Shuggie Bain. Douglas Stuart
nose, and looked scornfully at Shug. It must have smelled like someone pissed in a pot of old porridge back there.
The taxi started climbing the tenemented hills of Dennistoun. Shug looked in the mirror and watched the woman, who was watching him. The Glasgow housewives always sat square in the middle, never to the side looking out of the window or on one of the fold-down seats like the lonely old men who were hungry for company. She sat as they all did, upright and rigid, like a Presbyterian queen, knees together, back straight, with her hands clasped on her lap. Her coat was pulled close around herself, her hair was set and brushed, even in the back, and her face was set tight like a mask.
“It’s a wild terrible night, right enough,” she said finally.
“Aye, the radio said it would piss all week.” There was something about the woman that reminded him of his own mother, dead and gone. The raw hands and tiny frame belied the strength and power that surely ran through her. He thought of the nights his father would raise his fist on his mother. The more she took it the more he rained down on her, turning her red then blue then black. Shug thought about her at the mirror, pulling her hair over her face, pushing her make-up wider around her eyes to cover the bruises.
“Ah wis just saying I don’t usually get a taxi.” She was searching for his eyes in the mirror.
“Oh, aye?” said Shug, glad to have his thoughts interrupted.
“Aye, but I’ve had a wee win the night, you see. Just a wee one, mind, but it’s nice all the same.” She was rubbing her thumbnail raw. “It’ll come in right handy, you see, now that my George is out of work,” she sighed. “Twenty. Five. Years. Out at the Dalmarnock Iron Works, and all he got was three weeks’ wages. Three weeks! I went up there maself, chapped on the big red gaffer’s door, and I telt him what he could dae with three weeks’ wages.” She opened the clasp on her small hard bag and looked inside. “Do you know what that big bastard telt me? ‘Mrs Brodie, your husband was lucky to get three weeks. I have some young boys wi’ their whole lives ahead o’ them and they only got paid till the end of their shift.’ Made my blood absolutely boil so’in, it did. I said to him, ‘Well, I’ve got two grown boys at home to feed, and they cannae find any work either, so just what do you suppose I do about that?’ He looked at me and he didnae even blink when he said, ‘Try South Africa!’”
She closed the bag. “They’ve never even been to South Lanarkshire, never mind South Africa!” She kept rubbing her red thumb. “It’s no right. The government should dae something. Shutting down the ironworks and shipbuilding. It’ll be the miners next. Just you watch! South Africa! I never! Go all the way to South Africa so they can build cheap boats there and send them home to put more of our boys out of work? The shower of swine.”
“It’s diamonds,” Shug offered. “They go to South Africa to mine diamonds.”
The woman looked as if he had contradicted her. “Well I don’t care what they mine, they could be pulling licorice out a black man’s arse for all I care. But they should be working here at home in Glasgow and eating their mammy’s cooking.”
Shug put his foot on the accelerator. The city was changing; he could see it in people’s faces. Glasgow was losing its purpose, and he could see it all clearly from behind the glass. He could feel it in his takings. He had heard them say that Thatcher didn’t want honest workers any more; her future was technology and nuclear power and private health. Industrial days were over, and the bones of the Clyde Shipworks and the Springburn Railworks lay about the city like rotted dinosaurs. Whole housing estates of young men who were promised the working trades of their fathers had no future now. Men were losing their very masculinity.
Shug had watched the thinning out of the working classes from their poor neighbourhoods. Middle-class civil servants and city planners had seen it a stroke of genius to ring the city with new towns and cheaply built estates. Given a patch of grass and a view of the sky, the city’s ills were supposed to disappear.
The woman sat stiff and still on the back seat. The skin was wearing off around her thumbs, and worry sat around the corners of her mouth. Only when she patted the back of her hair did Shug know she was still alive. The taxi dropped her at the mouth of her close, and she pushed a pound tip into Shug’s hand.
“Here, what’s this?” He tried to pass it back. “I’m no needin’ that.”
“Gies peace!” she shushed. “It’s just a wee bit of my winnings. I’m spreading my luck around. Luck’s the only thing that’s gonnae get us out of this mess.”
Shug took the tip reluctantly. Fuck the English tourists and their bastarding Kodaks. Shug had seen it before, those with least to give always gave the most.
By the time Shug got back to the city centre the last picture had let out and the city was settling in for a few hours of cold sleep. Some of the late-night clubs were banging out music, but it was suicide to sit outside them waiting for a fare because the first drunks wouldn’t be spilling out till well after midnight. Shug sighed and thought about waiting around. Maybe he’d pick up a bird who’d been left holding all the Babycham while her pals danced with some fellas. The ugliest bird usually left first. He’d driven them home before, even waited with the meter off while they got some consoling bags of crisps and chocolate biscuits from the corner Paki. If you talked nice to them they were dead nice back.
He had loosened his tie and settled in for the long wait when the soft voice came over the radio. “Car thirty-one. Car thirty-one. Come in.” His heart sank. It was Agnes, it had to be.
He picked up the black receiver and pressed the button on the side. “Car thirty-one here.” There was a long pause, and he waited for the news.
“You’ve been requested up at Stobhill, car for Easton,” said Joanie Micklewhite.
“I’ve got a fare, and I’m taking them out to the airport. Do you no have a car closer?” he asked.
“Sorry, sunshine! You’ve been specially requested.” He could almost hear the smile. “Punter said to take your time, there was no rush.”
He hadn’t thought it’d be this. Agnes surely, or even his first wife after money for their four weans, but he hadn’t thought it would be this. They weren’t there yet, surely?
The drive up to the old hospital was quick this time of night. The Royal Infirmary was where the football stabbings and giro-day domestics went. Stobhill was where Glasgow was born and where Glasgow died. Now a mousy girl was stood there in the glow from the foyer, wearing a blue cleaner’s apron. She clawed at her saggy tights and wriggled them straight and flat. Her make-up had spread from the cold and the tears, and he could see the ring of burnt douts at her feet, like she must’ve been waiting in the cold for him her whole break. Shug smiled. She was only twenty-four and already his doormat.
“I didnae think you were coming,” she said, climbing into the back of the taxi.
“What did you call me out here fur?”
“I missed ye, that’s all,” she said. “I haven’t seen ye in weeks.” She rolled her thick legs open and shut coquettishly. “You’ve no gone off o’ me, have ye?” She grinned.
Shug turned in his seat. “Who the fuck do ye think ye are, Ann Marie? I’m tryin’ to make a livin’, and ye call me across the city like I wis a dog that pissed on yer carpet.” He slammed the heel of his fist on the glass partition. “We have to be discreet. Cool like. What the fuck do you think would happen if Agnes found out, eh? I’ll tell you what would happen. She’d get a haud of you by the scruff of yer neck and drag the length of the Clyde wi’ ye for starters. When she was done dragging yer body she would drag yer good name. She’d phone yer parents every night just after they’d gone to their beds. She’d wake them up and tell them that their good wee Catholic girl was carrying on with a married man.” He paused, watching his words take effect. “Is that really what you want?”
The tears were running down her face and pooling on her apron. “But ah love ye.”
Shug pulled