He reminded her of the colour of sausage casing, except it was less of a colour, more of a watery tint that has been spread too thin. He looked worn through. Lizzie had to use both of her hands to cradle one of his, and as she laid her cheek on it, she could feel the raised cobalt veins that traced the top of it. These were hands that had loaded grain trucks for twenty years, hands that had laid pungent tarmacadam, hands that had killed Italians in North Africa.
Now Wullie was having trouble even breathing. The air in his lungs sounded as if it was being run over a grater, it would catch on the prongs and stop, only to rattle and rasp back out of him. Lizzie wiped at his face with the hanky she kept up her sleeve. His mouth was always open now, the corners caked and dry. She wanted to kiss him once more, she wanted some last memory of the fine man that he had been, that he still was.
The old men in the other beds were dozing. She had watched the nurses give them all a drop of liquid morphine, and now they looked like they slept an uneasy sleep. Lizzie unbuttoned her coat and drew the scarf off from around her hair. She lifted Wullie’s hand and drew down the bed sheets. At first she thought to climb in beside him, lie against the stone wall of his body and cry. Instead, as she mounted the hospital bed, she had a change in her heart. She clambered on to the bed and then, still in her good coat, she straddled him.
Anyone else might have missed it, but Lizzie was sure she saw the lids of his eyes flutter, the corners of his mouth pull tight in a cheeky smile. She rocked back and forth gently. It wasn’t meant to be as dirty as it looked. She only wanted to feel him pressed against her, warm and alive through the cotton of his pyjamas, through the clammy poly blend of her underwear. She only wanted to give him a little comfort against the pain. Didn’t she owe him that?
Lizzie lit a fresh cigarette as she rocked and rubbed on top of Wullie. She took a deep lungful and then leaned over and blew it into his face. She could only imagine how much he would be missing his Regals.
“Are ye alright, Mrs Campbell?” asked a voice from behind her. There were hands gently but firmly holding her elbows. “It’s alright now, darlin’,” the voice said, as it guided her off the bed. “It’s alright, ma wee china.”
Wullie didn’t stir as the Sister helped Lizzie down. His pyjamas were wrinkled where Lizzie had creased them, otherwise nothing had changed. Without any judgement, the nurse snuffed the doubt in Lizzie’s fingertips and pulled her skirt back below her knees. Lizzie felt herself guided back to her seat, and she felt the cold glass of water at her lips. The whole time the Sister soothed her, in a gentle, calming voice, she petted her like a cat, and it made Lizzie want to tell her secret things. Lizzie took the Sister’s hands in her own and said, “Please, God, don’t take him away. Please. No’ again.”
Agnes’s face was very thickly made up, and it looked to Shuggie like the paint had been layered over several other faces she had forgotten to take off first. The boy followed her at a discreet distance, stopping now and then to gather up things that fell from the pocket of her matted mink coat.
As Agnes stoated through the infirmary’s automatic doors, a concerned nurse ran over, thinking she was in need of attention. Shuggie watched the girl try to corral his mother and slip her gently into a tatty wheelchair. Agnes pushed past the nurse and went in the direction of the oncology wards. Shuggie heard the nurse say to a male attendant that she thought for sure Agnes was a working girl.
“She is not,” said Shuggie, quite proudly. “My mother has never worked a day in her life. She’s far too good-looking for that.”
The matted mink coat gave her an air of superiority, and her black strappy heels clacked out a slurred beat on the long marble hallway. The rubber tip had worn away from around the right heel, and although she had coloured the shoe in with an old black bingo marker, the sharp metal nail scraped the floor with the screech of hard times.
Gaunt faces looked out from white beds as she scratched her way past. A large, friendly-looking Sister came out of a booth and stepped directly into her path, a green clipboard clutched to her chest like a shield. She was as wide as a small wall. “Scuse me. Can ah help yeese?” said the nurse with a tired smile. “Ah’m Sister Meechan.” She pulled at the official-looking badge on her blue uniform.
To Agnes, she seemed kinder than the nurses Lizzie had worked with years before, great hulking Glasgow women able to hold grown men down on a Saturday night and pull broken bottles from between their ribs. They had granite faces, cold and hard, from watching the endless soap opera of mindless violence. Sister Meechan was clearly trying her best. Agnes looked down at the stocky nurse and looked at her small badge. The letters were moving. She took a deep breath and tried to sound sober. “No, thanks. I know where. I’m going.”
Sister Meechan didn’t break her well-trained smile. “Do ye, aye? It’s the back of nine. Visitin’s done for the day.”
With a heavy blink Agnes drew her eyes over the officious woman. The end of her nose was pitted like a small strawberry. Agnes let her eyes linger and tutted in sympathy for it, letting the Sister know she had clocked it. Then she put her ringed fingers on the nurse’s thick arm in an entitled way, each finger falling on to her flesh as if she were playing scales at the piano. “I’m here to see my father.”
Agnes’s breath was yeasty and sour on the nurse’s face. “And what is your faither’s name?” said the Sister without flinching. Glasgow routinely presented her with all sorts.
“Wulli … William Campbell.”
The nurse made to check the name on her green clipboard but stopped. “Och, ah see.” Her practiced face cracked, and underneath, several real emotions played across it. She hugged the clipboard to her broad chest and took her free hand and placed it gently on Agnes’s arm. Agnes found herself staring at it.
“Oh, hen,” she said tenderly, breaking all the formality of her training. “Ah’m dead sorry for the state of your daddy. He’s one of our favourites, such a big handsome basturt, and he’s no been a single bit of bother.” Then Sister Meechan stepped closer to Agnes and added conspiratorially: “Ah am worrit about your wee mammy, though. She disnae seem to be coping aw that well. The night ah was making sure aw the supper things had been tidied away, but when ah reached your faither’s bed ah noticed the privacy curtain was still half-drawn. Ye ken it was far too late for that. So ah pult back the privacy curtain to find the poor soul atop of him gieing it pure laldy.”
Shuggie would have said that the nurse was a kind lady. Agnes would have to disagree. If she had been sober she might not have laughed. If the kind nurse didn’t have her hand on her arm and that pitiful look on her face she might not have laughed. However, she wasn’t sober and she wasn’t in the mood to be condescended to. So she laughed. It came at first as a guilty giggle but then it caught her with a shake, and she threw her head back in gaudy, haughty peals of laughter. Then she said, cruelly, “Were you jealous?”
Sister Meechan’s fleshy jaws smacked together. “Dear God!” The strawberry nose twitched. “Do ah need to remind ye that this is a communal ward?”
Shuggie saw his mother’s fists tighten. “Oh, give me a break.” Agnes dropped her jaw, her eyes still bright with laughter. She leaned in close. “After nearly forty-seven years together that poor woman is mad with the grief.” She extended a mink arm and pushed past the broad Sister as easily as drawing curtains back from a window. She clipped up the corridor to the door of the ward. As she turned, the bare nail made a shameful scrape on the floor. “And my Daddy is one fine-looking man.”
Shuggie watched from the shadows and waited for his mother to push through the big swing doors into the ward. He came up silently behind the Sister, who was standing slack-mouthed and staring in the direction of the scraping heels. He was sure the Sister was feeling sorrier for the old woman with the dying husband, for now she also had a bad drunk for a daughter. Shuggie poked her fleshy arm, and she jumped at the silent visitor by her side.
“I’m sorry,” he said, much like it was a calling card. “Please forgive her abruptness. She really is a good person.” Then he added, “So. Is this where people come to get to heaven?”
Sister Meechan clutched her hand to her heart from the fright. The boy in the fitted suit was standing very close to her. He clasped his hands behind his back, like he was an old man, like he was the head of the hospital himself. She wanted to touch him back. She wanted to see if he was real. “Och, son. Ye cannae be sneaking up on folk like that.”
“I take care where I walk. I don’t sneak.” He straightened his narrow tie. “Can you please answer my question?”
The Sister blinked. “Heaven? I suppose so. Sometimes.”
Shuggie chewed his lip. “So can they go to hell from here too?”
She could have told him it depended on the shift, that most people admitted to the ward on an Old Firm game day should probably go straight to hell. She looked him up and down; the boy couldn’t be more than eight or nine. “No, son. Not too often,” she lied.
With curious fingers he started to stroke the metal watch chain that hung from her pocket. “Do they leave on a bus for heaven?” A patronizing smirk crossed her lips, and she reached out a scrubbed hand to pat him on the head. He ducked instinctively and tutted, “Please don’t do that! I just had it parted.” With a sullen look he came closer again and resumed twisting the interlocking links.
Sister Meechan’s hand wavered awkwardly in the air, unaccustomed to not being in command. “Ye are a very tidy little boy.”
“My mother says it doesn’t cost anything to take pride in your appearance.”
With a glance down the hallway she asked, “So was that wummin yer mammy?”
Shuggie nodded. “Uh-huh.” He looped the chain around his fingers and stole a glance up at her kind face. “It’s OK, though. You don’t have to like her. Sometimes she drinks from underneath the kitchen sink. Nobody really likes her then. Not my daddy, or my big sister, or my big brother. But that’s OK. Leek doesn’t like anyone really. Mammy says he’s a social spastic.”
Sister Meechan closed her eyes, the clear grey eyes that had seen all manner of sins and sights. “Does she do that often?” she asked.
Shuggie dropped the chain. He looked up at her through his knitted brows. “I can manage. I can fetch messages and make sure she goes to bed on time. Besides, Sister Nurse. You never answered my question. My mother told me that my grandaddy would be going to heaven soon, and I wanted to know if he had to get a bus or if we could take him in a black hackney?”
The Sister’s hand moved from her heart to her throat. “Och, son. It disnae really work like that. They don’t leave on a bus. I mean sometimes they go in a big black car.” She started worrying a tab of neck skin, twisting at it as though it were a necklace. “But when a person goes to heaven they don’t take their bodies wi’ them.”
Shuggie stuck his bottom lip out in thought. His right eye closed in sour disbelief. “Do they not take their hearts?”
“Naw.”
“Do they not take their eyes?”
“Well. Naw.”
“Do they not even take their fingers?”
“Naw, son. They don’t take their legs, or their arms, or their noses. They don’t take anything, because it’s not their bodies that go to God. It’s their spirit.”
Shuggie looked relieved somehow. The nurse could see a weight shift on his shoulders. He turned on his polished heels and followed the perfumed cloud of Agnes down the corridor. He stopped at the double doors.
“So if your body doesn’t go to heaven, it doesn’t matter if another boy did something bad to it in a bin shed, right?”
The door to the communal ward had swung open with a slam. The lights were low and drowsy; beige men sat propped up in white beds. On the far side of the ward Wullie’s bed was ringed with orange visitors’ chairs. Each of the empty chairs had a lonely pool of reflected light, and Lizzie sat alone, her grey coat, grey skirt, and tan tights fading away against the bright plastic.
Agnes threw her hands over her face in a wide arc of grief, something like a grotesque peek-a-boo. Backlit by the bright corridor light she performed like she were onstage at the King’s. She crossed the ward and let her bag and coat slip off and lie behind her in a trail across the floor. In defiance of Sister Meechan she put an open-toe sandal on the bedrail and climbed up on the bed. Lizzie looked down at the foot on the bed, heartsick at the painted toes bursting through the worn black tights. Agnes mounted the bed and draped herself over her sleeping father like his widow. Then she began to hug him and wail like his mistress. Wullie didn’t stir. Lizzie rose from the chair and without a word pulled her daughter’s black skirt back down over her white nylon petticoat.
The ward door opened a thin crack, and Shuggie appeared, carrying a handful of her belongings. “You’d lose your head if it wasn’t screwed on.”
The dying men stirred again at the apparition of youth. A visiting lady in a lambswool twinset folded her arms across her chest, she pointed her suede driving moccasin towards him in disapproval. The suited boy walked across the floor and silently gathered more of his mother’s things, dragging the discarded coat behind him like a wet towel. His granny was smiling at him. It was the smile she had when she was watching Sunday telly and not paying much attention. She didn’t look sad at all, Shuggie thought, she looked peaceful, resigned. He sat on one of the empty chairs next to her and held her thin hand as they watched Agnes stumble down off the bed. In the dim light his grandfather looked the colour of condensed milk. His skin looked thin, like yellow flypaper, and was pulled so tight and thin over the bony Campbell nose it put Shuggie in mind of a chicken’s wishbone.
Agnes sat in the other seat next to her mother and took her free hand. Lizzie said, “Visiting hours are over.”
Agnes’s head bobbed on her shoulders. “Mammy, this is hard for me. I just couldn’t get up the courage to come.”
“Aye, well, you look plenty full of it now.”
“I just finished what I had in the house. As soon as it’s all done I’m going to get better. I’ll even join the AA.” She was lying, and it rang hollow.
“I’ve never liked those AA places. They attract the lowest kind of people. God gave you a will. You should use it to save yourself.”
For a good while the three generations sat in silence, their hands laced together in a chain. Agnes’s cheap stone rings were as big and blue as Lizzie’s knuckles. Agnes took a length of toilet paper out from up her jumper sleeve, wiped her eyes, and then handed it to Lizzie, who did the same and passed it to Shuggie, who folded it to a side free of mascara or phlegm. Agnes reached into her black bag and drew out two cans of lager. She popped them with a foamy hiss, dropping the pulls neatly back into the bag. “I don’t think I can handle this. Are they all to leave me?”
Lizzie took the white toilet paper from Shuggie and modestly covered the half-naked pinup on the side of the lager can. “I feel like he’s just back from that bastarding war. It’s too soon for him to leave again.”
Shuggie watched the lambswool woman twist her mouth in disgust at the open lager. He turned to tell his mother, but he could see Agnes wasn’t there in the room with them. She hadn’t even heard a word her mother had said. Shuggie straightened the buttons on the front of his granny’s wool coat, turning all the plastic flowers the right way up, leaves at the bottom, the petals at the top. He waited as the women talked and talked and talked and did not listen to each other.
The old man lay in the bed taking his shallow breaths. The air made a wheezing sound as it squeezed around the tumours in his lungs. Agnes clenched her jaw in anger so tightly that the porcelain dentures shrieked like two supper plates rubbing together. “I should never have left with that bastard Shug.” She lit two fresh cigarettes and handed one to her mother. “I’ll tell Daddy that when he wakes up, eh.”
It was this that brought Lizzie’s mind into focus. Lizzie took a draw on her cigarette and blew it carefully into Wullie’s face. “Your faither is never going to get any better.”
Agnes patted the bed. “Not my daddy. He’ll be right as rain in a few days.”
“Agnes! The doctors have said he’s never going to get home again.”
Agnes took another drink from the can. Shuggie watched the layers of old mascara dissolve and black tears start to migrate down her face. “Why do we have to just lie down and take everything in life?”
Lizzie shrugged. “Oh, what guid are the poor me’s now?”
They were silent a good long time after that. It grew so late it became early. The lambswool woman eventually left, and shortly after Sister Meechan brought them opaque mugs for the lager and cleared the offending lager cans. The nurse said nothing more, and Agnes knew then it must be getting close to the end. The Sister gave Wullie more morphine, gave Lizzie an ice cube for his lips, and then she pulled the heavy curtain closed around the four of them. Shuggie’s legs went numb from the hard seat, but he knew better than to make a fuss.
In the quiet, Agnes slowly sobered. She read the Freemans catalogue to steady the shakes. She had been dog-earing certain pages, starting in early February, to get ready for the next school year in August, Shuggie stretching and growing like a weed. She refilled their mugs, slower now, and asked her mother, “How will you manage without him? For money and that?”
Lizzie shrugged. “How have you managed?”
Agnes glanced at her father. “I wouldn’t like to say.”
Lizzie let the boy doze against her, she lifted her arm and pulled him into her side. She checked he was sleeping before she spoke again. “I need to tell you something Agnes. I don’t want you to pass remark on it. I couldnae bear it if you judged me.”
Agnes sat forward. “What is it? Are you all right?”
Lizzie shook her head. “I’ve been hard on you. I know I have.” Lizzie paused as though she was waiting for Agnes to disagree, but Agnes did not disagree. “I was never a fan of Big Shug. But I was harder on you than I should have been.”
“It’s OK. You were right to be hard.”
“No, I’ve been in your shoes. I suppose I just hoped for better shoes for you.”
Lizzie checked the sleeping boy again before beginning her tale. Shuggie had his eyes firmly closed, but he was not asleep. He listened very closely to what she said next.
Lizzie took a deep breath and held it as long as she could before she spoke again. “Whatever it takes Agnes, keep going, even if it’s not for you, even if it’s just for them. Keep going. That’s what mammies do.”
She’d been pulling a grey-headed mop over the tenement stairs, stopping her dance every so often to wring its head with her bare hands. The acid tang of bleach and pine resin nipped at her eyes as she chased dirty water from stair to stair and pushed the last little wave out of the close mouth. Lizzie dragged the heavy tin bucket into the street and poured the brackish water down the hill. Half-dressed weans jumped and danced over this new river, screaming with delight.
She spent the rest of the morning washing sheets in Agnes’s tin baby bath. She would never have admitted it, but she missed the steamie. She used to love the ritual of it; it was a place free of men, free of weans, a place where the women could share the bits of themselves that they couldn’t talk about at chapel. She would pay her money, get her sink, and put her curtains and work dresses in to steep in the deep boiling water. As the dirt loosened from the cloth, the women would stand around in a half-circle and work the gossip into a lather. Nothing happened in Germiston that the steamie didn’t know about.
Now, she knew, they were talking about her. Now they waited for her to finish on the wringers; they would say happy goodbyes, and when she was gone they would pluck her good name to bits like a bit of old ham bone.
As she choked the dirt from the clothes, great tides of water lapped over the side of the tin bath. She cursed at the mess, but at least she didn’t have to wash his things any more. At least she didn’t have to wash for Wullie Campbell. She couldn’t imagine one of his granary overalls fitting in the little bath anyway. There would be no room for the water.
Lizzie had been red-faced and thumping down into her laundry when she noticed Agnes twirling, her frilly white socks sucking up the pooling suds. Lizzie lifted her from the damp floor. She dropped the child in a kitchen chair and redid the velvet bow in her hair. “I suppose you’re hungry again?”
Lizzie’s brow furrowed as she ran her fingers over the cabinet shelves. There was nothing there to eat: a handful of pockmarked potatoes, a stick of gritty lard, and a poke of flour that was so used up it looked like it might blow over from emptiness. She reached behind the empty bread bin, took an old box of soap flakes off the bottom shelf, and tipped it gently. Three hidden eggs rolled out of the box. They were brown and plump, with not a speckle on them. With a spoonful of lard she cracked them into the black pan, and they rolled and spat luxuriously in the bubbling fat. She turned to Agnes and put her finger across her lips in a secretive way. The bairn looked up at her with fat cheeks, and she put her little pink finger across her bud of a mouth and made the motion back to her mammy.
Agnes sat on Lizzie’s knee, and they ate the hidden eggs from the same plate. The yolk was so deep and fatty that Lizzie could feel it coat her teeth, and she could see it gum together the child’s lips. Happy and full, she dawdled Agnes on her knee for a while, listening to the weans play Injuns in the street, listening to the siren at Provan Gas Works call the men back to work. Lizzie wondered whether a man who was still walking back to the gas towers felt any shame, any shame at all. She remembered how Wullie had felt before the day he told her he couldn’t take it any more.
It was a mild day. From the open window Lizzie could hear the huddled concentration, tiny hushed voices and the whoops and shrieks when the little Injuns snuck up on the dim-witted cowboys. Then the tone changed suddenly. The weans were excited about something different, they were gasping and cheering now, and something was travelling up and down the street faster than it could ever be carried by foot. Many voices were sharing the same words, passing mouth to mouth, like a rudimentary telegram. Lizzie moved discreetly behind her net curtains to catch a sly peek; all the other women were hanging shamefully out of open windows. Weans were shouting bits of news up at their mothers, and the women were turning around and sharing it with the darkened rooms behind them.
There was a sudden knock at her door. Lizzie looked at Agnes, the child had a thick ring of yellow yolk around her mouth. She wiped it, hiding the evidence. She knew the door was not locked, it never was. This was a good close, full of papists. Whoever was outside now must be a stranger to her. Lizzie stopped at the hallway mirror and tried to push some life back into her hair. In her head she ran down her list of debts, checking their good standing; she looked in on the empty shelves one more time in the scullery, and feeling fairly secure, she opened the front door.
The greenish-cobalt light that poured in through the landing window settled on him like a fine dust. The man said nothing. He was half-smiling as he slipped a bag from his shoulder, a tall heavy cotton bag, so full of things that it stood up on its own and nearly came to the bridge of her nose. She didn’t know why she said it. Perhaps she could think of nothing else to say.
“That better not be full of dirty clothes.”
He laughed, and she had been grateful of that later: to only laugh at her and not let her confusion steal the joy from the day. “Can I come in?” He doffed his side cap.
She had the sensation of not being able to place him, this stranger. His face was like a face she would see on the Royston Road, and she would return the half nod out of politeness instead of deep recognition. Still, Lizzie stepped backwards into her hallway, and the stranger stepped over the threshold. He dragged the heavy canvas bag behind him and closed the door. He was folding and unfolding his field cap when he saw the eyes looking at him from beside the table.
“Is that her?” he asked.
Lizzie could only nod. The last time he had seen her, she had been pink as a ham hock, and wrapped in an embroidered blanket that Granny Campbell had handworked. Of course, there had been christening photos and Easter cards, but it was not the same. It seemed like this was the first time he had seen her with his own eyes. He drank in the thick ebony hair, the glass-green eyes, and best of all, the chubby legs. Wullie knelt, and he was crying, slow rivulets of relief that she should be a happy-looking and healthy wean. He opened the mouth of his tall bag, and very gently he took out a beautiful doll wrapped in hand-painted fabric, brightly coloured wonders, one after the other, beaded ribbons from Africa and wee paper crosses from Italy. There were penny sweeties in striped wrappers and more dollies, all different colours and patterns; they had faces with skin colours and eye shapes Lizzie had never seen before. Everything Wullie laid down in front of her, Agnes took up, till she was dropping things from the overflow in her arms. As Agnes leaned against his knee and turned the riches in her hands, he buried his nose in the crown of her hair and drank in the sweet soapy freshness of her.
As Wullie knelt, Lizzie had been touching him gently, almost not touching him. The back of his neck was a syrupy brown like she had never seen, it was the colour of burnt sugar tablet, golden and sweet. She could see a little down the back of his shirt neck, and she could see how the line changed sharply from this dark burnt tan to a healthy golden tone. She had been gently considering a lock of hair that curled behind his ear; it was free of pomade and a horn-brown colour so alive with the sun, so different from tip to root, that she didn’t recognize it, she didn’t recognize him. She wondered, where had the flat ebony gone that she knew and loved. She let the fine hair run through her fingers, and then she tugged it, hard.
Wullie looked up at her then. He closed one eye and smiled his lopsided grin. He was real. He was home.
The papers had never said; she checked them every day, sometimes twice, sometimes ten times. When she came back from the hospital, she would go to the shared cludgie in the back green and sit on the warm bowl and read the paper auld Mr Devlin would sometimes leave there. The papers had spoken of how the boys in North Africa had won a great victory, but they also told of the many sons from Glasgow, from Inverness and Edinburgh, who had sacrificed and would never be coming home. Lists and lists of names. Even the wee few streets of Germiston had lost that many. Every week it felt like families came with heavy heads out of the close mouths having been down at the chapel saying prayers for their lost sons. There had been so many she had lost count. Mr Goldie, young Davie Allan, the Cottrell brothers, who were only twenty-two and twenty-three and had left behind seven fatherless children between them.
In turn, all these poor soldiers had each been declared dead, and Wullie had not. She had told her mammy Isobel how that gave her hope, but Isobel had travelled a long hard road in life. She held her youngest daughter in her arms and told Lizzie to put aside hope, to give her attention to practical things, her new bairn, her wee job, and feeding the pair of them. “If ye hope,” said Isobel, “Ye also mope.”
None of that mattered now. Wullie Campbell was home, and Lizzie was moving around the room before she knew what she was moving for. There were happy voices in the close; she could hear them sing his name, and she knew they would be coming for him soon. She gathered Agnes into her arms and took her to the drying cupboard. She parted a stack of towels and took out a hidden sewing tin; she opened it quietly, and the air was thick with the sweet smell of buttery Madeira cake. The shelf also held a greasy ham hock, and Lizzie ripped a hunk from the bone. She put the whole Madeira tin on Agnes’s lap and into each hand slid a hunk of greasy flesh. “Mammy needs you to stay in here awhile.” She closed the door gently on her daughter.
They would be coming for him.
Lizzie quickly stepped out of her underwear, she didn’t kiss him, she still had not thrown her arms around him. None of that would be enough to fill the absence she had felt. She doubled herself over the back of the wooden armchair and gripped the turned armrests for support. She felt him appear behind her, his presence was faint at first, like he was merely following her on the street, but then he touched her, he kissed the back of her neck, and she felt him push roughly inside. She watched his brown hands as his strange fingers curled around her pale forearms. He pushed into her slowly, and then he went faster, and soon he folded on to her, covering her as if he were a blanket, as if they were one.
They would be coming for him.
He didn’t smell as she remembered. There was an overripe orange tang to his hair, and his breath, though sweet, smelt more like molasses than she liked. Lizzie turned her neck to look back at him, his eyes were open and concentrating on her, and she was sure it was him. That green and copper colour, the colour of a golden sun bursting through thick green beech leaves, was still the same.
Once, long before Agnes, Wullie had taken her on three separate buses and up to the Kelvingrove Hall. She had never been inside such a fine building before, and she was shy to follow him through its grand halls. She felt her shoes were too loud, too squeaky, and the hem of her good dress hung too long out of the bottom of her coat. Wullie hadn’t minded. With his thick arms he separated the crowds for her. He acted like he had the same right to be there as any doctor from the Byres Road. Only later did he confess to her that he knew of this grand place just because he had repaired the tiles on its roof.
It had been a rare afternoon. At the top of the sandstone staircase there had been a painting on exhibition; a beautiful oil painting of a stand of beech trees sat at the side of a lazy river, the autumn wildflowers still golden and bracken-coloured on its bank. Wullie had been smiling at her then, and she had forgotten all about her chapel dress. His eyes were speckled the same colours as the painting, the same faded green colour of uncollected hay and deep umber of a red deer. Now, as she searched these eyes for the man she loved, she knew the green of the painting was the same, even if the frame they sat in was something different.
There was a faint noise. She had forgotten. How could she have forgotten when she had lost so much sleep worrying over it?
Wullie stopped pushing into her. He straightened and was staring into the corner as if he was seeing something approaching in the distance, something he didn’t like the look of. Lizzie felt him slip out of her. He tidied himself back inside his uniform and was moving towards the far corner. He was tiptoeing with his palms wide open, as if the thing hiding there might spook and try to rush past him. The infant cried out again. He was girning as Wullie pulled back the tented curtain of the crib.
She would never forget that look on his face. He was staring at her over the wide bone of his shoulder when the front door finally gave. Nobody bothered to knock, and there were footsteps and cheering as the union men and their wives spilt in with plates of sandwiches and half-bottles of Mackinlay’s. She had only enough time to let go of the arms of the chair and straighten herself before the first cans of sweetheart stout were burst. As he made a pantomime of hugging his pals, his green and amber eyes never left her face. All she could do was mouth across the happy crowd to him, I’m so sorry.
Later they had pulled the heavy curtain across and climbed into the recessed bed before the last well-wishers had left. He said he was tired, but Lizzie could feel the heat of the drink radiate off him as he lay awake beside her. She wondered if her shame burned outwardly in the same way. They didn’t talk. They lay there not touching, and he felt farther away from her now than he ever had in Egypt.
When she woke in the morning, he was already dressed in his good wool suit. The trousers were wide-looking now, a little old-fashioned, and she could see that the jacket hung on him more loosely than it had in the past. He had found the secret tins of Spam and hidden ham hock and the last of the Madeira cake that the grocer had given her. He was trying to feed his daughter a mouthful of fried Spam, and each time she refused he would laugh and spoil her with a bite of Madeira.
She didn’t like to see him with that dirty food. She could imagine Mr Kilfeather, the bow-legged greengrocer, but she could not rightly remember how it had all started, it had all been so insidious. Had it just been an extra handful of eggs? A little more than the ration book would give? Had it been the spare arse end of a loaf? How could she tell Wullie any of it?
The infant, this other little Kilfeather boy, was gently cooing to itself in the corner. Wullie’s back was to it, like he couldn’t hear it.
As she stepped from behind the curtain, Wullie rose without looking at her. He rebuttoned his jacket and kissed Agnes goodbye, then he removed the bundled bag of clean sheets from the old pram. Lizzie was watching him as he lifted the little boy from his crib; the baby’s pink arms reached out to him, like it knew and trusted the deep well of goodness from which Wullie Campbell had sprung. Lizzie watched Wullie place the baby in the proud carriage and tuck the knitted blanket tenderly under his chin. He turned for the door.
Something made her step forward. She put her hand on the carriage handle. “Where are you going?”
“Out.”
“Will you be back?”
“Of course.” He sounded surprised at the question.
She felt like if she cried she would never stop. Lizzie let go of the handle. “I’m so sorry,” she whispered. “I got bits of meat. We ate well. I didn’t know. I. I just didn’t know if you would ever come home.”
“I know,” was all he said.
She was pleading now. “When I found out I took every Askit powder I could get. Great big handfuls of it. It was just. It was just too late.”
“I don’t need to know, Lizzie.” He took her face in his hands and kissed her then. It was the first kiss she had been given since he had kissed her at Saint Enoch’s on the day he left. She had never let Mr Kilfeather kiss her, she felt she had to tell him that.
He said, “I’m sorry I was away so long.” Then Wullie took the pram, and the strange baby, and went out into the mild spring morning.
It was the longest day she had ever known.
Wullie was back before the street lamps were lit. Lizzie had been at the window all day, and she could hear him whistling all the way down Saracen Street. Mrs Devlin told her later that he had given her a fright, because at first she had thought it was one of yon Indian fellas, seeing how dark and golden he was. Then, she said, he had danced up the stairs, singing and swinging on the banister like he was Fred Astaire himself.
When he came in the door, there was no pram, there was no blanket, there was no strange little boy. He gathered his girls into his arms, and Lizzie could smell the cold fresh air on him, like faraway open fields.
Wullie ate his dinner with an appetite, two big bowls of pea soup thickened with cream and salty with stripped mutton. Lizzie couldn’t tell him where it had all come from, how it had been paid for, and she was relieved that he didn’t ask.
That night, as she cooried into him behind the curtain, she stroked the thick hair on his arm. She turned to him and asked where the baby boy was.
Wullie pulled her closer to him and looked at her with those speckled green eyes, and all he said was, “What baby?”