Mo-Maw was chanting to herself. “All better, all better. See, he’s fine. He’s back now. He’s fine.” She was flapping and turning on the dirt. Mungo could see she was relieved. But the relief was for herself.
The infighting had started on Saturday morning when Jodie had asked her mother where Mungo was, and Mo-Maw had answered vaguely, fishing. It had dawned on them too late. It had occurred to them that Mo-Maw had never known the men she had sent her son away with. But Mo-Maw had become defensive and she insisted there was safety in the company of men; what safer place was there for a young boy to be? What harm could come of it: a few fish, some fresh air, a hot bonfire. It was only Scotland. The bad things that happened here happened on the very streets she had sent him away from.
Hamish crossed the dirt towards them. He grabbed the lip of Mungo’s cagoule pocket and, tugging on it possessively, he peered inside. “Whut? Nothin’ for us?” Mungo had thought it would be impossible to look at Hamish but he found that he could. In fact, he found he could look at him without blinking. Mungo bored his eyes into the bridge of his nose until Hamish stepped back. He let go of his little brother.
“Haw! Any chance of service here?”
It was that, this single sentence, that let him know it was over. Full stop. The taxi driver, with his gut hanging over his money belt, said he needed his black pudding roll, and that he was pure gasping for a small tea with two teabags. Mo-Maw scuttled back to her serving hatch. The bank holiday weekend was over. He was home. It would be a thing they would never talk about again. Like the never-was baby, or James, the boy who Mungo had loved.
Mungo watched as his siblings gathered up their belongings. He saw them with an unusual clarity. It was already over for them. It would never be over for him. He just had no one to tell.
Mo-Maw was gone from him, he knew that now. She was Jocky’s burden, and if not Jocky’s, then some other mug’s, someone who thought he could handle her. He should have been relieved, but he hated that he felt abandoned.
Jodie would leave forever. It would be gradual at first, but then she would finish university and her absences would stretch. Hamish had been right all along. She would round out her vowels and suppress her glottal stop. She would like her bread to be brown and her films to be foreign. Perhaps she would meet someone at uni who she could quietly love, but she would never bring them home at Christmas. She would have a house full of stray puppies if anyone let her. Mungo could imagine her adopting ex-police dogs, so many dogs that her small flat would smell of incontinent Alsatians.
Hamish winked at him. And Mungo knew then that he would not leave.
He would be dragged behind Hamish into all the idle violence they could manage. He would need to find a girl, he would need to get her pregnant quickly, he would try his best to love her. He would work when he could, and he would steal what he could, and on Thursdays and Saturdays he would sell ten-pound eccies to university students outside the Sub Club and the Arches. He would fight the Bhoyston until he got too old and then he would go to Old Firm games and get into rammies outside the Louden Tavern and sing his supremacist songs every twelfth of July. He would need to become the man that Hamish expected him to be.
“Do you want a bath?” Jodie was heaving her satchel on to her shoulder.
But Mungo wasn’t listening.
Across the road, outside the monstrous infirmary, was a figure. Mungo had not noticed him at first. The buses to the East End were idling in the holiday traffic and the figure kept dropping out of view. The young man was waiting patiently, like he was about to cross the road, but the opportunity came, and he stayed where he was. He would never cross that road.
Around his feet were a pile of mismatched bags, lumpy and bloated, stuffed with soft clothes, full of his life. He wore two heavy coats despite the summer heat. There were black stitches on his pale chin and both his eye sockets were dark blue where his nose had been broken. His ruined fingers were splinted and bound with pink gauze that was already grimy with dirt.
He was watching, and he was waiting, and he was leaving all at the same time.
They stood and regarded each other over the four lanes of traffic. It felt like an eternity. Every time a white van would block his view, Mungo’s stomach lurched and he held his breath until it moved again and he was sure the boy was still there, with his packed bags, still watching and waiting. There he was, James-Guid-and-True.
James raised his broken hand in a half-greeting. It was discreet, tentative, like they were only strangers. But it was only for Mungo. It was for no one else.
Mungo smiled something small and timid. James returned it, and they let their grins widen slowly, slowly, until Mungo knew what he was going to do, where he was going to go. The only place he would ever want to be.
Jodie had gone to see James when Mungo had telephoned Mo-Maw from the lochside. She had pressed his buzzer, but he would not answer, would not let her in. Jodie had hammered all the buzzers on the panel. She had waited until a neighbour admitted her and then stormed the stairs. On her knees at his letter box she told James the story of what had happened – or told it to the empty hallway, since James hid in the shadows.
His face was pummelled, and he would not open the door to any Hamilton. He stood frozen in the hallway and looked at the ripped-out phone jack. “Mungo hasnae phoned,” James lisped from the darkness. “He couldnae phone us, even if he wanted to.” Jodie let go of the flap. From what she glimpsed through the letter box she could tell she had interrupted his packing.
* * *