“Be sure you do,” the P.M. rapped out and in a shrill tone, “How you deal with the man is your own affair, but the brief case, unless recovered, could develop into a leaked document involving National Security in areas of nuclear safety and perhaps other matters, so pay attention.”
Without reply The Agent stood motionless, his eyes swung to the operations wall maps, and then with a deliberate slowness, back to the P.M. Minutes ticked by. Neither spoke. Unhurriedly, The Agent turned and walked to the steel door. Looking back he pointed to the button on the desk.
A shaking finger pressed it. The door slid open, soundless. The man in the dark suit stood in the doorway staring. A white face, expressionless.
The P.M. sat heavily and wiped his sweating hands.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
As the Good Sun ripens the Barley
Vague with exhaustion, I wondered were we sailing? A tremor of wind, the slap, slap of water on planking, I swayed with the movement aware only of holding onto a mast. A sail came down, the gentle crunch of a keel of sand. Strong arms helped me over the gunnel. The first stars above the dark bulk of a jetty, steps of cut stone, narrow and slippery, a hand rope against the wall. Few words, “Take it easy, boy.” The breeze which must have sailed us whispered in the dunes. A rutted track and my fumbling steps took us onto open fields. I felt an arm support me.
Venus lit our path, brilliant and close on the south west horizon. In the far distance across a sheen of water an island floated. A silhouette against the planet’s light it rested on the luminance of the sea. Greatly affected I stopped. In the velvet blue of gathered night it appeared as a forgotten place, remote and forlorn, simplicity abandoned to shadows of the past. The man’s voice stirred me, “Come away, the island will be there tomorrow.” Dew on a rooftop sparkled. Quiet words were spoken at the door. I caught the door post to steady myself. The porch light shone on yellow oilskins and boots that smelt of cattle. Taking my elbow the old man helped me through a kitchen, past the scent of milk and fresh butter, into a warm room.
My eyes opened without grasp of where, when or how I came to be in bed. A beam of evening sunlight crossed a room. Alarmed for a second, the hospital ward returned. Motes of dust swirled in radiant heat, tiny particles in the sun’s power. What equation could predict their antics? My wretched mind thrown back to ten years of screen bound calculations began to visualize the complex mathematics, so much part of that existence. Jostling specks pranced before my eyes, their movements seemingly random. The sun’s rays prevented them becoming a layer on the floor. What clever calculation could predict their course, or their relationship one to another?
Dust to dust? For all I knew, I was an infinitesimal speck, a nano second’s arrangement of the particles of existence dancing between a life- giving sun and the mystery of its gravity. Could anything in this universe be random, without cause? How far did the past dictate the future? If it did, then all our tomorrows existed in the potential of yesterday. Therefore, all past and futures are here in the present. Perhaps within the matrix of universes there exists only the flow of infinite possibilities? Maybe the particles of our current being are endlessly transmuted on a sea of time, only to reform again. My eyes opened fully and I struggled to throw off the despair of another fit of introverted thinking.
An iron bar propped open the small attic window, cool air wafted over my face bringing the smell of the sea and the rhythmic beat of a gentle swell. Quietly at first, as if from beyond distant hills, came another sound. Closer, closer, a vibrant song, bubbling and clear, I heard, ‘cur-lew, cur-lew, cur-lew’ rising in tempo. I threw back the sheets and caught hold of the window ledge. A large bird high above the fields, I listened in fascination. On trembling wings it called to un-trodden haunts, wild and treeless. The liquid outpouring faded to lisping notes, the melancholy of places lost. The bird alighted and raised beautifully pointed wings above a dark mottled back. Amongst the rashes it went out of sight.
From the window I looked about the small bedroom. A trance, another bout of hallucination, the sequence of the past days a preordained trick of fate, denying the assumption of free will? That I easily dismissed but not these inexplicable mental pictures, happenings long past, surges of thought plucked from tomorrow; could my reality be parallel phases running out of sync? All future exists split seconds before it becomes reality to our perception. That the sun will rise tomorrow is merely a concept rooted in probability; real time, a flawed abstraction. The future becomes the past faster than our brains function. The past is behind us in an instant. Perhaps it is never erased. Maybe it remains a flux of particles and reality the plausible victim of increasing entropy?
Stop, stop, I clasped my forehead, insanity loomed unless my thoughts would settle. I looked out from the skylight again. The unhurried steps of the old man approached from a field lined with rows of hay. Somewhere in the house I could just make out a woman singing. Quietly, step at a time, I went downstairs.
Supper waited on a scrubtop kitchen table. The three of us ate together without any awkwardness and no questions as to who I might be. They merely accepted my unexpected arrival for what is was, unexpected. My only embarrassment was the repeated coughing. That evening, through in a room across the hallway, we sat at a peat fire. It imparted homeliness to the cushioned wooden chairs and worn rugs. The pink glass of lamp sitting on a polished gate-leg table threw its rosy light on the mellowed wood of tongue and grooved walls. A black piano of some vintage judging by the candle brackets and perched on its lid, glinting in the firelight, a fiddle.
A collie dog pushed at my leg. I dropped a hand and felt a hesitant lick. The old chap’s wife joined us, “You’ll be the better of this,” she smiled putting a glass in my hand. I sipped. My throat burnt. “A powerful charge there, boy,” the old man said as I coughed and coughed, rasping and losing breath. The woman stood beside the chair, a shadow of concern on her face. The coughing eventually subsided, “This cough will kill me yet,” I tried to laugh away acute embarrassment. It hadn’t occurred to mention my name, nor did they enquire.
My feet prodded the dog. It sprawled across the rug, paws to the fire. The painted mantle shelf swirled a little. Across the hearth, the man sat in a tall ladder back chair. His hair seemed the whiter for ruddy cheeks and a salt- air tan. I saw his look focused on the fire, perhaps weighing my remark. Eventually, raising his head and looking at me intently, he remarked, “Not at all, not at all, you’re here now boy. A cough? Hoch, hoch, the good air is near the ground. The old folk knew it, they took the dulse weed from the shore to put strength in the broth and they slept with the breath of the sea on their face.” Young eyes smiled from an old face, and he raised his glass, “And as the good sun ripens the barley, so the barley becomes his spirit.” Reaching across, he shook my hand with the grip of a man who worked land and sea, “Slainte mhath.”
“And to you,” I smiled back, remembering clearly how the previous night I’d held the eyes of the old man. Moments, penetrating and thoughtful, passed into the vagueness of recognition and an odd feel of belonging. By and by, my glass was refilled.
Embers in the grate glowed red. We sat. A tiny rustle broke the silence, peat fell against peat. A voice floated on the stillness, strangely familiar, deep and resonant, hollow as a disembodied echo will bridge time and distance. Was the voice in the room or just a welling of memory in my head? “Still the blood is strong. The heart is Highland yet.” A flame flickered in the grate. “Stone upon stone, blood upon blood, mind into mind, you will come to know, it is the ultimate power we possess.” Words, words, they filled the tiny space of an island room, charged words, driving me forward; foreshadowing obscure happenings?
I sat in the glow of a peat fire, my glass shone golden, its spirit adding to the perplexing euphoria of the past days. I fell to grappling with the fantasy of ideas, drifting in their spell.
“Nothing is as it seems, our attempt to measure accurately the mass, the polarity, or the position of any given particle, at a
ny one moment, is futile. Only an extremely fine approximation exists, the act of measuring is too slow. There is no finite measurement, only indefinable rates of change. Even estimating the degree of probability of any event happening is dependent on the accuracy of the analysis upon which that calculation relies. There always remains the possibility that the basis for the computation is a mistake. Given that nothing can be calculated accurately, certainty has no measure, it does not exist.”
Silence. Thoughts passed between us. A presence entered the room. “If fate exists, then we are the tool of its destiny,” the old man spoke with the mind of Norse mythology. “So without certainty, there can be no fate.” His eyes smiled, “Which is the more probable?”
I was at the mercy of a powerful mind, my arrogant pontificating reduced to scrambling for a verbal escape, a fool in need of bringing down to earth. I continued blatantly on with the same theme, “For us, certainty is an illusion. Given our present form of organic existence, any ultimate reality is unknowable, assuming it too exists. The hybridising of human intelligence and quantum calculating will form another rung on evolution’s ladder. Concepts expand, so reality for their calculator exists on the highway of particle transfer. Could only we break that cursed barrier the speed of light and find a wavelength.” I raised my glass, “Mind into mind, the journey of imagination.” I drank more, coughing fits forgotten in my voluble outburst.
The man listened with his head to one side, behind his intent eyes lurked a smile, far from unkind. “That old sun has made hay for me these past seventy years; good years, bad years, and tomorrow, it will probably do the same again.” He looked up at a large photo which hung above the mantle shelf, before turning back to me. “In my life, I’ve had plenty time and space to think; it’s only intuition that tells me the sun will rise tomorrow. My belief that it will is a faith with no more foundation than any religion or your exotic equations. Yesterday’s half made hay is not an ultimate proof, only the probability on which I’ve depended all these years. If the universe is a system of unending change we have no means of converting probability into certainty.”
I was thrilled he followed my exaggerated talk and maybe in his quiet way agreed. Our minds were attuned, I could talk to him. Away from the eyes of the old man, my excitement was drawn to the same mahogany framed photo, heavy and old, edges stained with age. As I stared, my focus morphed face into face.
A face looked down, gaunt to the point of death. Eyes glowed out of the ember dimness, socket deep and dreadful. I saw the strength of a gale on breaking seas, the flow of eternity that lies beneath wave and soil. Knuckles were slipping from a gunnel. White hair, in trailing strands. Arms waving, clawing the water, pleading, imploring, as though there remained to be saved something infinitely more precious than an old, worn life.
Gasping, choking, the old man reached out from the stench of antiseptic. Garish light shone over me. Green masks, green, forever green. The horror of a white haired man drowning. Down, down, until only green light. And gradually I looked at a face in a coffin, read the name, heard the thump of sand on a lid.
The old man bent, stirred the last of the embers. They burst into a tiny flame. In their glow his head loomed, a shadow on the wall. I gazed, one to another. Two faces were as one. Their eyes intent and knowing, looking into me, beyond me. “That man you’re seeing was my grandfather, Hector MacKenzie of Sandray. Out from the Sound that day, the sea took him,” and after a silence the solace of reflection, “over a hundred years ago.”
The room shrank to a voice. My eyes filled with the tears for my father. I shook violently,
“The past is ever at your shoulder. Look back, it’s the door of tomorrow’s understanding.”
I looked down at white knuckles. The arms of a wooden chair were the gunnel of a boat. Its sides were closing in, growing narrow and tall. Coughing and groaning I struggled to look out.
Light faded. Frightened, I touched wood; it was the smooth sides of a coffin.
CHAPTER TWELVE
The Road to Promotion
That’s the first fucking sea-gull I’ve noticed since I don’t know when. For brief moments the thought distracted the mind of a pallid faced individual who stood at an office window overlooking the Thames. More than a five’ o’clock shadow darkened his cheeks. Rings of sleeplessness pulled down the sagging flesh below his eyes. Impatient fingers drummed lightly together. The Agent paused, clasped his hands before thick pouting lips and breathed out.
Pressure, pressure, always bloody pressure, I’ve enough to do getting a bloody handle on these damn bombers; it was shaping up O.K., they’re still in U.K., that’s pretty sure. His mind darted back to last night, did that bitch of a wife know anything? But find a bloody brief case, for the sake of a P.M.’s wounded vanity--- and where the hell had this cheeky bastard vanished to? MacKenzie, he turned the name in his mind. Another bloody Scotsman, his teeth clenched, how he hated their false superiority, that bloody sing-song accent, always stuffing their damn Scotchness down your throat.
“Aaarrr,” he growled, drawing back his lips, “Fuck ‘em all, I’ll get this one alright, briefcase or no briefcase. He’ll get something to sing about.” He reflected, I’ll make this job a personal one, please the brainless politicians, take the easy road to promotion, stuff pleasing that bastard of a Chief, it’s the road to nowhere. The Agent glance at his watch, “God, is it that time?” He lit a fag, took a deep drag, and sighed. “What the hell’s keeping him?”
A heavily laden barge made slow progress up river against the falling tide, “Stupid bugger,” he spoke aloud to an empty room. The dullness of the water mirrored an overcast sky. Black smoke poured from the stern of the barge and coiled over the rippling surface. The gull flapped a few wing beats and sat bobbing in the oily wake. He watched the bird idly, bloody water, better it getting a wet arse than me. Memories returned of pulling a decomposed body out of the mud below Tower Bridge before realising it was weighted. An arm came off as he heaved; not a nice one.
The hubbub of continuous traffic penetrated the double glazing. Across the river, on the far embankment, blue lights were flashing around an ambulance. Not far from the spot they’d lifted his mother off the pavement, he reflected. He never saw her again. The Salvation Army and Dr. Banardo’s helped him. That was before a Reform School took charge. Youth’s bitterness had turned to resentment these past twenty years. It simmered just below the surface. The Agent hid it behind an unsmiling professional face. Only a handful of people were aware that he hadn’t the faintest idea who was his father.
Out of the gutter he’d climbed to a top rank. It’d had taken sheer guts plus all the devious cunning required of his profession. Too well he knew, without the right background of a ‘good’ school, and the accent it produced, he was never quite accepted by the society to which his position gave access. On many occasions when their upper class politeness cut him out it stung to the core.
A bully at heart, the exercise of power gave him a tingle of elation. To have a cringing victim weeping and pissing themselves, pleading for freedom, yes, even for their life had become the highlight of his job, all in a day’s work so to speak. That he was a perverted sadist didn’t occur to him; he happily suffered from its addiction, as strongly as any drug. Nothing could be further from The Agent’s mind than the example of his mother’s heroin craving. His youthful crimes of petty thieving and the resultant ‘handlings’ he received when in custody had left him with an ingrained hatred of authority, an attitude he was careful to mask. Unaware that trust is reciprocal, The Agent trusted nobody in this ‘cesspit of a world’ as he described it, totally oblivious to the fact that not a soul trusted him.
Caught off guard, The Agent spun on his heel, lurching forward. Such was his preoccupation at the window that a junior colleague had slipped the room without his hearing. Fuck, he swore under his breath and glared at the man knowing he would gloat to his cronies downstairs. They discussed details of the bombing case, scanning two possible sus
pects. Progress on one bloke seemed promising. The footage showed the suspect apparently checking the out the street. “OK, lie well back from that one, he’s your lead, give him all the rope he needs till you get to the team, then pull it tight, and fucking fast. OK? You know where to take the bastard and don’t be soft making him musical.” Looking sharply at the man, The Agent lowered his voice, “Remember rules, keep marks to a minimum. If that happens to go wrong, clever boy” he sneered, “erasing them is your problem.” Dismissing the man with a nod he selected a button on the desk.
His secretary entered, giving only a fleeting glance in The Agent’s direction. The fragrance of this woman excited him. It floated into the room. Brown hair with a natural wave fell loosely about her shoulders. A skirt of Parisian cut clung to the lines of a supple form. No pantie marks; he moved to put a hand under pert contours. A tinge of colour showed upon her cheeks as she quickly sat down at the opposite side of his desk. Without speaking, she kept her eyes focused on the laptop.
Last night floated through his thoughts as mentally he undressed her again. Conscious of a slight tension between them, he wondered, had that bloody hotel porter really recognised her? I won’t make that fucking mistake next time. He cleared his throat, dropping his voice an octave,
“Darling, don’t be upset, don’t spoil last night, never mind that cun.., that porter bloke, he can’t know your dear hubby, now can he? Anyway in ten days time, there’s a job on hand which justifies Switzerland. It’ll be totally private- three days,” adding with a snigger, “I’m not out to break any records, know what I mean but a lot can happen in three days.”
For the first time her eyes rose to his and she blushed. He walked quietly to her side of the desk. “It’s in Geneva. Book two singles, somewhere up the lakeside.” Leering down at the top of her head he stroked her hair. She stiffened slightly. “Hotel Du Lac in Vevey has a touch of class about it. Better be two singles, make sure they’ve got balconies, the view is something else, and,” he added with a hint of excitement, “there’ll be the Montreux Jazz Festival on about the same time. BA flights, up the front, know what I mean.” Nuzzling into her hair, he murmured, “And I’ll be your big boy. Know what I mean?”
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