by M. T Hill
‘It’s not my decision,’ Alba says, helping Oriol latch on. ‘You understand? They do as they do.’
Freya doesn’t understand. But she can’t turn, either. The dark vein in Oriol’s forehead has risen again. Whatever happened to Stephen – whatever’s happening here in this park – must be no clearer to Alba than it is to Freya.
* * *
Whatever was in the nest has got into Stephen, and so into Alba and Oriol. It has likely got into Shep, too.
Carry it for us, the caption under Stephen’s photo had said.
Freya turns to leave. ‘Your boy is beautiful,’ she tells Alba.
The Steeplejack
Vertex consumes Shep in the days after his fall. The island charges his sleep, his waking hours, his sunburn, with terrible purpose. On shift, his life is reduced to the quadrant he works with Kapper, to wire-walking and installing beacons. After his shifts, stinking and dehydrated in the canteen, Shep barely has the energy to lift a fork to his mouth, let alone miss anybody or anything back home.
As they work on the uppermost guy-wires, Shep and Kapper avoid discussing their near miss, though a new caution is established in certain movements, their piously kept-to safety checks. At this level, the wind roars through the scaffold’s negative space with a ferocity that’s hard to fathom on the ground. At its gustiest it’s hard to see, move or speak, much less think. Nor does Kapper repeat any of the things Shep apparently said as he came back up the guy-line before he slipped. Progress is all that matters; the past being irrelevant, and talking about it more so. Besides which, they’re actually getting on. Despite their initial clashes they’ve made peace through a shared work ethic – and a silent competitiveness that plays out as they take turns to belay each other on the wires.
Food eaten, Shep will usually limp back to his cabin and lie outside on the parched earth through dusk, watching the miniscule lights of technicians starting night shifts deep in the beta’s lattice. Sometimes these technicians test-fire the beacons the crew have installed that day. Shep finds these times especially peaceful, absent of pressure. Home, with its refineries and red-brick chimneys and Friday night drinks, a bound-up state a whole planet away. So maybe it’s inevitable that in this peace his old hobby should start to creep in. He starts taking photographs of the scaffold with his phone, cropping and colouring each picture differently for effect. When the commsat dishes rotate his way with a fleeting connection, he uploads pictures to a thread on the urbex forum with no explanation, no captions, no reports. It’s not that he’s trying to affect mysteriousness – it’s more that the scaffold speaks for itself.
* * *
When the first drone test session comes around, Eddy seems confident in the quality of the crew’s handiwork. From one hundred to five hundred metres, at which point you need to use the lift to go higher, the beta scaffold’s quadrants are fully rigged.
Walking towards the base pad that morning, Shep and Kapper acknowledge the rainbow forming over the runway where navy ground crews are hosing down the hot macadam. One end of the rainbow putters out by the radio masts, the other above the wings of a Merlin drone. The rainbow has gone by the time they meet the rest of the crew. They strap on their helmets, apply fluid to dried-out sun-lenses, fidget with nervous energy. It rained overnight and now their boots are heavy with a thick elemental paste.
‘Reckon we ballsed-up the microclimate,’ one of the jacks says to break the silence, pointing up the tower. His knuckles are tattooed with DEMO MANC. ‘Keep getting these freak clouds.’
On the other side of the base pad stands a group of abseilers, both strange and strangers to Shep. They’re fresh off the chopper and curiously innocent by the looks of them, like a group of visiting schoolchildren. It makes him realise how easy it is to recognise people who’ve been working on the island for a while. Little signs that make the distinction simple: raw skin, the smell of used overalls as they draw past, a willingness to discuss constipation, treacly piss. The intense nightmares they all seem to have about falling. And never mind the grey hairs sprouting on Shep’s face since he last shaved.
Eddy eventually shows up, Stetson on tight. ‘Now then,’ he starts, beaming, ‘how about we grab ourselves a view for take-off?’
The crew shuffle to the access hatch of the runway-facing quadrant. Before it’s his turn to slip inside, Shep stares out to sea. Visibility is decent most days – a good ten miles to the horizon, more up top – but the clarity of light is exceptional today.
‘You coming, cabbage?’ Kapper says.
Shep nods. A single drone signaller on the runway continues to rehearse. Kapper has taken to calling these signallers ‘scarecrows’ on account of the arms-wide semaphore they use to calibrate the drones’ sensors. In this there can be no error margin, and so Shep is excited to feel part of the process. All their work on Vertex has been building to this flight.
‘Not nervous, are you?’ Kapper asks Shep as they prepare to climb the ladder. He claps Shep on the shoulder. ‘Because I’ll eat my harness if that thing spoons it on our lines.’
‘Not nervous,’ Shep tells him.
* * *
The engineer wants the crew staged between all five maintenance platforms so they can each get a view. Shep, Kapper and two of the others are sent to the two-hundred-metre mark, with Kapper on point.
Shep has been up and down this tube dozens of times, but the climb is no less cramped or humid. Lactic acid is a pacer, and even without the biter to carry, Shep is relieved when Kapper leads them back into light.
The four jacks squeeze onto the platform. A vibration deep in Shep’s chest cavity. He writes it off as excitement and clips on to the railing. Then a surplus of saliva and a sensory surge: sea air, filth and degraded rubber on his palms, the lattice cocooning them. The edge calling him forward. But Shep doesn’t speak. He swallows all the spit and leans right out from the barrier to stretch his back and shoulders. The tower curves sickeningly into the pad. The island’s edge is razor sharp. Birds wheel lazily beneath them. That urge to jump is powerful.
Kapper touches Shep’s arm. ‘Laddy,’ he whispers. ‘Shut the fuck up.’
‘Eh?’
‘You’re doing it again.’
‘What again?’
‘Babbling,’ Kapper hisses under his breath. ‘They’ll think you’re bloody tapped.’
‘I didn’t say anything,’ Shep protests.
‘No? Then where’s this hornet? Where? You copped for sunstroke, or what?’
‘Leave it out,’ Shep says.
Yet even as he tries to read Kapper’s face, something moves in him. He fixates on the sensation and his stomach cramps hard.
‘Shep?’
Shep bends over double, staggers towards the platform edge.
‘Shep!’ Kapper shouts. ‘Fucking hell. Someone get Eddy on the line—’
Muffled, Shep hears Kapper asking the others to share their water tubes – feels them poking at his chin and lips. The tower’s formwork has doubled, separated out. His stomach cramps again and he falls to his backside. He manages to brush away someone’s tube before he vomits fleshy string onto the platform, choking hard to get it up, purging himself. The way it drops through the mesh is grimly fascinating. Slow, sinking squares that are torn out to sea by the wind. Then hands are all over him, and his bowels empty out, and he’s dragged to the access hatch and held down.
‘I’m okay,’ Shep keeps telling them as he comes round, sees three jacks with wide eyes. ‘Guys – I’m fine.’ And he’s sure of it. So sure, he pushes them away and shuffles to the platform fence, his overalls dripping, and throws his soiled legs and filled boots over the side, ignoring them all. The hornet buzzes around him. A cloying metallic stench. The view, this island, a weightlessness. The drone scarecrows, tiny figures down on the runway, with their paddles waving madly. The hangar door is fully open and a second Merlin noses along the apron to join the first. Both machines readying for take-off, the whole scaffold tremulous with anticipation.
Shep doesn’t know what Kapper is saying urgently into his watch. Couldn’t tell you if this, the first test day, might also be the day his friendship with Kapper is cemented and cracked all at once. He doesn’t care if the other jacks are cowering against the platform railings, hands clamped over noses and mouths at the smell of him. He doesn’t. All of Shep’s concentration is given to the Merlins as they clear the runway then rise, smooth and dark against the sky, heliophobic paint rendering each craft a dull, flat stone – like the kind Shep would try to skim from the banks of a lake somewhere in the northern uplands, in the past, in an old life.
The hornet hovers at his shoulder. It watches the drones with him.
The Journalist
While it’s still unwritten, Freya’s planned piece on Stephen is now seriously at odds with the detachment of her local reporting, the far-too-neatness of an obituary. It’ll be rigorous, sure, and of a certain quality – she hopes – but written with some new, much more personal emphases. Alba was right to say Freya’s story about Stephen is equally about her. So after leaving the park, Alba’s warnings in refrain, Freya goes directly to the airport and pays for an earlier flight home with her own savings. Just to get out of there. Just to start writing this thing out of her.
What’s the alternative? The idea of infection, a transmission – psychological or biological – is now too credible to ignore. Imagine another night in a hotel room, or this terminal, with no respite from Shep – Shep who’s surely suffering somewhere, changing beyond his comprehension; Shep whose living experience is surely the key to the mystery of Stephen’s death. Shep who’ll plug the holes in Freya’s project, and whose health now feels like Freya’s responsibility – as if through some bizarre inversion it’s her fault he did what he did that night. As if he was only showing off because she was with him.
No, Freya can’t stay here. She wouldn’t cope with the frustration. She’d only sit and chew herself up. The obscene cost of the early flight is worth it, cushioned slightly by her trip expenses being covered. That, and the man she spent the night with had given her his drinks receipts.
What had Alba called Stephen’s pre-death behaviour? Estado maníaco. A shift in mindset that led him towards arrogance, to risk-taking. To climbing a scaffold in his going-out clothes.
And Freya wonders: was Stephen silent as he fell? Or was he still laughing?
She holds her face. Her eyes are burning and nothing helps. Why is Alba so serene in her new life, even if something was clearly skewed or unbalanced there? And the boy – the cold in the flat. That unforgettable vein.
What does she have to stop Shep doing? And how can she, when he’s so out of reach?
‘They want you to leave,’ Alba had said. These guardians of hers. It makes Freya shiver. What has infected them all?
Freya checks the departure boards. Not long till the flight. She picks her nails. She thinks, If I’m not lonely, then I’m adrift. It means a lot to feel wanted, to understand your place in another person’s world. Who is Freya to Shep? Who is Freya to anyone? God, how simple it can be to miss the easy comforts of cohabitation. The familiarity of touch, a particular bed linen. Bobbly pillows. A well-travelled route between foreplay and sex – this being your side of the bed, this being mine.
Anonymous in the departure lounge, Freya finds herself scrolling through her contacts for a number she should’ve deleted. Then she swipes red on the second ring. She opens a new message and puts, Sorry, sat on it.
When she presses send, the screen locks up. He’s calling back. He’s giving her permission.
‘Hello?’ she says.
Dickhead’s voice is faint. ‘Had a call off this number?’ Wind in the background. Brash voices, traffic wash. He’s snippy. (‘You in a mard with me?’ she used to ask him, when he came in from work under a cloud.)
‘I sat on my phone,’ she tells him.
‘Didn’t catch that,’ he says. Sirens passing. ‘This is—’
‘Are you keeping all right?’
‘Sorry, who’s this?’
‘It’s me,’ she says. ‘It’s Frey.’
‘Freya?’ Practically shouting into his phone now. ‘Did you say it’s Freya?’
‘Yeah, it’s me.’
The background noise drops. Suction as a door opens into a foyer, maybe. Then the crackle of his beard rubbing the mic.
‘I’m in town,’ he tells her. ‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘I thought I’d call. See how you are.’
‘Oh.’
‘Oh,’ Freya repeats.
‘You abroad?’ he asks. ‘Dial tone was funny.’
‘I’m in Reykjavik. For work.’
‘Iceland? Time is it there?’
‘Same time it is there.’
‘Are you drinking?’
Freya shakes her head. ‘Same time zone. And nope.’
‘Well, I’d better get on with this shopping.’
‘That’s fine. I just wanted to—’
‘Bye, Frey.’
Freya’s next words are right there, suspended. But he’s already hung up.
* * *
It’s dark when the taxi drops Freya at her parents’ bungalow. The lights are off and there’s a fresh pallet of whole milk on the breakfast bar. A note nearby: ‘Gone to Tescaldi to complain about fridge. M+D x’
She finds a portion of lasagne in the oven but can’t face eating it. Instead, she sits there with a sugary tea and browses her social feed. Her shot of the Hallgrímskirkja has been reposted by a savvy Reykjavik tourism firm, and it’s netting hundreds of likes and comments. Normally she might feel proud of that – that something she’d created so quickly could travel so far in so little time. Not tonight.
She finishes her tea and goes to run a bath. She undresses and runs her phone’s torch over her skin. Her arms glow pinkly. Her fingertips light up red. She perches on the bath edge in the curls of eucalyptus steam and does the same with her stomach. What does she want to find? Bruise-like blotches, darkening veins? To be like her – like Alba? In the absence of Shep, will that help her get closer? Help her move on?
As she eases into the bath, she pictures Stephen and Alba having sex. Standing up, their dark hair pressed together. Passing the bunker between themselves.
Freya’s skin, however, is clean. No physical changes. No hints. The bunker still hiding inside her.
Shep, though, is out there. Away with work—
‘Sodding milk,’ she hears from the kitchen.
Freya wakes with a start. Her father’s voice. She’s sitting in a cold bath.
‘Freya?’
Her mother at the bathroom door.
‘Are you decent?’
‘Bloody hell, I’m having a bath. Hang on.’
Freya stands, takes a towel and covers herself.
‘Okay,’ Freya says.
Her mother barrels in. ‘What’s going on?’
‘What?’
Freya steps out of the bath and sits on the edge.
‘Where’ve you been?’
‘What?’
‘We’ve been trying to get hold of you.’
‘I did say – Reykjavik.’
‘What, in Iceland? What on earth for? You look terrible.’
‘Work? I told you. I’ve got a feature to write.’
Freya’s mother puts a hand to her forehead. She seems very old. ‘You didn’t say a word.’
Freya knows this isn’t true. And so what if it is? She has every right to disappear and reappear.
‘Pretty sure I did,’ Freya says. ‘You can tell your father over supper.’
‘Seriously? Do you want to get me chipped? Is that easier?’
‘Our house. Our rules.’
Freya snorts. ‘You know what you sound like?’
‘I mean it.’
‘I’ll piss off, then, should I?’
Her mother swallows. ‘Be our guest,’ she says. ‘You haven’t spent… haven’t spent a bean on board or food
while you’ve been here. We took you in with… with unspoken conditions.’
Freya glares. These are her father’s words.
‘You’ve wrecked one household,’ Freya’s mother adds, and now her voice is trembling. ‘You’re not – you’re not doing it here.’
Freya shoots up from her perch on the bath. The towel comes away. She’s naked and the chill is hideous. She’s only a little taller than her mother, but she leers down at her with a straight back and feels like she’s towering.
They stand there, looking at each other.
‘Freya,’ her mother starts.
‘Get out,’ Freya says. ‘Give me some fucking dignity.’
Her mother picks up Freya’s towel, eyes down. ‘No more,’ she says. And she leaves.
Freya turns to the mirror. Fever-cheeks. She dabs the towel across her brow, beading with sweat. She’s never sworn at her mother before. She looks at her neck, her shoulders, her belly. She scowls at herself, desperate to see it, then: to see them, to have her own testimony. But there are only red blotches from the shower’s heat, and an angry flush on her chest that rises to her neck and ears.
She wraps herself in the towel and returns to her bedroom. She slams her door as she did at twelve, as she always did when she wanted her parents to get the message.
• • •
As her parents sit for crackers and cheese, Freya shovels in the lasagne for lack of anything to say. If there’s accord, it’s because her parents daren’t speak either. The only noises are their chewing, the exaggerated way her father clears his throat as if he’s ready to announce his terms.
When she’s done, Freya gets up. ‘Can I use the computer?’
Freya’s mother settles her knife.
Freya’s father looks at Freya levelly.
‘What?’ Freya says.
‘Apologise to your mum,’ he says. ‘And you’re welcome to do whatever you bloody well like.’
Freya glances at her mother. There are faint stripes of grey down her cheeks. Freya looks back to her father. ‘I’m going to move out,’ she says. Then she flounces back to her room.