Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

  Many nights Catherine had sat up in bed, brushing her long hair, and watched Leek ask the same nonsense of Shuggie. Leek would straddle his baby brother with his lanky limbs and pin him to the floor. He would make two fists, holding them inches from Shuggie’s face, and would ask, “Cemetery? Or hospital?” It was pointless. All answers gave the same result. You were going to get whatever the bad bastard on top of you wanted to give.

  “I’m no gonnae ask you again.”

  The gutting knife rattled against her teeth as it tested the inside of her cheek. A single tear escaped her left eye. Catherine thought of the gluey fingers and forced a guess. “Celtic?”

  The man huffed in disappointment. “Lucky answer.” He drew the knife out slowly from between her lips; he was enjoying the terror on her face. Catherine put a finger inside her cheek, tasting the warm salty tang of blood, but the skin was still blessedly together.

  A bright light shone directly into her face, and she shrank back against the man behind her. “Fuck me!” said the voice. “It’s wee Leek’s sister.” It took a moment for her eyes to adjust to the torchlight; she put her hand on the tip and angled it down to the ground. The men standing around her were only boys, younger than her and probably younger than Leek. They had been smoking and waiting in the dark. With no peace at home they were waiting for someone to molest or for a chance to knife the night watchman.

  Her hand shot out and connected with the owner of the silver knife. She felt no better, so she made another fist and rained it down on his neck, head, and shoulders. The boy covered his head and danced away, laughing.

  Catherine pushed through the boys in disgust and ran the last block of pallets. She could hear feet, fast and flat, behind her. She grasped the wall of rough blue wood, and as quick as she could, she hauled herself up the stack of pallets. Behind her she felt a hand wrap around one of her new boots; it gave a quick tug, and her foot came free from its ledge. It took all of her strength to hold on to the splintery wood. She swung her boot back and heard it crack off a thick skull bone, and lifting her knee she found some purchase and scrambled up the rest of the tower.

  The torchlight shone up her skirt, trying to illuminate her gusset. They were taunting her, their voices pitched, ready to break, the dangerous sound of little boys coming into the intoxicating power of manhood. She pulled herself the last ten feet to the top. She wanted to lie down for a moment and catch her breath, but she forced herself to stand up and look defiantly over the side. There were five of them, pockmarked and fuzzy-faced. They were grinning up at her, as the eldest was pushing his forefinger into a donut hole he had made with his other hand. Catherine spat over the side on to them. It was a wide shower of white foam, and the boys shrieked like the children they still were and scattered like laughing rats.

  Standing on top of the flat pallet stack, she looked over the uniform fields of bright blue wood. The boys had made her lose count, and she hoped she had climbed the right tower. Leek could leap the eight feet or so between the stacks, but she never could. In wet boots she would slip and fall to the ground. She shuddered to think what the neds would do to her body as she lay there with a broken neck.

  Catherine counted four from the fence and counted five from the turning. It was right; she hadn’t lost count. Searching the top of the stack, she decided on a pallet that was about four by four in from the southeast corner. Checking over her shoulder, as she had been taught, she bent over and lifted a blue pallet free from the rest. A flickering light shone from somewhere within.

  Catherine put her head into the opening and hissed her brother’s name in the direction of the faint light. “Leek, Leek!” There was no answer. She hissed again, and suddenly the flickering light was snuffed and it went dark in the hole. Rain dripped from the end of her nose as she peered closer into the void. Suddenly a white face with small pink ears shot up at her from the darkness. “Boo!”

  Catherine fell backwards. If she had been closer to the edge she would have fallen over the side. She hauched a wad of spittle into Leek’s white face.

  “Aw, fuck’s sake!”

  “Well, what the fuck did you try to scare me like that for?” Catherine pulled her knees together and searched her red hands for blue splinters. The fear and shame flooded her then, and her face was awash in frustrated tears.

  Leek wiped his mouth with his jumper sleeve. He misunderstood her weeping. “Don’t start greetin’ about it. You coming in or what? You’re letting the rain in.”

  Catherine sulked over to the opening and climbed down into her brother’s den. Leek pulled the loose pallet closed over their heads. Inside it was as musty as an open grave and dark as a closed coffin. Catherine no sooner began the low exhale that preceded her moaning than Leek warned her, “Haud yer wheest,” as he shuffled about in the pitch-blackness. In the farthest corner there was a clinking of metal, and the space lit up with a faint smoky light.

  The camping lamp threw long shadows around the cave-like space. The centre of the hollowed-out pallets was easily twice the size of their bedroom at home, but the ceiling was only about six feet high. Leek had covered the floor and the walls in old bits of discarded carpet and flattened cardboard boxes. Through the narrow hole in the top he had dragged old bits of furniture and broken kitchen chairs. The pallets had been arranged to make supporting columns, and some had been angled and covered with old rugs to make a type of hard-looking settee. On the carpeted walls were naked pictures of Page Three girls. Someone had put up a picture of Maggie Thatcher and another joker had drawn a veined cock going into her haranguing mouth.

  Catherine watched her brother go about making his home comfortable for her. She had known some of the older Sighthill boys who had hollowed it out a few years before. After the wildest of them had stabbed a nosy night watchman they had been left pretty much alone. It was a great place to get drunk and sniff bags of glue. Most of the younger boys just liked that it was a space free from their heavy-handed fathers. Some of the boys brought girls here and would make beds out of borrowed coats and jumpers. Slowly, as good reputations became ruined, the Sighthill girls stopped coming to the pallet den. The boy’s voices kept breaking and their hormones kept raging, so most of them skulked away in randy pursuit. The pallet house became emptier and quieter. Now Leek could often spend the entire weekend there alone.

  If Agnes would take a drink on a Thursday, then Leek would take some tins of beans and powdered custard from his granny’s kitchen and come here to hide. When he’d come back on a Sunday night, they would all be watching the television. Agnes would be soft and repentant, the demon drink having left her. She would make a cuddling space on the settee next to her, and he would sit close, enjoying the warm, perfumed smell of her bath. Lizzie would look at him with a distant smile and ask him if he’d been in his bed all weekend. It was good to be a quiet soul.

  Not that he was small. By the time he turned fifteen he was already over six feet tall. He had always been skinny, and as he grew he became even more thrifty and efficient in build. His hair, like his build, he had inherited from his long-forgotten real father. It was fine and wispy, mouse brown in colour, and hung softly over his ears and eyes. His eyes were grey and clear but always slow to show emotion. He had long perfected the art of staring through people, leaving conversations to follow his daydreams through the back of their heads and out any open window.

  Leek was as economical with his emotions as he was spare in build. From his real father he had inherited a gentle personality, quiet and pensive, lonesome and faraway. His only real physical concession to his mother was his nose, large and bony, too severe to be Roman. It broke the line of his soft, shy fringe and sat upon his thin face like a proud monument to his Irish Catholic ancestors. Agnes had gotten it from Wullie, and Wullie had gotten it from his own father, who had brought it from County Donegal. It left no one unscarred and overlooked no man or woman in the Campbell lineage.

  The den was a carpeted fort, a boy thing. It smelled like beer, glue, and se
men, and Catherine did not personally see the appeal. Walking around the room, she shrank from the mess and the tins of half-eaten food. She wiped the tears from her face and sniffed. “How long have you been here today?”

  “Dunno,” he said, pulling a discarded coat from a mouldy heap in the corner. “She blootered the dregs of the christening whisky by lunchtime.”

  He held the dry overcoat out to her. Catherine stepped out of her good green coat and slid into the man’s Harris tweed. It smelled of lanolin and sweat, but the crispy dryness of the rough wool felt good. Leek took an old biscuit tin from the shelf above the girlie pictures and handed it to her. They sat together on the home-made sofa. He put his arm gently around her and climbed inside the coat till they had an armhole each.

  Catherine lifted fingerfuls of the sweet cake from the tin. She could taste the amber sugar of the syrup her granny was fond of. It made her feel better. “I haven’t eaten anything the day. There was no one to cover the phones, and Mr Cameron said he would bring me in a sandwich when he got his own lunch. But he didn’t. And, well, I didn’t like to say, or else he would know he had hurt my feelings.”

  “Feelings are for weaklings.” He was using the Dalek voice she hated.

  Catherine drew her head out of the collar and looked at him coldly. “Well, hiding is for cowards.” The long shy eyelashes fell low on his pink cheeks. Ever since he was a boy, he had been easy to hurt. She drew her arm back inside the mothy coat and wrapped it around his back; she could feel his thin ribs through his school jumper. “I’m sorry Leek. It’s terrifying coming out here to find you. I’m wet, and I was afeart, and now my new boots are ruined.”

  “You can’t keep anything good around here.”

  She pulled him to her, two years younger and already a foot taller. She buried her damp crown in the crease of his broad chin. She let herself cry quietly and tried to let the anger she felt for the neds and their fishing knife bleed out of her. “Have you been hiding here all day?”

  “Aye.” His sigh ran through her. “I told you. She woke up and I could tell over the cartoons that there was a belter coming. She was shaking something terrible, so she asked me to watch the wean while she went out to the shops . . .” He trailed off.

  She knew he was staring into the distance. “Did she take a drink in a pub?”

  His eyes had glazed over again. “No. I . . . I don’t think so. She had the whisky, then I think she got a carry-out and battered some in the lift back up.”

  “Well, it is very dry up at that altitude.” Catherine licked the last of the sticky mess from her fingers and put the tin down.

  “Aye, she seemed fair parched,” he said sadly. There was a long silence between them. Leek took out his top set of porcelain dentures and rubbed at his cheek as if they had been pinching. Agnes, annoyed with the constant trips to the dentist, had convinced him to have his teeth, weak and riddled with aluminum fillings, pulled for his fifteenth birthday.

  “Do they still hurt?” Catherine asked, grateful that her teeth were still her own.

  “Aye.” He flicked the slabber from the plate and put it back in his mouth.

  “I’m sorry, Leek, and I’m sorry I left you the day.” She gently kissed his cheek.

  It was a tenderness too far. He put his hand over her face and held her away from him. “Get off me, ya minger. Besides, don’t ever feel sorry for me. I’m done feeling bad about this shite.” Leek unbuttoned the oversize coat and stepped back out into the cold. He pulled the sleeve of his black school jumper over his knuckles and wiped his sister’s kiss from his face.

  Watching him, Catherine thought how Leek would have looked twelve had it not been for the large Campbell nose. She watched how his long fingers, as delicate and fine as a clockmaker’s, worried it, ran the length of it constantly, fidgeted with it, measured it, and then regretted it. He lowered his hand from his nose. “Stop gawking.” He stepped out of the lamplight into the dark side of the den.

  Catherine picked up a black sketchbook. Leek had been drawing again. She flicked through the pages holding intricate sketches of bikini-clad beauties sitting on top of a muscular Ferrari or astride winged wyverns. Leek’s was as good as any rock-album artwork, a beautifully rendered world of shy fantasy. The muscles and sinew and naked beauties eventually gave way to precise, ruler-drawn plans for architecture and woodwork, technical drawings for futuristic buildings and smaller, more thorough ones for record player units and one for a home-made easel. There wasn’t a minute she could remember that he didn’t have his pencil in hand.

  She was smiling proudly to herself when Leek emerged from the darkness and snatched the sketchbook from her. “I don’t see your fucking name on it.” He lifted his jumper and tucked the book into the waistband of his denims.

  “Leek, I think you are very talented.”

  He made a raspberry noise and disappeared back into the darkness.

  “I mean it. You are going to be an amazing artist, and I’m going to get married, and between us we’re both going to get the fuck out of here and away from this dump.”

  The hissing came from the dark. “Fuck you. I know you are going to leave me. I’ve seen you making eyes at that Orange prick. I know that you are going to leave me to deal with her on my own.”

  “Leek. Can you not stay in the light, where I can see you?”

  “No. I like it over here.”

  Catherine dried her hair on the coat sleeve and thought for a moment. She pushed back against the fear the neds had left inside her. “Shame, I’m here to take all my clothes off and wrestle a giant winged snake for you.”

  He stepped from the darkness, shaking his head. “Dinnae bother. I prefer to draw bigger tits.”

  Catherine flinched, but she said, “Use that imagination of yours.”

  “I don’t have a pencil fine enough to render their intricate, miniatur-ey-alley-osity.”

  They glowered at each other with serious expressions. Catherine made the dry boak face first and pretended to throw up all over the old man’s coat. Leek copied her, until they were swimming in imagined vomit. Catherine watched her brother’s shy smile return, and she thought how it was a shame he didn’t do that often enough any more. Leek caught her searching his face. “Take a picture, why don’t ye?”

  Catherine tried to soften her gaze, afraid she might send him back into the shadows. “So did Mammy look in a fighting mood or more of a maudlin mood when you left her?”

  He shrugged. “She was on the phone most of the day looking for Shug. I could just tell it was gonnae end badly.”

  “How comes?”

  “She was drinking like she wanted to get somewhere else.”

  “Was she loud?”

  He shook his head. “More sad than loud today.”

  Catherine sighed. “Fuck. We’d better get back. I think there’s been some trouble.”

  “No way. I stole enough food to stay here the night.” He was halfway back to the dark already.

  “You’ll catch your death of cold.”

  “Guid.”

  “Come on, Leek. You’re a bit bloody old for a Wendy house.” It was a mean thing to say, and she knew she wouldn’t win if she continued in this way. Her brother had been gifted with legendary stubbornness; he just stared through you and floated away, leaving behind his frame to be pecked to pieces. Catherine didn’t want to face their mother alone. She did not want to walk back through the darkness without him. “Please. I came to get you. I didnae give your glue-sniffing pals a look up my skirt for nothing.” She bit her lip pitifully. “They have a fishing knife, Leek. They grabbed my tits.”

  Leek looked very angry then. She was always scared and secretly delighted by the sudden force of his temper. It always came quietly and brutally, and the smallest slight could turn horseplay into horsepower. “Please.” Her arms went limp by her side in a gross pantomime of helplessness. Being pathetic was not in her true nature.

  Leek went back into the dark corner of the cave and returned wi
th his hooded anorak and the broken handle of a garden shovel. He turned it menacingly in his hands. He put out the smoky camping lamp, and together they climbed quietly back up the hole and out on top of the pallets. Leek slid the trapdoor shut, and they stood looking out over the glistening city below. It was beautiful. Catherine lifted her right hand and pointed into the darkness far beyond the orange city lights. “Leek. Do you see that o’er there?” she asked.

  It was a line of emptiness on the horizon, black like the edge of nothing. He followed the line of her finger. “Nope.”

  “There!” she said and pointed harder, as if this might help. “Look past Springburn and Dennistoun. Look past the very last scheme.”

  “Caff! Just because you make your arm go stiff it doesn’t help me see any better. It’s pitch-black. There’s nothing there.”

  “Exactly!” She considered this before lowering her finger and turning back towards the high-rise. “That’s where I overheard Shug say we were flitting to.”

  Six

  Agnes had lain with fits of coughing and hacking most of the night. Now the morning light that was pushing in through the curtainless window would give her no peace. She could no longer ignore the wet draught that was pushing into the room and down on to her clammy body. Opening her eyes, she searched the room feebly for a solution to this nuisance. Her eyes hadn’t expected to find the black fingers of soot. She had bolted upright in a panic before she recognized the burnt bedroom as her own. Like a terrible postcard from the night before, her reflection stared back, fully dressed, with a face full of spoilt make-up. She looked at the pillow behind her and at the wet blue mess she had left there. Her gaze shifted across to Shug’s side of the bed. It hadn’t been slept in.

  Agnes lowered her chin back to her chest and tried to clear her blackout. The correct images wouldn’t come. Running her fingers through her black curls she felt the crispy brittleness of too much hairspray. From habit she placed her head in her hands and dug her nails sharply into the hairline, feeling the poisoned blood flush to her scalp. It felt good. The memories of the previous night started to ring like large chapel bells in her skull.