Something flickered between them. He had misjudged. He had gone too far. For a second he thought the shutters would come down over James’s eyes again, that the bright eyes would fall back to the ground. He regretted having said it. Then James took a last draw of his cigarette. “Teapot? Aye. Well. Takes one to know one, eh.”
It was what they didn’t say next that made Mungo nervous. James didn’t break his stare and he didn’t say anything. His grin widened slightly and with each millimetre it grew, Mungo’s smile widened to meet it. They sat like that, just grinning until their faces hurt.
“You look like your da,” said Mungo eventually.
“Fuck ye, I don’t.”
“You do. You’re friendlier looking. When you want to be.” He picked at the grass. “You should try not to be so heavy sad all the time.”
James reached up and pushed Mungo’s hair out of his eyes. It was so quick it almost didn’t happen. His hand was furtive and fleeting, like a darting doo.
A fissure Mungo hadn’t known about cracked open in his chest; beneath it was a hollow feeling that had never bothered him before. It was an agony not to raise his own hand and touch the hairs James’s fingers had licked. It burned. He wanted nothing more than to feel the warmth left by his touch. He closed his eyes and said, “I feel sick.”
It was as though a sky full of clouds passed over James’s face, it was rain and it was fear. Mungo saw the change. It made him look up. They had been sitting close together on the berm but sending clumsy semaphores like it was the Clyde Valley that divided them. James leaned across the distance and placed a kiss on his lips. It was dry and his teeth scraped Mungo’s bottom lip. They bumped heads.
Mungo rubbed his forehead. “Did you just headbutt me?”
“We could pretend it was a headbutt if you like?” The smile was fleeing his lips again.
“Don’t be daft.” Mungo looked both up and down the hill, and then he kissed James quickly on the lips. It was like hot buttered toast when you were starving. It was that good.
* * *
They had buried James’s mother at Lambhill on a blowy spring day, when the wind stripped all the blossoms from the trees, and the white petals clung to the black mourning cars.
After the funeral, his father had spent his time helping James build the doocot. The whole thing had been his father’s idea; pigeons were a good, manly pursuit that would teach James discipline and how to care for something smaller than himself. Besides, if they kept busy building something together, then they didn’t have to talk about his mother.
His father missed three work rotations. He stayed away from the rigs as long as he could. His father had promised, “Listen, if ye spend an hour at the doocot every day, I’ll be back in no time at all.” Then he packed his rig bag and left James to an empty house and all the tears they could never have shed together.
James lay on his bed in a motherless house. The bed sheets were clean but they smelled sour. His father had left them too long on the clothes pulley and it had not occurred to him to turn and air them as they dried. It was these small things that made James feel heaviest. Small things his mammy would just have known to do.
He had done as his father advised. After school he had gone to the doocot and returned before it was dark. He had played with himself and then he had fed himself, and then played with himself some more. Once the fleeting sense of euphoria had ebbed from his body he was left with the stillness of another empty evening. He turned on the wireless in the kitchen and the television in the living room and then he lay on his bed and wondered if he was being punished for something.
He tried to push away the pictures that came into his mind, but they wouldn’t leave. They had started in the New Year, when the Catholic boys were put out on the North Field and played shinty with tartan-blue legs. The rain and the wind flayed anyone who would not keep moving in the smirr. They pulled their socks up to try and reach their short hems but Father Strachan shouted at them to stop making such a pitiful show of themselves. “If you are cold,” he yelled above the high collar of his long-sleeved fleece, “then run faster.”
After battering each other with caman sticks for ninety minutes, the boys were grateful for the lukewarm showers, water that was barely warm enough to return the feeling to their toes and wash the red clay from their legs. James stood under the end jet. He crammed his blue fingers inside his mouth. He tried not to look at Paddy Creek, with his lazy smile and broad, muscular shoulders. He tried to not watch the stream of shampoo as it trickled down his back, and ran between his buttocks. Like the stubborn oose you pick from an acrylic jumper, some unseen static kept pulling his gaze back to the boy. James turned away. He knew if they caught him staring they would have a hundred names for him before he had a name for himself.
James dangled his leg off the edge of his narrow bed. He reached overhead and took the newspaper out from the space between the headboard and the wall. Fetching the cream-coloured telephone through to his bedroom he dialled the number he found in the back of the paper. He could have rung it by heart. He dialled it partially three times before his fingers found the courage and committed to dialling the whole thing. There was a mechanical click and a tinny recording welcoming him to the party line.
A place where boys like you can meet boys like you.