“Ah’m sorry about the mess,” said Annie, sinking on to the three feet of pink carpet between the beds. “Ah try to keep on top of it, but it’s hard when he’s that determin’t to sit in his own filth all day.” She patted the floor beside her, and Shuggie squeezed down into the tight space. “What does yer maw do on the drink? Does she mong out like that?”
“No, she gets very drunk and then she gets very angry,” he said. “I worry that she’ll hurt herself.”
“Like do hersel in?”
“I suppose. Sometimes before school I hide all the pills in the bathroom. I know my brother takes his razors to work every day.” He twisted his finger through a loop of pink carpet. “But most of the time I just worry that she will make it worse for herself. She loses her pride. People don’t really want to know her any more. My sister lives with black people a million miles away because of her. My big brother is trying to save enough money to leave.”
Annie reached under the bed and opened an old colouring book. He was disappointed to see that she had matched the colours well enough but that she hadn’t stayed in the lines. “When the mine closed ah had to stay here tae look after ma da,” said Annie. “Ma old maw didnae gie two hoots.” She flicked through the pages. “Do ye want to do some colouring in?” she asked abruptly.
Shuggie shook his head. His eyes couldn’t help but flit to the shelves of rainbow-coloured ponies looking down happily on them.
“Do ye want to play with ma horses?” asked Annie. She was watching him closely, but he shook his head and tried to look disinterested. “Ma maw sends me them at Christmas and Easter. Sometimes she keeps sendin’ the exact same one, that’s how I know she’s not payin’ any attention.”
Annie bounced up on one of the thin beds. “Here, yer maw plaited this one’s hair for me.” She handed Shuggie a raspberry-pink horse. It had a long, purple plastic mane and tail, both of which had been plated neatly and finished in a bow made out of a plastic loaf tag. Annie gathered a handful of other ponies and bounced down off the bed and back to the caravan floor. They were all kinds of coloured plastic, each painted with long eyelashes and cheerful smiles. “You be Butterscotch, Cottoncandy, and Blossom. Ah’ll be Bluebelle a’cos she’s ma favourite. The others want to steal her pretty hairclips, but she’s too fast.”
The plastic ponies looked like puffy dog toys, but to Shuggie they were magical. Annie let him play with the ponies for the whole afternoon. They talked in high, animated voices, racing them across the face of the bedspread. They ran tiny brushes down their manes until the plastic hair shone with static.
Eventually Annie grew bored by the ponies, she seemed restless then, itchy. Her thin arm searched the darkness beneath her bed. From underneath the flounced pink ruffles she pulled out an oyster shell ashtray heaped with cigarette ash. There were two or three half-smoked doubts embedded in the ash. Annie pushed open the caravan window, she lit a crooked cigarette, took a shallow puff, and blew the smoke through the crack. She inclined her head in the direction of her father. “Sorry, he gets my nerves up that bad.”
She offered the damp doubt to Shuggie. He pursed his mouth and shook his head primly. Annie shrugged and slid back to the floor with a bump, the cigarette clamped tight between her teeth.
Shuggie was making Cottoncandy chase Bluebelle over a cassette-tape gymkhana when Annie asked abruptly, “Shuggie, have ye really touched Johnny Bell’s wee-man?”
The sore sides of his face flushed red again as he remembered Bonny Johnny, the washing-machine boy. Suddenly he wanted to drop the girl’s toys, push them away from him like they were evidence of the dirty things he had done. “No,” he lied.
“What was it like?” she asked, regardless. The cigarette was hanging from the corner of her mouth as she covered the pony’s flank in star-shaped stickers. She did it all with an air of routine and boredom, lethargic as any unionized workie.
“I said I never.”
Her left eye was shut tight against the sting of rising smoke. “Well. Ah would say ‘I never’ too. But ah’ve touched a wee-man before. Ah’ve touched the O’Heaney boys’ and Fran Buchanan’s.”
“But you are only nine!” said Shuggie. He sat away from the ponies now. “Those boys are in the big school.”
“Ah’m ten and three-quarters,” Annie exhaled a long plume of smoke, and blew a perfect, elegant circle. “Anyway, they took me up by the old Pit winding machines and let me have some Buckfast.”
“Did you not tell Father Barry? The police would jail them for that.”
“No.” She stubbed the doubt and laid her head on the bed, calmer now. “It wisnae worth it, though. Buckfast’s pure mingin’.”
Shuggie was shocked at her nonchalance. He was thinking about his mother again, here in this tin box, with Annie’s father and his nicotine fingers. He knew she would hate it here, but still she had come. A swift rage possessed him. “Why did you do that?” he spat out at Annie. “Why do girls always let boys do what they like?”
Her lilac-coloured pony had been prancing in dainty circles. Now Annie sat back from the playthings, and she was, for the first time that afternoon, lost for words.
Outside, the German shepherd started barking. Shuggie felt the whole caravan tilt as the dog rose and skittered off the front stoop.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. RAMBO! Rambo!” Annie bounced over the bed and out of the tiny bedroom. There was a great commotion in the caravan park as the dog met with another, and they fell upon each other with squeals and gnashing teeth.
Shuggie didn’t want to be there any more. He didn’t want to be pretending it was OK to be playing with girls’ toys or touching the dirty bits of boys in secondary school. He didn’t want to be anything like the lemonade girl. He didn’t want to be like Agnes. He wanted to be normal.
He rose to his feet and picked up his bag. Annie was roaring at Rambo to let go of the other dog. He could hear the fast gibberish of the racing blare from the telly. Shuggie didn’t want to think of Agnes here, he didn’t want to think of the nicotine-coloured man pawing at her, and then her plaiting Annie’s hair for a warm can of Special Brew.
It made him angry, so he unzipped his school bag and put two ponies inside.
Every weekday, before the last bell, Shuggie’s guts would tighten, and he would raise his hand and ask most politely to be excused. Dough-faced Father Ewan would inwardly curse the little boy who seemed regular as clockwork. At first he would ask the boy to wait, just wait the extra fifteen minutes till the school day was finished. Shuggie, always biddable, would nod with a wince and sit cocked slightly to the side, looking to be in genuine, desperate need. His wincing and huffing would soon start to distract the other children, and the Father would acquiesce.
Later, in the staffroom, the soft-middled Father would joke about what this miner’s diet of boiled cabbage and ground mince might do for the clergy. The polite little boy, the only one who clearly knew the difference between May I and Can I had been getting the cramps at quarter past three almost every afternoon of the school year. Father Ewan had come to set his watch by it.
So Shuggie would spend the last minutes of the school day sat on the low toilet. He would take his trousers down, only to be safe, but he came to know it was only indigestion. It was the burning bile of anticipation, the rising fear of what might lie at home.
Agnes had gotten sober many times before, but the cramps had never really, completely gone away. To Shuggie, the stretches of sobriety were fleeting and unpredictable and not to be fully enjoyed. As with any good weather, there was always more rain on the other side. He’d stopped counting a while ago. To have marked her sobriety in days was like watching a happy weekend bleed by: when you watched it, it was always too short. So he just stopped counting.
The boy could not remember the change in himself.
At what point the cramps died away and things became different was unclear. He could remember coming home from school one Friday in November and standing outside the house as he always
did. Every small detail of the house told of what lay within. This evening the curtains were drawn tight against the cold and the lamps were on. His stomach lifted in hope. Shuggie opened the front door a crack, just enough so he could hear the hum of the house. He knew what to listen for. Wailing and crying foretold a bad night; she would want to hold him in her arms and tell him bad stories of the men who had broken her. If there was the sound of country guitars and sad melancholy singing, then the warm moistness of shit would start to wet his underpants.
To hear his mother on the telephone was not always a bad sign. He had to creep in between the front door and the draught door to listen very closely to the tone of her voice, push his ear against the cold dimpled glass and hold his breath. She didn’t have to be crying or screaming or slurring her words for the drink to be in her. It could still be there. It made her overly polite, a false Milngavie accent full of long-syllabled words. Her lips would pull away from her front teeth and she would use words like certainly and unfortunately.
These were the worst sounds to hear. Agnes was mourning her losses but still too far from unconsciousness. She would sit him down and tell him her stories, only this time she would be angry and not sad. With a packet of half-smoked cigarettes beside her she would glide her finger through the phone book and make him dial the telephone numbers that she read out.
“Five-five-four, six-three-three-nine.”
Holding the receiver in his hand the boy would listen to the chirp-chirp and hope that no one would answer. He grew ashen as a voice came on the other line.
“Hello?” said the stranger.
“Oh. H-hello. I’m terribly sorry to bother you.” Agnes would nod her approval from the armchair. “I am looking for someone called Mister Cam McCallum.”
“Who?” asked the voice.
“Cam McCallum,” repeated the boy. “He lived in Dennistoun between nineteen sixty-seven and nineteen seventy-one. He was a bus conductor in the East End, going between George Square and Shettleston. He had a sister named Renée who married a man named Jock.”
The voice, confused at this oddly detailed information, would say, “Sorry, son, there’s no Cam McCallum who lives here.”
“I see. Thank you very much, sir. I am sorry to have bothered you.” Agnes would hiss with disgust from the front room and make him phone the next McCallum in the book.
It was worse when they found who Agnes was looking for. The man on the other line would say, “Who is this? Ah’m Cam McCallum. What do yeese want?”
The boy’s heart would sink. “Oh, I see. Could you please just hold on for a minute, Mister McCallum. I am transferring your call.”
Agnes’s eyebrows raised incredulously. Is that him? The boy would cup his hand over the receiver and nod. “Right,” she said, taking up her mug of lager and a fresh packet of cigarettes. He would hand the telephone to her like an obedient secretary, and Agnes would arrange herself as if Mr McCallum could see her through the phone. With a fresh cigarette between her long fingers she would lift the receiver to her mouth.
“Youu baaaastaaard,” she hissed as an introduction.
“Hello? Who is this?” answered the man.
“Yoouu Diirty Fuuucking Whoremaster of a Baaaaastard.”
The man would hang up eventually. He always did. Agnes would take a long draw on her cigarette, then a long pull on the old tea mug. She would stab the redial button on the telephone and smile as it quickly connected her.
“Don’t you hang up on me. Don’t you dare fucking hang up on ME!”
“Who the fuck is this?”
“Did you think you could get away with it? Eh? The things you did to that young lassie. You bad bastard. There’s not a bleeding heart in you, is there?”
Cam McCallum would hang up again, and if he were wise, he would wrench his telephone from the wall. Agnes slid her finger through the phone book like it was a menu, looking for something to fill her hunger. She moved on alphabetically, to the very next man who’d wronged her. Brendan McGowan. “Now wait till I tell you about this scunner.” She turned to Shuggie with the receiver crooked under her chin. “Losing me was the biggest mistake he ever made.”
She could sit at the telephone table until it got dark, then she could sit there in pitch-blackness. The end of a lit cigarette was her only light. Shuggie sat next to the electric fire listening to her roar. He was afraid to switch on any lights, hoping the dark would make her sleepy, worried the light would draw her to him like a moth.
All this in mind, Shuggie crept home from school and listened carefully at the draught door, hoping that she would not be crying or listening to country music or sitting ready for battle at the telephone. Even the hum of silence could set his guts twisting again. He had heard it once and had believed in it, the deafening hiss of nothing. He had crept into the house to listen closer, believing it was good news, and had let his hands fall from his tight sides. Agnes was there on the floor, in her tight black skirt, in her good winter coat. She was kneeling like she was praying, but the backs of her hands were soft against the linoleum, her head fully in the big white council oven. The sound of nothing had been a trick. The hiss of silence was only the thick gas carrying her away.
After that, he’d learned not to trust the quiet.
As far as the good signs went, the sounds of a busy kitchen were the best to hear, the slurp and shake of the washing machine, metal spoons in the sink, and the sound of soup bubbling in big pots. On these days he would stand happily in the hallway and wipe the condensation from the Artex walls till she found him standing there, half-stupefied with contentment, his fingers drawing wet patterns on the white plaster.
Other than the McAvennies, the worst bullies at school always seemed to come from houses where fathers still had work. Their food was microwaved or breadcrumbed, foil-wrapped, and individually sized. Their parents were younger and let their children eat what they liked and when they liked. They teased the children who ate stovies and mince, they would hold their noses and tell them they smelled like rotten cabbages. When they said this to Shuggie he buried his face in the arm of his school jumper and breathed in deep. The boiled cabbage and ham hock, the potatoes and lamb mince, to him it was a comfort, and he felt lucky to have it on him.
There were days when he would come home and hear another voice in the house. He would need to creep along the hallway till he could be very sure who it was. Nice people had stopped visiting a long while ago. The longer his mother had stayed in Pithead the more likely it seemed the visitor was a bad person.
Amongst the worst were the Pit uncles, nervous, jerking men with thin hair that always seemed wet. They would come to see how she was coping without a man. They would bring bars of chocolate and plastic bags full of lager cans, and they would keep their jackets on indoors.
Shuggie knew being home from school was a disturbance to their bad plans. Occasionally an uncle, if hopeful of getting his feet under the drop-leaf table permanently, would feign an empty interest in the boy while pushing chocolate bars across the ash-covered table to him. The man would ask: How was he doing at school? Did he not like to play outside?
As the boy got older they stopped doing this, stopped smiling at him with the face of Fagin. Now that he was ten, they saw him almost as another man, and they sat with petulant scowls that said Shuggie was ruining their dirty plans.
If there were unopened lager cans, then Agnes would make Shuggie sit next to the men on the couch. She would lean back and squint through the cigarette smoke, watch them shift uncomfortably. Between mouthfuls of lager, she would study them as if they were curtains and a bedspread and she were trying to find a matching set. She told the men how bright her Hugh was or how well he was doing in school. They would listen and nod and see their plans to jump his mother in the afternoon slip away. Some had spent quite a lot of money getting her just the right level of pliable. Now they were blocked from a clumsy, sweaty fuck in front of the after-school cartoons.
The returning uncles wised up
; they would bring cheap footballs, plastic kites, all toys meant to take Shuggie outdoors. The truly desperate would hand over a greasy pile of coins, suggesting to Shuggie, “Take yourself to the pictures for an hour.” Shuggie would look blankly at the clammy men and drop the greasy coins in his school bag, like a bus conductor, say thank you politely, and turn on the noisy television.
This happened only if they were still in the living room by the time Shuggie came home. If they were already in her bedroom, then the boy didn’t get any money, and no one bothered to ask him what he wanted to be when he grew up.
As bad as these uncles were, they were interested only in his mother. To Shuggie, the aunties who came to visit were often worse. It was like Agnes’s worst qualities went out and found a friend. He would be forced to babysit both women as they descended noisily into drunken oblivion, huddled over ashtrays sharing the last of the doubts and cursing the men that had brought them so low. Unlike the men they would talk and talk and talk.
These sunken-faced Pit aunties appeared at the door most mornings like feral cats. Even after a five-day stretch of sobriety they had the power to drag Agnes back into the drink. It was like they could hear her shakes from the other side of the housing scheme and would oblige at nine in the morning with a cheap carry-out. If that day Agnes had the conviction to be sober they would sit down and drink in front of her anyway. Misery loved company, and her eyes were soon greedily on the plastic bag by their feet.
If Shuggie was home from school, he wouldn’t let the women in. Even before the first postman had come, they were there with heavy bags in hand. At the front door they looked almost like good people, but he knew better. He tried to politely push them back down the stone stairs many times. He would lock the door, and they would call through the letter box, “Is your mammy no home?” and plead, “I’ve just come over for a wee cup of tea.” He wanted to stick forks through the opening into their thin faces as Agnes lay broken inside the house, her bones shaking, guts calling out for a taste of warm lager.
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