“It’s not a bowl cut.” Mungo slurped the metallic water. He peered at James over the chipped edge. “Besides, nice try, wingnut. Your first miracle as a holy saint should have been to fix those massive ears.”
“Don’t you like ma ears?” James was towering over him.
“Aye,” he grinned. “But can you move a bit to the left? I cannae see the sky.”
James made a grab for the mug. He tipped it and poured the water on to Mungo’s lap. “Piss yourself often, do ye?”
Mungo hooked his leg around James’s and brought him easily to the carpet, water sprayed everywhere. He had found someone he could say the cruellest things to and they would not leave. He didn’t care anymore if his lips were sore. They kissed and sucked and bit and lay on top of each other all the way through the evening news and well past the sour trumpets of Coronation Street. As much as they had kissed it had not yet gone any further. It was enough to put his hand up James’s shirt and feel the broad muscles of his back undulate as he rubbed himself against Mungo. James preferred to keep his own hands in the crook of Mungo’s back, softly stroking the downy hair that was growing above his buttocks. It made Mungo feel sleepy, it made him feel safe.
They pushed against each other harder now. He could feel James stiffen through his thick trackies. He moved his hand and used the back of it to rub where it was warmest, then he turned his palm to it and cupped it gently. James let out a low sigh. He pressed his forehead against Mungo’s, his breath was sweet with sugar and cereal milk. “Do ye want to?”
“I dunno.” Mungo was not sure what he was asking. So far James had been walking down a path ahead of him, while Mungo trailed behind. He led Mungo almost by the hand and several times when he stopped to look at him, it hurt Mungo to feel that the boy with the sticky-out ears might have already been down this road with someone else. He had wanted them to walk it for the first time together.
James raised himself on to his elbows, the front of his trousers tented and damp. As he left the room Mungo felt abandoned, exposed. Pulling his knees to his chest, he wondered what he had done wrong.
“I wanted to show you something.” James came back into the front room, a magazine in his hand. He was flicking through it, looking for something in particular, and Mungo knew from the naked contorted bodies and the cheap sound of the paper what the magazine was. “I visited my aunt once in Dundee. They sold these in the bus station. I missed two buses home before I grew the courage to buy it.”
“They let you buy it?”
James shrugged. “Aye, twelve ninety-nine is twelve ninety-nine, after all.”
The magazine was full of bloated Americans. Men with swollen muscles and lines of amber tans that showed the ghost of their missing swimming trunks. They didn’t have the long, thin limbs of him or James, the soft downy trails of hair, or the white skin that flushed when you touched it, that turned blue or pink depending on temperature, on emotion. Everything about these Americans was artificially plump; they were shaved and plucked, lying on their backs, legs in the air, more like Christmas turkeys than men. There was a painful rictus on their faces, glazed eyes, false winces of pleasure. One man was grinning at the camera while he choked his floppy cock, strangling it like it was an empty tube of toothpaste.
“No way. He’s shoved it up his arsehole.” Mungo was pointing at two baseball players on a slatted bench.
The magazine was not allowed to show a fully erect penis, but by how the men were arranged together, the idea was clear. He had thought about the curved hillock of James’s arse but the centre, the dark hidden part, was not yet something he had thought much about. On the next page, there it was, a man on his back, his legs in the air, his fingers probing himself. It looked painful.
“Aye,” James laid his head on Mungo’s shoulder. “That’s what we do.”
“Who’s we?” scoffed Mungo.
“People lit us.”
“Well. Who is the man and who is the woman?” Mungo asked sincerely.
“Well, you are the woman.”
He shook James from his shoulder. “You are.”
The pictures aroused him. Sometimes – when Jodie was in bed, and Hamish was sleeping at Sammy-Jo’s – he would take his brother’s stiff magazine full of buttery soft women. He liked the spreads with men in them the best and so he folded the page, turned the women to the back, and gave them a little rest. The first time he had doctored a page he had been too firm with the paper. Afterwards, no matter how he tried to smooth it, the telltale crease remained; it would surely grass him up. It was torturous to erect the screeching ironing board without waking his sister. Even after he ironed the page to the point of lifting the inks, the faint crease was still visible. The line still separated the woman from her own mouth and the flaccid cock that she tickled with the tip of her tongue.
James turned the page and amongst all the Americans and their army jeeps – even the cars looked bloated – was a realistic vignette of a bus conductor and a cheeky truant. It looked like the top deck of a Glasgow corporation bus, but the conductor had the boy over his knee and was leathering him with the flat of his hand. The schoolboy was grinning at the camera.
“He must have forgotten his monthly Transcard,” said James.
“Probably tried to get away with a half-fare.”
“Aye, he looks about forty-five.”
James tore the magazine from his grip. Mungo watched it sail across the room, but the images were already burned on the back of his retinas. They would be there, later, projected on to the underside of his duvet, like the pictures they played up at the Parade Cinema.
* * *
The first time Mungo saw James naked, the closeness of him made it hard to take it all in. Mungo wanted to push him away, pin him on the floor, stand over him, and just simply look. But they twisted together, brow to brow, mouth on mouth, and everything was like peeping through a crack in a door: an eyeful of alabaster and rose, the glacial blue of inner arms with their veins like violet rivers, the chafing at James’s elbows that Mungo wanted to kiss so badly, and the fields of fevered carnations blooming high on his pale collarbone. The boy was all growing bones and unblemished skin; a paint chart of the softest whites.
Lying on his back, he had ribs like the hull of an upturned boat, two tiny pink nipples, comically small for such a broad chest. The hollow cavity of his stomach collapsed under the canopy of his ribcage. His pronounced hip bones spoke of a framework he had not filled out yet, but from the muscles of his back, and the globes of his buttocks, it was clear that he would. His body was covered in a fine dusting of white-gold hair, as though pollen had settled upon him. He sparkled faintly in the gloomy daylight.
The feathered mustiness of his armpits and the down that dusted his arse cheeks tickled the tips of Mungo’s fingers. His skin was a bigger and more unexpected landscape than anywhere Mungo had ever been and he was glad to explore it. He travelled along the train tracks left behind by the tight boxer short elastic, the touch of it ribbed and musical under his fingertips. They explored each other, their gangly limbs wrapped together, clumsy and inexperienced, hands too hurried, greedy fingers too eager to rush on to other delights. Their bodies parted and James lay with his forehead pressed against Mungo’s and his breath, all toffee and milky tea, was hot against his face.