Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

  “I believe you, Shuggity. They are just bamming you up.” Leek took his brother in his arms, and in a great crushing hug he mashed the boy’s face into his ribs. “Anyhows, how old are you now?”

  Shuggie didn’t answer right away, he was happy to be suffocated. Then he spoke in a very considered tone, like he was reciting some fact in front of a dusty blackboard. “July sixteenth. Four twenty in the afternoon. You were a difficult birth, Leek, a very difficult birth.”

  “Fuck’s sake!”

  Shuggie buried his face deeper into Leek’s side. “I just think we should know things like that about one another.” Then he added sullenly, “Eight. I’m nearly eight and a half.”

  “Sakes! Why couldn’t you just say that? Anyway, you’re big enough. It’s time you tried to blend in more. You have to try and be more like those other wee bams.”

  Shuggie turned his head and gasped for air. “I am trying, Leek. I try all the time. Those boys let their shirt tails hang out like they have no shame, and all they do is kick that stupid bladder about. I’ve even seen them put their fingers down the back of their trousers and then smell it. It’s so . . . It’s so . . .” He searched for the word. “Common.”

  Leek let him go. “If you want to survive, you need to try harder, Shuggie.”

  “How?”

  “Well, first, never say common again. Wee boys shouldn’t talk like old women.” Leek hauched a wad of phlegm. “And you should try to watch how you walk. Try not to be so swishy. It only puts a target on your back.” Leek made a great pantomime of walking like Shuggie. His feet were pointed neatly outwards, his hips dipped and rolled, and the arms swung by his side like there was no solid bone in them. “Don’t cross your legs when you walk. Try and make room for your cock.” Leek grabbed at the bulge in the front of his corduroy and strode back and forth in a half strut, half lazy amble. “Don’t bend your knees so much. Take longer, straighter steps.”

  Leek walked around in easy natural circles. Shuggie followed in his wake like a mimic. He was trying his hardest to hold his arms tight. It was hard to make it look natural.

  They strutted like two cowboys across the flat upturned earth. On the face of the mine sat the main colliery building. As big as Glasgow Cathedral, the abandoned building sat like a lonely giant on the moon. Large broken windows were set in simple arches, too high for a view but high enough to catch all the day’s light for the cavernous inside. The windows that remained intact were blacked out with coal dust. At the far end of the building a large smokestack towered into the sky, and on wet days you could barely see the top for the soaking clouds. Pipes and rods lay scattered on the ground, the hurried tearing of hacksaws visible in the ends, looters taking what they could strip before the mine was officially dismantled for scrap.

  “I want you to wait here.” Leek marked a cross in the dirt. He reached over his brother’s head and, grabbing the handle of the backpack, spun him around. He unzipped the little zippers, and Shuggie buckled at the weight of him rooting through the bag. “You are to keep lookout, right? If you see anybody then come and get me right away.” Leek drew bolt cutters and a crowbar from the backpack.

  The little boy nodded, feeling lighter already. “Why have we got to do this anyway?”

  “I’ve telt you a thousand times. I need to save money. I’ve got plans. I can’t be a YTS apprentice forever.”

  “Am I in your plans?” asked Shuggie.

  “Don’t fuck about.” He pointed to the colliery. “It’s getting harder every time, cos there’s less and less for the taking, so I might be gone awhile. Do you hear?” With a loud zip Leek closed the empty backpack and spun his brother back around. “Keep your eyes open.” Leek slid into the darkness of the colliery building. Shuggie watched him cross the pools of dim daylight, and then he was gone into the dark corners of the coal cathedral.

  For a while Shuggie drew in the dirt. The stour was deep and soft. He drew a horse and then he drew Agnes. He liked to draw curly hair. He drew it on everything. It looked cheerful.

  Leek crossed to the very back of the building, intent on stripping the copper from the far wall where the cables met the lighting generator. Closed for less than three years, the mine was sealed and slowly being dismantled, the owners selling it for scrap. The miners and their eldest boys had been trying to beat them to it. The copper in the wires was worth its weight, so they stripped junction boxes, ripped up the cables, and gnawed it all bare like mice. Leek saw the rubber casings were already pulled from the wall and what lay on the floor was empty, like marrowless bones. He followed the cable outside to where the wires started to run underground towards the main shaft. A hundred feet from the back of the colliery building the cable stuck up in the air. The last salvager had pulled all he could and left it sprouting like a ruptured artery. Leek bent and with the sharp end of the crowbar began to break the hard dirt.

  He was at it for an hour or so and lifted his head only when he could smell the house fires come on in the scheme. The smell of the burning coal told him it was getting late in the afternoon. They were safer back across the black sea before it got dark.

  As he hacked and sawed he wished Shuggie was bigger, wasn’t such a whiny runt, that way he could have carried more. The copper itself was heavy but the thick rubber casing was a killer. It wasn’t clever to strip the wire there in the open face of the colliery. A couple of the younger Pithead boys had been caught stealing the copper and been done for it. It cost them more in fines than you’d make from stripping the whole Pit of its wiring.

  Leek wrapped a disappointing length of rubber wire around himself several times like a climbing rope. Swinging his crowbar, he crossed the grey pools of light and emerged into the dark winter afternoon. He cheered himself with thoughts of the room he would rent one day, at the very top of Garnethill near the Mackintosh Art School, with the extra copper money he’d been setting aside. There was even enough for a wee bribe for his brother, the grass. He almost smiled as he stepped back into the daylight, but it was too quiet. The grass was gone.

  Shuggie would have liked to have thrown stones. That was fun. Last time he had spent an hour trying to reach the high windows and finally put one in. It made a loud crashing sound in the silence. Leek came hurtling out of the darkness and leathered him for that.

  Instead he was walking in wide circles, he stopped every so often to grab at the empty front of his trousers and kick his legs a little wider like a cowboy. He was deep in concentration, trying to imagine a normal body like Leek’s, which hardly seemed to have any graceful or usable joints at all, when he finally saw the man. By the time he registered the danger, the strange man was running with plumes of slag dirt dancing at his heels. By the time Shuggie realized he should also run, the man was past the massive winding towers and almost on him.

  Shuggie was supposed to warn Leek. He was supposed to keep watch and run into the colliery when the bogey was up. The man was coming down on him, and Shuggie looked at the darkness inside the building and he ran the other way.

  The empty backpack danced from side to side as Shuggie bolted. He took the first hill at a run, attacking the side of it, sinking knee-deep, wellies farting indecently. By the time he reached the top he saw that the man was scaling the side of the hill in long strides like Leek did, digging each foot in and flying over the loose slag. Shuggie turned along the crest of the black dune and ran for his life. He could feel the stranger’s determination, he could almost feel the man’s hands on his legs. As he flew down the far side, the earth roared after him, and with a grainy splash he fell into the valley between two hills. The man appeared at the top. Shuggie watched him stand there against the darkening sky, his shoulders spread and fell, and his hands balled into frustrated fists.

  Shuggie ran through the black valley, but the man followed like a kestrel on a mouse.

  The slag hills were ending, only the hummocky peat fields lay beyond. The man could sail down the slag and catch him easily, so the boy ran faster, across the sh
ale and weedy slag, past the point where the grass won the battle and the brown fields began. He stumbled through the weeds, listening for the flattening of grass behind him. But there were no more footsteps.

  Shuggie reached a thick tuft of yellow grass and threw himself down in a heap. The man stood at the top of the last hill, his shoulders rising and falling as he cupped his hands to his mouth and hollered: “I’ll get ye, ya wee thieving bastard!” Then he was gone.

  Shuggie lay still in the clump of long weeds until he was sure the man was truly gone. He lay there so long that his front was wet through, as the peat happily released the damp from the last rain into his clothes, dead earth having no use for it. The slag sea lay between him and the scheme, and the man lay between him and home. What the man would do to him flowered in his imagination, a montage of cartoon bogeyman violence. Shuggie didn’t want to be buried forever in the slag sea. He wanted to go home. The ground flushed warm as he pissed himself.

  The winter afternoon was dying quickly, the sunless sky was a solid blanket of fleecy greys. Shuggie began walking around the slag hills, keeping to the fringe of marshland that encircled it. It was slow-going, and his legs were red raw from the indigo dye leaching from his trousers. He came to a wide crater in the ground, a sunken frying-pan-shaped stretch of dark grey mud that collapsed into the earth like the centre of an underbaked cake. The walk around the outside would take too long. If he could cut across the middle he would be home in no time. The dim glow of the scheme lay on the far side, warming the low-hanging clouds like a bedside lamp. Shuggie crudely blessed himself and climbed down into the crater.

  The sunken ground was only ten or so feet below ground level, but the sides of the earth were steep, and as he slid down the slag he wondered if he would be able to climb back up. With a wet thud he landed at the bottom. From the safety of the crumbling edge he stretched his leg out and tapped the surface of the crater. It was wet and sticky, but like a slimy bar of soap it was more or less solid. He took one foot and tested it on the smooth surface. It held. He lifted it and looked at the wellie footprint, it lingered for a moment, and then like magic it disappeared.

  Boldly he took a quick couple of steps on to the smooth surface, stopped, and ran back to the rocky edge. He watched the ghostly footsteps disappear. It was like he was being followed by his shadow, and here, fading in front of him, was the proof. A smile caught fire on his cold face, and for a moment he forgot about his chafing thighs. With airplane arms he made sweeping circular patterns in the wet grey mud and danced with his invisible ghost partner. He started to sing gently to himself.

  To the far side it would take less than a minute at full wellie-boot run. With a jump he started out on the glassy mud. As he took quick little steps across the crater the red wellies made a slap-slap, slaaap sound, like a fat hand hitting a fat thigh. The footsteps bounced off the sides of the crater and echoed around the pit. It was the change in tone he noticed first.

  It got slower. It got deeper. From a tight slap-slap the sound changed to a wet slurp, like the back of a spoon on cold porridge. By the halfway point he was getting tired. The mud started shifting and sucking at his wellies. As his knees were pumping higher, his legs were moving slower. His feet were being pulled free of the wellies. He spread his toes and gripped the rubber like a desperate claw.

  In a sudden panic he veered off course. He was the length of four Leeks from the crumbling bank when he could no longer pull his foot from the hungry mud. He released himself from the wellies and jumped from the little red boots. Now barefoot, he realized how stupid he had been; the mud felt as wet as bathwater. He took two or three steps farther and stopped. He felt the mud sucking on his feet like a greedy mouth on an ice lolly. It started eating him again. He would not make it.

  If he was to die, he would die in the boots. He thought only of her face when they found him without the wellies, and her Dr Scholl’s sandal and the welt it would leave on his corpse. He struggled back to the red boots and stepped into them. Clutching the top of one, he tried to free himself, but as one leg moved higher it drove the other deeper into the wet mouth. The mud rose up to the buckle, well past his calf, almost to his knee. It started to soak his trousers. He watched it spill in over the top of his boots and felt it between his toes. He let go, finally, straightened up, and then, because he did not know what else to do, he started to sing again.

  “Ah buhlee that chi-hil-dren are our few-ture. Teach em we-e-ll and let em lead the-he way.” Shuggie watched the coal mud fill the other boot, the chance to abandon the red wellies gone. “Show em all the bew-ty they possess in-si-hide.”

  Louder now, he sang on, mimicking all the notes in the way he had heard on the radio. “Ah decidet long aglow ne-er to wa-halk in anybody’s sha-dow. If ah fail if ah suck seeds at least it been as ah buh-lee. No matter what youse tek from me. Youse ca-hant take away ma dihig-ni-tee.”

  There was a muffled voice in the dark. “The fuck? Haw you. Whitney Houston. Up here.”

  Shuggie hadn’t seen the shadow on the edge of the crater; even now it was hard to pick out Leek against the coal-coloured sky. “What the fuck are you doing in there?”

  Shuggie screwed his eyes shut. “AAAAH, YOU BLOODY FANNY BALLS BASTARD SHITTY SHIT, HURRY UP! GET ME OUT OF HERE, YOU FUCKING FANNY FINGERER!”

  In the dark there was a scrabble of dirt and heavy feet on the wet mud.

  “FUCKING MOVE IT.” He listened to feet strike the sucking slag. “GET ME OUT OF HERE, YOU CUNT.”

  The wet slapping sound got closer, he heard a familiar sigh, as Leek started to swear under his breath. Leek grabbed his brother by the backpack and with a grunt plucked him like a skinny garden weed. Shuggie felt himself pulled free of the mud and then plonked back down on its surface. Leek took hold of the back of Shuggie’s anorak like a set of reins and dragged him towards solid ground.

  “Aaah, no! Wait! NO!” They stopped short. Leek brought his face close to his brother’s, peering in the gloaming to see what the new fuss was. “Leave me. Leave me!”

  “Are you stupit or something?” Leek dragged him to the edge and cuffed him hard on his ear. He seemed angry at Shuggie. He seemed in a great hurry to be gone.

  “I can’t go home again,” the boy flailed dramatically. “Not without my wellies. She’ll kill me! She’s still paying the catalogue.”

  “Jesus Christ!” Shuggie felt the hand relax on his hood as his brother slipped back into the crater. In the dark there was a grunt and the sound of frustrated tugging as the mud sucked and belched again. It was quiet for a moment, till he heard the slap-slapping of Leek’s boots and felt the hand on his shirt neck again. Leek dragged Shuggie away from the crater, and only when Shuggie started to whine about the jagged rocks did Leek stop and let his brother put the wellies on. As Shuggie slowly put on his boots, he watched his brother pace with nerves, his eyes on the far horizon, peering back towards the colliery over the distance they had come. He seemed itchy with adrenaline.

  “Hurry up!” Leek shook Shuggie by the shoulders, his long fingers meeting in the middle of his back. Shuggie blinked up at his brother. He noted for the first time how Leek’s eyebrows had grown together in the centre. He found it oddly distracting and was going to say so.

  But there was something wrong with Leek’s voice; it was garbled and distorted. He was scaring Shuggie. There was a spray of darkening blood on Leek’s face, sticky as syrup. The side of his left eye was blackening into a bruise that looked like a deep hollow in the gloaming light, and his bottom lip was swollen and split. Leek rubbed at his jaw like it was very sore. He put his hand inside his mouth and took out his bottom set of dentures with a pained wince. There was a tooth missing, another one was cracked, and the pink ceramic plate was split clean in two, like someone had struck him hard in the jaw.

  “Are you OK?”

  “Fuuu-uck,” moaned Leek. “I told you to keep a fuckin’ lookout. You were supposed to warn us about that watchie.” There was no skin on his knuckles as he
rubbed at his jaw. His eyes shone scared in the dark. “I hurt him bad, Shuggie. I had to. This is all your fault.”

  Leek put the cracked ceramic in his pocket, and Shuggie saw now he had no copper cable, no crowbar in his hands. Leek started them at a jog and kept checking as though they were being followed. Shuggie’s boots were not on correctly, his damp socks bunched between his toes and rubbed the skin from his foot, but he dared not ask his brother to slow down.

  When they reached the edge of the scheme they were both grateful for the safety of the sickly orange street lights. When Leek spoke without his bottom teeth, his face half-collapsed. It was hard to understand the soft, mushed words, but Shuggie could read the fear and disappointment in his eyes clearly enough.

  Fourteen

  Leek never went scrapping for copper again. The Pit watchie was hospitalized, his skull cracked open by Leek’s crowbar, his mind scattered like a pile of dropped playing cards. The polis went door to door, looking for the young man who had done it. When they came to their door, Agnes made them wait on the bottom step. She fiddled with her gaudy bauble of an earring, did not need to feign annoyance, and huffed like they were insulting her by darkening her door. She turned them away easily, and never before had Leek been so grateful that his mother kept herself immaculate.

  Agnes never even asked Leek if he had done it. It never even crossed her mind. Bridie Donnelly had stood smoking by the fence post while the polis went up and down the street. She only seemed surprised it wasn’t one of her own brood. Bridie said it was the best thing that could have happened to the watchman’s family. His security contract would have been ending soon, and now he was guaranteed disability for life. She said he had never been a big talker anyway.