Twenty-Five

By the time Agnes awoke in Gartnavel Hospital her boy had been living at his father’s almost a week. Before she cut herself she had called the taxi rank to declare that Shug had finally gotten his wish, she was leaving them all for good, and that he should come collect his winnings, the boy. She said that she had bought a new suit for Shuggie from the catalogue, and that Shuggie was to wear black dress socks to her funeral, that Shug would need to be vigilant about that.

Leek never knew how that message got to Shug. Did the hackney dispatcher broadcast it over the CB radio for all to hear? Did all the black hackneys pull to the kerb and idle their engines as Joanie Micklewhite relayed the last wishes of the woman she had helped kill?

Shug had not bothered to rush. When he finally came to Pithead he was impressed that Agnes had actually gone through with it. He found the boy eating tinned peaches, sitting stunned on the bloody settee, consoling a wet-faced Shona Donnelly from upstairs.

Shuggie had never been to his father’s new house before. As the taxi chugged heavily through echoing streets, the boy counted on his fingers and realized he had spent less than three hours with his father since Joanie Micklewhite had stolen him away. He sat in the back of the black hackney as good as a stranger. He couldn’t really remember meeting Joanie Micklewhite either, but he could remember the yellow roller boots with a traitor’s cramp that hurt his heart. Joanie had become like a villain in his mind; her reality and her legend were mixed deep inside him. Agnes’s hate for her was as ingrained in him as knots in wood.

So Shuggie sat in stilted silence as the taxi rounded the corners of a brutal-looking council scheme. Each street was a scarred field of burnt-out off-licences, dirty canals, and cars on bricks. To the boy, this place looked a little like Sighthill; five or six tall high-rises pinned the heavy winter sky in place. Yet, unlike in Sighthill, the high-rises were ringed at the bottom with low, boxy concrete houses instead of flat empty forecourts. These low houses looked like ants gathered around trees, or scraps made of the council breeze blocks left over from the high-rises. What was once built to be new and healthful now looked sick with a poverty of hope. There was no grass and no greenery; every flat surface was concreted over or covered in large, smooth round boulders.

Big Shug stopped the engine at a vandalized telephone box. Shuggie could tell from the back of the taxi that it was a difficult conversation. It looked difficult, because after Shug hung up he stood in the phone box for a long time smoothing his moustache.

The boy opened the suitcase Shug had made him pack. Into it he had put all the possessions that meant most to him and very few clean clothes. He took out a faded Polaroid. It showed a shirtless Shug holding him as a newborn in one proud outstretched hand and smoking an ashy doubt in the other. He checked it now against the man in the phone box.

On dreich days Shuggie would take Agnes’s wedding album and hide at the foot of her bed poring over the photos of his father. Shug didn’t look like the person he remembered from the three Polaroids taken at the wedding reception. He looked smaller than the smiling man who had sat on the banquette with his arms flung open around drunken bridesmaids. Now, the years of sedentary taxi driving had taken what was already average and also made it round. The short Caesar cut of the photos was replaced by a wispy comb-over. The once cheeky eyes were set deeper into his pink flesh. Shuggie couldn’t imagine any woman wanting to slow dance with this man now.

Shug hadn’t really looked at the boy until he was in the back of the taxi and they were already on the North Side. He climbed back into the driver’s seat and turned and looked at the mud and dirt and blood on the boy’s school uniform. He asked Shuggie whether he had any cleaner clothes to change into. The boy said he had no clean clothes, but he did have pyjamas. It was a shameful feeling, taking off your clothes in front of a strange man, in a strange taxi.

Shuggie was in his clean pyjamas as they crossed Joanie Micklewhite’s threshold. Her house was the middle in a strip of semi-detached houses that circled the fattest of the grey high-rises. She had a concrete front yard and an asphalt backyard, and therefore they paid a higher rent rate to the council. As the boy crossed the front door he noticed with awe that they had stairs in their house, two separate floors; that alone would kill Agnes.

Joanie Micklewhite was stood at the end of the short hallway with her fingers laced patiently in front of her round belly. She didn’t say hello to the boy or to Shug; she just nodded and turned back into the kitchen. It was late supper time when they arrived, and Shug led the boy into what he called the “dining room, ” and Shuggie made a note to never tell his mother that they had stairs or a dining room.

The boy sat in the middle of the folding table, and Joanie scowled at one end, and his father glared at the other. Sat at the table already were six of Joanie’s weans. They looked ill-humoured and hungry, like they had been made to wait for something not that special. The youngest of Shug’s stepchildren was a boy aged about seventeen. Only one was a girl, called Stephanie, and it was the only name Shuggie could remember from his father’s introduction. He remembered partly because it was the most Protestant name he had ever heard but also because, when Shug had first left, Catherine had threatened to kick the life out of Stephanie Mickle-Shite in an attempt to cheer up Agnes. Now, sat across from her, Shuggie could see Catherine would have lost. Stephanie had thick hairy forearms. Out of all of them, she hid her dislike for their new visitor the least.

Shuggie sat quietly while the Micklewhite-Bains recounted their days to his father. They had a lot to tell him. They had office jobs, they had cars, they were sticking in at school or were waiting to hear from a university. One was a training to be a teacher, and Stephanie worked in a place where everyone had something called a personal computer. They all called him Dad, which confused the boy, and they all wanted him to listen to them over the others, like he was an honoured guest. Shuggie was staring, he couldn’t help it; Stephanie lowered her head almost on to the table, met his eyes with a cold glare, and asked if he would like to take a picture.

After that Shuggie tried to keep his eyes moving. He tried to surreptitiously soak in all the details of his father. He knew almost nothing about him, and while the others ate, he stole sideways glances at the man and wondered why he tolerated these other children but had left him.

The strange man lifted his glass and drank his milk, and all the while his eyes scoured the others like a searchlight. He would lower the milk glass and with his other hand smooth the lines of his glossy moustache in satisfaction. Shuggie was nervously rubbing his own top lip when his father finally looked at him, and they regarded each other in silence.

After dinner, Joanie led the boy to where he would be sleeping. Despite the dining room, the Micklewhite house seemed very small. The eldest boy slept on a single bed in a narrow cupboard under the glorious stairs. He was a professor of chemistry or something, and his cupboard was decorated with Star Trek memorabilia all suspended from the ceiling by invisible fishing gut. If their brightest and eldest was in the cupboard, the boy couldn’t think where they were leading him.

Joanie took Shuggie upstairs and passed three or four small bedrooms. There was another Micklewhite, a seventh, a boy also called Hugh, who was away in the Army cadets. Joanie switched on the bare bulb and said that he, the new Hugh, could sleep here, “temporarily, mind you. ” The room was messy and felt stuck in a limbo between a child’s and a man’s bedroom. There were little green soldiers glued along the windowsill next to posters of a naked Samantha Fox. Hugh Micklewhite had kept his clothes, clean and dirty alike, in a heaped pile next to his bed. Shuggie cleared a space on the sheets and sat on the dented mattress. His head was swimming.

He counted on his fingers. If you included Leek and Catherine, then Shug had fourteen children. There were four of his own from his first marriage, then Shuggie, and he’d added Catherine and Leek and then collected the seven half-grown Micklewhites. His father had three sons named after himself: one Hugh per woman. After he had done the sums, Shuggie felt lucky to have had those three hours of his father’s time.

Big Shug took to hiding in his taxi: double shifts, back shifts, night shifts, early shifts. For his part, Shuggie skulked around the shadows of the high-rises and hid from them all. In the mornings Joanie turned the boy out of the house. She told him that his father needed peace to sleep, “that was what the night shift did to taxi men. ” At the front door she pushed a jam piece and a peeled carrot into his hand and told him to go and play and not to come back till it was dark. She pointed out into the distance and waved her hand wide across the scheme, meaning he could go anywhere he pleased for all she cared.

While every other wean was in school, Shuggie spent the time wandering the high-rises. Each floor of the high-rise had a shared laundry room between the flats. These were cavernous concrete rooms that had a wall of breeze blocks and so were open to the elements on one side. Housewives would hang their clean washing there and wait while the Glasgow wind battered it dry and froze it solid. Shuggie rode the lift, floor to floor, till eventually he would find a laundry room that was unlocked and open. The higher was always better, and he would sit with his legs and arms through the breeze blocks and look out over the sandstone city all the way to Sighthill. The north wind would scald his face as he dropped little green soldiers to the ground below. He strained to see the black line on the horizon and tried to imagine her there. Was she missing him? Was she even alive?

The boy had been dropping the green men to their deaths for nearly three weeks by the time Agnes came. Eventually she had discharged herself. She telephoned, and Shuggie watched with a dark curiosity as Joanie Micklewhite spat hate as good as she got. He felt like a traitor, to be inside the hoormaster’s house, to have Joanie hang up on his mother, and then to watch them laugh and degrade her and pick her apart like old chicken. The boy was heartbroken to watch them take joy in her misery. He died for the fear she might think he was now one of them, laughing down the phone at her. He thought about her wrists and the blood on the tea towels, and like a big baby he cried from frustration right there in front of them.

In a way Joanie changed her tune then. The boy didn’t understand why she suddenly became sweet as sugar towards him. Shuggie had gone from being an imposition to being a useful pawn. To her he was now a wonderful, magical, hurtful way to show Agnes Bain once and for all who was the winner.

Agnes grew sick of all her threatening and all her tearful begging. She sat at her dressing table and set her hair into a hard crown of black roses with layer after layer of her expensive hairspray. She pulled on her tight black skirt and a fresh white blouse, and over this she wore her good purple mohair coat, making sure it was long enough to cover her tender, bandaged wrists. She sank three cans in quick succession, and then she burst the gas meter open and called a taxi.

Agnes had threatened to do it, and they hadn’t believed her. Like bullies they had felt safest in a crowd, and they had laughed down the phone in big HA-HA-HAs. Now, as she stepped out of the black hackney, she asked the driver to kindly wait.

“I won’t be a minute, ” she said. “I’m only away to have the last laugh. ”

With a proud clip, Agnes walked down the street counting up the odd numbers. Opening the metal gate she stood in the small front yard and rubbed at her heart when she saw the double-glazed windows. She looked at the new windows and then at the two storeys, and her mouth pulled wide in a sickened grimace. She checked the address on the torn piece of paper and then pulled down on the cuffs of her purple coat one last time.

Agnes hammered on the door, but no one answered. There was a scurrying of feet by the peephole, and then there were voices giggling. Agnes hammered again, and then she stepped backwards.

“SHUG! ” she shouted. “SHUG BAIN! SHOW YOUR FACE, YOU WIFE-BEATING HOORMASTER. ”

She waited. There was no answer from inside the two-storey house, but people on the street stopped dead in their tracks. They milled about behind postboxes and parked cars; children laid their BMX bikes down in the dirt and scurried to get a better look. She could feel them all watching, and it emboldened her.

“SHUG BAIN! YOU BALD-HEADED FUCKFACE. STOP PLAYING WITH YOUR TINY COCK AND SHOW YOUR FUCKING SELF! ”

Her voice bounced off the low buildings and carried clear across the high-rise flats. Agnes straightened her back and drew up her chest to scream again, and then something caught her eye. There was nothing in the paved front yard; its concrete was perfectly flat and grey. There was nothing except for a few straggling weeds and, in the corner, two large silver rubbish bins.

Agnes picked up the first bin; it was not yet full, not yet too heavy. In one clumsy motion she twisted her body, her thin heels wobbling under her, and then slinging back around let go of the bucket. Still weak from the hospital, she almost fell backwards, gracelessly, through the gate. The metal bin flew through the air, and for a moment she thought it would bounce off the thick windows and do her a damage. She held her breath in fear it might miss.

Agnes didn’t miss.

The bin found the centre of the window and crashed with an almighty clatter into the room. The glass broke into small, ice-cubed pieces, and the proud net curtains were pulled down from their rod. The old women who had stopped in the street screamed for mercy. The children on BMX bikes whooped with excitement.

The Micklewhites had been sitting, Walton-style, at the dining room in the back of the house when Agnes had started hammering. Everyone but Shug jumped when they heard the noise from the front room. Joanie, who had been laughing at Agnes over a serving dish of golden potatoes, was up and through first. When she saw the glass and the garbage, she screamed as if she had been knifed.

By the time Shuggie had pushed through the tangle of Micklewhite legs, Joanie was standing amidst the debris and rotten rubbish with her mouth open and hands flaccid by her side. Stephanie put her arm around her mother, lest she should keel over. The big colour television lay smashed on its face. Shuggie noticed it didn’t have a coin meter; wait till I tell her that, he thought.

There in the front yard, smiling, stunning, and mostly sober was Agnes Bain. The boy wanted to scream, Gooooooooaaaaal. He wanted to run a victory lap around the scheme with her.

Shug made it to the front door first. With his arms pinned on either side of the door frame he stopped the rest of the Micklewhites from spilling out into the street. Their arms clawed at her around the bulk of him; it looked like the zombie horror films Leek let him watch. Agnes calmly put her hand into her bag and pulled out a long cigarette. Lighting it slowly, she took a long elegant draw. “You bastard, ” she said, quite calmly. “Get my boy out here now. ”

Joanie, who was still amidst the glass, found her sharp tongue at last. She let out a shriek, the kind that starts at your toes and tightens all the muscles in the body till it erupts out of your mouth. “You auld drunk hoor! You’re gonnae pay for that window, so help me God! ”

Agnes picked at a fresh chip in her nail. She looked disappointed as she held her hand up to Joanie. “Now look what you made me do. T’chut. ” She mugged and made her painted nails dance in a wave. She turned her cold eyes back to Shug and hissed through gritted dentures, “Get my boy out here now. ”

Joanie pushed her way into the hall, past the boy and the other roaring bodies that Shug was using his girth to hold back. His face had flushed between scarlet and puce. “You auld drunk, I’m going to fucking kill ye, ” Joanie spat, her talons wildly scraping the air.

“Shug Bain, I am warning you! ” Agnes took another draw on the cigarette and looked down the street as more neighbours emerged from their homes. She moved closer to the second silver bin. “If you don’t get my son out here now, I’ll put in every window in this fucking street. ”

Joanie kept clawing at the air around Shug and started spitting watery gobfuls into the street. Agnes only looked at her distastefully and went back to picking at the chipped nail. Joanie kept screaming like a banshee. “Ye’re fuckin’ mental. They should never have let ye oot o’ the maddie house. ”

In a fluid motion Agnes dropped her cigarette on the ground and had her black high heels off and clutched in her hands. Agnes, who couldn’t throw a ball straight, was feeling brave after the bin had found its mark. The first sharp stiletto sailed through the air and clattered against the door frame and fell to the ground. Agnes shifted forward in her stocking feet and like an experienced shot-putter let fly the second heel; it found its mark on the side of Joanie’s face. Joanie staggered back into the hallway with a bloody yelp.

The boys on bikes howled with wicked delight. They fell to the ground and furiously started gathering chuckie stones, holding them out to this warrior woman and chanting for more blood. “Here! Here! Missus. Again! Again! ”

There was blood, a small amount only, but enough for Joanie to wipe on her hand and rile up her brood. At the sight of the blood the Micklewhite boys started to push harder to get out and lynch Agnes. Shug looked like his heart might burst from the strain.

Shuggie could hardly see his mother standing in the front yard. The hallway was so full of bodies pushing against his father, and if he couldn’t see through the mess of angry limbs, then he would never be able to reach her. He turned and retreated slowly up the hall and sleekitly slid into the room on the left. He crossed the glass-strewn living room and stood on the large upended TV, using it as a step to climb up on to the window ledge. In one leap he jumped up and over the jagged edge of the broken window and dropped down on the hard concrete outside.

Shuggie moved cautiously towards his mother. She was gaunt and pinched-looking, and underneath her paint she was a grey anaemic colour he had never seen before, but she was alive. Shug watched his son tread delicately across the broken glass. “Shuggie, come here, now, ” he barked. The claque of Micklewhite voices behind him started to protest. They were braying for blood; they were telling Shug to let the boy go. He ignored them. “She’s no gonnae get any better, son. Come away from there. ”

Shuggie paused for a second, he looked over his narrow shoulder bone and shrugged. “But she might. ”

Agnes was glaring up at Shug, her hand outstretched to her boy. “You can’t see green shite but you want it. ”

“I know what’s good for the boy. ” His lip curdled under the bristles of his moustache. “You cannae look after yersel, never mind him. Fuck’s sakes, look how twisted you’ve made him. ”

In her stocking feet Agnes bent over and folded the boy in a deep embrace. The buttons of her good coat scratched at his face, but he didn’t care. He choked her middle and tried to bury himself back into her flesh. His bottom lip started to tremble; it protruded and rose like a heat blister. Agnes put her thumb gently on it and kissed the pale skin above his left ear. Her words were as warm and easy as the Fair Fortnight sun. “Shhh, we’ve been greetin’ in front of them long enough. Not here, don’t give them the satisfaction. ”

She drew herself to her full height again, somewhat diminished without the black heels. She looked up at Shug and the grotesque chorus that longed to do her a damage. “Sometimes you don’t even want a thing. You just can’t bear anyone else to have it. ”

Without another word Agnes took Shuggie’s hand and led him out of the gate. The BMX boys were still screaming for blood. Agnes raised a hand to quiet them, but they took it as a salute, and then the whole street broke into a cheer: “Gaun, yersel, Missus! ”

By the time they got into the back of the taxi, her boy was mute and staring up at her like she was an apparition. She cupped Shuggie’s face with her painted fingers and turned his gaze out to the low house. “Get a good look. God help me, you’ll never see that fat bastard again. ”

As they drove away she held his chin. Shuggie watched his father struggle to push the Micklewhites back inside the hallway, as if he was stuffing an unpegged tent back into a bag. Now there was a deflated roundness in his shoulders; all the gallus swagger of the past few weeks was gone.

As they left the scheme, the BMX bikes circled the hackney, soaring and diving like little starlings. Agnes pulled the boy into her side, and he clung to her like a limpet. She held him tight for a long time and tried to ignore the scent of another woman’s soap on his hair. He let her cry, he let her talk, and he didn’t contradict her when she made him fine promises he knew she would be unable to keep.

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