“Mungo Hamilton,” his Modern Studies teacher often declared, “How come ye cannae be mair lit yer sister?” The little Napoleon had a mass of grey curls that he teased out on all sides in the hopes it might make him more imposing. He spoke in a gruff Glaswegian dialect. Mungo knew he faked it in order to appear authentic to the East End weans, and to subjugate them by sounding like their fathers. Many of the male teachers did this because their proper Queen’s English stank of privilege and always elicited mockery when they raised their voices and tried to control their classrooms. The man drummed his fist on Mungo’s forehead as if he was checking the hull of a leaky boat. “How can’t ye be mair lit Jodie?” Mr Gillespie would pause – he liked an uncomfortably long silence – before he would dismiss Mungo back to his desk with a wave of his stubby hand. “Ah suppose at least yer fuck all like your Hamish, and that’s better than nuthin’.”
Mungo gladly let Jodie do his homework while he sat by the radio and recorded the top forty on to a cassette. When he grew bored of this, he found a balloon in the kitchen drawer and blew it up, then he and Jodie kicked it back and forth without letting it touch the carpet. Once or twice, Jodie swung her leg too hard and her tight pencil skirt caught her other leg and swept her to the floor. While she lay there laughing, he would sit on her chest and pretend to dribble spit on to her face. They didn’t wrestle, and eventually their gaze would slide back to the television. Mungo would sit on her for a while, and Jodie would let him, until he became too heavy, or she needed to get up and go pee. She would be late for her shift at Garibaldi’s Café; Mungo knew she would have to run all the way down Armadale Street just so Enzo wouldn’t scream at her in Italian for twenty minutes straight. Still, here she was, kicking this stupid balloon and ripping the seam of her best skirt just so he wouldn’t be lonely without her. She was good like that.
“What are you going to do tonight?” she asked.
“Mibbe walk about for a while.”
“You need to try and make some frien …” When she saw his eyes were twitching, she trailed off.
He was standing on the balloon and trying to burst it.
“Listen, I’m not coming home after my shift tonight. Don’t worry, I’ll find you at lunchtime tomorrow and we can sit together. I promise.”
“Where are you going after Garibaldi’s?”
“Never you mind.” He followed her as she started filling her schoolbag with strange things: hair tongs, corn plasters, a velvet dress she had ironed and hung on the back of the bathroom door. “I’m staying with one of the girls from my History class.”
“But who?”
She tapped the end of her nose. There was panic rising inside him and she could see it clear as a bubbling pot. “But I’m not Mo-Maw. I will be back tomorrow. Promise.”
“Okay.” He tried to not pick at his face but he couldn’t help himself.
* * *
After Jodie was gone Mungo stood at the window and worried for Mo-Maw some more. To kill the quiet, he took out his sketchbook. Letting his hand glide over the page made him forget himself. Jodie had been the first to notice it. One day she had grown irritated by his restlessness and had given him one of her old jotters and a half-chewed blue biro. When he couldn’t concentrate or grew itchy, she opened it to a blank page, and he drew great sprawling patterns. He never drew figures, he just started in a corner with the indigo ink and let it wander where it would until he had filled the page with intricately swirling, interlocking jacquards: things that looked like peacock feathers, fish scales, or ivy vines, all looping around each other till no whiteness remained. There were wonderful patterns forming in his mind. They could look as ornate as the Bayeux Tapestry or as simple as Ayrshire lace.
But today the blank page could not hold his attention. His mind would not leave his mother alone.
It had been Mo-Maw’s turn to mop out the close, which meant it became Jodie’s responsibility. For the past two weeks Mungo had watched his sister skitter inside the close mouth and sneak up the stairs before any of the neighbours could open their door and shame her for the stour. It was unfair, Mungo thought: Jodie was run ragged, and all because she had a fanny.
With nothing better to do, he filled the tin bucket and poured globs of Jodie’s conditioning shampoo into the water. He started on the top landing, outside Mr Donnelly’s door, and washed each stone step on his way downstairs. The close soon smelled tropical with happy bursts of coconut and strawberry chewing gum, but the mop grew slick and several times he had to wash a landing again and again to calm all the bubbles.
The Hamilton family lived on the third floor of a four-storey sandstone tenement. The close wasn’t fancy but it was well kept, and everybody went to the bother of leaving a clean doormat outside their door. There were two flats on every landing and each half-landing had a stained-glass window, a simple diamond pattern that let in light from the back green and cast a subdued olive and indigo down the stone stairway.
As he emptied the perfumed water into the gutter he watched gangs of young Proddy boys prowl along the road. They had their jackets zipped open despite the damp cold, and they hung off their thin shoulders in an air of gallus nonchalance. Without exception, they wore their hair parted in the middle and hanging over their eyes in heavy gelled curtains.
“Mungo!” they called at him. They balled up their faces, twisted them like wrung-out tea towels.
Annie Campbell was out on her landing by the time Mungo climbed back up the stairs. She was rubbing at the stone floor with her foot, her husband’s moccasin slipper making a tacky, sucking sound. “Oh! Mungo son, what did ye wash this wi’?”
“Just shampoo, Missus Campbell.” He had always liked Mrs Campbell. When they were younger, she had baked cakes. On dreich days, if she had heard them playing in the close, she would give them each a slice of Selkirk bannock and tell them how she missed her own boys, all grown and headed somewhere south to look for work. Mungo knew Mr Campbell used to work for Yarrow Shipbuilding, although he couldn’t remember Mr Campbell ever leaving the house for work, not since Thatcher had stopped funding for the Clyde. Now Mr Campbell rotted away in an armchair that faced a hot television, and the Hamilton children slunk against the wall if they ever met him on the stairs.
Mrs Campbell swept Mungo’s hair off his face. “Honestly son, ye are all kindness and no common sense.” She dug around in her pinny and handed him a fistful of lemon drops. They were all congealed and stuck together as one.
“Ah havnae seen your mammy in a guid while. Is she keeping awright?”