Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

  The potato peelers were nodding in unison again. Lizzie said, “I’m no judging the men. That was just what they did in those days. If you wanted your housekeeping money you had to go dig your man out of the pub on a Friday teatime. But your faither would come singing Friday night, his wage packed in his hand and a fresh parcel under his arm. Silly fool would have been down that market on his way back from Meadowside and picked up a wee dress or a new coat for you. I never knew a man know the size of his weans, let alone go shopping for them. I used to tell him to stop it, he was spoiling you. But he would say, ‘What’s the harm?’”

  “Mammy, I can’t talk about this again.”

  “Honestly, I was that happy for you when you married that Brendan McGowan. He seemed like he could give you what your faither had given me. But look at you, you had to want better.”

  “Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Better?” Lizzie used her clenched teeth to itch the tip of her tongue. “Look where better has gotten you. Selfish article.”

  Agnes brushed out the last of her mother’s curls. She had to restrain herself not to give them a sly tug. “Well, seeing as you think I’m selfish then, I need to ask you for a favour.”

  Lizzie sniffed. “It’s a bit early in our friendship to be calling in favours.”

  She rubbed the lobe of Lizzie’s ear gently, manipulatively. “I need you to tell him for me. Tell him that we’re moving. Will you do that?”

  “It’ll kill your faither.”

  “It won’t.” She shook her head. “But if I stay here I know I am going to lose him.”

  Lizzie turned and studied her daughter closely. She stared coldly at the flicker of hope in Agnes’s eyes. “You will believe anything, won’t you.” It wasn’t a question.

  “We just need a fresh start. Shug says it might make everything better. It’s only a wee place, but it’s got its own garden and its own front door and everything.”

  Lizzie waved her cigarette airily. “Oh, la-di-dah! Your very own front door. Tell me: How many locks do you suppose this front door is going to need to keep that wandering bastard at home?”

  Agnes scratched the skin around her wedding band. “I’ve never had my own front door.”

  The women were silent a long while after that. Lizzie spoke first. “So, where is it then? This front door of your own.”

  “I’m not sure. It’s way out on the Eastern Road. It used to be rented by an Italian chippy or somebody Shug knows. He said it was very green. He said it was quiet. Good for my nerves.”

  “Will you have your own washing line?”

  “I would think so.” Agnes rolled on to her knees. She knew how to beg for what she wanted. “Listen, we’re pals again, right? I need you to tell my daddy for me.”

  “Your timing is beautiful. After this morning’s nonsense?” Lizzie pulled her chin into her chest and made a long, low clown mouth. “If you leave he’ll blame himself to his dying day.”

  “He won’t.”

  Lizzie began rebuttoning her summer dress. The buttons were lining up wrong, and it was testing her patience. “Mark my words. Shug Bain is only interested in Shug Bain. He’s going to take you out there to the middle of nowhere and finish you for good.”

  “He won’t.”

  Wullie and Shuggie came lumbering across the forecourt then. Lizzie saw them first. “Look at the state of that. A walking advert for soap powder.”

  By the time Agnes looked up, the last of the Eiffel Tower was being licked from between the boy’s chubby fingers. She couldn’t help but smile at her father, the giant with his shirt tails untucked, like a schoolboy shirking his uniform. They walked slowly, swinging between them the Daphne dolly that Shuggie treasured so much.

  “If you cannae make Shug do right by you, at least make him do right by the boy.” Lizzie narrowed her eyes at her grandson, at his blond dolly. “You’ll be needing that nipped in the bud. It’s no right.”

  Seven

  Agnes followed Shug’s red leather cases as they migrated around the flat. They had shown up out of nowhere, earlier in the week, with no price tags and the faint look of having been gently used. Shug had neatly folded all of his clothes, setting socks within shoes and rolling underwear into tidy jam rolls, before packing everything thoughtfully inside. Often, during the week, he would open one of the red cases and study the contents closely, as though memorizing the inventory, then close and lock it securely again. Agnes could see the cases were half-empty, that there was still valuable space inside. Several times she left small piles of the children’s clothes near them and then watched with bubbling jealousy as the cases up and moved to the other side of the room, still with nothing belonging to her or the children placed inside.

  On the day of the flit he had set the red cases by the bedroom door. Agnes worried the suitcase lock with her nail. She wondered why she hadn’t seen the new house herself. Shug had come home with the idea after one of his night shifts spent talking to a Masonic pal who owned a chippy in the city centre. A council flat in a two-up two-down that he said had its own front door. Shug signed for it there and then with all the casualness of buying a raffle ticket.

  Agnes wrapped the last of her glass ornaments in newsprint and lined up her old green brocade cases next to Shug’s. She intermixed them, rearranged them, but no matter what she did there was a sense that they didn’t belong together any more. In the luggage tag that hung from her case was a handwriting she barely recognized now. It was the happy, confident loops of a much younger her, running away from her first husband for a promise of a life that was worth living. Her fingers traced the forgotten name: Agnes McGowan, Bellfield Street, Glasgow.

  When Leek was still in nappies, Agnes had run away.

  On the night she finally left she had packed the green cases full of new clothes, showy, impractical things she had bought on the last of Brendan McGowan’s tick and had kept hidden for the past long year. Before she ran away she had scrubbed their tenement flat one last time. She knew the news would bring in the neighbours. With beady eyes they would pour in to offer condolences to her man, hoping to gnash their gums at her uppity ways. She wouldn’t dare give them the pleasure of thinking her slatternly too.

  On the plush hall carpet she had tamped a loose corner with her toe, pushing it back in place, and she was sad to hear the crunch of carpet tacks grip the wood once again. Earlier in the day she had tried to lift it. She had broken two good wedding spoons and bloodied her fingers before sitting back in frustrated tears. As the mascara ran down her face she had wondered if maybe she should stay on, just a little longer, just till she had gotten good use out of that new Axminster. She hadn’t tried to take everything, but that carpet was new, and she had enjoyed how the old wife across the close blanched every time she saw it. It was the kind of hall carpet that you left your front door open for, the beautiful thick kind that you wanted all the neighbours to see. She had nagged and nagged until she got it installed, wall-to-wall, Templeton’s Double Axminster, but the tingly feeling hadn’t lasted this time, not even half as long as she had expected it to.

  Living with the Catholic, in the ground-floor flat, all she could see was a wall of grey soot-covered tenements across the street. The night she ran away, Agnes had watched the lights go out, one by one, good, hard-working folk getting an early night for an early start. Outside in the rain was the purring hum of the hackney engine. She could not help but feel some excitement, and inside her, underneath the doubt, was a rising thrill.

  Over the back of the sofa lay two miniature effigies; studies in neat melton and soft velvet and uncomfortable shoes of patent leather with gaudy silver buckles. She woke her sleeping toddlers. Catherine looked like a drunken old man, her sleepy eyelids opening and closing in big distressed gulps. As Agnes kissed them awake, there was a low scratch on the tenement door. She crept out to the hallway. The door opened with a low whine, and a man’s round, tanned face twitched anxiously in the bright tenement light. Shug moved impatiently from one foo
t to the other, ready it seemed to run at any moment.

  “You’re late!” Agnes hissed.

  The smell of sour stout on her breath made him swallow his half-smile. “I don’t fucking believe it.”

  “What do you expect?” she hissed. “My nerves are shot waiting for you.” Agnes pulled the door open and passed the heavy cases to Shug. They bulged at the zippers and tinkled happily, as if they were full of Christmas ornaments.

  “Is that it?”

  Agnes stared at the deep, swirling carpet and sighed. “Aye. That’s it.”

  With the cases in hand the man shuffled into the street. Agnes had turned then and looked back into the flat. She went to the mirror in the hall and ran her fingers through her hair; the black curls bounced and folded back on themselves tightly. She ran a line of fresh red lipstick across her mouth. Not bad for twenty-six, she thought. Twenty-six years of sleep.

  In the children’s bedroom she finished making the beds and put the dirty pyjamas into the pocket of her mink coat. Without negotiation she gave them each a single toy to bring and led them out into the hallway. Stopping in front of the big bedroom door, she turned to them. She looked at the lovely carpet and in a low voice urged, “Right, no matter what, no crying, all right?” The shiny heads nodded. “When we go in there, do you think you can give me a big, big happy smile?”

  She found the bedroom switch through habit. It flicked on with a click, and the dark burst with bright, unflattering light. The room was small and tight, dominated by a rococo-style bed that was much too large. The boy happily called out, “Daddy!” and the messy hump in the royal bed stirred. Brendan McGowan sat up in shock, blinking at the Victorian carollers stood at the foot of his bed. His mouth went slack.

  Agnes pulled the collar up on her mink coat in a grand gesture. It was a coat he had bought for her on tick, an unneccesary extravagance that he had hoped would make her happy and hold her at peace from want, if just for a while. “Right. Thanks for everything, then.” It was coming out wrong. “I’m away,” she said, in a clumsy understatement, like a maid who had finished her chores and was leaving for the day.

  The sleeping man could only blink as his waving family filed out of the room. He heard the front door close gently and the heavy hum of a diesel engine. Then they were gone.

  As they roared away that night, the black hackney taxi sounded solid and heavy as a tank. Agnes sat on the long leather banquette flanked by her warm babies. The four drove in silence through the wet and shiny Glasgow streets. Shug’s eyes kept glancing in the mirror, flitting over the faces of the sleeping children and tightening slightly. “Where are we going, then?” he asked after a while.

  There was a long pause. “Why were you late?” asked Agnes from behind the collar of her coat.

  Shug didn’t answer.

  “Did you have second thoughts?”

  He stopped looking in the mirror. “Of course I did.”

  Agnes brought her leather-gloved hands up to her face. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Well, didn’t you?”

  “Did it look as if I did?” she replied, her voice higher than she would have liked.

  The streets of the East End were empty. The last pubs were closed, and decent families were tucked in together from the cold. The hackney pulled along the Gallowgate and drove on through the market. Agnes had never seen it empty before; it was usually full of people buying their messages or new curtains, nice bits of meat or fish for a Friday. Now it was a graveyard of empty tables and fruit boxes. “Where are we going to go?”

  “I left mine at home, you know.” He was glowering at her in the mirror. “We agreed. We said a fresh start.”

  Agnes felt the hot heads of her children burrowing into her side. “Yes, well, it’s not that easy.”

  “Aye, but you said.”

  “Yes, well.” Agnes fixed her eyes out the window. She could feel him still staring in the mirror. She wished he would watch the road. “I couldn’t do it.”

  The man looked at the children in their Sunday finest, old-fashioned clothes worn for the first time, expensive clothes bought for a midnight escape. He thought about all their clothes neatly folded in the cases. “Aye, but you didnae even try, did ye?”

  She fixed her eyes on the back of his head. “We can’t all be as heartless as you, Shug.”

  He had tapped the brakes as his body spasmed in anger. All four of them lurched forward, and the children started to gripe. “An’ you fuckin’ ask me why I wis late?” Bits of spit landed, gleaming, on the rear-view mirror. “Why I wis fuckin’ late wis because I had to say goodbye to fo-wer greetin’ fuckin’ weans.” He drew the back of his hand across his wet lips. “Never mind a wife that threatened to gas the lot of them. Telt me if I left her that she would put the oven on and not light the ignition.”

  The taxi screamed off again. They drove in silence, watching empty night buses grumble by and dark windows on cold houses. When he spoke again he was quieter. “Have you ever tried to walk to the front door with your bastarding family stuck into you like fish hooks, eh? Do you know how long it takes to peel four screaming weans off your leg? To kick them back down the hall and shut the door on their wee fingers?” His eyes were cold in the mirror. “No, you don’t know what it’s like. You just tell muggins here to come get ye. You sally out with suitcases like we were off to Millport for the day.”

  She was sobering up. She stared silently out the window, trying not to think of the trail of fatherless children and the childrenless father they were leaving in their wake. In her mind it looked like a trail of viscous, salty tears being dragged along behind the black hack. The excitement had left her by then.

  When they had passed under the iron railway bridge at Trongate for the third time, the sun was starting to rise and the fresh fish vans were being unloaded at the market. Agnes stared at the women crowded at the bus stop, the early-shift charwomen getting ready to clean the big city-centre offices. “We could go to my mammy’s new flat,” she had mumbled finally. “Just till we find a place of our own.”

  All these years later, Agnes didn’t want to think about that night because it made her feel like a fool. Now she had packed the Catholic’s suitcases again. These brocade cases that were now carrying her away were the same ones that had brought her here to her mother’s. She looked down on the green cases and ripped the old McGowan label in two.

  After Agnes had left the Catholic, Brendan McGowan had tried to do the right thing by her. Even after she had stolen away in the night, he had hounded her to her mother’s and made promises of what he would change to have her back. Agnes had stood there, in the shadow of the tower block, with her arms folded, as her husband offered to rearrange himself so completely into whatever she wanted that he would not have been recognized by his own mother. When it was clear she wouldn’t take him back, he had asked the parish father to talk with Wullie and Lizzie and guilt her into returning. Agnes would not be told. She would not go back to a life she knew the edges of.

  For the next three years Brendan McGowan had sent his money every Thursday and taken the children every second Saturday. The last thing Catherine remembered about her real father was sitting in Castellani’s café as Brendan wiped vanilla ice cream from Leek’s face. Agnes had dressed them both deliberately in the best clothes they owned, and an older lady, with pearls about her neck and ears, had complimented Brendan on their neatness and good manners. The woman leaned down to Catherine’s height and asked the pretty girl what her name was. Clear as a Cathedral bell, the little girl had replied, “Catherine Bain.”

  Brendan McGowan had excused himself from the table then. He had wound between the clusters of happy families towards the bathroom, and then he had turned and gone out into the street. Catherine didn’t know how long they had been sitting there alone, but Leek had eaten his ice cream and then hers and was dipping his finger into the melted dregs at the bottom of the shell-shaped glass.

  The good Catholic had done all he could to hold his r
estless wife. She had run from him, and he had lowered his pride and asked for her back. She had divorced him, and he had lowered his pride again and had taken any time he could with his children as sacred. Then she had given them the Protestant’s name, and like lambs who had wandered from their field, they were sprayed with the indelible keel marks of another. Agnes had found his limit. Now, thirteen years on, Leek and Catherine could not have picked him out if they met him in a crowd.

  Agnes had to restrain herself from picking at the brocade handle. She had packed her questions and doubts into the Catholic’s cases again and cheerlessly carried them to the taxi. To look at it now, the black hackney felt like a hearse. Wullie wouldn’t speak to her as he helped carry the children’s clothes down in the rusted lift. Lizzie stood over the big soup pot in the kitchen and wrung her chapped hands on her apron. As Agnes watched her mammy stir, she could see the gas wasn’t on.

  Leek and Catherine had sat up in their beds at night talking about the ominous pull of this new life. Agnes could hear the low mumble of their worries through the wall. Lizzie had come to her earlier in the week and said the children had asked to stay on with her. She pleaded with Agnes to let Leek finish school and let Catherine be close to the factoring office. The day of the flit, Agnes had noticed how Leek had been gone the whole morning, slunk off with his pencils and secret books to some hidey-hole or other. Catherine had quieted her trembling lip and dutifully helped her mother pack. All morning Lizzie hugged Shuggie close and whispered prayers for safe return into his pale neck. Agnes watched Leek, when he thought no one was looking, plead to his granny again; she heard him say that he would be good, that he would behave. Agnes was glad when Lizzie rebuffed him gently. “No, Alexander, your home is with your mammy.”