Twenty-Four

The boy opened his eyes, and she was there, sat quietly on the end of his bed. She was the terrible half-a-person that always came in the mornings now. He watched her shiver for a while, trembling with the dampness that the drink had left in her. She held a piece of toilet paper to her mouth as she coughed up wet phlegm and then tried to hold in the rattling boak that followed.

Agnes cocked her head and looked at him with pleading, sleepless eyes. “Morning, sunshine. ”

“M-morning. ” Shuggie stretched his toes to the end of the bed.

Her hand was shaking as she gently pulled the layers of bedcovers away. The damp March air rushed in, and Shuggie whined and curled up in a tight ball. Agnes reached out her cold hand and put it on his clammy foot. He had taken another stretch: the old pyjamas cropped above his calves now, the hair on his legs starting to thicken and grow darker. “Another year and you’ll be a man, and then what am I going to do? ”

“Do you think I will be taller than Leek? ” he asked. His brother’s bed was already empty.

“Most definitely. ” She pushed his inky hair away from his eyes and tried to sound cheery. “How’d you like to stay off the school the day? Keep me company? ”

Shuggie’s eyes flew open at the offer. “I dunno. Father Barry says I’ve missed too much already. ”

“Och, you never mind him. You went nearly every day last week. I’ll write you a note saying your granny died. ”

Shuggie groaned and stretched his toes into the cold. “He’s not daft. You’ve done that three times already. ”

He knew what she wanted. As soon as the clock turned a quarter to nine he was put out on the frozen street with the Tuesday Book in his hand. He wore his thin cagoule and good trousers, and over one arm he carried a large, gingham nylon shopper bag. The shopper was a decoy; there would be no groceries to put into it, but it played the part and made the whole thing look more respectable. Like a greedy bookie, Shuggie flicked the pages of the Tuesday child-support book and watched the princely sum of eight pounds fifty appear on all the dated coupons. He found the one she had signed for this week, checked to see whether she had filled it out correctly in her desperate hunger, and then he dropped it into the decoy bag.

He knew she was watching from behind the net curtains, so he walked quickly and with a purpose. When he turned the corner out of sight, he slowed and spent a time squashing the white berries into a paste.

Shuggie had tried it all ways, rushing like the clappers up the street and back or going missing for hours in the peat marshes. Once he had even cashed the books and spent the child support on actual messages, provisions and meat from the butcher. It always ended up the same; she returned the messages that she could and bought what she really needed first, drink. So now when he cashed the benefit books, he just put his head down and got on with it with a sense of resignation.

She hadn’t been the same since New Year’s Eve. Whoever had left her half-naked under the pile of strangers’ coats had taken the yearning for a good party out of her. Now when Shuggie watched her drink he could see she had lost the taste for a good time. She was drinking to forget herself, because she didn’t know how else to keep out the pain and the loneliness.

The petrol station had turned her away. She had missed too many shifts, and with no one to cover, the station had gone dark too many times. At first Agnes had taken the rejection on the nose, like everything else, it was not meant to work out for her. When the catalogue bills started to pile up, and there was no money for drink by a Thursday, she started to talk about her sacking like it was a conspiracy. She had been too popular, too beautiful, she said, and the station owners hadn’t liked how the place had turned into a social club for lonely taxi drivers. Leek had sat and listened to her, quietly spooning hot cereal into his mouth, and then he had asked, calmly, “How long are you going to keep lying to yourself? ”

The queue took forever. It was silent but for rattling coughs, the swish of nylon anoraks, and the stamp, stamp, stamp of the agitated woman behind the counter. The way they fidgeted, he could tell that the people had waited a long weekend for their benefit books to be cashed. Some people would have been hungry, some running out of cigarettes by Sunday teatime, and others, like his own mother, were dying of a deep thirst. Shuggie pulled up to the counter and pushed the book into the little drawer that sat at eye level. With a slice it was pulled away from him. With a slice it came back.

“You’ve not signed it, ” said the postmistress.

Shuggie took the chained-down pen and wrote his name in the designee space in the way she had made him practice. He dropped it back in the drawer and smiled up at the lady. The woman took it up and looked at it closely on both sides. She wore rose-framed glasses and looked down at him like a teacher on a high stool. “Can Missus Bain not come and collect her child support herself? ” she asked, a fraction too loudly.

Shuggie felt the queue behind him shift impatiently from one foot to the other. “No. ”

The woman leaned backwards as if stretching her tired back. “Young man. Should you not be at school? ” He heard the queue clear its throat in agreement.

“My mother is not well, ” he whispered discreetly into the drawer.

The woman leaned into the safety glass, her face looming large above his. “Yes, but it comes to my mind that I see you every single Monday and Tuesday morning. ” She sniffed and held up the book, putting her finger under Agnes’s signature. “It says here, ” she sniffed again, “that authorizing a designee is only for temporary purposes, and if the person cannot claim their own benefit then the book should be returned to the DSS. ”

Shuggie felt the threat of shit in his underpants. All he could manage was a quiet, “Please, Missus. ”

“Shall I take this book from you, young man? ” She adjusted her glasses with an ink-stained finger. “Should I send it back to the DSS? ”

The boy shook his head and felt the leak start to worsen. “No. Please, Missus, ” he begged.

The woman seemed not to hear or not to care. She folded the book and put it closed on the counter. Solemnly, she folded her hands over the top of it as though in prayer. The back of Shuggie’s eyeballs began to sweat. He could hear the hungry crowd start to moan. The child benefit was more than a quarter of all the money Agnes would get to feed them for a week.

With a trembling lip, Shuggie tried again. “Please, Missus. ”

The impatient crowd tutted and sighed behind him. “That boy’s mammy is not well! ” said a high voice from the very back of the post office. The postmistress looked up from the ashen face to the long queue. “Gie him his money, or he’ll have nothing to eat! ” it said again.

An old woman at the front joined in. She was tired of the wait and was shaking her pension book. “Oh, for the love. Gie the boy his money, ya heartless jobsworth. ”

The lady behind the counter looked at the queue and down at the fearful boy. She opened the book reluctantly. Stamp! Stamp! She marked it and ripped out the coupon for that week. Into the drawer she slipped the Tuesday Book, a fiver, three pound notes and a new fifty-pence piece. She held on to the drawer and leaned her face up to the little holes in the glass. Quieter now she said, “You are a smart boy. Don’t you let me catch you here again next week. Get yourself back in school. Study. Stick in at it and don’t spend your whole life in a benefits queue. ” There was a pity in her eyes, and with that she sent the drawer through. The boy nodded obediently and, licking the running wetness on his top lip, emptied the drawer of the money. He couldn’t worry about next week. He’d have to worry about the rest of this week first.

Shuggie had hurried towards Pithead as quickly as he could. When he passed the school, he climbed the broken fences and ran down the dirt siding into the marshlands. When he was far enough from the road, he took off his trousers and his underpants, and hunkering down, he finished what the postmistress had started. Then he turned his white underpants inside out and tried to scrape them clean on some dried reed grass.

By the time he got home, it was still not half past ten in the morning, and the street was just starting to open its curtains. He opened the front door and ran right into her, standing in the middle of the hallway. She was dressed in her best mohair coat and had lined her eyes and put a deep lavender colour on her top lids. Her hair was set and curled, and the hairspray still hung wet and sparkling on its tips like dew. Under her left arm she had her best bag, and the other hand was out, palm side up, like a patient saint. It was itchy and red-looking.

“Where the hell have you been? ” she asked, wanting no reply.

The boy opened the message bag and took the notes and single coin out from amongst his dirty underpants. Agnes clipped it securely into her purse. “Right, I need you to walk me up the road. If we meet anybody, I want you to talk to me. ”

“What about? ”

“Anything. Bloody anything. Just talk to me and don’t bloody stop, OK? ”

Agnes spun him around and pushed him back out the door. As they reached the corner, he could tell she was relieved they hadn’t passed a soul yet. At the bottom of the hill, leaning over a garden fence, was Colleen McAvennie talking to one of her and Eugene’s cousins. They were smoking cigarettes, and Colleen had two big black bin bags full of washing or sheets or the last of Big Jamesy’s clothes. They looked up as they heard the rap of heels on the concrete. Agnes made an unsteady swerve, as though she were going to cross the road, but instead she pulled her head up high and kept her path. She strutted out a confident rhythmic clip and turned her head and said to the boy, “What would you like for your dinner tonight? ”

Shuggie looked up at his mother and did as he had been taught. “Roast chicken, please. I’m a bit tired of sirloin every other night. ”

They passed the women, who stopped their own conversation, and Agnes said with a light laugh, “Oh, you! You will have steak again and be thankful! ” She turned her regal profile and held her raw hand behind herself. “Oh, hello Colleen, hello Molly. This one is growing like a weed. ” The women said nothing as she passed, but she felt them draw their eyes over the coat, over the shoes and hair. When she was safely past them, her face froze in a rictus and she muttered, “Aye, same to you cunts, ” and then crossed the street.

Dolan’s general shop sat at the end of a row of three boarded-up shopfronts perched at the top of the hill that overlooked all of Pithead. When the colliery was still open it would have been a busy place, meeting the families’ needs with fresh vegetables, the best meat, and a place to pass bits of talk. Now Mr Dolan didn’t even turn on the lights. If the other nearest shop hadn’t been over two miles away, then Dolan’s might have closed altogether. As though admitting this half defeat, the shop sat with its metal shutters closed and the lights always off, only daylight pouring through the bill-postered front door.

Mr Dolan himself was a kind and gentle man, although the sight of him scared Shuggie. When the shopkeeper was a boy, and the mine was still open, he fell out of a yew tree and crushed his right arm so badly they had to amputate it. Now every time a wean climbed a fence, mammies hung out windows and screamed, “Get doon aff o’ that or ye’ll end up like poor Mister Dolan. ”

As the shop bell rang, Mr Dolan looked both happy and sad to see Agnes. The racks of lager cans and whisky bottles behind him said he well understood the new economy of the scheme. Yet, when the beautiful woman came up to the counter, the one-armed man couldn’t help but sigh at the waste.

Agnes, trying to ignore the pity in his face, asked the shopkeeper how he was today. Mr Dolan just shrugged and nodded towards the boy. “Why are you no in school? ”

“He’s got a wee bug, Mister Dolan, ” Agnes interjected. “It’s been going around. ”

The old man sucked his teeth but didn’t linger on the lie. Agnes took out a piece of paper on which she had written a short message list. She ordered some innocent provisions: tinned custard, tinned peas, some mince, and a handful of potatoes. She asked for a little sliced ham and fidgeted nervously as Mr Dolan moved the meat skillfully in the slicer using his half stump. The butt end of cured pig and the pink-puckered edge of his stump looked to be one and the same.

“How much is that to be? ” she asked, as he put the slices of gammon into her message bag.

“Five poun’ two pence, ” said the man.

Agnes fumbled for a moment. “C-can I also have the day’s paper, please? ”

“Five poun’ twenty seven. ”

“A wee bar of that Cadbury’s for the boy. ”

“Five poun’ fifty. ”

“Let’s see, ” said Agnes, in a fake forgetful tone, “Oh, aye. I nearly forgot. ” Shuggie looked at his feet in shame. “Can I have twelve Special Brew, please? ”

When the man turned to reach these from the shelf, Agnes licked all the lipstick off her bottom lip.

“Thirteen poun’ even, ” the man said.

Agnes opened her purse and looked down at the notes and the single silver coin. “Oh, Mr Dolan, seems I’m a wee bit short the day. ”

The one-armed man reached under the counter and pulled out a big red ledger. He thumbed through the pages to B and found Agnes’s name. “Hen, you already owe me twenty-four poun’, ” he said with gravity. “I cannae gie ye any more tick till that’s all paid. ”

With a pained smile, Agnes looked through the message bag and placed the gammon, the tinned peas, and two potatoes back on the counter.

Whatever Mr Dolan thought, he never said. As terrifying as his loose sleeve was to the boy, Shuggie knew that he was a deeply sympathetic man. All the mothers in the scheme called him “the one-armed bandit, ” on account of his high prices, but Shuggie had never seen him be anything but kind. As Agnes stood shaking before him on a Tuesday morning, she looked as though she were shopping in the West End at the big brand-name shops. Mr Dolan never called out her little charade. Sometimes, when she was pulling food back out of the bag, he would wink at the polished boy with his hair washed and parted and would slide him a piece of ripe fruit. But not today. Today he took back nearly all the groceries and rang up the lager for Agnes.

Agnes clipped through the scheme with the message bag by her side. She glided faster now, and Shuggie struggled to keep up as she flew down the hill. When she got home she went into the kitchen without taking off her coat. Shuggie sat in the living room and let her gather herself. He waited for the hiss and splash of the cans and then the sound of the drink being hidden. He waited until he heard the tap running at the big metal sink.

“You feeling better? ” he asked from the doorway.

She turned from the tea mug. The nervousness from her face was gone, but the worry was still there. “Much better, thanks. You were a good wee helper the day. ”

He went and wrapped himself around her waist. “I’d do anything for you. ”

All the way across the peat marsh he kept stopping and turning back to wave, until the house dropped out of sight and he couldn’t see her at the window any more. As he cracked his way across the frozen burns he consoled himself, knowing exactly what her day looked like. There was comfort in the fact that whether sober or not, it largely followed the same trapped routine.

Shuggie flicked the brittle heads of the bulrush reeds and wondered whether the sadness would get her today. The frozen reeds were bone dry, and when he tapped the heads their seeds took to the air like little parachutists. They floated up and back to the scheme like a parade of little ghosts. He made a game of telling the ghosts that he loved her, and with a flick he sent them her way.

The trampled grass circle, where he practiced being a normal boy, was exactly as he had left it. On days when she had kept him home from school he had collected old bits of abandoned furniture for his flattened island. When she had a particularly bad bender; he spent a whole school-less week taking an old chair over, some carpet scraps from the bins, and odd pieces of cutlery and broken china. With ends of old rope he pulled things out of the rusty burns. He pulled out a broken telly and sat it facing the centre of the island. Even though it had no screen, just having it there made it feel more like a home. When he had all the furniture he wanted, he spent any dry days arranging and then rearranging the stuff into a shabby front room. He found an old-fashioned baby carriage and pushed it around, struggling through the long reeds, collecting the prettiest flowers for his new home. When he found a little black rabbit, dead and frozen one winter afternoon, he washed it in the burn and buried it in the dirt. Then he had buried the plastic ponies next to the rabbit, the shameful scented horses that he had stolen but that were not meant for boys. The following spring he searched the slag bings and took to laying sprigs of purple helleborine on the graves. With no friends to speak of, these little rituals occupied him well, allowing him to spend the day feeling house-proud, to attend to the shameful hummocks as dutifully as any mourning widow.

All that short day he walked around his trampled island washing the dirt off things. He took the fork, the spoon, and the cracked plates down to the burn and rinsed them in the water. He lifted the bits of carpet and tried to shake the stour from them. Then he hung the rain-soaked blanket over a chair to warm and crack in the low sun.

The sun was already leaving the sky after a short day’s housework. As he climbed through the back fence he hoped to take a deep bath and practice his red book, but the front door was hanging wide open. Shuggie stood frozen on the bottom step for a long while, wondering what the omen was, tilting his head and listening like a guard dog. Creeping up the long hallway he could hear a commotion from inside the living room. He walked cautiously to the door and pushed it open a crack. Inside, prostrate on the floor, was Agnes. Sat on her chest, like a school bully, was Leek.

The crimson swirls on the red carpet were wrong. The pattern looked broken and disjointed. As Shuggie stepped closer, he could see that there was blood on his mother and that there was blood on Leek’s face too. If he could have focused, he would have seen that there was also blood on the TV and the brown table and the fringe of the settee.

Leek was pushing down on to the heap of her. Around them were bloody piles of fabric that had once been clean tea towels. Agnes was writhing and cursing under Leek’s weight. She called him names that Shuggie had never heard before, and his brother was crying strange tears and struggling to hold her down.

There was a broken razor blade on the carpet; to Shuggie it was small and thin and innocent-looking, like a tiny guillotine for a cartoon mouse. He only noticed it because it was funny that it should be in the living room, lying in the middle of his mother’s good carpet. Leek was screaming something at him, but Shuggie couldn’t understand. He wanted to know why there was blood on her tea mug. He watched his brother twist his face towards him as he held blackening tea towels over Agnes’s wrists. When he had one of her arms secure under his knee, he reached out and grabbed Shuggie by the shirt front. Agnes’s other arm flew free, and there was a low spurt of blood. Shuggie wanted to tell Leek, Look! Look! That is where the blood is coming from! but Leek had him by the collar and was shaking him so hard he thought his neck might snap.

“Shuggie. Listen to me. ” Leek’s eyes were very wide, and there was white foam in the corners of his mouth. His face was coated in the thick white dust of a plasterer, and there was blood on the white of his teeth. “You need to call a fucking ambulance. ”

“You’re a selfish cunt, ” she wailed. “Just let me go. ”

Her body was racked with deep sobs. Leek’s tears were falling on to her face and mixing with her own.

“I’m too tired. ” Still she pushed and she heaved, and then her eyes rolled backwards as though they were looking for the relief of sleep.

“You don’t love me. ”

“You don’t love me, ” she repeated, again and again.

The boy pulled the door quietly closed behind him. He sat down and composed himself before he called 999 and asked for an ambulance. Leek was screaming something at him, but he didn’t understand. He didn’t understand any of it.

When Agnes awoke in the psychiatric hospital she had no memory of getting there. The ambulance had taken her the many miles to the Royal Infirmary in the shadow of Sighthill. One of the emergency doctors skillfully stitched her wounds and stopped her blood loss. Then they put her on a drip and sedated her to keep her from clawing at herself again. As she rolled into a fitful sleep, they had admitted her to Gartnavel to begin the deeper healing. When she woke she was in a ward with thirteen other women: Grown women dribbling on themselves. Poor women crying at dollies to get dressed for school. Sedated women who didn’t ever sleep a wink.

As Agnes, tiny and stitched up, slept through her sedation, Leek and Eugene drew the curtain against the unfortunates and stood sentinel on either side of her bed. It was the most time they had ever spent together. Each man was glad, in some way, to have this dormant body between them to focus on. It was a relief in the same way old people enjoyed having a child in the room, because it gave them something to fuss over when they had nothing left to say to each other.

Leek had not spoken to Eugene since the man had goaded Agnes into breaking her sobriety. Now they spent most of that first afternoon warily engaging with each other, avoiding eye contact, and talking about Agnes as though the other man had never met her. They agreed on only one thing. They looked down at the wrung-out woman and agreed how lucky she was to have survived. From the long, deep cuts on her wrists it was clear, she hadn’t wanted to leave anything to chance.

“So it was the foreman, then? ” asked Eugene, unable to meet Leek’s clear gaze.

“Uh-huh. ”

“Lucky that. ”

“S’pose. I don’t know how many times she had phoned that day. She’s been calling my work a lot lately. ”

“Aye. My taxi rank as well. ”

Leek hunched his shoulders, like he sat heavy under the memory of it all. “It was a brass neck, but the gaffer was usually pretty good about it. Except this one time he came over and told me personally that I had better get home fast, there was some sort of emergency. ”

“He telt you that? ”

Leek nodded. “He had my jacket in his hands, and at first I thought I was getting the sack. Then he told me to hurry. He even gave me money for a taxi. ” Leek brushed the hair back over his eyes. “That’s how I knew something bad must have happened. ”

When Agnes finally woke up, it took a while for the realization of what she had done to sink in. First she smiled at them as if they had brought her morning tea. Clouds of memory passed over her, and then she looked down and saw her bandaged wrists. She had come closer this time than ever in the past. Leek’s construction site was on the South Side. She hadn’t meant for him to make it. She hadn’t known the gaffer was a good-hearted man.

“Where’s the wean? ” she asked, her voice cracked with dryness.

Leek looked at her, and then, for the first time, he looked at Eugene. “He’s OK, ” said Leek.

Agnes’s eyes swivelled without her moving her head. “I asked where. Not how. ”

The blackness in her dilated pupils pinned him to the wall. Leek looked away and tried to busy himself with something to soothe her thirst. He poured her a phosphorescent glass of diluting juice, but she held her hand out in refusal. He looked at his shoes. “Well. He’s with Big Shug, ” Leek said finally, wishing in that instant that he had lied.

Agnes did not say anything. She thought he was lying. The way her top lip curdled and stuck to her teeth warned Leek to stop taking the piss.

“Before you cut yourself, you must have phoned him and told him to come get Shuggie. It all happened that fast. I couldn’t help you and help Shuggie. ” Leek exhaled upwards, and his fringe rippled like a curtain in an open window. “It’s too much, Mammy. I can’t be the one to save everybody all the time. ”

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