“This is what you do when a bird gets distressed.”
“Is it not kinder to jist snap their necks?”
James laughed. “It’ll be over soon. Then we can pick any direction and ride our bikes there.”
“And what about Ashley?”
“You ask too many questions.”
“If you do shag her, I would understand.” It was a gamble to say it, he could lose, but he needed to say it regardless. “But, like, I will also die.”
“Nah. You’re harder than ye look.” James stopped stroking his neck and drew his knuckle gently across the twitching cheekbone. When Mungo opened his eyes ten digits were splayed before him, he added his own hands and extended four more, then James folded one away. “Look, only thirteen left now. Ma da has only thirteen more shore leaves til you turn sixteen.” He seemed like he wanted a smile from Mungo before he left. Just one single smile. Mungo would not surrender one.
Mungo found himself staring at the countdown. It had seemed innocent as an advent calendar a few days ago. But now he pictured Jodie with her bags already packed, Ashley sprawled on her parent’s bed, and Hamish, wild on his own supply, with a bottle of siphoned petrol in his hand. Thirteen fingers, thirteen shore leaves, was a distance too far to imagine. They wouldn’t both make it. Not safely. Not together. “I can leave now, if you can? Tonight. Who cares if somebody phones the polis? Who cares if the school sends out the Social Work? We can hide. Let’s just fuckin’ go.”
James chewed the inside of his cheek. It was worse than he had thought. He reached beyond Mungo and closed the doocot door. In the darkness his strong fingers encircled Mungo, they pressed against his ribs and moved around to his spine as the long arms snaked around him. Mungo suffocated himself against James’s chest, he found the prickle of Shetland wool solid and comforting. James’s breath felt hot against his crown. “I listened to your mixtape. I stand in the dark at my window and listen to it every night. I thought you said it was all top forty but it’s only one song over and over.”
“I felt embarrassed. I lied.”
“I love the Smiths.”
Mungo rubbed his face on the lambswool. “But how come Morrissey didnae think there was panic on the streets of Glasgow? There’s plenty of fuckin’ panic here.”
“Probably because Glasgow rhymes with fuck all. Well, anytime I hear it I will think of you. Ya handsome wee devil.” He tilted his head towards Mungo’s lips and kissed him deep on the mouth. Then he shoved him back to arm’s length and shook him slightly. “Cheer up. I love you, Mungo Hamilton.”
“Don’t.” Something in him could not stand to be loved.
“How no? I can love you if I want.”
“It’ll just make it harder for me. When everything gets spoiled.”
James took his hands away. Mungo felt like the doo again as the anxiety flooded his body. Without opening his eyes, he could hear the rusty hinges of the heavy door, could feel the cold, weak light on the pink of his eyelids.
“Not everything good goes bad.”
Mungo wanted to believe that.
James took up the pliers again. “Only two more days. We can be the gether again. Can you come over on Saturday night? He should be on the last train back to Aberdeen by then.”
“Aye, okay.” Mungo tried his best to sound nonchalant, when in reality he would look forward to that moment for every minute in between. Then he shook his head, and his hair fell over his eyes again. “Wait, naw. I can’t come on Saturday night.”
“How no?” James looked crestfallen.
Mungo would never admit it, but he liked to see James’s disappointment, the slight swing back of power. It was a twisted payment for the starvation he had suffered the past week. “Nothing. It’s jist our Hamish’s nonsense.”
“Can’t you just tell him no?”
Mungo laughed at the absurdity of the idea. “That’s funny. Let me tell him I don’t like his glasses while I’m at it.”
“What can be that important it cannae wait?”
“I hate it. But there’s a fight planned for Saturday night across the Royston bridge. The Bhoyston have been bamming them up. He said I needed to be there to give them hauners. It’s a reputation thing. I’m a Hamilton.” He skipped over the threat about burning James alive. “Hamish wouldnae take no for an answer.”
“So, you’re just gonnae go and chib some Catholics?”
“Honestly, I’m brickin’ it. But I was hoping to jist show face, then stand at the back, like.” Mungo found a bottle of penicillin on the shelf. He shook it like it was a maraca.
“But I’m a Catholic.”
“You’re no really. It’s no the same, you’re different. You don’t even go to chapel.”
“It’s exactly the fuckin’ same.” He turned his shoulder on Mungo and said just loud enough for him to hear. “Ye’re a wee coward.”
Idiot. Weakling. Poofter. Liar. Coward.
“You do well worse things to hide yourself.”
“At least ah don’t hurt other people.”
Mr Jamieson would be hurt, Ashley would be hurt too, but she would recover swiftly. Mungo did not want to breathe life into these people and bring them back into the doocot between them. “These Catholic fighters, the Bhoyston, they want to hurt me as well. If I don’t stand up to them, I’ll run into them one day in the Trongate or the Briggait, and they’ll slash me from here to here.” Mungo ran his fingernail from his earlobe to the corner of his mouth. He pressed so hard it left a bloodless line that flickered and faded. It was pure Ha-Ha talking.
James was hunched over the broken hinge just as Mungo had found him. It was strange to see; it was like he had never even visited, as though he had not altered James’s day one bit. His life would go on without him. “If you fight the Catholics, don’t come on Saturday. Don’t come near me on Sunday or Monday or ever again. If you do that, I don’t want to know you.”
TWENTY-TWO
Mungo dared not fall asleep. It was his third night at the lochside and his head was bobbing on his shoulders. Gallowgate was in no hurry. He rolled a mean cigarette from scavenged baccy and smoked it inside the collapsing tent. As he told his stories he held the glowing tip too close to the combustible fabric. Mungo didn’t care anymore. Let it burn.
By the last light of the tea candle, the inked man advanced upon him slowly, territorially, painted knuckles on the ground. He touched him almost tenderly and caressed the boy with a gentleness that made Mungo feel sick. Mungo put his hand over Gallowgate’s mouth – he couldn’t bear to hear him say sweet things – but Gallowgate took it the wrong way. He licked the inside of Mungo’s palm, nibbled from the meat to the fingertip, his tongue slipping in and out between his fingers.
The tenderness quickly evaporated and the inked man began pawing at him, forcing rough hands inside Mungo’s clothes. His greed possessed him, his eyes looked bottomless in the candlelight, and he scratched the boy as he grabbed at his flesh. Mungo didn’t want what came next. He spat into his own cupped hands and then wrapped them around Gallowgate’s swelling. In the flickering light, he worked as quickly as he could to give the man what he wanted, and to send him back into the darkness.