To Mungo, his brother was simply Hamish – Hamey if he was feeling especially brave. But to his troops he was Ha-Ha, or the Big Man, despite his disappointing height. Ha-Ha watched the last of the troops scale the ladder before he addressed Mungo. “Whit’s happenin’ gobshite?”
“Nothing.” Mungo shrugged. “Have you seen Mo-Maw?”
Ha-Ha shook his head. He looked up at Mungo through his thick government lenses, his eyes tiny behind the yellowing glass. As a boy he had been embarrassed by his free tortoiseshell frames, but Mungo knew his brother had mastered this shame, and now relished the chance of anyone calling him a speccy cunt so he could surprise them with the swiftness of his violence. Hamish loved traps: he particularly enjoyed the suspended moment when someone ran off a cliff and didn’t know they were about to fall to their doom. He came to appreciate how his glasses disarmed strangers. Other men would foolishly let the wee wide-o in the pensioner’s glasses get too close, and still thought they could get the better of him, right up until he was shattering their teeth on the kerb edge.
Hamish was not tall, but he was always ready and never, ever scared to hit first. He was wearing his denim jacket and a pair of jeans that were an identical shade of blue. He had buttoned the jacket up to the throat and turned the collar up. On his feet he wore a pair of triple stripe Sambas that looked brand new. Nothing on him was given to fat, every tissue was sinew and muscle. Everything was pulled in tight like he was ready to bolt. Ha-Ha never ran.
“On ye go.” Ha-Ha pointed up at the rickety ladder.
Mungo stepped back.
“How?”
Mungo knew his face was electric. “I’m no in the mood.”
Ha-Ha wrapped a hand around the back of Mungo’s neck. He was going to say something further but instead he thrust his brother at the ladder and Mungo found himself scaling it.
The builder’s yard was not large. The industrial vehicles were packed tight, like pieces of a board game in a box. It was all very neat and orderly: mixers, spreaders, heavy steam rollers, and sitting in the middle, like a band of brontosauruses, were the long-necked excavators.
The key to success at the builder’s yard was not to raid it too often. If you thieved from it too frequently then the foreman would install a temporary night watchman to protect the equipment. He was always a temp, because the Protestant boys would not think twice about stabbing him, so it was hard for the foreman to retain someone full-time. However, if they raided it only once or twice a year, it became a strange sort of parasitic relationship. The boys smashed and stole what they liked, and the foreman claimed the damage on insurance and still came out in the black in his account books. Hamish knew there were times the canny foreman used the raids to replace outdated models, or tools that were half-broken and would cost more to mend than to replace. Hamish had seen him once, in the Louden Tavern, and the man had nodded a faint head bob of respect. Twice a year, no more. It was still cheaper than hiring a night watchman.
The young Protestants were standing on the corrugated roof of the main building; their breath misted the air as though they were a string of Eriskay ponies. Mungo watched their eyes scour the builder’s yard. None of the horses moved until Ha-Ha scaled the wall. He stood amongst them like a general, a stone-washed emperor.
“Hallo, Hallo, we are the Billy boys.
Hallo, Hallo, ye’ll know us by our noise.
We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood, surrender or ye’ll die.
For we are the Brigton Billy boys.”
Ha-ha knew what he was doing. The Orange song filled them with pride. Any fear the half-men harboured vanished on hearing it.
One by one they dropped off the guttering and hit the gravel like spears of rain. Mungo turned to his brother but Hamish had vanished, and Ha-Ha was in no mood to talk to him. He was watching his soldiers make the first sweep, seeing what could be soundlessly liberated, before the fun of the smashing started. Then Ha-Ha shoved his brother and Mungo hooked his hands on to the tin guttering and dropped the fourteen feet to the ground.
The youths were ripping things out of the cabins now, tearing up owner’s manuals and carelessly tossing screws like shrapnel. Of all the things they did, this was the part that Mungo hated the most. He could understand the theft – stolen things were useful – but this was just mindless destruction. The ginger-headed boy had found a bright orange hard hat; it dwarfed him and made him look like a wean who was terminally sick. Mungo watched him hammer his head into the side window of a steamroller. He did it again and again until the glass cracked and he could push the rest of it in with his elbow.
Ha-Ha never came down to the ground. From time to time the squad would throw things up to him, forgotten wrenches or a rusting spirit-level. Behind his thick glasses he watched everything like a tawny osprey. He pointed from his perch and the boys scurried off, searching for the shadow of his talon.
One of the squad was being too considerate in rifling through a toolbox. He was sitting in the raised bucket of a digger, as comfortable as a new settee. He was a tall youth who wore his mousy hair long on the sides and softly feathered over his eyes. Mungo knew that he occasionally spoke in the Queen’s English – not hame but home, not didnae but did not – and that it slipped out of him when he was tired. He had a proud mother and a working father who still lived at home. The others teased him for it. Ha-Ha’s voice boomed over the gravel. “Haw Prince Charles! Can ah bring ye a cup o’ tea? Ya fuckin’ poofter.”
The marauders stopped what they were doing, fearful that he should be naming one of them a deviant, an aberration amongst decent men. Ha-Ha pointed his finger directly at the youth and shook his head in shame. “Stop fuckin’ wasting time like ye were choosin’ carrots to shove up yer arse.” The mousy boy scattered the toolbox as he tried to reclaim his manhood. The others tittered and went about ransacking the place with a sense of relief. There was nothing more shameful than being a poofter; powerless, soft as a woman.
Mungo hid in the darkened cabin of a backhoe, safe from Ha-Ha’s glare. He watched the mousy-haired boy flush scarlet and then spray the box of brackets everywhere with a malicious kick. The others scavenged all the weapons and tools they could and when they were done, they started their smashing. A ruddy-faced youth swung a fence post off the window of the excavator. The safety glass made a satisfying crunch.
When they grew tired of this, they moved on to the third stage, and, reverting to children again, they played. The young men climbed on to the roof of the smallest of the loaders and made a great circuit of jumping from one to the other, never touching the ground. They ran this obstacle course of follow-my-leader and climbed higher and higher. They found new ways to make it more dangerous. They took it in turns to climb the angled neck of the brontosaurus excavators, they crept upwards to the bucket and then they leapt, gliding through the air to the roof of a backhoe. If they missed, then it was a twenty-foot plummet to the ground. But they flew across the night sky like fearless angels, their tracksuits flapping behind them like flightless wings.
The machinery was wet with rain. Mungo watched as some of the boys slipped on the angled neck of the brontosaurus. One or two overshot the jump and slid across the wet backhoe only to catch themselves at the very last moment on the raised rubber seal of a window. It always made the others hold their breath and fall silent for a moment. As the lucky boy hauled himself to his feet they would whoop for their own immortality.