The lady in the Aran gansey took her eyes off the road a moment too long, and the car swerved as she connected with the verge. A thumb, or maybe a Bic lighter, jabbed a warning into the side of his bare leg. It was clear Gallowgate wanted him to stop talking. Mungo could hear St Christopher huff; he was smacking his lips in agitation like a woman who couldn’t believe the price of milk nowadays.
* * *
They crept along for several miles, searching desperately for the point Gallowgate remembered from distant memory. Yet when they finally got to the broken fence it was exactly as he had described it. The lady clamped her handbag between her knees before she let them out. She sped off in first gear as they gathered up their bags of lager and fish gut.
“Snooty cunt. I thought she was going to twist her pearly earlobe right aff,” said Gallowgate with a chuckle.
St Christopher had been shaking over by the fence. His lips were still slapping together in agitation. “Mungo. You shouldnae break a person’s anonymity lit that.”
Mungo had to turn his eyes from the receding tail lights. “Sorry. I didn’t know.” Mungo had taken Mo-Maw to enough meetings on Hope Street to know fine well the Alcoholics’ rule of anonymity.
“Whit dis it matter to ye?” said Gallowgate. “The wee man wis only bletherin’。”
St Christopher was rattling like a fairground skeleton now. He took to muttering under his breath. “Ah’m jist saying you shouldnae ruin a person’s reputation like that.”
Gallowgate drew his eyes over the trembling man. There was mud on his good suit from where he had lain in the gorse and his “ten-for-a-fiver” white sport socks were ringed with dust from the road; there were scarlet blooms at the heels where his shoes cut his feet. Gallowgate shook his head. “Ah widnae have taken you to have been marked by pride.” From his jacket pocket he produced a Wagon Wheel and handed it to the boy. Gallowgate winked at him. It was an apology for the older drunk. It said that Gallowgate thought he was all right, that they’d suffer through St Christopher together.
It was getting late now. As they walked down to the loch, Mungo thought how the men made odd friends – but then he knew that drink was a great leveller, it always brought unlikely people together. He had seen that in his own home, how different folk could huddle in solidarity around a carry-out. He thought about all the aunties and uncles that crossed his door and had lain in waste with his mother. People she wouldn’t have sniffed at in the street became like kin when they cashed their unemployment giros and turned them into a quarter-bottle of amber.
There was no path to the loch, the ground was obscured with a carpet of horsetail fern. In the last of the blue daylight, Gallowgate wove in and out of the birch trees, gliding downhill to a loch they could not yet see. St Christopher fell behind. Mungo could hear him muttering to himself, and he stopped now and then to smile back at the sulking man, but St Christopher only paused and picked at the downy bark like he was fascinated by it.
Mungo had hardly been out of the city before. He had never been any place where the greenery didn’t eventually end. He had once roamed the untended fields around Garthamlock but they had been spoiled with burnt-out cars and burst settees, and you couldn’t run through the long grass for fear of things that might cut into your ankles. Now, as they walked through the forest, he was dizzy with the thought that he was only one of a handful of people who might ever have been here. There were no sounds, no birds, no animals skittering across the forest floor. It was soothing to be part of something so unspoiled.
They came across the bleached skull and bones of an old sheep. Gallowgate ran his fingers over the curled horns and explained it was a ram, “a man sheep.” Mungo fished around in his cagoule pocket until he found the disposable camera that Jodie had given him. The roll was half-spent already, wasted on silly snaps of Jodie experimenting with a home-cut fringe. The only sound in the understorey was the scritch-scritch of the film winding on. The flash stopped the leaves in their swaying. Even St Christopher stopped his lamenting.
They crossed a dim clearing in single file. Gallowgate squatted; he took the time to show Mungo what stinging nettles looked like, and when they came upon an ocean of the plants, he hoisted the bare-legged boy on to his back. Gallowgate charged through the undergrowth like a saddled mule. He whinnied as his jostling shook gurgling laughter from Mungo. The more Mungo laughed, the harder Gallowgate cantered, until Mungo’s shrieks echoed off the thick canopy and Gallowgate was panting heavily.
It had felt strange at first, to wrap his bare legs around Gallowgate’s waist, but he felt safe upon the man’s back. As Gallowgate put him down again, he rubbed the chill from Mungo’s shin bones, and Mungo wondered if he had read the man wrong. Mungo glanced up the path but he couldn’t see or hear St Christopher behind them anymore. Gallowgate didn’t seem concerned, he hauched into the ferns, and kept marching onwards.
The sun was dipping behind the hills by the time they reached the lochside. After the confines of the forest, the loch suddenly opened up and it was almost too expansive for Mungo to take in. He stumbled down to the shoreline.
The day was drawing in the last of her colours, and as the softest violets and apricots bled away into the horizon, he was sad to have not arrived sooner. Mungo tilted his head back and walked in a circle. The sky above him was a darkening blue smeared with faint streaks of lemon. He hadn’t known that the sky could hold so many hues – or he hadn’t paid it any mind before. Did anyone in Glasgow look up?
He let out a small awe-filled sigh. All this beauty in the sky was mirrored in the loch as though Mother Nature was bragging. Gallowgate grinned with pride. “Wait till you see the sky the night. Ye’ve never seen a black like it.”
Gallowgate offered Mungo his shoulders to sit upon, so Mungo could glimpse the other side before it vanished entirely in the dusk. From this height Mungo thought the loch must be two miles wide and a hundred miles long.
On the far side it was hemmed in by stout hills whose slopes were split like the underlying rock had torn through the very fabric of them. All the colours were patchy and mottled. It seemed to Mungo as though the hillsides had been blanketed in some giant threadbare rug. The moss green and drab brown were rubbed away in patches to reveal the grey granite as if it were the underlay of the land. There were scatterings of purple moor flower and golden gorse, and here and there were little pockets of white snow, clinging stubbornly to the deepest fissures.
The loch diminished out of view on the left. To the right it turned around a lazy corner and disappeared behind a wall of pine trees. Mungo thought how it was ten times bigger than his scheme, bigger, perhaps, than Glasgow herself.
He had seen the sea twice before. There the water was always shaking and churning. But here the tide was lazy and the surface was glassy as a puddle. Nothing moved except for the buzz of black midges that swarmed low and excited a ripple of hungry fish. The loch looked colder and deeper than he could say. It looked sad, like it had been forgotten. Quiet, like it kept its secrets.
Gallowgate lowered the boy. He rubbed his hands over Mungo’s cold back and then hurried across the broken rocks that lined the shore. Tucked into a moss-covered slope was a pile of rough-hewn boulders that vaguely resembled a bothy. There were parallel walls and Mungo could still make out the crumbled doorway and a gabled far end. Outside the bothy was a firepit and a semicircle of larger boulders for sitting on. Thick biting midges thrummed in the shadows.