Now Shuggie crouched outside the McAvennies and poured the remainder of the Hogmanay lager into the dead grass. He hid the empty can inside his shirt for shame. Half-stunned, he crossed the street and found the front door ajar and all the house lights still burning. He wandered from empty room to empty room in disbelief, still expecting to find her somewhere. He raked through the empty kitchen cupboards and found the last tin of custard. He opened it and dipped his spoon in deep. The sugary cream made the lager in his belly stop rolling around. He sat down on the low coffee table and greedily spooned the custard down as the happy revellers in George Square started to come on the television.
By the time the ceilidh band was in full swing he knew she would not be coming home. The revellers start to hug one another and break into song. He felt like a baby to miss his mother. It wasn’t fair, the way everyone could up and leave as they pleased.
Shuggie searched the house for a note or a sign, a treasure map to where she had gone, but there was nothing. He searched her black bingo bag and found all the markers there. He went to the wee phone table in the hall and thought about whom he could call. The red leather address book by the phone listed all the people Agnes knew. She had been religious about keeping it updated, and some of the names in the book had been crossed out in what looked like anger. Next to her neat cursive she had scrawled in another hand, one that looked like another woman’s entirely, a short comment. Nan Flannigan still owes my mammy five pounds from 1978, and Ann Marie Easton, two-faced hoor, and Davy Doyle wore a navy suit to my daddy’s funeral, and Brendan McGowan only wanted a slave and a housekeeper.
There were many first-name-only entries in the book. Shuggie guessed that most of them came from the AA. Some numbers gave additional descriptive information, a way to tell one Elaine from another Elaine. Shuggie thought it was funny how AA members did this. Maybe it was to protect anonymity, family names being private, but more likely it was because people came and went, and descriptions were better than names. He flicked through pages of names he recognized: Monday-Thursday Peter, Big Bald Peter, Mary-Doll, Jeanette Mary-Doll’s pal, Cathy from Cumbernauld, and Wee Ginger Jeanie, which was confusingly under G instead of J. That irritated him.
His mother could be anywhere, and he started to panic that he might not see her till February. He screamed at the thick book, “Where the fuck are you? Tell me!”
New Year’s in Scotland was a legendary two-day party. New Year’s in Agnes’s Glasgow was endless. When they first came to Pithead the boy had seen a house party that had lasted for days. Agnes had still been drunk by the sixth. By the time Shuggie was getting dressed in his school uniform, ready for the spring term, Leek had decided enough was enough. Leek could bear a lot, but on the sixth of January he rampaged through the house with a black bin liner and pulled two ratty miners out on to the frozen street.
Shuggie wondered about Leek, about his screaming, flashing gambling machines, and his insides hardened. He was getting sick of playing “you touched it last” with his brother. Picking at his bottom lip, he idly lifted the phone receiver and sniffed at the sour smoke and the perfume of her lipstick that still hung on the mouthpiece. For comfort he held the beige handset and listened to the hum of the dial tone. He looked at the keypad, and finally noticing the red redial button, he pressed it.
The phone chirruped for a long time before someone answered. Shuggie could barely hear the woman on the other end for the din of loud old-fashioned music in the background. “Hullo. HULLO! Who is this?” she shouted, her voice thick with smoke and slow with drink.
“Um. Is my mother there?” he asked, now sitting erect.
“Who is this?” she sounded bothered by the interruption. “Who’s your mammy, wee man?”
“My mother is Agnes Campbell Bain,” he said. “C-can you tell her it’s Shu—Hugh.” He caught himself. “Can you please tell her I don’t have any custard left.”
The woman leaned back into the noise of the party. “Haw, does anybody here know an Agnes?” she asked of the room behind her.
There were other voices, and then she said, “Haud on a wee minute, pal. Happy New Year, OK.” Before he could reply she had set the receiver down. He could hear men and women laughing in the background and could tell they were old because the melancholy Scots songs were already playing. Shuggie waited and listened a long time for the woman to come back. He was sure that she had forgotten him when a voice spoke.
“Sh-hullo,” slurred the familiar voice.
“Mammy? . . . It’s me.”
The voice didn’t speak for a while, and when it did it sounded confused. “What do you want? What time is it?”
“When are you coming home?”
“What time is it?”
Shuggie peered around the corner, and in the light from the telly could just about see the face of the little clock. “Half ten, um, no, it’s almost eleven o’clock.”
The voice went quiet. He heard the flare of a lighter as she sucked on her cigarette. “Well, then, you should be in your bed.”
“When are you coming home?”
“Look, don’t upset yourself. Doesn’t Mammy deserve a party? It’s been that long, Hugh.” Her voice trailed off. “I’ve been promised that many parties in my day. Why are you trying to ruin my party.” She was repeating herself now.
“Mammy, I’m scared. Where are you?”
“I’m up at Anna O’Hanna’s. Away to your bed, and I’ll see you when I get home.” This part was ominously vague.
The line went dead, and it took him a while to replace the receiver. Shuggie thought about calling again, but she wouldn’t come back to the phone. He sat there sniffing the receiver a while longer, and then he went to bed, still fully dressed, with the bedroom lights on and the Hogmanay celebrations still blaring on the television. There were happy voices out in the street; he could hear the McAvennie children run up and down the road shouting “Happy New Year” at the top of their lungs. They had a wooden football clapper that they were twisting into a roaring din.
He got up and went back to the phone table. Shuggie looked under A then under O and there she was, Anna O’Hanna. He had heard the name before. Anna wasn’t from the AA, she was a childhood friend, who was or was not also a distant relative. They had once worked together in the STV canteens and gone to the Tollcross dancing together in their youth. She was, by his mother’s own handwriting, an old backstabbing slitty eyed gossip and also the best friend I ever had.
Under her name was her address, marked as Germiston. He had no idea what Germiston was, but everyone Agnes ever knew lived in Glasgow, so he hoped Germiston would be there. Shuggie ripped a blank page from the back of his mother’s phone book and copied the address as neatly as possible. Then he called a number he found in the phone book under Taxi.
“Hullo, Mack’s Hacks,” said the gruff man.
“Hello. Can you tell me where Germiston is, please?”
“It’s in the northeast, pal. Do youse want a taxi?” he replied impatiently.
“Sorry to bother you again,” said the boy politely, “but how much does a taxi to there cost?”
“Where youse comin’ frae?” sighed the man.
Shuggie answered the man very specifically, giving the house number, the street, the town, and even the postal code.
“Ah, about eight pow-n, plus two fifty extra for being the New Year’s.”
“OK. One taxi, please,” said Shuggie, hanging up the phone.
With a butter knife he pried open the gas meter the way Jinty had shown them. Carefully he counted out the fifty pences, lining them up neatly on the table in front of the telly. There were only twenty of them, which without counting on his fingers he knew was ten whole pounds. The boy got the long, flat bread knife from the kitchen and began prying the back of the telly meter open the way he had seen Agnes do it a hundred times before.
With practice he knew he had to jostle it, so that the coins would fall out without damage to the meter itself. If the telly
man saw the meter was broken you would be in big trouble, but everyone on the street had so many years of practice that no one ever seemed to get into this big trouble. Shuggie had watched Agnes and then Leek raid the telly meter on a regular basis. You had to fill the meter with a fifty-pence piece for three hours’ of telly watching. When the money ran out, the telly automatically switched off, leaving you in darkness. There was no negotiating till the end of a film or till the advert break. If your money was up, the telly went black.
Shuggie slid the butter knife into the slot and two lonely fifty pences rolled out. If the man had told the truth, that should be enough to get him to Germiston. But not enough to get him back.
When he heard the idling sound of the hackney, Shuggie went outside. All the house lights of the street were on, and happy families were spending the bells together. Colleen was alone at her window, watching her children run up and down the road rattling their noisemakers. Shuggie did as Agnes taught him, and so he waved and smiled as he got into the hackney.
The taxi driver was a thin fair-haired man. He was taken aback to see a child dressed as a Chicago gangster. “Are ye it, wee man?” he asked, puzzled.
“Yes.” He handed the driver the handwritten address.
The driver lowered his head and peered at Shuggie’s front window for a sign of an adult, a mother or father to appear at the living room window. Shuggie took the plastic bag full of coins out of his pocket and placed it on his knee. All that silver made a sparking noise, and eyeing the small boy and then the money, the driver finally took the handbrake off with a huff.
The taxi pulled out of the small dusty scheme, and soon they were up in the dual lane traffic and moving quickly. Shuggie knew this was the road into the city centre. He made a note of the route, checking off landmarks, preparing for the long walk back. First they passed a secondary school, then some rugby fields, and finally the black void of a silent loch. From there it all flew by unknown.
Instead of taking the low road the driver took a higher road, like he was turning away from the city. It looked like back-country roads, like the city had exhausted the edge of its sprawl. The road was undeveloped; to the left were half-built Barratt houses with their backs facing the traffic and tall dark brown wooden fences keeping in their unplanted lawns. On the right unfolded miles and miles of fallow fields, dark and empty. The driver must have known the route well, because he kept glancing back and smiling at the boy in the white tie.
“Ye look very smart. Are ye going tae a party?” he asked, smiling in the mirror.
“Well, kind of. I also just think it’s important to always look your best.”
The man laughed. “So where’s yer maw, is she at this party?”
“I hope so,” Shuggie muttered.
“Very grown up o’ ye to be travelling alone at yer age,” he said. “Ah’ve goat a wee boy about yer age. You about twelve? He really likes tae ride up front and play wi’ ma CB radio.”
He was only eleven, but he liked the comfort of the bigger number, so Shuggie didn’t answer. It was funny the way you could see only the driver’s eyes or his mouth in the mirror, never both at the same time.
“Dae ye want tae ride up front wi’ me?” said the man’s mouth in the mirror. It split into a wide smile.
The taxi slowed to a stop, not at a junction or at a light but in the middle of the wide empty road. Shuggie looked to the half-built houses on the left and the flattened fields on the right. If he was to bring her back safely, then Shuggie supposed he had no choice but to do as he was told.
The man told Shuggie to get out. The front door on the left opened; there was no passenger seat on the left side of the black hackneys, just a carpeted floor. He stood in the carpeted enclosure amidst the evening newspapers, an old coat, and a half-eaten packet of sandwiches. Shuggie tried not to stare at the food. The bread was thick with crust, but he was so hungry he didn’t care, he would have eaten it crust and all.
“There ye go, that’s better, eh?” The driver cleared his stuff off the floor and made some room for the boy. He held the sandwich in his hand. “Would ye like some?” he said. “It’s just butter and bit of tinned ham.”
“No, thank you,” Shuggie said politely, but his eyes were burning into the half-eaten piece.
“Here, take it,” said the man, thrusting it towards him. “I can hear yer belly frae here.” Shuggie took the sandwich. The bread was damp from the butter, and he tried to eat it slowly, but the lager sat sour in his stomach, and he found himself pushing in large hunks of salted ham. It was so thick and rich it stuck to the roof of his mouth.
Even kneeling, Shuggie was still not shoulder-height to the seated figure. Glancing over the thick sandwich, he thought how the driver looked not at all like his father. The man’s face was kinder, the edges of his eyes were creased from smiling. There was a crucifix on a silver chain around his neck, and the sight of it calmed Shuggie in an unexpected way.
“That there is the CB,” said the driver, pointing to a handset that looked like an electric shaver. The driver switched a knob on the dial. “There ye go, ye can gabber all ye like, if ye want. It’ll only be the long-haul drivers and the lonely hearts that follow them who’ll hear ye on this channel.” The man smiled at him with straight teeth, and Shuggie thought he would like Agnes to meet him, this man who gave him sandwiches.
With a snap of the handbrake the taxi took off again down the dark road. Shuggie fell back against the glass partition. “Whoa, there, wee man, haud on to something!” With his left arm he encircled the boy’s waist, holding him tight and upright in the luggage space.
They drove on farther down the unlit road. Shuggie tried not to eat the sandwich too quickly. The ham was thick and so deeply salty it tickled his gums. The man said suddenly, “It happens mair than ye might think. Weans being left alone that is.” He turned to Shuggie and smiled. “I see it aw the time, mammies and daddies that desperate to go down the pub that weans are fending for themselves. Poor wee things.” Shuggie finished the sandwich. He tried not to lick the butter from his fingers.
“Was that good?”
Shuggie nodded and answered politely. “Yes. Thank you very much.” The man’s arm was still around his waist for support.
The man laughed kindly. “Ooh, thank you very much,” he repeated, like an amused parrot. “You’re a polite wee fella, aren’t ye?”
Shuggie tried not to look embarrassed. He fixed his eyes on the rear-view mirror and wished Leek was here. The empty country road seemed to go on forever; he was trying to remember the things they passed. He made a list of things he saw, like in a game of Granny Went to Spain, but after ten or fifteen trees and only one traffic light, all the things looked the same, and he gave up reluctantly.
Slowly the driver’s arm went lower down the boy’s side. With a slow hand, he pulled the back of Shuggie’s shirt from his tweed trousers and insidiously pushed his fat warm fingers down the back of Shuggie’s underpants. Without looking, Shuggie could tell the man was still smiling at him.
“Aye, you’re a funny wee fella, aren’t ye?” the man repeated. With a hard push, his hand reached further down inside the underpants, and he started searching the boy with his fingers. The waistband of the tweed trousers was cutting into Shuggie in the front. The strain felt like he was halving him in two, and he could have cried out for that pain alone. Still, Shuggie said nothing.
The cab was rolling slower. The driver made a funny sound like he was eating hot soup through his front teeth. Headlights tore in the opposite direction. Shuggie winced at the man now; his fat fingers were pressing down into him in a strange way. The custard made a skin on top of the sour lager, and the bread swelled and expanded in his gut so that he thought he might be sick. The fingers pressed and pressed. The driver’s mouth was pulled tight in a grimace. Shuggie wished for the light of some houses.
“You know, my father is a taxi driver.”
The driver stopped his grimace.
Shuggie kept on,
trying to keep his voice casual and ignore the fingers that were searching his dirty place. “. . . And my Mammy’s boyfriend, he’s called Eugene.” He took a shallow breath. “He might know you?” The question shot up at the end.
Slowly the driver slipped his hand out from the back of the tweed trousers. Shuggie slid his back down the partition and sat his dirty place safely on the floor of the cab. He put his fingers against his waist and in the dark he could feel the pink marks on his belly where the stitching cut into him. It felt like taking off school socks that were too tight, but worse.
Voices crackled over the CB. Some man in a Teuchter accent was talking about floods on the Perth Road. The driver wiped his hand discreetly on his work trousers. “So, did ye have a nice Christmas?” he asked casually, after a moment.
“Yes. Thank you,” Shuggie lied.
“Was Santa guid to you?”
Christmas came from the Freemans catalogue and was slowly paid off. “Yes.”
The black hackney finally reached the lights of a grey, worn-down housing scheme, and the driver asked, “Son. What did you say your daddy’s name was again?”
Shuggie thought about lying, “Hugh Bain.”
Something like relief swept over the driver, and he relaxed back into his chair. When he dropped Shuggie in Germiston it had already gone the bells. The boy offered the driver the bag of stolen fifty pences. The man looked at it closely, perhaps with pity or guilt, and said the ride was free because Shuggie had been such a good boy. The boy wished he had taken the coins; he didn’t want the man to think he had liked the way his fingers had hurt him.
Shuggie could feel the man watch his back as he climbed all the stone stairs to the front door on Stronsay Street. Only when he turned around and smiled a brave smile did the driver pull away. When the taxi turned the corner, Shuggie tucked the black shirt back into the tweed trousers. He rubbed at the sourness in his gut. Each of the buildings were identical; the tenements crowded in on the narrow road and made a canyon of bricks and glass. Looking up, he noticed music and bright lights coming from a flat on the third floor, so he pressed the metal buzzer for 3R. Without anyone asking who was there, the door buzzed automatically open.
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