Lie of the Land

by Michael F. Russell

  Once he got closer to the houses, he could see a dim light from the PV batteries in a few of them. Electric lights were also on in the community centre. Probably the committee in there, cooking up more ways to expropriate some communal creature comforts. It’s amazing how quickly dishonesty re-establishes itself, once officialdom takes hold and makes everything seem natural, rational and unavoidable. Food for the select few had been the norm, the last century and a bit notwithstanding. Normal dominion had been restored, after a reign of plenty.

  Tomorrow there was the wedding. A dance in the community centre to celebrate. Good for morale, he’d heard George say. Something to unite around.

  Bollocks to that.

  At first, Carl couldn’t believe that there was going to be a wedding in two days’ time. But now he figured that maybe George was right, and that it made more sense now, as a statement – call it a declaration of defiance – for two people to pledge lifelong fidelity to each other. The principle, he supposed, was admirable, even if, by all accounts, the bride-to-be had been having serious doubts before the redzone happened. The poor groom was clueless, apparently, and was telling everyone how love was eternal, and how lucky he was, even now. Especially now. Maybe the woman was right to play the percentages. Her options had narrowed, somewhat.

  At the hotel’s front door, Carl switched off the torch and stood there in the cold November black. The wind was really picking up now, and sleety rain started to spit on the windows and on his face. He felt a surge of remembered panic, fought to stay in control, feeling the hotel’s rough exterior wall, the ordinary and safe under his fingers. In the pitch dark, he felt his stomach lurch, as terror gave him a squeeze to remind him of where he was and what had happened to his world, ninety-six days before. Maybe there was no redzone. Or maybe they were being imprisoned here, for some unfathomable reason. He turned on the torch again.

  ‘They’re not as clever as they think,’ he muttered, climbing the stairs to forgetfulness, as quiet as any drunk can be.

  26

  There had been no-show from Carl today, so Alec John was out on the hill by himself. He’d seen the beam of a torch weave its way along the road last night, on the way down from Terry’s. Maybe Carl wouldn’t have been able to do much work today even if he’d wanted to come out: that home-brew was lethal.

  From below the ridge, Alec John scanned Inverlair Bay with binoculars, out to the far islands and inland, across the moors to the jagged basalt teeth of the Needles, where the eagles nested. Further south and west was Glen Athar, where the nearest SCOPE transmitter stood. He knew it was there, had seen it on the map, though he couldn’t see it. One day it would stop working, and they could see what was out there. It wouldn’t be him though, not if the transmitter lasted the average of two years.

  All was calm now, but the night before had been blustery. The bay was well sheltered, and Alec John knew that only a direct westerly gale could reach straight into it and do any real damage. Last night’s wind had come from the north-west, brushing the last of the leaves from the alder trees near the road, pruning a few of the weaker branches. Doing its job.

  He could see towards the south-east into the redzone, to the house of his former employer. Inverlair was sheltered from the north-west winds, but the sheikh’s fourteen-bedroom holiday pile was not so lucky. It took a hammering in the winter. Maybe people would live in the house again, one day. It had stood for almost 200 years, after all.

  Down at the community centre Alec John could see final preparations being made for the wedding reception. He shook his head at what he saw.

  Bunting.

  Can you fathom it? Probably the councillor’s idea, or that stuffed shirt of an architect, Anderson. George would have gone along with it because he’d been so henpecked by his wife that he didn’t have any thoughts of his own left. The good lady Alison said jump, and George didn’t even have to ask how high. But he had loved her, and now she was no longer around to give him the orders he had come to depend on without even knowing it.

  Alec John sighed, felt the tightness in his chest, his breath rasping, even when he stood doing nothing. George was doing his best, just like everyone else.

  It was easy to forget that SCOPE had happened at all. Who, Alec John wondered, did he have to mourn? A few cousins in Glasgow and Canada; that was more or less it. He was sorry they were dead. Perhaps they weren’t. But, in all honesty, he would have to say that he wouldn’t be too upset if they were. To look at the world – the one he was used to – was to see nothing that different. It was just that he couldn’t cross the estate like he’d been able to. Everything familiar to him was here, and everything from the first half of his life was strange and dead anyway, so there was no need to fret over it. It bothered him that he wasn’t that bothered. He scanned along the village with his binoculars. There was activity at the boatyard. Washing on the line. Kids on their bikes.

  ‘Bunting,’ he said out loud. ‘And where the fuck would you be going for a honeymoon?’

  Looking at the hotel, Alec John could see George in the back garden. And there was someone else with a pair of binoculars, in a first-floor window. Carl was watching the hill.

  •

  There was a dusting of snow on Ben Bronach. Carl was at the window of Howard’s old room, overlooking the back garden, with its clear view of the hills. This is the time of year when the deer come down to lower ground, Alec John had said. They’d even come as far as his back fence for food, not that there would be much of that this winter. What a racket the younger stags made at night now, crashing about in the trees, barging and bellowing. Showing off, like all young males.

  There were wind-blown branches on the hotel’s back lawn, and the leaves that had clung to the alder yesterday were now splattered all over the garden. Rain glistened on the grass.

  George was out again with his rake and Carl watched him from an upstairs window. George would stop every now and again, stare into space and wipe his eyes, then carry on with the job. You had to feel sorry for folk like George. Married for years and then, all of a sudden, alone.

  Nobody was really to blame for non-violent death, except maybe the person who died, but you could pin SCOPE down, attribute its malignancy to the nameless few. Blaming Howard was possible, though uncharitable: the guy had lost everything and the thing had killed him, far away from anyone that he might have called a loved one.

  Was it unreasonable to blame himself? Could he have stopped SCOPE without any proof of what its real purpose had been? No. SCOPE’s real purpose wasn’t the sort of hypothesis to entertain for any length of time, not in a sane and rational mind that wanted to stay that way. In any event, minutes after the article had been printed, CivCon would have trashed the office and banged them all up for a Category 1 violation of the Emergency Order.

  Carl lifted the binoculars to scan Bronach. He spotted Alec John looking at something with his own binoculars – the community centre, probably, judging from the direction he was pointing. Carl had heard they were even putting bunting up for the wedding. He shook his head, wondering if that had been George’s idea; the poor guy who was shuffling about in the back garden and who now looked every one of his sixty-four years.

  Isaac ran out into the garden, followed by his pal from a few doors down. Simone and Fiona would be in the kitchen, talking about food, kids and the dickhead upstairs. It was a wonder his ears weren’t ablaze.

  He lifted the binoculars again to look at Alec John and saw that the stalker was looking straight at the hotel, and at him. Carl smiled and waved, before lowering the binoculars and heading downstairs.

  Simone and Isaac were piecing a jigsaw together on the kitchen table when Carl came into the room. There was no sign of Fiona and her kid. Simone acknowledged Carl’s presence by refusing to acknowledge him.

  ‘I haven’t seen one of those for a while,’ he said. Simone clicked a jigsaw piece into place, picked up another.

  ‘It’s Grandpa’s,’ said Isaac, smoothing over the pie
ces that had been put in place, feeling the joins with his fingers.

  ‘Does he like jigsaws?’

  ‘He did,’ said Simone, her eyes still fixed on the developing picture of a red racing car speeding round a racetrack. ‘When he was a boy. This jigsaw is about fifty years old.’

  Carl remembered jigsaws. He looked at Isaac and at the ragged outline of the racetrack, banners flying and crowds cheering. From out of nowhere, tightness took hold of his throat as he half remembered something from long ago.

  ‘Oh,’ was all he could say, a moist heat in his eyes. He turned his back and poured a glass of water at the sink.

  ‘Let’s go and see Grandpa,’ said Simone. ‘I think he wants to read you another story.’

  Isaac shot out the door, delighted. Simone walked to the kitchen door, then stopped to make sure Isaac had run on ahead.

  His back to the room, rinsing his mouth at the sink, Carl braced himself. Simone was watching him; he could feel her eyes on his back. She was gearing up for something big, and he could feel the weight in the air of what was coming.

  The silence dragged on until it became obvious that he had no choice but to turn away from the sink and face her. Leaving the room would mean walking towards her, unless he went out the back door which, barefoot in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, would look pretty stupid.

  He turned round, a glass of water to hide behind.

  ‘I’m just waiting,’ said Simone, ‘to see how long it will take you to sit down and talk to me about what’s happening.’

  Downing the water, Carl wiped his mouth. ‘You said you were keeping it,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what more there is to talk about.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Simone quietly. ‘I am. Wouldn’t you like to know why?’

  They stood there, the silence thickening again. There were no thoughts in his head and there were a million thoughts in his head.

  He shrugged. ‘What do you want from me? Shall we get married and settle down?’

  ‘You’re a funny guy – did anyone ever tell you that?’

  Carl opened his mouth to reply.

  ‘I want you to tell me how you feel about it,’ said Simone, cutting him off.

  ‘Delighted.’

  Simone folded her arms. ‘Probably as delighted as I am.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Do you feel happy, sad? Do you feel anything? Maybe you can’t feel at all, and all you’ve got are crap jokes instead of real feelings.’

  ‘Okay,’ he raised his voice. ‘I feel . . . sick. You happy now? I feel sick to think about being here and what happened and that there’s a kid coming into this horrible fucking world because of me. There you go, now let’s sign the register and jump in the limo. Let’s call him or her something noble like, like, Gawain, or let’s go all alternative and call it Sunflower or . . . I was thinking of mustard yellow for the nursery, with teddies . . . and rainbows splashed across the fucking walls.’

  He stopped, aware that he was gripping the empty glass too hard and was brandishing it in Simone’s direction.

  ‘I hope being a total arsehole isn’t inherited,’ she said quietly. ‘Isaac’s a lovely boy, so I don’t think it is. Because his dad was an arsehole as well.’

  Her footsteps were quiet in the foyer, the fire door swinging open and squeaking to a soft close. Would she storm off to Fiona’s? Unload on her? Would she throw him out?

  Leaning over the half-completed jigsaw puzzle, Carl picked up a piece of red racing car. Something within him stirred, came to life. Shouting voices echoing from many years in the past, jigsaws fitting together under his concentration while his parents came apart. He gulped down another glass of water and went off to his room to wash. Face the day. All that shit.

  In the reception area, a shaft of sunlight came through the frosted-glass window, lighting up the front desk. Carl went behind the desk, turned the guestbook to face him, its flat edge clearing the dust to reveal clean wood. He opened the book and signed in as ‘Total Arsehole’. In the ‘Number of Nights’ column he wrote ‘Indefinite Stay’. Three months ago he had signed ‘Carl Shewan’ for ‘Three nights’. Now someone else had booked in, and there was only a passing resemblance to the other Carl Shewan.

  On the shelf below the desk he spotted the ID scanner, an old model, like so many he had seen before in train stations and hotels and not paid much attention to. He took it out, the keypad and separate downlink processor, and laid them on the desk. After a bit of fiddling and forcing, he managed to prise apart the book-sized processor’s plastic casing, exposing its circuitry. He squinted at the meaningless serial numbers and chip sets. Ingenuity, dexterity, made flesh, or at least memristors. Single-occupancy geeks or family men, who all had Government mortgages to pay off – they had made this, like they had made SCOPE and all the other kit that was needed to keep people safe from themselves. The people who had made the ID scanner were busy with their pieces of the puzzle. They only saw what was in front of them, the people who had been streamed into the only growth industry left, insecurity. They couldn’t see the bigger picture.

  Part of him wanted to crush the scanner under his heel, stamp on it, grind it into the dust. This gizmo should be obliterated, expunged from the cultural record: it was an aberration of nature. Instead of destroying it, he slotted both halves of the casing together again and put it back on the shelf. It didn’t mean enough any more to bother with. The guys who’d invented it were just doing a job. It wasn’t like they were guards at Auschwitz; they were just making little bits of rubbish, just as their training had shown them, and making precious money in the process. That was all. Maybe he should bury the fucking thing: HERE LIES FEAR – THE OLDEST TRICK IN THE BOOK.

  He trudged up the stairs for a wash. The pressure in the tap was low again, and it took a good few minutes for four inches of water to dribble into the bath. He stripped off and climbed in, sat down in the cold puddle with his scrap of soap, removing the worst of the grime and stink of days. Cupping water over his head, the cold shock woke him up. His hair had grown to a soft crew-cut now and it needed cutting again. His beard was back. But what was the point in shaving? Why bother trying to look the way he used to look? Maybe he should start to sketch, like Terry, to forget who he was, to focus on something else that would eat up some time.

  An hour later he was sitting up at the broch, watching, through binoculars, the crowd at the tiny church. He’d exhumed only two stones in the last week.

  There was no minister or priest down at the church, so P.C. Gibbs, as the nearest thing, was joining together in matrimony the happy couple. There would be speeches. Looks like the local councillor is doing the honours: plastered in make-up, even now, hair solidly lacquered. It was scarcely believable.

  Scanning along the bay, he saw Alec John was down at his house, spreading some scraps for the hens. Winter was coming and they weren’t laying quite so often now. But Gibbs, and one of Cutler’s mob, would still be round to collect; so said the Year 1 plan in Howard’s survival strategy, and by Christ the committee were not going to deviate from it, in public at any rate. There was no chance of him pulling strings with George on anyone’s behalf. Given Simone’s condition, George was likely to use those strings to strangle him.

  27

  Carl had joined Alec John up on the hill; both men glad to avoid the wedding.

  Within an hour, Alec John whispered, ‘Down.’ He pulled Carl by the sleeve and they lay still among the banks of heather.

  ‘Over there,’ Alec John said, pointing. Propped on his elbows, he raised a small pair of black binoculars.

  Carl could see nothing.

  ‘The wind’s in our favour. Come on.’

  Alec John crawled ahead and slid into a soft mossy gully. ‘We’ll have to wait, he’s on the slope.’

  ‘Can we not get any closer?’

  ‘It’s not that,’ said Alec John, peering over the edge of the gully. ‘The slope’s rocky and it’s too steep. If I take him there he’ll roll all the way down and get smashed to bits. Bruised meat
isn’t very appetising, and he’ll be harder to cut up. The slope’s too steep for him if he goes further on . . . He’ll come back, if we wait.’

  ‘For how long?’

  ‘Until he comes back.’

  Twenty minutes later there was sign of movement. The stag had been eating the juiciest patches of grass that were hard to reach. If he’d fallen, it would have been the end of him, but the reward was rich, undisturbed grazing. With autumn curdling the air, it was worth the risk.

  Alec John inched backwards into the gully. ‘He’ll come on a bit and then hopefully stop once he’s more exposed. He’ll want to check around for a bit before heading down into the glen. We’ll take him then, with a bit of luck.’

  They watched the stag come closer, picking his way along the ridge, wary of every sound and smell. He stopped.

  ‘Just a bit more,’ said Alec John, his eye to the rifle’s scope. ‘Another few metres will do it.’

  ‘Is he too far away?’

  ‘Ten years ago I might have, but I’m not too good at that kind of range any more. I can hit him, but that’s not good enough. He could be miles away by the time he dies.’

  They waited.

  After what seemed like an age, the stag finally walked on towards them. But he soon stopped again, his nose in the air. He turned to face the long curve of the glen, and stood, almost side-on to the gun.

  Alec John jerked as he fired, and the crack nearly deafened Carl. The stag’s legs buckled and he collapsed as if his feet had been swiped from under him.

  Carl rubbed his ear. ‘Jesus.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Alec John. ‘Now that’s not bad, not bad at all.’ He clambered to his feet, pulled what looked like a stopwatch from his pocket, and strode away.

  Something was dead, thought Carl as they rushed towards the animal. A huge living creature had been shot dead, right in front of him, and it all looked so ordinary, so workaday. Alec John was more interested in his pedometer.

  ‘Will you look at that?’ he said, stopping right next to the stag. ‘A hundred and sixty-four metres. It’s been a good few years since it was one shot from that range.’