Agnes brushed out the last of her mother’s curls. She had to restrain herself not to give them a sly tug. “Well, seeing as you think I’m selfish then, I need to ask you for a favour.”
Lizzie sniffed. “It’s a bit early in our friendship to be calling in favours.”
She rubbed the lobe of Lizzie’s ear gently, manipulatively. “I need you to tell him for me. Tell him that we’re moving. Will you do that?”
“It’ll kill your faither.”
“It won’t.” She shook her head. “But if I stay here I know I am going to lose him.”
Lizzie turned and studied her daughter closely. She stared coldly at the flicker of hope in Agnes’s eyes. “You will believe anything, won’t you.” It wasn’t a question.
“We just need a fresh start. Shug says it might make everything better. It’s only a wee place, but it’s got its own garden and its own front door and everything.”
Lizzie waved her cigarette airily. “Oh, la-di-dah! Your very own front door. Tell me: How many locks do you suppose this front door is going to need to keep that wandering bastard at home?”
Agnes scratched the skin around her wedding band. “I’ve never had my own front door.”
The women were silent a long while after that. Lizzie spoke first. “So, where is it then? This front door of your own.”
“I’m not sure. It’s way out on the Eastern Road. It used to be rented by an Italian chippy or somebody Shug knows. He said it was very green. He said it was quiet. Good for my nerves.”
“Will you have your own washing line?”
“I would think so.” Agnes rolled on to her knees. She knew how to beg for what she wanted. “Listen, we’re pals again, right? I need you to tell my daddy for me.”
“Your timing is beautiful. After this morning’s nonsense?” Lizzie pulled her chin into her chest and made a long, low clown mouth. “If you leave he’ll blame himself to his dying day.”
“He won’t.”
Lizzie began rebuttoning her summer dress. The buttons were lining up wrong, and it was testing her patience. “Mark my words. Shug Bain is only interested in Shug Bain. He’s going to take you out there to the middle of nowhere and finish you for good.”
“He won’t.”
Wullie and Shuggie came lumbering across the forecourt then. Lizzie saw them first. “Look at the state of that. A walking advert for soap powder.”
By the time Agnes looked up, the last of the Eiffel Tower was being licked from between the boy’s chubby fingers. She couldn’t help but smile at her father, the giant with his shirt tails untucked, like a schoolboy shirking his uniform. They walked slowly, swinging between them the Daphne dolly that Shuggie treasured so much.
“If you cannae make Shug do right by you, at least make him do right by the boy.” Lizzie narrowed her eyes at her grandson, at his blond dolly. “You’ll be needing that nipped in the bud. It’s no right.”
Seven
Agnes followed Shug’s red leather cases as they migrated around the flat. They had shown up out of nowhere, earlier in the week, with no price tags and the faint look of having been gently used. Shug had neatly folded all of his clothes, setting socks within shoes and rolling underwear into tidy jam rolls, before packing everything thoughtfully inside. Often, during the week, he would open one of the red cases and study the contents closely, as though memorizing the inventory, then close and lock it securely again. Agnes could see the cases were half-empty, that there was still valuable space inside. Several times she left small piles of the children’s clothes near them and then watched with bubbling jealousy as the cases up and moved to the other side of the room, still with nothing belonging to her or the children placed inside.
On the day of the flit he had set the red cases by the bedroom door. Agnes worried the suitcase lock with her nail. She wondered why she hadn’t seen the new house herself. Shug had come home with the idea after one of his night shifts spent talking to a Masonic pal who owned a chippy in the city centre. A council flat in a two-up two-down that he said had its own front door. Shug signed for it there and then with all the casualness of buying a raffle ticket.
Agnes wrapped the last of her glass ornaments in newsprint and lined up her old green brocade cases next to Shug’s. She intermixed them, rearranged them, but no matter what she did there was a sense that they didn’t belong together any more. In the luggage tag that hung from her case was a handwriting she barely recognized now. It was the happy, confident loops of a much younger her, running away from her first husband for a promise of a life that was worth living. Her fingers traced the forgotten name: Agnes McGowan, Bellfield Street, Glasgow.
When Leek was still in nappies, Agnes had run away.
On the night she finally left she had packed the green cases full of new clothes, showy, impractical things she had bought on the last of Brendan McGowan’s tick and had kept hidden for the past long year. Before she ran away she had scrubbed their tenement flat one last time. She knew the news would bring in the neighbours. With beady eyes they would pour in to offer condolences to her man, hoping to gnash their gums at her uppity ways. She wouldn’t dare give them the pleasure of thinking her slatternly too.
On the plush hall carpet she had tamped a loose corner with her toe, pushing it back in place, and she was sad to hear the crunch of carpet tacks grip the wood once again. Earlier in the day she had tried to lift it. She had broken two good wedding spoons and bloodied her fingers before sitting back in frustrated tears. As the mascara ran down her face she had wondered if maybe she should stay on, just a little longer, just till she had gotten good use out of that new Axminster. She hadn’t tried to take everything, but that carpet was new, and she had enjoyed how the old wife across the close blanched every time she saw it. It was the kind of hall carpet that you left your front door open for, the beautiful thick kind that you wanted all the neighbours to see. She had nagged and nagged until she got it installed, wall-to-wall, Templeton’s Double Axminster, but the tingly feeling hadn’t lasted this time, not even half as long as she had expected it to.
Living with the Catholic, in the ground-floor flat, all she could see was a wall of grey soot-covered tenements across the street. The night she ran away, Agnes had watched the lights go out, one by one, good, hard-working folk getting an early night for an early start. Outside in the rain was the purring hum of the hackney engine. She could not help but feel some excitement, and inside her, underneath the doubt, was a rising thrill.
Over the back of the sofa lay two miniature effigies; studies in neat melton and soft velvet and uncomfortable shoes of patent leather with gaudy silver buckles. She woke her sleeping toddlers. Catherine looked like a drunken old man, her sleepy eyelids opening and closing in big distressed gulps. As Agnes kissed them awake, there was a low scratch on the tenement door. She crept out to the hallway. The door opened with a low whine, and a man’s round, tanned face twitched anxiously in the bright tenement light. Shug moved impatiently from one foot to the other, ready it seemed to run at any moment.
“You’re late!” Agnes spat.
The smell of sour stout on her breath made him swallow his half-smile. “I don’t fucking believe it.”
“What do you expect? My nerves are shot waiting for you.” Agnes pulled the door open and passed the heavy cases to Shug. They bulged at the zippers and tinkled happily, as if they were full of Christmas ornaments.
“Is that it?”
Agnes stared at the deep, swirling carpet and sighed. “Aye. That’s it.”
With the cases in hand the man shuffled into the street. Agnes had turned then and looked back into the flat. She went to the mirror in the hall and ran her fingers through her hair; the black curls bounced and folded back on themselves tightly. She ran a line of fresh red lipstick