Mungo listened to the side zipper slide open on Gallowgate’s sleeping bag. It was followed by the slow, tinny snickert of his own. Gallowgate’s denims were unexpectedly cold against his bare legs. The man’s arm moved down to the boy’s waist. Gallowgate pulled himself tighter against Mungo’s back. His fingers were splayed like a star on Mungo’s stomach.
“Hamish didn’t even let me try with the stabilizers he just took them off and said I was never to use them then he got on the bike and pedalled away from me he made me run after him all the way up to the top of the big hill and put me on the bike then he held the seat and right afore he let go he said he’d batter the fuck out of me if I fell off.” Mungo kept on talking to the dark. “The bike was wobbly but I stayed on it for ages and ages then it got faster and faster and faster till I couldn’t pedal and I had to lift my feet because the pedals were slapping my legs. I was happy for a moment.” Mungo drew a breath there. He could feel the man’s lips were slightly parted, they pressed lightly against the knuckle of his spine. “When I got to the bottom I didn’t know what to do because Hamish hadn’t shown me how to stop properly or how to turn so I just kept going and battered right into the red car it hurt my face and my arm and my knee and my bike took the hubcap off of one of the wheels I was lying on the ground crying with a nosebleed when Hamish came running and picked me up and we ran and hid behind the big green bushes.”
Gallowgate let out a shuddering breath of foul air. Then he started snoring. Mungo felt the arm grow dead around him. He stopped talking. It was a lot warmer in the shared sleeping bag. He felt stupid to have worried.
FOUR
There were rows of teeth marks on the windowsill, perfect little half-moons of anxiety. All afternoon Mungo knelt before the bay window and watched the street for her, his teeth sinking into the soft wood, the metallic taste of lead emulsion coating his tongue. The small flat was marked with his distracted grinding; the corners of towels were chewed and sodden, the hem of his school shirt was balled and stuffed into his mouth until he choked, the handle of the wooden spatula had a hammered pattern where he had clenched it between his molars.
After the trouble with the polis, Mungo spent a lot of time at the window. For days afterwards he avoided Hamish as best as he could, travelling in great wide arcs to stay far from his line of sight. It did no good.
Mungo came home from school one day and Hamish was sitting alone in the kitchenette. There were layers of clean clothes hanging from the laundry pulley above his head. Jodie had been busy keeping the house going, stripping beds, bleaching whites. Now Hamish sat beneath it smoking. He spoiled everything.
“Hallo.” Mungo surprised himself with how casually it came out. There was a disappointment in seeing his brother, but also a sick sort of relief. His schoolbag slid from his shoulder.
“You’ve been avoiding us,” said Hamish with a knowing laugh. There was fresh ink on his knuckles. Hamish liked to give himself tattoos using an old sewing needle and a burst biro. Curving across the knuckles of one fist was “Adri” and on the other “Anna,” Adrianna, the indigoed name of his little pink daughter. “Funny that. I should be the one embarrassed to run into you.”
Hamish’s tattoos had a disjointed, improvised feeling. The shapes were primitive and the designs were never plotted out, or laid against some larger, cohesive plan. When Hamish got dressed in the mornings Mungo had tried to decipher them. The ox heads and daggers and coiled serpents appeared at random and were spread out across Hamish’s pale skin from his nape to his kneecaps. He was punctured with a million pinpricks, tiny bursts of blue ink, and the symbols seemed scattered across him like constellations in a night sky.
“Have you seen Mo-Maw?” Mungo opened the kitchen cupboards, one after the other, hoping they were not empty, but knowing that they were.
“No. She’s probably done a runner. Does she owe somebody money?” He flicked his cigarette into the pile of dishes in the sink. “Leave a saucer of milk out for her, a packet of ten Regals. She’ll be back when she needs something.”
Mungo slunk out of the kitchenette. There would be nothing to eat until Jodie finished her shift. If she didn’t come back tonight, there would be nothing to eat until the morning.
“You havnae thanked me for saving you the other night.” Hamish was starting his menace. He followed his brother to the living room. Mungo threw himself on the settee and wished he would get on with it. “What the fuck were ye playing at? It wisnae Apocalypse Now. Why the fuck did ye no leave that ginger arsehole?”
“He was hurt.”
“So? I put a brick into the side of that polis’s face for you. I could get the jail and all because you were playing Florence Nightingale.”
“He nearly died. He was shittin’ it. I couldn’t leave him.” Mungo kept his eyes on the blank television, it was better to watch Hamish in the reflection, not to meet the provocation of his gaze. “It just felt wrong.”
Hamish pulled Mungo to his feet. He wrapped his tattooed hand around the back of Mungo’s neck and put his forehead against his brother’s. He must have seen it somewhere as a way for fathers to comfort sons, or to subjugate them. It should have felt tender, but something had twisted within him a while ago. Mungo tensed his stomach muscles and waited for the blow.
“The polis have been going door to door asking after us. They want to know who’s been robbin’ the builders. It’s only a matter of time afore some spiteful auld cunt grasses, and all because you couldnae man up.”