It was a Christmas card that had arrived two months too late. Leek had found work someplace else. They were building new houses, and they needed young men who could turn to any trade: tiling, plastering, roofing. He said the money was decent, and he didn’t know when he would be back. There had been no art school yet, maybe next year, he had said, or the one after. Instead there was a nice girl, and she worked in a tea room, and they liked to go walking together on something called a moor. The card had a twenty-pound note taped inside, a new note, crisp and never folded. Shuggie had wondered about that money for a long time. He allowed himself a brief daydream of Leek waiting for him at some distant bus station. Then he spent it on fresh meat and surprised Agnes with a heaping bowl of stovies.
There had been something else inside the Christmas card; a page from a lined school jotter covered with a pencil drawing of a small boy. He was sat cross-legged at the foot of an unmade bed, his back to the artist so you could see the base of his bare spine where the top and bottom of his pyjamas didn’t quite meet. Whatever was holding the boy’s attention was nestled discreetly in the curved crook of his body. The boy was engrossed, his face in shadow, and he looked like he was playing with small toy horses that could have easily been wooden toys, military or Trojan. Shuggie knew what they really were, that they were the scented dolls, bright and cheerful and for little girls. They were the pretty ponies, and Leek had known. Leek had always known.
The cold north wind roared around the concrete laundry room and pinched Shuggie’s nose red. When he couldn’t suffer it any longer, he put the card inside his coat and went home again.
All the lights were on when he returned. The stolen daffodils still wilted on every surface, and he could smell the yeast and the rot of her confinement. Shuggie listened to the whine of the operator’s warning as he replaced the abandoned telephone on its cradle. She had been busy; the red pen was out on the phone book, and there were fresh scratchings through old names.
Agnes was asleep in her chair. She looked like a melted candle, her legs lifeless and her head lolling to one side. Shuggie walked around the far side of her and shook the hidden Tennent’s cans to see how much she had drunk. He held the vodka bottle up to the light and measured its remaining dregs. It was all but gone.
In the silence he listened to her cough through the stupor, then she wretched and a trickle of thick bile appeared on her lips. Shuggie reached inside her jumper sleeve and took out her toilet paper, carefully enough not to wake her. With a practiced finger he reached inside her mouth and hooked out the bronchial fluid and bile. He wiped her mouth clean and lowered her head safely back on to her left shoulder.
There was an emptiness in his belly. It was below his stomach; it went deeper than hunger. He sat at her feet and quietly started to talk to her. “I love you, Mammy. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you last night.”
Shuggie gently lifted her foot, first unbuckling the tiny ankle clasp and slipping off each high heel and then carefully pulling the hard seam of her black tights out from between her toes. He rubbed the balls of her cold feet tenderly, and then he set each foot gently back on the floor. He talked to her quietly as he did.
“I went up to Sighthill today,” he whispered. “I looked out over the whole city.”
He set her high heels to the side of her chair and stood up over her again. With skill he searched under the soft sag of her breasts until he found the centre of her chest, and through her thin jumper he undid the butterfly hook of her bra. He watched as her heavy breasts poured free.
“You must have loved living there. There was so much to see,” he whispered. “It made me feel dizzy to think of it all.”
Hooking his fingers he found each bra strap. He moved them on her shoulder line and freed her burdened flesh from the digging pressure of the nylon. Agnes stirred but did not wake. She coughed again, a deep damp cough that was miners’ houses and mould, warm lager and now a cold night by the river. Shuggie rubbed her breastbone and wondered if the police cells were very cold. Her head rolled backwards on to the soft back of the chair, and quickly, from instinct, he placed his fingers on her temples and gently rolled it safely forward again.
“I’m going to leave school as soon as I can. It’s no good arguing. I need to get a job and get us out of here,” he said. “I was thinking maybe one day I’d take you to Edinburgh. We could see Fife, Aberdeen even. I could even save enough for a caravan maybe. Do you think maybe then you could get better?” Shuggie smiled down at her unconscious face. “What do you think?”
He listened to her breathing for a while, and then he reached to her side and undid the zipper on her skirt. It slid down easily, and her soft stomach rose gratefully, almost like bread dough escaping the pan.
“No? I suppose not,” he whispered.
Shuggie reached into her snoring mouth, and with a damp sucking sound, he pulled out each set of her dentures. He wrapped them in toilet paper and placed them neatly on the arm of her chair. With soft fingers he massaged her head and made waves through her black hair. He rubbed at her scalp just how she liked. Her roots were obscenely white.
Agnes coughed again, a dry tickle in her throat that rumbled into her belly and became all at once heavy and thick. The bile was on her lips again. Shuggie stopped running his fingers through her hair and reached for the toilet paper, but something made him stop. He watched her cough. “Suppose maybe Leek was right.”
She gurgled again, and her head fell backwards till it rested on the soft back of the chair. Agnes wretched, and he watched the bile bubble over her naked gums and painted lips. Shuggie stood there and listened to her breathing. It grew heavier at first, thick and clogged. Her eyebrows knotted slightly, as if she had heard some news that was unpleasant to her. Then her body shook, not hard, but like she was in the back of a taxi and they were bumping down the uneven Pit road again. He almost did something then, almost used his fingers to help, but then her breath hissed away slowly; it just faded, like it was walking away and leaving her. Her face changed then, the worry fell away, and at last she looked at peace, softly carried away, deep in the drink.
It was too late to do something now.
Still he shook her hard, but she wouldn’t wake up.
He shook her again, and then he cried over his mother for a long while, long after Agnes had stopped breathing. It did no good.
It was late now.
Shuggie arranged her hair as best as he could. He tried to cover the brazen whiteness of the roots, to arrange it just the way she liked to wear it. He unwrapped her dentures again and gently placed them back inside her mouth. Then, taking the toilet paper, he wiped the sick from her chin and pulled fresh paint across her lips, taking care to push the colour into the corners and stay neatly within the lines. He stood back and dried his eyes. She looked like she was only sleeping. Then he bent over and kissed her one last time.
1992
The South Side
Thirty-Two
There was no real stour to be wiped away, but Shuggie wasted the morning by wiping Agnes’s porcelain ornaments. In the move into Mrs Bakhsh’s bedsit the tiny fawn had chipped an ear, and the beautiful girl who sold rosy apples had lost a whole arm, still clutching her McIntosh red. For weeks it had made him feel terrible just to look at them. Now he took real care to wipe them all gently and set them back exactly in the right place.
That morning he picked up the long-limbed fawn and turned it carefully in his hand. He had expected the chip on the fawn’s left ear, but as he looked closer he saw how the paint was fading away from her lashed eyes and the white markings were rubbing off her flank. It angered him. He had always been so careful. He had always tried his best.
Shuggie squeezed the ornament until his knuckles blanched white. The fawn kept beaming its same serene smile. He pressed against the dainty front leg, lightly at first, then he pressed harder and harder until the porcelain gave. It made an awful grating, snicking sound as it broke. He stood without breathing for a long while. Unde
r the shiny porcelain veneer the ceramic was rough and chalky. He ran his finger along the sharp broken edge. Then, without thinking, he pulled again and again until he had snapped all the legs off the ornament. When it lay in pieces in his hand, he found he could not bear to look at it again. He dropped the broken fawn into the space between his headboard and the wall. Then he quickly gathered his coat and the bag holding the tinned fish he had bought from Kilfeathers, and locking the bedsit door, he went out into the bracing rain.
Shuggie floated in a daze towards the main road. Despite the rain, Pakistani men were still busy putting boxes of brown vegetables out in front of their shops. Screeching music blared out of the Bollywood video store; its windows were jarring with bright posters of swarthy-looking men holding doe-eyed women in swooning embraces. He stopped for a moment to study them, then he walked on, passing by unnoticed.
He boarded an orange corporation bus, and with a noisy clunk the driver issued a long white ticket, half-price for children. He climbed the stairs and sat on one of the last dry seats on the top deck. The bus crawled through the slow traffic, but Shuggie didn’t mind. He wiped a peephole in the condensation and watched the city fall away. The bus shuddered and turned into an abandoned scheme on the right. The gable ends of half-demolished tenements lay exposed in the rain. Brightly painted front rooms and wallpapered hallways stood bare and embarrassed-looking above piles of rubble. In one backcourt there was still a line of clean washing strung proudly between two makeshift poles. In another, happy weans kicked a bladder where whole blocks had been torn down around them.
The bus rumbled over the Clyde. The river water reflected the grey hulk of the Finnieston Crane as it loomed lonely and idle over the water. Shuggie wiped again at the damp windows and thought of Catherine. His mind always went to her when he saw the rusting cranes. She had not come home for Agnes’s funeral. She had told Leek, who had told Shuggie, she would rather remember her mother in the good times. It would do her no good to see how the drink had whittled her. Now, looking at the cranes, Shuggie realized he couldn’t picture Catherine’s face clearly any more. He wondered exactly what Catherine could still see when she thought of their mammy. Maybe she could see only lovely things.
They had burnt Agnes on a bright cold morning.
Shuggie had sat with her body for the best part of two days. At night he tucked a blanket around her, and the next morning he took it off again. He turned on the fire when she grew cold, but it was no good, her skin could retain no heat. He called Leek at the boarding house down south to tell him their mother was dead. Leek waited a long while for him to stop crying, and then he told Shuggie what to do, step by step, and then very patiently, he repeated it slowly, as Shuggie wrote it all down in Agnes’s phone book. That was good of him, Shuggie thought later, not to lose his temper.
Leek came north on the overnight coach. He travelled all those miles and then stopped ten feet away from Agnes’s body. He never seemed to be able to come any closer. He let Shuggie fuss with their mother, and later he simply watched as his brother bent over on the undertaker’s carpet and smashed and glued cheap stones together till he made her a pair of earrings that almost looked like they could match.
Leek organized the cremation. Shuggie followed Leek the entire week, too tired to cry, too stunned to be of further help. From the procurator fiscal to the undertaker, then on to the chapel, Shuggie followed behind him, pallid, useless, mute. Several times Leek stopped in the middle of whatever he was doing and turned to his brother. He said nothing; he left empty space for Shuggie to confess whatever was heavy on his mind. Shuggie tried, he wanted to tell Leek what had happened, but the words wouldn’t come, he couldn’t admit it. All he would say was that he had been tired, that he wished he had tried harder.
The DSS would pay to have her cremated but would not stretch to the cost of burial, because there was no space left in Wullie and Lizzie’s plot. Leek kept her death from the paper; there was no announcement in the Evening Times. Still, a woman in the next close had been intermittently in the AA with Agnes, soon the word spread through the fellowship, and there were strangers at the door. Then word of her death leached out to Pithead, and all the old ghouls came out to Daldowie Crematorium.
Big Shug had not come to Agnes’s cremation. The only black hackney that came to Daldowie was Eugene’s, and although Big Shug must have heard the news through Catherine or Rascal, he never showed face. Shuggie had packed a backpack full of clean clothes, just in case, then felt stupid for having done so. Throughout the service he searched the faces for his father, but Shug never came.
Leek frowned at Shuggie, like he was angry at his hope, disappointed that Shuggie was stupid enough to still believe. Leek said Big Shug was a selfish shitebag. It made Shuggie sad then, not only because it was true but also because Leek had looked so much like their mother when he had said it.
Inside the crematorium the mourners sat along the outside edges and towards the back. Only Shuggie and Leek sat in the front. Eugene sat near the door, flanked by Colleen and Bridie. Jinty, half-cut already, hung off young Lamby. When Shuggie turned around he thought how nobody looked truly sad. After they rolled Agnes into the ritual chamber, he heard a woman’s voice behind him tut, “Cremation? They’ll never get the bloody flame out with that old soak.”
Until then, Shuggie had not thought properly about her being cremated. When they put her coffin on the guide rollers, his mind was filled with supermarket conveyor belts. Then it dawned on him. He found himself straining, peering wide-eyed and wild, to see where she was going next. As he looked across at his brother, Leek only nodded calmly and said, “Aye, that’s her away.”
It was what Leek used to say as they watched Agnes get into a hackney. “That’s her away,” he would say, as he emerged from behind the good net curtains, grinning down at his younger brother, and then set about tormenting him in front of the evening news.
That’s her away. It was what you said when you disposed of something.
Outside the crematorium there were white buds on the bare trees, and the smell of thawing greenery hung across the memorial garden. Some of the mourners crossed the grass to offer their condolences to the boys. The bravest came themselves; others, like Colleen, sent a delegate, in the form of Bridie. Jinty had a difficult time crossing the damp ground. She looked perplexed when Leek said there would be no reception, no drink to celebrate.
“What, no a single drop?” she asked.
“Are you fuckin’ kidding me?” he spat, the front of his false teeth locked tight.
Eugene took Jinty by the arm then, to steer her away. He turned to Agnes’s boys to say something kind. But Leek simply turned away.
Shuggie rested his head against the bus window and tried not to think about the funeral any more. His fingers separated some coins from the others. He thought to call Leek later, from the payphone outside Mrs Bakhsh’s bedsit. He knew now how it should go: Shuggie would ask how the new baby was, but he would not ask about art school. Then when Leek asked him how he was, Shuggie would say he was doing fine, because he had learned that was what his brother wanted to hear. They would both pretend to be fine, and then they would talk awhile about a train ticket and a visit south, something small and distant to look forward to. Then Leek would go quiet. He knew Leek didn’t ever like to talk much. In one way that was good; to call south on the greedy phone box was expensive, and Mrs Bakhsh refused to install a phone of the boarders’ own.
The bus rumbled on. The Clyde shipbuilding yards were dead now. The wide river was quiet and empty, except for a lonely boatman in a small boat. The reflective strips on his raincoat shone bright as diamonds through the steady smirr. Everyone knew of this man; he was always on the front page of the free Glaswegian newspaper. Like his father before him, the man patrolled the Clyde without rest. He rescued those old men who, with a skinful, had fallen in over by Glasgow Green. Other times he pulled out the bodies of the men and women who hadn’t wanted to be rescued, those who slipped si
lently, deliberately, from the side of stone bridges into the brackish water.
Shuggie got off the bus at the back of Central Station. Even thick with grime and dabbled with pigeon shit, the riveted glass arches of the train station were still proud and magnificent. The mass of the glass station ran above some of Argyle Street and made a dark tunnel of the wide street below. The overhang was filled with fish and chip shops, bright places that sold half-priced denims, and a windowless pub that opened as early as it could in the morning and was already thick with smoke by lunchtime. Shuggie stopped outside a bakery. The ovens of the shop made it glow bright and warm, and the air was sweet with cheap icing sugar and white bread.
Sometimes he would just stand here and pass an empty hour, pretending to wait for a bus but only warming himself in the sugary dream of the air vent. He had found himself squinting at the taxi rank opposite on one such visit. He had been bending down slightly, buckling his knees and searching the faces of the drivers, before he realized what he was hoping for. Ashamed, he straightened up quickly and hurried away.
Shuggie went inside the bakery. There was a long queue of damp office girls dripping over the hot pastry cabinet. Shuggie waited patiently, his eyelids drooping in the sweet heat. A rosy-cheeked shop assistant scratched the back of her hairnet, and he asked her for two strawberry tarts. As she started to slide the tarts into a paper bag the glossy red jam began to spoil and stick to the paper. “Excuse me, Missus. Could I please have them in a box?”
“It’s fower cakes to a box, son,” she said, with a hot, bored chew.
Shuggie folded the five-pound note around his fingers. He would not be paid again until next week but said, “OK, then. I’ll take four, please. They are a present.”
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