Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

  Agnes folded her arms across her chest like a blockade. Then she folded her face closed. “My boy needs nothing from you.”

  Shug studied her for a minute and worried he might have lost her forever. He wondered, how does a fish free itself of a hook? He reached into the bag and pulled out the football boot box. He held it out to her. She would not uncross her arms to take it, so he laid it, like an offering to the gods, down on the top step at her feet. “You know you’ve always been the love of my life.” It was true, and it was a shame. “Here, this is for you.” He offered the bag of lager as he retreated backwards.

  “Those days are gone,” she said coolly.

  “Oh!” His lips pursed in admiration. “How long has it been this time?”

  “Long enough to matter.”

  He gave her small round of applause. “I thought I hadn’t been hearing from you.”

  “So you came for a look at the ruins. Just to check?”

  “S’pose you cannae kid a kidder.” He held his palms up in admission. “Can I no come in, Missus Bain?” He wielded her name as softly as he could.

  She didn’t say yes, and she didn’t say no. She just turned and walked up the hallway into the kitchen. She heard the door close behind her, heard the key turn in the lock and the heavy footsteps of Shug at her back.

  “I like what you have done with the place.” Shug sat down at the little folding table; he was studying the corner where the damp still peeled the paper from the wall.

  Agnes could see him looking at the fridge and the big freezer and wondering how she could afford any of it. Single parent with a raging drink problem. Without a word she put the kettle on and opened the bread bin. From the paper wrapper she took out two thick slices of white plain loaf and smeared thick yellow butter on them. She cut each in half and put it on a small tea plate. She slid the plate towards him, and he thanked her.

  He took up a buttery slice and crammed the edge into his mouth; the butter was sweet and thick. “I hear Caff is enjoying South Africa.”

  “Catherine? So I hear.” Agnes sounded tired.

  “Do you no hear from her?” he asked.

  “Not often.”

  “Aye, well, you’re to be a granny now.”

  Her hand grasped the edge of the worktop. The air blew out of her. “So I heard.”

  “Wee Peggy Bain is flying out there, you know. To support her when the bairn comes. Times like this,” he added cruelly, “you need your mammy, even if a mother-in-law is all you have.”

  “Where would I get the money for that?” Agnes turned to hide her face from him. She tried to busy herself in making two mugs of dark tea. She hoped he wouldn’t see how her hand was shaking.

  “Donald Junior is sure it’s to be a boy. I telt him I’d buy the pram if he named it Hugh, after his favourite uncle.”

  When she could control the heat in her face, she turned and brought the stewed tea to the table. Into his she spooned three sugars and added a big splash of milk. “I was trying to cut back on the sugars, but what the hell.”

  “Your scabby heart?”

  “Aye, still plays up from time to time. At least when it stutters, I know it’s still there.” He laughed and finished off a slice of buttery bread, folding the crust and shoving it under his moustache in one piece. “How is my boy? Is he anything like his old man?”

  “Dear God. I should hope not.”

  Agnes got up from the table quietly and left the room. She wanted to process the news about Catherine in peace. She didn’t say where she was going. Shug sat at the table and ate another slice of the buttered bread, and in his mind’s eye he tallied the cost of the new appliances in his head. She has a man, he thought. He sat forward in the chair and craned his neck around the door to see if he could see her. Wiping his buttery fingers on his trousers he wondered if she had slipped off into the bedroom. With a grin he picked up the carry-out and started around the unfamiliar house looking for where she’d gone. Sticking his head round some of the half-open doors he noted how neat and clean everything was. He thought about Joanie, her cat-hair-covered couch, her dirty drawers on the bedroom floor, and he could picture her now, carelessly brushing toast crumbs off their mismatched bedcovers.

  As Shug went slowly down the hall peering into rooms, her sad glass-eyed ornaments stared back at him. She wasn’t in any of these rooms. He stopped outside one of the last doors before the front door and found her there with her back to him. It was a boy’s room with two narrow single beds. On a low table by the door Shuggie had placed some robot toys, and in the spaces between them he had written out on neat little cards the names of those that were missing, ones that he didn’t yet own. It reminded him of Agnes. He had forgotten how much she had wanted and wanted and wanted.

  “Take a good look around,” she said quietly, “and then go.”

  “Where are all the fitba posters?” he asked, looking at the empty walls.

  “Hugh doesn’t like football. Actually, he doesn’t like posters much. He thinks they look common.”

  Shug looked at his son’s side of the small, fussy room. The only sign of childhood was the neatly arranged robots. He looked at them and then realized what they were. They were a mantelpiece of sad glass-eyed ornaments.

  “Seen enough?” Agnes seemed in that moment like a tired docent.

  “I suppose.” He sneered slightly.

  “Good,” said Agnes with a taut smile. She held her hand out towards the door. “Now you can fuck off.”

  Agnes was worried about her whites. All that summer the news was about Chernobyl and the nuclear explosion that had happened there. It had been a sad but distant worry until a man on the news warned about a light nuclear rain that was falling over the west of Scotland as it headed on to Ireland. As Shuggie helped her bring in the washing from the back line she asked him whether nuclear fallout might actually help get out stubborn stains. The boy shook his head; no, it wouldn’t be like a bleach. He told her about the depressing nuclear war cartoons they had been made to watch by Father Barry, and he said it might just eat the bed sheet whole. They had just carried in the last basket of still-damp sheets when the smirr started. From the front window the bouncing drops looked like every other kind of Scottish spit. As it splashed off the empty street they made a great game of things they would like to see burnt away by it:

  “Double football!”

  “Jinty McClinchy!”

  “Dirty Mouse McAvennie!”

  “This whole bastarding scheme!”

  “Snap!”

  Shuggie lay in front of the three-bar fire and watched Agnes iron the last of the dampness out of the washing. The rising steam meant she had to keep wiping her face on an old piece of toilet roll she kept up her sleeve. She took out her top teeth and pulled funny faces at him through the hissing steam. It was unlike her to lower her vanity like this. But there, in the close heat of the fire, Shuggie dreamt of how he never wanted this burning rain to end. How it would be better if they were stuck inside alone, where he could keep her safe forever.

  Big Shug had tried to bring her low. Neither of them spoke about his father or his sudden visit. To spite him, Agnes and Shuggie had made a grand gesture of delivering all the Special Brew to Jinty. They dressed in their matching best and slowly promenaded around to the McClinchys’ door. Jinty had opened the door with a confused frown covering a thin veneer of disdain. They smiled up at her as if they were the most faithful of Jehovah’s Witnesses. Only upon seeing the plastic bag did Jinty herself soften; at the dull clang of the lager bells she beamed in wonder like an apostle after the Resurrection.

  Eugene had phoned on that very same day.

  Agnes had heard from him less and less since her first AA birthday. Since he was a good man, she expected he would let her down gradually, very gently, and then she would never hear from him again.

  Eugene called for her in the taxi. It looked shiny, as if it had been washed especially for the occasion. He honked the horn once, but when she went ou
t into the street, he didn’t get out and open the passenger door for her, as he had done the times before.

  Colleen and the other women were lined up against the wooden fence opposite. Bridie held a half-dry potato pot and a grey tea towel. They looked as if they had been interrupted from their routine by the growl of Eugene’s diesel engine. Colleen looked livid as Agnes left with her prized possession.

  As the hackney pulled away Eugene didn’t speak. They had just passed the chapel when he pulled the taxi off the Pit Road and stopped it a few feet from the wide iron gateway of the closed colliery. He turned off the engine, and like a living beast the taxi stopping shaking below them. It was pitch-black and silent outside. He reached up and turned on the little yellow interior light.

  Agnes had been here a time before, with another taxi driver, a face she couldn’t remember. It made her feel cold inside. She watched Eugene’s kind eyes in the mirror. If she spoke first it would be clumsy and hurt-sounding, so she fumbled in her bag for her cigarettes and waited for him to say his piece and set the tone.

  “I wisnae gonnae keep this going,” he said quietly, without turning round in his seat. “I suppose I got a fright.”

  “I’m that scary?”

  “It was all they alcoholics and their, eh, disease.”

  Agnes closed the neck of her coat defensively. “Well. Don’t worry yourself. It’s not catching.”

  She heard his lips open and close, and then eventually he spoke again. “I know it sounds stupid, right. It’s just they people. The ones at your party. They were that. Ye know. Pitiful.”

  She took the blow without a wince, and then she surprised herself. “Eugene, you should know that, ‘they people,’ well, I am one of them.”

  His face moved in such a way that she knew this wasn’t at all what he had wanted to hear. “I didn’t mean any offence. It’s just that, well, ye seem so normal.”

  “That word again.” Agnes finished her cigarette and rolled her tongue around the inside of her teeth. “Eugene, listen, no hard feelings, OK. Just please take me home.”

  He was quiet for a long time, and then he slid the partition between them closed. The taxi shuddered to life. The bright headlights picked out the broken gates of the mine. Red paint, already faded, read: No Coal, No Soul, Only Dole.

  The taxi swung out on to the road, but instead of the short distance back into the scheme, it turned in the direction of the main road, towards life. Agnes leaned forward and rapped her ring on the partition, from curiosity more than annoyance. “I asked you to take me home.” He didn’t answer, and sinking back into her seat, she didn’t push. The thought of getting out of the house for even a single hour had hung before her like a sweet dream since he had telephoned.

  They didn’t go very far. The taxi reached the bright street lights of the main road and took a left on to the carriageway. Almost as soon as it picked up speed to join the faster traffic, it slowed again and pulled off on to a dark gravel driveway.

  Agnes had seen the golfers’ hotel before but had never been inside. It sat on the side of the dual carriageway, and because it was accessible only by car, it said it didn’t want the likes of her. From her seat on the bus she would watch the Jaguars pull up, fancy cars from fancy estates, far away from here. She would watch the smooth-faced men take their golf clubs out of the car boots while their wives would stand by, with their small purses and low heels, wrapped in Scottish Woollen Mill jumpers.

  It was true that the ring of green around Glasgow held the new slums of the urban resettlement, these forgotten, remote housing schemes. It seemed cruel to Agnes that these green fields also held some of the fanciest hotels and private clubs she had ever seen. The two different worlds didn’t like to look on each other.

  “We are not going here, are we?”

  “How no?” he said, pulling the fat black hack between two fancy saloon cars.

  Agnes gazed out at the garden lanterns leading the way to the white doors of the club. “Would you look at it? It’s not meant for the likes of us.”

  Eugene laughed. “Ah’m offended by that.”

  The pride rose in her. Her hand pulled the hem of her skirt. “Oh, Eugene, I can’t. I’m not dressed for it.”

  Without saying any more, Eugene stepped out of the taxi and opened her door. He had to reach all the way into the back of the cab to take her hand. In his warm paw hers was suddenly small and cold. She was proud, and she was frightened, and he was suddenly sorry for the words he had spoken before.

  The dining room of the golf club was simple, but to Agnes it was the height of class. It was a big open room that faced a wall of glass doors that overlooked the green lawn of the eighteenth hole. The room was carpeted in thick paisley carpet the colour of gold and parsley, and the walls had panelling laid in to waist-height, and above this were photos of club members and famous patrons. Agnes didn’t recognize any of them, and she didn’t like to squint in front of strangers.

  A young girl in a long tartan skirt led them to a seat in the back of the smoking section. Agnes almost died with shame when Eugene asked for a table nearer the glass doors and the lit fairway beyond. The girl only smiled and led them to a table closer to the front. As they sat down, Eugene said a loud hello to the tables on either side. The people politely nodded back.

  It had a fancy Gaelic name, but she recognized it as chicken. Agnes was going to have only this chicken and chips, but Eugene wouldn’t let the waiter take the menus until she ordered a starter, a main, and a dessert. She would have liked to have sat alone with the menu for days. She didn’t know what all the things were, but to suddenly see it all laid before her and to know she could have her pick of it made her feel light-headed. It was like a Freemans catalogue, only better. She ordered what she understood, and then she sat there worrying about the cost.

  “Listen, you have a wee drink if you want. Don’t worry about me,” she said, as the waiter brought them two fizzy colas. The glasses were tall, and each had a mixing stick meant for cocktails. “That’s fancy, isn’t it,” said Agnes, examining the stirrer and unable to relax. “Honestly, I don’t mind if you take a wee drink.”

  Their prawn cocktail starters arrived. The ice cream bowl was lined with a slice of lettuce and frozen pink prawns that swam in a sea of thick Marie Rose sauce. Around the edge of the glass were thick wedges of lemon. The prawns were still a little cold, not fully defrosted, which Eugene said wasn’t very good of the place. Agnes didn’t mind it, to her it tasted fresh, the ice a clean crisp stab against the sweet and tangy Marie Rose. “I’ve made this sauce before. But I’ve never thought about adding a lemon or the—”

  Eugene stopped her mid-sentence. “Ah have to ask you about something.”

  Agnes set down her small fork.

  “Ah don’t mean to bring it up again,” said Eugene awkwardly. “It’s just, ah’m tryin’ to understand, ah suppose. But, well, have they people, ye know the people at the AA, told ye when ye would get better?”

  The waiter had come and cleared their bowls before Agnes spoke again. “I don’t know what to tell you. They tell all of us that we will never get better. At least,” she added, looking at him directly, “not in the way you mean.”

  “But ye know how ye telt me you are a different person now? You telt me yersel that it was him that drove ye to the drink. Well, all that’s changed.” Eugene tried to soften his tone. “If we made a go o’ this, don’t ye think that wid keep ye off it?”

  “I don’t think it works that way.”

  “Yer arse. Wi’ me in your life, what would ye need a drink problem for? Drink is only for they sad pitiful bastards. Look at you now. Look at me, for fuck’s sake.” The pastel-jumpered couple at the next table made a distasteful cough. Eugene lowered his voice again. “Look, all ah’m saying is, ah like ye. I think you are that fuckin’ smashin’.”

  Eugene was unwilling to admit defeat, and Agnes could imagine he was a man well used to being able to fix any object that was broken. It made her feel lik
e an engine left corroding on a front lawn. “Well, I like you too.”

  The waiter brought the main dishes. He wrapped his hands in a towel and gently slid the hot plates in front of the couple. Agnes looked first at her roasted chicken, and then she cooed over Eugene’s lamb and boiled potatoes like a wean at Christmas. Eugene ignored the spread and pointed his thick finger in the direction of the coal-mining estate. “You are the best-looking wummin in that whole scheme. Most o’ them don’t even run a brush through their hair, and look at ye. Any time o’ the day, ye are spotless.” He leaned in. “I just need to know. Afore ah really fall for ye. Afore we start something serious.”

  Agnes felt uneasy. She tried to change the subject back to the food. “That looks lovely. Big portions, aren’t they? I thought it would maybe be a breast or thigh, not a whole half chicken.”

  The waiter coughed and asked if they had everything they needed. Eugene nodded yes. Then, on second thought, he added, “Pal. Bring us a bottle of your house wine, would ye?”

  “Red or white, sir?” asked the waiter quietly.

  Eugene looked at Agnes, who had gone stiff. He looked back at the waiter. “Would ye have white with chicken?” The waiter nodded that, yes, he thought that would be a good idea. So Eugene ordered a bottle of the white.

  “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to,” said Eugene softly. “Ah’m no forcing ye.”

  The chicken that had looked golden and juicy now looked dry and dead in front of her. The waiter brought the bottle of wine. He made to pour some for Agnes, and she didn’t stop him. She remarked on how the wine was almost the light peach colour of the roses in her front garden. “You know, peach roses are meant to be the colour of sincerity, the colour of gratitude.”

  The two of them sat looking at the glass for a long time. Eugene raised his and toasted the two of them. “Here’s tae us. Wha’s like us? Gey few, and they’re aw deid!” Agnes raised a half-smile and lifted her Coke glass. It was flat and watery now.