Before him, Jodie had never been outside of Glasgow; she had rarely been out of the East End. She knew the West End was not for the likes of her, with its gothic spires and ancient university and outdoor cafés with vegetarian menus, and she never went to the South Side because Hamish had scared her with lies of what the Pakistani men would do to a wee white lassie like her.
As he drove her across the Kingston Bridge the city was illuminated below her and she felt alive. They flew over the lights so quickly that in moments like this she believed she could belong anywhere, not just in a council tenement looking after her little brother. Jodie curled up into the leather seat and allowed herself the daydream of a life at college, maybe not a university, but a good trade school, a technical college like the Building and Printing school or Cardonald with its plumbers and hairdressers.
The man took her hand in his and kissed the back of it. As the lights fell away she put her trust in him. She knew he wanted the same bright future for her. He had told her many times how clever she was, and that when she had her education, they could be together, even in the bright daytime, somewhere far away from Glasgow and the eyes of his wife.
* * *
Mungo pulled on his cagoule. It was a royal-blue ski jacket that he needed to wrangle over his head because the zipper only went halfway down and butted into a large kangaroo pocket. He loved this jacket. He could carry all manner of things in the pocket, which opened with a Velcro flap at the top and you had to twist your body to reach inside. Often he found things, pocketed them, and then forgot about them for weeks until they brushed against his fingers again. When Hamish hung him by the ankles, his entire world would spill out like a confession.
For a while he wandered along familiar streets, winding back and forth, looking for a glimpse of Mo-Maw, lying to himself that he was not. The streets were narrow and the tenements were tall, making each road feel sunken, deep as a sandstone gorge. The sky was small here. It was hard to see what was coming over the horizon until it was directly above you. He had spent his whole life on these streets and some days it could make him feel like a mouse in a maze. He knew there was nowhere you could walk without people looking down at you, watching the sameness of the weather, passing the slow time. It was hard to feel alone.
The worst of the watchers was Mr Ogilvy. Ogling Ogilvy led the local Orange marching band and either he or his twin sons would stand at their window practising their fife and drums and letting the thin glazing shake in its putty. Today, the Ogilvy twins wore their regimental blues and their jaunty Tam-o’-Shanters. In their white gloves they looked as neat as porcelain ornaments, children dressed as romantic, hateful Union soldiers. The sharp song of their flutes carried out over the tenements, and behind them, echoing off the stone walls was the thoom, thoom, thoom of the Lambeg drum. Ogling Ogilvy hammered the heavy oak battle drum, and it thundered off the sandstone as the shrill piccolos played the melody to “The Sash My Father Wore.” Two men had stopped and leaned on the rusted fence to listen, their eyes wet with whisky. Mungo hurried past the Ogilvys’。 Thoom, thoom, thoom went his footsteps. He knew Ogling Ogilvy watched his every move. He knew he thought him a great disappointment to the Protestant cause.
Frowning, he reached the large patch of scabrous grass that separated the old tenements from the damp flats the council built in the sixties. The city planners had angled the new flats away from the greenery. They had faced them towards the motorway because they had thought that’s what people would have wanted to see: progress, not skinny weans playing in the smirr. Mungo loitered a while and was happy for a moment to be unobserved. The grass was worn bald and muddy, and bands of older boys were playing football, running up and down after a half-deflated bladder. They had organized shivering girls into clusters of three or four and were using them as wide goalposts. Every now and then the ball would ricochet off the face of one of these girls, and she would fake tears until the required boy came and clamped his chapped mouth over hers.
On the other side of the waste ground, younger boys had collected discarded wood, old doors, and bits of broken furniture. They had dragged it all the way here and assembled the scraps into dens. Eight or nine of these makeshift homes clustered together like a shanty town and Mungo watched little boys go around making repairs and improvements to their castles. As he watched their industry, he was reminded of a video the substitute teacher had played in school to show the inner workings of a beehive. He knew some of the boys had hard men for fathers and they had brothers in the jail. He had heard that boys as young as eleven could make swords and charge at bands of Catholics who came on to their scheme: they split skulls, they slashed faces, they stabbed Fenians twice their height and all for the chuckles of it. As he watched them cooperate building their dens, it was easy to forget the cheerful violence they were capable of.
Mungo kept his head low and passed by the new flats. The pebble-dash facing was so porous that even on dry days it looked like it was leaching rainwater back into the world. On the far side, behind fifteen-foot walls, was a builder’s yard. The builders had ringed the top of the wall in barbed wire, but the local boys would not be deterred.
Mungo watched a cluster of young men mount their attack on the wall. They had roped together two of their mammy’s wallpapering ladders and someone had stolen the duvet off their little sister’s bed. They wanted to get in because inside were great beasts of heavy JCB machines that could be climbed and smashed and destroyed. Sometimes, inside the cabin of one of the diggers, a workman would forget his tools and the boys would take the bag full of hammers and spanners and make great plans to weaponize them back at the tenements.
Best of all was the time someone left the keys for the JCB digger in the ignition. The Protestant boys took the digger, and after ramming it into other machinery drove it clean through the padlocked gate and up and down the back streets. They were lifting a bucketful of young men up to a second-storey window to peep in at a chubby girl when her mother finally called the polis.
Mungo watched the young men prop their rigged ladders against the wall. Their leader selected the smallest of them to climb the length of it and test it for sturdiness. A ginger-headed youth wrapped a teddy bear blanket around himself and scaled the shaking ladders. When he was high enough to kill himself, the other young men took turns at kicking the bottom of it. It must have been a great entertainment, for they were whooping and betting money on him cracking his skull. They grouped together and pushed the ladder away from the wall. For a moment it stood on its own and the ginger youth teetered with the promise of a broken back. He let out a pathetic howl. The ringleader cut through the others and with one hand he pushed the ladder back against the wall.
“Fuckin’ pack it in,” threatened Hamish.
The ginger boy blanched and wilted like stewed cabbage. He flattened the barbed wire under the teddy bear blanket and stood a while checking for the security guard before he scaled the wall and dropped on to the corrugated roof beyond. Mungo crossed the waste ground and stood next to his brother as the others climbed their siege ladder.
Hamish half-nodded in greeting. He was watching his troops very closely. Mungo knew he would give them harsh feedback later; he ran a neat, ambitious little army. It was important to expose the inadequacies of the men in front of the other men, for it kept them divided. It kept them trying their hardest.