Part 2 (1/2)
They moved in Stevie's toys the next morning, so he could bash his cars up and down the floorboards while his parents got the new place finished. They painted his room before the others, racing each other with the rollers, and it was bright in there with the window open while the walls dried. They ate their lunches sitting on the sofa, chip papers spread across their knees, only then Stevie's Mum made them stand up halfway through, so she could lay a dust sheet across the cus.h.i.+ons.
”We're keeping it nice. Right? Everything in the house.”
And his Dad saluted her: ”Aye, aye.”
Stevie's Mum scoured the free ads for fridges when they'd finished, until two of his aunties turned up with rubber gloves, to help her scrub out the new kitchen. They brought Stevie's big cousins along for him to play with, and the girls carried him around the living room like he was their baby, while the boys took running jumps onto the armchair his Dad had found them on a building job. It was big and green and soft with cus.h.i.+ons, and when Stevie's Mum was done with cleaning, she stripped off the covers and put them in the bath; she climbed in barefoot and marched up and down in the soapsuds to make his Dad laugh.
They were back at his Gran's place for tea, and on all the next evenings too, because their beds were still there to sleep in, and Stevie's Mum said they couldn't cook, not yet, in the new kitchen.
”Won't be long, son.”
All the talk round the table of the new place, cannae wait, fingers and faces all paint-flecked.
Come the middle of the week, Brenda took Stevie with her to work. She told him: ”It's so as your Maw an Da can get mair done.”
Her grandson was used to coming places with her as it was; Brenda cleaned houses and pubs, and Stevie liked to crawl along the benches while she came after him with the hoover. Or she sat him on a high stool in front of the fruit machines and let him bash the b.u.t.tons.
Friday was her day off, and because Malky was sleeping, she took Stevie on the Drumchapel rounds: calling in on her three older sons' houses for cups of tea and a catch-up, to use up the morning. Stevie ran ahead of her most of the way round the scheme, because he knew whose door was Malky Jnr.'s by now, and which floor of the high flats his Uncle Brian lived. Stevie's cousins were all at school, but at least he got their toys to himself while Brenda blethered with her daughters-in-law. She finished up at Craig's house, where Stevie got biscuits to fuel the trudge back to her place.
The boy had a good pair of legs. Lindsey had given up on the buggy since they moved, because the new flat was on the highest part of Drumchapel, and there were flights of steps all over, weeds growing up through the cracks in the concrete. They had to go down them to get anywhere, and then it was a steep haul to get back up again, so Stevie was used to trotting after his Mum along the pavements, past all the close-mouths, some with neighbours out and talking on the steps, others boarded over and sprayed with tags. Brenda knew Lindsey walked the scheme streets fast to get it over with, but Craig's end of Drumchapel was full of the new building works, so she let Stevie play awhile by the tonne bags. The place was crowded with pallets of bricks and sand piles these days, just the same as when Brenda was a girl, and she watched her grandson dig his fingers into the gravel, scattering handfuls at the half-built new walls.
”Reckon they'll build them tae last this time?”
He blinked at her, stopped in mid-throw, knowing a joke when he heard one, even if he couldn't work out what it meant. The scheme was all Stevie knew, but Brenda could remember a time before it sprawled across this hillside. So she smiled at him: ”Ach, don't mind me, son.”
Turning to go, he dropped his stones, skipping to catch up like the good wee boy he was.
Her grandson had no brothers and sisters, not yet, he mostly just had grown-ups about him, and all their endless talking, harking back and forwards, and Brenda knew fine well she was one of the worst offenders. She'd told him plenty of times before, how Drumchapel was home to her, no more, no less, and how her family got moved out here when she was six. They'd come from the tenements in the middle of Glasgow, with hundreds of other folk besides, mums and dads and kids, and Stevie had heard all about those uprooted families making a new go of it; how the closes were smart then, the steps kept scrubbed, half the place was still empty and the high flats not yet built.
If Malky caught her talking, she knew he'd laugh, telling her it wasn't fair on the boy, taking him for a captive audience. Her husband had no truck with looking back on life: he said before you knew it you'd get maudlin. Have you no had enough ae that wae your faither? But Malky was in bed now, not here to tease, and Stevie was good, quiet company besides, so Brenda held out a hand to the boy and pointed: ”The scheme wasnae nearly so big when we were moved here. It was aw still farms over that way, if you walked tae the far edge.” Below the grey closes standing tall now, all along the high ridge, there were fields of red-brown cows and barley when she was a girl, that her father took her to find. He took both his children to show them, and to tell them how he'd been a farm boy, back in Ireland. Born on his family's own smallholding, to open skies and views of the far hills, and fields they'd worked for generations. When Papa Robert said they were out of the slums now, he spoke like they'd been returned to a standing they'd been robbed of.
Brenda squeezed Stevie's fingers, remembering how her brother had held her hand then, a comforting grip, while Papa Robert told them how their family had been ousted. Eric already knew it, the family grief, all that they'd lost back in Louth. Brenda told her grandson: ”He was the first born, aye? My brother was older than me, by a good five years.”
And though Stevie had never met him, he nodded just the same; Eric already familiar to him from all her stories, the boy kept up with her along the kerbstones.
”Nearly there now.”
Brenda had trotted behind her brother half her childhood: Eric had always been faster home from school, in the afternoons, all along the wide, new roads. She told Stevie: ”He gave me a coal-carry when I got tired, but.”
He'd been a good big brother like that. And a good buffer too, against their Mum and Dad. Brenda said: ”There were great piles of builders' sand where the houses stopped. Eric had tae drop me tae get up the top. I mind our feet, sinkin ankle-deep, an how our shoes got full ae it, skiddin down the far slope.”
But her brother helped her with her laces, crouching down by the drainage ditches. Eric dusted her down.
”So as our mother wouldnae gie us a row, treadin dirt intae the new house.”
Her mother's temper had been fierce, and Brenda climbed her close steps, thinking about her parents; how they'd both taken a hard kind of pride in their family.
Stevie was ahead of her, already at the front door, scuffing his own feet clean on the mat, which made her smile again, telling him how her Mum and Dad were proud of the ground floor they'd been given, with a room for each of their children.
”It was mair rooms than they'd ever had, you get me?”
Papa Robert planted roses out the front: ”Three bushes in the bare earth. Like it was comin up roses for his faimly again, at last.”
Brenda had to laugh at that, sort of, getting her keys out, and then she said: ”Aye, my faither. He was a force tae be reckoned with.”
Even when the scheme spread out, turned big and harsh, he wouldn't make do with pee-the-beds and dog mess in front of the house.
It was dark inside the flat, Malky not yet up. So the pair of them were quiet then, taking off their shoes, and Brenda was glad of it. Her Dad had been a fierce man all round, and it was hard not to let that spill into her stories. Maybe Malky was right and it was best she was stopped, before she got started on her own tales of grief; of her brother and father, and the way they'd ended up at loggerheads.
Brenda thought she'd sooner tell Stevie more about Eric and their younger days. Only her brother had been more work than play once they'd moved here, because he'd started at the High School before a year was out, and it was a long bus ride from the scheme. And then Brenda thought how Stevie knew all that anyhow, because she'd told him Eric's new school was only for the clever ones, and that her brother only had to read something once to remember it. Eric had been best at drawing picturesa”he could make things look real, there on the papera”so his drawing teachers gave him extra projects, and her brother did those when he'd finished with his other work. Which left as good as no time for playing by the building sites. Stevie knew Eric had made it his job too, when he was grown: drawing s.h.i.+ps at the s.h.i.+pyards, pictures for the men to build by.
Brenda was proud of him. Didn't matter what her father said. Eric had built himself a fine life, and it was only what he deserved. He had a fine brain, the best in the family, and he'd known to make the most of his abilities. Brenda had repaid his childhood love with her loyalty, and she still kept a picture Eric had drawn for her, on the wall in the hallway.
It was pencil and fine, of her as a Mum, with all her boys. They were all in a row, eating ice-creams that Eric had bought them, with a baby asleep in a pushchair at the bottom of his close steps. The baby was Graham, and Stevie had had a hard time believing it, the first few times she'd shown him: that small and sleeping bundle was his big Da.
In the drawing, her boys were standing on Eric's close steps, and they weren't like any Stevie had climbed this morning. Sandstone, not concrete, they were wide and curved at the tops, with smart iron railings, painted black to match the front door.
”Where's that then? Where's Uncle Eric's house?” Stevie asked her now.
”He stays in Glasgow,” Brenda told him. ”Not so far.”
But still, it was nowhere near the rest of them, and she saw how it must seem strange to Stevie, that Eric wasn't on the Drumchapel rounds; the one person in the family they never went and visited.
All that distance. And all the grief that brought it about. Brenda thought it was Papa Robert's doing.
”My faither,” Brenda started. ”He tellt us our faimly were blown over fae Ireland. By storms that werenae our makin, aye? An he reckoned we were better than where we landed.”
He set a high bar for both his children: school and work were a means for getting on in life. Even Drumchapel was, in its own way, the new house in the new housing scheme. Papa Robert said they'd come through, if they knew their worth, in time, with faith. The thought gave Brenda an ache.
She could see her grandson trying to make sense of it: Eric's close steps, and how he was the best in the family, and now he lived somewhere far across Glasgow. Brenda thought it should have made Papa Robert glad, what Eric did with his life; Eric had come through, by anyone's lights. Except her father's. He said Eric had forgotten his family in the process, and all they should have meant to him. The way Papa Robert saw it, his son had turned his back on them.
”What's goin on here then?”
Malky was up. He was standing behind them in the hallway, a bit sour at being woken, but it was a relief to have her train of thought broken, even so. Malky looked from Brenda to Stevie, and then: ”Let me guess, son,” he said. ”She on about her Da?”
He shook his head.
”Papa Robert, an how he'd been abandoned.” Malky had heard it all before, too many times. ”The old guy poured our ears full, so he did.”
He laughed, but not like he was happy to be minded. Malky was talking to their grandson, but Brenda knew it was for her benefit when he bent down and whispered to Stevie, like he was letting him in on a secret: ”I grew up here an aw, son, an I learned quick, like everywan did. Drumchapel was where you landed when you fell off the edge ae Glasgow. Papa Robert should ae watched his step. It's a steep climb back up. Every man tae hissel.”
Malky never blamed Eric for making the break, any more than Brenda did, but he thought all this was old ground, and they'd trodden it far too often as it was.
His piece said, he straightened up, lifting Stevie into his arms for a hug. And then he and Brenda both looked at their grandson, all muddled and looking back at them.
Malky threw her a glance: enough now.
And Brenda nodded: aye, right enough.
But he was right enough about Drumchapel as well. So she told him, in closing: ”Dinnae say aw that tae Lindsey, will you?”