One by one they dropped off the guttering and hit the gravel like spears of rain. Mungo turned to his brother but Hamish had vanished, and Ha-Ha was in no mood to talk to him. He was watching his soldiers make the first sweep, seeing what could be soundlessly liberated, before the fun of the smashing started. Then Ha-Ha shoved his brother and Mungo hooked his hands on to the tin guttering and dropped the fourteen feet to the ground.
The youths were ripping things out of the cabins now, tearing up owner’s manuals and carelessly tossing screws like shrapnel. Of all the things they did, this was the part that Mungo hated the most. He could understand the theft – stolen things were useful – but this was just mindless destruction. The ginger-headed boy had found a bright orange hard hat; it dwarfed him and made him look like a wean who was terminally sick. Mungo watched him hammer his head into the side window of a steamroller. He did it again and again until the glass cracked and he could push the rest of it in with his elbow.
Ha-Ha never came down to the ground. From time to time the squad would throw things up to him, forgotten wrenches or a rusting spirit-level. Behind his thick glasses he watched everything like a tawny osprey. He pointed from his perch and the boys scurried off, searching for the shadow of his talon.
One of the squad was being too considerate in rifling through a toolbox. He was sitting in the raised bucket of a digger, as comfortable as a new settee. He was a tall youth who wore his mousy hair long on the sides and softly feathered over his eyes. Mungo knew that he occasionally spoke in the Queen’s English – not hame but home, not didnae but did not – and that it slipped out of him when he was tired. He had a proud mother and a working father who still lived at home. The others teased him for it. Ha-Ha’s voice boomed over the gravel. “Haw Prince Charles! Can ah bring ye a cup o’ tea? Ya fuckin’ poofter.”
The marauders stopped what they were doing, fearful that he should be naming one of them a deviant, an aberration amongst decent men. Ha-Ha pointed his finger directly at the youth and shook his head in shame. “Stop fuckin’ wasting time like ye were choosin’ carrots to shove up yer arse.” The mousy boy scattered the toolbox as he tried to reclaim his manhood. The others tittered and went about ransacking the place with a sense of relief. There was nothing more shameful than being a poofter; powerless, soft as a woman.
Mungo hid in the darkened cabin of a backhoe, safe from Ha-Ha’s glare. He watched the mousy-haired boy flush scarlet and then spray the box of brackets everywhere with a malicious kick. The others scavenged all the weapons and tools they could and when they were done, they started their smashing. A ruddy-faced youth swung a fence post off the window of the excavator. The safety glass made a satisfying crunch.
When they grew tired of this, they moved on to the third stage, and, reverting to children again, they played. The young men climbed on to the roof of the smallest of the loaders and made a great circuit of jumping from one to the other, never touching the ground. They ran this obstacle course of follow-my-leader and climbed higher and higher. They found new ways to make it more dangerous. They took it in turns to climb the angled neck of the brontosaurus excavators, they crept upwards to the bucket and then they leapt, gliding through the air to the roof of a backhoe. If they missed, then it was a twenty-foot plummet to the ground. But they flew across the night sky like fearless angels, their tracksuits flapping behind them like flightless wings.
The machinery was wet with rain. Mungo watched as some of the boys slipped on the angled neck of the brontosaurus. One or two overshot the jump and slid across the wet backhoe only to catch themselves at the very last moment on the raised rubber seal of a window. It always made the others hold their breath and fall silent for a moment. As the lucky boy hauled himself to his feet they would whoop for their own immortality.
Ha-Ha stood on the roof smoking a short dout. He had transformed from an emperor to a bored dad who hated having to share custody. It was as though he was watching his weans work off a day of sugary treats before he could return them to their mothers. It was because Mungo was watching his brother that he saw the sky change. Ha-Ha saw it too, the rhythmic pulse of blue and white. The police cars had crept nearer without wailing their sirens. Now they were at the gates. Ha-Ha had let his weans play too long.
Mungo spilled from the tin-can cabin and started the quick climb from front wheel to back wheel to engine mount to roof. He was bounding across the yard as the polis burst through locked gates. Around him the squad leapt from the long excavator arm and raced to the guttering and on to the safety of the roof. They were squealing like six-year-olds at a fairground as they danced away from the bogeyman’s grasp. Only when they reached the safety of the roof and the dauntless protection of Ha-Ha did they straighten up and become men again. They arched their backs and showered the polis with phlegm.
Six policemen arrived in two Rovers and one battered detention van. They caught one of the slower boys who jumped unwittingly into an officer’s arms. He held him for a moment like they were startled lovers.
The ginger-headed youth twisted on the neck of the excavator, slunk to his nylon backside, and was about to slide down and away from the polis. Mungo was almost at the guttering when he saw the boy fall. The metal must have been wetter than he had thought, and he slipped off the high arm as gracelessly as a bag of flour falling off a shelf.
He didn’t split open like a bag of flour and he didn’t cry out, but by the way his arm crumpled beneath him and the odd angle of his hand, Mungo could tell he had broken his wrist, maybe even shattered his forearm.