The tenement close was poorly lit. Somewhere above Shuggie loud music and happy voices bounced off the walls. Shuggie stepped inside. Any Glasgow wean could easily tell this was one of the poorer tenements. The six feet or so of decorative tiles that lined the entryway were cracked and missing. There was thickly applied council brown paint with a dirty cream stripe about adult eye level that pointed the way into the belly of the close. Every flat surface was covered in graffitied declarations of love and gang pride. From the sworn allegiance to the IRA, Shuggie could see that Germiston was certainly Catholic.
As he climbed up from the mouth of the close he could hear the party on the third floor. It sounded happy, like the night still hadn’t turned sour. The boy took the steep stairs slowly, one at a time. They were hard granite that had been worn into a dip in the middle, and there was no curving banister; instead the stairway was built around a solid wall of poured concrete. As he climbed he couldn’t see what lay around the corner.
He inched quietly upwards. As he turned the second bend, he came upon a woman and man sitting on the cold steps. They lay there rumpled like two piles of dirty laundry. They were doing things to each other that the boy had seen before. The old woman seemed barely conscious, and the man had his hand up her skirt, touching her in her dirty place.
Shuggie folded his arms over his chest and politely stepped back, away from what lay at eye level. He quietly stepped down some stairs and was almost back around the corner when the woman opened a rolling eye and noticed him. The man continued to rub at her like he was polishing a shoe.
“Whit ye looking at?” she asked, gummy-lipped.
“Are you OK?” he asked quietly. “Is he hurting you?”
Somewhere above them a door opened, and the noise of a grand party filled the close. People were leaving.
“Wid you stop that a minute, John.” She pushed the hands away. The woman pulled her top closed and tried to bring more dignity to the scene. She lowered her eyes to the stone stairs. The drunken man continued chewing her neck regardless.
Shuggie took out one of the fifty pences and put it on the woman’s bare knee. Then he darted past them, climbing up towards the noise at the top of the stairs. Men and women were pouring down in their winter coats. It took quick feet and effort not to be swept back down by their clumsy legs and long jackets. He reached the third floor, and finding the door still wide open, he went in. No one stopped him as he pushed through the legs into the small hallway. No one paid any heed as he went into the main room.
The room was a smaller version of the living room at home. It was covered in burgundy brocade wallpaper, and against one wall was a small electric fire with fake plastic coals throwing an orange glow into the sweaty room. In the middle of the room was a three-piece suite still covered in plastic. Around the corners were some borrowed kitchen chairs, and on these were sat men and women in their forties and fifties, faces Shuggie had never seen before. The men sat in heavy grey suits and wide ties, and the women were done up in pretty blouses. They looked stiff, as though they had come from chapel, but wet-eyed, like they had taken too much Communion wine.
The record player in the corner was spinning an especially melancholy version of “Danny Boy.” A few older jakeys sat by it with their cans of warm beer and murdered the words in a howl, while an old woman sat teary-eyed nearby. The whole room was already sliding down the peak of the evening. He circled the room, searching from face to face for a sign of his mother. Agnes wasn’t there.
In the corner near the window, sitting at a small folding table, was a young boy much the same age as Shuggie. He had been watching Shuggie the entire time as he did his searching circle of the room. He was dressed in his good clothes, and his hair was still neat from when his own mother must have parted it earlier. As they looked at one another, Shuggie wondered whether he was lost or searching too. The boy raised his hand in a small wave, and Shuggie made to cross the room and speak to the stranger. Halfway there he saw that on his little table sat a heaped plate of shortbread and some fizzy juice that still rolled with bubbles. Somebody here loved this other little boy. Shuggie turned away and went back to looking for Agnes.
Back out in the hallway he passed the tangle of legs once again. In the small narrow kitchenette was a woman with jet-black hair. His heart leapt and fell as he realized it was not his mother. Shuggie thought to ask her where Agnes was, but he was so embarrassed by the little shortbread boy that he said nothing. Pride clamped his mouth shut, and the black-haired woman sailed past him like he was invisible. There were three bedrooms in the tenement flat. Each was empty except for the odd lost partygoer having a quiet smoke or a quiet cry. He searched them all, but none of the drunks were his. The last room was the biggest bedroom, the one for mammies and daddies. The door was closed tight, and he had to pull down on the metal handle and push hard to get the sticky door open. There were no lights on in the room, but as the glow followed him in from the hallway he could see the large double bed was heaped high in winter coats.
Shuggie stood there and put his hand on the bag of coins in his pocket. It would be just enough to get him home. Perhaps he would find her there, frantic, sobered with worry, and waiting with hot tea and toast.
In the smoke and the dark, tears began to sting his eyes, and he sat on the coat-covered bed for just a minute. He was being a baby and he knew it. He had been a big baby all night, wanting his mammy, and he wished he was more like Leek, who never seemed to need anyone. Shuggie dug the nails of his left hand into the soft part of his right arm, and he willed the poor me’s to stop.
Something stirred under the coats. Shuggie stood up in fright. Out from some old jackets came a small white hand. It hovered for a moment before it pulled a coat away from its face, and there, with a wet face and spoilt mascara, was his mother.
Agnes’s hair was flat and matted on the right side. In the dim light the boy could see by the smallness in her eyes that she was no longer drunk. As she looked at him her lip trembled as if she would cry. This scared him into stopping his own sobbing, and he tried to stand up straight like a big boy. One by one he pulled the winter coats to the floor and uncovered her. Slowly she emerged, half-naked and crumpled, from the heap. In the half dark she held his eyes and she didn’t say a word. Slowly he kept pulling the layers from the bed. From beneath the heavy coats emerged her white legs and small feet. Shuggie stopped and looked at her there, and in the tangle and the hallway light he saw that her black Pretty Pollys had been ripped from toe to waist.
Twenty-Four
The boy opened his eyes, and she was there, sat quietly on the end of his bed. She was the terrible half-a-person that always came in the mornings now. He watched her shiver for a while, trembling with the dampness that the drink had left in her. She held a piece of toilet paper to her mouth as she coughed up wet phlegm and then tried to hold in the rattling boak that followed.
Agnes cocked her head and looked at him with pleading, sleepless eyes. “Morning, sunshine.”
“M-morning.” Shuggie stretched his toes to the end of the bed.
Her hand was shaking as she gently pulled the layers of bedcovers away. The damp March air rushed in, and Shuggie whined and curled up in a tight ball. Agnes reached out her cold hand and put it on his clammy foot. He had taken another stretch: the old pyjamas cropped above his calves now, the hair on his legs starting to thicken and grow darker. “Another year and you’ll be a man, and then what am I going to do?”
“Do you think I will be taller than Leek?” he asked. His brother’s bed was already empty.
“Most definitely.” She pushed his inky hair away from his eyes and tried to sound cheery. “How’d you like to stay off the school the day? Keep me company?”
Shuggie’s eyes flew open at the offer. “I dunno. Father Barry says I’ve missed too much already.”
“Och, you never mind him. You went nearly every day last week. I’ll write you a note saying your granny died.”
Shuggie groaned a
nd stretched his toes into the cold. “He’s not daft. You’ve done that three times already.”
He knew what she wanted. As soon as the clock turned a quarter to nine he was put out on the frozen street with the Tuesday Book in his hand. He wore his thin cagoule and good trousers, and over one arm he carried a large, gingham nylon shopper bag. The shopper was a decoy; there would be no groceries to put into it, but it played the part and made the whole thing look more respectable. Like a greedy bookie, Shuggie flicked the pages of the Tuesday child-support book and watched the princely sum of eight pounds fifty appear on all the dated coupons. He found the one she had signed for this week, checked to see whether she had filled it out correctly in her desperate hunger, and then he dropped it into the decoy bag.
He knew she was watching from behind the net curtains, so he walked quickly and with a purpose. When he turned the corner out of sight, he slowed and spent a time squashing the white berries into a paste.
Shuggie had tried it all ways, rushing like the clappers up the street and back or going missing for hours in the peat marshes. Once he had even cashed the books and spent the child support on actual messages, provisions and meat from the butcher. It always ended up the same; she returned the messages that she could and bought what she really needed first, drink. So now when he cashed the benefit books, he just put his head down and got on with it with a sense of resignation.
She hadn’t been the same since New Year’s Eve. Whoever had left her half-naked under the pile of strangers’ coats had taken the yearning for a good party out of her. Now when Shuggie watched her drink he could see she had lost the taste for a good time. She was drinking to forget herself, because she didn’t know how else to keep out the pain and the loneliness.
The petrol station had turned her away. She had missed too many shifts, and with no one to cover, the station had gone dark too many times. At first Agnes had taken the rejection on the nose, like everything else, it was not meant to work out for her. When the catalogue bills started to pile up, and there was no money for drink by a Thursday, she started to talk about her sacking like it was a conspiracy. She had been too popular, too beautiful, she said, and the station owners hadn’t liked how the place had turned into a social club for lonely taxi drivers. Leek had sat and listened to her, quietly spooning hot cereal into his mouth, and then he had asked, calmly, “How long are you going to keep lying to yourself?”
The queue took forever. It was silent but for rattling coughs, the swish of nylon anoraks, and the stamp, stamp, stamp of the agitated woman behind the counter. The way they fidgeted, he could tell that the people had waited a long weekend for their benefit books to be cashed. Some people would have been hungry, some running out of cigarettes by Sunday teatime, and others, like his own mother, were dying of a deep thirst. Shuggie pulled up to the counter and pushed the book into the little drawer that sat at eye level. With a slice it was pulled away from him. With a slice it came back.
“You’ve not signed it,” said the postmistress.
Shuggie took the chained-down pen and wrote his name in the designee space in the way she had made him practice. He dropped it back in the drawer and smiled up at the lady. The woman took it up and looked at it closely on both sides. She wore rose-framed glasses and looked down at him like a teacher on a high stool. “Can Missus Bain not come and collect her child support herself?” she asked, a fraction too loudly.
Shuggie felt the queue behind him shift impatiently from one foot to the other. “No.”
The woman leaned backwards as if stretching her tired back. “Young man. Should you not be at school?” He heard the queue clear its throat in agreement.
“My mother is not well,” he whispered discreetly into the drawer.
The woman leaned into the safety glass, her face looming large above his. “Yes, but it comes to my mind that I see you every single Monday and Tuesday morning.” She sniffed and held up the book, putting her finger under Agnes’s signature. “It says here,” she sniffed again, “that authorizing a designee is only for temporary purposes, and if the person cannot claim their own benefit then the book should be returned to the DSS.”
Shuggie felt the threat of shit in his underpants. All he could manage was a quiet, “Please, Missus.”
“Shall I take this book from you, young man?” She adjusted her glasses with an ink-stained finger. “Should I send it back to the DSS?”
The boy shook his head and felt the leak start to worsen. “No. Please, Missus,” he begged.
The woman seemed not to hear or not to care. She folded the book and put it closed on the counter. Solemnly, she folded her hands over the top of it as though in prayer. The back of Shuggie’s eyeballs began to sweat. He could hear the hungry crowd start to moan. The child benefit was more than a quarter of all the money Agnes would get to feed them for a week.
With a trembling lip, Shuggie tried again. “Please, Missus.”
The impatient crowd tutted and sighed behind him. “That boy’s mammy is not well!” said a high voice from the very back of the post office. The postmistress looked up from the ashen face to the long queue. “Gie him his money, or he’ll have nothing to eat!” it said again.
An old woman at the front joined in. She was tired of the wait and was shaking her pension book. “Oh, for the love. Gie the boy his money, ya heartless jobsworth.”
The lady behind the counter looked at the queue and down at the fearful boy. She opened the book reluctantly. Stamp! Stamp! She marked it and ripped out the coupon for that week. Into the drawer she slipped the Tuesday Book, a fiver, three pound notes and a new fifty-pence piece. She held on to the drawer and leaned her face up to the little holes in the glass. Quieter now she said, “You are a smart boy. Don’t you let me catch you here again next week. Get yourself back in school. Study. Stick in at it and don’t spend your whole life in a benefits queue.” There was a pity in her eyes, and with that she sent the drawer through. The boy nodded obediently and, licking the running wetness on his top lip, emptied the drawer of the money. He couldn’t worry about next week. He’d have to worry about the rest of this week first.
Shuggie had hurried towards Pithead as quickly as he could. When he passed the school, he climbed the broken fences and ran down the dirt siding into the marshlands. When he was far enough from the road, he took off his trousers and his underpants, and hunkering down, he finished what the postmistress had started. Then he turned his white underpants inside out and tried to scrape them clean on some dried reed grass.
By the time he got home, it was still not half past ten in the morning, and the street was just starting to open its curtains. He opened the front door and ran right into her, standing in the middle of the hallway. She was dressed in her best mohair coat and had lined her eyes and put a deep lavender colour on her top lids. Her hair was set and curled, and the hairspray still hung wet and sparkling on its tips like dew. Under her left arm she had her best bag, and the other hand was out, palm side up, like a patient saint. It was itchy and red-looking.
“Where the hell have you been?” she asked, wanting no reply.
The boy opened the message bag and took the notes and single coin out from amongst his dirty underpants. Agnes clipped it securely into her purse. “Right, I need you to walk me up the road. If we meet anybody, I want you to talk to me.”
“What about?”
“Anything. Bloody anything. Just talk to me and don’t bloody stop, OK?”
Agnes spun him around and pushed him back out the door. As they reached the corner, he could tell she was relieved they hadn’t passed a soul yet. At the bottom of the hill, leaning over a garden fence, was Colleen McAvennie talking to one of her and Eugene’s cousins. They were smoking cigarettes, and Colleen had two big black bin bags full of washing or sheets or the last of Big Jamesy’s clothes. They looked up as they heard the rap of heels on the concrete. Agnes made an unsteady swerve, as though she were going to cross the road, but instead she pulled her head up high and kept
her path. She strutted out a confident rhythmic clip and turned her head and said to the boy, “What would you like for your dinner tonight?”
Shuggie looked up at his mother and did as he had been taught. “Roast chicken, please. I’m a bit tired of sirloin every other night.”
They passed the women, who stopped their own conversation, and Agnes said with a light laugh, “Oh, you! You will have steak again and be thankful!” She turned her regal profile and held her raw hand behind herself. “Oh, hello Colleen, hello Molly. This one is growing like a weed.” The women said nothing as she passed, but she felt them draw their eyes over the coat, over the shoes and hair. When she was safely past them, her face froze in a rictus and she muttered, “Aye, same to you cunts,” and then crossed the street.
Dolan’s general shop sat at the end of a row of three boarded-up shopfronts perched at the top of the hill that overlooked all of Pithead. When the colliery was still open it would have been a busy place, meeting the families’ needs with fresh vegetables, the best meat, and a place to pass bits of talk. Now Mr Dolan didn’t even turn on the lights. If the other nearest shop hadn’t been over two miles away, then Dolan’s might have closed altogether. As though admitting this half defeat, the shop sat with its metal shutters closed and the lights always off, only daylight pouring through the bill-postered front door.
Mr Dolan himself was a kind and gentle man, although the sight of him scared Shuggie. When the shopkeeper was a boy, and the mine was still open, he fell out of a yew tree and crushed his right arm so badly they had to amputate it. Now every time a wean climbed a fence, mammies hung out windows and screamed, “Get doon aff o’ that or ye’ll end up like poor Mister Dolan.”
Shuggie Bain Page 34