He was always slow to realize when Hamish was manipulating him. It often dawned when Jodie would yell at Hamish to stop it, to stop using Mungo as his slave, stop saying nice things just so Mungo would do as Hamish wanted. This usually came right after Hamish had been incredibly, inexplicably kind to him. Mungo had started to become suspicious of the kindness of others, but James had changed that. Now he watched Gallowgate walk in a swaggering backwards fashion through the thick ferns. He was talking excitedly about building snares and box traps. “Ah’m gonnae show you everything ah know,” said the man. “How lucky are you?”
St Christopher was drying his suit by the smoky fire when they finally reached the campsite. His underwear hung off of him and the knuckles of his spine pushed against his thin skin like snow peas in a pod. Mungo looked at the sharpness in his bones and felt sorry for the man. He looked like one of the weans he saw on the African telethons, except they had bloated stomachs and St Christopher’s hollowed inwards under his ribs and almost reached his backbone.
He was happy to see them return. Drying on a rock were seven small fish, lined up neatly, their iridescence already dulled and flaky. St Christopher circled them like a proud house cat. “It’s no much,” he was saying while taking each fish into his paw and stroking it gently. “But the morra we’ll put them on the hooks and catch a perch or brown trout.”
“Aye.” Gallowgate rattled the plastic bags. “That might jist work.”
St Christopher cracked open the last bottle of whisky in celebration. He took two long slugs and passed it to Gallowgate, who did the same. They held it out to Mungo and the boy put the bottle to his lips but held his tongue over the hole as a stopper.
Gallowgate clouted him. “Don’t be a fanny. Get it in ye.” He cradled the back of Mungo’s head and tipped the bottle up to his lips. An angry, scorching wave poured down his gullet. It burned the air from his lungs. Gallowgate waited for the boy to stop choking before he tipped the bottle again. “Mair! Mair! Mair!”
Mungo was soon drunk.
He spent the evening pulling long branches from the forest and dropping them on the fire. One of the branches split like it had arms and he held it close like it was a fine lady. He turned and danced with it in the firelight. He was stumbling across the pebble shore and the men were watching him and cheering him on. They filled the empty bean cans with loch water and placed them amongst the flames to boil. Over and over they refilled the cans and poured it over the sweet and sour Chinese noodles. When they were done, each man had eaten at least two pots of the salty worms. They lay around feeling fat and content, their bellies lined with starch and full of firewater.
Mungo stared at nothing. His eyelids were growing heavy and he could feel his heart beating behind his eyeballs. Big gobbets of rain started falling and hissing on the campfire. The gobbets turned to a downpour and soon the men were scampering, saving the pathetic fish, the tweed suit, and what was left of the carry-out. They ran for cover and Mungo lost them in the sheets of sudden rain. The men crammed into the two-man tent by the bothy and he, alone, crawled into the half-collapsed shell by the waterline.
Gallowgate had given the boy a warm lager, and he was glad for the smoothness of its taste, how it was flat and soothing where the whisky had burned. He lay down and felt a rare peace. The ground was moving underneath the red tent. Streams of water coursed around his body, flowing towards the loch. He could feel the cold of the running water, yet he was not wet. He drank his lager. He closed his eyes. Drunk for the very first time, and carried away by the rain.
TEN
They had their ears to the carpet, their buttocks to the sky, and it looked like they were praying. The children knelt in the middle of the living room and listened as he swung his fist into her softness. He was hurting her. Each time he hit her, the woman cried out in pain. It was a tremulous squeak that ended in a chewed full stop, like she wanted to swallow the shameful cry as soon as it escaped her. Even as he was battering her, she worried about his good name.
“He’s gonnae kill her,” said Jodie. “Do something, Mungo!”
“Lit what?” He wanted to put his fingers in his ears.
“I don’t know.” The pages of her geography homework were creased in her fist. She was pacing and there was a panic in her eyes. “If Hamish was here, he would know.”
Rangers had lost the Old Firm game. It had started as a fine spring day. All along the road the tenement windows were open and televisions and wirelesses were blaring the game out into the street. Big Ogilvy and his twins stood at their bay window in their regimental blues, thoom thoom thoom. They filled the street with Orange pride. But Celtic scored early and the street fell into a tense hush, even Ogilvy’s twins stopped their peeping. Collins’s goal in the first half was followed by another from Payton, putting Celtic firmly in the lead. Rangers brought on their golden boy, McCoist, but they struggled to get back into the game. When Hateley eventually pulled a goal back at the eighty-four-minute mark, the street erupted in desperate cheering. In the end it was not the fact that Celtic won – for they had no chance of winning the league – it was the fact that they ended a historic run of forty-five games unbeaten for the champs. All the Catholics would be celebrating in Baird’s Bar. Mr Campbell had taken it heavy bad.
“We have to do something,” repeated Jodie.
“What?”
“I don’t know. God’s sake. Can you just be a bloody man, for once?”
But Jodie Hamilton was her own man. She was out the door and down the close stairs as Mr Campbell was dragging his wife across the hallway carpet. Jodie hammered on their door like a Provvie debt collector. Mungo appeared, not quite at her side, but slightly behind her. He rocked on his heels, and it took effort for him to step in front of his sister. As the door opened Jodie realized Mungo had their mop and pail in his hand.
It was rare to see Mr Campbell standing these days. But when he opened the door he filled the frame from to doorstep to lintel. “Whit in bloody hell do youse two want?”
Jodie had the peculiar courage of a girl who never expected to be hit by a man – which was strange, because all three siblings had seen their mother suffer at the hands of her boyfriends. There was no man that Jodie would not answer back, and although Mungo admired that about his sister, he thought she put too much faith in the decency of men. This belief, this bravery, gave her a gallus tongue. When they were little, Jodie opened her smart mouth amongst gangs of neds and wrote cheques that Hamish would have to cash later. More than once, Mungo had been chinned by some boy he had never met, and then told to pass it along to his mouthy sister.
Mungo spoke before Jodie could say anything. “Hallo, Mister Campbell,” he said, as cheerfully as he could manage. “It’s my turn to wash the close and I havnae any soap flakes. Do you think I could ask Missus Campbell for a lend of some?”
There was a deep lilac flush to the man’s face. He had been sweating and moving more than he had in years and his fat-clogged arteries were struggling to let the blood around his mass. The thin hair of his comb-over hung loose. “Annie is unable to come to the door the now. She’s no well. She’s in her bed.”