For the past few days he had been lousy with optimism, stupid, stocious with happiness. But now he lost all his bottle. All his newfound confidence ebbed away, and his shoulders took on their familiar slouch. Mungo made himself smaller again, and cringing, he held the gift behind his back and wished he hadn’t said anything at all.
James lay sprawled upon the navy-blue carpet, his head resting against his father’s settee, his neck at an angle that looked broken. “C’mon. Don’t be lit that.”
“Just forget it.”
James sat up and wrapped himself around Mungo the way monkeys did – maybe this is what Mungo had wanted all along. James was peering around him and snatching for the parcel. Mungo held the box at arm’s length, but James’s arms were longer. “Awright. Fine. Get off of me.”
“You don’t want me to get off of you, not really.” James was grinning, but he did as Mungo asked.
Mungo sank back on his haunches and reluctantly handed him the small gift. It was wrapped in a hand-drawn paisley pattern, made up of a hundred swooping pigeons, with wings outstretched and tipped with stripes, swirling across a sky full of puffy clouds. He had drawn it specially for James and he had held his breath as he sliced the page from his sketchbook. Hours upon hours of meticulous linework with a fine-nibbed pen, intricate as Toile de Jouy wallpaper.
James unwrapped the cassette and turned it in his hands. “What’s on it? It’s no rave music, is it?”
Mungo shrugged. “Naw. It’s nothing. Just some stuff I like from the charts.”
James set the cassette aside, like it didn’t matter much to him. Mungo picked at his cheek. He tried to pin down the hurt that already piqued the muscle to stop it spreading. It was only a cassette, after all, but by the way he felt when James put it to the side it could have been his heart. Then James did something unexpected. He smoothed the paper flat and holding it up to the sunlight he looked at it like it was the most magnificent thing he had ever seen. Mungo watched his fingers trace the spirals tenderly. “Is this for me as well?”
“Only if you want it.”
“Aye, I love it.”
“You don’t have to say that.”
James sat forward and kissed him. It was all so familiar now. They had moved beyond the clumsy petting and munching. Mungo would stop frequently to apologize, he felt so inept, and James would cradle his face and guide Mungo’s lips back to his. Now their kisses were soft and tender and offered without the fear of refusal. A kiss lasted hours. They lay with their mouths together and Mungo cupped his nose in the divot of James’s cheek, and then they led each other in a silent ramble, one would change the direction and the other would follow, over and over until an arm went dead, or the microwave pinged. A hand might slip under a T-shirt but it never dared to do anything else. Mungo knew he wanted to spend his life doing this, just kissing this one boy. There was no need to rush.
Mungo winced. The skin around his lips was chapped with too much tenderness. They looked bee-stung and had swollen slightly and grown rosy in colour.
“Shall we take a wee break?” Usually, James didn’t stop, he just kissed over the bud of Mungo’s cheek, down past his earlobe and across the pale skin beneath his shirt collar. They had been lucky. A few times they had gotten carried away and Mungo had spent a tense twenty minutes pacing in front of the hallway mirror checking for love bites, James hovering behind him, juggling ice cubes in his hands.
They lay in a nest of their own filth, discarded schoolbags and empty crisp packets. Cereal bowls ringed the carpet in front of the large television, like it was an altar. Half-watched videocassettes were strewn around, stripped of their fake encyclopaedia cases, alongside unfinished homework that had been abandoned in favour of kissing and staring. Mungo thought that if Lord of the Flies had been more like this, he might have paid some attention.
He had been surreptitiously borrowing articles of James’s clothing, intimate things, that he swapped out for his own perfectly clean, if not especially nice gear. It started with a pair of thick socks, after he complained that he was cold, even though James’s flat had central heating that left him dehydrated and with a dull headache. Then he stole a too-big pair of boxer shorts from the clothes pulley, and wore them for three days in a row, under his school trousers, bunched up like Victorian bloomers.
All week they had floated in the mornings from the doocot to separate schools, then back to the doocot, before spending long evenings in James’s front room: top floor, facing the moody sky, far from the eyes of anyone else. When they separated to their own bedrooms, across the back middens, they spent hours gurning at the window, feigning being murdered, and flicking each other the finger all while trying not to laugh too loud.
He had been mooning across the divide one afternoon while Jodie was clearing the dirty dishes. “But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks?”
“Whut?” Mungo was resting his cheek on the glass, enjoying the cool condensation.
“What’s her name?” asked Jodie.
“None of your business.” He felt more gallus now. No longer a solitary soul.
“Keeping secrets. That’s not very nice.” She tickled his ribs, inspected his sore lips.
“Secrets!” he howled unkindly. “You’re like the Finders Keepers of secrets.” He poked her in the belly and she flinched. He hadn’t known what he said. He was referencing the adverts they had loved on Saturday mornings, where American lassies wrote silly little secrets and locked them safe, in the belly of a stuffed bear. Smiling wee lassies who hadn’t had a teacher’s wean in their gut, stupid wee lassies with no real secrets worth keeping.
Jodie slapped his hand from her stomach. “Ye get more like Hamish every day.”
“God, Jodie, I’m sorry. I didnae think. I didnae mean it.”