Lie of the Land

by Michael F. Russell

  Now, two days later, there was nothing of the hind’s guts to be seen except a little dried blood and tufts of downy fur clinging to the heather. Who knows how many animals had fed off the remains? Maybe the guts had made the difference between life and death. A crow might emerge, alive, from the winter because it had eaten its fill here. That crow might kill a lamb. That lamb wouldn’t grow up to produce more lambs. The struggle for flesh was open and constant.

  •

  Dr Morgan was relieved. This looked like a straightforward pregnancy. ‘The head has engaged. BP’s fine. Everything’s normal.’ She smiled at Simone.

  Simone pulled up her jogging bottoms. Isaac was cackling out in the back garden with Pavel and Fiona.

  Normal. That was a good one. She tried to smile at Dr Morgan, puffing and heaving off the bed. ‘Thanks for coming round.’

  ‘I was passing anyway. Just checking on Mrs Mackay.’

  ‘Is she not well?’

  ‘Oh, she’s fine, a tough old bird that one. But her house is all electric, and it’s been bloody freezing in there, though we’re into spring now. She’s in her eighties. It was minus two in Mr Cameron’s bedroom when they found him. He was seventy-seven. And without treatment, the Armstrong boy’s leukaemia will kill him in a month.’ She rolled the latex gloves into a ball. ‘Just another day at the office.’

  Simone started to put her trainers on, but she was too big to reach down easily.

  ‘Here, let me.’ Dr Morgan crouched to finish the job and tie the laces. ‘How does the father-to-be feel now?’

  Simone considered her answer. ‘I think . . . I think he’s resigned to hanging around.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘Well, he’ll give it a go, I suppose.’

  ‘There’s a big difference between giving things a go and being resigned to hanging around, yeah?’

  Pulling herself out of the chair, Simone pressed her fingers into the small of her back. She grimaced.

  ‘He doesn’t have kids, does he?’

  ‘No,’ said Simone.

  ‘Did he have anyone special before, do you think?’

  Simone watched Isaac out in the garden, climbing up the ash tree with Pavel. They were both laughing. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Though I think there was someone a while back. She had an abortion and the baby wasn’t his. He eventually found all that out.’

  ‘He told you that?

  ‘Yes.’

  Dr Morgan nodded, satisfied. ‘He must have lost someone.’

  ‘As far as I can make out, his boss was the most important person in his life,’ said Simone. She waddled into the en suite bathroom and closed the door.

  Claire Morgan wanted to say that Simone reminded her of her own daughter. There was a photo of Simone’s mother on the bedside table. The natural links had been severed – for both of them – and she should say the thing she felt moved to say. Your mother and I are about the same age; I had a daughter too.

  She should draw the comparison, build something, and Simone should do the same. Only good could come of it. Her Nancy was gone and so was Alison Cutler and . . .

  The toilet flushed. Dr Morgan gathered herself.

  ‘You know these spraysuits?’ asked Simone.

  ‘No,’ said Dr Morgan. ‘Are they for swimming?’

  Simone smiled. ‘No. It’s mainly guys that use them. Stuff called neurogel. You bought a nebuliser and sprayed the gel on at home. There were also these contact lenses.’

  ‘Porn, you mean?’

  ‘Well,’ said Simone, ‘I suppose you could say that. But it’s more than porn. It was like living with someone, if that’s what the users wanted. It was for lonely people, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, there are plenty of them still around. Did Carl have one, a spraysuit?’

  ‘My dad seems to think he did. They were talking a while ago, before . . . before Terry.’

  There was a sharp crack against the windowpane, as the first nugget of hail pinged off the glass; within seconds the shower swept in at full pelt. Simone watched as Isaac, Pavel and Fiona rushed giggling to the back door, holding their faces.

  ‘Does Carl still blame Adam for what happened?’

  Simone nodded, feeling exhausted all of a sudden. She sat down heavily in the bedroom’s only comfortable chair, her breath condensing in the cold spring air. ‘He thinks Dad could’ve done something about it, though I don’t know what he had in mind. I mean, what could Gibbs have done anyway? Locked him in a cellar? I just get the feeling Carl wants Adam punished, somehow. He wants some kind of justice. But I say: what about justice for Gemma? If Adam or Casper get locked up why shouldn’t the same thing happen to Terry?’

  ‘And Carl can’t get what he wants,’ said Dr Morgan to herself, then louder, ‘so things are complicated between you two.’

  As quickly as it had started, the hail shower passed.

  ‘I think they always will be,’ said Simone, closing her eyes, her pale lips trembling. She tried to smile. ‘We didn’t have the ideal start, you know. I suppose I should be a little more . . . understanding.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s used to the city. He doesn’t belong here. The world for us maybe isn’t so different; for him it’s changed beyond all recognition, and everyone he knew in Glasgow is dead.’

  ‘True,’ said Dr Morgan. ‘But it’s been nine months, just about. Maybe it’s time he started to accept the situation.’

  ‘That’ll happen, eventually,’ said Simone, surprised by how confident she sounded. ‘Even if he could leave here tomorrow, there isn’t really anywhere for him to go any more.’ She sat up. ‘I’m not expecting anything to happen between us. I don’t think I even want it to. I’d just like him to acknowledge this.’ She patted her distended belly. ‘And accept the possibility that being a father might actually mean something.’

  Dr Morgan would have liked to talk more, but the sound of thumping feet and voices in the hallway helped decide the issue. She got smartly to her feet as Isaac and his pals burst into the room with a story about a dead bird they’d found in the garden.

  ‘Sounds like a greenfinch,’ said Dr Morgan. ‘Birds get disorientated sometimes – no one knows why – and they fly into windows, into the glass, and break their necks.’

  Ornithology by osmosis made her reasonably certain it was a greenfinch. If it hadn’t been for divorce, she might have been an expert on birds by now. He’d always loved birds.

  •

  Terry’s feet were on the windowsill, dust from sawn plasterboard on his boots and clothes, and in his tangled brown hair. There was old newspaper spread all over the floor of his uncle’s house, not much furniture in the rooms, and everything smelled of new paint. The smell of past normality and the freshness of the future, each room a different colour, right down to the floorboards. A house of moods, and a room for each one, so said Terry.

  ‘So, the trick is not to be afraid,’ he said, taking another suck on his spliff. ‘Open your mouth and your heart and your mind, and let the stuff just pour out of you. Say what you are moved to say. Take that first step towards not feeling stupid, by feeling stupid.’

  Carl sat on the floor, against the wall. He grunted, too convinced by Terry for comfort. He didn’t like the way everything was being smoothed over. The scars of knee-jerk justice were plain to see; the word rape conjured images of frenzied, feral violence. The truth of both was hard to fathom.

  SCOPE was an invisible glacier, just another expression of force. But now he was in a place where forces had overpowered choice. Glaciers don’t have the urge to dominate the rocks they grind to rubble. There’s no other mode of being for half-mile-thick ice; grinding rock is what it does. It was the same with stags. They can’t choose what they are; they can’t resist the actions they are compelled to perform. They are their actions. That’s what defines them.

  People aren’t just vectors of blind force. They can choose. It wasn’t just a case of subjugate and inseminate.

  Just for
something to say, Carl told Terry about the crow in the Larsen trap, up on the moors. The bird had gone crazy when it saw Carl approaching. He’d stood quietly, watching it from a distance. After a while the crow stopped flapping and clawing at the wire cage. It had been hard to tell if the thing was afraid; there was no trace of emotion in its gleaming black eyes, head cocking and bobbing, alert. To save shotgun shells, Carl was supposed to use the metal gripper to grab the bird by the neck, if he came across one still alive. Thus pinioned, the crow was then to have its brains stamped on.

  ‘But I shot it instead,’ said Carl. ‘And I blew the bloody Larsen trap to bits as well. I felt sorry for it – even though they take grouse eggs and go for the lambs. It was just a young one. Alec John said the older ones know not to go near the traps. The death of a few crows teaches the rest not to go near them. It’s like every so often they need a reminder of how to stay alive. A sacrifice. It was just trapped there, helpless, in the cage. I mean, I know it’s a pest, but you’re killing something that’s just trying to stay alive, same as you are. Anyway, I made a choice, and it’s been a while since that’s happened.’

  Terry passed Carl the joint. ‘Everything is entitled to its share. Somewhere along the line I think we forgot that. We wanted it all for ourselves.’

  Carl took a single draw from the spliff and passed it back. He shifted his weight on the hard floor, uneasy. ‘Different rules now, in lots of ways, I suppose. But there are still some that carry moral force.’ From this angle, and in profile, and with the light from the window hitting him straight on, Terry’s eyepatch wasn’t visible. But every so often, as people do when they’re talking, he’d turn his head, and Carl would see the patch. Off had come the surgical gauze that Dr Morgan had supplied, and in its place Terry had drawn an oversized eye onto a triangle of pliable white plastic. He’d sewn a red glass bead onto the patch as an iris. The effect was disconcerting.

  ‘I saw Gemma today,’ said Terry.

  ‘What do you mean – saw?’

  ‘She looked terrified, then turned bright red, then looked as if she was about to burst into tears. She said sorry and ran away.’

  Terry put the joint down in the ashtray and got up from the wicker chair, his red-bead eye matching the look on his face. He started measuring another sheet of plasterboard.

  •

  In the old quarry Carl watched sand martins swoop and frolic over the lagoon, shooting into their holes in the quarry wall, then bulleting out and up, dipping and circling. Spring is here, and this is how these birds behave. He watched them for a spell, at the centre of the sand martins’ wild wheeling orbit, until he forgot what had been on his mind. As afternoon lengthened, he turned and walked back along the main road and up the northern slope of the bay. Near the red-boulder roadblock he stopped. The Aurora was close inshore, just sitting there in the calm sea. Through the binoculars he could see Casper fishing astern and Adam, shades on, dozing in a deckchair.

  And then it took hold of Carl. The idea of what to do next got him like a heart shot.

  He raised the binoculars again, his pulse quickening. The Aurora must be a good 200 metres offshore, apart from one spit of rock, where the distance was maybe half that. He could get down there in ten minutes if he moved quickly.

  He ran down the uneven grassy meadow to the bottom edge. Crouching behind a fence, he cased the best route. What the fuck was he doing? Before he could find an answer, he set off again, running stooped to the gate that led down to the shingle and the rocks, slipping on the bank of high-tide seaweed as he rushed down to the foreshore. If he kept to the north side of the spit of rock the Aurora wouldn’t see him, and when he got to the point he would be close enough to . . .

  He splashed through rock pools, the .308 slung across his back, until he got to the cover of the spit. Maybe Adam and Casper had been fishing for hours and were set to go back to the pier. As he clambered over the dark rocks, the plan snowballed in his mind; each problem was met with a solution.

  Afterwards, he could run back to the ruins of the herring station, grab the old dinghy and oars, row out to the Aurora, drop the anchor, and shove the bodies overboard. Then he’d head back to the boat, sink it, and tell everyone that he came across the Aurora aground on the rocks.

  Afterwards. After what?

  The further out the spit he went, the wetter the rocks became and the deeper the water. Once or twice he slipped and nearly fell in. Under his breath he started singing, softly, ‘Set my people free, free, free, set them free’ over and over again, barely aware that he was even doing it.

  His heart was racing, lips dry, and he could feel his hands and legs starting to shake.

  And here he was. And there they were, close enough for a shot. He caught his breath, peeping round the rocks every now and again.

  Free, free, set them free . . .

  It was a perfect spot: the rocks were arranged so that he could adopt an ideal firing position. Even the barrel of the rifle would have a shelf on which to rest. The earth and the tides had provided for him in his hour of need. It was preordained.

  Free, free, set them free . . .

  As he raised the rifle he found that his hands couldn’t stop shaking. His heart was pounding in his throat and, even above the crashing surf he could hear it in his ears. Every time he tried to settle into position it would happen, his body shaking and his heart hammering against his ribs.

  Adam dozing in the sun, shades on. Take Casper first in the head, then down and to the left as Adam roused himself and – bang. He’d be doing everyone a favour.

  Free, free, set them free.

  Carl set the gun aside, and with a trembling hand wiped the sweat and snot from his face. He laughed to himself, unchambered the bullet, and turned away from his position.

  He held the rifle in front of him to look at it, one hand gripping the rubberised stock and the other the barrel.

  This gun was older than he was and it had never taken a human life. He’d had it all of five minutes and was already planning to do exactly that. Is that what he was going to do with the gun Alec John had bequeathed to him? Bloodlust wasn’t part of the inheritance, surely. He could block that signal, if he put his mind to it. A man isn’t a machine that can set conscience aside.

  He put the rifle back into its case. It’s easier, at the end of a telescopic sight, but not that easy. Adam was safe to throw his weight around until someone else threw it back at him. Let him sleep in the sun, saved for another day. Uncle Adam. The Big Boss.

  Laughing softly to himself, Carl made his way back along the spit, through the foreshore rock pools, and back up to the roadblock. The Aurora was motoring back towards the bay now. He watched it approach the pier, throttling back.

  Calmer now, his pulse back to normal, Carl made his way to Alec John’s. Shooting animals was power enough.

  Change had been thrown over him like a cloak of lead. The more he struggled under it, the heavier it got. Maybe if he stopped struggling, the future would lie lightly on him, and possibility would begin to flower once again. Lead would transmute, become lighter than air.

  Jess came scrabbling down the shell path as soon as she heard Carl’s footsteps. He stroked her, which set her tail to a joyful thrashing. Every time he saw Dr Morgan in Alec John’s house he assumed the worst: that the old man had decided enough was enough and it was time to go.

  ‘Well?’

  Dr Morgan was in the sitting room, heating some milk on the range. She stirred the pan, ordered Jess into her blanket-lined basket. ‘He’s okay,’ she said. ‘He’s got something to think about.’

  ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘It’s good news, maybe.’ Dr Morgan brightened. ‘I found a nanomed in the surgery. It’s less than two years old. It wouldn’t slot into the applicator as normal, so I just stuck it in a drawer ages ago.’

  ‘Can you use it?’

  Dr Morgan nodded. ‘I think so. It’s a fiddly job getting it into an ordinary hypodermic, that’s why I didn’t us
e it.’

  Carl clapped his hands. Jess jumped out of her basket and gave a short bark.

  ‘That’s fantastic.’ His enthusiasm waned when he saw Dr Morgan’s expression. ‘What’s wrong?’

  Warm milk was poured into a mug. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘if he takes the nanomed in one go his lungs will be restored, almost, to the way they were. He’ll have three good months.’ Dr Morgan glanced at Carl. ‘And then, unless the nearest mast fails – and assuming we can find more nanomed when it does – he’ll have to go through all this pain and discomfort again.’

  Carl sat at the table and stroked Jess at his knee. Death wasn’t going to decide this one, not entirely.

  ‘What does Alec John think?’

  ‘He’s not sure. I could give him it in two lots. He’d feel a lot better than he does now, but not well enough to go into the hills. He’ll have a few months if I split it in two.’

  Dr Morgan went through with the milk, Carl following her, to the end bedroom. ‘He’s asleep,’ she whispered.

  Propped on a bank of pillows, Alec John slept with his mouth open, thin hands splayed out on the duvet, ancient at sixty-six. His breathing was fast and shallow.

  ‘I thought he’d be asleep,’ said Carl softly. ‘He can’t sleep through the night so he dozes through the day.’

  ‘Are you up with him at night?’

  ‘Not often,’ said Carl. ‘He hates it when I come in. He was sitting in the chair the other night.’

  ‘Really?’

  Carl nodded. ‘Yeah. He was just sitting there, both hands on his walking-stick, like he was just about to get up.’

  ‘Did he?’

  ‘No. He was back in bed half an hour later. Is there a drop of rum in that?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Dr Morgan with a smile. She walked back through to the stove with the cup of milk. ‘You can warm it again when he wakes up.’ She poured the milk back into the pan and put the lid on. ‘You’re very attentive.’