Lie of the Land

by Michael F. Russell

  There had been money to spend and then, quite suddenly, there was no money to spend. Cue stress and marital difficulties. How come it always seemed to be the guys that walked out?

  The sharp, still world of frost and clear skies had given way to wind and rain, sluicing against the window of Room 7, but it was still very cold. On days like this there wasn’t much he could do out of doors. He could see that now and he no longer had any real urge to go squelching around the hills repairing a Stone Age broch. Eventually, figured Carl, every animal, human or not, learns to accept captivity, though that doesn’t mean to say there’s no corner of hope. That nugget of hope can be kept and taken out every now and again and looked at, like a lover’s photo in a locket. Then you close it up, put the nugget back in your pocket and get on with the grind.

  He lay on the bed, fully clothed against the cold, a scarf around his neck. The other day Isaac had shown him some crayon drawings, and it made him half-remember his own offerings as a kid. What had his own dad said when faced with a page full of his son’s scribbles? Maybe he said, ‘Brilliant, son, well done.’ Maybe he’d been genuinely enthusiastic about stick men with giant clubbed arms and tiny drainpipe legs, or big yellow suns and multi-coloured dogs with all their legs down one side. That response was possible, but Carl doubted that his own father – business going tits up, money worries mounting – would have been remotely interested in his son’s early artistic endeavours. In any case, he couldn’t remember any such encounter, traumatic or otherwise, with any degree of certainty. But he could remember snippets of arguments, sure enough, and to be honest, his dad did have a point. An ocean of liquid wealth had suddenly dried up, leaving a patchwork of puddles for little fish like him to gasp and flap in. It was almost funny. Servicing the insecurity industry could have given the man a good living, yet he’d turned his back on the Navy to buy a seafood restaurant in Leith. A little fish right enough, cursing his luck and the big ideas of his wife.

  As Carl lay on the bed smoking a spliff, he got the feeling that Isaac had not been happy with his critique of his drawings: obviously a single cursory ‘nice’ just didn’t cut it. But what can you say about stick men? You have a real eye for composition, young man. No. But the kid clearly thought his drawings were good enough to impress. Maybe Carl should have gone along with it by making generally encouraging noises, even though the felt-tip scribbles were just the basic elements of people and things. The kid was okay, once you got used to the fact that he was just a kid, and a confused one at that. They get hurt without understanding why.

  Carl could relate to that. At least Isaac was past the shitting and crying stage. After a while, when Carl spent long enough in his company, he could see that there were thoughts in Isaac’s head that were worth knowing. And they’re honest, kids – they can’t lie. Not when they’re young.

  Bugger it. Carl was stoned and cold, it was pissing down outside, and he was hungry. He checked the time. Pretty soon, Simone would be out around the village, helping to check on the older folk to see if they needed anything at the same time as George liked to read to Isaac sitting by the residents’ lounge fire. Carl could creep into the kitchen and help himself to whatever food was available, just like old times. His habit was being fed: there was usually a bowl of something left out for him. It was better that way, better than sitting round the table, stewing in thick silence. George had said they’d write ‘Carl’ on a plastic bowl and leave it on the floor.

  George, he’d noticed, had developed quite a skill for making him feel guilty for eating their food and for dirtying their sheets. Whenever someone in the village was ill, he would always refer to Carl’s pneumonia, and slow recovery. Maybe the old prick reckoned on bully-boy tactics, just like his son: if you don’t come to some kind of arrangement with my daughter, then we’ll stop feeding you and we’ll kick you out into the cold. Anyway, Carl had started to sneak down in the afternoons, about two o’clock, when no one was in the kitchen, as well as late at night. Looping his scarf around his neck, he padded downstairs, two pairs of Terry’s socks on his feet.

  The bowl of food was there, laid out for him in the still-warm kitchen. No name was on it, so far, and the bowl was on the worktop not the floor. Mutton and turnip stew. He grabbed the bowl and headed back upstairs to his room. When he’d finished, he sparked another joint, and lay back on his bed, the ache in his empty stomach drifting to the background again, though it was always there.

  Rain on the window. Music from his palmpod. Tetrahydrocannabinol in his bloodstream.

  The old is dead, and there isn’t going to be any miraculous resurrection.

  ‘It’s nothing to do with me,’ Carl had said to Isaac. ‘Everyone crying and your granny leaving and not coming back – that wasn’t my fault.’

  But even as he’d said the words, part of him said yes, it was his fault, and yes, he could have made a better effort doing something to stop SCOPE. And there was Terry, sitting over in his caravan, not washing, smoking Hendrik’s blow as soon as he woke up, if he slept at all. It was hard for Carl to watch that, even though he’d only known the guy for a while. Terry was lonely, and he needed a friendly face.

  ‘Maybe they’ll finish the job,’ Terry had said, slumped in his chair, one day, wreathed in smoke. ‘Adam and the rest will come for me one night and do me in.’ He’d looked up at Carl. ‘Now they don’t have to worry about the consequences.’ Terry laughed. ‘Like CivCon, or the Gestapo. A knock on the door and the bastards’ll black-bag me in a dawn raid and whisk me away. Shoot me in the quarry this time rather than slice my fucking . . .’

  ‘All right,’ Carl had soothed. ‘I don’t think that’s on the cards somehow.’

  ‘Why not?’

  Carl was silent for a moment, watching Terry flick his ash, tap-tap-tapping the joint on the rim of the ashtray, waiting for an answer. Tap-tap-tapping, even when there was no ash to flick. On edge.

  ‘Why would they come for you?’ he said at last.

  Terry shrugged. ‘Maybe they got a taste for it. Who could stop them if they came though the door, right now? You?’

  Squaring up to Casper, let alone the rest of the boatyard crew, wasn’t a prospect that Carl could imagine turning out in any way other than badly – for him. Maybe they did have a taste for it, and were enjoying flexing a bit of muscle, going round to polytunnels and greenhouses and hen-coops to see if people were hiding food. Enforcing Howard’s system.

  ‘You’re just being paranoid,’ said Carl. ‘Besides, you said you couldn’t remember what happened.’

  Tap-tap went Terry’s spliff on the ashtray. Tap-tap-tap . . .

  ‘I can.’

  They’d looked at each other.

  ‘It’s coming back to me, the more I try to remember, little snippets, in the dark, getting shoved around, and then the moonlight on something, flashing, a blade, you know, glinting in the moonlight . . .’ Terry’s voice broke, and the joint trembled in his hand. ‘And, uh, then I was screaming and I, uh, could feel . . . I didn’t meant to . . . I didn’t . . .’ His hand shook as he raised it to his eyepatch.

  Carl felt the colour drain from his face. He pursed his lips. ‘You sure?’

  Terry sniffed. ‘Yeah, I’ve been thinking about it, sitting here. I’ve remembered.’ He gave a short laugh. ‘Not much else to do but think.’

  Now that he thought about that conversation, he wasn’t sure if he trusted Terry’s account of losing his eye. Can memories be recovered like that, after some blanked-out trauma? He sat up, went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. A knife glinting in the moonlight – how very cinematic.

  There was a possibility, sure there was, but then he thought it might be a false memory because Terry wanted desperately for it to be the way he said it happened. To give matters their unvarnished truth, Terry might be lying. But he hadn’t been lying about not using violence on Gemma. The rumours said Dr Morgan confirmed that the girl and Terry had sex, but there was no sign of force.

  It was wron
g. How wrong? Was the crime one of degree, of measuring initial intent, or was that just fudging the issue?

  Carl tried to imagine someone being inside him when he did not desire it. When he wanted it to stop. What was he doing with Terry anyway? How could he associate with such a man?

  He looked at his face in the bathroom mirror. The beard kept him warm, as did the hair on his head. There was no room for style or fashion any more. He’d forgotten why he’d shaved it off in the first place. There was only the simple truth of keeping warm in the winter. Maybe he’d shave it off for summer, like they did to sheep.

  He set off for Alec John’s. At least he’d spend today inside, learning how to saw a carcass, how to slice it into cuts and joints of meat.

  It nagged at him, Terry and his flash of clarity. There was something about his way of telling it, something that wasn’t obviously either a lie or the truth. Call it self-delusion. Was he supposed to spread the story around? Was he supposed to tell Simone?

  He turned off the main road, just round the head of the bay, and walked up the gravel track to the stalker’s farm.

  He had to have the facts to stand up a hunch, and in this case his hunch was giving him trouble. There was no evidence to swing it either way; there had been no sign of broken glass or a knife in the trees in the clearing, just thin, sharp branches, sticking straight out from every conifer trunk. In daylight it was a pain to walk through; in the dark, and running, it would have been dangerous.

  January–April

  33

  The sky cleared, and the temperature plunged. Two Celsius was the best the brief, crystal daylight could offer; by night it was sub-zero, down as low as minus eight. Clear skies meant crunching grass below and the full catalogue of constellations wheeling above, Orion rising in the east, where the ionosphere flashed and crackled every now and then to SCOPE’s electric dance.

  As dawn broke, a light wind rose. A mile above the stirring village a parachute opened, a silver cylinder suspended beneath it, glinting in the early sun. The canopy of white nylon drifted inland on the breeze, away from Inverlair, and sank silently out of sight.

  Simone could hear Isaac humming to himself, as he thudded, one deliberate step at a time, down the stairs. Granddad would be down there, lighting the fire, wrapped in his dressing gown, with his balaclava on. He would probably tell Isaac off for coming downstairs without wearing any socks. Simone lay on her side, the duvet pulled up to her ears. At least she wasn’t vomiting any more, that was something, and Dr Morgan had said everything was fine; everything, that is, except life in general. Simone tried not to think of her mum; tried not to picture what would be left of her after almost four months lying wherever SCOPE had sent her to sleep. There was her son to occupy her thoughts now, and the baby in her stomach, and her dad and her brother and other people to think about. They were here, and they were alive. Simone kept telling herself that she had to focus on the present, and that thinking about what had happened served no purpose. It would drive her mad if she let it.

  What was she going to do?

  She started to cry, her mother not present to make things right, to comfort and cuddle and nothing more, no, nothing more . . .

  A crust had developed on her vulnerability, and no man would be allowed to penetrate it unless she, in full conscious realisation, wanted that to happen. She would keep her guard up, especially now, and her persona would bar the way to those who deserved exclusion. No outside force, no man, was going to make her feel bad again.

  It was obvious to her that Carl was either incapable of opening up or unwilling to try. She lay there, wrapped in the duvet, staring into space. Fatherhood, to Carl, was just a frightening word with unpleasant connotations.

  She hoped that her brother had told her the truth about Terry. It had been difficult enough to raise the baby subject before, to make it real for Carl, and now there was a reason for him to dislike her even more: Adam. She tried to see the justice in what had happened to Terry, but she found it impossible. He was a sad and lonely man.

  She felt nauseous again, and her breasts were tender. Pregnancy was real enough for her.

  At the same time that morning Carl lay in his own bed, fully clothed and hungry, trying to figure out how to start the day. He mustn’t stop washing just because it was easier and warmer to get into bed at night with all his clothes on. An effort to keep clean should be made, bollock-freezing water or not. He wasn’t going to stink like Terry. Days like this made him yearn for a coffee, a splash of Irish in it, just to keep out the chill. And carbs. Even the synthetic shit they used to hand out at the rationing centres. He would take a slab of polycarb right now, and a bucket of coffee, to kick-start his system. He was tired. Everyone was tired.

  Something would happen, something that would make his spirit soar. There had to be that in life, an end to the staleness and sameness and discomfort.

  This is how people used to live, he thought, his eyes fixed on the ceiling. They survived, cold and hungry, most of the time. Probably much worse back then, when there were no polytunnels or chest freezers or photovoltaics; no duvets or taps. And now an echo of the past had returned, making life what it had been for most of humankind’s existence: a struggle. Nature used to dictate that there was less of everything in the winter, including warmth. And now the power of seasonal rationing was back, tightening its coils around Inverlair for the long cold squeeze, until spring.

  He sighed. Why did she keep pushing him? She could be asking questions about SCOPE or Alec John or Terry one minute, then the next she’d ask about his own parents and the conversation, inevitably, would turn to children and the child that was on its way. He wasn’t going to get pinned down like that. It was too much like losing control, and he’d had enough of that over the last thirty-eight years to last a lifetime.

  In a minute he would fill a sink of water in the en suite, scrape together a film of soap from somewhere, and have a wash; then he would go and do something. In a minute he would do all that. Start the day. Perform an allotted task. He was starting to get the hang of things. Some of it disgusted him; the reek of steaming innards from a gralloched deer, or a snared rabbit, mouth full of its own blood. At least he was only answering to Alec John, not the committee – the self-appointed good shepherds. Maybe everyone needed that kind of authority, doing all the planning and organising.

  The committee had stepped into the breach and were now enforcing Howard’s survival plan, tweaked with their own sly modifications. Maybe that’s just what happens: those who get to call the shots pretend that everything is okay and above board, while the folks at the sharp end just accept injustice as natural, so long as it isn’t waved under their noses. Even gouging out eyes as punishment could be tolerated.

  Maybe he should tell the rest of the village about Adam Cutler’s food rationing stitch-up, and maybe enough of them would listen. But then what? Hold out the begging bowl and watch it get filled to the brim by a repentant committee? That sort of admission of culpability had never happened before the redzone, so why should it happen now? People look out for themselves; it only takes the right circumstances for the mask to drop, for people to regress to growling over a fresh kill.

  •

  Sunlight came streaming through the crystal-coated birch and into Alec John’s living room. The sky was cloudless and the early afternoon had a piercing light to it. The day would darken in two hours, but for now it was blue around and above the frosting bay. Hungry birds – siskin, Carl thought – were squabbling in the leafless trees, oblivious to him walking past, crunching up the shell path.

  Alec John was in his favourite spot, sitting at the window with a blanket round his shoulders and another over his knees, dozing, but not asleep. As Carl watched through the window, Alec John, his closed eyes dark and his skin stretched pale over the frame of his skull, grimaced and turned his head. But there was no respite from the discomfort, and the man’s gaping mouth struggled to inhale what his lungs could barely use. This is how it would
be, from now on: Alec John’s breathing would get quicker and shallower and the lack of oxygen, once his emergency tank ran out, would mean even walking to the toilet would be a struggle. Without regular injections of nanomed to fight the good fight, his heart would soon no longer be able to pump oxygenated blood to his lungs. This disease had been exorcised by inexplicable magic – in Alec John’s case administered five times a year by Dr Morgan. But now it was creeping back, repossessing its human host. Undoubtedly, emphysema would bring a few friends along, and they’d all have a wild old time in their Highland retreat. They’d do their best to devour it.

  Carl watched Alec John for a while. He couldn’t help but think of Eric and Leslie. Did they die together? The question kept occurring. He shuddered at the image of a Glasgow filled with desiccated corpses, in beds, cars, offices and streets, lying where they’d collapsed, bones picked clean. There would be other notspots and, one day, he’d drive away and find them.

  Carl went inside the house. ‘Hello, it’s me.’

  Alec John stirred at the sound. ‘Hello there,’ he gasped. He coughed, spat into his hankie, a trace of blood and sputum clinging to his grey-stubbled chin. He lifted the face mask, took a few deep breaths, and sat up straight to focus on his visitor.

  Carl noticed the bowl of soup, untouched, on the drop-leaf table. ‘George will take that personally,’ he said.

  Alec John shook his head. ‘I must have nodded off.’ He straightened his back against the armchair, smoothed his thinning grey hair into place. ‘I had some of the soup, and the bread – say thanks to George.’