They roughhoused until the street lights flickered on. Mungo had stayed away as long as he could. He lifted his T-shirt and rubbed at his swollen belly, feeling sick on sugary shortbread. “I need to get back. Mo-Maw will be worried.” It was the kind of thing Americans said on television. He liked the sound of it, though he knew she wouldn’t be.
A tightness spread across James’s face. He opened his mouth to say something but Mungo watched the words catch on his teeth as though he thought better of it. “Whroup, whrooup, whrooooup.” He bobbed and cooed in reply.
“I’ll come to the doocot after school the morra.” Mungo tried to sound as casual as he could. He pretended he was looking in his cagoule pocket. “You go to the Catholic school, don’t you?”
“Aye,” said James. “I told you your Ha-Ha used to try and murder me.”
Mungo looked up. He had misunderstood. “I thought you meant that in a general way. You know, like a touch of casual murdering.”
James sat up and pulled his knees to his chest. “Naw. Every day at four o’clock I had to bolt from him and the other Billies. For a speccy wee dwarf, your Ha-Ha can really fuckin’ run.”
“Aye, he’s a man of wasted talents.”
James was picking at his big toe. It seemed like he wanted to say something more, but several times he lowered his head and his hair fell over his eyes. When eventually he spoke, it was directed towards a tasselled table lamp. “Can I ask you a favour, Mungo? I don’t mean anything funny by it. But would you stay, just a wee while longer? Maybe, if you like, stay here the night?” Mungo could see he was struggling. “I have a Christmas selection box, ye can have first pick.”
“I can’t. My maw.” Mungo thumbed over his shoulder.
“Go on. Please.”
Mungo exhaled. He knew what it was to feel this heavy.
The boys went one flight down and asked to use Mrs Daly’s telephone. The woman seemed to have been expecting them and left them alone in her tidy hallway. The phone rang twice before Jodie answered. She sounded the same deflated way she often did after a long shift at the café. Mungo told her where he was, told her where he would stay, and said he would collect his uniform in the morning.
“Wait, do you actually have a pal?” She sounded both surprised and relieved.
“Is that awright?”
“Fine.”
“Can I stay here then?”
“Aye. If I need you, I’ll wave across the back middens. Look out for the smoke signals.”
“Will you tell Mo-Maw for me?”
“I will,” she said, then she rattled her lips together in an exasperated breath. “When I see her.”
“What do you mean?”
Jodie was running a flat brush through her hair. He could hear the static crackle down the telephone line. “Mungo, did you actually think she was going to stick around this time?”
“Oh.” Mrs Daly had so many cats that Mungo couldn’t keep count.
“Never mind. She wrote a lovely note.”
* * *
James’s bedroom was a mess. The walls were thick with posters pinned layer upon layer. Clothes, clean and dirty, lay in heaps on the floor. In the corner of the room was a pile of old canary cages, modified to transport pigeons. Above these was a twitcher’s map of Scotland, lochs and hillsides in glorious detail, each glen filled in with the type of bird an enthusiast could expect to find there. James had circled some far-flung places to disappear to.
The boys lay together, with James facing upwards and Mungo with his head at James’s feet, head to toe in the single bed. They took great pains to not touch. If one moved his leg too close, the other shifted and hung off the side of the narrow mattress.
“What’s your maw like?” asked James in the darkness.
It was hard to describe such a thing. You only got one mother, it didn’t bear a comparison and she didn’t come with a list of features like a new oven. “I dunno. She’s just my maw.” Mungo had never considered it before.
He could hear James picking an old sticker from his headboard. “Does she like to dance?”
“Aye.”
“Does she like to sing?”
“More so when she’s drunk.” Mungo’s eyes were open in the darkness. The room looked strange and somehow familiar. He would have thought a Catholic’s bedroom would have been bare, or perhaps with crucifixes everywhere, but there were none. He kept expecting to roll over and see Hamish eating cereal in his bed. “My sister says she’s not a mother at all. She says we were just a mistake that happened to a stupid young lassie and that she has regretted it ever since. After my dad died Mo-Maw decided she was going to put herself first.”
“That’s not what mammies are supposed to do.”
“That’s another thing Jodie says.” He didn’t want to talk about them anymore. “What was yours like?”
“Oh, she was the business,” James said very quickly. “Even when she was really sick, she pretended like she wasn’t. Every day I came home from school she wouldn’t let me out of her hug until I told her everything that had happened. If Geraldine got home after me she had to wait in line for her hug. It could take pure ages. My mammy called it the juicin’. She said if she didn’t hold us tight, we would ignore her. She squeezed us as hard as she could to get all of the good stuff out of us. She wouldnae let go until ye telt her absolutely everything.”
“That sounds nice.”
“Aye. It was.” James coughed like there was a clog in his throat. Mungo could tell he was breathing deeply to keep himself from crying.
Mungo didn’t know what to do. He reached out a hand and felt the sharpness of James’s shin bone. He made a fist and tapped along the bone, up and down, up and down, the way a doctor would probe a fracture. He waited for James to pull away. But he didn’t, and Mungo folded first. He drew back his hand, laid it in the centre of his chest. “What was the best dinner she made?”
“She was a shitey cook.” He sniffed. “But I miss that – not the food – but the feeling that she was here in the flat, looking after us. The flat never felt empty when she was in the kitchen. Ma da was on the rig when she died. She had told him she was fine, but she wasn’t. They chartered a special helicopter for him and everything, but it still took him eight hours to get home after she was dead.”
Eight hours. Mungo couldn’t imagine a distance that far.