On Wednesdays, the two of them have a midweek treat: tea at Gallowgate. Digby waits for her and thousands of “Singers” to pour out of the factory at the end of the shift. The Proddies will emerge first. Catholics like his mother come after; they are the lowest paid and do the roughest jobs. Her supervisor is a Proddy and a Rangers supporter, of course. Glasgow, like most Scottish cities, is violently split by religion. His grandparents were in the Irish wave that came after the Famine, turning the East End into a Catholic bastion (and the home of the Celtic football team).
Digby loves to stare up at the square clock tower that stands six stories high. The factory buildings extend on either side of it like trains a mile long. Each face of the tower, which is Glasgow’s most famous landmark, has a massive clock weighing two tons, with SINGER in giant letters above each dial, visible from anywhere in the city. Digby could spell SINGER before he could write his name. Standing this close and looking up, Digby feels he’s in the presence of God, whose name is SINGER. God has his own trains and railway station to run parts from the foundry to Helensburgh, Dumbarton, or Glasgow. God churns out a million sewing machines a year and employs fifteen thousand people. God lets his mother splurge on drawing paper and watercolors for Digby. God allowed his mother and him to move out from Nana’s and live on their own, and be silly and loud and have jam with their tea every day if it pleases them, and it does.
The rumble of hundreds of hobnail boots sound as they descend the factory steps. Soon he spots his mother, red-haired and beautiful. Men look at her in a way that makes him angrily protective. “Away! I’m done with men, Digs,” she said after cutting down a suitor. “A mooth ta eat and ta tell lies, that’s all.”
She’s not smiling when she comes to him. “They’ve gone an’ cut the assemblers tae only a dozen and the rest o’ us are meant to pick up the slack. Ah was burstin’—hardly time to take a pee. An it’s aw fur the sake of ‘industrial efficiency’!” There’ll be no tea today. Instead, her coworkers gather around his mother’s dining table, planning a strike. Digby hears them say that God—Mr. Isaac Singer—is really the Devil. God is a polygamist with two dozen children by various wives and mistresses. God sounds a lot like Archie Kilgour. For the next week, his mother is off to meetings every night, rallying support, returning late, bright-eyed but pale with fatigue.
He’s slicing bread for their tea when he hears her steps on the stairs much too early. He has a terrible foreboding. “They give me ma book, Digs. Kicked yer maw out. They found cause.” If she expects her friends to strike in her support, she’s disappointed. Since she’s no longer employed, the strike fund won’t pay her.
There’s nothing to do but move back in with Nana, a flatulent hypochondriac who crosses herself when she hears church bells and refers to Digby as “the bastard.” Digby and his mother sleep in the front room—no more jam, and sometimes no bread. His mother has the covers over her head when he leaves for school, and she’s that way when he returns. Her dull eyes remind him of the haddock lined up on ice at the Briggait Fish Market. “Thar’s nae good that e’er came out o’ the Gaiety,” Nana says to her daughter with satisfaction.
This is how a boy’s world crumbles. On his walks back from school, the four-eyed monster in the tower tracks his every movement. No show tunes play in his head. He and his mother are intruders in a house that holds the coffin gases of a “pernickety old pharisee of a wummin,” as his mother is wont to say.
The doctor who came to the mean little flat called his mother “catatonic.” When she rallied, Digby walked her from factory to counting house to drugstore. Work, any work, would be healing. But she might as well have been wearing a sign that said GINGER FENIAN AGITATOR. That was what a butcher called her. She cleans houses when she can; an invalid herself, she’s hired to care for invalids.
Winters are so cold Digby keeps his hat on indoors, but he must remove one glove to do his essays. Nana hounds her daughter. “Get yirsel’ oot. We’ve nae coal, and gey little food. If ye’te beg, if ye’te spread yer legs, do it. That’s how you got yirsel’ into this mess.”
Seven years after she was let go, they are still at Nana’s. After school, by habit, he keeps watch over his mother, sitting beside her, sketching on water-stained ledgers a neighbor gave him. He spins out a rich and sensual world in pen and ink. Beautiful women wearing heels that turn their calves into erotic pillars, women with slim shoulders and full hips in fancy hats and fur shrugs. Here and there a breast pops out from a blouse. Newspaper advertisements are good for perfecting form. The eyes he sketches are getting better; the tiny square of reflected light over the iris brings his creations to life, allows them to behold their creator. When he discovers an anatomy text in the Clydebank Library on Dumbarton Road, the women in Digby’s sketches begin to have transparent skin that reveals their bones and their articulations. He’s reassured to think that no matter how disappointing humans can be, the bones, the muscles, and the viscera are constant, an unchanging interior architecture . . . except for the “external genitalia.” A woman’s privates are rather less than he expected to see: a furry mound, a lipped portal that further conceals and leaves him with more questions.
His mother was once the most glamorous woman he knew. But now, so many years after losing her job, she makes little effort, speaks not at all, and still spends hours in bed. Even so, in the line of her arm draped over her cheek, in the angle between forearm and wrist, and again between palm and fingers, she has innate grace. Her red hair no longer looks on fire, and her forelock of gray suggests she’s brushed up against wet paint. At times she stares at her son, punishing him with a look that makes him feel responsible for all her troubles. She’s aged, but he can’t imagine she’ll ever look like Nana, with those inflamed fissures at the corners of her lips, bookends for a foul mouth.
The only time his mother ever turns on him is when Digby proposes to leave school, to get work. “Do that and ah’m deid,” she says, furious. “It’s only you bein’ top o’ the class that gets me through this hell. I dream o’ yer success. Dinnae disappoint me.”
In the end, she disappoints him. By then he’s almost a man, with a Carnegie College scholarship, secured against all odds. He plans to study medicine, drawn as he is to the body and its workings.
He comes home on a Sunday after an all-day tutoring session. Nana is out. Above his desk, his mother sticks her tongue out at him obscenely, a tongue three times its normal size, and blue. Her frog eyes mock him. The smell in the room tells him that she’s soiled herself. She dangles from a rafter, her toes barely off the ground. His school tie bites into the blue flesh of her neck.
Digby falls back against the door, dropping his books. This is why he kept vigil. This is what he feared, though he never dared put words to it. He’s too terrified to approach the body and take it down.
He lets the old woman make her own discovery. Nana screams, and then her sobs spill out of the room. The polis take the body down. The neighbors gawp at the sheeted form. His mother’s soul has been dead for years and her body has now followed.