Shuggie Bain. Douglas Stuart
Agnes Bain pushed her toes into the carpet and leaned out as far as she could into the night air. The damp wind kissed her flushed neck and pushed down inside her dress. It felt like a stranger’s hand, a sign of living, a reminder of life. With a flick she watched her cigarette dout fall, the glowing embers dancing sixteen floors down on to the dark forecourt. She wanted to show the city this claret velvet dress. She wanted to feel a little envy from strangers, to dance with men who held her proud and close. Mostly she wanted to take a good drink, to live a little.
With a stretch of her calves, she leaned her hipbone on the window frame and let go of the ballast of her toes. Her body tipped down towards the amber city lights, and her cheeks flushed with blood. She reached her arms out to the lights, and for a brief moment she was flying.
No one noticed the flying woman.
She thought about tilting further then, dared herself to do it. How easy it would be to kid herself that she was flying, until it became only falling and she broke herself on the concrete below. The high-rise flat she still shared with her mother and father pressed in against her. Everything in the room behind her felt so small, so low-ceilinged and stifling, payday to Mass day, a life bought on tick, with nothing that ever felt owned outright.
To be thirty-nine and have her husband and her three children, two of them nearly grown, all crammed together in her mammy’s flat, gave her a feeling of failure. Him, her man, who when he shared her bed now seemed to lie on the very edge, made her feel angry with the littered promises of better things. Agnes wanted to put her foot through it all, or to scrape it back like it was spoilt wallpaper. To get her nail under it and rip it all away.
With a bored slouch, Agnes fell back into the stuffy room and felt the safety of her mammy’s carpet below her feet again. The other women hadn’t looked up. Peevishly, she scraped the needle across the record player. She clawed at her hairline and turned the volume up too loud. “Come on, please, just the one wee dance?”
“T’chut, no yet,” spat Nan Flannigan. She was feverish and arranging silver and copper coins into neat piles. “I’m just about to pimp out the lot of ye.”
Reeny Sweeny rolled her eyes and held her cards close. “Ye have one filthy mind!”
“Well, don’t say I didnae warn ye.” Nan bit the end off a slab of fried fish and sucked the grease from her lips. “When I am done taking all your menage money at these cards ye’re gonnae hiv to go home and fuck that bag o’ soup bones you call a husband for more.”
“No chance!” Reeny made a lazy sign of a cross. “I’ve been sitting on it since Lent, and I’ve got no intention of letting him get at it until next Christmas.” She pushed a fat golden chip into her mouth. “I once held aff so long I got a new colour telly in the bedroom.”
The women cackled without breaking their concentration on the cards. It was sweaty and close in the front room. Agnes watched her mammy, little Lizzie, carefully studying her hand, flanked by the bulk of Nan Flannigan on one side and Reeny Sweeny on the other. The women sat thigh to thigh and tore at the last scraps of a fish supper. They were moving coins and folding cards with greasy fingers. Ann Marie Easton, the youngest amongst them, was concentrating on rolling mean-looking cigarettes of loose tobacco on her skirt. The women spilt their housekeeping money on to the low tea table and were pushing five- and ten-pence bets back and forward.
It bored Agnes. There was a time before baggy cardigans and skinny husbands that she had led them all up to the dancing. As girls, they had clung to one another like a string of pearls and sang at the top of their voices all the way down Sauchiehall Street. They had been underage, but Agnes, sure of herself even at fifteen, knew she would get them in. The doormen always saw her gleaming at the back of the line and beckoned her forward, and she pulled the other girls behind her like a chain gang. They held on to the belt of her coat and muttered protest, but Agnes just smiled her best smile for the doormen, the smile she kept for men, the same one she hid from her mother. She had loved to show off her smile back then. She got her teeth from her daddy’s side and the Campbell teeth had always been weak, they were a reason for humility in an otherwise handsome face. Her own adult teeth had come in small and crooked, and even when they were new they had never been white because of the smoking and her mammy’s strong tea. At fifteen she had begged Lizzie to let her have them all taken out. The discomfort of the false teeth was nothing when compared to the movie star smile she thought they must give her. Each tooth was broad and even and as straight as Elizabeth Taylor’s.
Agnes sucked at her porcelain. Now here they were, every Friday night, these same women playing cards in her mammy’s front room. There was not a single drop of make-up between them. Nobody had much of a heart to sing any more.
She watched the women fight over a few pounds in copper coins and let out a bored huff. Friday card school was the one thing they looked forward to all week. It was meant to be their respite from ironing in front of the telly and heating tins of beans for ungrateful weans. Big Nan usually went home with the winnings from the kitty, except for the times when Lizzie would have a lucky-handed winning streak and got a slap for it. Big Nan couldn’t help herself. She got jumpy around money and didn’t like to lose it. Agnes had seen her mother get a black eye over ten bob.
“Haw you!” Nan was shouting at Agnes, who was engrossed with her own reflection in the window. “Ye’re bloody cheatin’!”
Agnes rolled her eyes and took a long mouthful of flat stout. It was too slow a bus for where she wanted to go. So she filled her gullet with stout and wished it was vodka.
“Leave her be,” said Lizzie. She knew that faraway look.
Nan returned her gaze to her cards. “Might have known you two were in cahoots. Thieving bastards the pair o’ ye!”
“I’ve never stolen a thing in my life!” said Lizzie.
“Liar! I’ve seen ye at the end of a shift. Lumpy as porridge and heavy as oats! Stuffing your work pinny full of rolls of hospital toilet paper and bottles of dish soap.”
“Do you know the price of that nonsense?” asked Lizzie indignantly.
“Aye, of course I do,” sniffed Nan. “Because I actually pay for mine.”
Agnes had been floating around the room, unable to settle. Now she nearly upended the card table with an armful of plastic shopping bags. “I bought youse a wee present,” she said.
Nan usually wouldn’t have allowed the interruption, but a gift was free and she knew better than to pass that by. She tucked her cards securely into her cleavage, and as they passed the plastic bags around, each woman drew out a small box. For a while they sat in silence contemplating the picture on the front. Lizzie spoke first, a little affronted. “A bra? What am I wanting with a bra?”
“It’s no just any bra. It’s one of those Cross Your Heart bras. It does wonders for your shape.”
“Try it, Lizzie!” said Reeny. “Auld Wullie will be at you like it’s the Fair Fortnight!”
Ann Marie took her bra from the box; it was clearly too small. “This bra isnae my size!”
“Well, I tried my best to guess. I got a couple of spare, so mind and check all of them.” Agnes was already unzipping the back of her dress. The alabaster of her shoulders was shocking against the claret of the velvet. She unhooked her old bra and her porcelain breasts slid out; she slipped herself quickly into a new bra, and her breasts lifted several centimetres. Agnes dipped and spun for the women. “A fella was selling them off the back of a lorry down Paddy’s Market. Five for twenty pound. Pure magic, eh?”
Ann Marie rummaged and found her size. She was more modest than Agnes, so turned her back to the room as she took off her cardigan and slipped off her old bra. The heaviness of her tits had left red strap welts on her shoulders. Soon all the women except for Lizzie had unfolded their dresses or unsnapped their work coveralls and were sitting in their new bras. Lizzie sat with her arms across her chest. The others, almost bare from the waist up, were running their hands along the satin straps and staring down at their