The telephone let out three quick pips. Gallowgate savoured the last of his mother’s sighs. There was a rasp at the bottom of her breath now, a sandpapery sound that said it was too late to stop smoking.
SIXTEEN
Mungo sauntered through the doocot grass. He stopped now and again, and pretended to be interested in something at his feet. He went unnoticed and for every minute that passed, he inched closer to the structure, until he was so near he could no longer pretend he was just casually strolling by. James was inside, hunched over a cage of brown doos. He was pouring medicine down a bird’s throat, whispering to it as he squirted a syringe into its gullet. Everything around him was dim, drab, except for him and the fledgling, illuminated from the skylight above. He looked like an oil painting, as though the heavens were smiling down upon him. His hair shone like a crown spun from pulled sugar.
Mungo slouched against the door frame, he laid his cheek against the painted wood. “A woman I know was almost murdered by her husband.”
James didn’t flinch, he didn’t jump at the voice. Mungo knew then that he had seen him orbiting the doocot and had not bothered to reach out.
Mungo searched around for something, anything, to talk about. In the corner, under the lowest bench, lay two piles of roofing slate. Mungo used them to pry open a conversation. “Did you buy roof tiles?”
James glanced at the slate. “Naw,” he said, and that seemed the death of it. Mungo felt his fibre push away from the door frame. It seemed clear that their friendship was over, and it was time for him to go. Then James spoke again. “There was a couple leaning against the door one night. The next night there was a couple mair. They’re dead heavy. It’s the strangest thing.”
“Just like that?” Mungo knew it was not just like that. He knew Poor-Wee-Chickie would have worked hard to bring the slate to the boy. It would have taken several nighttime trips to deliver the tiles, his shopping trolley squeaking in the dark, a nervous Natalie pulling on her leash and the pair of them staying to the shadows.
James handed Mungo a Manila envelope. Inside were countless slate nails, a tile punch, and a precise technical drawing of where to put the nails through the tiles. Mungo unfolded the foolscap, it was drawn in a neat hand but it was unsigned. “Jeez-o. A slate roof. You’ll have the nicest gaff on the scheme.”
“Aye.” But he didn’t look happy about it. He could still not look Mungo in the eye.
Mungo understood that feeling of shyness and shame, and he felt a tenderness for James. “Look, if we plumb this doocot you could get forty-five pound a week for it. It’s practically two floors. You could get a single mother, six weans, and four pit bulls in here, easy.”
James didn’t seem to be in a mood for jokes. He turned his back to him again, hunched over the doo, picking sawdust and shite out from between its claws. It seemed like he wanted to be alone.
Mungo turned to leave before his face started to sputter. “Listen, I don’t know what I did, James. But I’m sorry. I really am.” He scuffed his shoe, there was a crunch of rat glass underfoot. All Mungo had done was comfort his friend when he had been grieving his mother. There had been nothing dirty about it, but everything felt wrong.
“Don’t be stupit.” The light from the doo trap cast hard shadows across James’s face. It made his ears stick out more.
“I’m not funny, if that’s what you are thinking. It was only a hug. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I know.” James sealed the envelope of nails and tossed it to the side. “You’ve been picking your lip again.” He paused, then he added, “Do you want some cake?”
“Cake?”
James nodded into the corner. There was a white box on the bench. Mungo lifted the lid and inside was a Victoria sponge with whipped cream oozing from between its golden layers. There was a decorative teddy bear, and edible letters where someone had misspelt Birtday Boy. Mungo stared at it for a long time. He felt rotten. “Do you have a bike?”
“How? Did ye get me one?”
“James, I didn’t know it was your birthd—”
“I’m only joking. Aye, I have a bike.”
“Then let’s just go somewhere.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know. Somewhere nice. Somewhere we’ve never been.”
“But where?”
Mungo shrugged. He extended his arm and held out his index finger, he spun slowly. “Say when.”
It was the first smile James had given him that day. It was small and it was crooked but it gave off more brightness than the doocot skylight above them. “Ye’re a fuckin’ eejit.” He watched Mungo spin for several revolutions. “Awright, awright. Stop.”
Mungo stopped. His arm was pointing eastward. It was as good a direction as any.
* * *
They filled James’s schoolbag with cans of sugary ginger and the white cake. Using a wheezy football pump, they reinflated the wheels of Mr Jamieson’s Rattray. The bike was rusted from disuse and the rubber handles had worn away with sweat, leaving Mungo’s hands black and sticky from just wheeling it out of the close. The white frame had been patterned with alternating stripes of gold and green plumber’s tape. Proud to be a Fenian. James sensed Mungo’s reticence to climb on to the narrow seat. “But it’s been blessed by the Pope himself.”
“It’s a bit much. I’ll get fuckin’ stabbed.”
James pedalled the old Rattray racer and Mungo sat pillion behind him. He held his body rigid and touched James’s waist only slightly. James hunched forward and bobbed up and down, working hard to propel them both forward, pumping the pedals like a shire horse. At first, they glided up and down the familiar streets. They passed the same faces they saw every day, and Mungo alternated between fearing that James would stop pedalling and want to go home or that they would corner into Ha-Ha’s crew and he would be beaten to death for riding behind a boy on a bike bright with Celtic colours.
“You’re not doing it right. You have to go in the direction you chose. That’s the only rule.”
James huffed but he turned the bike eastward and when a street tilted the wrong angle, they took the next left, and kept cycling away from the afternoon sun. Several times James looked like he wanted to give up. At first the streets seemed to be getting worse. They passed tight-packed tenements that were heavy with a sense of lack and need. They rode between rows of bombed-out flats where all the windows were boarded up with protective covering. When James faltered Mungo dug his hands into his side. “Keep going, keep going, keep going.” There had to be more.
Eventually the city started to expand as if it was breathing, the houses started to spread apart, and there was more sky than sandstone. The council houses changed to a four-in-a-block formation, but the small gardens were mostly untended and riddled with weeds. When they dead-ended into Barlinnie Prison, Mungo almost admitted defeat. James was panting from the hill, and they stood and stared at the barbed-wired monolith, massive and forbidding as a Victorian workhouse.
“My uncle, Paddy Grant, is inside for aggravated assault,” said James.
“Mo McConnachie’s there,” said Mungo, “and Joe McConnachie as well.” Everyone knew someone on the inside of Barlinnie.