Like a cold draught, they always pushed in.
They waited till they heard the morning bell, to be sure he would be gone. When he crept back through the door at four o’clock they smiled triumphantly at him.
Auntie Jinty was the worst of them. She would pester Shuggie for a kiss as he came in the door from school. The boy could feel her warm tongue against his cheek like a piece of fatty stewed beef. On damp days Agnes made him rub the little woman’s hard feet. Years of the drink had eaten her features, but they spread even thinner in grimacing pleasure as her sour little feet wriggled in her brown tights. She never gave him money.
Jinty hated Shuggie because his presence guilted Agnes into periods of dryness. If it wasn’t for him they could have left the shores of sobriety behind and forever sailed a sea of Special Brew.
“What class are ye in now?” she asked once, her feet in his hands.
“Primary five,” said Shuggie, keeping his eyes on Jinty.
She turned to his mother; she still had her headscarf on. “Well, it’s a bit late, Agnes, but ye know, ah think there would still be time to make a difference.”
“Time for what?” he asked, rubbing at her bunions.
“To get ye into oor Louise’s school.”
The boy flashed a startled look; he flicked his eyelashes at her and drew his brows down. “Your Louise is a right spazzy.” As soon as he said it he knew it was unkind.
Jinty pulled her foot from his hand and leaned forward in the soft chair. She uncurled a long knuckly finger and shoved it into his chest. Her face was sore-looking, and Shuggie knew her husband hit her. Agnes had said as much. As she spoke, her bottom lip looked like it might burst. “Oor Louise has special needs, and her school has donkeys. Does yer school have donkeys?”
“No.”
“Well, ah think ye should go to her school because it has donkeys.” She took a satisfied tug on the foamy beer.
“Mammy, tell her I’m not a spazzy. I don’t need donkey school.” His voice was whining and threatening to break. He did not take his eyes from Jinty.
Agnes’s eyes were closed, and a lit cigarette was slipping from her hand. Beer sloshed on to her lap in big raindrops. Jinty saw her opportunity and went on with a false smile. “There will be lots of other children just like ye. Ye’ll make lots of friends and get good hot lunches and hot dinners.”
“I have friends,” he lied.
“It’s a big adventure because ye get to stay overnight and come home on Friday nights just for the weekend.”
Shuggie had seen the special bus drop Louise off on Friday night. He had seen the McAvennie boys throw stones at it as it drove by. He knew Louise vaguely, she was quiet like Leek. He had also seen how she looked happier on a Sunday than she did on a Friday.
“Look, it’ll be guid. Ye won’t be so different any more.” Jinty turned to Agnes, who was slipping into the noisy sleep of an old man. “That’s it set, eh, Agnes?” She nudged his sleeping mother. “Tomorrow ah’ll call the school, and Shuggie can go straight into oor Louise’s class.” Jinty lifted her foot again and thrust it back into his lap.
Shuggie knew in truth that Louise was only a wee bit slow; neglect had made her shy and withdrawn and that made her always a half beat out of step, which the Pit took to be funny-acting. Bridie Donnelly had said that Jinty was just selfish. The special school got Louise away throughout the term and allowed Jinty to dedicate more time to raising her favourite child, Stella Artois.
Agnes said later that by the time she realized what was happening, Shuggie had Jinty on the floor and her Saint Christopher medallion was broken at the lock. When Leek later asked him what had happened, the boy could only remember twisting her big toe till it cracked; he had wrenched and twisted until her knee buckled and she fell screaming for mercy out of the chair. After that, Shuggie said, everything just fell away; it was like when you look through binoculars but from the wrong end.
Shuggie listened at the front door out of habit. As he walked up the long hallway, he could feel the walls wet with cabbage sweat and the condensation from tea kettles. He slipped like a ghost deeper into the house till he saw her standing in the kitchen doorway rewrapping a block of soft white lard. Her hair was soft, white roots shining below the black dye, her face was free of make-up. As she wrapped the lard she was looking out the little window above the sink on to the miles of marshlands. She looked peaceful.
He straightened tall at last, and the pain went from his bowels. She saw him then in the shadows of the hall. He went to her, and she placed her arms around his head and pulled him close to her soft stomach. Shuggie wrapped his arms around her, and she buried her face in his soft black hair. “Mmmm, you smell just like fresh air,” she said, cupping his cold cheeks and kissing them gently.
“You smell like soup,” he said.
“Charming! Away, take your uniform off. I’ll bring you some tea.”
“You will?”
She chased him from the kitchen. The living room was cosy and smelled like hot hoovers and lemon furniture polish. The electric fire was on, and the big curtains were drawn against the cold scheme outside. He turned on the TV, and the meter at the top flashed that they had six hours left before they needed more fifty-pence pieces; it was pure luxury. Standing on the back of his shoes he kicked them off, shook out of his school trousers, and unbuttoned the white shirt. The clothes fell about him on to the floor, where he left them in a melted pile. He sat in the middle of the big square coffee table in his clean underpants and stared open-mouthed at the afternoon shows.
Agnes came in with a mug of hot tea and a small plate, which she set in front of him.
“What’s this for?” he asked.
“It’s for you,” she said.
Shuggie looked at the golden apple turnover and slowly reached out a single finger to touch it. He could feel the heat come off it. She had put it and the tea plate in the oven to warm them through. The pastry was brown and flaky, and all over the top were little white crystals of hard sugar that had melted and made a crispy, sweet-looking shell. On each side of the pastry was hot, sticky golden apple sauce, oozing out on to the plate in bubbling clumps. The turnover made a happy, crisp crackling noise under his finger.
The boy looked down at the plate blankly. He worried he could hardly eat it, as his stomach was doing something that felt like the fear cramps. This time, instead of the choking sourness, something bubbled inside him like yellow sunshine. A smile broke inside him, and lifting his stocking feet he rocked back on his tail bone and spun and spun and spun on his backside until the little tea table was shiny with delight.
Agnes had chosen the Dundas Street meeting in the hope that she would not know anyone there. She had tried AA meetings from time to time, but they had never taken. She would be looking around the fellowship at the broken men and women as the shame rose inside her. In the daylight she would have crossed the street just to avoid these people.
Even though her attendance was spotty, the East End group she sometimes went to had started feeling small and overly familiar. Agnes had made a mess of it. Most of the older men had visited her in Pit-head, and she was starting to see familiar parts of herself in the faces of the drawn, nervous women. It was getting harder to deny she was like them. So one night Agnes stayed on the bus, passed the familiar meeting rooms, and continued on to Dundas Street. It was a fresh start, she had thought, and hopefully a better class of alcoholic.
The Dundas Street meeting was in the city centre between the Queen Street train station and the Buchanan bus station and as such pulled in a fairly wide congregation. The sandstone building had been a once-grand trade merchants’ office, but through changes in the sixties came to resemble a poorly run primary school. It was long ago stripped of its ornately carved mouldings and suffocated under dowdy brown council paint, strip lighting, and peeling linoleum. To Agnes, it looked very anonymous.
The Dundas Street AA had a cheap, long-standing lease on a high-ceilinged meeting room. A sli
ghtly raised stage at the front of the room was set with a folding table and six plastic chairs lined up behind it. To the left were a smaller antechamber and a thin corridor where an urn and biscuits were kept. It felt transient, but the regulars tried to make it homely and comfortable with calendars and postcards sent from Lourdes, from Rome, from Blackpool.
Agnes put Shuggie to bed early and then caught the bus into town, not sure whether she would make it to a meeting or, as she had done before, turn herself towards a bingo hall on the Gallowgate. It took all she had to climb the Dundas stairs, and when she walked through the door she was relieved not to see a familiar face. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. People shifted nervously in their seats, each a respectable distance from his or her neighbour. There was an almost constant chorus of racking coughs and sticky wet phlegm. It felt less cosy than the other meetings. People nodded and smiled politely to each other, but there seemed to be less connection, more of the anonymity she craved. She sat an unobtrusive distance from the front and could feel the eyes burn on the back of her head. She was overdressed in her long mohair coat, but she was more comfortable that way.
A group of people who had been talking quietly in the corner took to the six chairs at the table on the stage. A handsome silver-haired man stood up from behind the table. His eyes were deep and brown, and his brow stood out in a thick, pronounced line. Despite the nerves and shakes within her, Agnes could not help but feel a thrill.
“Hello,” he began, in a booming voice. “Thank you for coming to the Tuesday night group. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is George and I am an alcoholic. I have been at Dundas Street for, oh, well, nearly twelve years now. I am encouraged by the amount of familiar faces I see tonight in the crowd, and as always I am also saddened by the amount of new ones.”
He rested his thick knuckles on the table. “We also have some old friends on the top table the night and one or two new ones.” The people to his left and right shifted and smiled. “Afore I introduce them to you let us start by taking a moment and asking the Lord for help.” The man lowered his head, his hair shone like Christmas tinsel. Agnes squinted at him then for a better look. The room moved as one as heads rolled forward and eyes closed for the Serenity Prayer. Agnes knew it by heart, none of it had seeped into her head.
The meeting started, and she listened to the top table discuss the matters of the meeting and pass out news and condolences. A friend of the group had died; from what Agnes could tell, it was the drink that had gotten her. George introduced the newest faces on the top table and asked them to share their story with the group. A thin man with a flat Weegie accent stood up. “Hiya, ma name’s Peter un ah’m an alcoholic.” His eyes misted as he spoke about how he’d lost contact with his wife and then how his sons had fallen into first the drink and then the drugs as well. Agnes listened to the man flattening his vowels, spitting out the story as if he were angry, using short familiar words that the Glasgow people had made up. She felt she knew him down to his particular tenement because of how he spoke. She didn’t wonder at his circumstances, and by the end she felt sorry for him: he would never have been able to escape the weight of his own accent.
As they kept talking, she drifted miles away, her insides hurting for a drink. A voice called out. “You. The black-haired woman in the purple coat.” George was pointing directly at her. “Would you like to share anything with the group?”
Agnes made to shake her head no, but instead she found her legs tightening, and almost involuntarily she stood up. She had done this before, a dozen times at a handful of different chapters. She turned to the left and then her right and gave a small smile. All the faces turned to her, but their features were only blended featureless smudges. A passing worry that the back of her lovely coat was creased from sitting distracted her a moment, and she stumbled over her first words. “H-Hello, my name is Ag-Agnes, and I am. I suppose I am. An alcoholic.”
The room made a sound of tepid support. “Welcome, Agnes.”
Agnes made to go on, but she found now that the words left her. Her hand ran over the back of the coat trying to smooth any wrinkles. Except for some chronic coughing the room went silent.
“I am in flames, yet I do not burn,” boomed the man’s voice.
“Sorry?” said Agnes.
“Ego sum in flammis, tamen non adolebit,” George said. “I am on fire. I do not burn. It’s Saint Agnes’s lament.”
“Oh.” She was unsure whether she should sit down.
“Never a truer word spoken, eh?” he continued, finding his footing, addressing the broader fellowship. “I am in flames, yet I do not burn. Well, let that be hope for us all. Every one of us here tonight has been ravaged by the flames.” He cleared his throat and spread his arms, like a fairground huckster. “Haven’t we all burnt for another drink, burnt up with the fever, with the sweat and panic, our throats on fire, our hearts burning in our chests?” The crowd made an agreeing murmur. “Then you have it.” He made a satisfied ahhhhh sound. “That glorious drink you have wanted so badly, and it burns through you, as sure as petrol. Like petrol it fuels the demons in you, it burns you away to the very devil. You go up in flames, and everything you touch you destroy; everyone you love steps away, steps back from the fire. Money burns, families burn, careers burn, reputations burn, and then when it’s all burnt, you still burn.”
The crowd was rapt. “Aye, I cannot tell you how I have watched the flames burn everything I ever had. Even when I was trying to be done with the drink, standing there crying out for help, it was like I was still alight, the great untouchable.” The crowd tutted in sympathy. “As I reached out for help, everyone shrank back from me; they pulled away from fear that the fire would return. ‘Don’t help him,’ they said. ‘He’s no worth it,’ they said. ‘He’ll never change, he’ll just pull you down as well.’”
The handsome man shook his head. The room was quiet now. “Still, at the end, it was true, eh? I am in flames, yet I do not burn.” He wiped the spit from the corners of his mouth. “That’s what Saint Agnes had to teach us. How even in the darkness there is still hope.”
Agnes blinked blindly around the smoky room. She tucked her skirt and coat under her and made to sit down again. The man raised his voice again and pointed at her. “Flames are not just the end, they are also the beginning. For everything that you have destroyed can be rebuilt. From your own ashes you can grow again.”
Agnes smiled demurely, she resisted the urge to roll her eyes.
The speaker had tried his best to inspire. The meeting went on, and all the fellowship turned to face the front again. Agnes let out a long, low breath; it felt like the first of the evening.
There was a comforting hand on her shoulder then, a woman’s hand, fine and pale, but the back of it already puffed with the thick blue veins of age. The woman leaned forward to whisper into her ear. She came so close that Agnes could not turn, she could not see her face.
“Aye, right enough. The bastards couldnae burn Saint Agnes, so they beheaded the poor lassie instead. Fuckin’ men! Eh?” The old woman patted her shoulder once, and then, with a cough, she sat back in her seat.
Nineteen
Agnes stepped out of her own ashes in time for Shuggie’s tenth birthday. She was off the drink for three months before she took up the night shift at the colliery petrol station. She had spread Christmas over four different catalogues, piling the tree with presents and filling the table with four kinds of game and meat with no way of paying for any of it. As Leek and Shuggie lay fat and full in the glow of the television, she did not realize she need not have bothered. They were happy with her alone, with her sobriety and the peace it brought.
The catalogue bills started to come in, but more than the money there was something else about the job that she needed then. The job helped with the loneliness. It kept her busy, gave her something to do on the long, empty nights. Without it she would have sat at home, wondering what she would do until sleep finally came. Most of those nigh
ts she would sit there thinking about Shug, thinking about the friends who never called any more, about Lizzie and Wullie and about Catherine in South Africa. The night shift helped keep her from the drink.
The petrol station doubled as a small shop, the only place for a mile that sold cigarettes, sugary ice lollies, and bags of oven chips. It was the centre of nothing. She pulled a drawer towards herself and lifted out the dirty coins that rattled there, dropped in the change, and pushed packets of fags and pints of milk back through the safety-glass partition. It was a social life of sorts, and she was glad for it.
Four nights a week Agnes sat behind the safety glass staring out into the empty darkness. At long intervals taxi drivers would pull in and fill their black hacks with diesel. Some would ask for the key to the dank little toilet, and some would ask her for a paper and a cold can of Irn-Bru. On either side of the safety glass they would have their banter, about the strikes out at Ravenscraig, about the death of the Clyde, about the shared things in their lives. Taxi drivers were used to being behind glass; their own nights were partitions and windscreens. Agnes grew glad of their company.
Over time a couple of the men became regular, and a few started to have their breaks there with her, eating sandwiches on either side of the glass. The late-night business at the petrol station improved after she started. Some hackney drivers went out of their way to call by, to spend five minutes with the beautiful woman who laughed at their stories, this doll who seemed always pleased to see them. They moved on only when the next driver pulled up.
Sometimes, if she was occupied in conversation, a few of the taxis circled the station until she was free. They watched her like shy weans gawping at a plate of biscuits. She could see them criss-crossing up and down the empty road, waiting for their ten minutes of peace with her, turning petulant when they saw her laughing with some other driver.
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