all murmured agreement at Nan’s wisdom.

  “So, no more school then, hen?” asked Reeny.

  Catherine stole a sly glance at her mother. “No. No more school. We need the money.”

  “Aye. The state of the day’s world ye’ll be supporting any man ye do get.” The women all had men at home. Men rotting into the settee for want of decent work.

  Nan was growing impatient again. She rubbed her chapped hands together. “Listen, Catherine, I love ye, hen.” She sounded insincere. “When ye are our first Scottish space cadet I’ll be sure and pack ye some sandwiches for yer trip. Till then . . .” She motioned to the cards, then pointed to the door. “Fuck off.”

  Catherine slunk over to her mother and reluctantly took Shuggie from Agnes’s hip. Her little brother was fascinated by the plastic slider on his mother’s bra strap.

  “Is our Alexander in for the night?” Agnes asked.

  “Uh-huh. I think so.”

  “What do you mean, you think so? Is Alexander in the bedroom or not?” The bedroom was too small to misplace a lanky fifteen-year-old. It barely held the bunk beds for Catherine and Leek and the single bed for Shuggie. Still, Leek was a quiet soul, given to watching from the edges, capable of disappearing even when someone was talking to him.

  “Mammy, you know what Leek’s like. He might be.” That’s all she would say. Catherine spun on her heels, a whirling fan of chestnut hair, and as she carried Shuggie out of the room, she sank her fingernails into the soft of his thigh.