The sky had dimmed again by the time Jodie came in from school. She cracked the bedroom door and their eyes locked in the silence. He thought she would be relieved, but Jodie just looked her usual disappointed self.
When the evening news came on Mungo made a heaped plate of dry toast and sat with Mo-Maw while she ate as much as she could. He never let her from his sight, lest she find a secret stash of fortified and calm her tremors with it. He laid out clothes for her to wear and together they caught a corporation bus into the city and went to the meeting hall.
He had been to AA before, but rarely without Jodie. Mo-Maw had tried the Twelve Steps over the years, but her sobriety had always been fleeting and vague. Like a gallus child that thought it could ride a bike without stabilizers, she pronounced herself cured after a few weeks, but soon crashed and skinned her knees on the drink again. She wasted a lot of breath arguing that there was a difference between taking a drink and being a drunk. Jodie had babysat him at the back of enough meetings for him to know that if you were an alcoholic, one or one hundred drinks were the very same thing. Mo-Maw disagreed; sobriety bored her.
The meeting room was at the back of an old Masonic hall. It felt like a school assembly, with painted floorboards that ran the length of the room, and a raised wooden stage. There was a connecting hallway leading to a small windowless kitchen and before and after the meeting the members liked to gather around the scalding tea urn. Mungo felt most comfortable there. He held Mo-Maw’s coat and when the meeting convened, he leaned against the urn and let the warmth radiate through his body as he listened to everyone’s confessions.
When the meeting was finished the alcoholics gathered around the folding trestle table. This particular meeting housed a tight community; humble folk who, regardless of the varying sizes of their wage packets, rubbed along with genuine empathy. Mungo liked to be amongst them and even though his eyes started to sting from the smoke, he liked the hugging sensation their puffy winter jackets gave him as he squeezed through the tightly packed crowd.
Mo-Maw took his hand and dragged him towards a cluster of women who were chewing on gammon sandwiches as they gossiped.
“Weh-ll, would ye look how big yer gettin’? And to think it was only the other day ye were doing forward rolls on my guid carpet.” Every-Other-Wednesday Nora cupped his face in her cold hands. Her cigarette gave off a tendril of smoke. His eyes were twitching, not bad, but enough. Mo-Maw sighed.
“Weh-ll, is yer face still giving ye bother?” Every time E-O-W Nora saw him she asked the same thing. She was a stocky woman; a home help from Roystonhill who had searching eyes and skin that had yellowed like old kitchen paint. Her salt-and-pepper hair was clipped short and her mouth was puckered with fine lines from smoking forty a day for forty years. When she spoke, she prefaced everything with a long, drawn-out weh-ll. It served as a “who am I to say?” It seemed she said this as if to undermine her own opinion, in case God disagreed with her, and would crack the heavens and contradict her.
“Weh-ll, never mind the twitchin’, son. You breakin’ hearts yet? I bet the lassies have to keep their hands over their ha’pennies wi’ you.” She winked at Mo-Maw. This was another thing she said every time she saw him.
“Ah wish he would, Nora. It’s a late bloomer ah’ve got on ma hands.”
“Well, lucky you. Enjoy him while ye can. I never see my sons anymore. Ye should see the miserable articles they’ve married.”
Mo-Maw pointed a finger at his crotch. “Ah had our Hamish have a wee look. Apparently, it’s aw there and working fine.”
“Mammy!” His voice pitched and broke. Several heads turned, cigarettes clenched between teeth.
“Ya wee bugger. If ah’ve telt ye once …”
The circle of women were appraising Mungo as though he was a second-rate bullock. E-O-W Nora put a calming hand on Mo-Maw’s arm. “Weh-ll, yer wee mammy is just worried about ye, Mungo. It’s hard raising boys when ye are a wummin on yer lonesome.” Then she turned back to Mo-Maw. “Ah mean, look at ma eldest boy, a brand-new motor, a glass conservatory, two weeks all-inclusive in Torremolinos, and here ah am sitting in the Garngad with kitchen wallpaper that won’t stay on the wall.” She dropped her dout into the polystyrene teacup. “As Rod Stewart is ma witness, if ah had it to do all over again, ah’d only have daughters.”
Mo-Maw scoffed. “God. Anything but that.”
THIRTEEN
Jodie stared out over the fallow fields of North Ayrshire. There had been a late frost and now the ploughed rows looked like stitched panels on a quilt, each channel picked out by snow-white thread. The brown fields rolled all the way towards the horizon where the charcoal sea met the flat dull sky. The suspension had worn out on the bus long ago and as they rattled their way towards this line of nothingness Mungo wouldn’t talk to her. He drew his hood up over his head and couldn’t bring himself to face her.
Mr Gillespie had run away. He and Jodie had such a habit of discretion that it was Mungo who told her that Mr Gillespie had disappeared.