Douglas Stuart

Booker Preis 2020

Shuggie Bain

sina (she/her) 

No day ever started well with six dozen raw chickens, and today of all days, it was stealing the sweetness out of his daydreams.

Sarah Christine Gill

Lea Hi

She had loved him, and he had needed to break her completely to leave her for good. Agnes Bain was too rare a thing to let someone else love. It wouldn't do to leave pieces of her for another man to collect and repair later.

He liked the drive from Sighthill, it was like a descent into the heart of the Victorian darkness. The closer you got to the river, the lowest part of the city, the more the real Glasgow opened up to you. There were hidden nightclubs tucked under shadowy railway arches, and blacked-out windowless pubs where old men and women sat on sunny days in a sweaty, pungent purgatory.

Joe took the white paper and dropped a heaped scoop of fat chips and a big bit of golden battered fish on it. He drizzled the hot food with salt and vinegar, and Shug circled with his fingers. “Mair, Joe. Mair.” The man piled it on till it was sodden.

In the bedroom she changed her skirt for something that would let her kick, and donned the angora jumper with the rhinestone beads, the impractically fluffy one that Colleen had been so suspicious of. She took some time going through her box of jewels, picking the largest gemmed rings, which were papal in scale. The glass gems were so poorly set they ripped tights and caught on tea towels. Some mornings after a bad bender, she woke up to find cuts on the side of her face or the inside of her forearms. Agnes looked at her bejewelled hands, a sparkling weaponry, knuckledusters of peeling, plated gold. The last of the lager curdled in her empty stomach, and she knew the time was now.

Lizzie’s brow furrowed as she ran her fingers over the cabinet shelves. There was nothing there to eat: a handful of pockmarked potatoes, a stick of gritty lard, and a poke of flour that was so used up it looked like it might blow over from emptiness. She reached behind the empty bread bin, took an old box of soap flakes off the bottom shelf, and tipped it gently. Three hidden eggs rolled out of the box. They were brown and plump, with not a speckle on them. With a spoonful of lard she cracked them into the black pan, and they rolled and spat luxuriously in the bubbling fat. She turned to Agnes and put her finger across her lips in a secretive way. The bairn looked up at her with fat cheeks, and she put her little pink finger across her bud of a mouth and made the motion back to her mammy. Agnes sat on Lizzie’s knee, and they ate the hidden eggs from the same plate. The yolk was so deep and fatty that Lizzie could feel it coat her teeth, and she could see...

As Wullie knelt, Lizzie had been touching him gently, almost not touching him. The back of his neck was a syrupy brown like she had never seen, it was the colour of burnt sugar tablet, golden and sweet. She could see a little down the back of his shirt neck, and she could see how the line changed sharply from this dark burnt tan to a healthy golden tone. She had been gently considering a lock of hair that curled behind his ear; it was free of pomade and a horn-brown colour so alive with the sun, so different from tip to root, that she didn’t recognize it, she didn’t recognize him. She wondered, where had the flat ebony gone that she knew and loved. She let the fine hair run through her fingers, and then she tugged it, hard.

After the burial, Agnes wrapped sandwiches in paper towels and sent Shuggie three times around the room, until black handbags were bursting and fragrant with hot salmon and butter. Even when people turned the boy away Agnes sent him back around, and around, with pretty plates heavy with thick meat.

She was no use at maths homework, and some days you could starve rather than get a hot meal from her, but Shuggie looked at her now and understood this was where she excelled. Everyday with the make-up on and her hair done, she climbed out of her grave and held her head high. When she had disgraced herself with drink, she got up the next day, put on her best coat, and faced the world. When her belly was empty and her weans were hungry, she did her hair and let the world think otherwise.

“I was going to go out and get you a new daddy.” 

He ran the thick brush around the side of her hair, and the hairspray cracked and dusted the air like sweet pollen. He liked the way the hair started to soften and feather. 

“That’s OK. I don’t need a daddy.”

Shuggie Bain quotes

Join the club