George splashed his face with water. ‘Never mind. It’s fine.’
Isaac came over. ‘Is it cut?’
‘No.’
‘Let me see?’
‘It’s fine,’ he barked, quickly drying his hands and face. He threw the dish towel aside.
Before the boy’s shock became tears, George whisked him out into the lobby, the mask of tolerance restored.
Down at the pier, a group of people had gathered. George gripped his grandson’s hand, figured that if the boat was back so soon it must be bad news. The Aurora ploughed towards them, throttle easing back and into reverse as it neared the pier.
The expressions of those onboard told the story. Engines idling, the boat came to a stop, backwash lapping against the pier’s barnacle-encrusted legs.
‘Just over three miles,’ shouted Howard. ‘We went as far south as we dared and worked our way west and north.’
George sagged, letting go of his grandson’s hand. His voice cracked. ‘Could you see any other boats?’
Howard shook his head. ‘Nothing.’
The sea looked inviting to George as the Aurora was tied up alongside. The urge to jump off the pier took hold.
He felt a little hand slip into his, squeezing. The pressure roused him.
‘Well, we know what we have to do,’ George found himself saying. He spoke loud enough for everyone to hear. ‘We sink or swim. That’s the choice. We were told it a few days ago, now we’re hearing it again – that’s all. We’re going to get through this – all of us – together. We stick with the plan that Mr Brindley told us about at the meeting. Tomorrow we’ll start organising jobs and work crews.’
Fair enough, that kind of pep talk. But what George really wanted to do was jump into the boat and race it out to sea as fast as he could, regardless of the consequences and blind to the reason for doing so. Despite that, his words had come out in a firm and clear voice. He wondered how that had happened.
George walked away, gripping his grandson’s hand a little too tightly. As he climbed the rhododendron-lined path, he tried to remember when, exactly, the hotel stopped being a thriving business and became a huge empty building that ate his money. The process had been gradual. Like a heaving late-night party, people had slipped away, imperceptibly, until there were only a few stragglers left to face the dawn.
Inverlair Hotel had gone way beyond being a drain on his resources, he thought. It had become a mausoleum, and he was the caretaker.
•
Carl and Howard started their first sweep of the redzone at the roadblock, on the north road out of Inverlair.
‘We’ll head down towards the sea first of all,’ said Howard. He nodded inland, to the brooding massif of Ben Bronach. ‘Then we’ll move up there.’ He studied his deltameter-cum-phone. ‘Look, the reading at the roadblock today is weaker than it was when Gibbs put the roadblock up. We’ll need a few sweeps of the bay to get an average.’
On the grassy verge, a fat bee bounced from stem to stem. Howard’s plan seemed like a good one.
‘It’s lovely here,’ Carl murmured, looking out to sea. ‘It was pissing down yesterday and now it’s like the Bahamas.’
They left the single-track road and walked down the grass slope to the rocky shoreline, then came back up towards the roadblock, Carl entering co-ordinates on Howard’s palmpod like he’d been shown. Sheep and sturdy black-faced lambs scattered as they retraced their steps.
‘Don’t take this the wrong way,’ said Carl as they reached the road again, ‘but why didn’t you go to the media about SCOPE? Something this big is hard to ignore, even with the PLC on our case. Someone would have published, spun it as a managerial issue. There must’ve been some way of getting it out.’
Sweat glistened on Howard’s hairless head. He took off his jacket. ‘I was a partner in a firm, GeoByte Services,’ he said. ‘Three of us in a management buyout. The other two were more finance and deal-making, but I wanted to stay in product development. It was my job to iron out the signal noise from other telecomms on the site-share. Anyway, I went to Len, one of the partners, a guy I’d known for almost twenty years. I told him the modelling results confirmed the resonance in the diarite filters when the transmitters were networked. So he said he’d have a look at my results.’
Howard cleared his throat. ‘A week later he still hadn’t got back to me, fobbed me off when I asked him about the resonance results. Then, when I was about to go to him again, we got a visit from the main contractor, their head of procurement no less, who starts talking about a new contract, a bigger one, if we deliver on SCOPE. And that’s when things got difficult for me. I went to Len again, but there was no budging him. I could see what they were trying to do, the contractors, so I went to the Security Ministry, and another sympathetic hearing took place.
‘Two days later there was a break-in at the science park, my hard copies of the modelling report were stolen, and all my backup data – three months of research – was wiped. Flash drives, cloud accounts, everything.’
Howard looked straight at Carl. ‘I guessed then that CivCon would be monitoring me so I couldn’t risk any kind of contact with you. And anyway, what would you have said if I’d phoned you up ranting about SCOPE and its two-hertz harmonic that might send people to sleep as they were walking in the street?’
‘I would have thought you were nuts. If you were lucky I would have checked you out and asked for proof.’
‘And I had none to show you.’
They pressed on in silence, Carl dropping back a little, lost in thought. What Brindley had said was plausible enough to dispel guilt, culpability. Could he have done anything different?
•
A few days later they were halfway through a second sweep of the bay. The first set of readings had given a maximum safe distance of 4.2 kilometres from Inverlair Hotel to the edge of what everyone now referred to as the redzone. They were about 400 metres above sea level.
‘These are the exact co-ordinates, no doubt about it.’ He handed the deltameter back to Carl. ‘The field strength is much weaker than it was on the first sweep. Down to 120 microtesla again.’ He frowned at the readings.
Here was something. Carl grabbed at the floating feather of hope with both hands. Twelve days and maybe SCOPE was conking out already. Never mind two to five years. Sitting on a moss-covered rock, Howard wiped the sweat from his eyes, frowning over his deltameter. Insects droned and hovered over the stewing bogs. He screwed the top back on his water bottle.
‘Both the delta field’s magnetic and microwave components are still present, which means the nearest transmitter is still working. I don’t know why the signal strength has dropped off. There can be temporary attenuations in a signal for all sorts of reasons.’
Carl’s head dropped. ‘So, it’s just a blip?’
Brindley pulled at blades of long grass. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Why not? You built the fucking thing.’
‘Incorrect,’ said Brindley, glaring at Carl. ‘But I think you know that . . . I think you also know that SCOPE was more than an emergency communications system. You do know that, don’t you?’
Carl set off back down the grassy slope towards the village. He turned round, walking backwards. ‘Well, if there’s one man who can tell the rest of us what SCOPE really was, it sure as fuck isn’t me.’
22
Grief belonged in the past. He had no use for it now. George kept telling himself that. It was too soon, that was the problem, and if he’d been given to platitudes, he would have said that time is the great healer, or something along those lines.
When he was alone he felt naked before grief. It had reduced him to the core of what he was. It was testing him, interrogating the workings of his soul, responses that he had barely given a second thought to before. It was testing his stitches. Was he held together properly? Would he come apart?
He would endure, withstand the punishment, or he would disintegrate. For the time being, he’d let gri
ef take him, but he knew there had to be a way out of it, a way of confining it, mostly, as an experience that was based on memory, not raw actuality. George kept telling himself all that but, for now, it was no use. Maybe one day he would find himself entirely focused on what he was doing: the past’s ability to hurt him reduced to an intermittent and fading signal.
The bench was warm. George sat with his face to the sun, an empty space beside him that he could picture being filled by Alison. So many times she had sat there and he’d hardly been aware of her; now that she was missing, he could hardly take his eyes off the space she used to occupy, when the weather had allowed.
Simone and Isaac were round at Fiona’s, so he had cried on his own, a trickle this time, rather than a torrent.
He’d noticed that his daughter wasn’t letting him look after Isaac as often as she had; whenever she went out she took the boy with her. Did she think he was incapable of looking after his own grandson? Through his grief, George felt a surge of anger. It fired off in several different directions: at Brindley and the journalist, at the bastards who dreamed up the SCOPE system, at his own daughter. Himself. Alison had been pissed off with his moods, his sullen sarcasm. If it hadn’t been for that, maybe she would never have felt the need to go to Edinburgh for a break in the first place.
He tried to focus. There were important things to do now. The situation is what it is, he told himself, and now we have to think of the future, like Brindley said. What was that stuff he’d been talking about the other day? Drawing up work crews. Rationing the food according to age and sex and usefulness. Okay. Lots to be done.
George cocked his head at the sound of his son’s fishing boat returning, engine throbbing. It was too soon. The other day they’d reached four miles out. He stood up, blew his nose and wiped his eyes, and headed down to the pier to meet the Aurora.
Carl shouted something from the deck of the boat but George couldn’t hear him above the engines. Adam eased back on the throttle, and guided the boat alongside, nudging the rubber casing. It was low tide and the Aurora was well below the top of the pier.
‘There might be a gap, a way out,’ Carl repeated. He scrambled up the metal ladder to join George on dry land.
Brindley doused some of their excitement. ‘It can’t be more than a few hundred metres wide,’ he said. ‘Hard to tell if it opens into the Atlantic. And if there is any kind of fluctuation in the field strength the gap could close in around you before you know it. There are refraction effects to consider as the tide rises and falls. You’d never turn around and get out in time.’
Carl stiffened. ‘You said it was possible.’
‘Possible, but extremely risky. A channel that narrow. In a boat.’ Howard shook his head. ‘And there’s no way of telling how far it extends.’
‘There might be a way out,’ urged Carl. ‘That’s what you said.’
‘Sounds like a death sentence to me,’ said George. ‘And where would you go?’
Carl glared at him. ‘Anywhere. West coast of Ireland – Howard’s friends went there. Or Spain.’
George considered the horizon. ‘I wouldn’t like to sail to Spain in a tiny boat like that – especially if I have to head north to start with to get into the Atlantic. And don’t they have that white rust fungus pretty bad down there?’ He glanced at Howard. The guy was talking sense. ‘In any case, there are over a hundred people in Inverlair and only three small boats.’ George shrugged.
‘So we just sit here for maybe five years, is that it?’ said Carl, unable to believe what he’d heard. ‘Shouldn’t we, er, actually try to get out of here? There isn’t much food, in case you hadn’t noticed.’
Brindley guessed that George was thinking the same simple question. ‘We can cope with the food we have, so I’m told. But why should we try to get out of here?’
Carl was flabbergasted. ‘Why?’ He shook his head. There were so many reasons to leave this place. Or at least Carl felt there must be. But when he needed just one of them, to slap down on the table as a trump card, he found himself unable to summon anything that sounded convincing. The places SCOPE hadn’t blanked out weren’t likely to be any better off than Inverlair. Further away, say north-west Africa, there might be a good life waiting – if a ten-metre fishing boat could make the 2,500-mile trip; if it could find a way out of the delta field and through the mountainous Atlantic.
‘I don’t know,’ he said quietly. ‘I just thought . . .’ He looked at George. ‘Don’t you want to try and get to Edinburgh, to your wife?’
For a second, emotion charted a charmed route in George’s heart, around Cape Wrath and the Pentland Firth.
‘You won’t be able to get anywhere near Edinburgh, or any other big town, for maybe ten years – I told you that,’ Howard said to Carl. ‘That much I can say with virtual certainty because of how SCOPE is configured in urban areas. I told you all this.’
Carl repeated the phrase, making the point. ‘Virtual certainty. Virtual. But not absolute.’
His eyes wide, Howard waved him away. ‘Oh don’t be so bloody stupid.’ He strode away. ‘Go on then. Go. Take the boat and see how far you get.’
‘Oh no, he fucking won’t,’ said Adam, climbing up onto the pier. ‘No one’s taking my boat anywhere.’ He looped a thick rope from the Aurora’s bow around a metal cleat on the quayside. His father tied the stern line.
‘There’s a spot of lunch waiting,’ George said to Carl. ‘Not much, but it’ll fill a hole. Brindley’s right, you know. If it goes wrong, it’s a death sentence.’
The boat nuzzled against the side of the pier, plastic squeaking on rubber, wet ropes taking the strain. A big seagull, snow-white chest, settled on a railing beside the men.
‘It would be a quick death, at least,’ said Carl. ‘And that’s better than the alternative.’
Saying nothing, George strode back to the hotel.
In the kitchen, they ate in silence. There was so much to say, and so many questions to ask. But instead of risking conversation, which might begin painlessly enough, saying nothing was obviously the safer option. Conversation could expose feelings, and feelings were hard to control, so the unresolved pressure of not talking swelled within the room. Isaac watched all the adults distill their private pain.
Eventually, Brindley spoke. ‘It’s still early,’ he said to Carl. ‘So I thought we could take some more signal readings in the hills, if you want to.’
It was unbelievable. Carl resisted the temptation to hurl his plate of food against the kitchen wall. Here they were, sitting nice and cosy around the table. Simone was being civil to him. But she was a door that had been closed and locked. He felt like saying: it was only a shag, and not a very good one at that. And that wee Isaac was giving him the evil eye as well. Little shite.
He nodded at Howard’s suggestion. ‘Shall we make a move then?’
Carl took his plate to the sink and rinsed it under the tap. The water was warm, the kitchen uncomfortably so because the fire was lit. From the window, Carl looked towards the summit of Ben Bronach. They would follow the line of the fence to the burn, then meet the forest track. From there it was up past the old stones and onto the shoulder of the hill, following the ridge, heading inland across the headwater streams that fed the river. He knew the way by now.
•
‘I don’t know if I’m imagining it, but is there something between you and Simone?’
It was another warm day, and plump lambs dozed by their chewing mothers. Carl figured there was no point in denying it. ‘We had sex.’
Howard didn’t know what to say. ‘Oh.’
‘She gave me a hug – that’s how it started.’ Carl’s voice cracked. ‘It was just comfort – closeness, y’know?’ He felt tears in his eyes and his face reddening. ‘But it doesn’t matter.’ He shook his head, annoyed with himself reacting this way. He was all over the place. ‘Embarrassment is a pretty pointless emotion to feel, given what’s happened, wouldn’t you say?’
The slop
e was getting steeper now, grass giving way to heather. Howard stopped for a breather, taking out a hankie to wipe the sweat from his face and head. ‘Your guess is as good as mine,’ he said. ‘I could never work women out.’
•
Five hours later Howard was flat out on the bed in Room 22, his legs and back aching, his neck sunburnt. Thank Christ he’d taken a baseball cap with him, otherwise his scalp would be toast. He felt good, though; physically tired, but relaxed with it. It was their longest stint yet, and they were well on with the second sweep of readings. He lay for a while, fully clothed, staring at the ceiling. Maybe he’d ask Adam Cutler if they could venture out in the fishing boat again, test the gap in the redzone to the north. Staying active made people forget – and that was good. If people did useful stuff, then so much the better. That was the only thing to do now: work. Survive.
There was a soft knock at the door.
‘Come in.’
The door creaked open. ‘Hello,’ said George, peering into the room.
‘Hello there.’ Howard smiled. ‘I can’t seem to move.’
The smile was returned, weakly.
‘I thought you might appreciate a dram,’ said George, his voice low. ‘If you feel up to it.’
Howard heaved himself up against the bedhead. ‘Whisky doesn’t really agree with me, but I’ll make an exception, on the grounds that it may have some curative effect. I’ll have a wash first. Freshen myself up.’
Ten minutes later Howard appeared in the residents’ lounge, just as George cracked the seal on a bottle. An oil-lamp burned on the mahogany coffee table. George handed Howard his drink and gestured to an armchair. ‘Carl said he would join us in a while. I prefer it in here to the annexe, although that didn’t used to be the case.’
Gingerly, Howard lowered himself into the chair. He raised his glass of single malt. ‘Cheers.’
Without any real enthusiasm, George returned the toast.
After a mouthful of whisky, Howard smacked his lips and held the glass up to the lamplight. ‘Liquid gold,’ he said.
George took another gulp of his drink. ‘You guys must be nearly finished the second sweep of the . . .’ He gestured towards vaguely towards the window.
Lie of the Land Page 15