Mungo watched a cluster of young men mount their attack on the wall. They had roped together two of their mammy’s wallpapering ladders and someone had stolen the duvet off their little sister’s bed. They wanted to get in because inside were great beasts of heavy JCB machines that could be climbed and smashed and destroyed. Sometimes, inside the cabin of one of the diggers, a workman would forget his tools and the boys would take the bag full of hammers and spanners and make great plans to weaponize them back at the tenements.
Best of all was the time someone left the keys for the JCB digger in the ignition. The Protestant boys took the digger, and after ramming it into other machinery drove it clean through the padlocked gate and up and down the back streets. They were lifting a bucketful of young men up to a second-storey window to peep in at a chubby girl when her mother finally called the polis.
Mungo watched the young men prop their rigged ladders against the wall. Their leader selected the smallest of them to climb the length of it and test it for sturdiness. A ginger-headed youth wrapped a teddy bear blanket around himself and scaled the shaking ladders. When he was high enough to kill himself, the other young men took turns at kicking the bottom of it. It must have been a great entertainment, for they were whooping and betting money on him cracking his skull. They grouped together and pushed the ladder away from the wall. For a moment it stood on its own and the ginger youth teetered with the promise of a broken back. He let out a pathetic howl. The ringleader cut through the others and with one hand he pushed the ladder back against the wall.
“Fuckin’ pack it in,” threatened Hamish.
The ginger boy blanched and wilted like stewed cabbage. He flattened the barbed wire under the teddy bear blanket and stood a while checking for the security guard before he scaled the wall and dropped on to the corrugated roof beyond. Mungo crossed the waste ground and stood next to his brother as the others climbed their siege ladder.
Hamish half-nodded in greeting. He was watching his troops very closely. Mungo knew he would give them harsh feedback later; he ran a neat, ambitious little army. It was important to expose the inadequacies of the men in front of the other men, for it kept them divided. It kept them trying their hardest.
To Mungo, his brother was simply Hamish – Hamey if he was feeling especially brave. But to his troops he was Ha-Ha, or the Big Man, despite his disappointing height. Ha-Ha watched the last of the troops scale the ladder before he addressed Mungo. “Whit’s happenin’ gobshite?”
“Nothing.” Mungo shrugged. “Have you seen Mo-Maw?”
Ha-Ha shook his head. He looked up at Mungo through his thick government lenses, his eyes tiny behind the yellowing glass. As a boy he had been embarrassed by his free tortoiseshell frames, but Mungo knew his brother had mastered this shame, and now relished the chance of anyone calling him a speccy cunt so he could surprise them with the swiftness of his violence. Hamish loved traps: he particularly enjoyed the suspended moment when someone ran off a cliff and didn’t know they were about to fall to their doom. He came to appreciate how his glasses disarmed strangers. Other men would foolishly let the wee wide-o in the pensioner’s glasses get too close, and still thought they could get the better of him, right up until he was shattering their teeth on the kerb edge.
Hamish was not tall, but he was always ready and never, ever scared to hit first. He was wearing his denim jacket and a pair of jeans that were an identical shade of blue. He had buttoned the jacket up to the throat and turned the collar up. On his feet he wore a pair of triple stripe Sambas that looked brand new. Nothing on him was given to fat, every tissue was sinew and muscle. Everything was pulled in tight like he was ready to bolt. Ha-Ha never ran.
“On ye go.” Ha-Ha pointed up at the rickety ladder.
Mungo stepped back.
“How?”
Mungo knew his face was electric. “I’m no in the mood.”
Ha-Ha wrapped a hand around the back of Mungo’s neck. He was going to say something further but instead he thrust his brother at the ladder and Mungo found himself scaling it.
The builder’s yard was not large. The industrial vehicles were packed tight, like pieces of a board game in a box. It was all very neat and orderly: mixers, spreaders, heavy steam rollers, and sitting in the middle, like a band of brontosauruses, were the long-necked excavators.
The key to success at the builder’s yard was not to raid it too often. If you thieved from it too frequently then the foreman would install a temporary night watchman to protect the equipment. He was always a temp, because the Protestant boys would not think twice about stabbing him, so it was hard for the foreman to retain someone full-time. However, if they raided it only once or twice a year, it became a strange sort of parasitic relationship. The boys smashed and stole what they liked, and the foreman claimed the damage on insurance and still came out in the black in his account books. Hamish knew there were times the canny foreman used the raids to replace outdated models, or tools that were half-broken and would cost more to mend than to replace. Hamish had seen him once, in the Louden Tavern, and the man had nodded a faint head bob of respect. Twice a year, no more. It was still cheaper than hiring a night watchman.
The young Protestants were standing on the corrugated roof of the main building; their breath misted the air as though they were a string of Eriskay ponies. Mungo watched their eyes scour the builder’s yard. None of the horses moved until Ha-Ha scaled the wall. He stood amongst them like a general, a stone-washed emperor.
“Hallo, Hallo, we are the Billy boys.
Hallo, Hallo, ye’ll know us by our noise.
We’re up to our knees in Fenian blood, surrender or ye’ll die.
For we are the Brigton Billy boys.”
Ha-ha knew what he was doing. The Orange song filled them with pride. Any fear the half-men harboured vanished on hearing it.