Shuggie Bain. Douglas Stuart
the back and was doing its best to hoist her enormous breasts off the shelf of her belly.
“Now those are the boobs I remember from when we were lassies,” said Agnes approvingly.
“Dear God, if only we had known then what we ken now, eh?” said Reeny. “I would have let any bastard that wanted a feel play wi’ them right then and there.”
Nan rolled her tongue lasciviously. “Pure shite! You were never one to keep your hand on your ha’penny anyway.” She was already keen to get back to business and was pushing coins around the table again. “Right, can we all stop looking at oorsels like a bunch of stupit lassies.” She gathered the cards back up and started shuffling the deck. The women still hadn’t drawn up their tops.
Lizzie tried to quietly burst the cellophane on a new cigarette packet. The other women were hawkish, growing sick of smoking harsh rollies and picking tobacco off the ends of their tongues. Lizzie sniffed, “I thought we were smoking our own?” But it was like eating ham hock in front of a pack of strays; they would give her no peace. She grudgingly passed around the fresh pack, and everyone lit up, enjoying the luxury of a manufactured cigarette. Nan sat back in her bra and held the smoke deep in her lungs as she closed her eyes. The air in the room grew hot and curdled again as the smoke swirled and danced with the paisley wallpaper.
Now and then fresh air pulled in and out of the sixteenth-floor window, and the women blinked at the sharpness of it. Lizzie drank her cold black tea and watched as the women all descended towards the darkness in their moods. Fresh air always did this to the drunk. The light, gossipy energy was leaving the room and being replaced by something stickier and thicker.
There was a new voice. “Mammy, he won’t go to sleep!”
Catherine stood in the living room doorway with a look of exasperation on her face. She held her little brother on her hip. He was becoming too big to be held like that, but Shuggie clung to her tight, and it was clear how he loved the bony comfort of her.
Catherine, sour-faced for sympathy, pinched at his wrists and pried him from her. “Please. I can’t handle him any more.”
The little boy ran to his mother, and Agnes swept Shuggie up into her arms. There was the static crackle of nylon pyjamas as she spun him, content at last to have someone to dance with.
Catherine ignored the fact that the women were sitting, half-naked, in new bras. She searched the debris of fish suppers. She preferred the smallest brown chips, the curly skins that spent too long in the fryer and became crispy in the hot fat.
Lizzie smoothed her hand across Catherine’s hip. Everything about her granddaughter seemed meagre, somehow unfeminine. At seventeen Catherine was long-limbed and boyish, with waist-length, poker-straight hair and no real curves. Fitted skirts seemed a disappointment on her. Lizzie had an absent-minded habit of rubbing her hand over her granddaughter’s hip, as if this might cause some sudden femininity to raise up. From pure routine, Catherine pushed Lizzie’s fussing hand away.
“Here!” said Lizzie. “Tell them about that smashin’ job ye’ve tain in the city.” She didn’t pause to let her granddaughter speak but instead turned to the women. “I’m that proud. Assistant to the chairman. That’s almost like being the gaffer yourself, eh?”
“Granny!”
Lizzie pointed to Agnes. “Well! That one thought she was going to get by on good looks. Thank fuck somebody’s got brains.” Lizzie crossed herself quickly. “I’ll gladly go up the confession for boasting.”
“And swearing,” said Catherine.
Nan Flannigan did not look up from her cards. “Now that ye’re working, doll. First thing to do is open two bank accounts. One for when ye take a man. The other one for yersel. And never fuckin’ tell him about it, eh.”
The women all murmured agreement at Nan’s wisdom.
“So, no more school then, hen?” asked Reeny.
Catherine stole a sly glance at her mother. “No. No more school. We need the money.”
“Aye. The state of the day’s world ye’ll be supporting any man ye do get.” The women all had men at home. Men rotting into the settee for want of decent work.
Nan was growing impatient again. She rubbed her chapped hands together. “Listen, Catherine, I love ye, hen.” She sounded insincere. “When ye are our first Scottish space cadet I’ll be sure and pack ye some sandwiches for yer trip. Till then . . .” She motioned to the cards, then pointed to the door. “Fuck off.”
Catherine slunk over to her mother and reluctantly took Shuggie from Agnes’s hip. Her little brother was fascinated by the plastic slider on his mother’s bra strap.
“Is our Alexander in for the night?” Agnes asked.
“Uh-huh. I think so.”
“What do you mean, you think so? Is Alexander in the bedroom or not?” The bedroom was too small to misplace a lanky fifteen-year-old. It barely held the bunk beds for Catherine and Leek and the single bed for Shuggie. Still, Leek was a quiet soul, given to watching from the edges, capable of disappearing even when someone was talking to him.
“Mammy, you know what Leek’s like. He might be.” That’s all she would say. Catherine spun on her heels, a whirling fan of chestnut hair, and as she carried Shuggie out of the room, she sank her fingernails into the soft of his thigh.
More hands of cards were dealt, more menage money was lost, and Agnes kept the records on rotation even though no one was paying any mind. Predictably, coins started piling in front of Nan as the piles of the others got smaller. Agnes, with her drink in hand, began to spin alone on the carpeted floor. “Oh, oh, oh. This is my song, ladies. Get up, get up!” Her twirling fingers implored them to their feet.
The women rose one by one, the unlucky ones happy to step away from Nan’s conspicuous pile of silver. They danced happily in their new bras and old cardigans. The floor bounced under their weight. Nan spun around a shrieking Ann Marie until the two of them knocked into the edge of the low tea table. The women danced with abandon and took big mouthfuls of lager out of old tea mugs. All their movement became concentrated in the shoulders and hips, rhythmic and lusty, like the young girls they saw on television. It was a certainty that the poor skinny husbands they kept at home would be suffocated later that night. The women, smelling of vinegar and stout, would go home and climb on top of them. Giggling and sweating, yet feeling for a moment like fifteen-year-olds again in their new bras. They would strip to holey tights and unclasp their swinging tits. It would be drunk open mouths, hot red tongues, and heavy clumsy flesh. Pure Friday-night happiness.
Lizzie didn’t dance. She had proclaimed herself off the drink. She and Wullie had tried to set a good example for the family. It had made her a bad Catholic to be tut-tutting at Agnes while enjoying a wee can or two herself. So she had stopped with the sweetheart stout and haufs of whisky, almost. Agnes looked over at her mammy sat with her cold mug of tea, and didn’t believe it for a minute. Sitting with a proud back, Lizzie’s eyes were still rheumy and damp-looking, her pink face clouded with a distant look.
Agnes knew Wullie and Lizzie had taken to slipping out of the room when they thought no one was watching. They would get up from the dinner table on a Sunday or make one too many trips to the bathroom. In secret they would sit on the edge of their big double bed with their bedroom door closed and pull plastic bags out from underneath. Into an old mug they would pour the bevvy and drink it quickly and quietly in the dark like teenagers. They would come back to the kitchen table and clear their throats, their eyes happier and glassier, and everyone would pretend not to smell the whisky. You only had to watch her father try to eat his Sunday soup to tell if he had a drink in him or not.
The record hissed to the end of the first side. Lizzie excused herself and wobbled off to the bathroom. Big Nan, thinking no one was looking, took the opportunity to peer slyly at Lizzie’s cards. Her eye caught a glint of unopened stout tins behind Wullie’s old comfy chair. “Jackpot!” she shouted. “That auld yin has a hidden carry-oot