Twenty-One 2 страница

Shuggie knew in truth that Louise was only a wee bit slow; neglect had made her shy and withdrawn and that made her always a half beat out of step, which the Pit took to be funny-acting. Bridie Donnelly had said that Jinty was just selfish. The special school got Louise away throughout the term and allowed Jinty to dedicate more time to raising her favourite child, Stella Artois.

Agnes said later that by the time she realized what was happening, Shuggie had Jinty on the floor and her Saint Christopher medallion was broken at the lock. When Leek later asked him what had happened, the boy could only remember twisting her big toe till it cracked; he had wrenched and twisted until her knee buckled and she fell screaming for mercy out of the chair. After that, Shuggie said, everything just fell away; it was like when you look through binoculars but from the wrong end.

Shuggie listened at the front door out of habit. As he walked up the long hallway, he could feel the walls wet with cabbage sweat and the condensation from tea kettles. He slipped like a ghost deeper into the house till he saw her standing in the kitchen doorway rewrapping a block of soft white lard. Her hair was soft, white roots shining below the black dye, her face was free of make-up. As she wrapped the lard she was looking out the little window above the sink on to the miles of marshlands. She looked peaceful.

He straightened tall at last, and the pain went from his bowels. She saw him then in the shadows of the hall. He went to her, and she placed her arms around his head and pulled him close to her soft stomach. Shuggie wrapped his arms around her, and she buried her face in his soft black hair. “Mmmm, you smell just like fresh air, ” she said, cupping his cold cheeks and kissing them gently.

“You smell like soup, ” he said.

“Charming! Away, take your uniform off. I’ll bring you some tea. ”

“You will? ”

She chased him from the kitchen. The living room was cosy and smelled like hot hoovers and lemon furniture polish. The electric fire was on, and the big curtains were drawn against the cold scheme outside. He turned on the TV, and the meter at the top flashed that they had six hours left before they needed more fifty-pence pieces; it was pure luxury. Standing on the back of his shoes he kicked them off, shook out of his school trousers, and unbuttoned the white shirt. The clothes fell about him on to the floor, where he left them in a melted pile. He sat in the middle of the big square coffee table in his clean underpants and stared open-mouthed at the afternoon shows.

Agnes came in with a mug of hot tea and a small plate, which she set in front of him.

“What’s this for? ” he asked.

“It’s for you, ” she said.

Shuggie looked at the golden apple turnover and slowly reached out a single finger to touch it. He could feel the heat come off it. She had put it and the tea plate in the oven to warm them through. The pastry was brown and flaky, and all over the top were little white crystals of hard sugar that had melted and made a crispy, sweet-looking shell. On each side of the pastry was hot, sticky golden apple sauce, oozing out on to the plate in bubbling clumps. The turnover made a happy, crisp crackling noise under his finger.

The boy looked down at the plate blankly. He worried he could hardly eat it, as his stomach was doing something that felt like the fear cramps. This time, instead of the choking sourness, something bubbled inside him like yellow sunshine. A smile broke inside him, and lifting his stocking feet he rocked back on his tail bone and spun and spun and spun on his backside until the little tea table was shiny with delight.

Agnes had chosen the Dundas Street meeting in the hope that she would not know anyone there. She had tried AA meetings from time to time, but they had never taken. She would be looking around the fellowship at the broken men and women as the shame rose inside her. In the daylight she would have crossed the street just to avoid these people.

Even though her attendance was spotty, the East End group she sometimes went to had started feeling small and overly familiar. Agnes had made a mess of it. Most of the older men had visited her in Pithead, and she was starting to see familiar parts of herself in the faces of the drawn, nervous women. It was getting harder to deny she was like them. So one night Agnes stayed on the bus, passed the familiar meeting rooms, and continued on to Dundas Street. It was a fresh start, she had thought, and hopefully a better class of alcoholic.

The Dundas Street meeting was in the city centre between the Queen Street train station and the Buchanan bus station and as such pulled in a fairly wide congregation. The sandstone building had been a once-grand trade merchants’ office, but through changes in the sixties came to resemble a poorly run primary school. It was long ago stripped of its ornately carved mouldings and suffocated under dowdy brown council paint, strip lighting, and peeling linoleum. To Agnes, it looked very anonymous.

The Dundas Street AA had a cheap, long-standing lease on a high-ceilinged meeting room. A slightly raised stage at the front of the room was set with a folding table and six plastic chairs lined up behind it. To the left were a smaller antechamber and a thin corridor where an urn and biscuits were kept. It felt transient, but the regulars tried to make it homely and comfortable with calendars and postcards sent from Lourdes, from Rome, from Blackpool.

Agnes put Shuggie to bed early and then caught the bus into town, not sure whether she would make it to a meeting or, as she had done before, turn herself towards a bingo hall on the Gallowgate. It took all she had to climb the Dundas stairs, and when she walked through the door she was relieved not to see a familiar face. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. People shifted nervously in their seats, each a respectable distance from his or her neighbour. There was an almost constant chorus of racking coughs and sticky wet phlegm. It felt less cosy than the other meetings. People nodded and smiled politely to each other, but there seemed to be less connection, more of the anonymity she craved. She sat an unobtrusive distance from the front and could feel the eyes burn on the back of her head. She was overdressed in her long mohair coat, but she was more comfortable that way.

A group of people who had been talking quietly in the corner took to the six chairs at the table on the stage. A handsome silver-haired man stood up from behind the table. His eyes were deep and brown, and his brow stood out in a thick, pronounced line. Despite the nerves and shakes within her, Agnes could not help but feel a thrill.

“Hello, ” he began, in a booming voice. “Thank you for coming to the Tuesday night group. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is George and I am an alcoholic. I have been at Dundas Street for, oh, well, nearly twelve years now. I am encouraged by the amount of familiar faces I see tonight in the crowd, and as always I am also saddened by the amount of new ones. ”

He rested his thick knuckles on the table. “We also have some old friends on the top table the night and one or two new ones. ” The people to his left and right shifted and smiled. “Afore I introduce them to you let us start by taking a moment and asking the Lord for help. ” The man lowered his head, his hair shone like Christmas tinsel. Agnes squinted at him then for a better look. The room moved as one as heads rolled forward and eyes closed for the Serenity Prayer. Agnes knew it by heart, none of it had seeped into her head.

The meeting started, and she listened to the top table discuss the matters of the meeting and pass out news and condolences. A friend of the group had died; from what Agnes could tell, it was the drink that had gotten her. George introduced the newest faces on the top table and asked them to share their story with the group. A thin man with a flat Weegie accent stood up. “Hiya, ma name’s Peter un ah’m an alcoholic. ” His eyes misted as he spoke about how he’d lost contact with his wife and then how his sons had fallen into first the drink and then the drugs as well. Agnes listened to the man flattening his vowels, spitting out the story as if he were angry, using short familiar words that the Glasgow people had made up. She felt she knew him down to his particular tenement because of how he spoke. She didn’t wonder at his circumstances, and by the end she felt sorry for him: he would never have been able to escape the weight of his own accent.

As they kept talking, she drifted miles away, her insides hurting for a drink. A voice called out. “You. The black-haired woman in the purple coat. ” George was pointing directly at her. “Would you like to share anything with the group? ”

Agnes made to shake her head no, but instead she found her legs tightening, and almost involuntarily she stood up. She had done this before, a dozen times at a handful of different chapters. She turned to the left and then her right and gave a small smile. All the faces turned to her, but their features were only blended featureless smudges. A passing worry that the back of her lovely coat was creased from sitting distracted her a moment, and she stumbled over her first words. “H-Hello, my name is Ag-Agnes, and I am. I suppose I am. An alcoholic. ”

The room made a sound of tepid support. “Welcome, Agnes. ”

Agnes made to go on, but she found now that the words left her. Her hand ran over the back of the coat trying to smooth any wrinkles. Except for some chronic coughing the room went silent.

“I am in flames, yet I do not burn, ” boomed the man’s voice.

“Sorry? ” said Agnes.

“Ego sum in flammis, tamen non adolebit, ” George said. “I am on fire. I do not burn. It’s Saint Agnes’s lament. ”

“Oh. ” She was unsure whether she should sit down.

“Never a truer word spoken, eh? ” he continued, finding his footing, addressing the broader fellowship. “I am in flames, yet I do not burn. Well, let that be hope for us all. Every one of us here tonight has been ravaged by the flames. ” He cleared his throat and spread his arms, like a fairground huckster. “Haven’t we all burnt for another drink, burnt up with the fever, with the sweat and panic, our throats on fire, our hearts burning in our chests? ” The crowd made an agreeing murmur. “Then you have it. ” He made a satisfied ahhhhh sound. “That glorious drink you have wanted so badly, and it burns through you, as sure as petrol. Like petrol it fuels the demons in you, it burns you away to the very devil. You go up in flames, and everything you touch you destroy; everyone you love steps away, steps back from the fire. Money burns, families burn, careers burn, reputations burn, and then when it’s all burnt, you still burn. ”

The crowd was rapt. “Aye, I cannot tell you how I have watched the flames burn everything I ever had. Even when I was trying to be done with the drink, standing there crying out for help, it was like I was still alight, the great untouchable. ” The crowd tutted in sympathy. “As I reached out for help, everyone shrank back from me; they pulled away from fear that the fire would return. ‘Don’t help him, ’ they said. ‘He’s no worth it, ’ they said. ‘He’ll never change, he’ll just pull you down as well. ’”

The handsome man shook his head. The room was quiet now. “Still, at the end, it was true, eh? I am in flames, yet I do not burn. ” He wiped the spit from the corners of his mouth. “That’s what Saint Agnes had to teach us. How even in the darkness there is still hope. ”

Agnes blinked blindly around the smoky room. She tucked her skirt and coat under her and made to sit down again. The man raised his voice again and pointed at her. “Flames are not just the end, they are also the beginning. For everything that you have destroyed can be rebuilt. From your own ashes you can grow again. ”

Agnes smiled demurely, she resisted the urge to roll her eyes.

The speaker had tried his best to inspire. The meeting went on, and all the fellowship turned to face the front again. Agnes let out a long, low breath; it felt like the first of the evening.

There was a comforting hand on her shoulder then, a woman’s hand, fine and pale, but the back of it already puffed with the thick blue veins of age. The woman leaned forward to whisper into her ear. She came so close that Agnes could not turn, she could not see her face.

“Aye, right enough. The bastards couldnae burn Saint Agnes, so they beheaded the poor lassie instead. Fuckin’ men! Eh? ” The old woman patted her shoulder once, and then, with a cough, she sat back in her seat.

Nineteen

Agnes stepped out of her own ashes in time for Shuggie’s tenth birthday. She was off the drink for three months before she took up the night shift at the colliery petrol station. She had spread Christmas over four different catalogues, piling the tree with presents and filling the table with four kinds of game and meat with no way of paying for any of it. As Leek and Shuggie lay fat and full in the glow of the television, she did not realize she need not have bothered. They were happy with her alone, with her sobriety and the peace it brought.

The catalogue bills started to come in, but more than the money there was something else about the job that she needed then. The job helped with the loneliness. It kept her busy, gave her something to do on the long, empty nights. Without it she would have sat at home, wondering what she would do until sleep finally came. Most of those nights she would sit there thinking about Shug, thinking about the friends who never called any more, about Lizzie and Wullie and about Catherine in South Africa. The night shift helped keep her from the drink.

The petrol station doubled as a small shop, the only place for a mile that sold cigarettes, sugary ice lollies, and bags of oven chips. It was the centre of nothing. She pulled a drawer towards herself and lifted out the dirty coins that rattled there, dropped in the change, and pushed packets of fags and pints of milk back through the safety-glass partition. It was a social life of sorts, and she was glad for it.

Four nights a week Agnes sat behind the safety glass staring out into the empty darkness. At long intervals taxi drivers would pull in and fill their black hacks with diesel. Some would ask for the key to the dank little toilet, and some would ask her for a paper and a cold can of Irn-Bru. On either side of the safety glass they would have their banter, about the strikes out at Ravenscraig, about the death of the Clyde, about the shared things in their lives. Taxi drivers were used to being behind glass; their own nights were partitions and windscreens. Agnes grew glad of their company.

Over time a couple of the men became regular, and a few started to have their breaks there with her, eating sandwiches on either side of the glass. The late-night business at the petrol station improved after she started. Some hackney drivers went out of their way to call by, to spend five minutes with the beautiful woman who laughed at their stories, this doll who seemed always pleased to see them. They moved on only when the next driver pulled up.

Sometimes, if she was occupied in conversation, a few of the taxis circled the station until she was free. They watched her like shy weans gawping at a plate of biscuits. She could see them criss-crossing up and down the empty road, waiting for their ten minutes of peace with her, turning petulant when they saw her laughing with some other driver.

Some of the older drivers asked only for the things that were on the low shelves. It was a game for them, to kill the time. Agnes didn’t mind. They gabbed away and watched her glide around the small shop, collecting their orders of sugar and starch. They felt less lonely as she bent over to get the day’s paper, savouring the tightening of her skirt as she crouched to reach the bottom shelf. They appreciated the way her jumper hung low and the black of her bra was visible against her rose-coloured skin. Agnes knew what a horrible thing it was to be lonely.

After a few dark winter months of working in the station, things started coming to Agnes. At first it was small things, like boxes of potatoes or extra jars of pickled onions from the cash and carry. One morning she was given a shipping box of panty liners. Soon a couple of the drivers started bringing bigger presents, like a used fridge, an old portable television, and other electronics that had come off the backs of lorries. Shuggie had come home from school and found the cracked draught door reglazed. He had come home and found the mouldy kitchenette freshly painted.

Towards the dead end of the night shift there were whole stretches of time when no one would stop in at the garage. Agnes would sit and stare out at the Pit Road, counting the hours by watching the back and forth of the lonely night bus. These nights she would sit behind her safety glass and slowly flick through her Freemans catalogue, spending wages before they were earned. The sun would creep up, and she would get ready for the shift to be over, slipping a bar of chocolate into her pocket for the wean’s school and helping herself to a fly packet of cigarettes. She’d open the lock on the door and let the morning shift in. As she walked the road back to Pithead, the morning sun would set the slag hills on fire before the heavy sky had a chance to roll in and cover the scheme in its usual grey blanket.

On the way home Agnes would sing a polite good morning as she passed the tired bones of the women with cleaning jobs in the city. The cleaners would rub the gold crosses that hung around their necks and mutter a quiet aye without looking at her. What a respectable Catholic was doing coming home at that ungodly hour, these thin women could not fathom. They were suspicious of this woman, who wore lipstick in the early morning and unchipped nail polish the colour of sex. The men who were lucky enough to still have jobs would look up and smile as they passed Agnes. They tried to hide the wrapped lunches that their wives had made as they wished her a good morning, gave her a sly wink.

When she got home she would slip the stolen chocolate bar under Shuggie’s pillow, and with a kiss and a cup of milky tea she would wake him for school. At the foot of Leek’s bed she would leave his overalls, clean and washed from the night before. The boys would lie in separate beds, silently facing each other, listening to the sound of her singing along to the morning radio. Neither of them would blink, scared to be the first to break the spell.

Agnes had been working the night shift for only a couple of months when she first met him, the red-headed ox. He was different from the others. The other taxi drivers had taken on that familiar shape of men past their prime, the hours spent sedentary behind the wheel causing the collapse of their bodies, the full Scottish breakfasts and the snack bar suppers settling like cooled porridge around their waists. Eventually the taxi hunched them over till their shoulders rounded into a soft hump and their heads jutted forward on jowled necks. The ones who had been at the night shift a long time had turned ghostly pale, their only colour was the faint rosacea from the years of drink. These were the men who decorated their fingers with gold sovereign rings, taking vain pleasure from watching them sit high and shiny on the steering wheel. This could not help but remind her of Shug.

When the redhead first stepped from his taxi, she tried not to stare. He must have been new to the driving. His shoulders were still straight, and the pink in his face was from daylight and fresh air, not dark pubs and golden pints of stout. He was a tall, broad man, and as he filled the taxi with diesel she watched how he stood straight and proud. He rocked the taxi side to side with one thick arm, his red curls shining under the flickering fluorescent lights. He didn’t flinch when he saw her, as the other men sometimes did, but he didn’t smile either. She was sat behind her glass, her arms folded, as if she was waiting for a lover who had forgotten to come and pick her up. She pushed his change towards him in the little safety drawer, and he mumbled thanks and went back to his taxi.

It was a few weeks before he turned up again. This time she was talking to him before he had even reached the window. “You’ve not been driving long, have you? ” she said, with a lipsticked smile, the drawer pushed out towards him invitingly.

“Scuse me? ” he said, shaken from his thoughts. “I cannae hear ye frae ahind that glass. ”

Agnes took in the broad Scots, the soft song of Strathclyde in his voice. She went on in the Queen’s best. “I was just asking if you are new to driving taxis. ”

“Whit makes ye ask a man tha’? ” he asked pointedly, his breath warm on the cold glass.

Agnes’s smile cracked. “It’s just, I get a lot of taxi drivers pass through here. You seem more … cheerful than the rest. ” He looked at her much as he might a talking dog. She fumbled on. “You know, you just seem less jaded by it. All that driving. All those difficult passengers. ”

“Do ye think ye are a good judge o’ character then? ”

The question took Agnes by surprise. It was her that was silent now. The redhead dropped some coins in the drawer with a loud tinny clang. “Gies a pint of milk and a white loaf. Pan bread, not plain. Make sure it’s fresh, and don’t squash it flat in yer contraption. ” He pointed at her security drawer.

It took her a moment to recover and get up out of her chair. She was halfway across the little shop before she looked back to see whether he was watching, but the redhead was staring at his feet as though there were a story written on his shoes. He breathed in through his horse-like nose, and she watched his shoulders rise and spread and then fall again. He looked tired, sick and tired. Returning to the window she placed the small milk bottle in the drawer and slid it through to him. He took it up in his big paw. She dropped the loaf in the drawer, and it was only then that he spoke again. “Ye’ll squash ma loaf. ” Agnes looked up at him, dumbstruck. The loaf would fit with a push, but he protested again, his cheeks turning pink, “I’m tellin’ ye, don’t shove that through there. ”

“It’ll be all right. The bread’s springy. ” She pushed her fingers against the moist loaf, and as if it were an advert for freshness, the loaf sprang back.

The man was silent.

Agnes smiled coyly. “Well, there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t open the security door. ” She placed her hand on her chest and opened her eyes wide. “You see, I’m here all by myself. ”

The redhead moved from one foot to the other, his cheeks flushed red. He blinked and looked at his feet and took a hard lungful through his big nostrils.

“Look, do you want this loaf or not? ” asked Agnes, leaning close to the glass. The front of her jumper shifted, and she knew the black strap of her bra would be on her shoulder. She smiled through half-lidded eyes.

He slammed his thick fist on the glass. It made her leap back as if she had been slapped. “Mother of God. Can an honest man no get a flat fucking bit o’ toast. ”

This brought out the demon in Agnes. It did her morale no good to feel so invisible. To be ignored like this made her want a taste of the drink. With a painted fingernail she slipped open the glued end of the loaf and drew out the doorstep slice. She dropped it into the drawer pan like a dead fish. She pushed the single slice towards the big man.

He looked down into the drawer at the loaf slice like she had shat in a box. “Well, take it then, ” she warned, the smile and the bra strap were gone. The redhead drew up the slice and held it tenderly. With a metal zip the drawer drew back inside, Agnes deposited another slice and pushed it through to him. The man drew it up. They went on in silence, Agnes dropping slices of pan loaf into the drawer and the man gathering them up delicately, like china dishes. She was sure he hadn’t breathed since the first slice had slid towards him. Somewhere inside him the air hissed out like a burst tyre, and he looked down at the half loaf in his arms. Agnes kept working the drawer.

“I used to work down the Pit till they shut it, ” he said quietly. “How could ye tell I wisnae a driver? ”

“I could just tell, ” said Agnes. “I’ve had experience. ”

“Aye? ”

“I could write a book. ” She slipped another slice into the tray.

“I don’t know how they do it, ” said the red-headed man. “And the people you meet? Every manner of scoundrel. ”

“It takes a certain kind of person to be out here at night. Have you been on the night shift long? ”

“About a month. ”

“It’s awful lonely, isn’t it? ” said Agnes.

The man looked at her for what seemed like the first time. “Aye, it’s very lonely, ” he said, his eyes were tired.

She slid the last doorstep slice towards him. “Well, come by tomorrow night. I’ll feed a box of cornflakes through this drawer to you. ”

The man smiled for the first time. His teeth were big and straight and white. “OK. ”

“Mind and bring a plastic bag ’cause I’m giving it flake by flake. ”

Since Shug there had been other men, but there had been no nights out. All day she had waited for the taxi horn. She had taken her bath by lunchtime and still had to wait until eight o’clock, when he said he would call for her. The clock radio blinked its neon numbers like a countdown. Agnes swung all day from feverish to despondent, and now, waiting in front of the vanity mirror, she felt increasingly stupid. In her mind she made a list of all the things she mustn’t tell this new man. The bad things better left untold made her throat feel choked. It called out for a drink.

Shuggie sat in thoughtful silence next to her, his hands patiently on his lap, his ankles crossed neatly, with the same look of pained nerves on his face. Agnes tried to tidy her life into a narrative and felt increasingly dull and flat. The things she shouldn’t speak about left her with yawning gaps. They shaped her into a woman who had been asleep since 1967, the year she had met Shug.

The red-headed ox was called Eugene. It was a good name, both old-fashioned and plain. It was a name mothers chose for firstborn sons, the ones that were to be solid and true, mother’s pride but not her joy. It had always seemed to Agnes that it was the name Catholic mothers gave to the sons who were for the priesthood, the children marked like a tithe offering.

Eugene pumped the horn of the black hack, and Agnes jumped with nerves. Small perfume bottles tinkled lightly on the night table. She looked down at the boy, who had crossed his fingers for good luck. He held them up and shook them at her with a hopeful smile. Leek leaned in the doorway, his arms folded across himself. She asked him for a kiss for luck, and Shuggie watched as she put her arms around his neck. At first Leek didn’t move, and then very slowly he unfurled and held her in his arms. He showered her cheeks with kisses until, giggling like a schoolgirl, she had to push him away and check he hadn’t ruined her blush.

Outside, in the soft evening light, she saw again how handsome the man was. In a wide-lapelled suit and with his thick hair combed wet through, he made the old hackney seem like a Rolls-Royce. Eugene opened the driver’s door and stepped out. Agnes saw his thin bolo tie, his tiepin gleaming proudly. This was, she realized, the first time they hadn’t been separated by safety glass. He opened the back passenger door for her, and without looking up she knew the Pit women were all stewing at their front windows. She felt the breeze of a thousand net curtains twitching. With a ringed hand she pushed her hair from her face and threw her head high. She could almost hear the angry slapping of gums.

“Did you find it OK, then? ” she asked, as he closed the door behind her.

“Aye, no problem at all, ” he said, starting the engine. “Did I keep you waiting? ”

“No, no. I was in a real rush to get ready, the day just flew by. ” She tried to sprinkle her words with a light casual laugh.

“Well, you look the part. ” He eyed her approvingly in his mirror.

“Oh, that’s a relief, ” she said, lifting her arms and letting the leather tassels on the sleeves shake. “I had no idea what to wear. ”

Agnes had never been to the Grand Ole Opry before. It sat on the South Side of Glasgow, on the Govan Road, an old converted picture hall in a decaying part of town. Couples went for the country-music nights, with line dancing and gunslinging matches. It might have been the good craic of the country music or it might have been the guns, but somehow the Opry appealed deeply to Glaswegians. Any night of the week it was ram-packed. For a few hours Edna McCluskey from Clarkston could become Kentucky Belle, while her man, wee Stan, would slip into a leather waistcoat and a big, tasselled Stetson and become Stagecoach Stan the Bounty Man.

Eugene parked and helped Agnes down from her carriage. The Opry’s Old Western sign lit up the street and shone off the wet tarmac. People jostled at the door to get in, and Agnes had the impression of being at a fancy premiere. Eugene cut to the front of the queue, gave a flash of his shiny silver sheriff’s badge, and they walked right in.

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