Paper Cup

Karen Campbell

• Publisher: Canongate Books
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781838855109
• eBook ISBN:
  9781838855116
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Scottish Literature
• Index: Literature

WATERSTONES SCOTTISH BOOK OF THE MONTH

'A truly original, brilliant novel' Daily Mail
'Very special indeed . . . your world will be a better place for reading this story' Joanna Cannon

What if going back means you could begin again?

Rocked by a terrible accident, homeless Kelly needs to escape the streets of Glasgow. Maybe she doesn't believe in serendipity, but a rare moment of kindness and a lost ring conspire to call her home, returning to the small town she fled so many years ago.

Chapter 1

A flutter and a swoosh. A fairy-winged, tulle-wound woman waltzes with a chamber pot on her head. Birling in the rain. Teetering on her peerie heels, stumbling into, then onto a bench.

In memory of Jessie Keane who loved to sit here.

The bench is damp. Smells of pish. The girl shuffles into the corner. A bedraggled bride, who will wake in the morning with no memory of the grand denouement of her hen night, but with a long, moss-coloured smudge on the back of her skirt. She flexes her toes. Surveys George Square through bleary eyes. Glasgow girls don’t do insouciant walking home with heels in hands after a night out. Invariably the ground is wet or covered in sick, and there will be jaggy unmentionables poised to bite your flesh.

Her shoes fall on their sides, unable to support their own height now her stockinged feet are free. It is an elongated, solid bench she sits on, built to hold many citizens. The drizzle makes a gauzy sheen of lamp posts, buses. Around her, the square is magnificent. Tinsel Town gleams, the city moist and mobile. Glasgow is a living beast of sandstone and grit, of smart-mouthed sideways humour, of traffic cones as modern art and soaring grandeur and dear, dear green places, of glittery puddles reflecting Victorian statues – men, all men, and one torn-faced queen – of deer grazing by gravestones, of the Molendinar Burn and a gentle monk named Mungo, of chewing gum, pizza boxes, tumbled ginger bottles, multicoloured faces and fluttering doos. Pigeons. Hunners of them. It is a place that has welcomed her to its bosom as a dancer would drag you into a ceilidh, sweat-drenched, barely pausing for breath. Four years of study has brought her here: one MA (Hons), some decent friends, and a passable fluency in Weegie. She practised hard. Folk thought her Galloway accent was Irish at first – or worse, from Edinburgh.

The night rain, settling on her. Seeping. Home tomorrow. To her lilac and turquoise bedroom. To French toast, knitted slippers and a shelf full of Beanie Babies that her mother still dusts. The girl begins to cry. She’s lost her pals and her head hurts. The veil that drapes from the potty is held by an elastic band, which cuts into her forehead. Stupid, stupid thing. It’s meant to be lucky – a sign that she will soon be great with child. She cries even harder. Her ears ache – her hens have been banging the potty all night, even after they stuck it on her head. Her pockets jingle with the change they collected in the potty’s plastic bowels, demanding pounds for a kiss. Selling her for kisses, to all men, any men, in the pubs they visited, even out on the streets. One old boy said he’d need to take his teeth out first. She retches, tries to remove the potty, but her hands can’t make proper contact with her head. They slither and drag: there is something very wrong. Jesus, she’s had a stroke. She’s had a stroke and Connor is bound to call it off; who’d want a bride that canny even smile? Panicked, she tries to touch her face. Can’t feel anything beyond a dull, padded sensation.

Whorls of people pass, dancing in the dark. All of them strangers. One boy showers another with the remains of his kebab; a taxi driver shouts. Contained trees drip despondently. Tonight, the City Chambers flies the rainbow flag and is lit in pink.

The smell of urine increases. She isn’t that drunk, surely? A mass at the other end of the bench stirs. Lifts its head.

‘Shh. Sorry, mate,’ she says. ‘Go back to sleep.’

The tramp adjusts his hat. In the rainburst arc of street light, his hair is glowing, and she cries all the harder.

‘I’m sorry. Sorry, pal. Jus ignore me.’

The figure doesn’t move. He is a statue on her bench, as stoic and weathered as the stone poets and politicians who adorn the square. The girl’s voice echoes inside her body, swimming with all the cocktails and Chardonnay; it is loud and splashy, but surprisingly lucid. So. Her tongue works fine. Just her hands that are wonky.

‘I’m really happy – I am, I am. I’m just a wee bit emontional. Is my hen night, see. So. I’m great. But I canny find ma pals.’ She hiccups, and a taste of sick is left behind. Her feet are cold. ‘Bloody went for chips ’n’ cheese. The lot of them! No me. Am not blowing it now – I’ve lost two stone, y’know? Cause I’m getting married in the morning! Is why . . . this.’ She waves dismissively at her headdress. ‘Ach, it’s not tomorr . . . One week tomorrow . . .’ She pauses. ‘Nope. Today. Wow. Canny believe it’s so quick, is come round so quick, ah canny believe it. Cause you’re planning and planning for ages, then whoosh! Just like that, is here it is. And there’s so much to do, and this is meant to be my night out, let my hair down, y’know, and now I’ve got this stupid thing stuck on my head and my hands don’t work and my pals have went and left me. Even my sister, and she hardly knows Glasgow at all at all.’

The tramp hasn’t moved, she doesn’t think he has, yet he seems more huddled, cowed in on himself. The girl’s skin is clammy; freezing rods of rain run down her neck. She tries to focus on the figure, but he is blurred. A smelly blur of coat and . . . cardboard? Half man, half rubbish. She giggles at her cleverness. Swallows.

‘I love him. Connor. Know? I mean I really, really love him.’

Still the tramp does not move. That nasty taste, swilling in her mouth. Salt. She needs salt. She licks the back of her rained-on hand, but her tongue sticks. Her flesh feels thick and distant. Thick hands. Useless. All that rain, and the man just absorbs it. She closes one eye, to see the shape of him better. What must it feel like, to not go home tonight? To not get dry, or get a heat in you? Ach, but there will be places. Places for folk like these. There’s another one over there in the doorway of the Chambers. Or maybe it’s a lassie peeing? Hard to tell through the shadow and smudged, liquid light. No one has to sleep on a bench in the rain anyway, and anyway, even if they wanted to, the police would move them on. When they had the Commonwealth Games here. That had been so brilliant. You didn’t see folk on benches then. The sun had blazed and the streets were shining. Blue Saltires, blue sky. Even the Clyde seemed blue. It was as if they’d lifted the giant rug that Glasgow sprawled on, and swept all the grubby bits underneath.

‘My head hurts.’ She cradles the pot between her muffled hands. The weight feels as if it will break her neck. ‘Gonny feel like crap tomorrow. And am going back down the road. Two hours on a shoogly train. Just for the wedding, but. Not to stay. Stay in bloody Gatehouse? No way, José. Ow.’

She’s forgotten not to shake her head. George Square tilts violently. Yet the people walking and smoking and waving arms for taxis, they keep going about their business fine. She grips the arm of the bench. Braces her spine against its wooden slats. The cold and miserable wet slaps in, rendering her slightly sober.

‘Nobody’s even heard of it; I just say Dumfries now, even though that’s nowhere near. Like when you go abroad and they say where’s Scotland and you go, near— Oh!’

Through long spears of rain, she can see her tribe – ten strident woman, chucking chips, come screeching, seething towards their bartered bride.

‘Where the buggery hell were you?’ she yells becomingly.

‘Where were you?’ her tribe yell back.

The girl rises from her bench, forgets she wears no shoes. ‘Shite!’ Her tights, sooking puddle water. In tandem, her ballast at the other end of the bench also shifts; the tramp is throwing off his cardboard blanket, ruffling as if his rags are feathers. ‘How could you all just leave me, eh? I’m supposed to be the . . . Oh! I canny even get this . . . It’s stu . . .’ Great juddering sobs flooding, surprising her, but it isn’t the indignity of the potty stuck on her head, or that her feet are snagged and saturated – and they’re Wolford tights, not cheap . . .

‘I can’t get . . .’

‘You’ve still got your Marigolds on, you daft bint.’

Of course. Along with the potty and the fairy wings, they’d put her in a tutu and bagged her hands in rubber gloves.

No. It is the way the tramp is watching her, like he’s hungry. God, of course he is hungry, but it is not for food, she thinks, it is for her, for this blaze of action, for being in the centre of a whole, and laughing, and going into the warm – not for jealousy, no, it is instinct, it is the instinct of the lost, and she feels she can’t breathe because he has real eyes, proper ones that have a colour and everything, how they bore into her, reaching in with pale, hard determination.

The girl recoils. It is too human, this face, and she wants to get away; it’s why folk fling money at them, isn’t it, why you never see the white of their eyes. Money, that’s it, he can have her money, all the stupid pennies that are jingling in her coat.

‘Get them off me! Get these bloody . . . like slimy bloody . . .’ She flaps and flaps her hands and her sister pulls – what has she been up to? Her lipstick’s all smudged and there is a love bite on her neck – in the queue for Pizza Crolla? Actually in the queue for Pizza Crolla?

‘Would you like a chip?’ Her pal Amy is proffering a greasy bag, and the tramp is reaching in. Such filthy fingers, Amy is a bridesmaid, what if she catches—

‘Get – them – off – me!’

A tug and a fling and a soar as hard and glittered as diamond, because diamond is as diamond does. The gloves come off, a splat of quiver-pink rubber strikes Amy’s shoulder, and the bride upturns her pockets so the silken lining is hanging out, shaking dross and bits of hankie and bright streams of golden coins around the dosser’s feet. The coins roll and bounce, some coming to rest against the discarded rubber glove. A celestial catcher’s mitt. The coins are fallen stars.

‘Here, mate. Here. Away and get . . .’ She doesn’t know. ‘Just. Here. Please, take it.’

‘Susan, don’t be so stupid. There’s about fifty quid . . .’ Her sister squats to retrieve the cash.

‘No!’ The bride-to-be is adamant. Adamant and pished. Or else. Or else it will be bad luck. She has begun collecting omens – black cats (different websites say they’re good or bad). Single magpies. Mirrors, ladders. You don’t want to risk fate.

‘Hope you realise how lucky you are.’ Sweet Amy, taking her arm. ‘She’d to kiss a hundred guys to get all that money. C’mon, missus, and we’ll get you home.’

The tramp crouches forward, a hollow, dank odour crouching too. It smells of forgotten leaves. A skein of long grey hair tumbles, escaping from his hat. He gathers the coins towards him, methodically, like he is tidying a mess.

‘Thank you.’

A soft voice. Such a soft voice.

‘Jesusgod,’ says Amy. ‘That tramp’s a woman!’

‘Jesusgod,’ say the rest, or some of them, or perhaps none. The bride feels sick. Feels really, really tired. She lets herself be absorbed into the shelter of their bodies. Her pals. Her hens. And they run for their bus, sparkling and animated in the rain.

Chapter Two

You are lying in your bed, with the covers pulled tight. Tight, because when you were wee, if everything up to your head and neck was swaddled, then the monsters wouldn’t get you. Or if you had your back to the door, then the blankets had to be wound right across your back, up past your ears, and you would never turn around, even though you could feel its eyes on you in the dark, this thing, this goblin, or the shadow on the picture on the wall: the open gaping mouth, the eyes of bright black coal.

So. You are in your bed, and it is comfy. But then it is a little cold, as if the covers have slipped. You know when your shoulders are exposed, and the chill that catches you, there, migrates, like the thin metal prongs of a freezing fork on your gums can give you toothache in your head? Yes, so, the cold passes from your shoulder to your neck, and simultaneously to your stomach; it gnaws along your spine at the precise moment you realise the bed is not comfy at all, because the cold is emanating from there. You have been kidding yourself that it’s soft, you have been dreaming it, but it’s actually a terrible, wet, rock-hard cold that you are lying on, but it’s more terrible than water, because it is solid. It is a heavy, dreadful cold that grows stronger as you screw your eyes shut. Ignoring it. Ignoring the leaping pain in your head and the dry-mouth drouth that is screaming at you. See? See what you have done, you total waste of space?

Oh, but it was lovely. Fine and lovely, the loveliest thing that has happened to you in months. First, the grip on glass. Unyielding. Yours. That first firm twist. The gorgeous click as metal cracked, green glints and the cascading spill of clear-pleated liquid, the sharp, bright glug, the glug, the luscious, gurgling glug that fills your veins and gives you what they had.

Warmth.

But you are not warm, not at all. Neither are you prone. Not even comfortably foetal. Kelly, you are propped. Discarded. Your knees are folded, hurting at your chin, which droops. Och. Your neck. Aching with weight; your swollen mega-head is too heavy to lift. And the blankets that have slipped are also heavy, but it is the heaviness of water. Damp folds chafing on your skin – but how, when it is the covers? And then you realise, they are not covers at all; they are the bulk of your clothes, layered on for warmth, and they are soaking. And that the cold moisture is coming from both outside and within. The moisture inside is your body, bleeding heat. You stink, Kelly. You must do. Great blocks of cold hammer you, thud, thud, thud. Your head. Your neck. Your knees. You need a pee. You need a drink. Imagining the heat of a cup of tea; imagine your own tea, a kettle, a heat, a hotness there, whenever you want it. Your choice.

You shift the bits of boxes you have cooried under, and the cardboard turns to pulp in your hands.

Kelly, you have woken inside a skip, although you don’t yet know it. All you know is sharp edges and the light smarting above, a pale, watery square of light that is quite bright enough, thank you very much. On your breast, you cradle an empty green bottle of Gordon’s gin. Beneath you, plastic crackles. It is a Tesco bag, bulging with change. You breathe the longest sigh, and pull yourself up.

‘There’s a queue, you know.’

The woman behind has given up sighing. Before the sighing, she had delivered two long tuts, and now she’s totally had enough....

Table of contents

• Chapter One
• Chapter Two
• Chapter Three
• Chapter Four
• Chapter Five
• Chapter Six
• Chapter Seven
• Chapter Eight
• Chapter Nine
• Chapter Ten
• Chapter Eleven
• Chapter Twelve
• Chapter Thirteen
• Chapter Fourteen
• Chapter Fifteen
• Chapter Sixteen
• Chapter Seventeen
• Chapter Eighteen
• Chapter Nineteen
• Chapter Twenty
• Chapter Twenty-One
• Chapter Twenty-Two
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgements