Lie of the Land
Page 26
‘Do I hear a sigh of relief?’
Jess padded through to the kitchen and flopped into her basket.
‘Not impressed with my hospitality, huh?’
The dog gave a deep, shuddering sigh, and curled up, cosy by the warm stove. Carl poured a glass of water and took it upstairs to his private Odeon. Sophia was still looking worried, eyes and mouth wide. Marrying Omar Sharif’s wily provincial potentate, rather than Stephen Boyd’s dashing but irrelevant Roman noble, was clearly giving her trouble. Film might be a world of illusion, but good ones had a grain of truth, emotional or otherwise. It was great to lose yourself in films. To forget. That’s what good ones did: they flowed over you like flashing water and made you forget who you were and the fact you were watching a film. Is there anything wrong with that? Is there any harm in forgetting, for a while, your space and place in time, even now?
Carl stuffed a few more leaves into his pipe and lit up. There was only a splash of fuel in the lighter he’d found in the shed. Chuckling, he thought of the folk in the village who were trying to invent matches by taking the phosphorus out of old lifeboat flares. If they couldn’t perfect their technique soon, maybe they’d all have to wait for lightning to strike a tree. Thank you, great Sky God, for sending us the power to cook and stay warm. Prometheus, or whoever, could then set off with a flaming torch, running from house to house.
‘Play,’ said Carl.
Sophia Loren took up where she left off. King Omar Sharif was given the girl. No contest, when there’s an empire at stake. After a while he shouted, ‘Pause.’ He sat there, listening to the sound of the house, another man’s house, settling around him. He chose some Led Zep from Alec John’s old CD collection and thrashed about on the drumkit for a spell.
With the thick end of the drumstick, he crashed down, hard, on the cymbal. It bucked and gonged and quivered into silence. He sat there, the drumsticks in his hands, another man’s house around him and around that, another world that wasn’t his world. No matter how long he stayed here he would always feel that he belonged somewhere else, that he was an outsider. He had tried hard, and had learned a new set of rules; he had focused on his daughter, on Isaac. Kids are so impressionable, they absorb habits and opinion, distill it all into their own poison, their own love. It was all transmitted, from one mind to another. It was all in the implanting.
Carl got up and went downstairs to the living room. In a black bin bag, taken from Terry’s uncle’s house, he found what he was looking for. He smoothed the old newspaper – yellow and brittle round the edges – flat on the drop-leaf table. His first big story. His first front-pager. Just short of nineteen years ago.
‘And over the top he went, fighting the good fight,’ he muttered to himself. Jess came shuffling through from the kitchen; he reached down and scratched behind her ear, the way she liked. From the drawer of the dark sideboard he took a pair of scissors.
‘Just in case you take me for granted,’ he said to the dog, cutting round the article. ‘At any point I could resume my flourishing career – so watch out.’
The dog breathed heavily at his feet, unconcerned.
Out in the shed, he found a box of Alec John’s stuff and, in it, an empty frame. Two years ago the photo of the long-dead Mrs Stoddart had been placed tenderly between her husband’s folded hands. They were together, not far from Howard. In place of the photo he positioned the newspaper article, clicked the glass back into the frame, and hung it on the same hook in the porch. Through the window he saw two kids, a boy and a girl, running up the track from the main road. Carl went outside to wait for them and noticed Isaac ambling some way behind his friends, whacking bramble bushes with a stick, trying to look cool.
‘If there’s a party at mine,’ said Carl, ‘then nobody invited me.’
‘It’s Gary,’ said the girl, out of breath. ‘He’s run into the redzone and hasn’t come back.’
‘What?’ Carl started off down the path then stopped, turned and ran back into the house. ‘What did he do that for?’
Isaac ran after him. ‘Is it Pulse Day today?’
‘Um, no, I don’t know,’ said Carl, rummaging through the side pockets of his rucksack. ‘What was that stupid fu—’ He shook his head. In truth, he had no idea when the next pulse in the delta signal was due. He used to know, used to have it marked out months ahead on the calendar. He found what he was looking for.
Car key. Deltameter.
Bolting from the house, he ran down the track to the stone byre. Both doors were flung apart and he whipped the dustsheet from Howard’s car. Every so often he turned the engine over, checked the tyres. If the thing started now, when he actually needed it, he could be at the roadblock in seconds.
‘Get in.’
Isaac and the other two got in. As she climbed into the back seat, Carl saw a fresh scar on the girl’s pale upper arm.
‘You kids still playing your stupid games, cutting yourselves open?’
The girl, Katy, pulled down her sleeve and glared at him. Carl jumped in. The car started first time.
‘We don’t need the safety chips any more. Gary said adults had put them in to keep us prisoners,’ she said. ‘Gary said we should cut them out.’ Then she shouted, ‘You made the world the way it is, fucking adults, so don’t start giving me advice and telling me what to do.’
Carl said nothing. The car swung out of the old byre and bounced down the rough stony track. They sped off up the main road the mile or so to the roadblock.
‘Maybe Gary won’t be giving any more orders,’ he muttered, eyeing the sullen girl in the rear-view mirror. He wondered if Isaac had asked for his own chip to be cut out. The idea made him queasy.
At the line of red boulders Carl stopped the car and they all got out. There was no sign of Gary, or the rest of the kids. Carl took out the deltameter.
Nothing.
He searched through the log, worked out when the last pulse should have been. Two days from now. Not today.
Not today.
‘There they are,’ shouted Katy, pointing down towards the sand dunes. ‘Gary’s with the rest.’
With the older boy in tow, she climbed the roadside fence and ran off down the field of thistles and reeds to join their friends, past the quarry. Oblivious to Gary and his pals, Carl looked along the stretch of road to where it curved round a long sloping outcrop of rock and grass, before vanishing inland among the hills. Gary and the other kids, jumping and running in the sand dunes, were at least 500 metres inside the redzone.
Carl stood, motionless and quiet, and looked down the road.
‘What’s wrong?’
It took him a few moments to register that Isaac was still beside him. ‘In you get,’ he said quietly.
There was not a flicker on the deltameter, right through the sinusoidal spectrum. If it had been Pulse Day, the signal would be back to full strength by now. But there was no sign of it. He licked his trembling lips.
‘What’s wrong?’
Carl put the car in gear and drove, taking it slow, doing 20mph, checking the deltameter as he went. At 30mph he reached the curve in the road; he checked the mileometer. A mile. Around the curve and on and down through a long dip and across a short bridge by more pine trees and then uphill again.
He stopped the car.
Two miles. Nothing. They were a lot closer to the Russian capsule now. The thick silver torpedo had not moved from its spot on the hillside for over two years, though the parachute had long been shredded by the wind. But that was a good half-mile away from the road. The capsule would keep. There was another village, he remembered, a few miles away.
Carl smiled, though tears were welling in his eyes. He coughed, blinked, his voice hoarse and uncertain. Solid plates were shifting again, as they always must, grinding towards a new alignment. Change was here. The wall of silence had opened, by how much it was hard to say.
With his left hand he reached over and grabbed the passenger seat belt, swept it around Isaac, and click
ed it into place.
‘What’s that for?’
‘So you don’t get hurt.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘I don’t know,’ whispered Carl. He put the car into gear again and drove on, his hands shaking. ‘We’ll find something useful, and bring it back.’
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Joan Michael, David Robinson, Jan Rutherford, Alison Rae and Neville Moir. You all played your part in making this possible. I am grateful.
M.F.R.