“Aye, that’s what I telt her. Gullible bitch.” She laughed bitterly. She had already warmed to Mungo. “Yer much better looking than yer brother.”
“Do you kiss better an all?” asked Nicola, who was still holding Morrissey at arm’s length. The girls all erupted in squeals of laughter. Suddenly they were fifteen again, only children after all.
“What did ye bring us?” asked Ashley. James already had his hand on her knee, he was moving his lips from her earlobe down to her fine neck.
Mungo dug around in his cagoule pocket for three bars of Terry’s mint chocolate.
Nicola immediately tore into it. “Whut? I’ve no had my dinner. My mammy’s at the infirmary with my wee brother. He swallowed an Easter ornament.”
James’s lips were locked over Ashley’s. Their mouths were opening and closing so wide that Mungo could see the muscle strain on James’s jaw. It was more of a mauling than a kiss but Ashley was swooning, encouraging him with little groans of pleasure. The ash from her cigarette dangled and fell on to the wet ground.
The other girls ate the chocolate and passed the bottle of Mad Dog between themselves. “Here, if you mix them, it tastes like one of they fancy cocktails.”
Mungo stood in the middle of the damp pathway and tried not to watch James. The girls flicked through the magazine, laughing at the dated haircuts on pop groups that had long since disbanded, and ignored Mungo entirely. He was certain he could walk away and no one would call after him. Angelique eventually looked up at him and studied him for a moment. Her face was peppered with pretty ginger freckles. “My mammy says you have roulettes. Is that true?”
“Roulettes?”
Angelique blinked half a dozen times in quick succession. Her tongue hung out of the side of her mouth like a strangled dog’s. “Do ye?”
Mungo watched the double-decker buses chug along the Parade. He imagined himself on the top deck, going somewhere, anywhere away from here. He didn’t know if he had Tourette’s – he didn’t want to know. When his blinking and ticcing had first become noticeable, Jodie had taken him to see the doctor. Dr Chaudhry had not seemed too concerned. She asked Mungo if there was stress in his life, if he was experiencing a particularly anxious time. Jodie had started laughing – not her usual affectation, but a nervous giggle that worsened the more she tried to hold it in. It was infectious, and Mungo began to laugh at the sight of his sister struggling to maintain her composure. Dr Chaudhry had become annoyed with them, and accused them of wasting her time. Jodie eventually gathered herself, and apologized, and said yes, she believed Mungo had stress in his life, and that it was nothing especially new.
The doctor said the stuttering facial muscles were not anything to be worried about, not yet. She said that they should increase the vitamins and magnesium in Mungo’s diet, but that if it didn’t calm down in six to nine months they should return, because it might be a sign of nerve damage or, more likely, Tourette’s. Fourteen months had passed and Mungo hadn’t returned to the doctor. He would rather not know and live in the faint hope of the ignorant; praying that it might clear up one day, in the same way his eruption of teenage acne had come and gone.
“I don’t know,” said Mungo.
At that moment five men appeared on the crest of the path. They passed under a canopy of trees and dipped in and out of the gloomy daylight. Each man had a single golf iron over his shoulder, and they walked, bandy-legged, towards the young lovers. Mungo froze. James stopped mauling Ashley and looked to the advancing men, trying to discern if they were neds or actually golfers. Imperceptibly, the boys rose on to the balls of their feet. As the men came closer, one of them was swinging his club as though the youths were a thicket and he wanted to clear a path through them. Mungo stepped back and on to the grass, and the men passed by without incident. Mungo and James shared a glance. They didn’t take their eyes from the men until they faded from view.
“So, which one of us do ye like?” asked Angelique.
“What?” Mungo turned back to the girl. He shrugged. “I think ye’re both lovely.”
‘Well ye cannae kiss us both, we’re no perverts.”
“Ah should go wi’ him,” said Nicola, the chocolate clotted on her braces. “Ah winched his brother.”
“What, is it a family account?”
“Naw. Ah’m just saying, everybody already knows ah’ve been wi’ a Hamilton. This one wouldn’t count a whole different person. It’s like a half-point or somethin’。 It’s no as bad.”
“Wie du willst,” said Angelique in gruff German. She took up the NME again and was flicking through the pages. “But I’m no standing at the bushes keeping edgy for ye.”
Nicola stepped off the bench and held out her hand like he had asked her to dance. Her assertiveness terrified him. She led him across the path and into some muddy ground surrounded by thick rhododendron bushes. It was a gloomy kind of dark in the centre. With no hesitation, she pressed up against him and took him in her arms.
Nicola was easily a head taller than James, and Mungo had to arch his back and stand on his toes as her mouth reached downwards and clamped over his. She smelled of fresh apple shampoo and like she lived in a house full of smokers. He could feel the jagged edge of her braces as she opened her mouth wide as a bin lid.
Mungo tried to match what she did and started counting from a thousand back to zero. He made it to 944 before she pushed him away. Nicola began smacking her chocolatey lips, as though she tasted something she hadn’t enjoyed. She peered at him in the darkness. The last of the daylight, dying somewhere far away, glinted in her pupils.
TWENTY
Mungo stood just beyond the bend in the road and watched them through the smirr. He picked at a patch of green paint that was clinging to the rusting fence. As he watched the laughing girls, he pushed the shard between his nail and nail bed, gritting his teeth as the paint flake cut into the soft skin.
The girls were huddled in the dry doorway. They were struggling against each other, two pushing inwards while the smallest one tried to hold them at bay. It looked like a fight but they were shrieking with glee and talking so loudly that women had gathered at their windows. Nicola easily reached over Ashley’s head and held her finger against the old close buzzer. The electric intercom shrieked. The sound carried down the narrow street, tweeeeeeee-eeeeeee, tweeeee-eeee-ee, tweeeeeeee-ee.
“Ah’m gonnae murder you,” Ashley hissed, but she was clearly delighted. She turned to run, but Nicola had hold of her anorak hood, so she threw her ringed fingers over her face, splayed wide enough to keep watching what was happening. “Ah’ll die of embarrassment.”
“Hallo. Is anybody there?” It was James’s voice, as friendly as it must have sounded to the masturbating men on the chatline.
The girls took turns to squeal into the intercom declarations of love for him and confessions of how Ashley was mad in the passion. Ashley tried to clamp her hands over her friends’ mouths, but they twisted free, and it was a battle she didn’t really want to win.
“If ye come out to the park, Ashley says she’ll let you dae whatever ye want to her.”