Mungo closed the front door and carefully returned all of Mo-Maw’s belongings to her bag. His mother had taken her bra off again, but that morning it was on the kitchenette table and she was shelling monkey nuts and dropping the shells into the upturned cup. There was an empty bottle of fortified wine on the table. She looked like she had been sat there smoking and drinking since before the dawn.
“Ah shut early,” she declared, although he did not ask. “Ah jist couldnae be bothered anymore.”
Mungo kissed her warm crown. She had tightened her perm with money they didn’t have. Her scalp smelled like it had been burned with chemicals. He put on the kettle and poured her two strong mugs of black tea, just the way she liked. Her head was drooping on to her chest, it bobbed in bunting waves, like a toddler past bedtime. Mungo watched her fight sleep, he tried to take the ashy cigarette from between her fingers but she pushed him away.
“Stop hoverin’。 Sakes. Yer like a wee wummin.” She ashed on to her own leggings, then brushed it on to the floor. He dared not sweep it up.
Across the back green, above the cluster of communal bin sheds, there were already bright lights in the flats opposite. Mungo watched the light come on in James’s house, a single light that he switched off whenever he left the room. Mungo knew he woke early to go to the doocot. He would spend an hour feeding and exercising the birds before there was any danger of another dooman sending a lure into the sky. That was the thing with the East End doomen: they were mostly unemployed, so they didn’t keep standard business hours.
James was silhouetted against the bright light of his kitchenette. He looked out and saw Mungo watching him. They still had not spoken, not even once, but he gave Mungo the thumbs up sign, with a face like it was a question. Mungo returned the salute with a definite thumbs down. James laughed.
“Come away from that window,” said Mo-Maw. “Stop watching wummin get dressed for their work. That’s aw ah need. To have raised a peepin’ Tom.”
Mo-Maw had taken to stealing meat from the caravan, arse ends of black puddings and half-defrosted bricks of sliced bacon. Mungo turned on the electric ring and prepared her a hot breakfast to line her stomach. The eggs rolled across the frying pan in a white greasy liquid of their own, catching bits of bacon fat and scraps of yesterday’s black pudding in their wake. He waited until the centre filmed over before he flipped them gently. The plate made a chalky sound as he slid it across the tabletop towards her. It was exactly as she liked it.
Mo-Maw made a retching sound. “Ah cannae be looking at that.”
“I could make you some porridge.”
“Stop fussin’。” She sounded tired but far from sleep.
“Maybe you want to go and lie down?”
She stubbed her cigarette into the egg roll. Her eyes cleared. The routine of the night shift was in her. “Ah want to go out.”
She could barely walk. With her arm around his shoulders Mungo carried her down the stairs. At one point she climbed up on the banister, and she was so wilful that he had to hold her as she slid down it. Wheeee. Mo-Maw began cackling and it was impossible not to be affected by her glee. Jodie would be furious that he hadn’t buffeted her from the door, that he hadn’t used all his wiles to deflect her to the settee and make her sink into the softness that she couldn’t rise up out of.
The early morning light was a pale-blue wash, it muted the vividness from everything it touched, it stole the life from the faces of passing strangers. He needed to put his arm around his mother to stop her from stumbling along the Parade. At times she leaned on him so heavily he felt like he had her whole weight against him. Then she would take a few shuffling steps and pitch the other way and he would stagger after her. It took all his strength and concentration not to tip them both into the gutter.
The early shift gawped down upon them from warm corporation buses. From the pity in their faces, Mungo could tell they made a sorry sight. Mungo tried to hold his spine straight and keep his eyes on the horizon like there was a purpose to their journey, but there was not; she had taken the notion for a walk and he had been powerless to stop her.
“We used to do this all the time when ye were wee.” She wasn’t any soberer but the cold had pinched her nose and now she looked fully awake. He was holding her at the waist and she had both her arms around him like they were young lovers. “Ah couldnae cross the doorstep but ye would be clinging to my skirt. The other two couldn’t have cared less if I got hit by a bus. But no you, you were always there for me.”
She had oriented their walk towards the city centre; maybe the casino would still be open, or the penny puggies under Central Station. Tattie-bogle liked lights. He had hoped she would lose heart, but she didn’t. The drink could flatten her or give her a peculiar stamina. The terror lay in the fact he never knew which it would be.
To get to the city centre they needed to pass in the direction of the Necropolis. The air would be freshest there, the steep hill would be best for clearing her head. It would be quiet that time of the morning, when no one could see the strain or embarrassment on his face. He bumped into her like a gentle tugboat, and steered her towards the cemetery. The view from the Necropolis spanned the low city. He could see the tall fingers of Sighthill and the dense cluster of Victorian buildings that made up the centre of the city. The Tennent’s brewery was already belching its yeast into the sky.
“Ah don’t think Jocky loves me.” Her American trainers were caked with mud by the time he dropped her on the steps of the John Knox memorial. “He’s taking me for a mug.”
Mungo crouched near the statue of a scowling clergyman to pick crocuses that were already past their peak. It was hard to find ones that had not yet collapsed in on themselves. “Maybe he doesn’t like you when you’re drinking.”
“Sakes. Ah’m only thirty-four. All ah should be doing is drinking. Drinking and dancing and laughing.” Her face looked sunken in the morning light. She took a bottle of fortified wine out of her bag. Mungo could feel his eyelids start to fill with electricity. He had emptied the drink from her bag before they left, but she had been wily enough to put it back in when he wasn’t looking. “Ah bet that sounds dead old to ye, din’t it? Ah wisnae much older than you when ah came down wi’ our Hamish. Your father was stunned. Ye should have heard the terrible things his mammy called me.”
Mungo couldn’t remember his grandmother. He had a lingering sense of a Presbyterian snob, a woman that spread jam on salted crackers and pretended they were fancy biscuits. “Tell me what my father was like?”
“Oh, no this again.” She struggled to light the end of a bent cigarette. Mungo worried she would forget he had asked about his father, but the nicotine seemed to focus her mind, and she eventually said, “He wisnae anything special. There was plenty better looking. But he was a cheeky and charming big bastard. A brave soul like our Hamish and soft in the centre like you.” Her eyes were fixed, somewhere out over the snaking Clyde.
“Why did you let him fight in the gangs if he had weans?” Mungo had asked her this a thousand times before. All three of them had.
“Ah couldnae have stopped him. Ah tried, but he never belonged to me, no really. We had only been living the gether for half a year afore he got stabbed. Jodie was still sleeping in a pram because we couldnae afford a bed for Hamish. We were only playin’ at houses.” Her eyes were rheumy with the cold. “Ah mean, ah wisnae even the first person that the polis told. Ah had to phone his mammy when he didn’t come round that night. She was the one who telt me he’d been stabbed. Ah was at home in an unfurnished flat nursing his two weans and she didnae even think enough of me to phone me herself.”