She beckoned Mungo over, her hand outstretched like a fine lady’s.
“Mungo, this is Mister Christopher, and this is …” she paused. “Sorry, whit did ye say yer name wis again?”
TWENTY-SEVEN
A scald of panic caused him to flee. For a time, he raced around mindlessly, gathering things, dropping things, stumbling and falling. He bolted into the forest, only to return to the loch, legs twitching, before bolting back in the other direction. It took all the willpower he had, but he eventually stilled his body even as his mind screamed at him to run. Feeling overwhelmed, he stood in the middle of the ruined campsite and closed his eyes and clamped a hand over his mutinous face. Mungo tried to steady his thoughts and think what Hamish would do if he were here. Hamish would do the dishonest thing, the self-serving thing. He would destroy what he could and hide the rest. Then he would lie and pretend like it never, ever, was.
Gallowgate was heavier than he looked, denser, meatier than St Christopher. Mungo could not haul him out to the underwater shelf alone, but he dragged the body as deep as he could and loaded his pockets with small skimming stones. His teeth chattered as he waited for the body to submerge. Mungo stood on the body. He bounced three times and watched Gallowgate’s last breath bubble to the surface. He could still see the whites of Gallowgate’s eyes as he came to rest on the loch bed.
Mungo tidied up the campsite as best he could. He filled the plastic shopping bags with all their scattered debris and then weighted them with small rocks and hurled them into the loch. Tucking the tents into their rolls, he buried them alongside the fishing rods, deep under the thickest ferns where the ground was peatiest. He tidied his own ruined, childish things into his backpack and slung it over his shoulder. Trembling with the last of his adrenaline, he crouched at the edge of the loch and cleaned the dirt from his face, pumiced the worst of the blood stains from his nylon shorts.
As Mungo leaned over the water he focused on his reflection. He wondered what it was the men had recognized in him. Where was this signal he could not see, the semaphore he had never meant to send? Was it in how his eyes never quite met theirs, how they turned themselves down submissively? Was it in how he stood with his hands limp at his side, his weight on one leg? He wanted to find the signal, and he wanted to end its transmission.
The men had looked at him as though they knew what lay inside his soul, things he still had not even admitted to himself. They knew the inescapable shame of it, how isolated it made him feel, and they had used that to separate him from his home and do as they pleased.
His tears fell and distorted his reflection. He thought about James, and the lovely things they had done on his navy carpet. Three days of happiness, three days marked with Chinese burns and clumsy caresses. Greedy little kisses that were full of bumping teeth and shy apologies. It was wrong to compare their loveliness to the things the drunkards had forced on to him. They were not the same thing, Mungo reminded himself. They were not the same at all. They were not.
He thought only of James then. Did he still wear James’s white-sugar kiss on his skin, is that what these men could smell? Could they see it, clear as a stain?
Mungo sat back and wiped his tears with the sleeve of James’s jumper. He washed the tip of Hamish’s shanking knife then stood up and swung his arm to throw it into the loch. Something occurred to him, a lesson he had learned about the unexpected visits of violence. He was still so far from home. He turned the knife in his hand and dropped it into his kangaroo pocket.
Gathering his things, he walked in the direction he thought they had originally come. He tiptoed through the nettles and wound his way amongst the pine and birch trees. He never saw the ram skull on the way back.
Eventually he came to a pitted access road, and for no better reason than to walk towards the slow summer sun, he turned right and followed the daylight. It was early in the afternoon, and between the trees, the clouds were white and moved quick in the sky. After two miles the road ended in a metal cattle grid and he turned again, trying to use the position of the sun to find true south. The road was empty, but every now and then a car would pass him and he would hold out his hand for either direction, unsure of where he was, or where he was headed.
After a few hours a car finally stopped. It was a green Land Rover Defender that was all mucky metal and set high up off the road. It stopped beyond him, a short way up the road, and he had to jog to reach it. As Mungo drew level the man peered down at him and it seemed like he had stopped only to gawp at the dirty boy in the ripped cagoule.
“Boy, where are ye awa’ tae dressed like that?” He had the song of the countryside in his accent.
Mungo tugged his shorts down over the embarrassment of dirt on his legs. He wanted to say to the man, I don’t know. Where should I go? But instead he hung his head and told the stranger he was trying to get to Glasgow. The man ran his eyes the length of him. He said he was going only as far as the big town – some Gaelic sounding place that Mungo had never heard of – but that if Mungo came with him, he would surely find better connections to the south from there.