Johnny grabbed a raised ridge inside the drum and moved it slowly from left to right, rocking it as gently as a baby’s crib. Shuggie fell over and scrambled for ballast against the swinging, he tensed all his muscles and bared his teeth, like a scared cat. Daphne slid away, clanging around the cylinder.
Johnny kept on rocking gently. “See it’s no’ that bad, is it?”
The motion came to remind Shuggie of the pirate ship ride that sat outside his grandfather’s favourite bakery. He gurgled with involuntary laughter.
“Haud on,” said Johnny. He gripped the metal ridge tighter, and bracing his body against the machine for purchase, he rocked it harder. Shuggie’s head and knees travelled in semicircles as Daphne hit the roof. The muscles on Johnny’s neck stood out as he pulled the drum round with all his might. Shuggie spun head over heels. He spun over and over, again and again, his head cracking on the metal paddles, his foot hitting him square in the back.
The drum slowed and Shuggie crashed into an upside-down heap. A thick arm grabbed one of the metal bars and stopped the centrifuge. A siren wail rose in Shuggie as the pain shot down through his crown, his split knee, and his bruised shins. From behind his waterfall of tears he could see a large hand come down again and again on Johnny’s head, the boy ducking for cover to protect his face. The attacker was too tall for Shuggie to see a face, just the angry lashings of a tattooed arm, slapping the boy’s bare neck and shoulders.
“Whit in the name of the wee man have ah telt ye about playing with that fuckin’ washin’ machine?” scolded the headless torso. With his fat thumb, the man jabbed towards the drum. “Get. That. The fuck out of there, afore ah really gie ye something to greet about.”
As swiftly as the figure had arrived, it disappeared again. Johnny stood in the opening looking like a battered dog. His smile was gone, his ears were pinned down. He reached in and plucked Shuggie out of the drum. “Listen. Ye stop that greetin’, or I’ll gie you something to greet about.”
Out of the drum the daylight was almost blinding. The pain in his head stole the colour from his sight.
Johnny looked the boy up and down. There was blood on Shuggie’s leg from where the metal had burst the skin, and bruises were already showing on his arms and legs. Johnny whipped him around the corner through the black flies and into the cool darkness of the bin shed. It smelt sour as curdled yoghurt.
In the dark, Johnny spat on his hand and rubbed it over the boy’s wet face and then down the length of his bloody leg. It made everything worse. The blood became a spittle wash, smearing further instead of wiping away. The boy grew panicked, his eyes wide in fear. He ripped a handful of large green docken leaves out of the dirt and scraped them up and down Shuggie’s leg. He scrubbed until the blood lifted off and was replaced by a thick trail of mushed green plant mucus. The chlorophyll stung the cut. Shuggie started to girn again.
“Haud still you poofy wee bastard.” All the tones of his earlier friendliness were gone. Shuggie could see his father’s red hand marks blooming across Johnny’s sepia skin.
It was quiet in the bin shed but for the buzz of fat bluebottles. Johnny rubbed and rubbed the little boy’s leg until his breathing calmed. His rubbing turned Shuggie from white to red to a deep green. As the panic left Johnny’s eyes, slowly the fake smile returned to his tanned face. It was very dark in the bin shed.
Bonny Johnny stood up again, a wiry silhouette against the bright daylight. He handed Shuggie the pulped green leaves and then he took down his gym shorts. “Stop girning,” he said, through his big boy teeth. “Now you rub me.”
By the time Shuggie had limped back to the Miners Club the sun had nearly dried up the rainbow puddles. He’d left Daphne in the machine. He didn’t ever want to go back.
As he climbed the stairs to the hallway he could hear her on the phone. “Fuck you, Joanie Micklewhite. You tell that whoremastering son of a Proddy bitch that he cannot have his cake and eat it too!” Each filthy syllable was enunciated with the alarming clarity of the Queen’s English. “You shitty, dick-sucking bastard. You are as plain and tasteless as the arse end of a white loaf.” The receiver went down with a clang, and the bells tinkled with the impact.
Shuggie reached the end of the hallway and turned the corner. His mother sat cross-legged at the little telephone table with the mug on her knee. She looked at him like he had risen from the carpet itself. She didn’t notice his missing tooth or the leg, stained with blood and spit and docken.
Plastered on her face was the glassy grimace that came from under the kitchen sink. She took her earring and threw it across the room before she picked up the phone again. “Now I’m in a mood to tell your granny where to fucking go.”
The house was only a stone’s throw from the bus stop, but Leek walked home very slowly. His legs were heavy from the day’s graft on the Youth Training Scheme, his insides heavy with the dread of what might lie at home. He only hoped for a peaceful hour so he could draw, but it had been a year free of peace since they had moved to the Pit.
He knew Catherine would not come home again tonight. She was getting adept at sneaking around under Agnes’s nose, holding her secret life with Donald Jnr away from their disintegrating mother. Instead, Catherine blamed her boss for all manner of slave-driving and told Agnes she would be late at the office and would need to stay at her granny’s. Leek saw how his mother worried over money, how she worshipped Catherine’s weekly pittance, and so she said nothing. Leek knew Catherine really was at Donald Jnr’s, lying on the blowup mattress in his mother’s spare room and trying to keep her hand locked over her modesty until Donald finally married her. After all his years of practice, Leek was angry that it was Catherine who was disappearing first.
It was still daylight, but there were harsh lights on in every room, and the curtains lay open in a shameful way. It was a very bad sign. In the front room Shuggie was idling between the net curtain and the glass. His palms and nose were pressed flat against the window, he was rocking his head back and forth in a soothing way, and no one was telling him to stop. When he saw his brother he mouthed Leek and left a grease smear on the glass.
The net curtains fluttered to life. A shadow fell across the window, and Agnes appeared behind her youngest. Leek raised his hand in a half wave and put his other on the gate in a gesture that said he was coming home. Agnes smiled out at him, the too-toothy grimace that telegraphed a thousand messages. Her eyes seemed dull to him, unfixed, and instantly he knew she was gone.
She disappeared again, back to the telephone table, back to the drink.
Leek picked up his tool bag and turned away from the house. There was an insistent chink-chink on the glass. Shuggie’s lips were wide as he overenunciated dramatically: Where. Are. You. Going?
Leek mouthed silently, To Granny’s.
Shuggie tried to steady his lips. Can. I. Come?
No. It’s too far. I can’t carry you.
What he never told Shuggie was that he had once found his real father’s address. Brendan McGowan. It was there, in Agnes’s phone book, circled in many different colours and thicknesses of ink, as if she had gone back to it, again and again, over the years. Leek had walked to this address the winter before and had sat on the wall opposite the broad Victorian tenement. He’d watched a man come home from work, a man he didn’t recognize, but who shared the same tired stoop. A man with eyes of the same light grey. The man parked his car in front of the building and then walked past Leek on the street with nothing more than a polite nod.
As the door opened, three small faces had raced down the close to greet him. Leek had watched the happy, rowdy family sit and eat at a dining table pressed against the front window. He’d watched them talk over the top of each other, the children standing defiantly upright on the dining chairs as the man laughed at their excitement. Leek had watched for a long time before he folded the address and dropped it between the slats of a storm drain.
Leek picked up his tool bag and headed out of Pithead. He turned
his back to Shuggie and dared not look again at the pleading face in the window. It was going to rain and it would be a long walk to Sighthill. He was tired, he had been tired for a long time now. All he wanted was a rest.
Eleven
Colourless daylight poured through the net curtains. It poked her in the face, and with a snort she thumped back into consciousness. Agnes opened her eyes slowly and found herself staring at the cream Artexed ceiling with its icy stalagmite texture. Her lips wouldn’t close over the sticky film on her top teeth as the dry boak rose inside her. Under her right hand she felt the slippery damask fabric of the armchair. Her fingers traced the familiar fag-burn holes. She was vaguely upright, cradling a dead phone receiver.
She sat still awhile, her head tilted over the back of the chair, like an open pedal bin. She closed her eyes again and listened to her brain thump loudly. Like a tide, the blood flushed in and out, in and out of her skull. Over the ebb she could tell the house was empty. It was early, but the boy had taken himself off to school again. He had already missed too many days. Too many days sat at her feet, just waiting and watching. The school didn’t like that. Father Barry had said that the Social Work would have to be notified if he did not start having a regular attendance.
Some mornings she would wake up with a fright and find Shuggie staring at her. He would be dressed, dwarfed by the bag slung over both shoulders, his face washed and his wet hair parted and brushed in the front only. She would lie there, fully dressed, trying to pull her dry lips over her teeth, while he would say, “Good morning,” and then quietly turn and leave for school. He hadn’t wanted to leave without letting her know he would be right back afterwards. He took her pinkie in his and swore it.
The house was quiet. She tilted her head forward into her hands, and the blood filled the back of her eyes. Shuggie wasn’t standing there as usual. On the table in front of her was a mug of cold tea, the top already congealed with a milky skin. Next to that a slice of white toast poked through with a clumsy knife, littered with lumps of butter too thick to spread. With a hand over her eyes she scanned the low coffee table for something to calm the shakes. She tilted mugs towards her and looked inside for a mouthful of beer. The mugs were empty. Agnes reached for a cigarette and with a sorry whimper pulled the last one out of the packet. She lit it with shaking fingers and took a long drag.
Feeling no better, she got up and shuffled around the couch looking for hidden quarter bottles or half-finished cans. She stoated around the empty house, tipping out all the hiding places that might hold a forgotten drink: the laundry basket, behind the vinyl video case covers that were made to look like encyclopaedias. On her knees, she pulled all the empty grocery bags out from underneath the kitchen sink till she knelt waist-deep in a cumulus of blue and white plastic.
The panic set in. From room to room she wandered, making shrieking, sucking noises of frustration through her front teeth. She had to keep stopping to spit gobbets of rising boak into sinks and old tea mugs. She dug out her big black leather bag and rifled around inside for her purse, sprang the metal clasp at the top, and opened it. Saint Jude rolled around at the bottom in a bed of fluff and grit. It was Thursday, and all the Monday and all the Tuesday benefit money was already done in.
On the Monday prior, she had lain awake through the night waiting for the radio clock to turn to eight. In high heels and uneven eyeshadow she had fairly run up the Pit Road to cash what the miners’ wives called the “Monday Book.” Standing at the back of the benefit queue, her head held high, her hands shaking in her pockets, Agnes had tried to ignore the women in their thin nylon jackets that made dry swishing noises. She stood there separate and aloof, as they rattled with their smoker’s cough, grumbling with sticky phlegm.
Thirty-eight pounds a week was meant to keep and feed them all. It made mothers stand in the little shop and look at pint cartons of milk like they were a luxury.
Agnes cashed the Monday Book with the air of a queen. She walked directly past the milk to the front of the shop, and promptly bought twelve cans of Special Brew. She talked cheerily about the good weather they had been having, but the Indian man said nothing. She was sure the blue elephant thing hanging behind him was giving her the hairy eyeball. She reclasped her purse demurely as he slid the cold metal tins into a plastic bag. The women behind her did sums out loud, their lips moving as they counted, adding bread to oven chips to cigarettes and then, defeated, putting the bread quietly back on the shelf. Agnes slipped back out into the street, and behind the low sandstone shop, she crouched in the broken glass and popped open the first cold can.
On a Tuesday morning she went back to the shop already with a drink in her. She glided up the dual carriageway, her knees dipping elegantly with each step. Agnes cashed in her Tuesday Book of eight pounds fifty in child support. Fortified by the Special Brew she told the shopkeeper that his blue elephant gave her the “heebie-jeebies.”
But it was Thursday now. She looked down into the purse, empty but for Saint Jude and the oose gathering in the creases. Sad, selfish tears of the poor me’s welled in her eyes. She raked a finger through the dirty ashtray. She needed to think what to do next.
The alcohol leaving her body made it hard to watch the television, so she ran a hot bath. The water would make her feel less cold, less sore. She rinsed the sweat and flatness out of her hair. She took the flannel cloth and began wiping the taste off her teeth and lay back in the scalding water and thought how she could get some money. Across her soft middle ran a deep red welt where, after she had passed out, her black tights had dug in, bruising the flesh. She stuck her finger in the welt. It ran across her spare tyre like a train track and that made her think of the Glasgow train, Paddy’s Market, which lay underneath its arches, and the pawnshop that sat there.
Without drying herself she ran about the house in a wet house-coat looking for something to pawn. In the daylight everything looked cheap and worthless. She turned every Capodimonte ornament in her hands and even tried picking up the black-and-white television, but she would never be able to hump it by foot into the city. In the bedroom she considered her jewellery, all the odd pieces that were lying loose in an old penny-bank bag: the Claddagh rings her mother had given her, her granny’s locket, Catherine’s christening bangle. It took effort, but she reluctantly put the bag back in the drawer.
She did a sly amble past Leek’s heavy toolbox. She nudged it with her toe. It was empty, he had taken all the tools with him to the YTS job site. He had carried it all, even the things he would surely not need. He had learned his lesson the last time she had been itching for pawn. Agnes scratched at her palm. She kicked the empty toolbox and went to Catherine’s wardrobe. She was surprised to find so little inside, it was like Catherine was a lodger who hadn’t committed to a new place. She turned a pair of high suede boots in her hand, but they had long been ruined with rain and mud.
Losing hope, she opened the little linen cupboard that held the good towels. There, folded away in a bin bag, was the old-fashioned mink coat she had bought on Brendan McGowan’s good tick. She took the plastic bag out of the cupboard and pushed her hand inside to the furry pelt. It felt like pure money.
Within the hour she had her hair set, the long mink coat on, and was walking up the main road the long miles to Paddy’s Market. She walked against the traffic, her head high, with a knowing smile on her face. The Pit grit pushed into her open heels as if it were beach sand. She straightened her back to look like she enjoyed letting the rushing traffic blow through her hair and tried to ignore the fine dust that rasped between her toes. Passing cars slowed at the odd sight. Her face burned with the flying grit and the shame, but she tilted her head back and walked on. She felt like she must have looked mental.
Every time she neared a bus stop she lingered like she was waiting for a bus, making a grand gesture of looking up her sleeve at a watch she did not own. Then she waited until the traffic thinned a little and walked on to the next one, her head thumping, her heart burni
ng. Four miles or so from the scheme, a bus slowed and actually stopped for her. Looking the other way she took one hand from her mink pocket and waved it away, like she was too good, as miners’ wives gawped out the window at her.
By the time she reached the outskirts of the city it had started to spit. It was a light sprinkle at first that hung on the tips of the coat and glistened like hairspray. Agnes was exhausted from walking in the high heels, but as she crossed the narrow streets of her first marriage, the fear that she could meet someone she knew made her walk faster. The spit became a downpour and soon the drenched coat slapped off her bare legs like a wet dog tail. She took refuge in a tenement doorway and watched the buses push dirty waves on to the pavement. For a moment, she missed the good Catholic.
Black mascara ran down her cheeks. She had a crumpled wad of toilet paper, and folding the sour boak stains into the back she wiped the lines beneath her eyes. The coat was sodden and matted in places where the water had pooled and sat. She took an ornament out of each pocket and rubbed the glass faces of the ballerinas till they were dry.
Across the road sat a long grey building. On the left hand was a taxi garage of sorts, where parts of broken black hacks and minibuses lay around like dinosaur bones, and somewhere in the back a radio played. Beyond this sat a small office, and through the dirty window Agnes could see that the walls were lined with new fan belts and hubcaps, tins of grease, and bottles of engine oil. It was a heavy service garage, not for the casual motorist. There were no packaged sandwiches, no maps of things to see.
A little bell rang as Agnes went inside. She was making a puddle on the floor as a man in overalls came through at the bell’s command. Red-haired, stocky, and flat-faced, his head joined directly to his body as if a neck were an unnecessary luxury. He looked up from his dirty hands, surprised to see a beautiful lady in a fur coat standing there.
Shuggie Bain Page 13