Red Shoes

A boy-child is waiting at a bus stop with his mother. The wind-blown rain makes the horizon blurry, traffic fizzes spray and pedestrians, the few bedraggled souls there are, watch out for gushes splashed up by passing cars or, heaven forbid, buses. Waiting here on Dalmarnock Road for twenty-five minutes, the red SMT bus is notoriously late. It’s the week before Christmas and cheap baubles illuminate fake trees in dark tenement windows.

The weekly visit to Granny is over; boy-child is chuffed with his shilling. There was laughter but there were also niggles; family niggles, unique and unexplainable to any but those involved (not even those, if we’re honest). The mother with her boy standing in the rain is chary of niggles. She is, without doubt, the family scapegoat, the one most hurt and devastated by her kin. This ‘fact’ has been tacitly understood among them for longer than any can remember. If they were a pride of lions, she’d have been left behind for the jackals long ago. 

They pick her clean, the raw pulse of her kind, well-meaning heart left exposed to the icy Glasgow winds of ill-judgement, No love for the meek in this slate-grey metropolis. They should ‘take to the drink’ to hide their angst and appear more sociable. The city’s motto should be ‘Take a drink and keep quiet’.

The boy-child is wearing red shoes the same colour as the bus which eventually arrives. Chances were they’d be off the bus by the Cathkin Braes due to his troublesome ‘bus-sickness’. Mother only shows gentle irritation at this common occurrence but it means double bus fares, an expenditure she can ill-afford with black-listed father forced on to the dole for his militant activities.

No other child that he knew wore red shoes.

Rain spackled, anoraked and rain-mated, the two wait for yet another bus out in the airy, misty braes. You can see nearly all of Glasgow from here, ominous and high-rised below old-man-grey clouds. In the gathering gloom you can see the fevered lights of the new high-rises and the general luminescence of sodium street lighting covering the metropolis like a lime-orange umbrella.