Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

  “You never told me much about your daughter.” She pushed the chicken around the plate. “Bernadette, is it?”

  “Aw, she’s aw grown up now, ah suppose. She does wonderful things for the nursery weans at Saint Luke’s. She’s like her mother in that, and she was very close to her mammy when she was alive. They always did things together, guid things for the Chapel, charity work for the miners’ widows.” He sucked some gristle from between his back teeth. “But she can be at that stoup altogether too much. The pair of them were always at the fuckin’ holy water. Back and forth like it was a dipping sauce.”

  “She sounds like a good person though.” Agnes said it, although, knowing Colleen, she suspected otherwise. “Have you told her about me?”

  “No,” said Eugene flatly.

  “Oh!” She would have liked to have sounded less deflated.

  “Cos our Colleen did.”

  Agnes exhaled. “I’ll bet she painted a pretty picture.”

  Eugene let his eyes float over the untouched glass of wine. “Ah suppose ye could say that.”

  They finished their dishes and talked about taxis and snack bars, South Africa and its palladium mines. Agnes pushed her fat potatoes under the half-eaten carcass. The waiter cleared the plates and brought the tiramisu out to the table. Eugene drank the bottle of white down as her glass of peach-coloured wine sat untouched, getting warmer.

  “I don’t think I could eat another bite.” She was playing idly with the tiramisu. “It’s lovely though. It’s the best custard I’ve ever had.”

  “A wee whisky would finish this off lovely,” said Eugene, scooping the last of the pudding into his mouth.

  “You know, I would never have thanked you for a whisky. Not even on my worst days. I find it’s like gin. It makes you sad. I didn’t drink to get sad. I drank to get away from sadness.”

  “What did ye drink, then?”

  “Oh, mostly only lager, and when I could afford it a half-bottle of vodka. On bad days it put the fight back in me.” She paused. “It gives you the worst blackouts, though. Well, at least when you are drinking to get drunk.”

  “Ah can hardly believe that you and her are the same person.” He paused, then said, “What do ye think would happen if ye took a drink o’ that wine the now?”

  “I’d probably want more.”

  “But maybe ye wouldnae.”

  “Maybe,” she said, then trying to be lighter, “Eugene, you don’t have to get me drunk to have your wicked way with me.”

  “Thank God for that!” He swept his hand over the debris on the table. “That would have been money down the drain, eh.” He laughed, and his face grew pinker. “Look, ah’m no trying to get ye drunk. Ah’m trying to have ye try a drink.”

  “But why?” Agnes was suddenly very tired.

  “Because . . . Because it’s what normal people do.” He moved the warm glass. “Look, just have a sip. To be social like. Ye’ll be fine. Listen, if ye start any trouble, I’ll have them put ye out and you can walk home.” He pushed the glass towards her by its long, elegant stem. “Ye’ll be fine. You’re a different woman now.”

  Agnes took the glass in her hand and held the wine up to her nose. The glass was warm, and the wine smelled like sunshine. “I don’t even really like wine that much,” she said, pushing it away.

  “Aw, yer shitebag scared.”

  She was scared; she was terrified even, but she wouldn’t let him see. She lifted the crystal glass to her mouth, and a small mouthful ran down her throat. It burned in a way she did not remember. The wine tasted nothing like sunshine. It was bitter, like cooking apples and vinegar. “See,” she said, putting the glass down.

  “Do you see?” said Eugene, genuinely excited. He looked like he might rise to his feet. “You haven’t burst into flames. You haven’t grown another head.” He lifted the dregs of his glass and swung it towards her in salute. “Cheers! Ah’m that proud of ye. Ah knew what ma sister said wisnae true.”

  He was right: she didn’t feel any different. Colleen was wrong. Agnes felt a wave of relief. She slowly finished the glass of wine, hoping what he said about her was true, feeling like she had beaten the AA and that she could be normal again.

  When the bill came, he paid in small notes, tightly curled from his nights out taxi driving. When they left the table, Agnes felt warm on the inside, and Eugene led her into the small members’ bar. Eugene laced his thick arm around her middle, and she felt happy that people were looking at them admiringly. As they sat close to one another in the corner, Eugene kissed her earlobe, and Agnes ordered a vodka and tonic and then she ordered another and then another.

  The taxi swerved back into the dark scheme. It was only good fortune that there were no other cars on the road. Agnes slipped around on the back seat, rolling in and out of a stupor. Eugene pulled the taxi over into the mouth of the closed colliery again. In the dark they tried to fuck, but it was clumsy and painful, and it made her rigid with a dark memory she couldn’t quite remember. As Eugene fumbled on top of her, coins spilt out of his pockets and made her feel as if she were being paid for.

  By the time Agnes had managed to scrape her house-key into the door lock, the lights were already on in the hall. As she fell in the front door, she felt her mohair coat catch on the jagged Artex plaster and heard her tights rip on its hooked spines.

  She was sure she was smiling up at Leek, so she didn’t know why her son would be so angry, why he was screaming down at her. All she understood was, he was hitting Eugene square in his thick neck with his fists. All she remembered was that another bedroom door opened, and there in the doorway was the little boy with the worried face of his own granny. His face was wet with disappointment. The front of his pyjamas was dark through with piss.

  Twenty-Three

  Christmas came and went, and Agnes started her New Year’s celebrations early. By the time it had gotten dark on Hogmanay, she had done away with the surreptitious pouring of vodka, half-hidden out of view down the far side of her armchair. By the time the television started preparing for the festivities, she was opening cans of Special Brew with a triumphant hiss and crack and pouring them like waterfalls straight into her old tea mug. It was still hours until the Hogmanay bells and she was already listing all the men who had ruined her.

  If Agnes had noticed that Leek was slowly disappearing, she didn’t say. Leek had spent his Christmas week hiding inside sleep. At night he hitchhiked to the city and played his apprenticeship wages away in the puggie machines that lined the arcades under Central Station. He disappeared earlier than usual on Hogmanay, like a man who sees rain coming and tries to outrun it.

  Shuggie stayed home, turning a drunk Agnes from the front door, keeping her away from the telephone. On Hogmanay, he sat by the window watching the Christmas-tree lights come on in the other front rooms as he pushed handfuls of white net curtains into his mouth. He stuffed them in until his mouth was full and he was less hungry than before. He soiled her good curtains in front of her and longed for her to tell him to stop, but she didn’t.

  While the McAvennies played with new bikes and enjoyed a visit from Big Jamesy, Shuggie sat by her feet like a quiet shadow. He watched without talking while she drank from the bottomless tea mug. She told him bad stories of his father again, picking up the tale like it was a book she had only set to the side for a year.

  By the time the six o’clock news was finished she was sitting on her bed slurring into the phone to Jinty McClinchy. Shuggie slid quietly along the hallway and sat with his back pressed against her bedroom door. From there he could listen through the chipboard and could follow the bell curve of her worsening mood. He wondered how long it would be till she passed out, till he could have a rest.

  There was music coming from her cassette player, and he could tell it was a bad sign. He slipped into the bedroom like a wary ghost. Agnes was smoking, dressed in nothing but her sheer black stockings and her black lace bra. Shuggie often bought new tights for her. Pride wouldn’t let h
er leave the house in a laddered pair, so the boy learned the exact size and shade she liked. Pretty Polly jet-black, semi-sheer tights were in all of his memories of her, both happy and sad.

  On her dark days, like today, the tights looked dirty and bad to him. They stood in contrast to her rose-coloured flesh and drew attention to the fact that she should have been dressed decently, like other mammies were. The tights left pink lines across the soft fat of her belly, where they pinched her skin. It seemed like something other people should not be able to see. He wanted her to cover it.

  She had forgotten he was home. When she finally noticed him in the mirror, she smiled that glassy smile she did with her teeth closed. Reaching deep into her black leather bag she produced a single fifty-pence piece. “Look at the state of you,” she said. “How can we celebrate the bells with you still in your pyjamas?” She gave him the coin and told him to fill a bath.

  He didn’t like to leave her like this. He could see she wasn’t at home in her own body. She circled her arms around his waist, drew him to her and placed a kiss on his lips. He could feel the heat of her breath, her lips slightly parted and lifeless. “Clean yourself good now,” she warned. “I want to start this year right.”

  When the bathtub was half-full of lukewarm water, Shuggie cautiously slid in. He worked the soap into his scalp and lay in the bath, listening to her shuffle from hiding place to hiding place, looking for the alcohol she had hidden from him and had now forgotten. He took out the little red football book that Eugene had given him and began to memorize all the teams and results of every match of the previous year’s Premier Division. He was penitent with these Hail Marys, going over and over the meaningless scores till he had committed them to memory. It would be a new year, a new chance.

  His Hogmanay outfit lay on her bed. It was the monochrome gangster get-up, the black shirt and the white tie. As they got dressed together in silence, they looked like an unhappy married couple who were headed to a very special party. He held his mother for balance and helped her pull on her skirt. “Let’s have a look at you, then.” She took a painted finger and slid it down his nose. “T’chut, look how handsome you are!” She shook her head in reverie. “Not a bit like your fat bastard of a father.”

  Agnes peeled off a can of warm Special Brew from its plastic noose. She looked at it lovingly and slid it solemnly into the boy’s hands. “Here, take this to Colleen’s. Wish her a happy New Year from me, and make sure she gets to drink in how smart you look.” A bitter smile cracked over her lips. “Be sure and tell your Auntie Colleen a ‘Happy New Year’ from me and Eugene, eh?”

  Every house in the street had its Christmas tree lit and proudly glowing in the front window. Dark-haired boys flitted down the street with bits of coal, excited and early to start the first footing. Shuggie took the short walk to Colleen’s house at a slow pace. He travelled along the wooden fences that hemmed the thick white-berried council bushes. He had no intention of passing on the can of drink or his mother’s message.

  As he crossed the street he wondered what people were eating. He imagined them huddled together with full bellies, shut in from the cold. He stood outside Colleen’s house squeezing winter berries between his fingers and thought about the steak and butter sandwiches sober Agnes had made for the bells the year before. He thought about the way they had cuddled on the settee and eaten peppermint chocolate, watching the crowd in George Square bring in the bells with a song.

  Shuggie wondered what to do with the can of lager. He hunkered in the darkness by Colleen’s low coal shed and pulled the ring pull. It sliced away from the can with a yeasty hiss, and the familiar smell was heavy in the cold air. With a cautious tongue Shuggie licked the brew from the top of the can. The foam tasted harmless, fluffy, like bitter air, a little sour and metallic, like wrapping his lips around the cold kitchen tap. His belly stabbed with hunger and anticipation, it asked to be filled, for a little taste of anything. Crouching like an animal, he turned his back to the street and drank a small mouthful of the lager. It didn’t burn. It tasted like flat ginger with a side of heavy seeded bread. He took another sip and another, and the grumbling in his belly grew quieter.

  He was glad of the warmth of it and the way it made his heart feel dizzy. The hunger started to subside, and he was feeling a little lighter, when he heard a diesel engine draw up. He watched Agnes stumble down the uneven paving of the path, clutching her purple coat closed over her short skirt. She said something flirtatious to the driver and climbed gracelessly into the back of the hackney. The driver wore thick government glasses; it clearly wasn’t Eugene. Shuggie panicked as the taxi pulled out of Pithead.

  In the four months and thirteen days since Eugene had helped his mother back on the drink, the red-headed taxi driver had come by two or three times a week. Those mornings Shuggie listened for Leek to leave for his apprenticeship, and a few minutes later, Eugene would slip into the quiet house. Shuggie could set the television meter by it.

  Since that night at the golfer’s clubhouse, Eugene had had the good sense to avoid Leek. As Agnes had lain singing to herself on the hall carpet, Leek had howled, and in his boxer shorts he had huckled Eugene out of the hallway and into the street. Although Eugene could have easily resisted, his manners were such that he let himself be manhandled out the door and found himself apologizing all the way to the kerb.

  That night Eugene had been sleepless with guilt. Early the next morning, away from his daughter’s scowl, he had pulled the telephone from the hallway and snuck with it into the bathroom, locking the door. He had woken Agnes, and she had met him at the colliery gates. He apologized for pressuring her into the drink, and he promised he would help her set it right again. As they sat in the back of the cold taxi she had kissed him for reassurance. Her loose tongue felt bloated and lifeless, and Eugene hoped the lager on her breath was only the dregs of the night before. As her head lolled in the taxi, he had remembered then, she had not drunk any lager with him at the golf club.

  After that night Shuggie had expected Eugene to flee. Instead, the boy sat in his school uniform at the telephone table and listened to them talk on the mornings Eugene came to visit. Shuggie unfolded his homework on his lap and signed her name carefully with the old biro. He remembered a time, in Lizzie’s house, when he had played with one of his mother’s Capodimonte knock-offs. The ornament was a romantic farm boy. He was wielding a blunt scythe and staring with such a strange wistful look that he must have been witness to the most glorious sunset. Repeatedly, Agnes had asked Shuggie to leave the boy alone, but he found he could not, and when she was in her Sunday bath he dropped it and the arm broke from the body and the scythe smashed from his hand. Shuggie had hidden the statue in the dark of Lizzie’s airing cupboard. He sat next to the heat of the immersion boiler and tried to stick the arm back on with everything from Sellotape to congealing rice pudding. He visited the broken boy every day for a week and prayed for some miracle. When he wasn’t in the airing cupboard he obsessed about it, and when he was in the cupboard he cried for what he had done. It was a whole week of torture before he panicked and just left it there, hidden between a set of old bath towels for someone else to find and repair.

  Shuggie sat at the telephone table and thought about the broken ornament again. He listened to them talk in the quiet voices adults used in the morning, and he could tell Eugene was tired from his night shift. The man had a wallpaper book, and he was asking what pattern Agnes preferred, the happy field flowers or the bold bengal stripes with tiny fleurs-de-lis. From the telephone table Shuggie could tell his mother was hushed with a sore head and concentrating all her energy as she fried liver for Eugene’s breakfast.

  “It’s nae bother,” said Eugene quite happily. “Ah can do the whole kitchen in a day. My faither once taught me a recipe for that mould. Ah can scrub the walls in the morning and paper in the afternoon. It’ll be brand new in no time.”

  “Yes, OK then,” said Agnes in a tiny voice.

  “Are ye alright
?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Just a wee sore head.”

  Shuggie could hear Eugene close the heavy wallpaper book; he could imagine him laying his hands palm upwards and open on the top of it. “You know mibbe don’t take a wee drink the day. How about if ye feel it coming on, ye could go for a wee walk or something?”

  Shuggie listened to his mother struggle to keep her voice even and flat. Like a skelfy piece of wood, she sanded at it, to hone the roughness of sarcasm from it. “A wee walk. Yes. Maybe that would sort it.”

  A few weeks later, by the time the wallpaper was hung, Shuggie noticed Eugene had stopped saying things like this. He acknowledged instead that if Agnes needed to take a drink, would she at least please stop hounding the taxi rank for him. Shuggie sat at the telephone table again and took her dog-eared phone book on to his lap. He took the chewed biro, and finding Eugene’s name, he changed the 6 in his telephone number to an 8. Then he found the listing for his taxi rank and changed all the 1s to 7s as skillfully as he could.

  When he looked up, Eugene was standing in the kitchen doorway with a Phillips-head screwdriver in his hand. Shuggie watched him go up and down the hallway and tighten all the door hinges till they shrieked against the wood. “Ah was just thinking,” he said to her. “The taxi needs to go into the garage next week, so ah’ll have a few evenings free. How about a wee night out, at actual nighttime, this time. Mibbe we could go back to the golf club and have that prawn cocktail ye liked so much. I was thinking this time I wouldnae have a bevvy. Mibbe this time naebody needs to have a drink.”

  Shuggie took his dirty tea mug and slid past Eugene into the kitchen. His mother was sat at the table, her head in her hands, her fingers scouring her skull, with a bucket between her knees. The new wallpaper was lovely, the yellow and blue field of flowers really cheered up the small space. Eugene had been very clever and neat in how he had lined up all the little bluebells. All the mould was gone, but now when Shuggie looked out the window, the brown marsh stood out like an enormous square stain in an otherwise pretty spring field.