Shuggie Bain. Douglas Stuart
and he liked the way her name sounded when he spelt it out slowly, just like his Granda Wullie had taught him. Shh-hee-nah.
Shuggie would collect the empty cans from around the house and line up the women on the edge of the bath. He would stroke their tinny hair and make them talk to each other in imagined conversations, rambling monologues, mostly about ordering new shoes from catalogues and whoring husbands. Big Shug had caught him once. He had watched proudly as Shuggie lined up the women and spelt out each of their names phonetically. He bragged about it later down the rank. “Five years old, eh!” he would say. “What a chip aff the auld block.” Agnes had looked on sadly, knowing what was really going on.
Later that week she took Shuggie into the BHS and bought him a baby doll. Daphne was a chubby little toddler, with the tufted coif of a fifties housewife. Shuggie loved the doll. He put all his lager ladies in the bin after that.
Shuggie had been watching his mother quietly. He was always watching. She had raised three of them in the same mould, every single one of her children was as observant and wary as a prison warden.
“Howse aboots some light entertainment?” he asked, mimicking some nonsense from the telly.
Agnes flinched. With her painted nails she cupped his face and squeezed his dimples gently. She pushed until the boy’s bottom lip protruded. “Ab-oww-t,” she corrected. “Ab-OU-t.”
He liked the feeling of her hands on his face, and he cocked his head slightly and baited her. “Ab-ooo-t.”
Agnes frowned. She took her index finger and pushed it into his mouth, hooking his lower teeth. She gently pulled his jaw open, and held it down. “There’s no need to sink to their level, Hugh. Try it again.”
With her finger in his mouth, Shuggie pronounced it correctly if not clearly. It had the round, proper oww sound that she liked. Agnes nodded her approval and let go of his lip.
“Dus that mean the wee mooose wisnae loose aboot the hooose?” He was giggling before he could even finish the cheeky nonsense. Agnes hunkered down to chase him, and he squealed with happiness and terror as he raced around the bed.
A pile of cassettes sat next to the alarm clock. He raked through them, scattering them to the floor until he landed on the one he was after. Shug had bought the alarm clock for her. He had saved bricks of petrol coupons, rubber-banded together, and handed them to her like they were gold bullion. The plastic button released the cassette drawer. Shuggie punched the tape in and rewound it, screaming, to the beginning. It sounded tinny and hollow on the alarm clock, but she didn’t care. The music made the room feel less empty. Shuggie stood on the bed and put his arms on her shoulders. They swayed that way for a while. She kissed his nose. He kissed her nose.
As the song changed, Shuggie watched his mother clutch the can to her chest and spin around the room. Agnes screwed her eyes shut and went back to a place where she felt young and hopeful and wanted. Back to the Barrowland, where strange men would follow her hungrily across the ballroom and women would drop their eyes in jealousy. With fingers unfurling like a beautiful fan, she ran her hand over her body. Just above her hips, she touched the stubborn roll of fat she had earned from birthing her three weans. Suddenly her eyes opened, and she returned from the past, feeling rotten and stupid and lumpy.
“I hate this wallpaper. I hate those curtains and that bed and that fucking lamp.”
Shuggie rose to his stockinged feet on the soft bedspread. He wrapped his arms around her shoulders and tried to cling to her again, but this time she pushed him away.
The small flat was never quiet, the walls were too thin. There was always the drone of the big telly turned up too loud for her father. The low complaints of Catherine, with the telephone pulled into her bedroom, the cord saw-sawing the good veneer off the bottom of the door as she paced and moaned about the slights of being seventeen. There were neighbours on every side and on the sixteenth floor, the wind, always the pulsing wind, rattling against the ill-fitted windows.
Agnes put her head in her hands. She listened to her parents roar with laughter at some effeminate English comedian. Her eldest two were out, who knows where. They always seemed to be gone now, ducking her kisses, rolling their eyes at everything she said. She ignored Shuggie’s light breathing, and for a moment it was like she was not nearly forty, not a married woman with three children. She was Agnes Campbell again, stuck in her bedroom, listening to her parents through the wall.
“Dance for me,” she said suddenly. “Let’s have a wee party.” She stabbed at the alarm clock, and the cassette squealed forward, the slow sad music speeding up to something happier.
Shuggie lifted her lager can. He put it to his lips like it was a magical power juice. The bitter oaty flavour made him flinch, the way it tasted like fizzy ginger, milk, and porridge all at the same time. He danced for her, stepping side to side and clicking his fingers and missing every beat. When she laughed, he danced harder. He did whatever had caused her to laugh another dozen times till her smile stretched thin and false, and then he searched for the next move that would make her happy. He bounced and flung his arms out as she laughed and clapped. The happier she looked, the harder he wanted to spin and flail. The vibrating patterned wallpaper threatened to make him sick, but he kept going, punching the air and rattling his hips. Agnes threw her head back in peals of laughter, and the sadness was gone from her eyes. Shuggie snapped his fingers like a hardman and jutted his head, still missing the beat. It didn’t matter.
They were both breathless from laughing when they heard it.
In the hallway the front door opened and closed. It was more a sucking of wind and a contracting of space than a noise. Heavy footsteps came slowly up the carpet to the bedroom door. Agnes gathered the spent lager cans and hid them on the far side of the bed. She twisted the rings upright on her fingers and, turning expectantly to the door, she practised her most lighthearted smile. The heavy footsteps stopped outside. Agnes and Shuggie listened to the soft chink-clink of small change in a trouser pocket. Then there was a low sigh, and the footsteps passed on down the hallway to the living room. He was home for his first tea break. It should have been a time to spend together. Now she listened to Shug say hello to her parents, his voice flat and without warmth. Agnes knew her father would have looked up, the television reflected on his glasses, and smiled. There would be a moment when Wullie would have stood and offered Shug the comfy armchair. Both men would have circled it, in an awkward game of musical chairs, until Shug put his hand on Wullie’s shoulder and lowered him back into the seat. Lizzie, stony-faced, would have stood to boil the ketttle and shivered likely, as though it was not Shug but the cold Campsie wind itself that had arrived.
Agnes listened to it all through the wall. In a single sweep, she caught the creams and perfume bottles on her dresser and sent them across the room. The lamp lay broken on its side. The bare bulb glaring up at her changed her features so completely that it scared Shuggie. Everything had turned upside down so quickly.
Agnes sank to the edge of the bed. Shuggie could feel her can of lager spill on to the mattress and start to soak through his socks. Burying her face in his hair, she sobbed her dry, frustrated tears; her breath was clammy against his neck. Falling back on the bed, she pulled him down beside her. As she gripped him, he could see her face was lopsided, the paint on her eyes was blurred and running away. It looked like the lager beauties sometimes did, a careless printer and a misaligned screen, and suddenly the woman was no longer whole, just a mess of different layers.
Agnes reached across the mattress for her cigarettes, she lit one and sucking loudly, she coaxed the end into a blazing copper tip. She looked at the light for a moment, and her voice cracked with the poor me’s as she sang along with the cassette. Her right arm extended gracefully, and she held the glowing cigarette against the curtains. Shuggie watched as the ash started to smoulder and then gave off a grey smoke. He started to squirm as the smoke burst with a gasp into orange flame.
Agnes used her free arm and pulled him tighter towards her. “Shhh. Now be a big boy for your mammy.” There was a dead calmness in her eyes.
The room turned golden. The flames climbed the synthetic curtains and started rushing towards the ceiling. Dark smoke raced up as though