They only stopped when the last pillow was flattened. Jodie’s left ear was bloody where her gold hoop had torn free, but she couldn’t care less, she didn’t even shout at Mungo. Every surface was thick with fibre and feather. “That’s what he deserves,” said Mungo proudly. But it was all too childish. It was not enough payback.
When they went outside, the winter sun was setting below the clouds, and Mungo could at last see the break between sky and sea. There were feathers in their hair and stuck to their school uniforms. Mungo crouched beneath the caravan and removed the brake bricks from the rear wheels. Jodie watched him do it with a nervous giggle. “You’re wasting your time. He’s gonnae sell it on. He’s never coming back.”
Her brother pondered it for a second. It was unfair to harm whoever the next holiday makers were. Hamish would not have cared. But it was cruel to send total strangers rolling and screaming into the Irish Sea.
“You’re no fun,” pouted Mungo, but he did not replace the bricks. He cantilevered the stand at the front and put the guiding wheel back in contact with the earth. The caravan shifted as he pushed it. It started rolling downhill, started gathering speed. “Ah, ah. Fuck!” he cried. “Run. Run!”
* * *
Jodie was curled up in the armchair and had been ignoring him as he tried to read John Donne. His face flushed with the effort but she was not paying attention to him. She was thinking about something else. He hadn’t even noticed that she was crying.
“How the fuck can auld McGregor do this to us?” he moaned. “It’s no fair to bully a Scotsman into speaking proper English and then throw it for a loop and saddle him with this shite.”
Mr McGregor was notorious for it. For those special weans – the boys who were going nowhere in life – he prescribed “the Big Donne.” The English teacher knew they were beyond his help. He administered the poet like it was a massive dose of penicillin for someone who had already withered with TB. If any child could not manage the curriculum, he was not going to waste any more time dragging them through The Mayor of Casterbridge. They were put to the back of the class and got the Big Donne. Most of them spent the hour drawing on the inside cover. Mr McGregor didn’t care.
“It suck’d me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea, our two bloods mingled bee;”
Mungo clawed at himself. “That wummin has scabies and he’s writing a love song about it. And auld McGregor has the cheek to give you the ruler if you say hame instead of hoh-m. But this auld soap dodger spells any fuckin’ word any fuckin’ way that he likes and gets called a ‘master.’” Mungo pitched the thin volume across the room.
“I like that poem,” said Jodie, mostly to herself. She wiped her face and tried to smile. “The poet is trying to con a woman into sleeping with him. They should teach every girl that poem the minute we get a chest.”
Mungo shook his head. “I’d like to dig up John Donne’s bones and punch them.”
“Punch? Would you?”
“Aye.” He eyed her suspiciously. “What’s wrong with you now?”
Jodie tugged at her woollen tights. She stood up and met him in the middle of the floor. “I’ll make you cheese on toast if you do something for me?”
There was that sudden kindness; Mungo knew he was about to be manipulated. “I’m no hungry.”
“I need your help. I need to ask you to do something and you need to be a man about it.”
There it was again, that phrase. They all wanted to see this man inside him. “I won’t agree until you tell me what it is.”
“Well.” She paused again. “I want you to punch me as hard as you can.”
He laughed great ugly guffaws. But Jodie was not laughing. She took his hand and laid it on her stomach, over the nubby fabric of her acrylic jumper. It was taut feeling and it was radiating an even type of heat. “If I have this baby, I’ll never get to read any more poems.”
He pulled his hand away. “Are you mental?”
She held on to him. “It’s nothing. It’s not even a baby yet, it’s only a wee tadpole. If I wait much longer it will have nerves. It will have earlobes …” Jodie had always been good at Biology. She was using what she had learned to pressure him. “Don’t worry. It’s only a sac of mucus and cells. If I get it out I can just flush it.”
“I can’t. It’s a baby.”
“It is not. And when all’s done, it never was.” She sighed and tried to talk softly to him. “Mungo, if I have this baby, I’ll be just like Mo-Maw. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
“Of course not. But mibbe I could look after it. I’m not going anywhere, so what’s the harm? You can just still go to school. You can go to college. The council will give us a wee flat. We’ll get brilliant benefits.”
The thought chilled her. She hadn’t imagined a life with her brother and a baby. “No. I’m not living like that. If you won’t help me then I’ll need to find work. They’re taking on trainees at Maguires, I can fold cardboard.” She stroked his bonny face and smiled. “But you’ll help me. I know you will.”
“I willnae.”
Jodie stepped away from him. In one smooth motion she stepped on to a chair and then on to the windowsill.
“What are you playing at?”
She turned. “Do you remember Tattie-bogle, when she wanted Mo-Maw to jump? If I don’t get this baby out of me, I will jump.” He remembered well. He would never forget his mother on the wet window ledge, how she clambered up there every so often, any time she felt the children did not love her enough. A shadow crossed Jodie’s eyes, a flicker that she sometimes got when she solved a particularly hard equation. “Huh. I understand why she did that now. I won’t live like this.”
Mungo put his arms around her waist and dragged her down. Then he shoved her so hard she flew back into the easy chair. The soles of her feet went skyward. “Fuck you.”
“Mun—”
“Fuck you.”
Mungo sulked in the dark kitchenette. He ran his finger around the field-flower wallpaper and enjoyed the way the pattern was padded to give it a three-dimensional feeling. He stared at the back of James’s tenement. They still hadn’t spoken since James had cried. He wished for a friend now.
The middle cabinet was full of pint glasses that Mo-Maw had stolen from the old men’s pubs on Duke Street. He took one and into it he emptied all the liquids and condiments in his mother’s kitchen: brown sauce, red sauce, yellow sauce, and sour separated milk. He added a raw egg, Askit painkiller powder, and half a shaker of black pepper. To the top of the sundae he added a long squirt of dish soap and a dash of toilet bleach. He topped it with a wad of his phlegm.
“Here, drink this.” He handed the potion to Jodie.
She was sitting on the windowsill looking out at the narrow street. She had been crying again. Then she laughed. But then she got herself stuck somewhere between tears and laughter. He stepped away from her, offended. “You asked for my help. Drink it.”
Jodie wrapped her arms around his shoulders, she tousled the hair at the back of his neck. It felt good. “You silly eejit. Mungo, they are not connected. The uterus and the stomach. I’ll likely shite myself, aye, but the blob won’t shift.” She put the foul glass on the windowsill. They could still smell it from across the room. “Punch me, or you can kick me, if you prefer. Just the once. I promise.”