“You are guid at that,” said a disembodied voice.
Mungo stopped his spinning. Gallowgate scrambled over the fallen wall, a cigarette clenched between his teeth, too sure of himself to take his hands out of his pockets. “Ah forgot this shitehole was here.” His jaw was looser than it had been that morning. He produced a fresh can of lager and drank it in four gulping mouthfuls. “If ye dinnae want to starve to death we need to go find a shop.” He crumpled the can in his fist and tossed it into the shadows of the crumbled hall. “Or, we could roast that auld idiot afore he frightens aw’ the fish away.”
Mungo had been hoping that they would never catch any fish. He hoped that the men would go to bed early, hungry and bloated on whisky.
Gallowgate clambered out of the castle. Mungo stalled, pretending to tie his shoelace, then he darted into the shadows and found the discarded Tennent’s can. He hid it inside his cagoule and climbed up and out. Gallowgate was already swaggering back in the direction they had come. Mungo stood a moment and considered his castle. He wound on his disposable camera and took the time to frame a photo that no one would care to see.
* * *
He didn’t have a watch, but it felt as though they had been walking for hours. They had tramped along the lochside, past the camp, and then kept on going. They walked far apart from each other and neither of them spoke. Mungo was dawdling at the back. He was picking the heads off wildflowers and filling his chest pocket for Jodie. As he plucked the flowers he made up their names: cowsbreath, ladies’ bumholes, blue-granda-willies.
The village was no longer a village. It was a spattering of fieldstone houses, leftovers from another time. The three or four other houses they passed seemed like they had stood empty for a long time. Mungo peered in all the windows.
The house closest to the road was a single-room shop that doubled as a part-time post office but was chiefly the private home of an unfriendly-looking woman. Everything in the shop was coated with a fine layer of dust. Under the glassy eye of the well-weathered shopkeeper, Gallowgate bought some tobacco, her entire stock of pot noodles, and as many cans of lager as he could afford. The woman never once smiled at them. She spoke with a sing-song lilt the likes of which Mungo had never heard before. It was a beautiful voice and Mungo would have liked to hear her talk more, but she had taken an immediate dislike to Gallowgate and was in a great hurry to get them out of her shop so she might return to doing absolutely nothing. There was something about the thinness of the fabrics they were wearing that she disliked. It pegged them as outsiders. She made a disapproving face when she saw Mungo’s gym shorts, his blue legs in his scuffed trainers. She narrowed her eyes when she first heard the flat, dull thud of Gallowgate’s accent. Glaswegians. All she said was “You better tek all yer rubbish awa’ wi’ ye when ye leave. We dinna need city fowks treatin’ yon loch lit it was one big rubbish bin.”
When the teuchter woman wasn’t looking Gallowgate gave her the middle finger and shoved a bar of chocolate up his sleeve. On the way back to the campsite he slipped the warm chocolate to Mungo. “Will that put a smile on yer face?”
They were leaving the cluster of cottages when they came across a red phone box. It was tucked under a clutch of yew trees and heavily overgrown. Mungo stopped abruptly. “Can I phone my maw?”
“Ah’ve no got any coins, wee man.” He knew that Gallowgate lied. Mungo had seen the teuchter woman hand him his change.
Mungo’s eye fluttered like it might spasm. He tried to focus his disappointment on searching his own pockets. He felt around in his cagoule and produced two silver coins. “S’awright. I’ve got some.”
It was strange to be in a telephone box that did not stink of rotting piss. For comfort, someone had lined the floor in patterned carpet and put an old kitchen chair under the receiver. On the shelf that held the phone book was an air freshener and a real living potted plant. Mungo pressed the soil and felt the dirt spring back from being freshly watered.
He pumped in his coins. His fingers hovered over the dial long enough that the line went dead and the coins were belched back at him. If only he could call James; he was the only person Mungo wanted to talk to. He was unsure of the number, and besides, Mr Jamieson was sure to have confiscated the cream telephone in his rig bag. It was stupid. What would make him think James would want to talk to him now?
Instead he dialled his home number, then without waiting he hung up. The coins rolled free, he pumped them in and dialled again. Mo-Maw answered on the very first ring. Mungo was surprised to find her there, and not with Jocky and her new family.
“Hallo?” She sounded on edge already. “Five-five-four … eh … six-one, eh … two-two.”
“Mo-Maw. It’s me.”
“Mungo. Mungo ma darlin’， is that really you? Are you awright? Where are ye?” The questions were tumbling out of her too quickly.
“Aye, it’s me. I’m fine.” Mungo started to answer the last question and then realized he didn’t quite know the answer. “I don’t know where I am exactly. It’s green, there’s a deep loch and an old castle. It was night-time when we got here so I didn’t see any signs.”
“Are they looking after ye?”
“Sort of.”
She exhaled for what sounded like the first time. “That’s good.”
Gallowgate rolled his hand like Mungo should hurry up.
“I learnt how to start a fire. I learnt how to put bait on a hook.”
“See!” Mo-Maw sounded like she was relieved. “That’s what ah telt our Jodie. That’s what ah wanted you to do this for. Masculine pursuits. It’ll make a man out of ye.”
Mungo turned his back to the window. He picked at the spider plant and whispered into the handset. “I want to come home now.”
“Okay. Then come home.”
He hadn’t expected her to be so easily convinced. It unnerved him. It had all been her idea but now she was willing to fold it, throw the whole experiment in the bin. “I can’t. It took ages to get here. They won’t want to leave till Monday.”
“Then ye jist have to tell me where ye are.”
The telephone let out three little pips. The money was running out. He felt his tic spasm. “I don’t know where I am.”
“Oh son. Ah’m sorry Mun—”
The line went dead. He cradled it against his chin for a while, pretending she was still there while trying to calm the mutiny in his face. He stood like that until Gallowgate rapped his ring on the glass. “Jesus Christ. It’ll be pitch-black afore we get back. The midges will eat us alive.”
* * *
His legs were covered in raised bites by the time they got back to the fireside. Relieved to have procured more drink, Gallowgate was in a chatty mood, and he talked all the way back to the campsite. He said he would show Mungo how to gut a fish, if St Christopher had caught any, and then he would show him how to set a trap for rabbits. On Sunday night they would cook a big rabbit stew. Rabbit meat and instant noodles. Gallowgate promised it would be the finest thing he had ever tasted.
Mungo watched the man closely; he tried to smile in all the right places. It was the fourth different face Gallowgate had shown him, and he wanted to keep all of them straight. There had been the sullen man on the bus, the letch with the dirty stories at the campfire, the wounded fisherman by the loch, and now this person, his excited best friend, his false big brother.