“Sometimes ah have the shakes that bad, ah should go tae a Wednesday night meeting as well. But well, ah just cannae.” St Christopher made a sad frown. “Do you see what ah mean?”
Mungo had been working hard at seeing what people really meant. Mo-Maw and his sister, Jodie, were always nagging him about that. Apparently there could be some distance between what a person was saying and what you should be seeing. Jodie said he was gullible. Mo-Maw said she wished she had raised him to be cannier, less of anybody’s fool. It was a funny thing to be a disappointment because you were honest and assumed others might be too. The games people played made his head hurt.
St Christopher was sucking down his can when Mungo said, “Maybe you should just go on Wednesdays too. Like, if you really need to?”
“Aye, but ah like ma handle.” His hand reached inside his shirt and drew out a small tin medallion of the saint. He peered down his pockmarked nose at it. “S-T Christopher. It’s the nicest thing anybody’s ever said about us.”
“Could you not just give them your family name?”
“Widnae be very anonymous wid it?” interrupted the tattooed man. “If ye start spilling yer guts and letting everybody know yer demons, then they’d be able to lift yer name out in the street.”
Mungo knew fine well that people had demons. Mo-Maw’s showed itself whenever she jangled for a drink. Her demon was a flat, eel-like snake with the jaw and beady eyes of a weasel and the matted coat of a mangy rat. It was a sleekit thing on a chain leash that shook her and dragged her towards things that she ought to be walking away from. It was greedy and it was cunning. It could lie dormant, wait for the children to leave for school, to kiss their mother goodbye, and then it would turn on Mo-Maw, throttle her as though she was some shivering mouse. At other times it coiled up inside her and sat heavy on her heart. The demon was always there just under the surface, even on good days.
On the days that she gave in to the drink, the demon could be quieted for a while. But sometimes Mo-Maw could get so far in the drink that she would become another woman entirely, another creature altogether. The first sign was how her skin grew slack, like her real face was sliding off to reveal this strange woman who lurked underneath. Mungo and his brother and sister called this slack version of her Tattie-bogle, like some heartless, shambling scarecrow. No matter how her children stuffed her with their love or tried to prop her up and gather her back together, she took in all their care and attention and felt as hollow as ever.
When Tattie-bogle spoke, her lower jaw would hang loose and her tongue would roll in her mouth in a dirty, lascivious way, like she wanted very badly to lick something. Tattie-bogle always suspected that she was missing some party, that something more exciting must be happening just around the corner or hidden up the next close. When she felt like this she would turn to her children and shoo them away as though they were drab little birds. Tattie-bogle believed that better things, brighter lights, bigger laughs were always happening to women who had no children.
Tattie-bogle would become best friends with women she had just met, and over a half-bottle of Black & White whisky she would betray her own intimate secrets, and then felt wounded when these new friends didn’t share the same depth of feeling. Then when they fought, she dragged them, or she was dragged by them, across the carpet and down the stairs. In the morning Mungo would find tufts of perfumed hair, like the straw from a burst scarecrow, lying in the hallway, animated by the draught that whistled under the front door. Either he or Jodie would hoover it up with the Ewbank and say nothing more about it.
It was Jodie who had split their mother in two. In the cold morning light, this trick helped Mungo forgive Mo-Maw when the drink had made her vindictive and rotten. “It wasn’t Mo-Maw,” soothed Jodie, as she held him in the airing cupboard, “it was only horrible old Tattie-bogle, and she’s sleeping now.”
Mungo knew what demons looked like. As the bus trundled north, he sat quietly and thought about his own.
“Ah wish this driver would hurry the fuck up,” the tattooed man said. He reached into the bag between his legs, the canvas strap was studded with brightly coloured lures. Rummaging amongst the spools of fishing gut he produced a pouch of tobacco. He rolled a fat cigarette, his tongue darting along the paper. The man took a deep drag and blew the smoke into his empty lager can. He cupped his hand over the mouth like he had caught a spider, but the stench of tobacco was already wafting around the bus. Several of the passengers turned and glared towards the back seats. Mungo leaned over him with a meek smile and unclipped the hasp on the thin window.
“Do you smoke?” the man asked between greedy puffs. His eyes were a rich green, glinting here and there with flecks of gold.
“No.”
“Guid.” He took another lungful. “It’s bad for ye.”
St Christopher reached out a trembling hand and the tattooed man reluctantly let go of the cigarette. St Christopher inhaled and filled himself up to the very brim. His dry lips were sticky on the damp paper. The tattooed man rammed his shoulder into Mungo’s. “Ma pals call us Gallowgate on account of where I’m frae.” He adjusted his sovvie rings and nodded towards the oblivious bus driver. “You’re a nervous wee fella, int ye? Don’t worry. If he gies us any lip, ah’ll fuckin’ stab him.”
St Christopher sucked on the dout until it burned his fingers. “Do ye like tae fish?”
“I don’t know.” Mungo was glad to see the cigarette die. “I’ve never done it before.”
“Where we’re gaun ye should catch pike, eels, speckled trout,” Gallowgate said. “You can fish the whole weekend and naebody will come by and ask for a permit. Ye’ll be twenty, forty miles from the nearest soul.”
St Christopher nodded in agreement. “Aye. It is as near tae heaven as ye can get on three buses.”
“Four,” corrected Gallowgate, “four buses.”