It was March and it was her birthday. Shuggie stole her two handfuls of dying daffodils from the Paki shop. Since the afternoon at Leek’s, he had hidden the benefit books and made sure they had enough to eat before she bought her weekly drink.
Since Christmas he had held a little of the meter money back, out of her sight, to give her a few pounds to play at the bingo on her special day. She had taken the envelope half-full of coins and held it to her chest like it was the crown jewels. She had been so happy.
When the police brought her home the next morning, the air in the flat was already thick and sickly with the pollen of the decaying daffodils. They had found her wandering by the River Clyde. She had lost her shoes and her good purple coat. She hadn’t even made it to the bingo.
Agnes couldn’t look at Shuggie for shame, and he wouldn’t look at her for a deep sense of his own stupidity. The chill of spending a March night outside was rattling sore in her damp lungs, so Shuggie poured a deep bath and sprinkled it liberally with cooking salt. He ironed and laid out clean clothes. He made her some milky tea, which he set outside the bathroom door, and then he left without either of them having said a word.
Dressed for school, he ran across the main road with the other children and was surprised to hear two fifty pences from the gas meter jangling around in his anorak pocket. It stopped him cold. He turned them over in his hand. He climbed aboard the first bus going anywhere and asked the driver how far the money would take him.
The view from the sixteenth floor of the Sighthill tower made him feel tiny. The city was alive below him, and he had never even seen a half of it. Shuggie pushed his legs through the breeze-block wall of the laundry room and looked out over the endless sprawl. For hours he watched as orange buses snaked through the grey sandstone. He watched as leaded nimbus darkened the Gothic spires of the infirmary, while elsewhere, obstinate sunlight brought the glass and steel of the university to life.
His arms and legs felt heavy hanging out over the city, but he found the envelope in his jacket pocket and took it out to consider it for the hundredth time. It had no return address on it, only a postmark that said Barrow-in-Furness. He didn’t know where Barrow-in-Furness was, but it didn’t sound like Scotland.
It was a Christmas card that had arrived two months too late. Leek had found work someplace else. They were building new houses, and they needed young men who could turn to any trade: tiling, plastering, roofing. He said the money was decent, and he didn’t know when he would be back. There had been no art school yet, maybe next year, he had said, or the one after. Instead there was a nice girl, and she worked in a tea room, and they liked to go walking together on something called a moor. The card had a twenty-pound note taped inside, a new note, crisp and never folded. Shuggie had wondered about that money for a long time. He allowed himself a brief daydream of Leek waiting for him at some distant bus station. Then he spent it on fresh meat and surprised Agnes with a heaping bowl of stovies.
There had been something else inside the Christmas card; a page from a lined school jotter covered with a pencil drawing of a small boy. He was sat cross-legged at the foot of an unmade bed, his back to the artist so you could see the base of his bare spine where the top and bottom of his pyjamas didn’t quite meet. Whatever was holding the boy’s attention was nestled discreetly in the curved crook of his body. The boy was engrossed, his face in shadow, and he looked like he was playing with small toy horses that could have easily been wooden toys, military or Trojan. Shuggie knew what they really were, that they were the scented dolls, bright and cheerful and for little girls. They were the pretty ponies, and Leek had known. Leek had always known.
The cold north wind roared around the concrete laundry room and pinched Shuggie’s nose red. When he couldn’t suffer it any longer, he put the card inside his coat and went home again.
All the lights were on when he returned. The stolen daffodils still wilted on every surface, and he could smell the yeast and the rot of her confinement. Shuggie listened to the whine of the operator’s warning as he replaced the abandoned telephone on its cradle. She had been busy; the red pen was out on the phone book, and there were fresh scratchings through old names.
Agnes was asleep in her chair. She looked like a melted candle, her legs lifeless and her head lolling to one side. Shuggie walked around the far side of her and shook the hidden Tennent’s cans to see how much she had drunk. He held the vodka bottle up to the light and measured its remaining dregs. It was all but gone.
In the silence he listened to her cough through the stupor, then she wretched and a trickle of thick bile appeared on her lips. Shuggie reached inside her jumper sleeve and took out her toilet paper, carefully enough not to wake her. With a practiced finger he reached inside her mouth and hooked out the bronchial fluid and bile. He wiped her mouth clean and lowered her head safely back on to her left shoulder.
There was an emptiness in his belly. It was below his stomach; it went deeper than hunger. He sat at her feet and quietly started to talk to her. “I love you, Mammy. I’m sorry I couldn’t help you last night.”
Shuggie gently lifted her foot, first unbuckling the tiny ankle clasp and slipping off each high heel and then carefully pulling the hard seam of her black tights out from between her toes. He rubbed the balls of her cold feet tenderly, and then he set each foot gently back on the floor. He talked to her quietly as he did.
“I went up to Sighthill today,” he whispered. “I looked out over the whole city.”
He set her high heels to the side of her chair and stood up over her again. With skill he searched under the soft sag of her breasts until he found the centre of her chest, and through her thin jumper he undid the butterfly hook of her bra. He watched as her heavy breasts poured free.
“You must have loved living there. There was so much to see,” he whispered. “It made me feel dizzy to think of it all.”
Hooking his fingers he found each bra strap. He moved them on her shoulder line and freed her burdened flesh from the digging pressure of the nylon. Agnes stirred but did not wake. She coughed again, a deep damp cough that was miners’ houses and mould, warm lager and now a cold night by the river. Shuggie rubbed her breastbone and wondered if the police cells were very cold. Her head rolled backwards on to the soft back of the chair, and quickly, from instinct, he placed his fingers on her temples and gently rolled it safely forward again.
“I’m going to leave school as soon as I can. It’s no good arguing. I need to get a job and get us out of here,” he said. “I was thinking maybe one day I’d take you to Edinburgh. We could see Fife, Aberdeen even. I could even save enough for a caravan maybe. Do you think maybe then you could get better?” Shuggie smiled down at her unconscious face. “What do you think?”
He listened to her breathing for a while, and then he reached to her side and undid the zipper on her skirt. It slid down easily, and her soft stomach rose gratefully, almost like bread dough escaping the pan.
“No? I suppose not,” he whispered.
Shuggie reached into her snoring mouth, and with a damp sucking sound, he pulled out each set of her dentures. He wrapped them in toilet paper and placed them neatly on the arm of her chair. With soft fingers he massaged her head and made waves through her black hair. He rubbed at her scalp just how she liked. Her roots were obscenely white.
Agnes coughed again, a dry tickle in her throat that rumbled into her belly and became all at once heavy and thick. The bile was on her lips again. Shuggie stopped running his fingers through her hair and reached for the toilet paper, but something made him stop. He watched her cough. “Suppose maybe Leek was right.”
She gurgled again, and her head fell backwards till it rested on the soft back of the chair. Agnes wretched, and he watched the bile bubble over her naked gums and painted lips. Shuggie stood there and listened to her breathing. It grew heavier at first, thick and clogged. Her eyebrows knotted slightly, as if she had heard some news that was unpleasant to her. Then her body shook, not hard, but like she was in the back of a taxi and they were bumping down the uneven Pit road again. He almost did something then, almost used his fingers to help, but then her breath hissed away slowly; it just faded, like it was walking away and leaving her. Her face changed then, the worry fell away, and at last she looked at peace, softly carried away, deep in the drink.
It was too late to do something now.
Still he shook her hard, but she wouldn’t wake up.
He shook her again, and then he cried over his mother for a long while, long after Agnes had stopped breathing. It did no good.
It was late now.
Shuggie arranged her hair as best as he could. He tried to cover the brazen whiteness of the roots, to arrange it just the way she liked to wear it. He unwrapped her dentures again and gently placed them back inside her mouth. Then, taking the toilet paper, he wiped the sick from her chin and pulled fresh paint across her lips, taking care to push the colour into the corners and stay neatly within the lines. He stood back and dried his eyes. She looked like she was only sleeping. Then he bent over and kissed her one last time.