little finger, with its gold sovereign ring, was barely touching him. It didn’t move, or wriggle. It just sat there, and that had made it burn all the more.
Now Shuggie stood in the damp bathroom holding his parka closed. Mr Darling pulled at the edge of his tweed bunnet in an old-fashioned greeting. “Ah jist chapped to see if ye were around the day?”
“Today? I don’t know. I have some messages to run.”
A cloud of disappointment crossed Mr Darling’s face. “Miserable day for it.”
“I know. But I said I would meet a friend.”
Mr Darling sucked at his large white teeth. The man was so tall he was still straightening to his full height. Shuggie could imagine generations of Protestant weans lined up in single file and terrified in his long shadow. He could see now that the man’s face was flush, a line of drinkers sweat already on the edge of his brow. The man had been bent at the keyhole, Shuggie was sure of that now.
“That’s a pity. Ah’m jist away to cash ma dole, might stop in at the Brewers Arms, then put a wee line on. But afterwards ah was hoping we could share a few cans. Mibbe watch the fitba results on the wee telly? Ah could teach ye about the English leagues?” The man looked down on the boy, he dug his tongue into his back molars.
If he played it right, the man was always good for a few pounds. But it would take too long to wait on Mr Darling to cash his unemployment; to stoat from the post office to the betting shop to the off-licence and then home, that was if he found his way home at all. Shuggie couldn’t wait that long.
The boy let go of the parka then, and Mr Darling pretended not to stare as the coat gaped slightly. But the man seemed unable to help himself, and Shuggie watched as the grey light in his green eyes dipped. Shuggie could feel it burn into his pale chest as the man’s gaze slid down over his loose underwear to his bare legs, the unremarkable, white hairless things, that hung like uncut thread from the bottom of his black coat.
Only then did Mr Darling smile.
SIGHTHILL
Two
Agnes Bain pushed her toes into the carpet and leaned out as far as she could into the night air. The damp wind kissed her flushed neck and pushed down inside her dress. It felt like a stranger’s hand, a sign of living, a reminder of life. With a flick she watched her cigarette dout fall, the glowing embers dancing sixteen floors down on to the dark forecourt. She wanted to show the city this claret velvet dress. She wanted to feel a little envy from strangers, to dance with men who held her proud and close. Mostly she wanted to take a good drink, to live a little.
With a stretch of her calves, she leaned her hipbone on the window frame and let go of the ballast of her toes. Her body tipped down towards the amber city lights, and her cheeks flushed with blood. She reached her arms out to the lights, and for a brief moment she was flying.
No one noticed the flying woman.
She thought about tilting further then, dared herself to do it. How easy it would be to kid herself that she was flying, until it became only falling and she broke herself on the concrete below. The high-rise flat she still shared with her mother and father pressed in against her. Everything in the room behind her felt so small, so low-ceilinged and stifling, payday to Mass day, a life bought on tick, with nothing that ever felt owned outright.
To be thirty-nine and have her husband and her three children, two of them nearly grown, all crammed together in her mammy’s flat, gave her a feeling of failure. Him, her man, who when he shared her bed now seemed to lie on the very edge, made her feel angry with the littered promises of better things. Agnes wanted to put her foot through it all, or to scrape it back like it was spoilt wallpaper. To get her nail under it and rip it all away.
With a bored slouch, Agnes fell back into the stuffy room and felt the safety of her mammy’s carpet below her feet again. The other women hadn’t looked up. Peevishly, she scraped the needle across the record player. She clawed at her hairline and turned the volume up too loud. “Come on, please, just the one wee dance?”
“T’chut, no yet,” spat Nan Flannigan. She was feverish and arranging silver and copper coins into neat piles. “I’m just about to pimp out the lot of ye.”
Reeny Sweeny rolled her eyes and held her cards close. “Ye have one filthy mind!”
“Well, don’t say I didnae warn ye.” Nan bit the end off a slab of fried fish and sucked the grease from her lips. “When I am done taking all your menage money at these cards ye’re gonnae hiv to go home and fuck that bag o’ soup bones you call a husband for more.”
“No chance!” Reeny made a lazy sign of a cross. “I’ve been sitting on it since Lent, and I’ve got no intention of letting him get at it until next Christmas.” She pushed a fat golden chip into her mouth. “I once held aff so long I got a new colour telly in the bedroom.”
The women cackled without breaking their concentration on the cards. It was sweaty and close in the front room. Agnes watched her mammy, little Lizzie, carefully studying her hand, flanked by the bulk of Nan Flannigan on one side and Reeny Sweeny on the other. The women sat thigh to thigh and tore at the last scraps of a fish supper. They were moving coins and folding cards with greasy fingers. Ann Marie Easton, the youngest amongst them, was concentrating on rolling mean-looking cigarettes of loose tobacco on her skirt. The women spilt their housekeeping money on to the low tea table and were pushing five- and ten-pence bets back and forward.
It bored Agnes. There was a time before baggy cardigans and skinny husbands that she had led them all up to the dancing. As girls, they had clung to one another like a string of pearls and sang at the top of their voices all the way down Sauchiehall Street. They had been underage, but Agnes, sure of herself even at fifteen, knew she would get them in. The doormen always saw her gleaming at the back of the line and beckoned her forward, and she pulled the other girls behind her like a chain gang. They held on to the belt of her coat and muttered protest, but Agnes just smiled her best smile for the doormen, the smile she kept for men, the same one she hid from her mother. She had loved to show off her smile back then. She got her teeth from her daddy’s side and the Campbell teeth had always been weak, they were a reason for humility in an otherwise handsome face. Her own adult teeth had come in small and crooked, and even when they were new they had never been white because of the smoking and her mammy’s strong tea. At fifteen she had begged Lizzie to let her have them all taken out. The discomfort of the false teeth was nothing when compared to the movie star smile she thought they must give her. Each tooth was broad and even and as straight as Elizabeth Taylor’s.
Agnes sucked at her porcelain. Now here they were, every Friday night, these same women playing cards in her mammy’s front room. There was not a single drop of make-up between them. Nobody had much of a heart to sing any more.
She watched the women fight over a few pounds in copper coins and let out a bored huff. Friday card school was the one thing they looked forward to all week. It was meant to be their respite from ironing in front of the telly and heating tins of beans for ungrateful weans. Big Nan usually went home with the winnings from the kitty, except for the times when Lizzie would have a lucky-handed winning streak and got a slap for it. Big Nan couldn’t help herself. She got jumpy around money and didn’t like to lose it. Agnes had seen her mother get a black eye over ten bob.
“Haw you!” Nan was shouting at Agnes, who was engrossed with her own
