Shuggie Bain

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Shuggie Bain Page 5

by Douglas Stuart


  The taxi started climbing the tenemented hills of Dennistoun. Shug looked in the mirror and watched the woman, who was watching him. The Glasgow housewives always sat square in the middle, never to the side looking out of the window or on one of the fold-down seats like the lonely old men who were hungry for company. She sat as they all did, upright and rigid, like a Presbyterian queen, knees together, back straight, with her hands clasped on her lap. Her coat was pulled close around herself, her hair was set and brushed, even in the back, and her face was set tight like a mask.

  “It’s a wild terrible night, right enough,” she said finally.

  “Aye, the radio said it would piss all week.” There was something about the woman that reminded him of his own mother, dead and gone. The raw hands and tiny frame belied the strength and power that surely ran through her. He thought of the nights his father would raise his fist on his mother. The more she took it the more he rained down on her, turning her red then blue then black. Shug thought about her at the mirror, pulling her hair over her face, pushing her make-up wider around her eyes to cover the bruises.

  “Ah wis just saying I don’t usually get a taxi.” She was searching for his eyes in the mirror.

  “Oh, aye?” said Shug, glad to have his thoughts interrupted.

  “Aye, but I’ve had a wee win the night, you see. Just a wee one, mind, but it’s nice all the same.” She was rubbing her thumbnail raw. “It’ll come in right handy, you see, now that my George is out of work,” she sighed. “Twenty. Five. Years. Out at the Dalmarnock Iron Works, and all he got was three weeks’ wages. Three weeks! I went up there maself, chapped on the big red gaffer’s door, and I telt him what he could dae with three weeks’ wages.” She opened the clasp on her small hard bag and looked inside. “Do you know what that big bastard telt me? ‘Mrs Brodie, your husband was lucky to get three weeks. I have some young boys wi’ their whole lives ahead o’ them and they only got paid till the end of their shift.’ Made my blood absolutely boil so’in, it did. I said to him, ‘Well, I’ve got two grown boys at home to feed, and they cannae find any work either, so just what do you suppose I do about that?’ He looked at me and he didnae even blink when he said, ‘Try South Africa!’”

  She closed the bag. “They’ve never even been to South Lanark-shire, never mind South Africa!” She kept rubbing her red thumb. “It’s no right. The government should dae something. Shutting down the ironworks and shipbuilding. It’ll be the miners next. Just you watch! South Africa! I never! Go all the way to South Africa so they can build cheap boats there and send them home to put more of our boys out of work? The shower of swine.”

  “It’s diamonds,” Shug offered. “They go to South Africa to mine diamonds.”

  The woman looked as if he had contradicted her. “Well I don’t care what they mine, they could be pulling licorice out a black man’s arse for all I care. But they should be working here at home in Glasgow and eating their mammy’s cooking.”

  Shug put his foot on the accelerator. The city was changing; he could see it in people’s faces. Glasgow was losing its purpose, and he could see it all clearly from behind the glass. He could feel it in his takings. He had heard them say that Thatcher didn’t want honest workers any more; her future was technology and nuclear power and private health. Industrial days were over, and the bones of the Clyde Shipworks and the Springburn Railworks lay about the city like rotted dinosaurs. Whole housing estates of young men who were promised the working trades of their fathers had no future now. Men were losing their very masculinity.

  Shug had watched the thinning out of the working classes from their poor neighbourhoods. Middle-class civil servants and city planners had seen it a stroke of genius to ring the city with new towns and cheaply built estates. Given a patch of grass and a view of the sky, the city’s ills were supposed to disappear.

  The woman sat stiff and still on the back seat. The skin was wearing off around her thumbs, and worry sat around the corners of her mouth. Only when she patted the back of her hair did Shug know she was still alive. The taxi dropped her at the mouth of her close, and she pushed a pound tip into Shug’s hand.

  “Here, what’s this?” He tried to pass it back. “I’m no needin’ that.”

  “Gies peace!” she shushed. “It’s just a wee bit of my winnings. I’m spreading my luck around. Luck’s the only thing that’s gonnae get us out of this mess.”

  Shug took the tip reluctantly. Fuck the English tourists and their bastarding Kodaks. Shug had seen it before, those with least to give always gave the most.

  By the time Shug got back to the city centre the last picture had let out and the city was settling in for a few hours of cold sleep. Some of the late-night clubs were banging out music, but it was suicide to sit outside them waiting for a fare because the first drunks wouldn’t be spilling out till well after midnight. Shug sighed and thought about waiting around. Maybe he’d pick up a bird who’d been left holding all the Babycham while her pals danced with some fellas. The ugliest bird usually left first. He’d driven them home before, even waited with the meter off while they got some consoling bags of crisps and chocolate biscuits from the corner Paki. If you talked nice to them they were dead nice back.

  He had loosened his tie and settled in for the long wait when the soft voice came over the radio. “Car thirty-one. Car thirty-one. Come in.” His heart sank. It was Agnes, it had to be.

  He picked up the black reciever and pressed the button on the side. “Car thirty-one here.” There was a long pause, and he waited for the news.

  “You’ve been requested up at Stobhill, car for Easton,” said Joanie Micklewhite.

  “I’ve got a fare, and I’m taking them out to the airport. Do you no have a car closer?” he asked.

  “Sorry, sunshine! You’ve been specially requested.” He could almost hear the smile. “Punter said to take your time, there was no rush.”

  He hadn’t thought it’d be this. Agnes surely, or even his first wife after money for their four weans, but he hadn’t thought it would be this. They weren’t there yet, surely?

  The drive up to the old hospital was quick this time of night. The Royal Infirmary was where the football stabbings and giro-day domestics went. Stobhill was where Glasgow was born and where Glasgow died. Now a mousy girl was stood there in the glow from the foyer, wearing a blue cleaner’s apron. She clawed at her saggy tights and wriggled them straight and flat. Her make-up had spread from the cold and the tears, and he could see the ring of burnt doubts at her feet, like she must’ve been waiting in the cold for him her whole break. Shug smiled. She was only twenty-four and already his doormat.

  “I didnae think you were coming,” she said, climbing into the back of the taxi.

  “What did you call me out here fur?”

  “I missed ye, that’s all,” she said. “I haven’t seen ye in weeks.” She rolled her thick legs open and shut coquettishly. “You’ve no gone off o’ me, have ye?” She grinned.

  Shug turned in his seat. “Who the fuck do ye think ye are, Ann Marie? I’m tryin’ to make a livin’, and ye call me across the city like I wis a dog that pissed on yer carpet.” He slammed the heel of his fist on the glass partition. “We have to be discreet. Cool like. What the fuck do you think would happen if Agnes found out, eh? I’ll tell you what would happen. She’d get a haud of you by the scruff of yer neck and drag the length of the Clyde wi’ ye for starters. When she was done dragging yer body she would drag yer good name. She’d phone yer parents every night just after they’d gone to their beds. She’d wake them up and tell them that their good wee Catholic girl was carrying on with a married man.” He paused, watching his words take effect. “Is that really what you want?”

  The tears were running down her face and pooling on her apron. “But ah love ye.”

  Shug pulled the taxi in a sharp arc and parked in a dark corner of the empty car park. He glanced at his watch and then met her gaze again in the mirror. “Aye, well, take yer fucking knickers o
ff then. I’ve only got five minutes.”

  Shug felt hungry as he headed back into the city. He was certain Ann Marie wouldn’t call the rank for him for a while. She was a nice lassie, heavy tits and eager too, but she was cramping his style. That was the problem with the young ones; they saw no reason to not expect better for themselves. She’d definitely have to go.

  He was just thinking of the voice on the radio when it spoke to him again. “Car thirty-one, car thirty-one, come in.”

  He picked up the receiver and held his breath; he was running out of luck. “Joanie?”

  “Phone. Home. Now,” came the terse reply.

  He pulled the hackney over at the mouth of Gordon Street, and clipping coins out of his dispenser he made a quick dash through the rain to an old red phone box. It was wet on the inside and smelled like piss. He had tried ignoring Agnes’s orders before, but that just made things more difficult. She would be insistent and get more abusive as the night wore on. The best thing to do was Phone. Home. Now.

  It barely rang once before it was answered. She would have been sat at the pleather phone table in the hall, just drinking and waiting and drinking.

  “Hell-o,” said the voice.

  “Agnes, what is it?”

  “Well, if it isn’t the chief hoor-master himself.”

  “Agnes,” Shug sighed. “What is it this time?”

  “I know,” spat the drunken voice.

  “Know what?”

  “Know. Everything.”

  “You’re no making any sense.” He shifted uncomfortably in the tight phone box.

  “I knoo-ow.” The voice boomed, her wet lips too close to the mouthpiece.

  “If you’re gonnae keep this up, I’m gonnae have to get back to work.”

  There was a deep sob on the end of the phone.

  “Agnes, you cannae phone the rank any more, I’ll get the sack. I’ll be home in a few hours, and we can talk then. OK?” But there was no answer. “Well, do you want to know what I know? I know I love you,” he lied. The sobbing got louder. Shug hung up.

  The rain and piss had soaked through his tasselled brogues. Picking up the black receiver again, he hammered it against the side of the red booth. He knocked out three panes of glass before the receiver broke, before he felt better. Back in the taxi he had to sit still for ten minutes until his knuckles would let go of the choke they had on the steering wheel.

  Maybe he would feel better if he ate something. He fished around under his seat for his plastic piece box. It smelled like margarine and white bread, like marriage and cramped flats. The corned beef pieces Agnes had packed turned his stomach. He dumped them into the gutter and cut up several side streets till he pulled up in front of DiRollo’s chippy, open twenty-four hours, bog-standard. DiRollo’s was popular with both cabbies and prostitutes because of the unsociable hours and the discretion of its owner. There was a big red lobster painted on the sign, but nothing as exotic on offer inside.

  Joe DiRollo stood behind the counter, as he seemed to do every hour of the day. At night the fluorescent light made him look deceased. A small man, hair thin and slicked back off his face, with chip grease or Brylcreem or both. Like an oily iceberg only his swollen head and shoulders were visible above the counter. The rest of his sallow bulk was squished up against the machete he kept under the counter. He greeted everyone with a phlegmy clearing of the throat and tilting of his fat head.

  “How ye doin’, Joe?” asked Shug, with no genuine interest.

  “Aye, no so bad.”

  “Been busy with our fair ladies the night?” Shug shoved his thumb in the direction of a gaunt-looking customer who, eyes closed, was swaying on her feet.

  “Ehhhh, they been a-cumming and a-going, you know?” He laughed at his own joke. “No’ so good for business any more. They eat half a bag of chips, drink a ginger, that’s it! They ask to use the toilet, my own toilet, and auld Joe says, OK. He’s a nice guy, but they don’t come out for an hour, you know. They eat a half a bag of chips, and then they wash their cunts in my toilet.”

  Shug was eyeing the fried fish in the hot counter. “It’s the drugs. I widnae dare stick it in them any more.”

  “Aye, they’re dropping like flies. If the drugs are no doing them in, then some bad bastard’s choking the life out of them.”

  “You’ll put me aff ma whelks.” Shug pulled a tight face. “Gies a fish supper, extra salt and vinegar, would ye?”

  Joe took the white paper and dropped a heaped scoop of fat chips and a big bit of golden battered fish on it. He drizzled the hot food with salt and vinegar, and Shug circled with his fingers. “Mair, Joe. Mair.” The man piled it on till it was sodden.

  He handed Shug his parcel. “So, you never give me an answer to my offer. You want the wee house or no?”

  As well as running the chippy, Joe DiRollo was famous for grifting the Glasgow City Council. He signed up for subsidized flats under the guise of one of his many daughters. Then he rented them along, skimming an extra tenner a week over what the council originally charged him.

  “I’ll let you know,” Shug said, backing out the door. “Mrs Bain, well, she’s difficult.”

  “I’m surprised you want to move at all. Thought you would be living like a king up there in that Sighthill sky.”

  “The King is fine; it’s the Queen that wants a beheading. Just hold on to that empty house of yours a while longer. There’s a lot that has to be lined up first. I want it all to go perfect.” He smiled and bit into a fat chip.

  By the time Shug finished the last of the whelks there was only an hour or so left on the clock. He rolled down the windows as the sun broke the top of George Square, bathing the city in a warm orange light and setting the statue of Rabbie Burns on fire. It was the best time of day, the city at peace, before it got ruined by the diurnal masses. He watched the clock in anticipation and set off early for the North Side.

  Driving slowly all the way to Joanie Micklewhite, he left the windows down and flicked the green air freshener with his forefinger. She would finish her shift soon, and then they could say all the things they could not over the CB radio. He pulled the taxi in tight amongst four or five others and waited for her, slumped forward in his seat, grinning like a daft boy, watching the front door like it was Christmas.

  Four

  They were both still damp and sitting on the edge of the bed when the evening street lights came on. Agnes had run Shuggie a deep bath, and then, feeling lonely, she’d climbed in beside her youngest. Lizzie would’ve had a fit if she had seen. It would have to stop soon, he was too canny for five. It was the first time he’d looked at her privates and then considered his own, like a spot-the-difference puzzle.

  The water had grown cold as they made a great game of filling the shampoo bottles and then soaking each other with the soapy jet. She let him scrape at the old nail polish on her toes, his care and attention feeling like a penny dropped in an empty meter.

  At the edge of her bed, she combed the boy’s glossy black hair, as his head lowered in concentration. He made the Matchbox car squeal through the paisley maze of bedspread, it climbed over her bare leg as easily as the Campsie hills. Without knowing what he was looking at, he traced the white scars, the memories of Shug’s fingernails, that lined the inside of her thigh. Then the car careened back to the bedspread. The tyres would scream loudly, and the boy would look up at her and smile with the self-satisfied face of his father.

  Agnes drew a fresh can of lager from a hidden place and gently pulled at the ring top. With a careful finger she gathered the bubbly drips and popped them into her mouth. She gave the boy the empty Tennent’s can. He had always liked the half-naked beauties photographed on the side. Shuggie was intent on this one, he hadn’t seen her before, and he liked the way her name sounded when he spelt it out slowly, just like his Granda Wullie had taught him. Shh-hee-nah.

  Shuggie would collect the empty cans from around the house and line up the women on the edge of the bath. He would stroke
their tinny hair and make them talk to each other in imagined conversations, rambling monologues, mostly about ordering new shoes from catalogues and whoring husbands. Big Shug had caught him once. He had watched proudly as Shuggie lined up the women and spelt out each of their names phonetically. He bragged about it later down the rank. “Five years old, eh!” he would say. “What a chip aff the auld block.” Agnes had looked on sadly, knowing what was really going on.

  Later that week she took Shuggie into the BHS and bought him a baby doll. Daphne was a chubby little toddler, with the tufted coif of a fifties housewife. Shuggie loved the doll. He put all his lager ladies in the bin after that.

  Shuggie had been watching his mother quietly. He was always watching. She had raised three of them in the same mould, every single one of her children was as observant and wary as a prison warden.

  “Howse aboots some light entertainment?” he asked, mimicking some nonsense from the telly.

  Agnes flinched. With her painted nails she cupped his face and squeezed his dimples gently. She pushed until the boy’s bottom lip protruded. “Ab-oww-t,” she corrected. “Ab-OU-t.”

  He liked the feeling of her hands on his face, and he cocked his head slightly and baited her. “Ab-ooo-t.”

  Agnes frowned. She took her index finger and pushed it into his mouth, hooking his lower teeth. She gently pulled his jaw open, and held it down. “There’s no need to sink to their level, Hugh. Try it again.”

  With her finger in his mouth, Shuggie pronounced it correctly if not clearly. It had the round, proper oww sound that she liked. Agnes nodded her approval and let go of his lip.

  “Dus that mean the wee mooose wisnae loose aboot the hooose?” He was giggling before he could even finish the cheeky nonsense. Agnes hunkered down to chase him, and he squealed with happiness and terror as he raced around the bed.

 

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