Mungo felt strangely sorry for him. The man was trembling slightly. Years spent hiding from daylight in dark pubs had given him the nervous reactions of a whippet pushed out into the snow, and he had the small darting eyes and long twitching limbs of a mistreated dog. He seemed on the verge of bolting.
As the last of the high-rises faded from view, the suited man made some small sounds, filling the empty air, inviting the others to join him in conversation. Mungo braced his chin to his chest and said nothing. The younger man was scratching his crotch. Mungo watched him from the corner of his eye.
This man seemed to be in his early twenties. He wore indigo denims and his belt was laced under the logo so as not to obscure the proud Armani badge. He was handsome – or he must have been close to it once – but there was something already spoiled about him, like good butcher’s meat that had been left out. Despite the heat he had been wearing a puffy bomber jacket. When he removed it, Mungo could see his arms were roped with lean muscle that spoke to a heavy trade, or years of fighting, or both.
His hair was clipped short. His fringe had been combed forward in a gelled line, the hairs formed little saw-toothed points, as though they had been cut by pinking shears. Mungo stared at the damaged skin of his knuckles. He was honey-coloured in the way Scottish people seldom were; perhaps his family were chip-shop Italian or Spanish by way of the Black Irish.
Any trace of that romance was lost as he said in flat, glottal Glaswegian, “Haw. Dinnae be botherin’ wi’ auld St Christopher.” He spoke without looking directly at either of them. “He’d bore the arse aff a horse.”
Mungo was left to ponder why he was on a bus with St Christopher, while the other man went back to picking his nose. As the man’s pinkie searched the inside of his nostril Mungo noted how he wore sovvie rings on all of his fingers and that his forearms were snaked with interlocking tattoos. He was a man covered in words: from the logos on his chest, to his shoes, to his jeans, to his skin. He had written on his flesh with a sewing needle, women’s names, gang names: Sandra, Jackie, RFC, The Mad Squad. Here and there, the blue biro ink had bled, it wept beneath his skin like a watercolour and tinted him a pretty violet hue. Mungo read his arms carefully. He committed as much as he could to memory.
St Christopher reached into one of the shopping bags, and with a sly wink he raised a half-dozen cans of Tennent’s Super. Keeping his small eyes on the back of the bus driver’s head, he broke two cans free of their noose and offered them to the boy and the tattooed man. Mungo shook his head but the young man took a can with a grateful groan. He burst it open and clamped his lips over the escaping foam. He drained it in three throatfuls.
St Christopher must have read the boy’s mind because he said, “They calls us St Christopher on account ah go to the alcoholic meetings on Hope Street every Sunday and Thursday. Ah’m Sunday-Thursday Christopher, so as no to be confused wi’ Castlemilk Chris or Wee Ginger-Heided Chrissy.” The man took a slug, and Mungo watched his throat struggle to take enough in. “S-T Christopher, ye see?”
Mungo had heard something like that before. Mo-Maw herself was known as Monday-Thursday Maureen. That’s who the other alcoholics asked for when the boy answered the hallway telephone. The callers wanted to be sure they hadn’t found the house of “Maureen from Millerston” or “Wee-Mo frae the Milk” by mistake. These small distinctions mattered if they were to honour the code of anonymity.
“Sometimes ah have the shakes that bad, ah should go tae a Wednesday night meeting as well. But well, ah just cannae.” St Christopher made a sad frown. “Do you see what ah mean?”
Mungo had been working hard at seeing what people really meant. Mo-Maw and his sister, Jodie, were always nagging him about that. Apparently there could be some distance between what a person was saying and what you should be seeing. Jodie said he was gullible. Mo-Maw said she wished she had raised him to be cannier, less of anybody’s fool. It was a funny thing to be a disappointment because you were honest and assumed others might be too. The games people played made his head hurt.
St Christopher was sucking down his can when Mungo said, “Maybe you should just go on Wednesdays too. Like, if you really need to?”
“Aye, but ah like ma handle.” His hand reached inside his shirt and drew out a small tin medallion of the saint. He peered down his pockmarked nose at it. “S-T Christopher. It’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said about us.”
“Could you not just give them your family name?”
“Widnae be very anonymous wid it?” interrupted the tattooed man. “If ye start spilling yer guts and letting everybody know yer demons, then they’d be able to lift yer name out in the street.”
Mungo knew fine well that people had demons. Mo-Maw’s showed itself whenever she jangled for a drink. Her demon was a flat, eel-like snake with the jaw and beady eyes of a weasel and the matted coat of a mangy rat. It was a sleekit thing on a chain leash that shook her and dragged her towards things that she ought to be walking away from. It was greedy and it was cunning. It could lie dormant, wait for the children to leave for school, to kiss their mother goodbye, and then it would turn on Mo-Maw, throttle her as though she was some shivering mouse. At other times it coiled up inside her and sat heavy on her heart. The demon was always there just under the surface, even on good days.
On the days that she gave in to the drink, the demon could be quieted for a while. But sometimes Mo-Maw could get so far in the drink that she would become another woman entirely, another creature altogether. The first sign was how her skin grew slack, like her real face was sliding off to reveal this strange woman who lurked underneath. Mungo and his brother and sister called this slack version of her Tattie-bogle, like some heartless, shambling scarecrow. No matter how her children stuffed her with their love or tried to prop her up and gather her back together, she took in all their care and attention and felt as hollow as ever.
When Tattie-bogle spoke, her lower jaw would hang loose and her tongue would roll in her mouth in a dirty, lascivious way, like she wanted very badly to lick something. Tattie-bogle always suspected that she was missing some party, that something more exciting must be happening just around the corner or hidden up the next close. When she felt like this she would turn to her children and shoo them away as though they were drab little birds. Tattie-bogle believed that better things, brighter lights, bigger laughs were always happening to women who had no children.
Tattie-bogle would become best friends with women she had just met, and over a half-bottle of Black & White whisky she would betray her own intimate secrets, and then felt wounded when these new friends didn’t share the same depth of feeling. Then when they fought, she dragged them, or she was dragged by them, across the carpet and down the stairs. In the morning Mungo would find tufts of perfumed hair, like the straw from a burst scarecrow, lying in the hallway, animated by the draught that whistled under the front door. Either he or Jodie would hoover it up with the Ewbank and say nothing more about it.
It was Jodie who had split their mother in two. In the cold morning light, this trick helped Mungo forgive Mo-Maw when the drink had made her vindictive and rotten. “It wasn’t Mo-Maw,” soothed Jodie, as she held him in the airing cupboard, “it was only horrible old Tattie-bogle, and she’s sleeping now.”