belt, and she couldn’t concentrate as she folded Shug’s clean socks, one inside the other, matching the faded hues together exactly as he liked. Whose arms would he be in now? She felt the fight inside her begin to grow again. Could he be as close as the next tower block, with big Reeny?
She had to get out, she had to show face.
From the linen cupboard she picked up one of the folding deckchairs they would take to the fair-week caravan. She took out and rinsed her dentures under the warm tap. In tight denims and wearing her new black bra as a bikini top, she went out into the landing and waited for the piss-stained elevator. When she made it down the sixteen floors, she was relieved to see there were no burnt curtains lying around.
Except for petrified dog shit and some faint scorch marks, the forecourt was empty. Agnes checked out back of the tower block to see if Shug’s taxi was parked there. She had caught him out like that once before. When he was supposed to be working a day shift he had been upstairs fucking some unknown wifey. His sweaty shenanigans had been separated from his family by a few feet of council-grade concrete. Agnes had ridden the Sighthill elevator all that afternoon with a mop bucket full of cold tea dregs and piss. She waited at each landing for the doors to open on him and called off the hunt only when they opened on a group of bonnie young girls who were going outside to play. The children took one look at her and fearfully refused to get in the lift with the mad-looking woman from the sixteenth floor.
At first she had thought how stupid Shug was to get caught out so easily. Only later, when she confronted him, did she learn that she was the stupid one. He hadn’t been caught out. He wanted to make sure she knew all about it. Some things were not to be missed.
The sun was white in the sky. The concrete was already vibrating with the morning heat. On the waste ground, Lizzie was sunbathing on an old blanket with her back against the foundation. Her floral dress was opened to the breastbone and pulled apart to make the most of that rarest of occurrences, sunshine. Her hair sat in tight baby-blue curlers and was carefully wrapped in a gingham tea towel. She was reading the day’s paper and gossiping with a clutch of old dears on the patchy grass. The other women sat in a cluster of kitchen chairs and were peeling the skin off big brown potatoes and dropping them into an old plastic bag.
Agnes set her deckchair a respectful distance from her mother and her gang. Lizzie barely looked up from her paper, and Agnes knew she was being punished. She tried to settle herself casually into the warmth of the sun, but her eyes kept flitting to Lizzie, wanting only a sliver of friendship to ease the loneliness in her chest.
There was new graffiti on the wall above Lizzie. It sprang like a dirty thought bubble from her curls: Don’t be Shy . . . Shows Yer Pie. To Lizzie, the graffiti could have been a helpful plea to a bashful baker. Agnes knew better and couldn’t help but laugh.
Lizzie scowled at her. “What do you find so funny?”
It was the first time she had spoken since the front-room chapel that morning, and Agnes took a moment to consider whether she felt like encouraging it or ruining it. “Nothing. Where’s my wee man?”
Lizzie answered as spartanly as she could. “At the bakers, getting his cake.” She went back to her paper.
Agnes knew the routine. Saturday and Sunday afternoons, Wullie walked with his grandson the half mile or so to the shops. It was a scant row of half-shuttered storefronts set into a shadowed recess that never seemed to catch the daylight. They had dragged families out of the old Glasgow tenements for this scheme, and it was meant to be different, futuristic, a grand improvement. But in reality the whole scheme was too brutal, too spartan, too poorly built to be any better.
Shuggie would stand well behaved inside the Paki shop while his granda bought a noose of sweetheart stouts and a half-bottle of whisky, enough to carry them through Saturday night and discreetly through the Sabbath. The growing boy gave Wullie and Imran something to talk about as the bags were loaded with the alcohol. It was a routine in which neither man was allowed to acknowledge the drink moving between them, as though it would have broken the charade. Across the shadows, inside the bakery, Wullie would make small talk with the pretty girls while Shuggie greedily eyed the cakes. Shuggie always chose the same bright pink sponge pyramid, covered in red and white desiccated coconut and trimmed with a sugary sweetie on top. He would walk home very slowly in Wullie’s shadow, enjoying his spoils.
Agnes looked in the direction of the shops but couldn’t see them. She rose and stood on the edge of the waste ground. In her black bra she threw her head back and stretched her arms wide to enjoy the sun’s tingle on her pale skin. She caught a sideways glance from Lizzie. There was the start of a puce bruise on her lower back. It was this that held her mother’s attention. Agnes’s ringed fingers traced the belt welt, and she winced dramatically.
Lizzie stiffened proudly and said, “For the love of God. Cover yourself.”
The women peeling potatoes exchanged a sympathetic glance that said they knew how bruises could be more plentiful than hugs in a marriage, and not just for the women. Agnes was not to be told. Irritated now, she collapsed into the deckchair again and bounced it gracelessly like it was a child’s space hopper, bouncing, bouncing, till she was sat closer to her mother.
Agnes sprawled out luxuriously, her skin already poaching to a light rose colour. She reached out her foot and played with the hem of Lizzie’s yellow floral dress like a child. Lizzie lowered her newspaper and pushed Agnes’s foot away. “Stop fussing with me,” she said. “You’ve got a cheek to show your face around me this morning.” Lizzie undid the tea towel wrapped around her curlers. She opened a plastic bag at her side and started unravelling her hair.
Agnes took her mother’s pick comb and slouched in the sticky deckchair again. “My head is throbbing.”
Lizzie drew out a curler and held the kirby grip between her lips. “Oh, poor you. I hope you don’t expect any sympathy.”
“You should have stopped him.”
Lizzie was watching Agnes out of the side of her eyes now. “M’lady, let me tell you, in forty years of marriage I have never once seen your father raise his hand in anger.” She turned to the women with the potatoes. “You know, Maigret, he’s that soft I thought he’d come back dead a week into that bloody War.”
“Aye, he’s a fine man, right enough.” The potato women nodded in unison.
Lizzie turned back to her daughter. “I don’t want you dragging his good name down with your own.”
Agnes ran the pick through a painted tangle. “Am I that low?”
“Low?” Lizzie scoffed. “Do you know I’ve just been sat here on my lonesome getting a wee bit of colour, and I’ve no been able to get any peace from anybody. A woman cannae even run her messages, but she’s got to cross this grass and ask me, how I’m holding up?”
“People should mind their own.”
“I’m just after having Janice McCluskie drag her Mongoloid son across those weeds to me. She goes, ‘I’ve heard your Agnes has no been keeping that well. How’s her wee problem?’” Lizzie’s knuckles were white with indignation as she twisted a kirby grip. “I’m sat here with my dress unbuttoned down to my God’s glory and that pair of mouth-breathers gawping down at me.”
“Ignore them, Mammy.”
“Bastards! No keeping well? No fucking keeping well!” Her hands clawed at the imagined offenders in front of her. Lizzie exhaled loudly, and her anger shifted to a look of tired defeat.
