He could hear James picking an old sticker from his headboard. “Does she like to dance?”
“Aye.”
“Does she like to sing?”
“More so when she’s drunk.” Mungo’s eyes were open in the darkness. The room looked strange and somehow familiar. He would have thought a Catholic’s bedroom would have been bare, or perhaps with crucifixes everywhere, but there were none. He kept expecting to roll over and see Hamish eating cereal in his bed. “My sister says she’s not a mother at all. She says we were just a mistake that happened to a stupid young lassie and that she has regretted it ever since. After my dad died Mo-Maw decided she was going to put herself first.”
“That’s not what mammies are supposed to do.”
“That’s another thing Jodie says.” He didn’t want to talk about them anymore. “What was yours like?”
“Oh, she was the business,” James said very quickly. “Even when she was really sick, she pretended like she wasn’t. Every day I came home from school she wouldn’t let me out of her hug until I told her everything that had happened. If Geraldine got home after me she had to wait in line for her hug. It could take pure ages. My mammy called it the juicin’。 She said if she didn’t hold us tight, we would ignore her. She squeezed us as hard as she could to get all of the good stuff out of us. She wouldnae let go until ye telt her absolutely everything.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Aye. It was.” James coughed like there was a clog in his throat. Mungo could tell he was breathing deeply to keep himself from crying.
Mungo didn’t know what to do. He reached out a hand and felt the sharpness of James’s shin bone. He made a fist and tapped along the bone, up and down, up and down, the way a doctor would probe a fracture. He waited for James to pull away. But he didn’t, and Mungo folded first. He drew back his hand, laid it in the centre of his chest. “What was the best dinner she made?”
“She was a shitey cook.” He sniffed. “But I miss that – not the food – but the feeling that she was here in the flat, looking after us. The flat never felt empty when she was in the kitchen. Ma da was on the rig when she died. She had told him she was fine, but she wasn’t. They chartered a special helicopter for him and everything, but it still took him eight hours to get home after she was dead.”
Eight hours. Mungo couldn’t imagine a distance that far.
“I was sat here with her body. Just waiting on him.” James was swallowing harder now.
Mungo couldn’t cross the distance between them. The best he could do was to lay his hand next to James’s so that their little fingers were almost touching. They were close enough that it was as if they were touching. The heat from James’s hand jumped the distance between them and flooded Mungo’s entire body. He lay there, upside down and a world away, and listened to James choke up. He wanted to offer more comfort. The courage wouldn’t come.
It was James that changed it. The pinkie that had lain next to his own crossed over and locked over his. The electrical current that had burned at the border jumped on to his skin and he was scorched.
Without questioning it, Mungo sat up in the bed and oriented himself to lie beside James. He pulled the boy on to his chest and felt the crumpled wetness of his face. He held him, just like Jodie would hold him, and let him remember his mother. It was good to put your weight on someone else, even if it was just for a short while.
EIGHT
Mungo stepped out of his school uniform and left it in piles across the living room floor. It was warm in the airing cupboard, it was peaceful, and he felt calmest here. He pushed his hand between a stack of towels and enjoyed the sensation that the cotton nubs left on his skin. He sank in all the way up to his armpit and it felt something like a hug. He’d been anxious all day, thinking about how James had been too embarrassed to talk to him after he had started crying about his mother.
Mungo had only wanted to help, but in the morning light, James couldn’t look him in the eye. As the sun came up, James had gone to the doocot and left Mungo to have his Weetabix alone, feeling like he had done something dirty, something wrong.
Mungo came out of the airing cupboard and stood at the bay window. He dug his thumbnails into the soft wood and deepened the gouges he had been making over the past few months. He watched as a familiar man came along the street. Although the man kept his eyes downcast his spine was rigid and his crown was pulled proudly upwards to God. The man walked with nipped footsteps; he tucked his arms neatly by his side, careful to take up no more room than was his to enjoy. He never swung his legs in the way of most men broadcasting how they needed to make room for their cocks. There was a stiffness in his arms but there, at the tips of his fingers, was a slight feathering. You could barely see it. Everybody could see it.
Rarely did you see the man without bags of messages. Every day he went to the Co-op and bought just enough to last him to the next day. He stocked a bachelor’s pantry: two sausages from the butcher’s, small packets of teabags, and bags of frozen vegetables that could be kept fresher for longer if he resealed them with old elastic bands.
Some idling Protestant boys clocked the man. Tucked safely under the awning of the Pakistani shop they nudged one another and aped him as he walked along the street. If Charles “Chick” Calhoun knew they were mimicking him, he didn’t acknowledge it. A rash-faced grease slick of a boy held his hand out in a vulgar way as though it had snapped at the wrist. He minced up and down in front of the neon star stickers that were advertising a great deal on yesterday’s bread. The other boys sucked on their fags and cackled to themselves. “Cooieee!” he called out with a flutter of his fingers.
There were several housewives idling at their windows, drinking tea and waiting for their children to come home from school. Anyone who was watching poor Mr Calhoun sucked on their teeth in pity.
“Cooo-fuckin’-eeee, ah said.” The ned was getting louder. “Yer no gonnae be rude and ignore us, ur ye?”
Mr Calhoun, as he was known to his face, and Poor-Wee-Chickie, as he was known behind his back, didn’t break his stride. He didn’t lift his eyes to his tormentors.
“Are ye looking at ma arse?” The ned tried an old tactic in order to provoke him. He turned to his friends. “Haw, did youse see that aul’ feller look at ma arse?” They all agreed that they had. Like shell-suited apes they started pacing and gesticulating wildly at the solitary man. It was all they wanted, to bait him into responding, to insult him so profoundly he would let his guard drop. Then they could feign injury, batter him, and remind him of his low place, sub-human, sub-them. This one old man made them feel better. When everyone looked at them like they were nothing, like they had nothing, he still had less.
The man maintained his neat stride, the narrowest of smiles on his lips. Mungo had no way of knowing that Poor-Wee-Chickie was not in there; he was not present in his own body, having learned, long ago, the art of floating away above the tenements. It was his trick. As his body fought along the Parade, his spirit was flying over Duke Street, swooping and spiralling to the La Scala picture house where it sat in the dark, watching Anne Baxter, incandescent, in All About Eve.