“We could pretend it was a headbutt if you like?” The smile was fleeing his lips again.
“Don’t be daft.” Mungo looked both up and down the hill, and then he kissed James quickly on the lips. It was like hot buttered toast when you were starving. It was that good.
* * *
They had buried James’s mother at Lambhill on a blowy spring day, when the wind stripped all the blossoms from the trees, and the white petals clung to the black mourning cars.
After the funeral, his father had spent his time helping James build the doocot. The whole thing had been his father’s idea; pigeons were a good, manly pursuit that would teach James discipline and how to care for something smaller than himself. Besides, if they kept busy building something together, then they didn’t have to talk about his mother.
His father missed three work rotations. He stayed away from the rigs as long as he could. His father had promised, “Listen, if ye spend an hour at the doocot every day, I’ll be back in no time at all.” Then he packed his rig bag and left James to an empty house and all the tears they could never have shed together.
James lay on his bed in a motherless house. The bed sheets were clean but they smelled sour. His father had left them too long on the clothes pulley and it had not occurred to him to turn and air them as they dried. It was these small things that made James feel heaviest. Small things his mammy would just have known to do.
He had done as his father advised. After school he had gone to the doocot and returned before it was dark. He had played with himself and then he had fed himself, and then played with himself some more. Once the fleeting sense of euphoria had ebbed from his body he was left with the stillness of another empty evening. He turned on the wireless in the kitchen and the television in the living room and then he lay on his bed and wondered if he was being punished for something.
He tried to push away the pictures that came into his mind, but they wouldn’t leave. They had started in the New Year, when the Catholic boys were put out on the North Field and played shinty with tartan-blue legs. The rain and the wind flayed anyone who would not keep moving in the smirr. They pulled their socks up to try and reach their short hems but Father Strachan shouted at them to stop making such a pitiful show of themselves. “If you are cold,” he yelled above the high collar of his long-sleeved fleece, “then run faster.”
After battering each other with caman sticks for ninety minutes, the boys were grateful for the lukewarm showers, water that was barely warm enough to return the feeling to their toes and wash the red clay from their legs. James stood under the end jet. He crammed his blue fingers inside his mouth. He tried not to look at Paddy Creek, with his lazy smile and broad, muscular shoulders. He tried to not watch the stream of shampoo as it trickled down his back, and ran between his buttocks. Like the stubborn oose you pick from an acrylic jumper, some unseen static kept pulling his gaze back to the boy. James turned away. He knew if they caught him staring they would have a hundred names for him before he had a name for himself.
James dangled his leg off the edge of his narrow bed. He reached overhead and took the newspaper out from the space between the headboard and the wall. Fetching the cream-coloured telephone through to his bedroom he dialled the number he found in the back of the paper. He could have rung it by heart. He dialled it partially three times before his fingers found the courage and committed to dialling the whole thing. There was a mechanical click and a tinny recording welcoming him to the party line.
A place where boys like you can meet boys like you.
He couldn’t tell how many men were on the line, but there were many voices in the dark. Some were like his, the heavy Glaswegian glottal, but others came from faraway parts of Scotland, with sing-song or refined voices, well-educated or shamed into sounding their vowels properly. They were talking and they were laughing. He listened to them talk about music, and the bars they liked and pubs they sometimes went to, where they could meet, places where landlords were more tolerant and would let them enjoy a pint in peace. Some older men came on and were fishing harder than the others. They would ask bluntly for what they wanted, words James didn’t know the meaning of but liked the sound of. Sometimes the men would find the thing they were hunting for and the two of them would agree to meet and click through to a private, more expensive line.
Usually James didn’t say much. It was comforting just to listen. Tonight, he could tell that some of the men were already touching themselves. The first time he had called, it was enough to shock him, to clamp his hand over the receiver and giggle nervously. But he got used to that rhythmic paddling sound; the way the receiver was cupped between their chin and chest, how they breathed hard and shallow through flared nostrils as they used their hands for other, dirtier things. It would start easily – or it would have already started by the time he rang on – a man （it was always an older-sounding man） would ask someone to describe himself and that someone would. The younger man would tell them all about the map of his body, the colour of his skin, the way his hair created a peach fuzz across his stomach and under the hard muscles of his arse.
“A swimmer’s body, not very muscular like, but lean, you know?” the Dundonian was saying.
“I like that,” panted the Perthshire farmer. “How many fingers can you fit inside?”
They would be gathered together, a semicircle of strangers, and as they listened to the young man, they would hope that the beautiful things he said about himself were true.
The farmer spent his mess. Some lines went dead, some new sounds added to the crackle. There was another voice in the background, a melodic, light voice, the voice James had come to listen for in the crowd. “Hah-llo,” it said. “Is there anybody out theeere?”
“Fraser, is that you?” asked James.
“Oh, guid.” The cheerful sound of a Gaelic speaker, turning himself to English. “I was hoping you were on here, Tonalt.”
James had lied when they had asked him his name. Donald, he had said, or in reality it sounded like D-awnaul-Dh, heavy with a flat Glaswegian D. He much preferred the way Fraser sang it. Tonalt. “I finally listened to that song, Tonalt,” Fraser said. “I stayed up half the night until it came on the radio.”
“And did you like it?”
“I did,” said the boy with real pleasure. His voice sounded gauzy and light, like he was hidden in a wardrobe with the phone cupped close to his lips. “I even taped it, but the cassette is chewy. I think next time we’re in Inbhir Nis I’ll need to get it on vinyl. But the ol’ lade is sick to the teeth of it already. She said I should be saving for headphones first.”
James liked how he dropped Gaelic words into his sentences; they stuck out, like half-hammered nails. The boys had once spent an hour laughing over the Gaelic translation of gay slurs; the party line went silent while Fraser presented and then repeated the words: Càm, càm. One by one, the disembodied men parroted the word, like an evening class full of study-abroad students. Fliuch, Boireanta, or James’s favourite, the unimaginative conjunction of boy and bum: Gille-tòiin.
“I could send a vinyl to you,” said James. “If I knew where you lived.”