Clang, here is the wean dancing on the bed.
Clang, here is the flame on the curtains.
Clang, here is Shug, twisting his wedding band with a face full of disappointment again.
Agnes lay back in bed. She sobbed, but it was the self-pitying kind that brought no tears. She thought about holding the wean down as the flames raced up the curtain. She pushed the memory away and willed herself not to look at it again, yet the more she looked away the more it blossomed like a terrible flower. The guilt sank like dampness into her bones, and she felt rotten with the shame. She searched for a cigarette to coat her sore throat; it felt as black and sticky as tarmacadam in July. There were no cigarettes left in the room and no matches either. She had been placed under surveillance. This at least cheered her a little.
Out in the hallway the house was quiet. It must have been late enough, because the door to her parents’ bedroom was open and she could see their bed was neatly made. She went into the windowless bathroom and closed the door, sitting on the toilet. She thought about taking a bath and sinking to the bottom to wait for the Lord. In the tub were two sodden bath towels, badly blackened by fire. She couldn’t bring herself to move them.
Agnes wrapped her lips around the cold metal tap and gulped the fluoride-heavy water, panting and gasping like a thirsty dog. She began to wipe the ruined make-up off her face; the cotton wool came away blackened with soot stains. Opening the medicine cabinet, she searched the plastic shelves for Wullie’s medicine, something to take the edge off, but the painkillers were gone. She lifted a bottle of congealed cough syrup and took a mouthful, and then she took another.
When she finally emerged into the dark hallway, she stood for a long time arranging herself. In the dark she tried on different smiles, small apologetic ones where she lowered her eyes and looked up through heavy brows with tight trembling lips. She tried some light casual smiles, like she was just back from the shops. She tried a large, toothy, beaming smile, a gallus head nod that said, So what? Fuck you. If Shug was in there, this would be the one she’d wear.
Wullie and Shuggie were sitting at the round dining table eating soft eggs and soldiers. Sixty years apart, they were huddled together in the far corner like old drinking pals. Leek was upended on the settee, his bare legs up and over the back, a sketchbook in hand. When he saw his mother, he got up very quietly and passed her with a polite nod, like a stranger in the street.
All the windows were thrown open, the house already scrubbed with bleach. The air was bitter and sharp. Wullie turned his head back towards his eggs when he saw her. He must have been at early Mass, his good suit was folded neatly over the kitchen chair. He sat in his undervest, his thick arms a tapestry of faded blue ink from his wrist to his shoulder meat, names and places never to be forgotten from the War, a laughing black-haired girl from Donegal, and Agnes’s own name and birthdate in proud elegant letters.
“You’ve missed Mass.”
Agnes tried several faces and finally decided on contrite. She heard sniffling in the kitchenette. “Is Shug here?” she asked nervously, a grin breaking over her false face.
Wullie shook his head. It had all been too ugly for him: the fight, the fire, the wean crying. He pushed his glasses up his nose and stared deeper into his eggs. “Please don’t grin, Agnes. Please don’t smirk at me like that.”
Her son, God bless him, had lit up like the Blackpool illuminations when she came into the room. Shuggie’s eggy hands were outstretched towards her, a bath towel tied around his head like a turban. “Mammy, Catherine wasn’t very nice to me this morning. She said I was a sook.” Agnes picked the boy up. He wrapped himself around her sore bones, squeezed the life back into her. “Granda said I can have three empire cakes the day.”
“Hugh, come back over here and finish your breakfast or there will be no cakes.” Wullie waved a thick hand at the boy, and with a sullen tut Shuggie slid down from his mother’s trunk. She felt the shaking in her bones start again. Her father shovelled a mouthful into Shuggie’s pursed lips before he spoke again. His voice was measured, but his eyes would not meet hers. “I know it’s my fault, Agnes. I know I’m the reason you are the way you are.”
Agnes shifted in irritation. Not this again. Her throat was desperate for a smoke.
“Hear me out. I know I spoilt you when I should have given you that belt. I know I’m sentimental, and I know I’m soft. But you have no idea. No idea what it was like.” Wullie rubbed the meat of his fist across his lips. He looked to the door of the kitchenette like there was someone offstage feeding him lines. “Fourteen of us there was. My auld ma saw none of them get what couldn’t be earned by their own hands. Not even our baby Francis, with his twisted leg. Poor wee bastard had to fight and shove like the rest of us. So when your mammy tells me I’m to be blessed with you, I prayed to let it be different. I promised that you’d never know want the way I knew want.”
“Daddy, please, you don’t have to . . .” Where were the fucking cigarettes?
He cracked his rough hands together; the sound was like booming thunder. “Am I always to be a milksop in my own house?” He was not a man who raised his voice. Agnes buttoned her lip; even Lizzie stopped her sniffling in the kitchenette. Wullie Campbell was a man built for loading granary barges down on the Clyde. She had seen him single-handedly clear a pub of a half dozen disrespectful Liverpudlians.
“Every day at a quarter past five you’d come running down that road to meet me as neat as a new pin. I asked your mammy to make sure you were clean. She used to say to me, ‘Wullie is all this palaver really necessary?’ But sure it was the only thing I ever asked her to do. A man needs to take pride in his family. But people don’t care about things like that any more, do they?” Wullie’s tattooed knuckles were knitted together in anger. “It gave me that much pleasure just to be proud of you. I could tell they were jealous, hanging out of their windows with tight faces. Grown men and women, jealous of a wee shiny bit of life like you. I used to laugh when they said you’d be ruined.”
“You did good, Daddy. I was happy.”
“Aye? Then what have you got to be so unhappy about now?” He sucked at his teeth and placed his hand on top of the boy’s head, the weight of it looked like it might buckle Shuggie’s neck. There were sentimental tears in Wullie’s eyes, but he was watching her coldly, like it was the first time he had seen her properly. “So tell me, Agnes. Am I to belt you?”
Agnes’s hand went to her throat, she felt like she might laugh. “Daddy! I’m thirty-nine!”
“Am I to beat this selfish devil out of you?” He rose slowly from the table. His arms were loose at his sides, his hands massive silt buckets at the end of iron cranes. “I am tired of you coming first, Agnes. I’m tired of watching you destroy yourself and knowing it’s my fault.”
Agnes took a step backwards. She wasn’t smiling any more. “It’s not your fault.”
Wullie closed the living room door quietly. He drew his heavy granary belt from his wool trousers, the Meadowside Union logo was debossed into the leather, and the sheer weight of it dragged on the carpet. “Aye, mibbe it’s for the best.”
Agnes held her hands out and backed slowly to the door. The gallus grin was gone from her face. As her father advanced she kept walking backwards, until she felt the living room cabinet at her back and heard the glass-eyed ornaments tinkle in warning. The boy was at her legs now, his head hidden halfway behind her denims. Wullie twisted the belt around his hands, once, twice, for a better grip. “Put that wean away from you.”
She held the boy closer. Wullie folded his hand around her soft upper arm. With his other hand he separated the boy gently but surely from her leg. He led Agnes over to his chair, where he sat down and pulled her over his knee.
She didn’t struggle, and no more begging words would come.
“Lord Jesus Christ, I ask You to give me the strength to forgive.” The union belt came down with a loud crack on the back of her soft buttocks. Agnes did not cry out. Wu
llie raised his hand again. “I thank You that my burden is never more than I can bear.” Crack. “Show Agnes the many blessings of her life.” Crack. “Quiet her needs.” Crack. “Show her some peace.”
There was a soft shuffle at her side, and Agnes felt her left hand be taken up. She felt the cooling of bloodless hands on the back of her clammy neck; she felt the gentle stroke of her mother. Lizzie knelt on the floor by her side. Her voice joined Wullie’s in prayer. “Lord, it is only through your forgiveness that we can forgive ourselves.” Crack.
After the fire Shug had gone out on the night shift, and for the second time that week he hadn’t come back in the morning. Besides his brother, Rascal Bain, and a few boys at the taxi rank, he didn’t have many male friends. Still, Agnes knew, there was a million other places he could happily be.
She sat gingerly on the edge of their bed. The backs of her legs were scalded red from Wullie’s belt, and she couldn’t concentrate as she folded Shug’s clean socks, one inside the other, matching the faded hues together exactly as he liked. Whose arms would he be in now? She felt the fight inside her begin to grow again. Could he be as close as the next tower block, with big Reeny?
She had to get out, she had to show face.
From the linen cupboard she picked up one of the folding deckchairs they would take to the fair-week caravan. She took out and rinsed her dentures under the warm tap. In tight denims and wearing her new black bra as a bikini top, she went out into the landing and waited for the piss-stained elevator. When she made it down the sixteen floors, she was relieved to see there were no burnt curtains lying around.
Except for petrified dog shit and some faint scorch marks, the fore-court was empty. Agnes checked out back of the tower block to see if Shug’s taxi was parked there. She had caught him out like that once before. When he was supposed to be working a day shift he had been upstairs fucking some unknown wifey. His sweaty shenanigans had been separated from his family by a few feet of council-grade concrete. Agnes had ridden the Sighthill elevator all that afternoon with a mop bucket full of cold tea dregs and piss. She waited at each landing for the doors to open on him and called off the hunt only when they opened on a group of bonnie young girls who were going outside to play. The children took one look at her and fearfully refused to get in the lift with the mad-looking woman from the sixteenth floor.
At first she had thought how stupid Shug was to get caught out so easily. Only later, when she confronted him, did she learn that she was the stupid one. He hadn’t been caught out. He wanted to make sure she knew all about it. Some things were not to be missed.
The sun was white in the sky. The concrete was already vibrating with the morning heat. On the waste ground, Lizzie was sunbathing on an old blanket with her back against the foundation. Her floral dress was opened to the breastbone and pulled apart to make the most of that rarest of occurrences, sunshine. Her hair sat in tight baby-blue curlers and was carefully wrapped in a gingham tea towel. She was reading the day’s paper and gossiping with a clutch of old dears on the patchy grass. The other women sat in a cluster of kitchen chairs and were peeling the skin off big brown potatoes and dropping them into an old plastic bag.
Agnes set her deckchair a respectful distance from her mother and her gang. Lizzie barely looked up from her paper, and Agnes knew she was being punished. She tried to settle herself casually into the warmth of the sun, but her eyes kept flitting to Lizzie, wanting only a sliver of friendship to ease the loneliness in her chest.
There was new graffiti on the wall above Lizzie. It sprang like a dirty thought bubble from her curls: Don’t be Shy . . . Shows Yer Pie. To Lizzie, the graffiti could have been a helpful plea to a bashful baker. Agnes knew better and couldn’t help but laugh.
Lizzie scowled at her. “What do you find so funny?”
It was the first time she had spoken since the front-room chapel that morning, and Agnes took a moment to consider whether she felt like encouraging it or ruining it. “Nothing. Where’s my wee man?”
Lizzie answered as spartanly as she could. “At the bakers, getting his cake.” She went back to her paper.
Agnes knew the routine. Saturday and Sunday afternoons, Wullie walked with his grandson the half mile or so to the shops. It was a scant row of half-shuttered storefronts set into a shadowed recess that never seemed to catch the daylight. They had dragged families out of the old Glasgow tenements for this scheme, and it was meant to be different, futuristic, a grand improvement. But in reality the whole scheme was too brutal, too spartan, too poorly built to be any better.
Shuggie would stand well behaved inside the Paki shop while his granda bought a noose of sweetheart stouts and a half-bottle of whisky, enough to carry them through Saturday night and discreetly through the Sabbath. The growing boy gave Wullie and Imran something to talk about as the bags were loaded with the alcohol. It was a routine in which neither man was allowed to acknowledge the drink moving between them, as though it would have broken the charade. Across the shadows, inside the bakery, Wullie would make small talk with the pretty girls while Shuggie greedily eyed the cakes. Shuggie always chose the same bright pink sponge pyramid, covered in red and white desiccated coconut and trimmed with a sugary sweetie on top. He would walk home very slowly in Wullie’s shadow, enjoying his spoils.
Agnes looked in the direction of the shops but couldn’t see them. She rose and stood on the edge of the waste ground. In her black bra she threw her head back and stretched her arms wide to enjoy the sun’s tingle on her pale skin. She caught a sideways glance from Lizzie. There was the start of a puce bruise on her lower back. It was this that held her mother’s attention. Agnes’s ringed fingers traced the belt welt, and she winced dramatically.
Lizzie stiffened proudly and hissed, “For the love of God. Cover yourself.”
The women peeling potatoes exchanged a sympathetic glance that said they knew how bruises could be more plentiful than hugs in a marriage, and not just for the women. Agnes was not to be told. Irritated now, she collapsed into the deckchair again and bounced it gracelessly like it was a child’s space hopper, bouncing, bouncing, till she was sat closer to her mother.
Agnes sprawled out luxuriously, her skin already poaching to a light rose colour. She reached out her foot and played with the hem of Lizzie’s yellow floral dress like a child. Lizzie lowered her newspaper and pushed Agnes’s foot away. “Stop fussing with me,” she said. “You’ve got a cheek to show your face around me this morning.” Lizzie undid the tea towel wrapped around her curlers. She opened a plastic bag at her side and started unravelling her hair.
Agnes took her mother’s pick comb and slouched in the sticky deck-chair again. “My head is throbbing.”
Lizzie drew out a curler and held the kirby grip between her lips. “Oh, poor you. I hope you don’t expect any sympathy.”
“You should have stopped him.”
Lizzie was watching Agnes out of the side of her eyes now. “M’lady, let me tell you, in forty years of marriage I have never once seen your father raise his hand in anger.” She turned to the women with the potatoes. “You know, Maigret, he’s that soft I thought he’d come back dead a week into that bloody War.”
“Aye, he’s a fine man, right enough.” The potato women nodded in unison.
Lizzie turned back to her daughter. “I don’t want you dragging his good name down with your own.”
Agnes ran the pick through a painted tangle. “Am I that low?”
“Low?” Lizzie scoffed. “Do you know I’ve just been sat here on my lonesome getting a wee bit of colour, and I’ve no been able to get any peace from anybody. A woman cannae even run her messages, but she’s got to cross this grass and ask me, how I’m holding up?”
“People should mind their own.”
“I’m just after having Janice McCluskie drag her Mongoloid son across those weeds to me. She goes, ‘I’ve heard your Agnes has no been keeping that well. How’s her wee problem?’” Lizzie’s knuckles were white with i
ndignation as she twisted a kirby grip. “I’m sat here with my dress unbuttoned down to my God’s glory and that pair of mouth-breathers gawping down at me.”
“Ignore them, Mammy.”
“Bastards! No keeping well? No fucking keeping well!” Her hands clawed at the imagined offenders in front of her. Lizzie exhaled loudly, and her anger shifted to a look of tired defeat. “I don’t deserve their hand-wringing, Agnes. I’ve worked hard my whole life without a day’s rest, and for what?”
Agnes knew the next line well enough. Agnes still shook her head.
“So you could have everything you ever wanted.”
Lizzie seemed so far away then. Agnes had the urge to wrap her mother in her arms, beg for her forgiveness, even though she felt not a shred of remorse. “Can’t we be pals again?”
“No. It’s not as simple as that any more.” The corners of Lizzie’s mouth turned down in a mocking way. “Let’s just kiss and make up? No, I think not.” She uncurled another clump of hair. “How many women will it take, Agnes?”
Agnes bristled. “I need a cigarette.”
“You need a lot of things.” Then she added, “You should have stayed married to that Catholic.”
Agnes rooted around in her mother’s curler bag. She took out the Embassy packet and put two cigarettes in her mouth. She took a long draw and held the smoke inside for a long while. “Jesus can’t pay my catalogue.”
Lizzie gave a fake laugh. “No. But hell will mend you.”
Agnes got up then and sat on the blanket by her mother’s side. The lit cigarette was a measly peace offering, but Lizzie took it and said, “Help me take out these curls. I must look half-mental.” Agnes took her mother’s head in her hands and ran her fingers through the thinning hair. Lizzie softened slightly. “You know, your faither always used to come in on a Friday night, half past six. Every other working fella on the street would go missing. There wouldn’t be a man’s voice till Sunday afternoon, not in all of Germiston. I remember that you could hang out that window and watch them all stoat home on a Sunday teatime. All of them addled wi’ the drink.”
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