Shuggie Bain

by Douglas Stuart

he noted how neat and clean everything was. He thought about Joanie, her cat-hair-covered couch, her dirty drawers on the bedroom floor, and he could picture her now, carelessly brushing toast crumbs off their mismatched bedcovers.

It was unlike her to lower her vanity like this. But there, in the close heat of the fire, Shuggie dreamt of how he never wanted this burning rain to end. How it would be better if they were stuck inside alone, where he could keep her safe forever.

It was true that the ring of green around Glasgow held the new slums of the urban resettlement, these forgotten, remote housing schemes. It seemed cruel to Agnes that these green fields also held some of the fanciest hotels and private clubs she had ever seen. The two different worlds didn’t like to look on each other.

Eugene was unwilling to admit defeat, and Agnes could imagine he was a man well used to being able to fix any object that was broken. It made her feel like an engine left corroding on a front lawn.

“You know, I would never have thanked you for a whisky. Not even on my worst days. I find it’s like gin. It makes you sad. I didn’t drink to get sad. I drank to get away from sadness.”

He disappeared earlier than usual on Hogmanay, like a man who sees rain coming and tries to outrun it.

felt like a baby to miss his mother. It wasn’t fair, the way everyone could up and leave as they pleased.

She was drinking to forget herself, because she didn’t know how else to keep out the pain and the loneliness.

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.

“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.

There was comfort in the fact that whether sober or not, it largely followed the same trapped routine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“It’s too much, Mammy. I can’t be the one to save everybody all the time.”

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.

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.

Shuggie made a note to never tell his mother that they had stairs or a dining room.

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.

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.

If their brightest and eldest was in the cupboard, the boy couldn’t think where they were leading him.

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.

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.

He stood outside the door and knew he wouldn’t stay today. Some mornings he had found that if he timed it correctly, he could find her after the drink of the previous day had left her and before she had soaked herself in fresh sadness. Then she would be small and a little pitiful, but she would be present, charming even, a thing he could look after like a spindly plant he wanted to coax towards the sunlight.

He had even read the agony column, which he enjoyed reading and found truly insightful, but would never admit to anyone.

“Then who will look after her?” “Well. She’ll have to look after herself.” “Then how will she ever get better?” Leek stopped his packing. He lowered himself on to one knee, so that he was looking up at Shuggie. His lips were moving silently, almost like he didn’t know quite where to start. “Don’t make the same mistake as me. She’s never going to get better. When the time is right you have to leave. The only thing you can save is yourself.”

Each time he held her he was less like a child. He was becoming something else, not yet a man, something like a stretched child, waiting to be inflated into adulthood. She clung to him while she could. He smelled fresh, like the fields outside.

She pitied them for not even having the pride to run a brush through their hair.

He could sense the fever that had fallen on her, the dream of being a new person surrounded by new things.

But the drink rarely lost. It was like a bully who gave Agnes that running start in the grinning confidence he would catch her easily, and she’d be battered again when the benefit book was cashed again the following Monday. Still, Shuggie always fell for it.

The pavements were full of people going about their messages, and nobody paid any mind to the others. They moved independently, in oblivious, anonymous, take-it-for-granted freedom. The people didn’t even nod hello to each other, and Shuggie could bet there was not a single cousin amongst them.

He opened his eyes wide like he had hit the bullying jackpot.

The boy was already halfway back down the close. Keir Weir was a palette of warm tones all chosen because of how well they went together. He was more tan than anyone Shuggie had ever known, and his brown hair shone with memories of a sun it had rarely seen.

Was this to be the moment that would make him normal?

Her mouth hung open and her eyes wanted to look away but couldn’t, because they were confused by what they saw. All

She was his best chance at being a normal boy, and already he had ruined it.

“That’s all they want to do. Go in there and suck the scabby faces off one another. It makes me sick the way they paw at each other. She’s been a right nympho since she turned thirteen.”

think it’s what all alkies want anyways.” She shivered. “To die, I mean. Some are just taking the slow road to it.”

suddenly he felt lonely, like he wanted to sit on Agnes’s knee again as he had when he was little.

He had lied to Agnes as she had lied to him about stopping the drink. She would never be able to get sober, and he, sat in the cold with a lovely girl, knew he would never feel quite like a normal boy.

Only her eyes were loose and half-detached, rolling under the waves of the day’s drink.

Agnes went to the bay window and looked down into the narrow street. She watched her baby come out of the close mouth and search the sky for her. She nodded smugly that she had been right, that she had always known he would leave her, like they all did.

“She might. I just have to try harder to help her. Be good to her. Keep myself tidy. I can make her better.”

“Bad news always follows you, Shuggie. It always has.”

Leek frowned at Shuggie, like he was angry at his hope, disappointed that Shuggie was stupid enough to still believe. Leek said Big Shug was a selfish shitebag. It made Shuggie sad then, not only because it was true but also because Leek had looked so much like their mother when he had said it.

She had been wise, and she had been gallus, and he knew now it had all been a childish front, a mouthy bravado that covered the hurt inside her. Now her pretty, freckled features were set in that closed, self-protecting