As the shop bell rang, Mr Dolan looked both happy and sad to see Agnes. The racks of lager cans and whisky bottles behind him said he well understood the new economy of the scheme. Yet, when the beautiful woman came up to the counter, the one-armed man couldn’t help but sigh at the waste.
Agnes, trying to ignore the pity in his face, asked the shopkeeper how he was today. Mr Dolan just shrugged and nodded towards the boy. “Why are you no in school?”
“He’s got a wee bug, Mister Dolan,” Agnes interjected. “It’s been going around.”
The old man sucked his teeth but didn’t linger on the lie. Agnes took out a piece of paper on which she had written a short message list. She ordered some innocent provisions: tinned custard, tinned peas, some mince, and a handful of potatoes. She asked for a little sliced ham and fidgeted nervously as Mr Dolan moved the meat skillfully in the slicer using his half stump. The butt end of cured pig and the pink-puckered edge of his stump looked to be one and the same.
“How much is that to be?” she asked, as he put the slices of gammon into her message bag.
“Five poun’ two pence,” said the man.
Agnes fumbled for a moment. “C-can I also have the day’s paper, please?”
“Five poun’ twenty seven.”
“A wee bar of that Cadbury’s for the boy.”
“Five poun’ fifty.”
“Let’s see,” said Agnes, in a fake forgetful tone, “Oh, aye. I nearly forgot.” Shuggie looked at his feet in shame. “Can I have twelve Special Brew, please?”
When the man turned to reach these from the shelf, Agnes licked all the lipstick off her bottom lip.
“Thirteen poun’ even,” the man said.
Agnes opened her purse and looked down at the notes and the single silver coin. “Oh, Mr Dolan, seems I’m a wee bit short the day.”
The one-armed man reached under the counter and pulled out a big red ledger. He thumbed through the pages to B and found Agnes’s name. “Hen, you already owe me twenty-four poun’,” he said with gravity. “I cannae gie ye any more tick till that’s all paid.”
With a pained smile, Agnes looked through the message bag and placed the gammon, the tinned peas, and two potatoes back on the counter.
Whatever Mr Dolan thought, he never said. As terrifying as his loose sleeve was to the boy, Shuggie knew that he was a deeply sympathetic man. All the mothers in the scheme called him “the one-armed bandit,” on account of his high prices, but Shuggie had never seen him be anything but kind. As Agnes stood shaking before him on a Tuesday morning, she looked as though she were shopping in the West End at the big brand-name shops. Mr Dolan never called out her little charade. Sometimes, when she was pulling food back out of the bag, he would wink at the polished boy with his hair washed and parted and would slide him a piece of ripe fruit. But not today. Today he took back nearly all the groceries and rang up the lager for Agnes.
Agnes clipped through the scheme with the message bag by her side. She glided faster now, and Shuggie struggled to keep up as she flew down the hill. When she got home she went into the kitchen without taking off her coat. Shuggie sat in the living room and let her gather herself. He waited for the hiss and splash of the cans and then the sound of the drink being hidden. He waited until he heard the tap running at the big metal sink.
“You feeling better?” he asked from the doorway.
She turned from the tea mug. The nervousness from her face was gone, but the worry was still there. “Much better, thanks. You were a good wee helper the day.”
He went and wrapped himself around her waist. “I’d do anything for you.”
All the way across the peat marsh he kept stopping and turning back to wave, until the house dropped out of sight and he couldn’t see her at the window any more. As he cracked his way across the frozen burns he consoled himself, knowing exactly what her day looked like. There was comfort in the fact that whether sober or not, it largely followed the same trapped routine.
Shuggie flicked the brittle heads of the bulrush reeds and wondered whether the sadness would get her today. The frozen reeds were bone dry, and when he tapped the heads their seeds took to the air like little parachutists. They floated up and back to the scheme like a parade of little ghosts. He made a game of telling the ghosts that he loved her, and with a flick he sent them her way.
The trampled grass circle, where he practiced being a normal boy, was exactly as he had left it. On days when she had kept him home from school he had collected old bits of abandoned furniture for his flattened island. When she had a particularly bad bender; he spent a whole schoolless week taking an old chair over, some carpet scraps from the bins, and odd pieces of cutlery and broken china. With ends of old rope he pulled things out of the rusty burns. He pulled out a broken telly and sat it facing the centre of the island. Even though it had no screen, just having it there made it feel more like a home. When he had all the furniture he wanted, he spent any dry days arranging and then rearranging the stuff into a shabby front room. He found an old-fashioned baby carriage and pushed it around, struggling through the long reeds, collecting the prettiest flowers for his new home. When he found a little black rabbit, dead and frozen one winter afternoon, he washed it in the burn and buried it in the dirt. Then he had buried the plastic ponies next to the rabbit, the shameful scented horses that he had stolen but that were not meant for boys. The following spring he searched the slag bings and took to laying sprigs of purple helleborine on the graves. With no friends to speak of, these little rituals occupied him well, allowing him to spend the day feeling house-proud, to attend to the shameful hummocks as dutifully as any mourning widow.
All that short day he walked around his trampled island washing the dirt off things. He took the fork, the spoon, and the cracked plates down to the burn and rinsed them in the water. He lifted the bits of carpet and tried to shake the stour from them. Then he hung the rain-soaked blanket over a chair to warm and crack in the low sun.
The sun was already leaving the sky after a short day’s housework. As he climbed through the back fence he hoped to take a deep bath and practice his red book, but the front door was hanging wide open. Shuggie stood frozen on the bottom step for a long while, wondering what the omen was, tilting his head and listening like a guard dog. Creeping up the long hallway he could hear a commotion from inside the living room. He walked cautiously to the door and pushed it open a crack. Inside, prostrate on the floor, was Agnes. Sat on her chest, like a school bully, was Leek.
The crimson swirls on the red carpet were wrong. The pattern looked broken and disjointed. As Shuggie stepped closer, he could see that there was blood on his mother and that there was blood on Leek’s face too. If he could have focused, he would have seen that there was also blood on the TV and the brown table and the fringe of the settee.
Leek was pushing down on to the heap of her. Around them were bloody piles of fabric that had once been clean tea towels. Agnes was writhing and cursing under Leek’s weight. She called him names that Shuggie had never heard before, and his brother was crying strange tears and struggling to hold her down.
There was a broken razor blade on the carpet; to Shuggie it was small and thin and innocent-looking, like a tiny guillotine for a cartoon mouse. He only noticed it because it was funny that it should be in the living room, lying in the middle of his mother’s good carpet. Leek was screaming something at him, but Shuggie couldn’t understand. He wanted to know why there was blood on her tea mug. He watched his brother twist his face towards him as he held blackening tea towels over Agnes’s wrists. When he had one of her arms secure under his knee, he reached out and grabbed Shuggie by the shirt front. Agnes’s other arm flew free, and there was a low spurt of blood. Shuggie wanted to tell Leek, Look! Look! That is where the blood is coming from! but Leek had him by the collar and was shaking him so hard he thought his neck might snap.
“Shuggie. Listen to me.” Leek’s eyes were very wide, and there was white foam in the corners of his mouth. His face
was coated in the thick white dust of a plasterer, and there was blood on the white of his teeth. “You need to call a fucking ambulance.”
“You’re a selfish cunt,” she wailed. “Just let me go.”
Her body was racked with deep sobs. Leek’s tears were falling on to her face and mixing with her own.
“I’m too tired.” Still she pushed and she heaved, and then her eyes rolled backwards as though they were looking for the relief of sleep.
“You don’t love me.”
“You don’t love me,” she repeated, again and again.
The boy pulled the door quietly closed behind him. He sat down and composed himself before he called 999 and asked for an ambulance. Leek was screaming something at him, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand any of it.
When Agnes awoke in the psychiatric hospital she had no memory of getting there. The ambulance had taken her the many miles to the Royal Infirmary in the shadow of Sighthill. One of the emergency doctors skillfully stitched her wounds and stopped her blood loss. Then they put her on a drip and sedated her to keep her from clawing at herself again. As she rolled into a fitful sleep, they had admitted her to Gartnavel to begin the deeper healing. When she woke she was in a ward with thirteen other women: Grown women dribbling on themselves. Poor women crying at dollies to get dressed for school. Sedated women who didn’t ever sleep a wink.
As Agnes, tiny and stitched up, slept through her sedation, Leek and Eugene drew the curtain against the unfortunates and stood sentinel on either side of her bed. It was the most time they had ever spent together. Each man was glad, in some way, to have this dormant body between them to focus on. It was a relief in the same way old people enjoyed having a child in the room, because it gave them something to fuss over when they had nothing left to say to each other.
Leek had not spoken to Eugene since the man had goaded Agnes into breaking her sobriety. Now they spent most of that first afternoon warily engaging with each other, avoiding eye contact, and talking about Agnes as though the other man had never met her. They agreed on only one thing. They looked down at the wrung-out woman and agreed how lucky she was to have survived. From the long, deep cuts on her wrists it was clear, she hadn’t wanted to leave anything to chance.
“So it was the foreman, then?” asked Eugene, unable to meet Leek’s clear gaze.
“Uh-huh.”
“Lucky that.”
“S’pose. I don’t know how many times she had phoned that day. She’s been calling my work a lot lately.”
“Aye. My taxi rank as well.”
Leek hunched his shoulders, like he sat heavy under the memory of it all. “It was a brass neck, but the gaffer was usually pretty good about it. Except this one time he came over and told me personally that I had better get home fast, there was some sort of emergency.”
“He telt you that?”
Leek nodded. “He had my jacket in his hands, and at first I thought I was getting the sack. Then he told me to hurry. He even gave me money for a taxi.” Leek brushed the hair back over his eyes. “That’s how I knew something bad must have happened.”
When Agnes finally woke up, it took a while for the realization of what she had done to sink in. First she smiled at them as if they had brought her morning tea. Clouds of memory passed over her, and then she looked down and saw her bandaged wrists. She had come closer this time than ever in the past. Leek’s construction site was on the South Side. She hadn’t meant for him to make it. She hadn’t known the gaffer was a good-hearted man.
“Where’s the wean?” she asked, her voice cracked with dryness.
Leek looked at her, and then, for the first time, he looked at Eugene. “He’s OK,” said Leek.
Agnes’s eyes swivelled without her moving her head. “I asked where. Not how.”
The blackness in her dilated pupils pinned him to the wall. Leek looked away and tried to busy himself with something to soothe her thirst. He poured her a phosphorescent glass of diluting juice, but she held her hand out in refusal. He looked at his shoes. “Well. He’s with Big Shug,” Leek said finally, wishing in that instant that he had lied.
Agnes did not say anything. She thought he was lying. The way her top lip curdled and stuck to her teeth warned Leek to stop taking the piss.
“Before you cut yourself, you must have phoned him and told him to come get Shuggie. It all happened that fast. I couldn’t help you and help Shuggie.” Leek exhaled upwards, and his fringe rippled like a curtain in an open window. “It’s too much, Mammy. I can’t be the one to save everybody all the time.”
Twenty-Five
By the time Agnes awoke in Gartnavel Hospital her boy had been living at his father’s almost a week. Before she cut herself she had called the taxi rank to declare that Shug had finally gotten his wish, she was leaving them all for good, and that he should come collect his winnings, the boy. She said that she had bought a new suit for Shuggie from the catalogue, and that Shuggie was to wear black dress socks to her funeral, that Shug would need to be vigilant about that.
Leek never knew how that message got to Shug. Did the hackney dispatcher broadcast it over the CB radio for all to hear? Did all the black hackneys pull to the kerb and idle their engines as Joanie Micklewhite relayed the last wishes of the woman she had helped kill?
Shug had not bothered to rush. When he finally came to Pithead he was impressed that Agnes had actually gone through with it. He found the boy eating tinned peaches, sitting stunned on the bloody settee, consoling a wet-faced Shona Donnelly from upstairs.
Shuggie had never been to his father’s new house before. As the taxi chugged heavily through echoing streets, the boy counted on his fingers and realized he had spent less than three hours with his father since Joanie Micklewhite had stolen him away. He sat in the back of the black hackney as good as a stranger. He couldn’t really remember meeting Joanie Micklewhite either, but he could remember the yellow roller boots with a traitor’s cramp that hurt his heart. Joanie had become like a villain in his mind; her reality and her legend were mixed deep inside him. Agnes’s hate for her was as ingrained in him as knots in wood.
So Shuggie sat in stilted silence as the taxi rounded the corners of a brutal-looking council scheme. Each street was a scarred field of burnt-out off-licences, dirty canals, and cars on bricks. To the boy, this place looked a little like Sighthill; five or six tall high-rises pinned the heavy winter sky in place. Yet, unlike in Sighthill, the high-rises were ringed at the bottom with low, boxy concrete houses instead of flat empty forecourts. These low houses looked like ants gathered around trees, or scraps made of the council breeze blocks left over from the high-rises. What was once built to be new and healthful now looked sick with a poverty of hope. There was no grass and no greenery; every flat surface was concreted over or covered in large, smooth round boulders.
Big Shug stopped the engine at a vandalized telephone box. Shuggie could tell from the back of the taxi that it was a difficult conversation. It looked difficult, because after Shug hung up he stood in the phone box for a long time smoothing his moustache.
The boy opened the suitcase Shug had made him pack. Into it he had put all the possessions that meant most to him and very few clean clothes. He took out a faded Polaroid. It showed a shirtless Shug holding him as a newborn in one proud outstretched hand and smoking an ashy doubt in the other. He checked it now against the man in the phone box.
On dreich days Shuggie would take Agnes’s wedding album and hide at the foot of her bed poring over the photos of his father. Shug didn’t look like the person he remembered from the three Polaroids taken at the wedding reception. He looked smaller than the smiling man who had sat on the banquette with his arms flung open around drunken bridesmaids. Now, the years of sedentary taxi driving had taken what was already average and also made it round. The short Caesar cut of the photos was replaced by a wispy comb-over. The once cheeky eyes were set deeper into his pink flesh. Shuggie couldn’t imagine any woman wanting to slow
dance with this man now.
Shug hadn’t really looked at the boy until he was in the back of the taxi and they were already on the North Side. He climbed back into the driver’s seat and turned and looked at the mud and dirt and blood on the boy’s school uniform. He asked Shuggie whether he had any cleaner clothes to change into. The boy said he had no clean clothes, but he did have pyjamas. It was a shameful feeling, taking off your clothes in front of a strange man, in a strange taxi.
Shuggie was in his clean pyjamas as they crossed Joanie Mickle-white’s threshold. Her house was the middle in a strip of semi-detached houses that circled the fattest of the grey high-rises. She had a concrete front yard and an asphalt backyard, and therefore they paid a higher rent rate to the council. As the boy crossed the front door he noticed with awe that they had stairs in their house, two separate floors; that alone would kill Agnes.
Joanie Micklewhite was stood at the end of the short hallway with her fingers laced patiently in front of her round belly. She didn’t say hello to the boy or to Shug; she just nodded and turned back into the kitchen. It was late supper time when they arrived, and Shug led the boy into what he called the “dining room,” and Shuggie made a note to never tell his mother that they had stairs or a dining room.
The boy sat in the middle of the folding table, and Joanie scowled at one end, and his father glared at the other. Sat at the table already were six of Joanie’s weans. They looked ill-humoured and hungry, like they had been made to wait for something not that special. The youngest of Shug’s stepchildren was a boy aged about seventeen. Only one was a girl, called Stephanie, and it was the only name Shuggie could remember from his father’s introduction. He remembered partly because it was the most Protestant name he had ever heard but also because, when Shug had first left, Catherine had threatened to kick the life out of Stephanie Mickle-Shite in an attempt to cheer up Agnes. Now, sat across from her, Shuggie could see Catherine would have lost. Stephanie had thick hairy forearms. Out of all of them, she hid her dislike for their new visitor the least.
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