As the rain started to come down, the last things to be loaded were Shug’s two red leather suitcases. Only when they were stowed in place did Agnes admit to herself that it was time to go. Lizzie and Wullie stood in the rain looking as grey and stiff as the tower block behind them. Their goodbyes had been casual and distant. Lizzie wouldn’t have them make a scene in public. A crack in the facade might open a rift, and Agnes had no idea what would flood forth from that. So instead they kept busy, fussing about kettles and clean towels.
Agnes sat on the back bench of the taxi with Shuggie packed between her knees. Leek and Catherine sat tight on either side, wedged amongst the boxes, their thighs pressed close to hers. She had ironed all their outfits, taking time to starch Catherine’s work shirt, picking out Shuggie’s blazer from the catalogue. She had bleached her dentures, and her hair was freshly dyed, a shade darker than black, closer to the saddest navy.
That morning she had tilted her head forward and asked Catherine what she thought of her new mascara. The mascara looked too heavy for her eyelids, like she was on the edge of sudden sleep. Now, as the taxi pulled out into the main road, Agnes made a show of looking back and waving mournfully through the rear window with a long, heavy blink. She thought it was a cinematic touch, like she was the star of her own matinee.
The hackney chugged up the Springburn Road and was past the empty Saint Rollox railworks before she turned back around in her seat. She ran through the hollow reasoning why she was going along with Shug’s plan, but as she tried to fortify herself with this rosary, it seemed like the stupid fancies a love-daft lassie half her age might have. Agnes rubbed the pads of her fingertips as she counted off her foolishness: The chance to decorate and keep her very own home. A garden for the weans. Peace and quiet for the sake of their marriage. She dug deeper. There was a chance that things would be different, she hoped, once she got him farther away from his women.
The windows grew foggy, and Shuggie drew a sad face in the condensation. With a flick of his thumb, Leek altered it to look like a swollen cock and then slumped down in his seat. Agnes drew her ringed hand over the drawing and saw through the clear glass that they were passing the big blue gas containers behind Provanmill, the guards at the northeastern gate of Glasgow.
They drove for a very long time in silence. Eventually the taxi chugged to a stop at some lights, and Shug opened the glass partition to tell them they were nearly there. He closed the glass again, and Agnes wondered whether it was from habit or something truer. She remembered when he had been courting her, how he would keep the glass open and try to charm her with his easy patter. He would lean back and rap his Masonic ring on the divider, a faint line on his left hand where his wedding ring should be. The air would be thick with his tangy pine aftershave and hair pomade. On weekday afternoons the taxi would smell of the sweaty stink of them, the glass misty from their lovemaking. She thought of the happy hours parked under the Anderston overpass, happy hours before they really truly knew one another.
Agnes looked at the grassy front gardens of the low bungalows and tried to feel excited again, but it was like trying to make a fire with wet wood. There had been a line where the houses had imperceptibly passed from council to bought. Shug slid the separating window open with a swish. “Look at they gardens, huh!” The houses were beautiful, with roses and carnations and smiling ornaments behind double-glazed windows. They pulled farther along, and the houses rose above them in a raised cul-de-sac, a manicured hump elevated above the noise of the road. Each private house had a garden, which had a drive, which had a car and sometimes even two. Agnes looked at Shug’s eyes in the mirror; he had been watching her. The look felt as close to love as she could remember. “If you like this, then just wait. Joe’s said it’s like a happy little village. A real family sort of place where everybody knows everybody else. Nicest place you could hope to live.”
Leek and Catherine shared a snide sideways glance. Agnes wrapped a hand around one of each of their knees and squeezed a firm warning. Shug shouted over the sound of the diesel engine, straining over his shoulder to be heard. “It’s next to a big colliery and all the men work up at yon coal mine. The wages are good enough that the women don’t even need to go out of the house for work. Joe said all their children went to the same school. Good for our Shuggie, get him out of the sky, have some boys his own age to play with.” His eyes were flashing happily in the mirror, he looked pleased with all his planning. Agnes watched him stroke at his moustache. “It turns out there’s no pubs out here. It’s bone dry, except for the Miners Club.”
“What, not a single one?” Agnes sat forward.
“None. You need to be a miner or miner’s wife to get into that club.”
Agnes could feel the sweat rise on her back. “What are you meant to do for fun?”
But Shug wasn’t listening. “This is it!” he shouted, pointing in excitement to a turning on the road. The taxi tilted as Agnes and the children leaned over to see the turning that would take them to their new life. On the corner sat an empty petrol station. It had a wide forecourt but only one pump for petrol and one for diesel. Shug slowed the taxi and turned into the street beside it.
Agnes rooted around in her leather bag. There was a jangle of bingo pens and mint tins as she took out a lipstick and pulled a fresh line of blood red around her mouth. With her hand already to her mouth, she surreptitiously slipped a blue pill between her teeth, and with a single crunch she broke it in two and swallowed it dry. Only Catherine noticed. Catherine watched her pout her lips and wipe carefully at the side of her lip line. Then Agnes reached over and adjusted the buckle on her high black heels, and with her long painted nails, she smoothed her wool skirt and picked at the oose migrating downwards from the front of her pink angora jumper.
Catherine narrowed her eyes. “How come you aren’t dressed for flitting?”
“Well, there is flitting and then there is moving house.” Agnes spat on her comb and dragged it through Shuggie’s hair. He squirmed, but she held his shoulders and kept combing until the hair sat in neat rows and she could see the clean pink lines of his scalp.
“Pfft. How do I look?” asked Leek, rumpling his hair over his face. His big toe was bursting the seam of his white trainers, a dirty sock starting to poke out.
Agnes sighed. “If anyone asks, you are with the movers.”
They slid the windows all the way down, and the taxi filled with a rushing breeze that carried the scent of fresh-cut grass and wild bluebells. Underneath the bright green tones was the dark brown of untended fields, mounds of cow dirt, and the dark places at the bottom of wet trees. The beaded sleeves on Agnes’s pink angora jumper danced in the wind, and she twinkled like a rabbit dipped in rhinestones. Shuggie reached up and ran his fingers through the glass beads. His mother’s mouth was set in a wide white smile, her teeth not touching, like someone was taking her photo. She would have looked happy if her eyes hadn’t kept anxiously flitting back to Shug’s eyes in the rear-view mirror. Shuggie sat playing with her sleeves and watched as her back molars came together and slowly started to grind back and forth.
The road narrowed again, and the last of the manicured gardens dropped away for good. There was a spit of dead yew trees and then flat, open marshland sprang up on both sides. Small brown hillocks and clumps of brush and gorse broke the endless emptiness. Dirty copper burns snaked through the open fields, and the wild brown grass grew right up on either side of the enclosing fences, trying to reclaim the rutted track, the Pit Road. The road itself was covered with a settled layer of charcoal dust, and the taxi pulled lines through it as though it were the photo negative of fresh snow.
The taxi shuddered around a lazy bend. In the distance lay a sea of huge black mounds, hills that looked as if they had been burnt free of all life. They filled the line of the horizon, and beyond them was nothing, like it was the very edge of the earth. The burnt hills glinted when they were struck with sunlight, and the wind blew black wispy puffs from the tops like
they were giant piles of unhoovered stour. Soon the greenish, brownish air filled with a dark tangy smell, metallic and sharp, like licking the end of a spent battery. They curved around another corner, and the broken fence ended at a large car park. At the back of the car park sat a high brick wall with an old iron gate set into it, held tight with a heavy padlock and chain. The guard’s booth at the side was tilting at a funny angle, and a thick layer of weedy grass grew on its roof. The mine was shut. Someone had painted Fuck the Tories on the plywood barrier. It looked like it was closed for good.
Opposite the gates was a low concrete building. Dozens of men were spilling out of its windowless structure and stood in dark clumps on the Pit Road. At first it looked like they were leaving chapel, but as the diesel engine roared nearer, they turned as if they were one. The miners stopped their talking and squinted to get a good look. They all wore the same black donkey jackets and were holding large amber pints and sucking on stubby doubts. The miners had scrubbed faces and pink hands that looked free of work. It seemed wrong, these men being the only clean thing for miles. Reluctantly, the miners parted and let the taxi go by. Leek watched them as they were watching him. His stomach sank. The men all had his mother’s eyes.
The housing scheme spread out suddenly before them. Ahead, the thin dusty road ended abruptly into the side of a low brown hill. Each of the three or four little streets that made up the scheme branched horizontally off this main road. Low-roofed houses, square and squat, huddled in neat rows. Each house had exactly the same amount of patchy garden, and each garden was dissected by the identical criss-crossing of white washing lines and grey washing poles. The scheme was surrounded by the peaty marshland, and to the east the land had been turned inside out, blackened and slagged in the search for coal.
“Is that it?” she asked.
Shug couldn’t answer. From the roundness in his shoulders she could see his own heart had sunk. Agnes’s back teeth were powder. As they drove towards the little hill, they passed a plain-looking Catholic chapel and a huddled group of women still with their housecoats on. Shug searched the street signs and turned the taxi a sharp right. The street was a uniform line of modest four-in-a-block houses. Four families lived in one squat block. They were the plainest, unhappiest-looking homes Agnes had ever seen. The windows were big but thin-looking, letting the heat out and letting the chill in. Up and down the street, black puffs of coal smoke came out of chimneys, the houses were incurably cold even on a mild summer’s day.
Shug stopped the taxi a few houses down. He leaned over the steering wheel to get a clear look at the building. There were hardly any cars parked on the street, and the ones that were looked like they were not in working condition.
While Shug was distracted, Agnes rummaged around in her black leather bag. “You three keep your mouths shut,” she hissed. She lowered her head into the cavernous bag and tilted it slightly to her face. The children watched the muscles in her throat pulse as she took several long slugs from the can of warm lager she had hidden there. Agnes drew her head from the bag; the lager had washed the lipstick off her top lip, and she blinked once, very slowly, under the layers of wasted mascara.
“What a shitehole,” she slurred. “And to think I dressed up nice for this?”
1982
Pithead
Eight
By the time the back doors on the Albion van were open, there were people standing in the middle of the road openly staring. They held wet tea towels and bits of half-finished ironing, things they hadn’t bothered to put down in order to come and look. Families came out from the low houses and settled down on their front steps as if there was something good on telly. A tribe of sooty weans, led by a trouseless boy, crossed the dusty street and stood in a semicircle around Agnes. She politely said hello to the children, who stared back at her, rings of a red saucy dinner still around their mouths.
The tight formation of the miners’ houses meant the front doors faced one another, each building separated by a low fence and a thin strip of grass. The front doors opposite Agnes’s were all thrown open, and women stood watching, a half dozen children milling about each one, all with the same face. It was like the photo of her Granny Campbell and her Irish dozen that Wullie had once shown her. Agnes, standing on her stoop, smiled across the low fence and waved, her beaded rabbit sleeves glinting in the light.
“Hello.” She politely addressed the general congregation.
“Ye movin’ in?” said a woman from the door beyond her own. The woman’s blond hair curled back on dark brown roots. It made her look like she had on a child’s wig.
“Yes.”
“All of yeese?” asked the woman.
“Yes. My family and I,” corrected Agnes. She introduced herself and held out her hand.
The woman scratched at her root line. Agnes wondered whether the woman spoke only in questions, when she finally answered. “Ah’m Bridie Donnelly. Ah’ve lived upstairs for twenty-nine years. Ah’ve had fifteen downstairs neighbours in aw that time.”
Agnes felt all the Donnelly eyes on her. A skinny girl with dark round eyes brought a tray of mismatched tea mugs through the door. Everyone took one. They didn’t draw their eyes from Agnes as they supped.
Bridie nodded over the fence. “That there is Noreen Donnelly, ma cousin. But no ma blood, ye understand.” A grey-coloured woman rolled her tongue in her head and nodded sharply. Bridie Donnelly went on: “That lassie is Jinty McClinchy. Ma cousin. She is ma blood.” A child-size woman next door to Noreen took a long drag on a short doubt. Her eyes narrowed from the smoke, and right enough she looked like Bridie in a headscarf. They all looked like Bridie, even the boys, only they looked less masculine.
From out of the side of her eye, Agnes could feel another woman crossing the dusty street. The woman stopped and talked to the semi-circle of raggedy children; she nodded like they had given her grave news and marched on through the front gate to the new house. Agnes had no escape. Behind her Leek came sullenly out of the house for his next load.
“Is that your man?” said the newly arrived woman without introduction. The meat of her face was a taut as a leathered skull. Her eyes were deep pockets in her head, and her hair was a rich wild brown but thinning, like the coat of an uncombed cat. She stood in bagged-out stretch pants, the stirrups stuffed into men’s house slippers.
Agnes stumbled over the absurdity of the question. There were twenty-odd years between her and Leek. “No. That’s my middle wean. Sixteen in the spring.”
“Oh! In the spring is it.” The woman considered this for a minute and then jabbed a sharp finger out at the vegetable van. “Is that there your man?”
Agnes looked at a mover struggling with the old television she had tried to wrap for discretion in a bed sheet. “No, he’s a friend of a friend who’s lending a hand.”
The woman thought on this. She sucked her gaunt cheeks into her skull head. Agnes made a half wave and a half turn to leave. “What’s that on your sleeves?” asked the thin woman.
Agnes looked down and cradled her fluffy arms protectively, like they were kittens. The rhinestones shook nervously. “They’re just wee beads.”
Shona Donnelly, the tea girl, exhaled slowly. “Oh! Missus, I think they’re lovel—”
The thin woman interrupted her. “Do ye even have a man?”
The front door opened again, and Shuggie came out on to the top step. Without addressing the women he turned to his mother and put his hands on his hips; he thrust a foot forward and said as clear as Agnes had ever heard him speak, “We need to talk. I really do not think I can live here. It smells like cabbages and batteries. It’s simply unpossible.”
The heads of the audience turned one to another in shock. It was like a dozen faces looking at their own likenesses in the mirror. “Wid ye get a load o’ that. Liberace is moving in!” screamed one of the women.
The women and children howled as one, high squeaky laughs and throaty coughs full of catarrh. “Oh! I do hope the piano
will fit in the parlour.”
“Well, it’s so nice to meet you all,” said Agnes with a thin grimace. She clutched Shuggie to her hip as she turned to leave.
“Oh, dinnae be like that. It’s nice to meet you an’ all, hen,” wheezed Bridie, her hard face softening around the eyes from the good howling. “We’re all like family here. We just don’t get that many new faces.”
The skull-faced woman took a step closer to Agnes. “Aye, well. We’ll get on just fine.” She sucked as though a piece of meat was stuck between her teeth. “Just as long as ye keep yer fancy sleeves away from our fuckin’ men.”
For the rest of the afternoon Shuggie walked the edge of the new scheme while the men unpacked the moving van. Women in tight leggings dragged kitchen chairs to their windows and sat watching, empty-faced, as box after box was unloaded. They had taken to greeting the boy with extravagant waves, doffing imaginary caps and then cackling to themselves.
In his new outfit he walked to the far end of the street. There was nothing out there. The street stopped at the edge of the peatbogs like it had given up. Dark pools of boggy water sat still and deep and scary-looking. Great forests of brown reeds shot up out of the grass and were slowly inching over the scheme, intent on taking it back from the miners.
Shuggie watched shoeless children playing in the stour. From the edge of a clutch of council bushes he pretended he was cataloguing some small red flowers, studying each for its size, while he waited for the children to ask him to join them. They were riding bikes in circles round each other and ignoring him. He popped the white berries between his fingers, trying to look casually disinterested, and then he tried to wipe the shine off his good shoes with the sticky juice.
The miners’ tackety boots made sparks on the tarmac. The men slowly started drifting one by one along the empty road. There was no colliery whistle now; still the men were pushed along by the muscle memory of a dead routine, heading home at finishing time with nothing being finished, only a belly full of ale and a back cowed with worry. Their donkey jackets were clean and their boots were still shiny as they jerked along the road. Shuggie stepped back as they passed, their heads lowered like those of tired black mules. Without a word, each man collected a handful of thin children, who followed obediently, like reverential shadows.
Shuggie Bain Page 10