Young Mungo

James’s father went out into the hallway. He ripped a wire from the wall and as he came back into the living room he was binding their cream telephone with its own cord. He shoved it into his sports bag without looking at his son. “You know the rules. If you need tae call me, use Mrs Daly’s phone.” James nodded slowly. Mr Jamieson ran his eyes the entire length of Mungo again, and the boy felt an odd compulsion to open his hands and turn out his palms.

“Right.” He zipped the sports bag closed. Reaching into a tight bundle of notes he peeled a stack of them away. He slapped the money on the table. “Three weeks, then. See if ye can no burn through it aw this time, okay? Try …” He started to say something, and then he cast his eyes over Mungo again and thought better of it. “Jist try your best to behave. Stick in at the school. Awright?”

He didn’t hug James goodbye. He just nodded, as though they had passed each other on the street.

Mungo didn’t speak until he heard the man go whistling down the close. “Wow. He’s a laugh.” But James was struck with a type of rictus. Mungo could barely recognize him without his usual carefree look. “You didn’t tell me your da was home.”

“He wasn’t. He only came for the weekend.”

“But I thought he got two weeks off?”

“Aye, he does. But he telt me he’s met a woman from Peterhead. He wanted to head north early and spend some time with her before going back to the rigs.”

Mungo didn’t know where Peterhead was. He said nothing.

“Apparently Caroline is a stewardess on the Auk rig.” James paused. “Her and her daughter breed Yorkshire terriers. They have eleven of them. Big fuckin’ whoop.”

It seemed like James didn’t want to talk anymore. He hammered the remote control, flicking between the same four channels so rapidly that Mungo had to hold his cheekbone and look away. He settled on some English comedy rerun. They sat in a heavy silence and watched as pensioners let a piano roll down a Yorkshire hillside.

The front room was the same shape as Mungo’s although everything in it was plusher and of a much finer quality. There was a fitted carpet and a large wool rug. Someone had taken care to match the settee to the carpet and the carpet to the curtains. It had the luxurious feeling of having been purchased all at once, not laid away and added to, stick by stick. There were framed photos on the mantel: one of a family of four posing in a studio, and another of two children, James and a handsome older girl.

“I didn’t know you had a sister.”

He followed the line of Mungo’s gaze. “Geraldine. She married a whisky distributor.”

“Cool.”

James snorted. “He’s called Gerald. His name is Gerry Berry. Can you believe it? Pair of them are pure jokes, man. She thinks she’s the dug’s baws because she lives in a fancy house wi’ satellite telly. But I know she’s all fur coat and nae knickers. Mrs Gerry Berry likes to come on Tuesdays and Thursdays after work and bring me frozen dinners.”

“Mibbe she wants to make sure you are eating right?”

“Really? I expect she feels guilty.”

Mungo was thinking about Jodie. His next question seemed only natural. “Why don’t you just go live with her?”

James turned and looked at him square in the eye. “Why doesn’t she ask me to?” Then he turned his face back to the television. This was a different person, not the industrious, hearty, fresh-air-filled boy he knew from the doocot.

“C’mon, don’t be like that.” Mungo rammed his shoulder into his.

When he did this to Jodie, she would shove him back, and soon they would be tormenting each other until whatever had first ailed them would have dissolved for a while. Mungo rammed him again. James didn’t move. Mungo felt foolish, pressed against his side. He was going to straighten himself when James shifted slightly. James raised his arm out from under the weight and draped it across Mungo’s shoulders. It made Mungo flinch in anticipation of a blow, a flick, a chokehold. But as he waited for retaliation, it slowly dawned on him that no hurt was coming. Instead of rejecting him James had made more space for him.

Mungo slid into him and filled the cavity in James’s side. There was a tide in James’s chest, and Mungo bobbed on the swell of it. He was carried along by the slow rise and fall of his ribcage and comforted by the sigh at the edge of his breath. James’s arm was heavy but Mungo liked the weight of it, he felt safe underneath it. The lanolin from James’s Aran jumper tickled the back of his neck and he could smell the musk of his armpit, the sticky remains of soapy deodorant, the salt of rain-scrubbed skin. James’s fingers danced in the air, they kept time with his distracted mind. Mungo closed his eyes and the fingers drummed a gentle beat on his chest.

Occasionally James would laugh at the clumsy pensioners on the telly and the whole bulk of him shuddered. Mungo was muted. He couldn’t focus on the programme, so he followed the patterns of James’s laughter, always a half-beat behind. They sat like that for a long time. It all felt somehow wrong. Mungo worried that it would end.

“It’s a lot of money, int it?” Mungo hadn’t heard him at first, so James said it again. “That money, it’s a fair whack.”

Mr Jamieson had left what looked like two hundred pounds on the table. Mungo had been trying not to stare.

“He gets paid a fortune, that’s the only reason he leaves. They pay overtime and danger money. He’s got nowhere to spend it out in the middle of the sea.”

“Is it to feed yourself with?”

“He never asks what I spend it on.”

James lifted his arm and stood up. It was as though a thick blanket had been pulled away on a February morning.

In the veneered cabinet there were some crystal ornaments and several shelves of leather-bound books. They had a refined air to them, posh as any scholar’s office. James took one down and opened it in front of Mungo. It wasn’t a book at all, but a burgundy case for a videocassette. None of them were actual books.

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