“Apparently Caroline is a stewardess on the Auk rig.” James paused. “Her and her daughter breed Yorkshire terriers. They have eleven of them. Big fuckin’ whoop.”
It seemed like James didn’t want to talk anymore. He hammered the remote control, flicking between the same four channels so rapidly that Mungo had to hold his cheekbone and look away. He settled on some English comedy rerun. They sat in a heavy silence and watched as pensioners let a piano roll down a Yorkshire hillside.
The front room was the same shape as Mungo’s although everything in it was plusher and of a much finer quality. There was a fitted carpet and a large wool rug. Someone had taken care to match the settee to the carpet and the carpet to the curtains. It had the luxurious feeling of having been purchased all at once, not laid away and added to, stick by stick. There were framed photos on the mantel: one of a family of four posing in a studio, and another of two children, James and a handsome older girl.
“I didn’t know you had a sister.”
He followed the line of Mungo’s gaze. “Geraldine. She married a whisky distributor.”
“Cool.”
James snorted. “He’s called Gerald. His name is Gerry Berry. Can you believe it? Pair of them are pure jokes, man. She thinks she’s the dug’s baws because she lives in a fancy house wi’ satellite telly. But I know she’s all fur coat and nae knickers. Mrs Gerry Berry likes to come on Tuesdays and Thursdays after work and bring me frozen dinners.”
“Mibbe she wants to make sure you are eating right?”
“Really? I expect she feels guilty.”
Mungo was thinking about Jodie. His next question seemed only natural. “Why don’t you just go live with her?”
James turned and looked at him square in the eye. “Why doesn’t she ask me to?” Then he turned his face back to the television. This was a different person, not the industrious, hearty, fresh-air-filled boy he knew from the doocot.
“C’mon, don’t be like that.” Mungo rammed his shoulder into his.
When he did this to Jodie, she would shove him back, and soon they would be tormenting each other until whatever had first ailed them would have dissolved for a while. Mungo rammed him again. James didn’t move. Mungo felt foolish, pressed against his side. He was going to straighten himself when James shifted slightly. James raised his arm out from under the weight and draped it across Mungo’s shoulders. It made Mungo flinch in anticipation of a blow, a flick, a chokehold. But as he waited for retaliation, it slowly dawned on him that no hurt was coming. Instead of rejecting him James had made more space for him.
Mungo slid into him and filled the cavity in James’s side. There was a tide in James’s chest, and Mungo bobbed on the swell of it. He was carried along by the slow rise and fall of his ribcage and comforted by the sigh at the edge of his breath. James’s arm was heavy but Mungo liked the weight of it, he felt safe underneath it. The lanolin from James’s Aran jumper tickled the back of his neck and he could smell the musk of his armpit, the sticky remains of soapy deodorant, the salt of rain-scrubbed skin. James’s fingers danced in the air, they kept time with his distracted mind. Mungo closed his eyes and the fingers drummed a gentle beat on his chest.
Occasionally James would laugh at the clumsy pensioners on the telly and the whole bulk of him shuddered. Mungo was muted. He couldn’t focus on the programme, so he followed the patterns of James’s laughter, always a half-beat behind. They sat like that for a long time. It all felt somehow wrong. Mungo worried that it would end.
“It’s a lot of money, int it?” Mungo hadn’t heard him at first, so James said it again. “That money, it’s a fair whack.”
Mr Jamieson had left what looked like two hundred pounds on the table. Mungo had been trying not to stare.
“He gets paid a fortune, that’s the only reason he leaves. They pay overtime and danger money. He’s got nowhere to spend it out in the middle of the sea.”
“Is it to feed yourself with?”
“He never asks what I spend it on.”
James lifted his arm and stood up. It was as though a thick blanket had been pulled away on a February morning.
In the veneered cabinet there were some crystal ornaments and several shelves of leather-bound books. They had a refined air to them, posh as any scholar’s office. James took one down and opened it in front of Mungo. It wasn’t a book at all, but a burgundy case for a videocassette. None of them were actual books.
Inside this fake book was a pile of crisp notes. “Two thousand and forty-nine pounds, give or take. I don’t spend everything he gives me. I try to save most of it so I’ll have enough to leave when I’m ready.” He folded the new notes inside and tossed the book across the table as carelessly as an empty cigarette packet. He sat on the other side of Mungo now, further away, and curled his flat feet up underneath himself. He went back to staring at the television.
“How’s Conan the Sectarian?”
James laughed, Mungo felt buoyed to see the happy-gappy teeth again. “Turns out his name was Caledonian Sun. He was famous. He wouldn’t settle so I took him to a guy in Garthamlock. He gave us forty poun’ for him, said Wee-Man Flannigan was gonnae stab me if ever he caught me.”
“But you didn’t steal the bird. Isn’t that the whole point?”
“Aye, but some eejits take it awfy hard. You were there, I caught him fair and square. Flannigan can go fuck himself. Whrooup, whrooooup.”
“I’m sad you sold him.”
James extended his foot and shunted Mungo. “You need to sell them. If ye don’t the bird might try to make its way home and take your prize doo wi’ it.” He pulled his foot away. “You need to move them on. Confuse ’em. It’s all part of the game.”
Mungo’s side felt hollow where he had been pressed against James. He had thought perhaps James had needed the contact, that perhaps he was lonely here all by himself, but perhaps it had been Mungo who had wanted the comfort.
“Are ye hungry?” asked James.
He wasn’t – the stovies coiled in his belly as heavy as lead – but he followed James through to the kitchenette anyway. The cupboards were filled with colourful boxes. It was an Aladdin’s cave of sugar, with every manner of prepackaged starch you could buy. Mo-Maw never went into those aisles at the shop, she stayed with the meats and vegetables and made it as far as the tinned soups. James looked at the hoard with a sigh of boredom.
On the wall above the small dining table was a collection of crucifixes. A collage of different palm leaves twisted into small crosses. The children’s names were written on them in the same writing but different coloured pens. His mother must have collected them every Palm Sunday throughout the years.
“Fuck!”
“Whut?” James was eating two chocolate biscuits that he had sandwiched together.
“Nothin’。”
The reason he could not quite place James was because they attended different schools; his was not just another unknown face, lost in the scrum of an overrun state school. James was a Catholic, and the Catholic was grinning as he poured two heaped bowls of sugar puffs and crumbled a chocolatey flake over the top. Mungo took his treat and tried not to look at the crucifixes. As milk dribbled down his chin, he resolved not to tell Hamish about the Fenian.