Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

  As Wullie knelt, Lizzie had been touching him gently, almost not touching him. The back of his neck was a syrupy brown like she had never seen, it was the colour of burnt sugar tablet, golden and sweet. She could see a little down the back of his shirt neck, and she could see how the line changed sharply from this dark burnt tan to a healthy golden tone. She had been gently considering a lock of hair that curled behind his ear; it was free of pomade and a horn-brown colour so alive with the sun, so different from tip to root, that she didn’t recognize it, she didn’t recognize him. She wondered, where had the flat ebony gone that she knew and loved. She let the fine hair run through her fingers, and then she tugged it, hard.

  Wullie looked up at her then. He closed one eye and smiled his lopsided grin. He was real. He was home.

  The papers had never said; she checked them every day, sometimes twice, sometimes ten times. When she came back from the hospital, she would go to the shared cludgie in the back green and sit on the warm bowl and read the paper auld Mr Devlin would sometimes leave there. The papers had spoken of how the boys in North Africa had won a great victory, but they also told of the many sons from Glasgow, from Inverness and Edinburgh, who had sacrificed and would never be coming home. Lists and lists of names. Even the wee few streets of Germiston had lost that many. Every week it felt like families came with heavy heads out of the close mouths having been down at the chapel saying prayers for their lost sons. There had been so many she had lost count. Mr Goldie, young Davie Allan, the Cottrell brothers, who were only twenty-two and twenty-three and had left behind seven fatherless children between them.

  In turn, all these poor soldiers had each been declared dead, and Wullie had not. She had told her mammy Isobel how that gave her hope, but Isobel had travelled a long hard road in life. She held her youngest daughter in her arms and told Lizzie to put aside hope, to give her attention to practical things, her new bairn, her wee job, and feeding the pair of them. “If ye hope,” said Isobel, “Ye also mope.”

  None of that mattered now. Wullie Campbell was home, and Lizzie was moving around the room before she knew what she was moving for. There were happy voices in the close; she could hear them sing his name, and she knew they would be coming for him soon. She gathered Agnes into her arms and took her to the drying cupboard. She parted a stack of towels and took out a hidden sewing tin; she opened it quietly, and the air was thick with the sweet smell of buttery Madeira cake. The shelf also held a greasy ham hock, and Lizzie ripped a hunk from the bone. She put the whole Madeira tin on Agnes’s lap and into each hand slid a hunk of greasy flesh. “Mammy needs you to stay in here awhile.” She closed the door gently on her daughter.

  They would be coming for him.

  Lizzie quickly stepped out of her underwear, she didn’t kiss him, she still had not thrown her arms around him. None of that would be enough to fill the absence she had felt. She doubled herself over the back of the wooden armchair and gripped the turned armrests for support. She felt him appear behind her, his presence was faint at first, like he was merely following her on the street, but then he touched her, he kissed the back of her neck, and she felt him push roughly inside. She watched his brown hands as his strange fingers curled around her pale forearms. He pushed into her slowly, and then he went faster, and soon he folded on to her, covering her as if he were a blanket, as if they were one.

  They would be coming for him.

  He didn’t smell as she remembered. There was an overripe orange tang to his hair, and his breath, though sweet, smelt more like molasses than she liked. Lizzie turned her neck to look back at him, his eyes were open and concentrating on her, and she was sure it was him. That green and copper colour, the colour of a golden sun bursting through thick green beech leaves, was still the same.

  Once, long before Agnes, Wullie had taken her on three separate buses and up to the Kelvingrove Hall. She had never been inside such a fine building before, and she was shy to follow him through its grand halls. She felt her shoes were too loud, too squeaky, and the hem of her good dress hung too long out of the bottom of her coat. Wullie hadn’t minded. With his thick arms he separated the crowds for her. He acted like he had the same right to be there as any doctor from the Byres Road. Only later did he confess to her that he knew of this grand place just because he had repaired the tiles on its roof.

  It had been a rare afternoon. At the top of the sandstone staircase there had been a painting on exhibition; a beautiful oil painting of a stand of beech trees sat at the side of a lazy river, the autumn wildflowers still golden and bracken-coloured on its bank. Wullie had been smiling at her then, and she had forgotten all about her chapel dress. His eyes were speckled the same colours as the painting, the same faded green colour of uncollected hay and deep umber of a red deer. Now, as she searched these eyes for the man she loved, she knew the green of the painting was the same, even if the frame they sat in was something different.

  There was a faint noise. She had forgotten. How could she have forgotten when she had lost so much sleep worrying over it?

  Wullie stopped pushing into her. He straightened and was staring into the corner as if he was seeing something approaching in the distance, something he didn’t like the look of. Lizzie felt him slip out of her. He tidied himself back inside his uniform and was moving towards the far corner. He was tiptoeing with his palms wide open, as if the thing hiding there might spook and try to rush past him. The infant cried out again. He was girning as Wullie pulled back the tented curtain of the crib.

  She would never forget that look on his face. He was staring at her over the wide bone of his shoulder when the front door finally gave. Nobody bothered to knock, and there were footsteps and cheering as the union men and their wives spilt in with plates of sandwiches and half-bottles of Mackinlay’s. She had only enough time to let go of the arms of the chair and straighten herself before the first cans of sweetheart stout were burst. As he made a pantomime of hugging his pals, his green and amber eyes never left her face. All she could do was mouth across the happy crowd to him, I’m so sorry.

  Later they had pulled the heavy curtain across and climbed into the recessed bed before the last well-wishers had left. He said he was tired, but Lizzie could feel the heat of the drink radiate off him as he lay awake beside her. She wondered if her shame burned outwardly in the same way. They didn’t talk. They lay there not touching, and he felt farther away from her now than he ever had in Egypt.

  When she woke in the morning, he was already dressed in his good wool suit. The trousers were wide-looking now, a little old-fashioned, and she could see that the jacket hung on him more loosely than it had in the past. He had found the secret tins of Spam and hidden ham hock and the last of the Madeira cake that the grocer had given her. He was trying to feed his daughter a mouthful of fried Spam, and each time she refused he would laugh and spoil her with a bite of Madeira.

  She didn’t like to see him with that dirty food. She could imagine Mr Kilfeather, the bow-legged greengrocer, but she could not rightly remember how it had all started, it had all been so insidious. Had it just been an extra handful of eggs? A little more than the ration book would give? Had it been the spare arse end of a loaf? How could she tell Wullie any of it?

  The infant, this other little Kilfeather boy, was gently cooing to itself in the corner. Wullie’s back was to it, like he couldn’t hear it.

  As she stepped from behind the curtain, Wullie rose without looking at her. He rebuttoned his jacket and kissed Agnes goodbye, then he removed the bundled bag of clean sheets from the old pram. Lizzie was watching him as he lifted the little boy from his crib; the baby’s pink arms reached out to him, like it knew and trusted the deep well of goodness from which Wullie Campbell had sprung. Lizzie watched Wullie place the baby in the proud carriage and tuck the knitted blanket tenderly under his chin. He turned for the door.

  Something made her step forward. She put her hand on the carriage handle. “Where are you going?”

  “Out.”


  “Will you be back?”

  “Of course.” He sounded surprised at the question.

  She felt like if she cried she would never stop. Lizzie let go of the handle. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I got bits of meat. We ate well. I didn’t know. I. I just didn’t know if you would ever come home.”

  “I know,” was all he said.

  She was pleading now. “When I found out I took every Askit powder I could get. Great big handfuls of it. It was just. It was just too late.”

  “I don’t need to know, Lizzie.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her then. It was the first kiss she had been given since he had kissed her at Saint Enoch’s on the day he left. She had never let Mr Kilfeather kiss her, she felt she had to tell him that.

  He said, “I’m sorry I was away so long.” Then Wullie took the pram, and the strange baby, and went out into the mild spring morning.

  It was the longest day she had ever known.

  Wullie was back before the street lamps were lit. Lizzie had been at the window all day, and she could hear him whistling all the way down Saracen Street. Mrs Devlin told her later that he had given her a fright, because at first she had thought it was one of yon Indian fellas, seeing how dark and golden he was. Then, she said, he had danced up the stairs, singing and swinging on the banister like he was Fred Astaire himself.

  When he came in the door, there was no pram, there was no blanket, there was no strange little boy. He gathered his girls into his arms, and Lizzie could smell the cold fresh air on him, like faraway open fields.

  Wullie ate his dinner with an appetite, two big bowls of pea soup thickened with cream and salty with stripped mutton. Lizzie couldn’t tell him where it had all come from, how it had been paid for, and she was relieved that he didn’t ask.

  That night, as she cooried into him behind the curtain, she stroked the thick hair on his arm. She turned to him and asked where the baby boy was.

  Wullie pulled her closer to him and looked at her with those speckled green eyes, and all he said was, “What baby?”

  Sixteen

  Agnes thought about what her mother had told her, she thought about it constantly in the days leading up to her father’s death. The lung cancer eventually took him. He rattled all the way to the end.

  They buried Wullie Campbell on a damp day in March, on a gentle slope at the back of Lambhill Cemetery. On the days she was sober, Agnes cried for her father. Then she cried for herself, jealous that Shug had never loved her the way Wullie had loved Lizzie.

  When she was in the drink, she phoned her mother and railed at the old woman for having spoilt her memories of her father. What man takes a baby and just makes it go away? Then, within a month of her father’s death, her mother died, and there was no one left to scream at any more.

  Elizabeth Catherine Campbell had died in her slippered feet.

  By the time Agnes had pleaded with a Glasgow taxi rank to drive all the way to Pithead and take her to the hospital, Lizzie had been with the angels for an hour and a half. Agnes, in her state of distress, had walked out and down the centre of the lonely Pit Road to meet the taxi. When she finally saw the headlights she threw herself prostrate into the dust.

  When she arrived at the hospital, the polis had told Agnes that the bus driver was devastated. “He’s a good man,” they said, “with many years of clean devoted service to the corporation.” It was just he never expected the old woman to step backwards off the kerb. He never meant to kill her, but in stepping backwards she must have been determined to kill herself. That’s what they said.

  Under the shaded brims of their police hats, Agnes knew the constables were running their eyes the drunken length of her, as though this ruin of a woman would drive any mother to the same. Their cold eyes and their warm words did not match. “It happened often enough,” they said then, as though Lizzie had chosen this cowardly way to end things. Her mammy would never. She was a good Catholic. Agnes knew better.

  Later that week, when the undertakers finally released Lizzie, Agnes set the body up for a viewing in her mother’s bedroom. Leek helped her lift the double bed and lean it against the wall to make way for the trestles and the small coffin. Their mattress lay propped there, and she knew it would never come down again. From the linen closet she took a wide sheet and draped it over the bulk of the mattress like it was a ghost of good memories now dead. She hadn’t yet paid her father a month’s mind, and already here she was, stood at the foot of her dead mother. Her bones cried out for drink.

  Agnes sat alone at the side of Lizzie’s open coffin. She covered her hair in the most sombre headscarf she owned and wore the same black knitted dress for the second time that month. The Sighthill flat held no good memories for her now. First it had been her daddy and now it was her mammy. She laid no cardboard over the carpet this time; let the mourners ruin it.

  Lizzie looked tiny in the coffin. The undertaker had applied thick make-up to the gouges on her forehead, and hidden her mangled hands under the band of silk trimming cloth. Agnes arranged her Bible and coiled her medallion of Saint Jude on top of the silk. She was done with all that.

  Agnes had asked that Lizzie be dressed in her olive Sunday suit and that the roots be dyed out of her hair. The undertaker had asked her to bring a hat to cover some damage to her mother’s head, and she gave him a photo that showed how her hair should be set into tight rosette curls and how it should frame her face on the sides. The man did his best to return her to a look of peace, but there was a thick waxiness to her face that denied Lizzie her true likeness. There was no happy tint to her cheeks, no light rose flare at the end of her small nose. Agnes kissed her then. She cried for her forgiveness.

  When she ran dry, she sat upright again and listened to the hum of the television in the flat next door. She took off her last pair of unpawned earrings and gently inserted them into her mother’s lobes. “I know they don’t match.” She pulled a tight curl over the left one. “At least Daddy will have a good laugh when he sees you.”

  Her hands turned Lizzie’s good brooch upright, the beautiful tin pressing of the Virgin and Child that Nan Flannigan had brought back specially from Lourdes. “Poor Nan. She should have kept a closer eye on you.” She exhaled. “Why did you have to do such a stupid thing?”

  Agnes spat on a piece of balled-up toilet paper and wiped at the bone of her mother’s cheeks. The heavy paint barely shifted. “I was going to make tinned salmon sandwiches instead of cheese this time. Is that all right? I didn’t like the way the edges of Daddy’s pieces went hard as they sat out all day. I could see those ingrates roll their eyes. I saw that bisim Anna O’Hanna and her curled lip. I even heard Dolly say to her John, ‘All they people in from Donegal and no even a slice of meat for the bread.’”

  Agnes pushed out her bright lipstick and drew it across her mother’s thin lips. Rubbing a little on her thumb she smoothed it into her gaunt cheeks as rouge. She wanted to straighten the emerald-green cloche but was afraid to touch the back of Lizzie’s head, so instead she licked gently at the auburn curls on her crown with the end of a pick comb. “There, you look better for a little life in your cheeks.” The words stuck in her throat.

  Agnes stayed by her mother’s side for the night. In the damp of the April morning they laid Lizzie’s coffin in the open space above Wullie. The ground was sodden. The grave needed to be pumped out of water before they lowered her in on top of her husband.

  After the burial, Agnes wrapped sandwiches in paper towels and sent Shuggie three times around the room, until black handbags were bursting and fragrant with hot salmon and butter. Even when people turned the boy away Agnes sent him back around, and around, with pretty plates heavy with thick meat.

  It was dark when they got home from the reception. The miners’ women were still leaning on sagging gates, taking advantage of the break in the spitting rain. She was sober, for fear her mother had been watching, but now, as she stood over Leek, she let the amber sweetness of Special B
rew soak her heart.

  Agnes stood over him as he opened his sketchbook. From an envelope at the back he unfolded a long piece of paper with what seemed like an endless amount of numbers on it. Sleekit and embarrassed, he covered the rotary from her eyes and slowly dialled the long African number. Here it was then, the number that Catherine never wanted her to have. It was the loneliest feeling.

  She tried to listen for as much information as she could glean, but he was laconic with his words. She strained to hear Catherine’s voice. From the damp hallway in Pithead it sounded to Agnes like there were beautiful canary birds in the very air. She wanted to imagine Catherine surrounded with lush carpets of tropical flowers, with pretty names she might never learn, from books she would never read. In her heart she hoped her daughter was happy. She hoped Catherine would call out to her, that Leek would pass the telephone and she could tell her for herself how much she wanted her home.

  “Catherine, it’s me. It’s Leek,” he said. “I’m sorry. It’s Mammy’s phone. Yes. She’s here actually, she’s standing right next to me.” He looked Agnes up and down suspiciously. There was a pause. Agnes could hear Catherine raise her voice in agitation. “Don’t worry, I never. I promised you I wouldn’t.”

  “Do you like South Africa?” There was a pause. “Oh, he’s fine. Nearly died up the Pit but he’s fine. Still a bit funny. You know, funny funny.” He held his wrist out and lisped into the phone, “Gerald Fitzpatrick and Patrick Fits Gerald. Like.”

  There was laughter on the other end. Agnes prodded him. “Right, anyway, Catherine, is Donald there? No, I wasn’t checking. It’s just, I’ve got some bad news. It’s just, well, Granny is dead.” There was another long pause.

  Agnes mimed, Is she crying?

  Leek waved her away. “Last week. She was hit by a corpy bus. It was fast. Her mind was going. Well. Fine. No. Look, I didn’t know how to say, but Granda is dead too. It’s no joke. I swear. We didn’t want to upset you. Three weeks or so.” He started to talk through gritted teeth. “Well, it was my decision not to tell you, actually, that’s the thing about being left behind in all the fucking shite, you get to make all the shitty decisions.” There was a long pause. Agnes thought she could hear Catherine cry or apologize or both. “So, are you coming home, then? Oh. Oh. OK. Oh. Fine. Well, congratulations, I suppose.”