Mungo shrugged. “Naw. It’s nothing. Just some stuff I like from the charts.”
James set the cassette aside, like it didn’t matter much to him. Mungo picked at his cheek. He tried to pin down the hurt that already piqued the muscle to stop it spreading. It was only a cassette, after all, but by the way he felt when James put it to the side it could have been his heart. Then James did something unexpected. He smoothed the paper flat and holding it up to the sunlight he looked at it like it was the most magnificent thing he had ever seen. Mungo watched his fingers trace the spirals tenderly. “Is this for me as well?”
“Only if you want it.”
“Aye, I love it.”
“You don’t have to say that.”
James sat forward and kissed him. It was all so familiar now. They had moved beyond the clumsy petting and munching. Mungo would stop frequently to apologize, he felt so inept, and James would cradle his face and guide Mungo’s lips back to his. Now their kisses were soft and tender and offered without the fear of refusal. A kiss lasted hours. They lay with their mouths together and Mungo cupped his nose in the divot of James’s cheek, and then they led each other in a silent ramble, one would change the direction and the other would follow, over and over until an arm went dead, or the microwave pinged. A hand might slip under a T-shirt but it never dared to do anything else. Mungo knew he wanted to spend his life doing this, just kissing this one boy. There was no need to rush.
Mungo winced. The skin around his lips was chapped with too much tenderness. They looked bee-stung and had swollen slightly and grown rosy in colour.
“Shall we take a wee break?” Usually, James didn’t stop, he just kissed over the bud of Mungo’s cheek, down past his earlobe and across the pale skin beneath his shirt collar. They had been lucky. A few times they had gotten carried away and Mungo had spent a tense twenty minutes pacing in front of the hallway mirror checking for love bites, James hovering behind him, juggling ice cubes in his hands.
They lay in a nest of their own filth, discarded schoolbags and empty crisp packets. Cereal bowls ringed the carpet in front of the large television, like it was an altar. Half-watched videocassettes were strewn around, stripped of their fake encyclopaedia cases, alongside unfinished homework that had been abandoned in favour of kissing and staring. Mungo thought that if Lord of the Flies had been more like this, he might have paid some attention.
He had been surreptitiously borrowing articles of James’s clothing, intimate things, that he swapped out for his own perfectly clean, if not especially nice gear. It started with a pair of thick socks, after he complained that he was cold, even though James’s flat had central heating that left him dehydrated and with a dull headache. Then he stole a too-big pair of boxer shorts from the clothes pulley, and wore them for three days in a row, under his school trousers, bunched up like Victorian bloomers.
All week they had floated in the mornings from the doocot to separate schools, then back to the doocot, before spending long evenings in James’s front room: top floor, facing the moody sky, far from the eyes of anyone else. When they separated to their own bedrooms, across the back middens, they spent hours gurning at the window, feigning being murdered, and flicking each other the finger all while trying not to laugh too loud.
He had been mooning across the divide one afternoon while Jodie was clearing the dirty dishes. “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?”
“Whut?” Mungo was resting his cheek on the glass, enjoying the cool condensation.
“What’s her name?” asked Jodie.
“None of your business.” He felt more gallus now. No longer a solitary soul.
“Keeping secrets. That’s not very nice.” She tickled his ribs, inspected his sore lips.
“Secrets!” he howled unkindly. “You’re like the Finders Keepers of secrets.” He poked her in the belly and she flinched. He hadn’t known what he said. He was referencing the adverts they had loved on Saturday mornings, where American lassies wrote silly little secrets and locked them safe, in the belly of a stuffed bear. Smiling wee lassies who hadn’t had a teacher’s wean in their gut, stupid wee lassies with no real secrets worth keeping.
Jodie slapped his hand from her stomach. “Ye get more like Hamish every day.”
“God, Jodie, I’m sorry. I didnae think. I didnae mean it.”
“Make your own dinner, Romeo.” She threw the tea towel at him. “And if your girlfriend scabs your face that sore, make sure and think twice afore you put anything else near her.”
The slow hours he spent away from James felt overwhelming. His legs thrummed with a restless energy that irritated Jodie. The hours felt filled with nothing. It was time to sleep and eat and think of things to tell him when he saw him again, stupid little things hardly worth repeating, but he knew James wouldn’t mind.
As they lay around James’s living room one afternoon, James had seemed restless, swinging his shinty stick while they watched television. He sat up suddenly with a demented look upon his face. He was giggling to himself as he draped a blanket and then a bath towel across his shoulders. He pulled his woollen hat upwards till it sat on the very top of his head and resembled a peaked mitre. “Wait. Wait.” James held his caman as though it was a ceremonial mace, and then he turned to face Mungo. He extended his right hand, holding his index and ring fingers aloft as though he was hailing a bus. “Guess who I am?”
Mungo snorted. “Ah dunno. A bam in a bath towel?”
“Naw. I’m you.”
There was a mug of tap water they had been sharing; it somehow made the water taste sweeter to be drinking from the same vessel. Mungo motioned for James to pass it to him. “Fuck off, James. How’s that me?”
James threw his arms wide in a show of saintly grace. He flicked his fingers in an invitation for the believers to come forward and adore him. “Come to me, my child.”
Mungo thought about it. He wanted to obey.
“It’s you. It’s St Mungo.” James turned his profile to the daylight. “It’s the statue they have of you above Kelvingrove Museum. Have you no even seen it?”
Mungo had never been to Kelvingrove, and although it was only a few miles away, he had never been to the West End. To admit this would bring out a feeling of inferiority in him and he wanted so badly for them to remain equals, the very, very same. Mungo rolled his eyes and motioned for the communal chalice again.
James handed him the mug of tap water with a papal flourish of his hand. “Bless you, my son.”
Mungo took a long slug of water. “Wait. Are you wearing your big sister’s trackies?”
James looked down quickly. “Naw!” They were the same trackie bottoms he had been wearing for the past three days. They could do with a wash. “Piss off. Don’t come wide with a holy saint, son.” Mungo was laughing to himself when James looked up again. “How? Is that a bowl cut you’ve got?” He stepped forward and tugged on Mungo’s forelock. “Wait, you do have a bowl cut?”
They had crossed this line a day or two before. They had wandered from timid tenderness to affection wrapped in insults. It was a lovely place for two boys to be: honest, exciting, immature.