what?”
“Know. Everything.”
“You’re no making any sense.” He shifted uncomfortably in the tight phone box.
“I knoo-ow.” The voice boomed, her wet lips too close to the mouthpiece.
“If you’re gonnae keep this up, I’m gonnae have to get back to work.”
There was a deep sob on the end of the phone.
“Agnes, you cannae phone the rank any more, I’ll get the sack. I’ll be home in a few hours, and we can talk then. OK?” But there was no answer. “Well, do you want to know what I know? I know I love you,” he lied. The sobbing got louder. Shug hung up.
The rain and piss had soaked through his tasselled brogues. Picking up the black receiver again, he hammered it against the side of the red booth. He knocked out three panes of glass before the receiver broke, before he felt better. Back in the taxi he had to sit still for ten minutes until his knuckles would let go of the choke they had on the steering wheel.
Maybe he would feel better if he ate something. He fished around under his seat for his plastic piece box. It smelled like margarine and white bread, like marriage and cramped flats. The corned beef pieces Agnes had packed turned his stomach. He dumped them into the gutter and cut up several side streets till he pulled up in front of DiRollo’s chippy, open twenty-four hours, bog-standard. DiRollo’s was popular with both cabbies and prostitutes because of the unsociable hours and the discretion of its owner. There was a big red lobster painted on the sign, but nothing as exotic on offer inside.
Joe DiRollo stood behind the counter, as he seemed to do every hour of the day. At night the fluorescent light made him look deceased. A small man, hair thin and slicked back off his face, with chip grease or Brylcreem or both. Like an oily iceberg only his swollen head and shoulders were visible above the counter. The rest of his sallow bulk was squished up against the machete he kept under the counter. He greeted everyone with a phlegmy clearing of the throat and tilting of his fat head.
“How ye doin’, Joe?” asked Shug, with no genuine interest.
“Aye, no so bad.”
“Been busy with our fair ladies the night?” Shug shoved his thumb in the direction of a gaunt-looking customer who, eyes closed, was swaying on her feet.
“Ehhhh, they been a-cumming and a-going, you know?” He laughed at his own joke. “No’ so good for business any more. They eat half a bag of chips, drink a ginger, that’s it! They ask to use the toilet, my own toilet, and auld Joe says, OK. He’s a nice guy, but they don’t come out for an hour, you know. They eat a half a bag of chips, and then they wash their cunts in my toilet.”
Shug was eyeing the fried fish in the hot counter. “It’s the drugs. I widnae dare stick it in them any more.”
“Aye, they’re dropping like flies. If the drugs are no doing them in, then some bad bastard’s choking the life out of them.”
“You’ll put me aff ma whelks.” Shug pulled a tight face. “Gies a fish supper, extra salt and vinegar, would ye?”
Joe took the white paper and dropped a heaped scoop of fat chips and a big bit of golden battered fish on it. He drizzled the hot food with salt and vinegar, and Shug circled with his fingers. “Mair, Joe. Mair.” The man piled it on till it was sodden.
He handed Shug his parcel. “So, you never give me an answer to my offer. You want the wee house or no?”
As well as running the chippy, Joe DiRollo was famous for grifting the Glasgow City Council. He signed up for subsidized flats under the guise of one of his many daughters. Then he rented them along, skimming an extra tenner a week over what the council originally charged him.
“I’ll let you know,” Shug said, backing out the door. “Mrs Bain, well, she’s difficult.”
“I’m surprised you want to move at all. Thought you would be living like a king up there in that Sighthill sky.”
“The King is fine; it’s the Queen that wants a beheading. Just hold on to that empty house of yours a while longer. There’s a lot that has to be lined up first. I want it all to go perfect.” He smiled and bit into a fat chip.
By the time Shug finished the last of the whelks there was only an hour or so left on the clock. He rolled down the windows as the sun broke the top of George Square, bathing the city in a warm orange light and setting the statue of Rabbie Burns on fire. It was the best time of day, the city at peace, before it got ruined by the diurnal masses. He watched the clock in anticipation and set off early for the North Side.
Driving slowly all the way to Joanie Micklewhite, he left the windows down and flicked the green air freshener with his forefinger. She would finish her shift soon, and then they could say all the things they could not over the CB radio. He pulled the taxi in tight amongst four or five others and waited for her, slumped forward in his seat, grinning like a daft boy, watching the front door like it was Christmas.
Four
They were both still damp and sitting on the edge of the bed when the evening street lights came on. Agnes had run Shuggie a deep bath, and then, feeling lonely, she’d climbed in beside her youngest. Lizzie would’ve had a fit if she had seen. It would have to stop soon, he was too canny for five. It was the first time he’d looked at her privates and then considered his own, like a spot-the-difference puzzle.
The water had grown cold as they made a great game of filling the shampoo bottles and then soaking each other with the soapy jet. She let him scrape at the old nail polish on her toes, his care and attention feeling like a penny dropped in an empty meter.
At the edge of her bed, she combed the boy’s glossy black hair, as his head lowered in concentration. He made the Matchbox car squeal through the paisley maze of bedspread, it climbed over her bare leg as easily as the Campsie hills. Without knowing what he was looking at, he traced the white scars, the memories of Shug’s fingernails, that lined the inside of her thigh. Then the car careened back to the bedspread. The tyres would scream loudly, and the boy would look up at her and smile with the self-satisfied face of his father.
Agnes drew a fresh can of lager from a hidden place and gently pulled at the ring top. With a careful finger she gathered the bubbly drips and popped them into her mouth. She gave the boy the empty Tennent’s can. He had always liked the half-naked beauties photographed on the side. Shuggie was intent on this one, he hadn’t seen her before, and he liked the way her name sounded when he spelt it out slowly, just like his Granda Wullie had taught him. Shh-hee-nah.
Shuggie would collect the empty cans from around the house and line up the women on the edge of the bath. He would stroke their tinny hair and make them talk to each other in imagined conversations, rambling monologues, mostly about ordering new shoes from catalogues and whoring husbands. Big Shug had caught him once. He had watched proudly as Shuggie lined up the women and spelt out each of their names phonetically. He bragged about it later down the rank. “Five years old, eh!” he would say. “What a chip aff the auld block.” Agnes had looked on sadly, knowing what was really going on.
Later that week she took Shuggie into the BHS and bought him a baby doll. Daphne was a chubby little toddler, with the tufted coif of a fifties housewife. Shuggie loved the doll. He put all his lager ladies in the bin after that.
Shuggie had been watching his mother quietly. He
