Shuggie Bain. Douglas Stuart
potatoes and dropping them into an old plastic bag.
Agnes set her deckchair a respectful distance from her mother and her gang. Lizzie barely looked up from her paper, and Agnes knew she was being punished. She tried to settle herself casually into the warmth of the sun, but her eyes kept flitting to Lizzie, wanting only a sliver of friendship to ease the loneliness in her chest.
There was new graffiti on the wall above Lizzie. It sprang like a dirty thought bubble from her curls: Don’t be Shy . . . Shows Yer Pie. To Lizzie, the graffiti could have been a helpful plea to a bashful baker. Agnes knew better and couldn’t help but laugh.
Lizzie scowled at her. “What do you find so funny?”
It was the first time she had spoken since the front-room chapel that morning, and Agnes took a moment to consider whether she felt like encouraging it or ruining it. “Nothing. Where’s my wee man?”
Lizzie answered as spartanly as she could. “At the bakers, getting his cake.” She went back to her paper.
Agnes knew the routine. Saturday and Sunday afternoons, Wullie walked with his grandson the half mile or so to the shops. It was a scant row of half-shuttered storefronts set into a shadowed recess that never seemed to catch the daylight. They had dragged families out of the old Glasgow tenements for this scheme, and it was meant to be different, futuristic, a grand improvement. But in reality the whole scheme was too brutal, too spartan, too poorly built to be any better.
Shuggie would stand well behaved inside the Paki shop while his granda bought a noose of sweetheart stouts and a half-bottle of whisky, enough to carry them through Saturday night and discreetly through the Sabbath. The growing boy gave Wullie and Imran something to talk about as the bags were loaded with the alcohol. It was a routine in which neither man was allowed to acknowledge the drink moving between them, as though it would have broken the charade. Across the shadows, inside the bakery, Wullie would make small talk with the pretty girls while Shuggie greedily eyed the cakes. Shuggie always chose the same bright pink sponge pyramid, covered in red and white desiccated coconut and trimmed with a sugary sweetie on top. He would walk home very slowly in Wullie’s shadow, enjoying his spoils.
Agnes looked in the direction of the shops but couldn’t see them. She rose and stood on the edge of the waste ground. In her black bra she threw her head back and stretched her arms wide to enjoy the sun’s tingle on her pale skin. She caught a sideways glance from Lizzie. There was the start of a puce bruise on her lower back. It was this that held her mother’s attention. Agnes’s ringed fingers traced the belt welt, and she winced dramatically.
Lizzie stiffened proudly and said, “For the love of God. Cover yourself.”
The women peeling potatoes exchanged a sympathetic glance that said they knew how bruises could be more plentiful than hugs in a marriage, and not just for the women. Agnes was not to be told. Irritated now, she collapsed into the deckchair again and bounced it gracelessly like it was a child’s space hopper, bouncing, bouncing, till she was sat closer to her mother.
Agnes sprawled out luxuriously, her skin already poaching to a light rose colour. She reached out her foot and played with the hem of Lizzie’s yellow floral dress like a child. Lizzie lowered her newspaper and pushed Agnes’s foot away. “Stop fussing with me,” she said. “You’ve got a cheek to show your face around me this morning.” Lizzie undid the tea towel wrapped around her curlers. She opened a plastic bag at her side and started unravelling her hair.
Agnes took her mother’s pick comb and slouched in the sticky deckchair again. “My head is throbbing.”
Lizzie drew out a curler and held the kirby grip between her lips. “Oh, poor you. I hope you don’t expect any sympathy.”
“You should have stopped him.”
Lizzie was watching Agnes out of the side of her eyes now. “M’lady, let me tell you, in forty years of marriage I have never once seen your father raise his hand in anger.” She turned to the women with the potatoes. “You know, Maigret, he’s that soft I thought he’d come back dead a week into that bloody War.”
“Aye, he’s a fine man, right enough.” The potato women nodded in unison.
Lizzie turned back to her daughter. “I don’t want you dragging his good name down with your own.”
Agnes ran the pick through a painted tangle. “Am I that low?”
“Low?” Lizzie scoffed. “Do you know I’ve just been sat here on my lonesome getting a wee bit of colour, and I’ve no been able to get any peace from anybody. A woman cannae even run her messages, but she’s got to cross this grass and ask me, how I’m holding up?”
“People should mind their own.”
“I’m just after having Janice McCluskie drag her Mongoloid son across those weeds to me. She goes, ‘I’ve heard your Agnes has no been keeping that well. How’s her wee problem?’” Lizzie’s knuckles were white with indignation as she twisted a kirby grip. “I’m sat here with my dress unbuttoned down to my God’s glory and that pair of mouth-breathers gawping down at me.”
“Ignore them, Mammy.”
“Bastards! No keeping well? No fucking keeping well!” Her hands clawed at the imagined offenders in front of her. Lizzie exhaled loudly, and her anger shifted to a look of tired defeat. “I don’t deserve their hand-wringing, Agnes. I’ve worked hard my whole life without a day’s rest, and for what?”
Agnes knew the next line well enough. Agnes still shook her head.
“So you could have everything you ever wanted.”
Lizzie seemed so far away then. Agnes had the urge to wrap her mother in her arms, beg for her forgiveness, even though she felt not a shred of remorse. “Can’t we be pals again?”
“No. It’s not as simple as that any more.” The corners of Lizzie’s mouth turned down in a mocking way. “Let’s just kiss and make up? No, I think not.” She uncurled another clump of hair. “How many women will it take, Agnes?”
Agnes bristled. “I need a cigarette.”
“You need a lot of things.” Then she added, “You should have stayed married to that Catholic.”
Agnes rooted around in her mother’s curler bag. She took out the Embassy packet and put two cigarettes in her mouth. She took a long draw and held the smoke inside for a long while. “Jesus can’t pay my catalogue.”
Lizzie gave a fake laugh. “No. But hell will mend you.”
Agnes got up then and sat on the blanket by her mother’s side. The lit cigarette was a measly peace offering, but Lizzie took it and said, “Help me take out these curls. I must look half-mental.” Agnes took her mother’s head in her hands and ran her fingers through the thinning hair. Lizzie softened slightly. “You know, your faither always used to come in on a Friday night, half past six. Every other working fella on the street would go missing. There wouldn’t be a man’s voice till Sunday afternoon, not in all of Germiston. I remember that you could hang out that window and watch them all stoat home on a Sunday teatime. All of them addled wi’ the drink.”
The potato peelers were nodding in unison again. Lizzie said, “I’m no judging the men. That was just what they did in those days. If you wanted your housekeeping money you had to go dig your man out of the pub on a Friday teatime. But your faither would come singing Friday night, his wage packed in his hand and a fresh parcel under his arm. Silly fool would have been down that market on his way back from Meadowside and picked up a wee dress or a new coat for you. I never knew a man know the size of his weans, let alone go shopping for them. I used to tell him to stop it, he was spoiling you. But he would say, ‘What’s the harm?’”
“Mammy, I can’t talk about this again.”
“Honestly, I was that happy for you when you married that Brendan McGowan. He seemed like he could give you what your faither had given me. But look at you, you had to want better.”