“Oh! I don’t know. I hope so.”
“Mister McNamara. I won’t like you if you disappoint her.”
For a while Eugene said nothing. The strange little boy had stunned him to silence. “You know, son, maybe it’s time you thought more about yourself. Leave your mammy be for a while. I can take it from here. You should get out and play with some weans your own age, try to be more like the other wee boys.”
From the pocket of his dress trousers Eugene drew out a little red book no bigger than a packet of cigarettes. It was thin and cheaply printed. He handed it to the boy, and Shuggie looked at the dog-eared cover. It read: Free Gift with your purchase of the Glasgow Evening Times. On the cover was a black-and-white picture of an old football hero; his socks looked thick and woolly. It was the Wee Red Book Guide to Scottish Football History.
Shuggie looked down at the book and flicked through the yellowed newsprint pages full of old football scores. Scottish Premier League Results. Gers won 22, drew 14, lost 8, 58 points total. Aberdeen won 17, drew 21, lost 6, 55 points total. Motherwell won 14, drew 12, lost 10. His face flushed with shame; any feelings of superiority left him. “Thanks,” he said, and he slipped it quickly into his pocket, like it was a dirty secret.
Shuggie crossed the room to where his mother stood with the men from the Dundas Street chapter. They looked up at her like an adoring choir. The first man, Monday-Thursday Peter, supported another man by the elbow. This second man looked like he’d taken a stroke or like his motor functions had been addled by the drink. The third man was younger and broader, not yet a ruin or a shell, but his fingers were dirty with cigarette stains. This younger man was closer in age with to Leek. His hair was bleached at the tips, and he was dressed in a trendy nylon anorak, but it gave him the look of a jakey. He looked sly and light-fingered, like the Pithead boys who stood outside Mr Dolan’s and used their Army pockets to shoplift. Shuggie was glad he had hidden his mother’s Capodimonte ornaments. Then this young man smiled. His teeth were small but straight and white. His face was handsome and healthy and kind. Shuggie felt funny inside. The football book burnt his leg.
“Oh, this is my youngest, Hugh.” Agnes was proudly stroking the top of his head.
“Hiya, pal,” said the first man. He held his hand out to the boy. “I’m your Uncle Peter.”
Shuggie looked at the hand without taking it and then looked up coldly at the man. “No,” he sighed. “You’re just Peter. I am very well aware of my family tree, thank you.”
“Aye, he’s a bright lad, right enough,” said the man, straightening up. This close, Shuggie could see where his shaky hands had forgotten to shave; there were sore-looking patches on the underside of his chin.
Agnes gave Shuggie such a hard shake that his hair fell out of its neat parting. “What’s gotten into you? Apologize to Mister . . . eh, Mister . . .” Agnes was lost for words, and Monday-Thursday Peter fidgeted uncomfortably. She shook her boy again. “Apologize to Peter!”
“I’m sorry, Mister Peter,” he said, but his eyes were watching Eugene.
Mary-Doll crossed the room towards Eugene. “I’ve no seen you afore. Are you wi’ the Dundas Street group?”
“Naw.”
“Aye, I thought I didnae recognize ye.” She pulled her shiny fringe down over her eyes, and feeling better she grinned. “I’ve been sober myself for nearly three months now. The council just gave me a wee flat. I was on that list for nearly four years, mind. I’m hoping to get bunk beds for the living room soon. Then my weans can come stay.” She curled a tendril of her shiny hair flirtatiously around her finger.
Eugene tried a thin smile. She took it the wrong way.
Mary-Doll kept pumping out private details without a pause or concern. “I been saving up hard, and I’ve already bought myself a wee colour portable and a lovely new rug, bits and bobs, you know, this and that. I wish I had Agnes’s touch, mind. She keeps a lovely house, doesn’t she? She keeps herself lovely an all. Even at her worst she was always spotless.”
“That right?”
“Aye. Even at her worst she was always neat as a pin.” She changed course, tired of talking about other women. She placed her hand on his arm. “Listen, you didnae tell me which meeting you went to.”
“Oh, well, I don’t. I don’t go to any meeting. I don’t have a problem.”
“Oh, aye? Lucky you. Do ye want mine?” She laughed, her gums were white and anaemic-looking.
“No, thanks.” Eugene lifted his head and called over the music to Agnes. He thought she looked uncomfortable too and wondered what her boy was saying that made her look so. He nodded his big red head, and she made her way over to the door.
Eugene excused himself from the ghostly woman and led Agnes out into the hall. The hall was quiet and less smoky, and he finally let out a breath. Agnes watched as Eugene placed his hand on his money belt in a way that made her uncomfortable. “Listen, I better get back out there. You know, make a couple of fares before the clubs all shut for the night.”
“Oh. Yes, of course. Are you all right?”
“Aye, aye,” he answered too quickly. He scratched the line of hair at the back of his neck.
Agnes knew lying when she saw it. She leaned forward to kiss him on the lips, but Eugene turned awkwardly and caught her on the cheek. It was light and dry, like a casual greeting between French friends. As he pulled away, she realized she was still standing with her lips parted, ready for a proper kiss that never came. It was her sex kiss, and it was unwanted. It made her feel old and dirty. She could see Colleen in him now, and too late she changed her expression, from love to hurt to one of armour.
“Well, I’ll phone ye, alright?”
“Yes. Please do.” She sniffed airily, folding her arms.
“Well, you had better get back to yer. Eh. Yer . . .” He stumbled for words. “Yer party.”
She watched the door close behind him, then the jiggle of the handle as he took care to make sure it caught in its lock, like he was sealing a box. She heard the gate latch on his way out and his voice call out to his nieces and nephews playing outside. It was a different voice than the one he had used on her. A life spent listening to the sounds of taxis told her he slammed the door of the hackney. She could hear the engine start with a growl and could tell he pulled away too fast. But, then, reading the taxis was the easy part.
From the living room she could hear the sugary hiss of more bottles of fizzy ginger being opened. She watched her friends in the room in their loose-fitting clothes. For years the drink had held them stuck, like they were frozen, robbing decades from them, spinning them out of the world and sucking the literal life from them. She felt ill suddenly, felt like she wanted them out of her house, to give her life a good bleaching.
Agnes looked down at herself and felt embarrassed for being so low as to be with them. Then she felt lower for being such an unchristian cur. Along the hall ceiling floated a thick wave of cigarette smoke. Someone put on a new top-forty record. Agnes had heard it before. The squeaky-voiced singer started singing, “Happy birthday, happy birthday.” Agnes headed to the bathroom to fix herself up.
Was she broken and stuck, like them? In the mirror a facsimile of Elizabeth Taylor looked back at her, only now it was Liz, the vain and haughty version from the paparazzi photos on the yacht in Puerto Vallarta. Her hair was still thick, her make-up still feline. But now the hair was too black and the make-up was too heavy, the popular colours of a decade gone by. Even her eyelids were metallic green, like oxidized copper. She took out an old tortoiseshell pick comb and fixed the curls in her hair, flattening them into wavy layers and making them smoother, less bouffant-like, less old-fashioned. She took an elastic band and pulled a mean ponytail into the back, the first one she had ever worn. It lifted her face as she wiped the heavy lipstick from her lips, the metallic gleam from her eyelids, and the pink rouge from the burst red veins. Blank as a canvas now, she drew electric-blue kohl under her eyes, the way she had seen the young girls on To
p of the Pops wear it.
When she lifted her head again, the woman who looked back at her was just the same. She was stuck like the others. It had nothing to do with the outside.
She was sick for a drink then, something, anything, to take the woman in the mirror away. Agnes drew the old gas-bill envelope out of her make-up bag and took out two of Bridie Donnelly’s happy pills. Without water she crunched, tilted her head and swallowed them down, like a baby bird.
She took her time, finished her cigarette, and dropped it hissing into the toilet. As she watched it swirl down the drain she slowly forgot what had been bothering her. She looked in the mirror again and smiled. Now she was fixed up.
Twenty-Two
When Shuggie came home from school on his eleventh birthday there was a shoebox sat on the top step and a black hackney parked outside. Eugene had been cooler towards her since the party, so much so that even Leek had noticed. On the nights she didn’t work at the petrol station Agnes had taken to chain-smoking by the phone and underlining pages from her twelve-step book. Shuggie and Leek had lain awake those nights. In the dark their eyes locked together as they listened to her sighing in front of the late-night television, knowing she wasn’t paying attention to any of it.
Shuggie missed school for three days. He faked constipation cramps and followed her around the house reading aloud from Danny, the Champion of the World. He believed if he could fill her every moment with noise then maybe she would stay away from the drink. He had stood outside the bathroom as she peed and told her of the pheasants that Danny tricked with sleeping pills. He climbed into her cold bed at night and read non-stop as she lay awake. When she could take no more, Agnes filled him full of milk of magnesia and was relieved when he was loosened up enough to go back to class.
Shuggie sat on the doorstep and lifted the strange box on to his lap. Nestled inside, in clouds of white tissue paper, was a pair of black football boots. Shuggie slipped out of his shiny school shoes and into the studded boots. He clacked up and down the path. The boots were easily two sizes too big for him, but they looked like the same kind the boys at school wore. As he clacked around in circles he wondered whether they made him more normal.
The milk of magnesia grumbled inside, loosening his bowels. He pulled on the front door handle, but it was locked. He understood that well enough. As he waited in the shadows of the house he was just glad that Eugene had come back around; even a McAvennie for a father was better than his mother on the drink. He rested his ear against the door and prayed for Eugene to stay, prayed that his mother would find strength to stay off the drink and be at peace. Then he prayed for God to make him normal for his birthday.
His stomach flipped again. He was cupping one hand over his grumbling backside and with the other he pulled violently at the door. A key turned inside the lock, and the handle jerked from his grasp.
It wasn’t Eugene. In the doorway stood his father. He was flattening his hair back over his pink head, and he looked down at the boy in shock. “You home from school already?” was all he said, after all this time.
Shuggie, wide-eyed, nodded like he was simple. He hadn’t seen Shug since that afternoon at Rascal’s three years ago. Shug tucked the back of his dress shirt into his strained trouser band and nodded at the boy’s feet, “So, you like your present?” Shuggie looked down at his feet and realized the black football boots were not from Eugene after all. Before he could answer, his father grabbed at his face and said, “Fuck me. You’re no half getting that big old Fenian nose.”
Shuggie’s hand flew defensively to his Campbell nose. He traced the little horse bone, the rudder-like bump that was growing there.
Shaking his head in disappointment, Shug pulled out the change dispenser he used in the taxi. With a flick of his thumb he slid out two twenty-pence pieces. “Here, mibbe if you take up the boxing somebody’ll break it for ye.”
Shuggie looked at the coins for a while, feeling more shocked than ungrateful. Shug took it the wrong way and reluctantly pumped out four fifty-pence pieces. “Don’t ask for mair!” Grudgingly, he dropped the money into the boy’s hand. “So, are you chasing the lassies yet?”
The boy had never been asked that before. He shrugged.
Shug thought of himself at eleven and took that as false modesty. “Aye, well, mibbe you’re a Bain man after alls, eh?” His tongue wet his bottom lip. “It’s a grand age to be sticking yersel into a lassie’s bread bin, seeing as ye’ve got a couple mair years afore any real harm can come of it.”
Shuggie could think only of Granny Lizzie’s bread bin and the thick-crusted loaf she had always kept in there. The way she had cut away the crusts for him and then slathered them with butter and ate them herself.
“Well, I cannae stay talking aw day. You are spending my money quicker than I can make it.” Shug stepped around his son and groaned as he got back into the hackney. The boy watched it sink and sigh under his weight. “Be sure and look after your mammy. Try and stop her from taking up with any Catholics, ye hear?” His father turned the engine over and drove off without a goodbye.
Shuggie turned towards the quiet darkness of the house. He stepped clean out of the new boots, and with a high kick sent them flying towards the peatbogs. He went inside and found her there, sat on the edge of his single bed. The covers were rumpled behind her, and at her feet sat a bag full of Special Brew. They looked at each other with the same dazed look, like they had both woken up from the same peaceful nap, like it would be a while before they felt like they had the will to form words and speak.
He had heard she was doing well, or rather, he hadn’t heard anything, and that was the point. It had been over a year since she had called the taxi rank. Fourteen months since she had screamed blue murder down the phone at the dispatcher or since she had threatened to stick a knife in the boy and then gas herself. It had been over a year that he hadn’t heard.
The boy’s birthday was coming up, and that would be as good a time as any to see for himself. One of the other drivers had gotten a shitload of black football boots off the back of a lorry. They had pulled up a rental van next to the articulated truck, and while it was unloading, they stole six dozen pairs right there in the middle of Sauchiehall Street, as nice as you like, in broad daylight.
What boy didn’t like football? If Agnes had a new man, he could just drop off the boots. No harm in that. If she didn’t have a man then he wanted to know why she had stopped bothering him. She had hurt his ego in an unexpected way, so into the birthday bag he had slipped six cans of Special Brew.
Shug slid down the window of the hackney and leaned his arm on the hot black metal. He watched the light catch the gold of his rings and thought how his hands looked better after a week in the sun at Joanie’s caravan. Everything looked better when he had a bit of colour on him. As he raced along the carriageway he wondered if Agnes was still as beautiful as he remembered. He appreciated Joanie, but she was no looker when held up next to Agnes Campbell. Joanie was peace and quiet. She was even and steady and not a bit of bother. She took a drink but never got drunk, and she never cared for the bingo or fancy carpets or dreaming. Joanie was a hard grafter and was content with her lot. She had little personality but was dirty and grateful in bed in the way that he knew plain women often were. Still, he had to admit that in the looks department Agnes Campbell was a prize mare and Joanie was only a scrapmonger’s pony.
As he turned off into the colliery town he wondered if she’d ruined her looks with the drink yet. He’d seen it before. There was a type, especially in Glasgow, women who froze and withered at the same time. Their faces shrank, sucked dry by the drink, red lines bloomed on bony cheeks, sagging bags of sadness bloated under watery eyes. They tried to cover it all up, but they were stuck, and their faces became a museum to outdated hairstyles and heavy make-up. He wondered if she still had the light Irish eyes and the high cheeks, that soft pinkness that always smelled so clean and sweet. In the hot taxi he smiled and felt his blood rise for her. He
found himself thinking about what he would say to be able to fuck her one last time. He was glad he had taken a bath the night before.
Shug had not been out this way in years. A look in the phone book confirmed it was still the exact same address. She still took his name. Bain. He smiled, thinking her too proud to go back to being a dirty, common Mick. He found the house easily, the glorious garden of roses, too conspicuous and too showy for the shabby Pit town. The door was a different colour to the others, freshly painted in a red gloss; it looked confident, and it made him happy to see that. He knocked on the door and waited there for her to answer. From inside he could hear the roar of a hoover. He knocked again, and the machine went dead. He heard doors opening and cracked his best smile as the red swung inwards.
Agnes always kept the windows open in summer, and the opening door sent a wind rushing through Shug’s long, thin hair. As she looked down on him, she caught him trying to hold it vainly back in place over his shiny skull. The lecherous smile slipped from his face.
There was no make-up on her face, and although older she looked as fresh as when they had first met. On her cheeks were thin broken lines, but the eyes still shone, and Shug thought how she looked as if she had just been out for a brisk walk. Her hair, dark as night, sat soft and curly on her head. It made him angry that she was looking down on his own baldness.
“There she is. The love of my life.”
Agnes looked blankly down at him, her tongue rammed into the roof of her mouth.
“Well, don’t look so bloody surprised.” As soon as he said it, he knew he wouldn’t win her over like that. He wanted to sound light and easy, remind her of what she had been missing. “It’s been a while. Have ye no missed me?”
“You’ve gotten fatter.”
His hand went from his hair to his belly. “Oh, aye, mibbe. She’s a good cook, that Joanie.”
Agnes winced. “A well-rounded hoor then.”
“Look, I didn’t come here to fight at your front door. I brought the wean a present for his birthday.” He held up the cheap plastic bag. “Can I no come in?”
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