Shuggie Bain

  “Say hello to your new mother,” baited Shug, still grinning. “Go on, give your new mammy a hug.”

  “No. Some of us know what side our bread is buttered on,” said Shuggie, leaving the safety of the traitor’s leg. He didn’t know where he had heard that before, probably from her, screaming at her phone table.

  “Pfft. You’re gonnae need a new mammy, Shuggie. That old one you’ve got is for the knacker’s yard.” Shug stood up with a click of the knee and a wince. “Or the Eastern Hotel, more like.”

  Joanie waved a small hello to the boy. She held out a paper shopping bag. “You never mind him, son. Sometimes I swear his heart is as empty as a Fenian’s cupboard on a Thursday.” She came forward with the shopping bag, it looked very heavy. “Listen, you don’t have to call me anything but Joanie.” She peered into the bag. “Our Stephanie has outgrown these, but they are so new-looking I hadn’t the heart to throw them out. Would you like them?”

  He shook his head no, but his lips said, “What are they?”

  She came closer and set the bag between them like she was feeding a cautious beast. Then Joanie the Hoor took two steps back. “Ye’ll just have to look and see.”

  His father came out of the kitchenette with a tall glass of milk, there was already a rich line of cream on his bristles. He leaned against the wall and watched the boy hug the safety of the corner. Shuggie wanted to step away from the bag, wanted to pretend like he wasn’t interested, but it was calling to him, and he found himself stepping towards it. He tapped the bottom of the bag with his toe and it was heavy. He used a finger to push it open. At the bottom were eight bright yellow wheels. His eyes were wide as saucers as he took out the first roller boot.

  “I still don’t know why we couldn’t have given him Andrew’s old bladder fitba,” said Shug to Joanie.

  They were a bumblebee-yellow suede with white stripes and white laces. The laces were fed through a dozen holes, and the boots went up nearly to his knee. He loved them.

  “What do you say to Joanie?” prodded Catherine.

  He wanted to pretend he did not care. He wanted to put the boots back in the bag and tell Catherine that they had to leave. He felt like a traitor. He was no better than his sister.

  Auntie Peggy’s high voice came out of the kitchen hatch. “Shug. You’ll never believe what the Prodigal has gone and done.”

  Shug smirked at his nephew and then smirked at Catherine in a way that made her want to fold her hands over her chest, over her belly.

  Donald Jnr spoke first. “No! It’s no that, Uncle Shug. I’ve got an offer of work, good high-paying work where I get to be lord and master over four dozen men.”

  Shug finished the last of his milk. “But I was looking forward to seeing you on that rank.”

  “You might see him on the Renfrew Street rank yet,” said Catherine, as she helped Shuggie into the new boots. She turned her head, spoke to Donald Jnr over the small bones of her shoulder. “I have a career of my own, you know. I can’t just up sticks and follow you around like a shadow.”

  Shug watched her try to master his nephew and laughed. “Donnie Boy! You thought you were on to a sure thing, but look how the Catholics are revolting.”

  Donald Jnr turned to his uncle. “It’s a good job in the palladium mines. Out in Transvaal, I think it’s called. They telt us they will take nearly all the Govan riveters, fly us out there, find us somewhere to live. Even give us a month in advance. Yasssss! Soooth Efrika. Boyeee.”

  “Youse gonnae be a Kaffir master!” said Shug, his bottom lip stuck out in genuine pride.

  “Don’t use that horrible word in front of the boy,” Catherine said. She helped her brother on to his feet and turned him towards the door. “Go play in the hall. Make sure and shut that door behind you.” They watched him go, his arms stretched out for balance, his fingers splayed upwards like pretty bird wings. Shuggie pushed off each step into a gliding graceful swoosh, but each boot embedded soon enough into the deep pile carpet. They watched him clomp out into the hallway, his face split from ear to ear in a smile.

  Shug sucked his teeth in disappointment. “I don’t think that boy is mine.”

  Shuggie lowered his arms. He stopped gliding across the carpet. Suddenly he could feel just how heavy the old roller boots really were.

  Shug turned to Catherine and asked, “What do ye think she’ll say when she hears I’ve seen him?”

  Catherine looked at Shuggie, she could see the scalding in his cheeks. “Oh no. We can’t ever say he’s been here.”

  A mean smile broke over Shug’s face. He spoke in the pushing voice that bullies in school used when they wanted to see a fight. “Go on. Let him tell her.”

  With a shove, Catherine closed the door between them. Shuggie could hear his father roar with laughter. He heard Catherine ask, “Why on earth did you ask me to bring him if you are going to be such a bloody bully?”

  Shuggie spent the afternoon wearing lines in the hall carpet, trying as hard as he could to ruin it. He listened to the adults fight about something he thought was called Joanna’s Bird that lived in the south of Africa. He heard Catherine say she would be settled there by Christmas. He wondered what black people were like and why they needed Donald Jnr to make them work better. He wondered why his big sister had to go off and leave him.

  Thirteen

  The black slag hills stretched for miles like the waves of a petrified sea. The coke dust left a thin grey coating across Leek’s face. It hollowed out his already gaunt features, outlining the thick horse bone of his nose, and darkened the fine hairs of his scant moustache. His feathered fringe had stopped bouncing up and down and lay heavy and grey against his forehead. He looked like a man made of graphite, like one of his own black-and-white drawings.

  It was slow-going, climbing up the crumbling black hill. It sucked at his feet and with every step it ate him nearly to his knees. The fine jet dust found every opening and filled every space. It poured over the top of his slip-on loafers, their braided tassels swinging up clouds of black like the tail of a dirty cow. On the downward slope the loose slag raged after him like a hungry wave. Although there was nothing to him, his hollowness still brought the crust of the hill pouring down. The slag shrugged as though it were turning itself inside out, clearing him off and revealing a darker, untouched blackness beneath. Each time the hills wiped him away he felt more unnoticed, more like an unseen ghost than usual.

  Crossing the black sea was best when it wasn’t windy or wet. When the wind licked the dry hills they took to the air like the inside of a burst Etch A Sketch, like the lead dust from a million shaved pencils. If it caught in his mouth, he could taste it for days. When it rained over the colliery, the hills felt tired and beaten. They solidified, as if they had given up and died.

  Leek climbed to the top of the highest bing and sat down. He lit a short doubt and looked out over the dead colliery and the dying scheme that lay beyond. Like a diorama, it sat orderly and uniform in the peaty marshland, the way a model maker’s collection of toy houses sat on a balding brown carpet. Even from here Leek thought it looked petty and small.

  He took his sketchbook from inside his anorak. His sooty fingers left smudges as he tried to capture the horizon with the broad side of a soft pencil. If the Pit scheme had been made by a model maker, then what a miser he must have been. Where were the miniature tin cars, the farm animals, or the green fluffy bushes that looked like spiny sea coral? Leek watched the black-jacketed figures loitering around the men’s club and wondered whether the model maker didn’t like colourful, happily painted figurines.

  He looked out over the scene, past the pipe-cleaner trees and the carpet of dead marsh. The Glasgow to Edinburgh train seemed like a toy in the distance as it charged through the wasteland that separated the miners from the world. It created an unseen boundary, and it never ever stopped. Years ago the council had ripped out the only station, for big savings in stationmaster wages. They laid on a single bus that came three times a da
y and took an hour to get anywhere.

  Now, in the evenings, the eldest of the miners’ sons stood at the train tracks with beers and bags of glue and watched with sadness and spite the happy faces roar by every thirty minutes. They fondled their cousins’ tits under baggy Aran jumpers and ran across the tracks in front of the speeding train, their soft hair whipped by the near miss. They threw bottles of piss at the windows, and when the driver let fly his angry horn, they felt seen by the world, they felt alive.

  Since the colliery had closed they had taken to laying branches across the tracks, thick brown limbs that they had to bounce up and down on to rip from the dying trees. When the trains severed them easily, the boys left stones and then later red builder’s bricks. A boy not much older than Shuggie had lost an eye from the flying, sparking rocks. So instead, armed with cans of lighter gas meant for sniffing, they started to set fires in the reeds. Leek had watched as they set the brown marsh on either side of the tracks ablaze. Still the Glasgow trains would not stop.

  Leek scored his chewed pencil through the desolate view. He didn’t realize it, sitting there alone, but while he drew his hunched shoulders fell from around his ears.

  It was getting harder to get up in the mornings, to let the day in, to come back to his body and stop floating around behind his eyelids, where he was free. He was turning up later and later for his apprenticeship. The gaffer was giving up, Leek could see it. They floated by each other with equal disinterest.

  At first the gaffer, a sinewy, pragmatic man, had given the well-practiced speeches. As the apprenticeship went on, and Leek kept staring through him, the speeches slowly filled with bitter bile. Leek nodded like a metronome through the spit-stained lecture on how his generation was ruining the country. The gaffer, fair frothing at the mouth, reached out and pushed Leek’s fringe away with a rough palm. The young man’s eyes were empty as two dull marbles. The man had seen it all in his thirty years in the building trade: generations of weans dragged in on government schemes, lazy and disinterested or mouthy and fly. Over time they would break and fall into their place, grow up into men who got lassies into bother and needed the steady wage. In all his years he’d never met a soul like this boy before.

  Angry, the gaffer drew his short pencil from behind his ear and with a set jaw stabbed it a half inch from Leek’s face. Leek never flinched, he’d practiced that for Agnes. He locked the door that lay behind his eyes and walked away, leaving the body, the plaster dust, the flask of cold tea, and the angry gaffer behind.

  The gaffer might have let him go, but this was a YTS, and as long as Thatcher was subsidising his wages the man would let him stay on. They would always need a tea maker. The older joiners took to sending Leek to the store for tartan paint. They made him check boxes of half-inch nails and sort them into ascending sizes. Leek just shrugged his shoulders to their laughter and went on his way, happy to be losing his body in their monotonous, fruitless tasks, his mind floating free about the world.

  Now, in the silence, he turned the pages of the sketchbook and drew two envelopes from the back leaf. The first envelope was a thin, colourful airmail letter, neat sky-blue paper that folded on itself, and was sent with a row of springbok stamps from Catherine in Transvaal. He turned it in his hands and wished it didn’t make him so heartsick to read it. He wished her excitement for patio furniture and biltong sausages didn’t make him feel so much like a discarded thing, something so easily left behind.

  Still, Leek thought this new sadness was better than the anger he had felt at first. Sadness made for a better houseguest; at least it was quiet, reliable, consistent. When Catherine had first married Donald Jnr, they had all been angry. Agnes, soaked through with vodka, had dragged Catherine’s mattress out to the kerb. She had managed it single-handedly, and the boys could only stand back as the last of their sister was set amongst the black bags.

  Leek took up the second letter. It was dirty now, creased at the corners from hours spent reading and rereading. The envelope was a thick cream paper, mottled, like expensive watercolour stock. Someone had written his name in black calligrapher’s ink, Mr Alexander Bain, taking the effort to level it off with a neat ruler line. Leek opened the envelope and unfolded the typed letter. The paper snapped with quality. His dirty fingers traced the familiar crest at the top of the page; he could have read it with his eyes closed.

  Dear Mr Bain,

  I am pleased to inform you that after careful review of your application and your portfolio we are happy to offer you an unconditional place on the BA (Hons) Fine Art course . . .

  Leek folded the letter and slid it carefully back into the envelope. He knew it said that they would send him more information, that he had to contact the registrar of the fine-art course to accept the coveted space. He knew it said he should start in September. But that was already a September two years ago. He thought back to the time when he had received the letter. He saw Shug leave. He saw Catherine watch the door and his funny little brother, hungry and fearful, while his mother sat with her head in the gas oven.

  It was cold and quiet on the petrified sea; that was why he liked it. Lost in his daydream, he ignored the sound at first, until it got closer and grew more insistent, the horrible farting of sucking wellies. Shuggie appeared, red and flushed, on the crest of the slag bing. The usual creamy colours of him were muted by a layer of dust, but there were wet pink circles around his eyes and mouth. Leek hid the letter in the sketchbook and carefully tucked it all back inside his jerkin.

  “I asked you to wait!” moaned Shuggie. His bottom lip was a pink bubble in the grey dirt.

  “If you cannae keep up, then don’t ask to come.” He felt sure they’d had this conversation before; he felt like they were always having it. Leek stood up and took off again. He looked like a daddy-long-legs trying to glide on the surface of inky black water, his blue nylon anorak as shiny as the shell of a beetle. He tried to lose his little brother by bolting down the steep sides in large jumps. He had hoped the boy would stop and turn for home. Still Shuggie kept on.

  Leek listened to his brother panting like an asthmatic at his back, it was breaking his peace. He should have told him that he couldn’t come, but his brother was a notorious grass. Shuggie had learned this skill well but was clumsy at using it. He would spill the worst information for the littlest reward, and he almost always went too far. Agnes, when provoked, could chase Leek round the house with a heavy Dr Scholl’s sandal; the flat rubber sole left purple welts floating in red slap marks, which got Shuggie grinning like butter wouldn’t melt.

  Leek had wondered why his mother even cared if he wandered the dead mine. He was sure it wasn’t the danger of the slag or the bottomless black water in the old quarry. It was the dust that bothered Agnes. It was what the neighbours must think when they saw him come back covered in soot and dirt. How she could no longer pretend that she was nothing like them, that she was better born and stuck only temporarily in their forgotten corner of misery. It was pride, not danger, that made her so angry.

  With a flick of his loafer Leek sent a shower of slag backwards and listened to the small cough and whine. Shuggie made a growling sound like an angry badger, and Leek laughed and resolved to make him do it again on the way back home.

  Leek galloped down the last of the hills and waited for his brother at the bottom. The tide of slag moved like a landslide. Shuggie took large windmilling leaps, and on his second or third step the slag suddenly solidified. His legs moved too fast, and with a sharp shriek he pitched forward on to his front and slid the rest of the way on his face. He came to a rasping stop, and the slag rose silently around him, swallowing him like a hungry grave. Leek reached down and with one hand lifted the boy clear of the coal by the strap on his backpack. A small black face with two white eyes blinked up at him in confusion and fear.

  Leek couldn’t help but laugh. “What have I told you? You have to take it lighter on the way down, else you’ll set the whole side of the fucking thing moving.”

&
nbsp; “I know, but it starts sliding and I get a fright that I might get buried.” Shuggie shook the slag from his black hair. “Mammy would burst you if I died.”

  Leek set the boy down. “Do you have to be so annoying? Why can’t you just be normal for once.”

  The boy turned from his brother. “I am normal.”

  Leek thought he could see the pink rise on the back of Shuggie’s neck. His shoulders shuddered with the start of tears. Leek spun his brother back around. “Don’t turn away from me when I’m talking to you.” Leek studied his face closely. It hadn’t been rising tears; Leek knew the flush of shame and frustration well enough. “Are the kids at school still battering you?”

  “No.” He twisted free from Leek’s grip. “Sometimes.”

  “Don’t let it bother you. They see the one thing that’s a bit more special than them and then they just pile on.”

  Shuggie looked up. “I told Father Barry on them. I asked him to make it stop.” Shuggie straightened the pleat on his trousers. “But he only made me stay behind after bell. He made me read about the persecuted saints.”

  Leek tried not to smirk. “What a useless old bastard. That’s just the way of the Chapel: ‘Stop complaining, it could be worse.’” He kicked off his tasselled loafer and, bending over, emptied it of slag dust. “You know when I was at school they said there was a Father that was diddling this one quiet boy. Can you imagine that?” He lifted his eyes and met Shuggie’s face. “Has he ever touched you, Shuggie? Father Barry, that is.”

  A cloud passed over Shuggie’s face, dark enough to make Leek stop ridding himself of coal dust. “No,” he said quietly. Then the words started tumbling out quicker than he could organize them. “But they said I did things to him. They said I did dirty things. But I never. I promise. I don’t even know what those things are.”