“Okay. Then come home.”
He hadn’t expected her to be so easily convinced. It unnerved him. It had all been her idea but now she was willing to fold it, throw the whole experiment in the bin. “I can’t. It took ages to get here. They won’t want to leave till Monday.”
“Then ye jist have to tell me where ye are.”
The telephone let out three little pips. The money was running out. He felt his tic spasm. “I don’t know where I am.”
“Oh son. Ah’m sorry Mun—”
The line went dead. He cradled it against his chin for a while, pretending she was still there while trying to calm the mutiny in his face. He stood like that until Gallowgate rapped his ring on the glass. “Jesus Christ. It’ll be pitch-black afore we get back. The midges will eat us alive.”
* * *
His legs were covered in raised bites by the time they got back to the fireside. Relieved to have procured more drink, Gallowgate was in a chatty mood, and he talked all the way back to the campsite. He said he would show Mungo how to gut a fish, if St Christopher had caught any, and then he would show him how to set a trap for rabbits. On Sunday night they would cook a big rabbit stew. Rabbit meat and instant noodles. Gallowgate promised it would be the finest thing he had ever tasted.
Mungo watched the man closely; he tried to smile in all the right places. It was the fourth different face Gallowgate had shown him, and he wanted to keep all of them straight. There had been the sullen man on the bus, the letch with the dirty stories at the campfire, the wounded fisherman by the loch, and now this person, his excited best friend, his false big brother.
He was always slow to realize when Hamish was manipulating him. It often dawned when Jodie would yell at Hamish to stop it, to stop using Mungo as his slave, stop saying nice things just so Mungo would do as Hamish wanted. This usually came right after Hamish had been incredibly, inexplicably kind to him. Mungo had started to become suspicious of the kindness of others, but James had changed that. Now he watched Gallowgate walk in a swaggering backwards fashion through the thick ferns. He was talking excitedly about building snares and box traps. “Ah’m gonnae show you everything ah know,” said the man. “How lucky are you?”
St Christopher was drying his suit by the smoky fire when they finally reached the campsite. His underwear hung off of him and the knuckles of his spine pushed against his thin skin like snow peas in a pod. Mungo looked at the sharpness in his bones and felt sorry for the man. He looked like one of the weans he saw on the African telethons, except they had bloated stomachs and St Christopher’s hollowed inwards under his ribs and almost reached his backbone.
He was happy to see them return. Drying on a rock were seven small fish, lined up neatly, their iridescence already dulled and flaky. St Christopher circled them like a proud house cat. “It’s no much,” he was saying while taking each fish into his paw and stroking it gently. “But the morra we’ll put them on the hooks and catch a perch or brown trout.”
“Aye.” Gallowgate rattled the plastic bags. “That might jist work.”
St Christopher cracked open the last bottle of whisky in celebration. He took two long slugs and passed it to Gallowgate, who did the same. They held it out to Mungo and the boy put the bottle to his lips but held his tongue over the hole as a stopper.
Gallowgate clouted him. “Don’t be a fanny. Get it in ye.” He cradled the back of Mungo’s head and tipped the bottle up to his lips. An angry, scorching wave poured down his gullet. It burned the air from his lungs. Gallowgate waited for the boy to stop choking before he tipped the bottle again. “Mair! Mair! Mair!”
Mungo was soon drunk.
He spent the evening pulling long branches from the forest and dropping them on the fire. One of the branches split like it had arms and he held it close like it was a fine lady. He turned and danced with it in the firelight. He was stumbling across the pebble shore and the men were watching him and cheering him on. They filled the empty bean cans with loch water and placed them amongst the flames to boil. Over and over they refilled the cans and poured it over the sweet and sour Chinese noodles. When they were done, each man had eaten at least two pots of the salty worms. They lay around feeling fat and content, their bellies lined with starch and full of firewater.
Mungo stared at nothing. His eyelids were growing heavy and he could feel his heart beating behind his eyeballs. Big gobbets of rain started falling and hissing on the campfire. The gobbets turned to a downpour and soon the men were scampering, saving the pathetic fish, the tweed suit, and what was left of the carry-out. They ran for cover and Mungo lost them in the sheets of sudden rain. The men crammed into the two-man tent by the bothy and he, alone, crawled into the half-collapsed shell by the waterline.
Gallowgate had given the boy a warm lager, and he was glad for the smoothness of its taste, how it was flat and soothing where the whisky had burned. He lay down and felt a rare peace. The ground was moving underneath the red tent. Streams of water coursed around his body, flowing towards the loch. He could feel the cold of the running water, yet he was not wet. He drank his lager. He closed his eyes. Drunk for the very first time, and carried away by the rain.
TEN
They had their ears to the carpet, their buttocks to the sky, and it looked like they were praying. The children knelt in the middle of the living room and listened as he swung his fist into her softness. He was hurting her. Each time he hit her, the woman cried out in pain. It was a tremulous squeak that ended in a chewed full stop, like she wanted to swallow the shameful cry as soon as it escaped her. Even as he was battering her, she worried about his good name.
“He’s gonnae kill her,” said Jodie. “Do something, Mungo!”