“I was sat here with her body. Just waiting on him.” James was swallowing harder now.
Mungo couldn’t cross the distance between them. The best he could do was to lay his hand next to James’s so that their little fingers were almost touching. They were close enough that it was as if they were touching. The heat from James’s hand jumped the distance between them and flooded Mungo’s entire body. He lay there, upside down and a world away, and listened to James choke up. He wanted to offer more comfort. The courage wouldn’t come.
It was James that changed it. The pinkie that had lain next to his own crossed over and locked over his. The electrical current that had burned at the border jumped on to his skin and he was scorched.
Without questioning it, Mungo sat up in the bed and oriented himself to lie beside James. He pulled the boy on to his chest and felt the crumpled wetness of his face. He held him, just like Jodie would hold him, and let him remember his mother. It was good to put your weight on someone else, even if it was just for a short while.
EIGHT
Mungo stepped out of his school uniform and left it in piles across the living room floor. It was warm in the airing cupboard, it was peaceful, and he felt calmest here. He pushed his hand between a stack of towels and enjoyed the sensation that the cotton nubs left on his skin. He sank in all the way up to his armpit and it felt something like a hug. He’d been anxious all day, thinking about how James had been too embarrassed to talk to him after he had started crying about his mother.
Mungo had only wanted to help, but in the morning light, James couldn’t look him in the eye. As the sun came up, James had gone to the doocot and left Mungo to have his Weetabix alone, feeling like he had done something dirty, something wrong.
Mungo came out of the airing cupboard and stood at the bay window. He dug his thumbnails into the soft wood and deepened the gouges he had been making over the past few months. He watched as a familiar man came along the street. Although the man kept his eyes downcast his spine was rigid and his crown was pulled proudly upwards to God. The man walked with nipped footsteps; he tucked his arms neatly by his side, careful to take up no more room than was his to enjoy. He never swung his legs in the way of most men broadcasting how they needed to make room for their cocks. There was a stiffness in his arms but there, at the tips of his fingers, was a slight feathering. You could barely see it. Everybody could see it.
Rarely did you see the man without bags of messages. Every day he went to the Co-op and bought just enough to last him to the next day. He stocked a bachelor’s pantry: two sausages from the butcher’s, small packets of teabags, and bags of frozen vegetables that could be kept fresher for longer if he resealed them with old elastic bands.
Some idling Protestant boys clocked the man. Tucked safely under the awning of the Pakistani shop they nudged one another and aped him as he walked along the street. If Charles “Chick” Calhoun knew they were mimicking him, he didn’t acknowledge it. A rash-faced grease slick of a boy held his hand out in a vulgar way as though it had snapped at the wrist. He minced up and down in front of the neon star stickers that were advertising a great deal on yesterday’s bread. The other boys sucked on their fags and cackled to themselves. “Cooieee!” he called out with a flutter of his fingers.
There were several housewives idling at their windows, drinking tea and waiting for their children to come home from school. Anyone who was watching poor Mr Calhoun sucked on their teeth in pity.
“Cooo-fuckin’-eeee, ah said.” The ned was getting louder. “Yer no gonnae be rude and ignore us, ur ye?”
Mr Calhoun, as he was known to his face, and Poor-Wee-Chickie, as he was known behind his back, didn’t break his stride. He didn’t lift his eyes to his tormentors.
“Are ye looking at ma arse?” The ned tried an old tactic in order to provoke him. He turned to his friends. “Haw, did youse see that aul’ feller look at ma arse?” They all agreed that they had. Like shell-suited apes they started pacing and gesticulating wildly at the solitary man. It was all they wanted, to bait him into responding, to insult him so profoundly he would let his guard drop. Then they could feign injury, batter him, and remind him of his low place, sub-human, sub-them. This one old man made them feel better. When everyone looked at them like they were nothing, like they had nothing, he still had less.
The man maintained his neat stride, the narrowest of smiles on his lips. Mungo had no way of knowing that Poor-Wee-Chickie was not in there; he was not present in his own body, having learned, long ago, the art of floating away above the tenements. It was his trick. As his body fought along the Parade, his spirit was flying over Duke Street, swooping and spiralling to the La Scala picture house where it sat in the dark, watching Anne Baxter, incandescent, in All About Eve.
Poor-Wee-Chickie lived on the ground floor left. It was a door the children all rushed past. A plain brown door like Mungo’s own, that had a sad, degraded look from all the times it had been scrubbed clean of foul graffiti. Someone – a Proddy pal of Ha-Ha’s – had found a half-dead can of spray paint in one of the middens. The wit had spray-painted Child Mahlestur in tall letters on Poor-Wee-Chickie’s door. Jodie had tried her best to wash it away before Mr Calhoun saw it. She must have been scrubbing the paintwork raw because it was the sanding noise that finally brought him to the door. He found her there, her school uniform lousy with bleach and paint flakes.
“Ah, the poor beasts. They cannae spell for toffee. Personally, I prefer kiddie fiddler myself. It sounds somehow more genteel, more musical. Don’t ye think?”