Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

  The driver watched him in the mirror and then turned round with a concerned look. “You alright, wee man?” he asked with thin patience.

  No one came to the close mouth. “South Side, please.”

  The taxi took the boy through the busy heart of Glasgow, in a rambling line from the East End to the South Side. They passed the Victorian train station, and he saw lost-looking boys his own age standing in bubble-shaped anoraks and tight denims, loitering around the arcades and amusements that clustered nearby. The taxi went down one of the streets lined with office buildings, and people were leaving their work and queueing at the bus stops on the corners. The lights came on in the pound stores, and he watched women with shopping bags full of Christmas presents. Several times he cleared his throat to ask the taxi to turn around, but he never did. They flew across the wide grey Clyde, with its disused blue cranes and shipbuilders’ yards. “Where to exactly, pal?” asked the man.

  Shuggie didn’t know the exact address. He knew it was on the Kilmarnock Road, and he was pretty sure it was above the savings bank, so he told the man as much. The driver sighed and lowered his head, driving slowly along the congested main road and looking for a bank with a blue sign on a corner.

  Here the Victorian tenements still had a grandeur to them. They were cut from expensive red sandstone, and not the porous blond of the East End that sucked up all the dirt and black damp of the city and held on to it for decades. This road was alive with the transient energy of students, immigrants, and young professionals. The taxi passed wine bars and delicatessens. There were small bookstores, pubs with tables out on the street, and shops that sold the latest clothes from down south. Shuggie was watching a young woman with flowers in the basket of her bike and almost missed the bank. It was there, on the left, old and draughty-looking, with a big blue sign, just as he had remembered it.

  The taxi did a neat pirouette. “Twelve poun’,” said the man, punching the meter.

  Shuggie felt the panic rise. “Wait a minute, please,” he said, reaching for the door handle.

  “Naw, pal.” The old driver locked the door remotely. “Twelve poun’, please.”

  Shuggie tried the locked handle; it wouldn’t budge. “Please. My brother will pay, and he lives in that building there.”

  “Son, you must think I was born yesterday. If I open this door, you’ll be off up that street like a dirty Mick wi’ a hot potato.”

  Shuggie slid back in the seat. “Mister, I don’t have any money.”

  The driver barely winced at what he had seen coming. “Then we are going to the polis.” He took the handbrake off, and Shuggie felt the taxi shudder and roll. Its front wheels pulled out into the evening traffic.

  “Mister!” spat Shuggie in panic. “Ah. I’ll let you touch my willy.”

  The driver looked at the boy in the mirror for a while. His eyes sat deep and small in his pink face. They were hard to read. His lips barely moved beneath his moustache. “Son, how old are you?”

  “Fourteen.”

  The man didn’t take his eyes from the boy’s face. His head seemed to roll back on to his thick neck, and his moustache danced unhappily. Shuggie tried to smile, but his lips had gone dry, and they wouldn’t pull away from his teeth. “I mean it. I do. You can touch my willy or you can play with my bum,” he said earnestly. “If you like.”

  With no warning the red lights above the locks went out. There was a pity in the man’s eyes, but Shuggie was too scared to let it rip at his pride. “Son, I only take cash.”

  Shuggie tried the door and almost fell out on to the street. Tired women with thick bags of messages criss-crossed hurriedly on the wide pavement. Clumsy with nerves, Shuggie stumbled through the lines of busy shoppers and stood in the sanctuary of the tenement mouth. He found the name Bain on the big panel of buzzers. He pressed the button and waited, but no one answered. His legs started twitching in a jittery panic, threatening to run. He pressed the buzzer again and looked up and down the street for a thickness in the crowd, or an open close to lose himself in. Behind him, the taxi driver sighed. “Right, son, get back in the taxi.”

  Just then a voice crackled over the buzzer. “Hallo?”

  When Leek came downstairs, he was still in his work clothes. The thick stour of white plaster chalk made him look like a baker’s ghost. He crossed to the taxi and paid the man his twelve pounds. Shuggie watched him count out the last of his change in ten and five pences. When he was done, he turned his white face to his little brother. His shoulders unknotted. “Christ!” he spat. “She’s started early wi’ you.”

  Leek led his brother all the way up the tenement stairs. They got to the door of the flat and entered a windowless hallway. Off the hallway came five or six doors; behind each door lay a single bedsit room. Leek slipped his key into a thin Yale lock and opened his door.

  Shuggie had been here only once before, a time that Leek had come for him unexpectedly. Agnes had been drinking, and a steelworker from the tenement next door had been gladly refilling her mug. By lunchtime, they had made him feel like he was in the way, and somewhere, deep inside, Shuggie had lost the energy to watch over her.

  So he had gone looking for Keir along the Parade in the drenching rain, ducking in and out of newsagents and pub doorways. Something cold ran down the back of his neck, and he had turned and seen his brother watching him from a dry tenement doorway, just watching. Shuggie couldn’t tell how long Leek had been there. He hadn’t seen his brother in nearly eighteen months. Shuggie raised his hand in a shy wave and crossed the road cautiously. He was scared, for he knew Leek didn’t like to be cornered, and he was afraid that his brother might use his long legs to run. But Leek hadn’t ran. He had only nodded and then clouted Shuggie on his shoulder.

  On that rainy Saturday, Leek had taken him across the city for a few hours of peace and quiet. He had filled him with a bowl of sugary cereal, and then they had sat on the settee and watched Dr Who together. Shuggie had pretended to fall asleep and slid slowly into Leek’s narrow side. Leek didn’t move him, and Shuggie had been unable to tell him just how much he had missed him.

  Leek never said more. He never mentioned how often he had gone to watch over Shuggie. Shuggie never knew if it had been his first time or his hundredth. He was just glad he had been there.

  So Shuggie had seen this room once before. The room itself was large and proud, and what once would have been a smart living room was now stuffed with borrowed furniture. The ceiling was higher than the room was wide, and at the front were large bay windows that let the evening light and the traffic noise spill in from the main road. Shuggie looked around; there was something different about it this time, but he couldn’t tell exactly what.

  Leek took his seat again in front of the blaring telly and started spooning in mouthfuls of hot noodles. Leek caught him staring. “The kettle’s just boiled.”

  Shuggie burst the foil on the top of some noodles and poured in the galloping water from the steaming kettle. He knew he had to let it stew for five minutes, but the tub burnt his hand, and the smell of the cheap noodles stoked the hunger in his belly. His lips must have been wet with hunger, and when he lifted his eyes, Leek was holding out his only fork towards him. He cleared clothes from the end of the narrow bed. “Sit down, you’re giving me the heebs.”

  Shuggie sat where he was told, and the two of them huddled around the colour television in silence. The boy tried not to eat the food too fast, tried not to make a pig of himself, to be a good guest, like she had always taught him to be. “Thank you very much for my dinner,” he said, as though it were a fine Sunday roast.

  After a while Leek asked, “So how come she finally papped the golden boy, then?”

  “I dunno,” said Shuggie.

  “How long has she been on the drink this time?”

  Shuggie shook his head. “I stopped counting. She stopped drinking for a short while near Halloween, but I don’t know why, and it never caught on.”

  Leek let out a disappointed
sigh, as if to say that was all he needed to know. “I thought you knew better by now. She’s never going to get off the drink.”

  Shuggie was staring into the swampy broth. “She might. I just have to try harder to help her. Be good to her. Keep myself tidy. I can make her better.” Then he added, “Anyway, you could help some.”

  Leek rubbed at a pocket of wind trapped in his chest. “Ah! I see. You were papped for being a nagging moan.”

  Shuggie ignored the taunt. He looked around at all the things Leek had gathered to make a little home: one cup, one bowl, a single set of towels. There were found things, cobbled together, a kerosene camping lamp on a bedside table, a kitchen chair used as a clothes horse. The room looked disjointed and tatty, like a spare room in an old house where people put the things they didn’t want any more. Still, amongst the shabby cramped furniture, were expensive electronic toys: a telescope, a Japanese camera on a tripod, a remote-controlled Lamborghini. It looked like a boy’s den, the lair of someone who was spending money on all the wrong things. Then Shuggie realized what was different this time: it was organized. It was tidy, because Leek had been packing his life into a set of brown moving boxes. They sat ominously in the far corner. He was going away.

  As Leek watched the television, Shuggie felt lonelier now than he ever had. He looked around the rented room and now saw what it was. It didn’t look dingy any more. It looked wonderful. It wasn’t a hidey-hole from her, or a secret den. It was a last raft. Leek was leaving.

  He studied the side of Leek’s face. His older brother still had the stoop, the knotted shoulders, the tight mouth, yet now his eyes looked green instead of grey, and his hair was pushed confidently away from his face. Shuggie regarded him as he watched the television and envied this new peace in his faraway eyes. “What do you think will happen to her?”

  “She’ll sober up. She’ll beg you to come back. Then she’ll do it all over again,” said Leek bluntly. “But she’ll have a taste for papping you now.”

  “I meant in the long run.”

  “Oh. The drink will put her out on the street,” said Leek, very quickly and too casually.

  “On the street? No way! She won’t even leave the house without colouring in the scratches on her shoes.”

  “Shuggie, she’s getting too old for this. It’s only a matter of time before it all catches up with her.” He picked the inside of his nose. “What’s she gonnae do when you leave? What’s she gonnae do when the men stop wanting her?”

  “Then I won’t leave,” said Shuggie with certainty.

  Leek sniggered. “So are you gonnae be one of those middle-aged saddos that still lives with his mammy? Still lets his mammy buy his clothes for him and stoats up and down to the post office wi’ a pensioners’ trolley.” He rolled up the mucus and flicked it into the corner. “’Asides, if she was gonnae get better she would have got better by now.” Leek scratched his chin, but his eyes went back to the little television. “The drink will put her out on the street. You will come to your senses. Sooner or later.”

  Shuggie felt sure now that they had been playing “you touched it last” and no one had bothered to explain the rules to him. He hadn’t known he was going to ask this, but as soon as he had, he knew he had wanted to ask it for a very long time: “Why did you never come back for me?”

  Leek took his eyes from the television and met Shuggie’s stare. He hooked his hand around the back of his brother’s neck. “That’s not fair, Shuggie. How am I meant to raise you? What have I got? ’Asides, you’re still lying to yourself. Look at you! No one can help you but you, Shuggie. I mean, think about it. Think how long it took for me, and in all that time Caff never once came back for me.”

  There was a loud buzzer sound from the carpeted hallway.

  “Shuggie. You. You didn’t.” He was staring at his brother with a wide-eyed fear. The shrill buzzer went again, more insistent and angrier. Leek scuttled out into the hallway, and Shuggie heard him scream into the handset, straining to be heard over the noise of the busy road.

  “I didn’t mean to.” Shuggie was talking to himself, apologizing to no one in particular. “I only told her it was the Kilmarnock Road.” He was only making it worse. “Oh. I might’ve said it was above the bank.”

  “You little grassing bastard.” Leek lifted a jam jar full of coppers and dumped its contents on the single bed. A dirty metallic smell filled the air. With quick fingers he pored through the coins and counted out around ten pounds. He slipped the coins into his dusty coveralls and clattered out the door and down the wide close mouth. Shuggie listened to him jangle into the distance.

  When Leek came back, his face was flustered and angry, red from the stairs and knotted with outrage. Shuggie felt the warm noodles in his belly turn to worms. Leek stood at the door with a plastic bag in his hands. The bag was full of tins of Bird’s yellow custard. Leek pushed his damp fringe back from his face. His forehead was pink and dust-free now. “That custard,” he said, catching his breath, “has just spent the last of my wages on a sightseeing tour of Glasgow.”

  A bubble of sick, nervous laughter rose inside Shuggie. He tried to put his sleeve over his mouth but the sound escaped regardless.

  “It’s not fucking funny,” spat Leek, but he was smiling, then he was laughing. “Bad news always follows you, Shuggie. It always has.” A telly turned up the volume on the evening news in another bedsit; Leek made the two-finger salute at the adjoining wall and shut his thin door. “Turns out Mammy phoned the taxi company and tells them to come and get her. When she comes down out of the close she puts the bag of custard in the back and tells the driver to bring it over here. He telt her, ‘no way,’ but she says her boy will pay the fare at the other end. That I would even give the driver a two-pound tip!” Leek stopped laughing. He slumped against his moving boxes. “I don’t even think I have enough left for my work’s bus fare.”

  “Why did she send the custard, though?” asked Shuggie. He wondered what terrible thing she might have done to get the money for the food.

  Leek had started to step out of his work shoes when the buzzer howled again. The two of them looked at each other in disbelief. Leek went out to the intercom in the hall. He came back in looking crushed and worried; his smile was gone. From his pocket he took a small pen-knife, and on his knees he burst open the lock on the gas meter till a handful of shiny silver coins fell out. Without speaking he gathered them up and went down the stairs.

  Leek was gone an age this time. Shuggie stood rooted to the floor. He whispered to himself, over and over, “I shouldn’t have left you, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have left you, I’m sorry,” in incessant prayer.

  The door opened and Leek stepped through the darkness and back into the bedsit. Under the whiteness of the dust was an even whiter face. Leek cradled something in his arms, and when he spoke it was the quiet shy voice that he used to use. He definitely wasn’t smiling any more.

  “Shuggie,” he whispered. “The taxi driver is waiting downstairs. I gave him a handful of coins, and he said he would take you home again. He needed to go back east anyway. Gather your stuff and take yourself home.”

  Shuggie nodded, slowly and obediently. He had touched it last. He could never be free. “What’s in the bag?”

  Leek looked down at the white plastic shopping bag in his arms and undid the knotted mouth. Shuggie watched his shoulders rise behind his ears. Whatever it was, it had turned Leek’s anger into concern; it had scared him almost. Leek put his hand inside and slowly drew out the tan-coloured plastic with its looping spiral tail. “I don’t think this is a good sign.”

  It was the telephone from his mother’s house.

  It was an end to all contact, a sign she would hurt herself and this time she would not call for help—not to Leek’s gaffer nor to Shug nor to Shuggie. The tinned custard wasn’t a fuck-you to ungrateful sons. She was making sure her baby was fed, and now she was saying goodbye.

  Thirty-One

  It was March and it was her
birthday. Shuggie stole her two handfuls of dying daffodils from the Paki shop. Since the afternoon at Leek’s, he had hidden the benefit books and made sure they had enough to eat before she bought her weekly drink.

  Since Christmas he had held a little of the meter money back, out of her sight, to give her a few pounds to play at the bingo on her special day. She had taken the envelope half-full of coins and held it to her chest like it was the crown jewels. She had been so happy.

  When the police brought her home the next morning, the air in the flat was already thick and sickly with the pollen of the decaying daffodils. They had found her wandering by the River Clyde. She had lost her shoes and her good purple coat. She hadn’t even made it to the bingo.

  Agnes couldn’t look at Shuggie for shame, and he wouldn’t look at her for a deep sense of his own stupidity. The chill of spending a March night outside was rattling sore in her damp lungs, so Shuggie poured a deep bath and sprinkled it liberally with cooking salt. He ironed and laid out clean clothes. He made her some milky tea, which he set outside the bathroom door, and then he left without either of them having said a word.

  Dressed for school, he ran across the main road with the other children and was surprised to hear two fifty pences from the gas meter jangling around in his anorak pocket. It stopped him cold. He turned them over in his hand. He climbed aboard the first bus going anywhere and asked the driver how far the money would take him.

  The view from the sixteenth floor of the Sighthill tower made him feel tiny. The city was alive below him, and he had never even seen a half of it. Shuggie pushed his legs through the breeze-block wall of the laundry room and looked out over the endless sprawl. For hours he watched as orange buses snaked through the grey sandstone. He watched as leaded nimbus darkened the Gothic spires of the infirmary, while elsewhere, obstinate sunlight brought the glass and steel of the university to life.

  His arms and legs felt heavy hanging out over the city, but he found the envelope in his jacket pocket and took it out to consider it for the hundredth time. It had no return address on it, only a postmark that said Barrow-in-Furness. He didn’t know where Barrow-in-Furness was, but it didn’t sound like Scotland.