“If ye want, I’ll let ye touch my tits,” said Leanne next to him. “That’s if ye want?”
He shook his head without looking at her. “No, thanks.” He let a handful of small grey stones roll down the embankment and on to the motorway.
The girl dug at a line of green moss. “Well, I’m no sitting here to catch my death.”
Shuggie drew the chewed comb from his mouth and wiped the wet end of it on his trousers. It left a wet, dark patch on his leg. “Maybe I could comb your hair?”
The girl didn’t answer, and he felt the red flush back into his face. Then she sighed and slowly drew the furry elastic band from her hair, and the thin, straight ponytail fell around her ears. The tightness in her face softened. Her eyebrows lowered and her freckled skin looked less taut and transparent. She looked kinder now and much younger. Shuggie took the comb and ran it the length of her hair. The brown was more than just brown. It was a million shades of glossy reds and a melange of dark chestnuts. The hair slid through his fingers like silk, each strand light as gossamer.
They sat like this for a long while, listening to the clumsy moaning behind them and watching the buses come and go to Edinburgh. Shuggie drew the comb gently through the girl’s hair, and soon she closed her eyes and relaxed her head against his chest. “Does your maw take a drink?” she asked abruptly.
“Sometimes. Just a little,” admitted Shuggie. “How can you tell?”
“You are too worried-looking.” She raised a hand and found the bridge of his nose. She rubbed it gently. “Don’t worry, though. Mine does an’ all,” she said. “I mean. Well, sometimes. Just a little.”
Shuggie fixated on the comb gliding through the hair. He watched how each strand separated like burn water. “I think she is going to drink herself to death.”
“Would you be sad?” asked the girl.
He stopped combing her hair. “I would be gutted. Wouldn’t you?”
She shrugged. “I dunno. I think it’s what all alkies want anyways.” She shivered. “To die, I mean. Some are just taking the slow road to it.”
Something shook loose inside him, as if the old glue that was gumming his joints together had failed. His arms felt unexpectedly heavy, like the knotted muscles that stopped his shoulders from spreading were suddenly unravelling. He felt the words start to pour out of him. It felt good to tell her things. He hadn’t known how much lighter it would feel. “It’s hard to not know what you are coming in to at nights.”
“Aye, but it’s never a hot dinner, is it?”
“No,” admitted Shuggie. His stomach turned over with fresh worry. “Do you have many uncles?”
“Aye, of course,” she said. “Ye know, I’m a Cath-lick.”
“No! I mean, you know, un-cles.”
“Them. Oh, aye. They don’t stay that long, the scavengin’ bastards. They always end up battering her, and then my brothers always end up battering them.” She yawned like it was too ordinary to explain. “My job is to dip their pockets for money.”
“Really?” He was surprised at her barefaced pride.
“Aye. I clean them out. Every single penny.” She shrugged nonchalantly. “I need to. Ma maw spends that much of the message money on drink.”
Shuggie picked long broken hairs from the old comb and wound them thoughtfully round his finger. “I wonder if my mother knows yours?”
“Doubt it.”
“I mean through the meetings. Through the AA,” he said.
“Naw. Auld Moira is well past that shite.” She shook her head. “Has she ever tried to send you to Alateen?”
“No. What’s that?”
“It’s like AA but for families. Moira said it was a support group. She said it would help me to cope with her illness.”
“Did you go?”
The girl sat up and took her hair in her hand. “Once. But after that, no fuckin’ way! Why should I go when she hardly makes the meetings herself. Eh?” She pulled the short sleeves down over her blue hands. “Anyway, you should have seen some of the posh wee bastards that were there. All moaning that their mammy drank all the Christmas sherry and fell asleep afore present-opening time.” A cruel smile crossed her lips. “So I telt a story of how ma maw opened all the presents and drank ma brother’s Christmas aftershave by mixing it wi’ a bottle of fizzy ginger. You should have seen their faces.” Leanne grinned like the devil and put on a fancy Edinburgh accent. “I’ll have an Obsession and Diet Coke, please.”
“Diet Coke?”
“Aye, she’s worried about her weight.”
Shuggie laughed, then felt bad for laughing. “Did she really drink that perfume?”
“Oh, aye. Well, she tried it. Drank the whole thing. It near kil’t her. She was vomiting for days.” Leanne rubbed at her chilled legs. “Her sick smelt nice though.”
Leanne’s face fell again; the end of her nose was purple with cold. “The next Christmas she wised up. Auld Moira Kelly got the itch and took some of the presents up the far end of Duke Street on Christmas Eve. She stood in the knee-deep snow and sold them at the side of the road for some drink money. She sold a cassette player for five pounds and a wee colour portable for twenty.”
“I’m sorry.”
“The worst part is that I’m still paying the catalogue for them.” The words were on his lips before he realized he had spoken them out loud. “My mother tried to kill herself last night.”
Leanne turned to face him. “Did she take some pills?”
“No.”
“Slash her wrists?”
“Well, no,” he paused. “Not this time anyway.”
“Put her head in the oven?”
“No. She has afore. But I think the one in the new flat is electric.”
“Ugh, that’ll not stop them.” Leanne took a strand of hair between her fingers and inspected its frayed ends. “Ma maw did it once when I was away on a school trip. I’d had a lovely time at the Edinburgh Zoo looking at the penguins, but when I got home my brothers were all stood around her laughing. She looked like she had been on the sunbeds. She’d tried to do hersel in and baked her face instead. Half her hair had grill lines on it from the oven rack.” She plucked violently at a broken hair. “It was mental. She permanently crimped half her head and set the other side in a semi-wave.”
Shuggie couldn’t help but laugh. The girl giggled lightly and then sighed sadly almost as quickly. “Well, what did yours dae, then?”
“She tried to throw herself out of the window.” He lowered his eyes. “With no clothes on.”
“Jeezo,” the girl whistled. “Auld Moira has never tried that. Thank fuck I live on the ground floor.”
Shuggie rubbed at his arm; he felt the fresh welts from her struggle scream from under his jumper. Agnes had sure enough taken to the window ledge. It was a new tactic, and it had terrorized him. She had been casting up on the telephone, and then she went quiet. When he found her, she was at the kitchenette with one leg in and one out the window, her bare cunt on the stone sill. She was naked and screaming, and he had to use his whole strength to drag her back inside. There were slivers of her skin still stuck under his fingernails. A tired, damp feeling ebbed over him now. “I think the drink will kill her, and I feel like it’s my fault.”
“Aye. It probably will kill her,” she said, much as if she were only discussing the weather. “But like I said, it’s a slow road, and there’s nothing you can do to help her.”
The desperate slurping sounds behind them stopped. Leanne sat forward, her hair so shiny it was almost wet-looking, her face calmer and kinder now. The cold motorway air rushed between them. Shuggie let a little ball of her loose hair roll down the embankment, and suddenly he felt lonely, like he wanted to sit on Agnes’s knee again as he had when he was little.
Leanne turned and regarded him over the curve of her shoulder. In the bright headlights he saw how pretty her eyes really were, not only brown but gold and green and a sad flat grey. He knew now that he couldn’t keep his promise. He h
ad lied to Agnes as she had lied to him about stopping the drink. She would never be able to get sober, and he, sat in the cold with a lovely girl, knew he would never feel quite like a normal boy.
Thirty
The first thing he said to her as he came in the door from school was, “I’m hungry.”
Nobody ever cared how she felt or if she was hungry. They just told her what they wanted and what they were going to take from her. She sat in the armchair and lit another cigarette while listening to the cupboard doors in the kitchenette open and shut. “Mammy, there’s nothing to eat!” he shouted from the kitchen. His voice had broken, and although it was not deep it had the entitled timbre of a grown man’s. He didn’t even bother to come through and see if she was there. He knew she would be. Agnes took a mouthful from the mug and asked no one in particular. “Why do you all have to take me for granted?”
She could hear him drag his school bag along the carpet. “Ma-mmy, I’m hungry. Ma-a-ammy, I’m hungry,” he whined. It was almost a song to him by now. The living room door opened, and he dragged himself through. He was changing, getting taller, taking a stretch. He was always hungry.
Agnes looked at him there, his hair parted differently, the clothes hanging off his skinny shoulders, and decided she didn’t like this change. “Are you not going to ask me how my day was?” she drawled.
Shuggie ignored her and swept around the room efficiently, like a hotel maid. He drew the curtains and put on the lamps. He turned on the electric fire, the one that he used when he tried to make her fall asleep.
“Turn that off,” she barked. He looked at her, and then looked straight through her and left the fire on. “I’m-fine-thank-you-and-howare-you?” she said with a snide sneer.
“I told you I was hungry, and there is nothing in the house to eat.” He turned to face her, and although he drew himself to his full height, he looked tired. “What are you going to do about it?”
Standing there now he looked like his granny. She could see Lizzie with her hand on her hip, shaking her head in disappointment, lamenting that only hell would mend her. It caught her off guard, then it got her goat. “Don’t you look at me like that.”
Shuggie had had enough. He sat across from her and rubbed at the side of his temples as if his head hurt. “I said I was hungry.” He was deliberately pushing her. “What are you going to feed me?”
“Oh, you are all the same, eh? Take! Take! Take! Well, let me tell you, I have no more to give.”
“Drink! Drink! Drink!” he mimicked. “Well, let me tell YOU, I’m bloody starving.”
“You cheeky streak of piss.” Her false teeth ground together in her tight face. Only her eyes were loose and half-detached, rolling under the waves of the day’s drink.
Shuggie rose again and stood in front of the fire. “It must be so easy for you staying here all day, but I’ve got to go out there and mix with those people.” He let out a long sigh like a punctured bike tyre. His shoulders lost all of their bones. “Most of them can barely speak English. I can’t even understand what the teachers are teaching.”
“Easy for me?” She was slipping out of time. “They feed you a hot fucking lunch up at that school, don’t they! Three hot courses, I bet. That’s more than I get sat here on my own.”
Shuggie put his tongue between his teeth and bit down on it hard. Only when he had mastered his breathing did he speak again. “Look. Just give me some of the social. I will go back out and get us some dinner.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Well, there isn’t any money.”
“How?” The life returned to his shoulders. “So. Monday Books, Tuesday Books. Where has all the week’s money gone?”
“Pfft,” she said, with a flourish of her hand; it looked like a fluttering bird that wore its only colour on the very tips of its wings. “It’s gone away. Vanished. Just like all the bad bastards I’ve ever known.”
Shuggie leaned over her now and looked down the secret side of her chair. There were only the six cans of cheap lager. It wasn’t enough to waste the entire benefit. “Gone where?”
“Oh. Up the bingo. It was the snowball the day,” she said. “Well, that and I bought a wee filled roll. Excuse me.”
“Agnes,” he said, “we’ll starve.”
Agnes cleared her throat. Then she shrugged her shoulders. “Aye. Probably.”
Shuggie sat down in the middle of the settee and looked into the hot bars of the fire. Agnes took another can and with a painted nail slipped the ring pull off with a delicious hiss. The fight started to seep out of her. “Look, you better eat all the lunches. That’ll be one hot meal, I suppose.”
He spoke very quietly. “They’ve been taking the tickets off of me. I’ve not been getting the free lunch.” He looked at her face; she had sucked her head back over her neck in affronted confusion. “These boys in fourth year. They don’t like how I speak. They said I was too posh. They took the tickets. They’ve been eating my lunch.”
Something cleared in her eyes. The fire made its pinging song, the coiled bars bursting with orange heat, but now she felt only cold. “We’ll starve,” she said quietly.
“I know.”
They sat in the beaming heat of the electric fire for a long while before Shuggie stood up again. The fire was making him sleepy, and the lager smell was making him sick. He had to get out. He thought he might go up to the main road to try what Keir had taught him and steal some crisps from the newsagents for their supper. Four or five packets, he thought, and then neither of them would be hungry any more.
Agnes watched him stand and silently shuffle to the door, his feet flattening the carpet as he went. The stretch he had taken meant he was almost as tall as his brother. He was nearly fifteen and the growing pains had made him irritable. He looked to her like a piece of pale sugar toffee, pulled too long, ready to break in the middle. She could see her sons had the same old man’s stoop, Alexander and Hugh, the same burdened shoulders. Watching him, she felt a longing for her other boy. She tried to cover it up. “Oh, so are you leaving me now as well?”
“What?”
“Taken all you could get, and now you are done.”
“What?” He couldn’t take in what she was saying.
“You’ve never gone hungry before. Never once in all these years.”
“I know,” he lied. There was no use in fighting her now.
With difficulty Agnes got herself up and out of the chair. She shoved the boy, who was hovering aimlessly between here and there. “Well, here, let me bloody help you.” She stoated out the door into the hallway; her shoulder connected with the door frame and rattled with a crack.
He listened to her nails click on the buttons of the telephone. He heard her complain to herself under her breath and then, “Hello! Yes. Taxi, please. For Bain. That’s right. Off the Parade.”
She came back into the room looking victorious. “Well, I never thought you would leave me.”
“Come on,” he pleaded, his hands open and stretched out towards her. Nothing inside him wanted to harm her. “I’m not leaving.”
She slid back into her drinking chair. “Aye, you are. They all leave. Every last one.”
“Where would I even go? I don’t have anywhere to go.”
Agnes had started to turn inwards. She started talking to herself. “I’ve raised nothing but a shower of ungrateful swine. I’ve seen you looking at that door, watching that clock. Well, to hell with you.”
Out on the street the horn of a hackney pumped three times. The thrum of the diesel engine echoed up the canyon of tenements. “Go on!” she spat. “Go! Away to your fucking brother’s. See if he’ll feed you. See if I care.”
“No, I don’t want to go. I am meant to stay here with you. Just you and me. Like we promised each other.” His lip started to tremble. He crossed the room to her and tried to hold her, tried to lace his fingers behind her neck.
Sounding impatient, the taxi pumped its horn again. She took his arms and pressed her nail
s into the soft flesh by his wrists. “You and your fucking promises. I’ve never met a man who kept one yet. You can all sit around and stuff yourselves till you are full, and then you can laugh, Agnes Bain. Ha fucking HA!”
“No!” He struggled to grip her hair, her jumper, her neck. Anything.
“Look!” she reasoned as she unpicked him from herself. For a moment her eyes cleared of the fog, and his mother seemed like she might actually be in there. “Don’t you ask me to phone you a taxi and then stand there and make a liar out of me. Get your bag. You’re papped!”
The telephone rang. She shoved him away, and a great shower of beads ripped from the neck of her jumper. The telephone kept ringing. The ringing bells were hammering his skull. Shuggie answered it in a daze, and a gruff-sounding man asked, “Taxi for Bain, pal?”
“Uh-huh.” He wiped his face on his sleeve.
“Well, your driver’s downstairs. He’s no got all bloody day.”
Shuggie put the phone back on the cradle and stood in the hallway, waiting for her to say something, anything. Agnes could have said anything then, and he would have taken it and he would have forgiven her. He would have sat back at her side and wrapped his arms around her legs. He could starve, as long as they starved together.
No. Agnes wouldn’t look at him. She didn’t say a single word. So Shuggie picked up the school bag and went out the door, down the winding stairs, and out of the tiled close. The driver folded his newspaper as the boy got into the black hackney.
Agnes went to the bay window and looked down into the narrow street. She watched her baby come out of the close mouth and search the sky for her. She nodded smugly that she had been right, that she had always known he would leave her, like they all did. She watched him climb into the waiting taxi, and she knew then that she had lost him.
The driver asked Shuggie where he was going. The boy just sat there and had to think for a long time, unsure of where to go now, stalling for any sign of hope. His eyes flitted nervously to the mouth of the close. He wiped his eyes on the sleeve of his school jumper, hoping each time he pulled his hand away, that she would be there.
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