Mungo had been summoned. He was hunchbacked in front of the television, drawing a tight spiral that he didn’t know how to end. Jodie looked at him havering over whether to go. She turned off the television and reminded him of how much worse it would be if he didn’t do exactly as Hamish asked.
Most of the time Hamish stayed in one of the damp council flats that were built in the 1960s. Mrs McConnachie lived on the top floor and since Hamish had impregnated her youngest lassie, Sammy-Jo, she felt obliged to let him hang around. Mungo could see his brother tried to be on his best behaviour when he was there. He acted in a constricted way, tight-faced, grudgingly patient. It served only to squeeze all the cruel bits of him into the part of his day when he was not trapped under the McConnachie roof. But Hamish knew better than to chance his luck further: Sammy-Jo was only fifteen, and Mrs McConnachie could have him jailed for molesting a minor. As it was, her doctor called the Social and the Social called the police. Sammy-Jo lied to them all; she said she didn’t know who the father was, and on the birth certificate a civil servant had written Unknown in his finest calligraphy. Hamish had copied the script and tattooed the word behind his right ear.
Mungo stood on the threshold to Mrs McConnachie’s living room. He hadn’t been invited inside yet. The settee had six of the boys from the builder’s yard crammed on to it. They were packed thigh to thigh and spilled over the arms of the small sofa. In their nylon tracksuits they looked like so many plastic bags all stuffed together; a flammable, noisy jumble of colour-blocking and sponsorship logos. There was the manic throb of techno coming from the stereo; someone had a bootlegged copy of a Carl Cox set from Rezerection. It sounded like the DJ was pressing an early warning siren over a stuttering breakbeat. It was so aggressive sounding – it moved so fast – that it made Mungo feel tense.
The ginger boy was the only one to look up at Mungo. He half-nodded and then swivelled his clear blue eyes back to the daytime television. That was it, that was all the thanks Mungo would get for saving him. His arm looked mangled; navy-blue fingers blossomed from the end of a sickly pink stookie. The plaster was already covered in hand-drawn cocks, each throbbing vein painstakingly rendered in fat bingo marker, and signed with pride. The boy’s eyes were a faraway blue, and there was a rash around his thin mouth from huffing a fresh bag of glue. His arm must have hurt awful bad.
One of the MacPherson brothers was sat on the settee. It was rumoured that there were four brothers in total, but at any given time there were only ever two MacPhersons on the streets of the scheme at once. They alternated in and out of Polmont Young Offenders so frequently it seemed like Mrs MacPherson was checking them in and out of a pawnshop based on how much she could handle at any given moment. Mal MacPherson sat on the broken arm of the settee, tapping his white drumsticks soundlessly on his legs: the left holding a rigid beat, the right adding the swirling thrill. He stopped and held the drumsticks aloft with a sense of ceremony. The sticks made a rigid line, the tips connected under his septum. He held it for a beat – Mungo could almost hear the pause in the marching tune – and then he proceeded to drum soundlessly again. The boy was dedicated. He was always practising for the Orange band competitions that took place in the Auld Resolute working men’s club; a barricaded, windowless hall that sat defiantly in the Catholic end of the Calton.
On the soundless television, an English woman was dipping a vase into liquid and showing the audience how to crackle glaze the surface of it. Each one of the young men was staring slack-jawed at the screen. On the low table in front of them sat a bundle of folded nappies amongst a pile of stolen car radios, half-drunk bottles of MD 20/20, and one very large tomahawk.
The tomahawk was homemade. Someone had taken the handle from a ball-peen hammer and screwed it to a slice of sharpened metal. Mungo knew that one of the boy’s uncles still worked in shipbuilding and would bring him offcuts of steel when he could. The axe looked like a medieval weapon that could cleave the arm off a man. The boy had polished it lovingly and then, using electrical tape, had wrapped the handle in blue, white, and red stripes. He had sharpened the blade to a shining point, it made a screeching noise just to look at it. Mungo couldn’t stop staring.
Sammy-Jo McConnachie was sitting on the armchair. She was drowned by one of Hamish’s jumpers. She had their pink baby stuffed up underneath it, and was trying to get her to latch on. Mungo glimpsed the side of her breast. The swelling looked painful; there were angry veins bruising the underside of each tit, and it looked like two giant gooseberries had been stitched to a child’s ribcage. The girl looked tired and seemed on the verge of tears. The baby was fussing and colicky sounding. Its five measly hairs were gathered together and bound with a jolly bow.
The woman stopped glazing her vase and held it out for the cameras to see the intricate swirls. The young men looked from one to another in amazement; white pearls of acne flushed across their foreheads. “That’s pure beautiful,” said the ginger-headed boy. They all nodded in agreement.