Brenda worried about Lindsey. It had taken all her good offices to get the girl talking to Graham. Promises had been made, Graham had given his word, Malky had even fetched his drum from the lockers in the snooker club. It sat unused these days, shut in Brenda’s hallway cupboard, but the girl and Stevie were still living in her spare room. It had been weeks now.
Malky had got Graham coming round, morning and evening, thinking it might help if he lent a hand, getting Stevie up for school or putting him to bed. But Graham couldn’t push it too far because Lindsey was quick to take offence.
“What’s he doing here again?”
She’d point at him in the doorway, saying:
“I’m not wanting help. Not his kind anyhow.”
She was hurtful; back to the hurt young thing she’d been when she first arrived from Ireland.
Lindsey claimed she still had cleaning jobs, but Brenda wasn’t so sure that was true any more. She’d been such a busy thing, full of bright purpose, but it seemed like days could pass now, with her just sitting on the sofa, face uncertain, pale against the cushions. She’d be there when Brenda left for work, and still there when Brenda got back, like she had nothing to do, nothing to put a hand to, until Stevie came in from school.
The girl had her stumped: Lindsey didn’t want Graham doing too much for the boy, but it was like she didn’t know what to do for Stevie either. Brenda remembered how she used to hoik him about on her hip, carrying him with her from job to job, room to room, while she sorted and tidied and hoovered. Now Lindsey stared blank-faced at her son when he came in the door; taken aback, like it had slipped her mind how much he’d grown.
Stevie was still skinny, most likely he always would be, but his arms and legs were long now, not long till he’d be in secondary, and he’d lost that soft boy’s face, it had been replaced by sharper angles in his young brow and cheekbones. When he sat at the table he was all shoulder blades and elbows, and he was always hungry, shovelling his platefuls in a hurry, too big for sitting on her lap. Lindsey sat across from him at mealtimes, like she didn’t know what to make of him.
Brenda had done the same, four times over, and she knew how it felt: like you’d lost something that used to be your own.
So she told her:
“Boys grow up, so they do.” One night while they were clearing the table, and she gave the girl a small smile, as much to say she’d survived it.
“They come back tae you, hen. In their ain time. Still the same, but different as well. Us mothers, we just have tae wait it out.”
Brenda meant it as a comfort, that she’d wait it out with her. Only Lindsey was looking at her from across the table, plates in hand and her small face helpless, like she couldn’t see herself cope with that. It was just too hard, all of this: marriage and motherhood, the scheme and band, the hooded man, and no wee boy to hold on to, nothing that was hers, she shook her head:
“I never meant for him to grow up here.”
“I know that.”
“Time’s gone so fast. I should never have let it go past.” Lindsey said it like she’d failed him. “Maybe I’m no cut out.”
“Ach.” Brenda put down the glasses, held out her arms, telling her: “Course you are. You’re Stevie’s Mum, you’ll do what’s best for him.” As much as to say that’s what mothers did.
But Lindsey shook her head again:
“You and yours maybe, aye. Not mine.”
It gave Brenda a start, that lost look she gave her: the girl’s Mum had gone, she’d left her, and with that father as well, which was just about the worst thing. So Brenda nodded. She let her arms fall, and then they both just stood there a moment.
“Sorry, hen.”
“Don’t be. You’ve no need.”
The girl sighed, and Brenda hoped she might let herself be held now: all these years Lindsey had been here, Brenda thought she’d been making life better for her, that they all had. Only here she was now, saying:
“They grow apart. Kids and their parents.” Blunt-voiced, speaking from experience. “It’s part of life’s pain. That’s what Eric says.”
It was an Eric way to put it, an Eric way to look at it, right enough. So then Brenda stepped over and pulled Lindsey close.
“Don’t heed my brother too much, will you?”
It had started to frighten her, how much Lindsey spoke like him.
The girl was too much like Eric at his lowest ebb, and Eric’s was just about the only place she went these days: he still had her looking through his sketches.
Her brother had a gift, Brenda had always known it, even if his pictures were mostly too dark for her to like. He saw the dark in things, in people, and it wasn’t that she thought he was wrong to draw it, she just wouldn’t want that on her walls.
“Hard tae look at the world like that.”
She told Lindsey as much, a few days later, when it was just the two of them out to get the messages. Brenda wanted Lindsey to get out more, and not just to Eric’s, so she chivvied her to come on chores at least, up and down the scheme steps. No sense sitting inside, getting nowhere but lower; Brenda even had half a mind to take her cleaning, like she had in their early days.
Back then she’d been glad that Lindsey went to her brother’s. The girl had been a friend to him, but Brenda wasn’t at all sure Eric could do the same in return.
“Dinnae get me wrong, hen.”
Brenda loved him, and dearly, but she knew he wasn’t to be relied upon, not in life’s tight spots:
“He just gets caught up in his own mind.”
Forewarned was forearmed, so she told Lindsey while they walked: how the worst of Eric’s episodes was after Franny died, but it wasn’t the first time he got ill.
“That was when he was still at school. Daen his Highers. He tellt you this?”
Lindsey shook her head, squinting a bit, and Brenda shifted her bags from hand to hand, saying:
“Didnae think so. Best you know, but.”
All his teachers predicted high grades and proud achievements, but when it came to his exams, he couldn’t write, couldn’t put a thing down on the paper, not a word or a number.
“Eric never tellt anywan at the time either.”
Even when it happened in every subject. He just sat in the hall and watched the clock, and when the exams were over and done with, he wouldn’t leave the house.
They stopped a moment at the corner; Brenda to catch her breath, and give her carrying arm a rest, and Lindsey to ask:
“So then what?”
“Ach, weeks it went on for.”
Silence from Eric, worry and fury from her parents. They never called on any doctors, and Brenda didn’t know if that was out of ignorance or shame, but she tried explaining to the girl just the same: how her parents had always got up and got on with life, through everything. Dispossession, emigration, war and shortages, rehousing.
“Far worse than a few exams.”
“Might have guessed.” Lindsey nodded, picking up Brenda’s shopping, like she already knew where this was going. “Papa Robert never was for understanding. Good thing Eric got away from him.”
Only Brenda hadn’t meant to blame her Dad. That wasn’t what she’d been after. She even felt for him, looking back, especially to when the results came in, and all the money he’d scraped together for Eric’s High School years came to nothing. So she told Lindsey:
“It wasnae that, hen.”
The girl was walking ahead, and Brenda fell into stride beside her:
“My parents. It was beyond their ken, aye?”
Eric had gone to the good school and got beyond them, the whole family, even before he left Drumchapel. And they’d thrown up their hands first, they’d despaired. But then they’d just got on with the days, because the days kept coming: work and meals and chores and sleep.
“Dae you see?”
Brenda wanted Lindsey to understand, how it was with Eric: that he’d long had these episodes and the family had to learn to weather them, not be taken down by them as well.
“Best no get yoursel pulled under,” Brenda told her.
It wasn’t the nicest thing to say about her brother, and Brenda wasn’t sure; maybe the girl thought she was being disloyal. Lindsey stuck by Eric, she didn’t like to hear bad about him. But Papa Robert hadn’t always done the wrong thing by him, and Brenda thought she had the girl’s ear now, so she told her:
“My faither was practical in the end. He had tae be. For aw our sakes.”
Eric had a good clutch of Standard grades, and he could still draw.
“It was the wan thing he still did, in his room, behind his closed door.”
Papa Robert knew a man at the shipyards—a time-served draughtsman, and in the district lodge like he was—so he showed him some of Eric’s work: still lifes from school, fish and fruit, meticulous. Brenda remembered the man coming up to the flat, and Eric being told: he was to be washed and combed and dressed, and to speak when he was asked.
The whole interview was awkward.
“A shambles, Papa Robert said, after the Brother had left.”
Lindsey nodded, tight-mouthed, like she could just imagine it: Papa Robert’s bitterness. But Brenda didn’t want her to see it that way, so she stopped her at the close steps, telling her:
“My Da got Eric taken on, but.”
The job had got Eric back on track. He’d served out his apprenticeship; Eric earned a good wage and got promoted through the ranks.
“He liked the work an aw. Till he was made redundant.”
But from the look on Lindsey’s face, Brenda could see she’d lost her again. It was enough to make her want to cry out sometimes, to take the girl by the shoulders, give her a shake and make her count her blessings. A healthy boy, and a bright one too, a home of her own and a husband who provided; a husband who doted as well, and could still be persuaded, Brenda was certain. It wasn’t so different from her own life, and she saw no sense in the girl giving up, just because it wasn’t perfect. What more did Lindsey want?
Only the girl was standing at the door, ready for inside, sofa and silence; sorrow on her small face. And then Brenda thought how Lindsey’s dreams were only small ones, after all. Let her have them. A wee bit of happiness, a wee family growing in a good place: where was the harm? Folk had the same dream, the world over. It was all Eric had wanted too, for him and Frances, and hadn’t she’d railed against her father, for being too stubborn to accept that? So Brenda sighed, digging out her keys, bringing the conversation to a close:
“Eric’s job. The wan Papa Robert got for him. It was how he met Franny, aye? When she started workin at the same offices.”
At least that raised a smile on Lindsey’s lips. The first Brenda had seen in ages. But it was a dry one, at the irony, with no warmth or strength. Not the kind that could sustain you.
It shook Brenda, how she couldn’t give Lindsey strength these days; how she couldn’t find the right words, the right things to tell her. And that it was Eric she was looking to: the one who’d got away.
He drew Lindsey something most times she visited: tokens of his appreciation to take home, Brenda had seen them. None of the pictures were of Franny, much as Lindsey had always hoped for one, and she had herself. Brenda thought a drawing of Franny, or a story about his good years with her might be helpful. Just what Lindsey needed.
But Eric was drawing their Dad now. And not just their childhood days on Drumchapel either, with Papa Robert’s roses; most of the pictures Lindsey brought home were of a different order. They looked more like Papa Robert’s stories, of the farm where he’d spent his boyhood, the family’s lost Louth acres, so Brenda couldn’t help herself feeling nervy.
Her father’s stories didn’t have the happiest ending.
Her brother’s happiness was rarely long-lived either. If he could just tell Lindsey something that would give her heart. Was that too much to ask?
Lindsey never said if she was coming, she’d just be there at Eric’s door, mostly it was late morning, and he’d be sitting, drawing.
“You take care ae her,” Brenda told him, when she came cleaning, like she reckoned he needed telling; Eric thought he couldn’t do anything but. Lindsey was always welcome. She’d shown him care he’d not known in years; a kindred feeling, so long missing, and it had made all the difference, having her there and looking through his sketches. Talking him through them, like they meant something.
She’d been quieter about these new ones, Eric’s first attempts at drawing Ireland, and he wasn’t sure yet himself, what sort of picture they’d make, so he longed for more time with Lindsey, and talk. Only he did think Brenda was right: the girl was just too withdrawn these days.
“Take her out, wid you?” his sister told him. “Bring her out ae hersel, don’t let her brood now.”
Lindsey had good reason, Eric thought. But he knew from his own life what that was like, because he’d been just the same after Franny died, and he’d been glad then of any help he’d got. Brenda had come calling, often with Graham, and Eric remembered how that had helped, taking his young nephew on afternoon visits to John Joe’s. His brother-in-law had done his bit, too, walking him to his appointments, at the hospital and at the doctor’s, talking the long route back through the West End and Botanic Gardens.
Those walks had given Eric respite, so even if the late winter days were sharp, he did take Lindsey out, and to better places than Brenda could anyhow. Over the Kelvin to the warm glasshouses, or out on cold and sunny treks to the high ground of Ruchill Park, cutting back behind Firhill along the quiet of the canal banks. They mostly walked in silence, but then one chilly March afternoon, Lindsey stopped on the towpath and told him:
“I’ll have been here ten years soon.”
She said it straight out, with no lead-up, and she made it sound an age. The low sun on them both, Eric stood with her thinking it felt like five minutes since she’d come into all their lives, and he was glad of every one of them. Only then Lindsey said:
“When I left home, it seemed like Glasgow was far away. Turns out it isn’t.”
The warmth had gone out of the day by then, and the air bit at Eric’s cheeks and fingers. He looked at Lindsey’s face, young and stern, and how she’d pulled her jacket sleeves down against the cold. He thought those years would feel like for ever to her, especially lived in Drumchapel, so he smiled at her, gentle:
“Where would you go, hen? If you could.”
Trying their old game. But she just shook her head, like there was no point playing any more:
“Graham’s not for moving.”
Eric sighed for her:
“Drumchapel tae his bones, aye?”
He didn’t mean it unkindly; Malky was too, in his own way. For all that he laughed about Papa Robert and his roses, Eric knew his brother-in-law, and that he was in it for the long haul: if enough good people stayed, the scheme could still be a decent place. But Lindsey kicked at some loose stones under her feet, and he thought she wouldn’t want to hear that.
They were near the end of their usual route, where the path took them down to the street; Eric was due to deliver her to the bus stop, because she liked to be in good time for Stevie, only Lindsey told him:
“My boy. He’ll not be a boy all that much longer. Next thing we know, he’ll be leaving home. Then what am I going to do?”
She was trying to make light, her pretty mouth gone all twisty, rueful, but Eric could see she was frightened; the way she spoke about her young son, like she was no longer of use to him. Lindsey stayed where she was too, not done yet with speaking. She took a breath and then she said:
“You and Franny. Did you live out at Greenock?”
“I took a room out there, aye.”
Eric nodded, curious that she was asking: Greenock had never been on her elsewhere lists, was she looking for a bolt-hole for her and Stevie? Eric told her:
“I got moved up a grade at the shipyard, and the room came up there about the same time. That was before we were married, but, me an Franny. Just courtin.”
“But you wanted to be by her?”
“Aye.”
He had. He’d wanted away from Drumchapel, and Papa Robert; just Franny, that’s all he’d thought he needed then. It made Eric smile again, soft, to remember how that felt, and Lindsey saw it.
She blinked at him, like she wanted to hear more, and it never failed to move him, how this girl was interested. What could he tell her? Something to make her smile, Eric decided: that would be good now. So he cast about for a memory, of the life when he still had Frances.
“We’d borrow a car, at weekends, fae wan ae Franny’s neighbours. An we’d drive up tae the high slopes, up above the houses.”
Franny had always wanted him drawing. Not just for work.
“She grew up in Greenock, so she’d find me the best views. Out across the Clyde, aye?”
He’d sat and sketched, while she’d sat and knitted. Or she’d have a book along.
“She liked it anyhow, my Franny, just bein out and up high. That peace, aye? She grew up in a small house, wae a big family.”
Eric laughed.
“Did they like you? Her family,” Lindsey asked. Eric thought she was blushing at being so forthright; it was like she’d wanted to know all this for ages. “Did they mind?”
“Us gettin wed?”
Lindsey nodded.
“Her grandmother tellt her she’d go tae the bad fire.” Eric smiled. “Her parents, but, they werenae bothered. Franny was over thirty, aye? Old tae be unmarried. They were glad tae see her settled.”
Lindsey was quiet after that; no need to ask what Papa Robert had thought. The girl knew how it was, when your father wouldn’t come to your wedding.
The sun was setting, the last of the day still visible in the gaps between the Maryhill tenements: gold and purple, it lit up the water. Time to go now. But Eric wanted to tell Lindsey more; his mind still turning back, to Lochcarron holidays, his Skye honeymoon, and how he and Franny had their first rows when they got home.
“She had her ain ideas,” he said. “Franny was like you that way. The shipyard wouldnae have married women on the books, so I thought she’d be stayin at home, darnin my socks, pressin my work shirts. Only Franny wouldnae have it. She went out and found hersel a new job.”
Eric hoped it might console her, to hear he’d been a stick-in-the-mud husband too, and that he’d seen sense in the end. But the girl just looked at him, sad. What was she thinking?
The banks were gloomy, but the canal still bright, the reedy backwaters radiant, like the western sky. Lindsey said:
“You left everything for her.”
She said it like she approved. But like she didn’t know if Graham could do the same for her. Then she turned and started making for the road.
Eric saw her onto the bus, and she waved a hand to him from the top deck as it drew away, but she cut such a lonely figure up there, it left Eric shaken.
He’d left everything, just like she’d said. And Eric knew she hadn’t meant to, but Lindsey had unsettled him, even so; she’d roused unquiet thoughts. He knew all too well how it felt to be alone in this world.
Slow down the road towards home, Eric turned over the girl’s words, his mind turning over itself, going back to his own lonely times, after Franny died.
Brenda had come to see him, whenever she could manage. But it was a long haul from Drumchapel, and she’d had her boys to look out for, all still so young then. John Joe had done his best, keeping track of Eric’s prescriptions, counting out his tablets on the kitchen table, when he thought Eric couldn’t see him, making sure he was keeping up with the dosage. But he’d had his own life too, his work and his doos. His brother-in-law was a good man, but Eric had known he was a burden.
Back at his desk, he’d intended to do more drawing, but Eric found he could only sit; wretched thoughts crowding his mind, pushing out the happy times he’d meant as a comfort to the girl.
All those weeks of Franny’s last treatment, Eric remembered: how when she was in the hospital overnight, he used to sleep on her side of the bed until she came back. And how he slept there again, in the worst months after he’d lost her; it was the only way he could trick himself into getting some rest.
Memory had Eric dry-mouthed. That bleak and fearful time, long past.
Lindsey had made the break too, from home and from her father. And now what?
Eric thought he had to warn her not to cut herself adrift. He didn’t think Graham would leave Drumchapel, and it was too hard to think of the girl alone, like he’d been.
Stevie’s Mum wasn’t always in the playground. None of his school pals got picked up any more, so he didn’t mind that too much. But he didn’t always know which way to go from the gates: back to his Gran’s, or to his old house where his Dad lived. No one had told him what was happening, or which one was meant to be home now, and it left him feeling nowhere, so he made for the high blocks some afternoons, seeking out his cousins.
They were finished with their exams, working different jobs, but even if they weren’t there, Stevie mostly found different kids to knock about with: boys from school, or whose dads he knew from the band. Stevie played keepie-uppies in the echo-loud stairwells, or dares outside, jumping off the roofs of the bin sheds, running pure breakneck along the high walls. Or he played nothing if there was no one about, just hanging around the lift doors. It was best if he left it a couple of hours until he went to his Gran’s; if he could put off being alone with his Mum. The way she looked at him sometimes. Better his Gran was back from work to do the talking.
It was the mornings that were hardest.
Some days Stevie woke up with his Mum in the bed beside him. Grandad Malky had put an extra bed in the spare room, and Stevie would half-remember her getting up and shifting him over in the dark, closer to the wall, a few inches, making just enough room to fit her. His Mum used to lie with him when he was wee, to get him off to sleep, so even if it was a squeeze now, it was still cosy; more like the way things used to be.
Only then he’d hear his Dad come in. He’d open the bedroom door and stand there, a few seconds, a minute, and Stevie would keep his eyes shut, because he didn’t want to see his Dad’s wounded face. He knew his Mum wasn’t sleeping either: he could feel it from the way she lay, tight and still, her back to the doorway. Stevie felt like this was all his doing.
If it was a school day, his Dad would get him up; over his Mum and into the kitchen. He’d nudge Stevie into his clothes:
“Socks, son. Mon. Breeks.”
Handing him his trousers, coaxing him out of his sleep. If Stevie’s Gran was there, she’d give him his breakfast and take him to lessons, so that would be fine then. But on mornings she was out and cleaning, Grandad Malky not yet back from his night shift, his Dad put out cereal and milk, and had to go to the bedroom door again.
“Lin?”
There’d be nothing first, and then:
“Yeah, yeah.”
His Dad left for work after that, and if his Mum still didn’t get up, Stevie would go and stand by the bed. Until she opened her lids, squinting a bit.
“Sorry, love. I’ll be upna minute, kay?”
Except he knew she wouldn’t. They’d always be late for school: best part of an hour, or more than, on a bad day, when she buried her head in the duvet. On bad days, she’d ask:
“Where’s your Gran, son?”
Like she didn’t understand his Gran had gone to work.
“Would you go and find your Gran, love?”
Like his Gran was the one he should go to, not her.
So Stevie took himself back into the kitchen and wished his Dad was still there, or Grandad Malky back from driving. To lift his Mum out of bed and into her jeans, or just to sit with him. Stevie didn’t like waiting on his own, because he was never sure how long he’d have to stay there, watching the hand on the kitchen clock, ticking on, thinking who he should go to now. He knew he’d be going in to class with everyone turning and staring at him anyhow, and the teacher all torn-faced again.
Sometimes he asked his Dad, when he was handing him his vest:
“Can you no take me? Please?”
And his Dad looked like he might, only then he sighed:
“Your Maw’ll dae it, son.” All quiet.
Stevie thought it would be better if he shouted. Or if his Mum did. So then at least he’d know if they were angry, or what. If one of them was angry with him, or both. Who he belonged with. The way things were just now, Stevie didn’t know where to put himself, left alone in the kitchen, tying the laces on his school shoes. Time went on, he took to walking to school by himself.
On his days off, Graham would get to his Mum’s house early. Stevie wouldn’t be home yet, and Graham couldn’t just sit there like a spare part, so he mostly went to the spare room and looked at the bed where Lindsey slept now.
It would never be made, or Stevie’s single by the wall; the blankets all in a heap, and clothes all over the floor. Graham picked them up and folded, because he was meant to be doing his bit. Even if Lindsey didn’t want it.
On his hands and knees like that, he found an old shoebox one afternoon, half under Lindsey’s bed. He pulled it out and lifted the lid. Graham found a whole pile of Eric’s pictures.
So then he knew where she went; most likely she was with the old guy right now.
There was a small sketch at the top, of Auntie Franny: all creased, like it had been looked at a lot. Graham lifted it away and found faces he knew, and faces he didn’t, a couple of Papa Robert among them. And then there were a whole lot of sketches with no one in them.
They were all of landscapes and they all looked like Ireland; just like the place Papa Robert had always told of. Rolling fields as far as the skyline, riddled with lanes, dotted with farms, framed by the hills that rose behind them.
Or were those the Tyrone hills behind Lindsey’s Dad’s house?
Graham leafed on through the pages, and there they were again, in the low summer sun, and the more Graham stared, the more they came to look the same as he remembered from that first time. When Lindsey pulled him up the path and in through the door, and there was no one home, nobody but them, half on the floor, half on the sofa in the front room.
Graham was stung. How did Eric know what those hills were like?
When he’d first fetched Lindsey back to Glasgow, when they used to cycle all over, she’d got Graham to ride them to the top of the scheme one time. Her fingers hooked into his pockets, she’d stood and shown him the view out west, beyond Drumchapel to where the back-country started, and she’d told him they were just like the hills her Dad climbed. She never said too much about home, but Graham could hear she’d been glad to escape that man. Lindsey was still an unknown quantity, but it had felt good that day, knowing he’d been the one who fetched her away. Graham had liked the pull of her fingers, that way she’d had back then of tugging him onwards. She’d pulled him through the flat that morning, when his Mum was out at work and his Dad still sleeping. Finger to her lips, Lindsey had led Graham into the bathroom, the only door with a lock in the house, pressing herself up against him in her rush, the hard mound of her pregnant belly, the twisting life inside that the two of them had made.
But now it seemed like Eric knew her better. Probably the old guy knew what was happening with their marriage. It was more than Graham did.
There was even a sketch in the pile that Eric had done at their wedding: Lindsey and Stevie on the back of a coaster. Graham stared at the fine pencil lines, simple, beautiful, the pair of them.
He shoved the pictures back into the box. Graham lay down on the bed, hands to his head. He was still there when Lindsey came into the room.
She looked frozen to the bone, standing there, blinking at him. Then she climbed under the blankets, turning her back, curled over with all her clothes on, like she couldn’t get warm.
Graham lay on top of the duvet, next to Lindsey. Him on one side of the bed and her on the other. Time was she’d have had her arms around him, and her legs; it hurt him to remember.
He knew where she’d been, and he’d seen the drawings she kept. Graham didn’t know what to say, but he wanted to say something.
“They sketches you have,” he told her. “The wan on the coaster. It looks just like you.”
The thought just fell from his mouth, there where he lay, his head all heavy on the pillow, and there was some relief too, once it was out, because the picture was lovely, and a very good likeness. Lindsey stirred a bit then, and Graham thought she might turn over, but she didn’t.
After a while, she said:
“That was me ages ago.”