Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

In reality, pushing the metal through the bumpy pink flesh was the easy part; the difficult part was resisting the urge to do the same to the customers.

This mess would have hurt her pride. Someday he would save some money and buy new sheets of his own, soft and warm and all the same colour.

as the man spoke to him, he could think only about the taste of the tinned ale, how sour and sad it tasted. It reminded him of things he would rather forget.

If the school knew how he lived, they would have been forced to do something about it.

She wanted to feel a little envy from strangers, to dance with men who held her proud and close. Mostly

Him, her man, who when he shared her bed now seemed to lie on the very edge, made her feel angry with the littered promises of better things.

Agnes just smiled her best smile for the doormen, the smile she kept for men, the same one she hid from her mother.

Leek was a quiet soul, given to watching from the edges, capable of disappearing even when someone was talking to him.

Every building was in competition with the next, blinking with a thousand gaudy bulbs of its own.

Shug could see the waterfront through her eyes, the tawdry glamour of the clubs and the adventure of the amusement halls. He wondered if this, too, would lose its shine for her.

the children were always noisiest when they were happiest,

He liked to roam alone in the darkness, getting a good look at the underbelly. Out came the characters shellacked by the grey city, years of drink and rain and hope holding them in place. His living was made by moving people, but his favourite pastime was watching them.

Rain was the natural state of Glasgow. It kept the grass green and the people pale and bronchial.

Whole housing estates of young men who were promised the working trades of their fathers had no future now. Men were losing their very masculinity.

Shug had seen it before, those with least to give always gave the most.

Agnes screwed her eyes shut and went back to a place where she felt young and hopeful and wanted.

When she laughed, he danced harder. He did whatever had caused her to laugh another dozen times till her smile stretched thin and false, and then he searched for the next

The vibrating patterned wallpaper threatened to make him sick, but he kept going, punching the air and rattling his hips.

As she gripped him, he could see her face was lopsided, the paint on her eyes was blurred and running away. It looked like the lager beauties sometimes did, a careless printer and a misaligned screen, and suddenly the woman was no longer whole, just a mess of different layers.

They were taunting her, their voices pitched, ready to break, the dangerous sound of little boys coming into the intoxicating power of manhood.

Agnes would be soft and repentant, the demon drink having left her.

was good to be a quiet soul.

His eyes were grey and clear but always slow to show emotion. He had long perfected the art of staring through people, leaving conversations to follow his daydreams through the back of their heads and out any open window.

His only real physical concession to his mother was his nose, large and bony, too severe to be Roman. It broke the line of his soft, shy fringe and sat upon his thin face like a proud monument to his Irish Catholic ancestors.

Leek took out his top set of dentures and rubbed at his cheek as if they had been pinching. Agnes, annoyed with the constant trips to the dentist, had convinced him to have his teeth, weak and riddled with mercury fillings, pulled for his fifteenth birthday.

Her brother had been gifted with legendary stubbornness; he just stared through you and floated away, leaving behind his frame to be pecked to pieces.

The guilt sank like dampness into her bones, and she felt rotten with the shame.

Wullie shook his head. It had all been too ugly for him: the fight, the fire, the wean crying.

A man needs to take pride in his family. But people don’t care about things like that any more, do they?”

“It gave me that much pleasure just to be proud of you.

Grown men and women, jealous of a wee shiny bit of life like you. I used to laugh when t...

am tired of you coming first, Agnes. I’m tired of watching you destroy yourself and knowing it’s my fault.”

never knew a man know the size of his weans, let alone go shopping for them. I used to tell him to stop it, he was spoiling you. But he would say, ‘What’s the harm?’”

silently out the window, trying not to think of the trail of fatherless children and the childrenless father they were leaving in their wake.

She would not go back to a life she knew the edges of.

Agnes looked at the grassy front gardens of the low bungalows and tried to feel excited again, but it was like trying to make a fire with wet wood.

The look felt as close to love as she could remember.

With her hand already to her mouth, she surreptitiously slipped a blue pill between her teeth, and with a single crunch she broke it in two and swallowed it dry. Only Catherine noticed.

Leek watched them as they were watching him. His stomach sank. The men all had his mother’s eyes.

The front door opened again, and Shuggie came out on to the top step. Without addressing the women he turned to his mother and put his hands on his hips; he thrust a foot forward and said as clear as Agnes had ever heard him speak, “We need to talk. I really do not think I can live here. It smells like cabbages and batteries. It’s simply unpossible.” The heads of the audience turned one to another in shock. It was like a dozen faces looking at their own likenesses in the mirror. “Wid ye get a load o’ that. Liberace is moving in!” screamed one of the women.

heading home at finishing time with nothing being finished, only a belly full of ale and a back cowed with worry.

They lined the mound of the hills like trees with no leaves. She watched her son, jealous of his talent to disappear, to float away and leave them all behind.

“Why don’t we just go back to Sighthill?” Catherine would whisper. But Agnes couldn’t explain through the hurt. She knew he would never come back if she returned to her mother’s. She was to stay where she was dropped. She was to take any little kindness he would give.

Shug had added it to the long list of things she had to stop if she ever wanted him home. It was his emotional ransom.

Joanie sounded flat, like when you turn the corner and run into someone you’d rather never see again.

She was caught between wanting to start a fight and stab him and wanting him to stay a little longer.

She had loved him, and he had needed to break her completely to leave her for good. Agnes Bain was too rare a thing to let someone else love. It wouldn’t do to leave pieces of her for another man to collect and repair later.

“Aye, the minute ah saw ye, ah spotted it. They thought you were the big I Am, all done up in sequins, like some big dolly bird from the city. But ah could see through it. Ah could see the sadness, and ah knew ye had to be a big drinker.”

The boy was watching him, peering through half-lidded eyes the same way Shuggie had seen the miners’ children squint when he raised his hand in class. It was a blend of disbelief and disdain. He had often seen his granny look at his father this way.

Plastered on her face was the glassy grimace that came from under the kitchen sink.