Mungo had mixed feelings about the February half-term holidays. School provided a relief from worrying about Mo-Maw all day, and he looked forward to the free school dinners. With the school closed for a week, he was soggy with listlessness. Jodie had no time to distract him as she took on more shifts at the Italian café, her wages were barely able to cover feeding them both without Mo-Maw’s benefit books.
Most days, Jodie let Mungo come and sit with her at lunchtime and together they shared a deep-fried pizza in one of the booths towards the back. Enzo took a frozen pizza and, cracking it over the bone of his knee, folded it in two. He dipped it in a batter, the same creamy gloop that smothered all the fish and sausages, and then fried it quickly. It ended up as a bubbling mass of glorious stodge and melted cheese. Mungo had to burst it open and let the magma cool before they could touch it. When they were finished eating they both felt greasy and tired, yet underneath this was the sensation of being completely full and there was a comfort in that.
Mungo swung his legs underneath the table and tested Jodie on her French verb conjugation. He was rotten at French; every sentence felt as though it was spoken by a manic stutterer and the idea that something as simple as a spoon had a sex left him feeling agitated and with the desire to break something. It was like a game no one would tell him the rules to. When he pressed Jodie on the rules, she just shrugged. When he quizzed Jodie, he got the French pronunciation wrong, so Jodie would correct the question and then provide a perfect answer. She was that good. He laid his head on the table and told her how she would go to college and live in a fancy house in the West End. She flicked her apron at him and went back to work.
After this, Mungo was left with the yawning gape of the day in front of him. Sometimes he chewed the windowsill, sometimes he bothered Mrs Campbell. He would chap her door and ask if she needed anything doing. She was a busy woman, happiest when she was being useful, so she mostly always said no. But sometimes, there on her doormat, she would run her fingers through his thick hair. He liked the way her short nails raked his scalp. It took him a few visits to realize that this was what he came for.
Once or twice Jodie came home with news of a Mo-Maw sighting. One of the ice-cream lickers had seen her in Haghill, or getting on the Barras bus with thick armfuls of shopping. These women had never spoken to her, they had just seen her, but they said she looked well, hale, freshly painted. Jodie would lie and smile and say, yes, yes, Mo-Maw was doing great. She was ecstatic to be a granny to Ha-Ha’s little Adrianna.
When she was safe at home, these comments made Jodie apoplectic. As she sprayed her work shoes with deodorant she called their mother filthy names that made Mungo blanch. She was harshest on Mo-Maw in a way that only girls were allowed to be. She said it felt like having a lost dog you couldn’t admit had run away, a wayward bitch that you hoped would come home when her heat broke. At first, these sightings were a small comfort to Mungo. For a brief flash they gave him hope that she hadn’t been murdered, that she wasn’t floating somewhere in the cloudy Clyde. But if she was alive, why didn’t she come home? And after a while he also came to hate receiving news of her looking happy, stories of her whistling round the Trongate.
Over half-term he kept a wide berth around Hamish. He avoided the council flat where Hamish stayed with his girlfriend, his new baby, and his sort-of mother-in-law. He skirted the waste ground where the boys played football and set up turf wars with the Catholics from Royston.
Since the incident with the flying brick, the polis drove up and down the tenement streets constantly. They would chap at the door of anyone who might tell them who the boys were that raided the builder’s yard. Almost everyone knew it was Ha-Ha, but nobody would take the risk of grassing. The polis officer was still in the hospital. His jaw had been mangled and was hinged with four metal pins; he was left with a clamped mouth that wouldn’t open wide enough for solid food.
There was a quiet, forgotten place behind the tenements, a scrabble of trees that sat between the edge of the motorway and the last row of sooty sandstone. The city council had fenced in as much land as they intended to care for, and opposite this the roads department had fenced in the rushing motorway. Between these two fences was a sliver of unclaimed grass, a purgatory only forty feet wide. Over the half-term Mungo sat on the grass, picking at the scraggly wildflowers, feeling guilty about the policeman. Sometimes old men with leash-less dogs would dauner by, but mostly, Mungo was alone. He took out his sketchbook and drew the grids and interlocking faces of the tenements. Without lifting his pen he filled a double page with a wall of bricks and windows with tightly packed venetian blinds. But the roaming pen could not calm his mind. He closed the sketchbook, and then his eyes, laid his chin on his clasped hands, and felt the breeze of the day trippers as the traffic sped past to Edinburgh.
There was a doocot at the far edge of the forgotten grass. A two-storey shelter, six feet by six feet, and fourteen feet tall. The rectangular turret looked hastily put up from old, corrugated iron, a set of heavy front doors and glossy melamine that came from dismantled cafeteria tables. The whole structure had a tottering angle but was sturdy enough; each seam was nailed or soldered firmly shut, and the roof was sealed from the rain with thick tarpaper. A sliding skylight was fixed on to this roof, and over this skylight was a wire basket that cantilevered and acted as a snap-trap of sorts. Although it was made of scraps, the tower had a house-proud feel. Whoever built it had taken great care; they had painted it in a drab olive colour, an unassuming tone that would camouflage it against the waste ground it sat upon. There was a working door mounted on to one face, and laid across this were three heavy iron bars each with a fist-sized padlock.