Seventeen 10 страница

Shug finished the last of his milk. “But I was looking forward to seeing you on that rank. ”

“You might see him on the Renfrew Street rank yet, ” said Catherine, as she helped Shuggie into the new boots. She turned her head, spoke to Donald Jnr over the small bones of her shoulder. “I have a career of my own, you know. I can’t just up sticks and follow you around like a shadow. ”

Shug watched her try to master his nephew and laughed. “Donnie Boy! You thought you were on to a sure thing, but look how the Catholics are revolting. ”

Donald Jnr turned to his uncle. “It’s a good job in the palladium mines. Out in Transvaal, I think it’s called. They telt us they will take nearly all the Govan riveters, fly us out there, find us somewhere to live. Even give us a month in advance. Yasssss! Soooth Efrika. Boyeee. ”

“Youse gonnae be a Kaffir master! ” said Shug, his bottom lip stuck out in genuine pride.

“Don’t use that horrible word in front of the boy, ” Catherine said. She helped her brother on to his feet and turned him towards the door. “Go play in the hall. Make sure and shut that door behind you. ” They watched him go, his arms stretched out for balance, his fingers splayed upwards like pretty bird wings. Shuggie pushed off each step into a gliding graceful swoosh, but each boot embedded soon enough into the deep pile carpet. They watched him clomp out into the hallway, his face split from ear to ear in a smile.

Shug sucked his teeth in disappointment. “I don’t think that boy is mine. ”

Shuggie lowered his arms. He stopped gliding across the carpet. Suddenly he could feel just how heavy the old roller boots really were.

Shug turned to Catherine and asked, “What do ye think she’ll say when she hears I’ve seen him? ”

Catherine looked at Shuggie, she could see the scalding in his cheeks. “Oh no. We can’t ever say he’s been here. ”

A mean smile broke over Shug’s face. He spoke in the pushing voice that bullies in school used when they wanted to see a fight. “Go on. Let him tell her. ”

With a shove, Catherine closed the door between them. Shuggie could hear his father roar with laughter. He heard Catherine ask, “Why on earth did you ask me to bring him if you are going to be such a bloody bully? ”

Shuggie spent the afternoon wearing lines in the hall carpet, trying as hard as he could to ruin it. He listened to the adults fight about something he thought was called Joanna’s Bird that lived in the south of Africa. He heard Catherine say she would be settled there by Christmas. He wondered what black people were like and why they needed Donald Jnr to make them work better. He wondered why his big sister had to go off and leave him.

Thirteen

The black slag hills stretched for miles like the waves of a petrified sea. The coke dust left a thin grey coating across Leek’s face. It hollowed out his already gaunt features, outlining the thick horse bone of his nose, and darkened the fine hairs of his scant moustache. His feathered fringe had stopped bouncing up and down and lay heavy and grey against his forehead. He looked like a man made of graphite, like one of his own black-and-white drawings.

It was slow-going, climbing up the crumbling black hill. It sucked at his feet and with every step it ate him nearly to his knees. The fine jet dust found every opening and filled every space. It poured over the top of his slip-on loafers, their braided tassels swinging up clouds of black like the tail of a dirty cow. On the downward slope the loose slag raged after him like a hungry wave. Although there was nothing to him, his hollowness still brought the crust of the hill pouring down. The slag shrugged as though it were turning itself inside out, clearing him off and revealing a darker, untouched blackness beneath. Each time the hills wiped him away he felt more unnoticed, more like an unseen ghost than usual.

Crossing the black sea was best when it wasn’t windy or wet. When the wind licked the dry hills they took to the air like the inside of a burst Etch A Sketch, like the lead dust from a million shaved pencils. If it caught in his mouth, he could taste it for days. When it rained over the colliery, the hills felt tired and beaten. They solidified, as if they had given up and died.

Leek climbed to the top of the highest bing and sat down. He lit a short doubt and looked out over the dead colliery and the dying scheme that lay beyond. Like a diorama, it sat orderly and uniform in the peaty marshland, the way a model maker’s collection of toy houses sat on a balding brown carpet. Even from here Leek thought it looked petty and small.

He took his sketchbook from inside his anorak. His sooty fingers left smudges as he tried to capture the horizon with the broad side of a soft pencil. If the Pit scheme had been made by a model maker, then what a miser he must have been. Where were the miniature tin cars, the farm animals, or the green fluffy bushes that looked like spiny sea coral? Leek watched the black-jacketed figures loitering around the men’s club and wondered whether the model maker didn’t like colourful, happily painted figurines.

He looked out over the scene, past the pipe-cleaner trees and the carpet of dead marsh. The Glasgow to Edinburgh train seemed like a toy in the distance as it charged through the wasteland that separated the miners from the world. It created an unseen boundary, and it never ever stopped. Years ago the council had ripped out the only station, for big savings in stationmaster wages. They laid on a single bus that came three times a day and took an hour to get anywhere.

Now, in the evenings, the eldest of the miners’ sons stood at the train tracks with beers and bags of glue and watched with sadness and spite the happy faces roar by every thirty minutes. They fondled their cousins’ tits under baggy Aran jumpers and ran across the tracks in front of the speeding train, their soft hair whipped by the near miss. They threw bottles of piss at the windows, and when the driver let fly his angry horn, they felt seen by the world, they felt alive.

Since the colliery had closed they had taken to laying branches across the tracks, thick brown limbs that they had to bounce up and down on to rip from the dying trees. When the trains severed them easily, the boys left stones and then later red builder’s bricks. A boy not much older than Shuggie had lost an eye from the flying, sparking rocks. So instead, armed with cans of lighter gas meant for sniffing, they started to set fires in the reeds. Leek had watched as they set the brown marsh on either side of the tracks ablaze. Still the Glasgow trains would not stop.

Leek scored his chewed pencil through the desolate view. He didn’t realize it, sitting there alone, but while he drew his hunched shoulders fell from around his ears.

It was getting harder to get up in the mornings, to let the day in, to come back to his body and stop floating around behind his eyelids, where he was free. He was turning up later and later for his apprenticeship. The gaffer was giving up, Leek could see it. They floated by each other with equal disinterest.

At first the gaffer, a sinewy, pragmatic man, had given the well-practiced speeches. As the apprenticeship went on, and Leek kept staring through him, the speeches slowly filled with bitter bile. Leek nodded like a metronome through the spit-stained lecture on how his generation was ruining the country. The gaffer, fair frothing at the mouth, reached out and pushed Leek’s fringe away with a rough palm. The young man’s eyes were empty as two dull marbles. The man had seen it all in his thirty years in the building trade: generations of weans dragged in on government schemes, lazy and disinterested or mouthy and fly. Over time they would break and fall into their place, grow up into men who got lassies into bother and needed the steady wage. In all his years he’d never met a soul like this boy before.

Angry, the gaffer drew his short pencil from behind his ear and with a set jaw stabbed it a half inch from Leek’s face. Leek never flinched, he’d practiced that for Agnes. He locked the door that lay behind his eyes and walked away, leaving the body, the plaster dust, the flask of cold tea, and the angry gaffer behind.

The gaffer might have let him go, but this was a YTS, and as long as Thatcher was subsidising his wages the man would let him stay on. They would always need a tea maker. The older joiners took to sending Leek to the store for tartan paint. They made him check boxes of half-inch nails and sort them into ascending sizes. Leek just shrugged his shoulders to their laughter and went on his way, happy to be losing his body in their monotonous, fruitless tasks, his mind floating free about the world.

Now, in the silence, he turned the pages of the sketchbook and drew two envelopes from the back leaf. The first envelope was a thin, colourful airmail letter, neat sky-blue paper that folded on itself, and was sent with a row of springbok stamps from Catherine in Transvaal. He turned it in his hands and wished it didn’t make him so heartsick to read it. He wished her excitement for patio furniture and biltong sausages didn’t make him feel so much like a discarded thing, something so easily left behind.

Still, Leek thought this new sadness was better than the anger he had felt at first. Sadness made for a better houseguest; at least it was quiet, reliable, consistent. When Catherine had first married Donald Jnr, they had all been angry. Agnes, soaked through with vodka, had dragged Catherine’s mattress out to the kerb. She had managed it single-handedly, and the boys could only stand back as the last of their sister was set amongst the black bags.

Leek took up the second letter. It was dirty now, creased at the corners from hours spent reading and rereading. The envelope was a thick cream paper, mottled, like expensive watercolour stock. Someone had written his name in black calligrapher’s ink, Mr Alexander Bain, taking the effort to level it off with a neat ruler line. Leek opened the envelope and unfolded the typed letter. The paper snapped with quality. His dirty fingers traced the familiar crest at the top of the page; he could have read it with his eyes closed.

Dear Mr Bain,

I am pleased to inform you that after careful review of your application and your portfolio we are happy to offer you an unconditional place on the BA (Hons) Fine Art course …

Leek folded the letter and slid it carefully back into the envelope. He knew it said that they would send him more information, that he had to contact the registrar of the fine-art course to accept the coveted space. He knew it said he should start in September. But that was already a September two years ago. He thought back to the time when he had received the letter. He saw Shug leave. He saw Catherine watch the door and his funny little brother, hungry and fearful, while his mother sat with her head in the gas oven.

It was cold and quiet on the petrified sea; that was why he liked it. Lost in his daydream, he ignored the sound at first, until it got closer and grew more insistent, the horrible farting of sucking wellies. Shuggie appeared, red and flushed, on the crest of the slag bing. The usual creamy colours of him were muted by a layer of dust, but there were wet pink circles around his eyes and mouth. Leek hid the letter in the sketchbook and carefully tucked it all back inside his jerkin.

“I asked you to wait! ” moaned Shuggie. His bottom lip was a pink bubble in the grey dirt.

“If you cannae keep up, then don’t ask to come. ” He felt sure they’d had this conversation before; he felt like they were always having it. Leek stood up and took off again. He looked like a daddy-long-legs trying to glide on the surface of inky black water, his blue nylon anorak as shiny as the shell of a beetle. He tried to lose his little brother by bolting down the steep sides in large jumps. He had hoped the boy would stop and turn for home. Still Shuggie kept on.

Leek listened to his brother panting like an asthmatic at his back, it was breaking his peace. He should have told him that he couldn’t come, but his brother was a notorious grass. Shuggie had learned this skill well but was clumsy at using it. He would spill the worst information for the littlest reward, and he almost always went too far. Agnes, when provoked, could chase Leek round the house with a heavy Dr Scholl’s sandal; the flat rubber sole left purple welts floating in red slap marks, which got Shuggie grinning like butter wouldn’t melt.

Leek had wondered why his mother even cared if he wandered the dead mine. He was sure it wasn’t the danger of the slag or the bottomless black water in the old quarry. It was the dust that bothered Agnes. It was what the neighbours must think when they saw him come back covered in soot and dirt. How she could no longer pretend that she was nothing like them, that she was better born and stuck only temporarily in their forgotten corner of misery. It was pride, not danger, that made her so angry.

With a flick of his loafer Leek sent a shower of slag backwards and listened to the small cough and whine. Shuggie made a growling sound like an angry badger, and Leek laughed and resolved to make him do it again on the way back home.

Leek galloped down the last of the hills and waited for his brother at the bottom. The tide of slag moved like a landslide. Shuggie took large windmilling leaps, and on his second or third step the slag suddenly solidified. His legs moved too fast, and with a sharp shriek he pitched forward on to his front and slid the rest of the way on his face. He came to a rasping stop, and the slag rose silently around him, swallowing him like a hungry grave. Leek reached down and with one hand lifted the boy clear of the coal by the strap on his backpack. A small black face with two white eyes blinked up at him in confusion and fear.

Leek couldn’t help but laugh. “What have I told you? You have to take it lighter on the way down, else you’ll set the whole side of the fucking thing moving. ”

“I know, but it starts sliding and I get a fright that I might get buried. ” Shuggie shook the slag from his black hair. “Mammy would burst you if I died. ”

Leek set the boy down. “Do you have to be so annoying? Why can’t you just be normal for once. ”

The boy turned from his brother. “I am normal. ”

Leek thought he could see the pink rise on the back of Shuggie’s neck. His shoulders shuddered with the start of tears. Leek spun his brother back around. “Don’t turn away from me when I’m talking to you. ” Leek studied his face closely. It hadn’t been rising tears; Leek knew the flush of shame and frustration well enough. “Are the kids at school still battering you? ”

“No. ” He twisted free from Leek’s grip. “Sometimes. ”

“Don’t let it bother you. They see the one thing that’s a bit more special than them and then they just pile on. ”

Shuggie looked up. “I told Father Barry on them. I asked him to make it stop. ” Shuggie straightened the pleat on his trousers. “But he only made me stay behind after bell. He made me read about the persecuted saints. ”

Leek tried not to smirk. “What a useless old bastard. That’s just the way of the Chapel: ‘Stop complaining, it could be worse. ’” He kicked off his tasselled loafer and, bending over, emptied it of slag dust. “You know when I was at school they said there was a Father that was diddling this one quiet boy. Can you imagine that? ” He lifted his eyes and met Shuggie’s face. “Has he ever touched you, Shuggie? Father Barry, that is. ”

A cloud passed over Shuggie’s face, dark enough to make Leek stop ridding himself of coal dust. “No, ” he said quietly. Then the words started tumbling out quicker than he could organize them. “But they said I did things to him. They said I did dirty things. But I never. I promise. I don’t even know what those things are. ”

“I believe you, Shuggity. They are just bamming you up. ” Leek took his brother in his arms, and in a great crushing hug he mashed the boy’s face into his ribs. “Anyhows, how old are you now? ”

Shuggie didn’t answer right away, he was happy to be suffocated. Then he spoke in a very considered tone, like he was reciting some fact in front of a dusty blackboard. “July sixteenth. Four twenty in the afternoon. You were a difficult birth, Leek, a very difficult birth. ”

“Fuck’s sake! ”

Shuggie buried his face deeper into Leek’s side. “I just think we should know things like that about one another. ” Then he added sullenly, “Eight. I’m nearly eight and a half. ”

“Sakes! Why couldn’t you just say that? Anyway, you’re big enough. It’s time you tried to blend in more. You have to try and be more like those other wee bams. ”

Shuggie turned his head and gasped for air. “I am trying, Leek. I try all the time. Those boys let their shirt tails hang out like they have no shame, and all they do is kick that stupid bladder about. I’ve even seen them put their fingers down the back of their trousers and then smell it. It’s so … It’s so …” He searched for the word. “Common. ”

Leek let him go. “If you want to survive, you need to try harder, Shuggie. ”

“How? ”

“Well, first, never say common again. Wee boys shouldn’t talk like old women. ” Leek hauched a wad of phlegm. “And you should try to watch how you walk. Try not to be so swishy. It only puts a target on your back. ” Leek made a great pantomime of walking like Shuggie. His feet were pointed neatly outwards, his hips dipped and rolled, and the arms swung by his side like there was no solid bone in them. “Don’t cross your legs when you walk. Try and make room for your cock. ” Leek grabbed at the bulge in the front of his corduroy and strode back and forth in a half strut, half lazy amble. “Don’t bend your knees so much. Take longer, straighter steps. ”

Leek walked around in easy natural circles. Shuggie followed in his wake like a mimic. He was trying his hardest to hold his arms tight. It was hard to make it look natural.

They strutted like two cowboys across the flat upturned earth. On the face of the mine sat the main colliery building. As big as Glasgow Cathedral, the abandoned building sat like a lonely giant on the moon. Large broken windows were set in simple arches, too high for a view but high enough to catch all the day’s light for the cavernous inside. The windows that remained intact were blacked out with coal dust. At the far end of the building a large smokestack towered into the sky, and on wet days you could barely see the top for the soaking clouds. Pipes and rods lay scattered on the ground, the hurried tearing of hacksaws visible in the ends, looters taking what they could strip before the mine was officially dismantled for scrap.

“I want you to wait here. ” Leek marked a cross in the dirt. He reached over his brother’s head and, grabbing the handle of the backpack, spun him around. He unzipped the little zippers, and Shuggie buckled at the weight of him rooting through the bag. “You are to keep lookout, right? If you see anybody then come and get me right away. ” Leek drew bolt cutters and a crowbar from the backpack.

The little boy nodded, feeling lighter already. “Why have we got to do this anyway? ”

“I’ve telt you a thousand times. I need to save money. I’ve got plans. I can’t be a YTS apprentice forever. ”

“Am I in your plans? ” asked Shuggie.

“Don’t fuck about. ” He pointed to the colliery. “It’s getting harder every time, cos there’s less and less for the taking, so I might be gone awhile. Do you hear? ” With a loud zip Leek closed the empty backpack and spun his brother back around. “Keep your eyes open. ” Leek slid into the darkness of the colliery building. Shuggie watched him cross the pools of dim daylight, and then he was gone into the dark corners of the coal cathedral.

For a while Shuggie drew in the dirt. The stour was deep and soft. He drew a horse and then he drew Agnes. He liked to draw curly hair. He drew it on everything. It looked cheerful.

Leek crossed to the very back of the building, intent on stripping the copper from the far wall where the cables met the lighting generator. Closed for less than three years, the mine was sealed and slowly being dismantled, the owners selling it for scrap. The miners and their eldest boys had been trying to beat them to it. The copper in the wires was worth its weight, so they stripped junction boxes, ripped up the cables, and gnawed it all bare like mice. Leek saw the rubber casings were already pulled from the wall and what lay on the floor was empty, like marrowless bones. He followed the cable outside to where the wires started to run underground towards the main shaft. A hundred feet from the back of the colliery building the cable stuck up in the air. The last salvager had pulled all he could and left it sprouting like a ruptured artery. Leek bent and with the sharp end of the crowbar began to break the hard dirt.

He was at it for an hour or so and lifted his head only when he could smell the house fires come on in the scheme. The smell of the burning coal told him it was getting late in the afternoon. They were safer back across the black sea before it got dark.

As he hacked and sawed he wished Shuggie was bigger, wasn’t such a whiny runt, that way he could have carried more. The copper itself was heavy but the thick rubber casing was a killer. It wasn’t clever to strip the wire there in the open face of the colliery. A couple of the younger Pithead boys had been caught stealing the copper and been done for it. It cost them more in fines than you’d make from stripping the whole Pit of its wiring.

Leek wrapped a disappointing length of rubber wire around himself several times like a climbing rope. Swinging his crowbar, he crossed the grey pools of light and emerged into the dark winter afternoon. He cheered himself with thoughts of the room he would rent one day, at the very top of Garnethill near the Mackintosh Art School, with the extra copper money he’d been setting aside. There was even enough for a wee bribe for his brother, the grass. He almost smiled as he stepped back into the daylight, but it was too quiet. The grass was gone.

Shuggie would have liked to have thrown stones. That was fun. Last time he had spent an hour trying to reach the high windows and finally put one in. It made a loud crashing sound in the silence. Leek came hurtling out of the darkness and leathered him for that.

Instead he was walking in wide circles, he stopped every so often to grab at the empty front of his trousers and kick his legs a little wider like a cowboy. He was deep in concentration, trying to imagine a normal body like Leek’s, which hardly seemed to have any graceful or usable joints at all, when he finally saw the man. By the time he registered the danger, the strange man was running with plumes of slag dirt dancing at his heels. By the time Shuggie realized he should also run, the man was past the massive winding towers and almost on him.

Shuggie was supposed to warn Leek. He was supposed to keep watch and run into the colliery when the bogey was up. The man was coming down on him, and Shuggie looked at the darkness inside the building and he ran the other way.

The empty backpack danced from side to side as Shuggie bolted. He took the first hill at a run, attacking the side of it, sinking knee-deep, wellies farting indecently. By the time he reached the top he saw that the man was scaling the side of the hill in long strides like Leek did, digging each foot in and flying over the loose slag. Shuggie turned along the crest of the black dune and ran for his life. He could feel the stranger’s determination, he could almost feel the man’s hands on his legs. As he flew down the far side, the earth roared after him, and with a grainy splash he fell into the valley between two hills. The man appeared at the top. Shuggie watched him stand there against the darkening sky, his shoulders spread and fell, and his hands balled into frustrated fists.

Shuggie ran through the black valley, but the man followed like a kestrel on a mouse.

The slag hills were ending, only the hummocky peat fields lay beyond. The man could sail down the slag and catch him easily, so the boy ran faster, across the shale and weedy slag, past the point where the grass won the battle and the brown fields began. He stumbled through the weeds, listening for the flattening of grass behind him. But there were no more footsteps.

Shuggie reached a thick tuft of yellow grass and threw himself down in a heap. The man stood at the top of the last hill, his shoulders rising and falling as he cupped his hands to his mouth and hollered: “I’ll get ye, ya wee thieving bastard! ” Then he was gone.

Shuggie lay still in the clump of long weeds until he was sure the man was truly gone. He lay there so long that his front was wet through, as the peat happily released the damp from the last rain into his clothes, dead earth having no use for it. The slag sea lay between him and the scheme, and the man lay between him and home. What the man would do to him flowered in his imagination, a montage of cartoon bogeyman violence. Shuggie didn’t want to be buried forever in the slag sea. He wanted to go home. The ground flushed warm as he pissed himself.

The winter afternoon was dying quickly, the sunless sky was a solid blanket of fleecy greys. Shuggie began walking around the slag hills, keeping to the fringe of marshland that encircled it. It was slow-going, and his legs were red raw from the indigo dye leaching from his trousers. He came to a wide crater in the ground, a sunken frying-pan-shaped stretch of dark grey mud that collapsed into the earth like the centre of an underbaked cake. The walk around the outside would take too long. If he could cut across the middle he would be home in no time. The dim glow of the scheme lay on the far side, warming the low-hanging clouds like a bedside lamp. Shuggie crudely blessed himself and climbed down into the crater.

The sunken ground was only ten or so feet below ground level, but the sides of the earth were steep, and as he slid down the slag he wondered if he would be able to climb back up. With a wet thud he landed at the bottom. From the safety of the crumbling edge he stretched his leg out and tapped the surface of the crater. It was wet and sticky, but like a slimy bar of soap it was more or less solid. He took one foot and tested it on the smooth surface. It held. He lifted it and looked at the wellie footprint, it lingered for a moment, and then like magic it disappeared.

Boldly he took a quick couple of steps on to the smooth surface, stopped, and ran back to the rocky edge. He watched the ghostly footsteps disappear. It was like he was being followed by his shadow, and here, fading in front of him, was the proof. A smile caught fire on his cold face, and for a moment he forgot about his chafing thighs. With airplane arms he made sweeping circular patterns in the wet grey mud and danced with his invisible ghost partner. He started to sing gently to himself.

To the far side it would take less than a minute at full wellie-boot run. With a jump he started out on the glassy mud. As he took quick little steps across the crater the red wellies made a slap-slap, slaaap sound, like a fat hand hitting a fat thigh. The footsteps bounced off the sides of the crater and echoed around the pit. It was the change in tone he noticed first.

It got slower. It got deeper. From a tight slap-slap the sound changed to a wet slurp, like the back of a spoon on cold porridge. By the halfway point he was getting tired. The mud started shifting and sucking at his wellies. As his knees were pumping higher, his legs were moving slower. His feet were being pulled free of the wellies. He spread his toes and gripped the rubber like a desperate claw.

In a sudden panic he veered off course. He was the length of four Leeks from the crumbling bank when he could no longer pull his foot from the hungry mud. He released himself from the wellies and jumped from the little red boots. Now barefoot, he realized how stupid he had been; the mud felt as wet as bathwater. He took two or three steps farther and stopped. He felt the mud sucking on his feet like a greedy mouth on an ice lolly. It started eating him again. He would not make it.

If he was to die, he would die in the boots. He thought only of her face when they found him without the wellies, and her Dr Scholl’s sandal and the welt it would leave on his corpse. He struggled back to the red boots and stepped into them. Clutching the top of one, he tried to free himself, but as one leg moved higher it drove the other deeper into the wet mouth. The mud rose up to the buckle, well past his calf, almost to his knee. It started to soak his trousers. He watched it spill in over the top of his boots and felt it between his toes. He let go, finally, straightened up, and then, because he did not know what else to do, he started to sing again.

“Ah buhlee that chi-hil-dren are our few-ture. Teach em we-e-ll and let em lead the-he way. ” Shuggie watched the coal mud fill the other boot, the chance to abandon the red wellies gone. “Show em all the bew-ty they possess in-si-hide. ”

Louder now, he sang on, mimicking all the notes in the way he had heard on the radio. “Ah decidet long aglow ne-er to wa-halk in anybody’s sha-dow. If ah fail if ah suck seeds at least it been as ah buh-lee. No matter what youse tek from me. Youse ca-hant take away ma dihig-ni-tee. ”

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