Young Mungo

What ye want is an easy life. There’s nothin’ easy about love.

It was hard to describe such a thing. You only got one mother, it didn’t bear a comparison and she didn’t come with a list of features like a new oven.

Even beasts never lose hope for a different outcome.

“I need to get back. Mo-Maw will be worried.” It was the kind of thing Americans said on television. He liked the sound of it, though he knew she wouldn’t be.

What you do not do – what you absolutely do not do – is leave your children alone while you disappear. You don’t fuck off to get your hole and let them think you’re dead.

Pity only feels guid for a minute. It gets stale awfy quick and then it starts to fuckin’ stink.

“Do you think people will like us?”
“In Ardnamurchan? Ah dunno, we don’t really need people to like us. We just need them to leave us alone. There’s hardly any people there, ah think it’ll be awright.”

English comedians were notoriously unfunny. English comedians performing in front of the Queen were unfunny and slick with a strange kind of slithery smarminess.

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.

Any other time Mungo would have defended their mother. That was his role in the family tragedy, to find the last scraps of good in Mo-Maw and forever be reminding his siblings of it. He knew his line, but he didn’t have the energy to recite it.

He had spent his whole life on these streets and some days it could make him feel like a mouse in a maze. He knew there was nowhere you could walk without people looking down at you, watching the sameness of the weather, passing the slow time. It was hard to feel alone.

“Is that why you hate her?”
“I don’t hate her.” Hamish laughed, but it was sour. “Aye, mibbe I do. But don’t we all blame her for somethin’?”
“I don’t blame her. I just try to love her.”

It was dazzling, how something marvellous could be destroyed so quickly and so completely.