St Christopher was rolling the sleeves of his blazer up. His forearms were so thin that he could turn the woollen fabric several times over, till it almost reached his elbow. Skewering another sprat on the line he cast it into the water. Instantly the float bobbed once, and the sprat was gone. “Cunnin’ fishy basturts!”
The man was soaked to the knees. He took off his suit trousers and waded waist-deep into the loch. His underpants hung loose, like a loincloth made from an old sheet. With arms outstretched he stood as still as a dead tree and when a fish came near, he made a pantomime of trying to scoop it out with his bare hands. He fell in, sinking under the surface. He flailed up again, sputtering and cursing, clutching his loose drawers to stop them sliding down his legs. Mungo laid down his rod and excused himself to the bathroom. He had to keep his back to the saint to hide his laughter.
* * *
St Christopher paid no mind as the boy wandered along the shore of the long loch. There was a copse of stunted trees that came down to the water’s edge. Mungo weaved in and out of them, feeling the bog suck at his shoes and the mud migrate upwards on to his bare legs. He went deeper into the forest. It was quiet at the loch, but it was even quieter here without the gentle lapping of the water. He idled over mossy boulders and climbed carefully along fallen tree trunks, enjoying how the sun dappled the ground through the thin canopy. He hid himself but nothing stirred. Mungo wondered about the last person to see all this forgotten dell. It struck him then that he was totally alone.
He came to a gurgling river, a freshwater tributary that fed into the vast loch. The water frothed at the edges for the richness of the minerals in it. It swirled around boulders, and here and there it was thick with schools of brown fish, darting and happy and unbothered. Mungo waded through the waist-deep current; it was colder than the loch, coming fresh off the thawing peaks. He lost his footing on the mossy riverbed and the icy water knocked the breath from him. He jumped and squealed, suddenly very alert, clambering on to the next boulder. He crossed the river and the fat brown fish watched him go.
The trees thinned and he was back at the exposed lochside, far from the men. Mungo walked the shoreline, only stopping to fill his pocket with flat stones for skimming. As he turned a bend the ruins of an old castle stood before him. It rose from the same grey and dun-coloured stones of the hills around it, pushing up from the granite like a great rift in the earth. It must have once been a proud place, sprawling over several small hills down to a peninsula on the lochside. There still stood the three tall walls of a great hall, and another surviving wall had the vague shape of a tower, four or five stories tall, with the narrow slits of arrow embrasures.
Mungo clambered over one of the collapsed walls and stood in the gutted hall. Part of the tall tower lay in the heart of the castle, where it had come crashing through its own roof. What remained felt thick as a fortress. Besides trespassing at Culzean with Hamish, he had never seen a castle before, much less been inside one. Mo-Maw had always kept him from school on the days the class would go to Stirling or Edinburgh. “Ah don’t work aw the hours God sends so ye can be fingerin’ some tapestries.” There was always something more urgent to spend the four pound fifty on.
Fifteen years he had lived and breathed in Scotland, and he had never seen a glen, a loch, a forest, or a ruined castle. Actually, he had seen them, but only ever on biscuit tins or the side of tourist buses. Mungo lay down on one of the large hearthstones and let his head spin. It was hard not to feel a little drunk. “Halloooo.” His voice echoed off the roofless chamber. “Whroup, whrooup, whrooooup,” he called to the sky.
He wondered how it would feel to go home, now that he had seen more of the world in a single day than in fifteen years – how could he stay on the scheme and not try to go beyond it? James had been right. Mungo wished that James was here with him, or Jodie, but mostly James. It would be grand to have someone to share all this newness with, someone who knew that he wasn’t making it all up. Mungo picked at the ochre lichen and felt frustrated that he wouldn’t have the words to paint it all again for Jodie or Hamish or Mo-Maw. Even if he could describe it, he knew that they wouldn’t care anyway; they would make him get up off the clothes that still needed ironing or ask him to hold the box of car radios they had stolen. They would look at him with a bored chew and wonder when his stories of this golden-green place would be over.
But maybe James wouldn’t. James would have listened to him tell his stories, and when Mungo showed him the photo of the ram’s skeleton, James would ask if there had been a rancid smell (there had not), he would ask if there’d been any wool sticking to the underside of the carcass (there had been, it was cream-coloured and curly). He wished James was here. James would have cared.
Mungo tapped the back of his head against the hearthstone.
He shot to his feet. It started as a nervous canter. He needed to move, needed to shake the guilty thoughts of the Fenian out of his head. Standing by the rotted mantel he clapped the heels of his shoes together. He bowed to the empty hall and with a heel-toe-heel-toe, he galloped the first round of Strip the Willow. The school had taught the dance during a particularly nasty winter. They had grudgingly cancelled any periods of outdoor sports and the council estate boys – who had natural finesse when they were cracking hockey sticks across one another’s skulls – were made to dance around the cold gymnasium in reluctant pairs. Mungo twirled with the memory of it. He had always liked the ceilidh lessons; he was just never allowed to admit it. He cantered around the ruined hall, spinning an imaginary Jodie at the end of his outstretched arms.