“Ye’ll get used to them,” said Gallowgate, handing the boy a large dock leaf. “Rub yer legs with this and ye’ll be awright.”
Mungo rubbed at his bare legs until they turned green and slick with chlorophyll. The biting flies seemed undeterred.
St Christopher hobbled out from the treeline. He plonked himself down by the lochside and dunked his feet in the icy water. With his angular bones and his grey tweeds, he was just another rock on the shoreline.
Gallowgate marshalled the setup of camp around the stone fire ring. He took off his trendy nylon bomber and the knees of his Italian denims were soon damp as he unpacked the pile of plastic bags. From the backpack he unfurled two thin-looking tents. The two-man tent he erected inside the abandoned bothy. The smaller tent he staked across the far side of the camp, on a bed of dry shingle, almost as far away from the other as possible. Mungo helped drive the curved metal pegs into the ground with a flinty rock. “Shouldn’t the tents be closer together?”
Gallowgate looked at the boy and shook his head. It seemed he meant it to be a friendly smile, but it was without warmth, and Mungo thought he saw a flash of menace cross his thin lips. Perhaps, like Hamish, he didn’t like for his authority to be questioned.
“Naw. Better to be far frae the fire,” Gallowgate said. He went back to pulling the guy line tight. He strummed it to check its tension. “Don’t youse want to see the stars?”
THE JANUARY BEFORE
TWO
Their mother was surely dead. It had been over three weeks since her children had seen her, and Mungo could imagine nothing but the most gruesome of scenarios. Mo-Maw Hamilton had been raped and then she had been gutted with a steak knife that some long-haul lorry driver had bought using petrol station coupons. She had been trussed and the tips of her fingers hacked off before her naked body was slipped into the cold brackish water of the River Clyde. Mungo followed his sister from room to room, conjuring the worst.
“I just know she’s dead.”
“Maybe,” soothed Jodie. “Or maybe she’s just on another bender.”
“But what if she is dead?”
Jodie sighed. “Look around. We’re no that lucky.”
The children had come home again from school to an empty house and an emptier fridge. Jodie was watching her brother pace back and forth in front of the bay window, imagining all the horrible things that might have befallen their mother, listing the reasons they should go to the polis. They were in their school uniforms, matching navy jumpers over a striped burgundy and gold tie, except Mungo’s tie was wrapped around his head like a bandage to soothe the itchy feeling in his face.
“She’s fucked off before,” said Jodie. “Don’t forget who you’re dealing with.”
Jodie crossed to where he had been ploughing furrows into the carpet. She wrapped her arms around him, tried to quiet the fluttering inside his chest. He was only a year younger than her, but he had taken a stretch; it had come late, but he was taller than her by almost a head now. Jodie laid her cheek against the nape of his neck, he was burning hot. “Any minute now she could walk through that door.”
Mungo turned his brown eyes to the door, the tic under his left eye sparking out a telegraph. Jodie cupped his chin with her hand and manually turned his face away. He was like a dog, he could stare at something for hours unless you distracted him from it.
She pressed her fingers to his face. The doctors had advised her not to draw any attention to his twitch, to simply ensure that he was getting enough magnesium and that he would grow out of it eventually – but he hadn’t, and she doubted that he ever would. It was happening more frequently now. His nose would begin to crinkle, and then he would blink as though someone was flicking the power switch in his brain. If he was especially anxious, or tired, it manifested as a tug or a twitch in his left cheek. He had taught her where to press to try and calm the electricity. It was nothing but a placebo. Jodie came to understand that he just liked to be touched.
He had been clawing at his cheek again, the skin was chafed and angry. Jodie tutted. “You have to stop scratching at your coupon. You’re going to leave a scar. Haaah-ha.”
“I can’t help it.”
There was a fresh sore on his top lip. He had taken to picking it when the sore on his cheekbone became too raw. “Oh, for goodness’ sake. You’re gonnae end up all pockmarked and snaggle-faced like that fella who works at the butcher’s.”
Her younger brother was a rare sort of handsome. His wasn’t the usual blunt or rugged masculinity, and it wasn’t the over-preened, over-musked, amateur-footballer style that the boys in her year aspired to. Mungo had high cheekbones and a refined brow that Jodie, with her plump cheeks and stub nose, would have killed for. There was a timidness to his gaze. His hazel eyes could bathe you in their glorious warmth, or he could dip them away from you and make you wish he would look at you again. If you could coax it from him, then there was a real reward in his cautious smile; to earn it made others feel instantly endeared towards him. His unruly mop of hair made women want to mother him.
Growing up he had always been the obedient groom that Jodie constructed play-weddings around. Jodie would nag, while Mungo, always agreeable, would do as he was told. He would stand stock-still as she and Angie Harms swanned around him, draped in mucky veils made from their mother’s net curtains. He spent many afternoons kneeling, biting at the hair scrunchies they had wrapped around their puppy-fat thighs in imitation of a garter belt.
There was a gentleness to his being that put girls at ease; they wanted to make a pet of him. But that sweetness unsettled other boys.
Mungo had always been the bonniest of the Hamiltons. His brother and sister shared his chestnut hair and light olive complexion, so different from their mousy, wan mother. Hamish, when he had wanted to get a rise out of Mo-Maw, had said at least their shared colouring proved they all came from the same father, that they’d gotten more from him than just his surname. Jodie had to admit that Mungo wore it the best. Where the freckles and the sallowness looked slightly grubby on her and Hamish, on Mungo it looked so creamy that you wanted to take a spoon to him.
Jodie had seen the inside of Glasgow Cathedral only once; she had been allowed to go on that particular school trip since she could walk there and it was all free. As the other girls took out their RE notebooks to rub at the stone carvings, Jodie found a stained-glass window of the patron saint, St Kentigern, or as he was colloquially known to Glaswegians, St Mungo. Here St Mungo was depicted as a melancholy boy, cradling a fat salmon, looking sorry that it was dead. Jodie had watched the afternoon light splinter through the saint and cross the dusty cathedral floor and thought of her brother. It was a peaceful window, somehow lonesome. Jodie had sighed before it. It was unlike Mo-Maw to get something so right.
When they were younger and Mo-Maw took them shopping on Duke Street, women would stop to suddenly admire Mungo. “Here now, what a good-looking wee boy ye’ve got there.”
Hamish would step in front of Mungo and say, “Thank you missus, you’re no bad looking yersel.”
The clumsier of the women would tut and say, “Naw son, no you. Him! He’s bonny.”
Mungo always hated that. He didn’t like anyone staring at him. He knew when they got home Hamish would batter him, stuff him between the bed frame and the skirting board, and then just stand on him till he was bored.