The mannish woman was visibly shaken to come across the boy in the middle of the road. Her surprise turned to fear and then disappointment, as the two alkies clambered out from the undergrowth. Mungo stood in front of her brown Lada, blocking her escape, smiling as warmly as he could. He made an unsettling sight, beaming with relief in the dim glow of her headlights.
The woman wouldn’t let any of them sit up front. But in the back seat, crushed between the strange men, he was glad of the roaring warmth of their bodies. They burned blue with the alcohol and the tang of peat on their breath reminded him of winter fires. The cold had robbed Mungo of any notion of independence and he gladly let their bodies swallow his. Gallowgate uttered as many polite niceties as he could manage; Mungo listened to him struggle to sharpen his vowels. He asked the woman to drive them to the dip in the road where the fence was broken, and a mud track led down to the lochside. Mungo could tell that even in broad daylight this would be hard to find, never mind in the violet gloam.
The woman drove slowly, afraid of the men in the back seat, terrified to miss the break in the fence and be stuck with them longer than she needed to be. Mungo watched her eyes flit to the rear-view mirror and every time they made eye contact, he smiled his best school picture smile.
“I’ve never seen sheep before,” he said.
The woman smiled, if only to be polite. Whatever Mungo was doing seemed to make her more uncomfortable. Her skin was leathered as though she worked in the wind and the rain. She wore horn-rimmed glasses over a hand-knitted Aran jumper, and over this humble garment she had carefully arranged a pearl necklace. Mungo watched her tuck the necklace inside her jumper.
“We’re not related,” Mungo said quietly. “These are pals of my mother’s and they’re taking me away on a fishing weekend.”
“Wonderful,” she said without any wonder at all.
“Aye.” He felt compelled to tell her more, to let someone, even this snobbish woman, know who he was, who he was with, and where they were taking him. “They are members of Alcoholics Anonymous. S’pose my maw thought it would do us all some good to get some air about us.”
The lady in the Aran gansey took her eyes off the road a moment too long, and the car swerved as she connected with the verge. A thumb, or maybe a Bic lighter, jabbed a warning into the side of his bare leg. It was clear Gallowgate wanted him to stop talking. Mungo could hear St Christopher huff; he was smacking his lips in agitation like a woman who couldn’t believe the price of milk nowadays.
* * *
They crept along for several miles, searching desperately for the point Gallowgate remembered from distant memory. Yet when they finally got to the broken fence it was exactly as he had described it. The lady clamped her handbag between her knees before she let them out. She sped off in first gear as they gathered up their bags of lager and fish gut.
“Snooty cunt. I thought she was going to twist her pearly earlobe right aff,” said Gallowgate with a chuckle.
St Christopher had been shaking over by the fence. His lips were still slapping together in agitation. “Mungo. You shouldnae break a person’s anonymity lit that.”
Mungo had to turn his eyes from the receding tail lights. “Sorry. I didn’t know.” Mungo had taken Mo-Maw to enough meetings on Hope Street to know fine well the Alcoholics’ rule of anonymity.
“Whit dis it matter to ye?” said Gallowgate. “The wee man wis only bletherin’.”
St Christopher was rattling like a fairground skeleton now. He took to muttering under his breath. “Ah’m jist saying you shouldnae ruin a person’s reputation like that.”
Gallowgate drew his eyes over the trembling man. There was mud on his good suit from where he had lain in the gorse and his “ten-for-a-fiver” white sport socks were ringed with dust from the road; there were scarlet blooms at the heels where his shoes cut his feet. Gallowgate shook his head. “Ah widnae have taken you to have been marked by pride.” From his jacket pocket he produced a Wagon Wheel and handed it to the boy. Gallowgate winked at him. It was an apology for the older drunk. It said that Gallowgate thought he was all right, that they’d suffer through St Christopher together.
It was getting late now. As they walked down to the loch, Mungo thought how the men made odd friends – but then he knew that drink was a great leveller, it always brought unlikely people together. He had seen that in his own home, how different folk could huddle in solidarity around a carry-out. He thought about all the aunties and uncles that crossed his door and had lain in waste with his mother. People she wouldn’t have sniffed at in the street became like kin when they cashed their unemployment giros and turned them into a quarter-bottle of amber.
There was no path to the loch, the ground was obscured with a carpet of horsetail fern. In the last of the blue daylight, Gallowgate wove in and out of the birch trees, gliding downhill to a loch they could not yet see. St Christopher fell behind. Mungo could hear him muttering to himself, and he stopped now and then to smile back at the sulking man, but St Christopher only paused and picked at the downy bark like he was fascinated by it.