tap and gulped the fluoride-heavy water, panting and gasping like a thirsty dog. She began to wipe the ruined make-up off her face; the cotton wool came away blackened with soot stains. Opening the medicine cabinet, she searched the plastic shelves for Wullie’s medicine, something to take the edge off, but the painkillers were gone. She lifted a bottle of congealed cough syrup and took a mouthful, and then she took another.
When she finally emerged into the dark hallway, she stood for a long time arranging herself. In the dark she tried on different smiles, small apologetic ones where she lowered her eyes and looked up through heavy brows with tight trembling lips. She tried some light casual smiles, like she was just back from the shops. She tried a large, toothy, beaming smile, a gallus head nod that said, So what? Fuck you. If Shug was in there, this would be the one she’d wear.
Wullie and Shuggie were sitting at the round dining table eating soft eggs and soldiers. Sixty years apart, they were huddled together in the far corner like old drinking pals. Leek was upended on the settee, his bare legs up and over the back, a sketchbook in hand. When he saw his mother, he got up very quietly and passed her with a polite nod, like a stranger in the street.
All the windows were thrown open, the house already scrubbed with bleach. The air was bitter and sharp. Wullie turned his head back towards his eggs when he saw her. He must have been at early Mass, his good suit was folded neatly over the kitchen chair. He sat in his undervest, his thick arms a tapestry of faded blue ink from his wrist to his shoulder meat, names and places never to be forgotten from the War, a laughing black-haired girl from Donegal, and Agnes’s own name and birthdate in proud elegant letters.
“You’ve missed Mass.”
Agnes tried several faces and finally decided on contrite. She heard sniffling in the kitchenette. “Is Shug here?” she asked nervously, a grin breaking over her false face.
Wullie shook his head. It had all been too ugly for him: the fight, the fire, the wean crying. He pushed his glasses up his nose and stared deeper into his eggs. “Please don’t grin, Agnes. Please don’t smirk at me like that.”
Her son, God bless him, had lit up like the Blackpool illuminations when she came into the room. Shuggie’s eggy hands were outstretched towards her, a bath towel tied around his head like a turban. “Mammy, Catherine wasn’t very nice to me this morning. She said I was a sook.” Agnes picked the boy up. He wrapped himself around her sore bones, squeezed the life back into her. “Granda said I can have three empire cakes the day.”
“Hugh, come back over here and finish your breakfast or there will be no cakes.” Wullie waved a thick hand at the boy, and with a sullen tut Shuggie slid down from his mother’s trunk. She felt the shaking in her bones start again. Her father shovelled a mouthful into Shuggie’s pursed lips before he spoke again. His voice was measured, but his eyes would not meet hers. “I know it’s my fault, Agnes. I know I’m the reason you are the way you are.”
Agnes shifted in irritation. Not this again. Her throat was desperate for a smoke.
“Hear me out. I know I spoilt you when I should have given you that belt. I know I’m sentimental, and I know I’m soft. But you have no idea. No idea what it was like.” Wullie rubbed the meat of his fist across his lips. He looked to the door of the kitchenette like there was someone offstage feeding him lines. “Fourteen of us there was. My auld ma saw none of them get what couldn’t be earned by their own hands. Not even our baby Francis, with his twisted leg. Poor wee bastard had to fight and shove like the rest of us. So when your mammy tells me I’m to be blessed with you, I prayed to let it be different. I promised that you’d never know want the way I knew want.”
“Daddy, please, you don’t have to . . .” Where were the fucking cigarettes?
He cracked his rough hands together; the sound was like booming thunder. “Am I always to be a milksop in my own house?” He was not a man who raised his voice. Agnes buttoned her lip; even Lizzie stopped her sniffling in the kitchenette. Wullie Campbell was a man built for loading granary barges down on the Clyde. She had seen him single-handedly clear a pub of a half dozen disrespectful Liverpudlians.
“Every day at a quarter past five you’d come running down that road to meet me as neat as a new pin. I asked your mammy to make sure you were clean. She used to say to me, ‘Wullie is all this palaver really necessary?’ But sure it was the only thing I ever asked her to do. A man needs to take pride in his family. But people don’t care about things like that any more, do they?” Wullie’s tattooed knuckles were knitted together in anger. “It gave me that much pleasure just to be proud of you. I could tell they were jealous, hanging out of their windows with tight faces. Grown men and women, jealous of a wee shiny bit of life like you. I used to laugh when they said you’d be ruined.”
“You did good, Daddy. I was happy.”
“Aye? Then what have you got to be so unhappy about now?” He sucked at his teeth and placed his hand on top of the boy’s head, the weight of it looked like it might buckle Shuggie’s neck. There were sentimental tears in Wullie’s eyes, but he was watching her coldly, like it was the first time he had seen her properly. “So tell me, Agnes. Am I to belt you?”
Agnes’s hand went to her throat, she felt like she might laugh. “Daddy! I’m thirty-nine!”
“Am I to beat this selfish devil out of you?” He rose slowly from the table. His arms were loose at his sides, his hands massive silt buckets at the end of iron cranes. “I am tired of you coming first, Agnes. I’m tired of watching you destroy yourself and knowing it’s my fault.”
Agnes took a step backwards. She wasn’t smiling any more. “It’s not your fault.”
Wullie closed the living room door quietly. He drew his heavy granary belt from his wool trousers, the Meadowside Union logo was debossed into the leather, and the sheer weight of it dragged on the carpet. “Aye, mibbe it’s for the best.”
Agnes held her hands out and backed slowly to the door. The gallus grin was gone from her face. As her father advanced she kept walking backwards, until she felt the living room cabinet at her back and heard the glass-eyed ornaments tinkle in warning. The boy was at her legs now, his head hidden halfway behind her denims. Wullie twisted the belt around his hands, once, twice, for a better grip. “Put that wean away from you.”
She held the boy closer. Wullie folded his hand around her soft upper arm. With his other hand he separated the boy gently but surely from her leg. He led Agnes over to his chair, where he sat down and pulled her over his knee.
She didn’t struggle, and no more begging words would come.
“Lord Jesus Christ, I ask You to give me the strength to forgive.” The union belt came down with a loud crack on the back of her soft buttocks. Agnes did not cry out. Wullie raised his hand again. “I thank You that my burden is never more than I can bear.” Crack. “Show Agnes the many blessings of her life.” Crack. “Quiet her needs.” Crack. “Show her some peace.”
There was a soft shuffle at her side, and Agnes felt her left hand be taken up. She felt the cooling of bloodless hands on the back of her clammy neck; she felt the gentle stroke of her mother. Lizzie knelt on the floor by her side. Her voice joined Wullie’s in prayer. “Lord, it is only through your forgiveness that we can forgive ourselves.” Crack.
After the fire Shug had gone out on the night shift, and for the second time that week he hadn’t come back in the morning. Besides his brother, Rascal Bain, and a few boys at the taxi rank, he didn’t have many male friends. Still, Agnes knew, there was a million other places he could happily be.
