She found the bedroom switch through habit. It flicked on with a click, and the dark burst with bright, unflattering light. The room was small and tight, dominated by a rococo-style bed that was much too large. The boy happily called out, “Daddy!” and the messy hump in the royal bed stirred. Brendan McGowan sat up in shock, blinking at the Victorian carollers stood at the foot of his bed. His mouth went slack.
Agnes pulled the collar up on her mink coat in a grand gesture. It was a coat he had bought for her on tick, an unneccesary extravagance that he had hoped would make her happy and hold her at peace from want, if just for a while. “Right. Thanks for everything, then.” It was coming out wrong. “I’m away,” she said, in a clumsy understatement, like a maid who had finished her chores and was leaving for the day.
The sleeping man could only blink as his waving family filed out of the room. He heard the front door close gently and the heavy hum of a diesel engine. Then they were gone.
As they roared away that night, the black hackney taxi sounded solid and heavy as a tank. Agnes sat on the long leather banquette flanked by her warm babies. The four drove in silence through the wet and shiny Glasgow streets. Shug’s eyes kept glancing in the mirror, flitting over the faces of the sleeping children and tightening slightly. “Where are we going, then?” he asked after a while.
There was a long pause. “Why were you late?” asked Agnes from behind the collar of her coat.
Shug didn’t answer.
“Did you have second thoughts?”
He stopped looking in the mirror. “Of course I did.”
Agnes brought her leather-gloved hands up to her face. “Jesus Christ.”
“Well, didn’t you?”
“Did it look as if I did?” she replied, her voice higher than she would have liked.
The streets of the East End were empty. The last pubs were closed, and decent families were tucked in together from the cold. The hackney pulled along the Gallowgate and drove on through the market. Agnes had never seen it empty before; it was usually full of people buying their messages or new curtains, nice bits of meat or fish for a Friday. Now it was a graveyard of empty tables and fruit boxes. “Where are we going to go?”
“I left mine at home, you know.” He was glowering at her in the mirror. “We agreed. We said a fresh start.”
Agnes felt the hot heads of her children burrowing into her side. “Yes, well, it’s not that easy.”
“Aye, but you said.”
“Yes, well.” Agnes fixed her eyes out the window. She could feel him still staring in the mirror. She wished he would watch the road. “I couldn’t do it.”
The man looked at the children in their Sunday finest, old-fashioned clothes worn for the first time, expensive clothes bought for a midnight escape. He thought about all their clothes neatly folded in the cases. “Aye, but you didnae even try, did ye?”
She fixed her eyes on the back of his head. “We can’t all be as heartless as you, Shug.”
He had tapped the brakes as his body spasmed in anger. All four of them lurched forward, and the children started to gripe. “An’ you fuckin’ ask me why I wis late?” Bits of spit landed, gleaming, on the rear-view mirror. “Why I wis fuckin’ late wis because I had to say goodbye to fo-wer greetin’ fuckin’ weans.” He drew the back of his hand across his wet lips. “Never mind a wife that threatened to gas the lot of them. Telt me if I left her that she would put the oven on and not light the ignition.”
The taxi screamed off again. They drove in silence, watching empty night buses grumble by and dark windows on cold houses. When he spoke again he was quieter. “Have you ever tried to walk to the front door with your bastarding family stuck into you like fish hooks, eh? Do you know how long it takes to peel four screaming weans off your leg? To kick them back down the hall and shut the door on their wee fingers?” His eyes were cold in the mirror. “No, you don’t know what it’s like. You just tell muggins here to come get ye. You sally out with suitcases like we were off to Millport for the day.”
She was sobering up. She stared silently out the window, trying not to think of the trail of fatherless children and the childrenless father they were leaving in their wake. In her mind it looked like a trail of viscous, salty tears being dragged along behind the black hack. The excitement had left her by then.
When they had passed under the iron railway bridge at Trongate for the third time, the sun was starting to rise and the fresh fish vans were being unloaded at the market. Agnes stared at the women crowded at the bus stop, the early-shift charwomen getting ready to clean the big city-centre offices. “We could go to my mammy’s new flat,” she had mumbled finally. “Just till we find a place of our own.”
All these years later, Agnes didn’t want to think about that night because it made her feel like a fool. Now she had packed the Catholic’s suitcases again. These brocade cases that were now carrying her away were the same ones that had brought her here to her mother’s. She looked down on the green cases and ripped the old McGowan label in two.
After Agnes had left the Catholic, Brendan McGowan had tried to do the right thing by her. Even after she had stolen away in the night, he had hounded her to her mother’s and made promises of what he would change to have her back. Agnes had stood there, in the shadow of the tower block, with her arms folded, as her husband offered to rearrange himself so completely into whatever she wanted that he would not have been recognized by his own mother. When it was clear she wouldn’t take him back, he had asked the parish father to talk with Wullie and Lizzie and guilt her into returning. Agnes would not be told. She would not go back to a life she knew the edges of.
For the next three years Brendan McGowan had sent his money every Thursday and taken the children every second Saturday. The last thing Catherine remembered about her real father was sitting in Castellani’s café as Brendan wiped vanilla ice cream from Leek’s face. Agnes had dressed them both deliberately in the best clothes they owned, and an older lady, with pearls about her neck and ears, had complimented Brendan on their neatness and good manners. The woman leaned down to Catherine’s height and asked the pretty girl what her name was. Clear as a Cathedral bell, the little girl had replied, “Catherine Bain.”
Brendan McGowan had excused himself from the table then. He had wound between the clusters of happy families towards the bathroom, and then he had turned and gone out into the street. Catherine didn’t know how long they had been sitting there alone, but Leek had eaten his ice cream and then hers and was dipping his finger into the melted dregs at the bottom of the shell-shaped glass.
The good Catholic had done all he could to hold his restless wife. She had run from him, and he had lowered his pride and asked for her back. She had divorced him, and he had lowered his pride again and had taken any time he could with his children as sacred. Then she had given them the Protestant’s name, and like lambs who had wandered from their field, they were sprayed with the indelible keel marks of another. Agnes had found his limit. Now, thirteen years on, Leek and Catherine could not have picked him out if they met him in a crowd.
Agnes had to restrain herself from picking at the brocade handle. She had packed her questions and doubts into the Catholic’s cases again and cheerlessly carried them to the taxi. To look at it now, the black hackney felt like a hearse. Wullie wouldn’t speak to her as he helped carry the children’s clothes down in the rusted lift. Lizzie stood over the big soup pot in the kitchen and wrung her chapped hands on her apron. As Agnes watched her mammy stir, she could see the gas wasn’t on.
Leek and Catherine had sat up in their beds at