Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  Mr Coyle patted him on the shoulder. ‘It’s good training.’

  Robbie couldn’t imagine what his father was training him for; his ambition was to be teleported into space, not become a door-to-door salesman. The people they visited divided evenly into those who could see the light of Mr Coyle’s reason and needed no further persuading, and bigoted Tory nincompoops who were beyond salvation and deserved locking up. Electioneering was a complete waste of time.

  ‘This is real politics,’ Mr Coyle redundantly reminded his son while they walked. ‘Not books and theories and having secret meetings like that idiot David Luss.’

  ‘You mean Moira’s boyfriend?’

  ‘I think they’ve split up now, which is just as well, not that Moira’s got much more sense, though don’t tell your mother I said that. But Luss, he’s your typical Trotskyite agitator.’

  ‘I thought he was a science teacher.’

  ‘Aye, that makes it even worse. These people are wreckers, they’re not interested in making people’s lives better. They only want to stir things.’

  They walked up the path of an overgrown garden and Mr Coyle rang the doorbell; it was answered by an elderly man whose grey hair was combed in a way that looked almost femininely flamboyant.

  ‘Thanks for calling, but I’ll be voting Liberal.’

  ‘You mean you’re going to waste your vote!’ Mr Coyle’s voice had a forced chumminess, heavy with ironic sympathy. ‘I thought an intelligent man like you would support Labour.’

  Surely they must know each other already, Robbie decided. This was merely some kind of banter.

  ‘Yours is the only party that’s bothered to come to my door, Mr Coyle, I’ll say that much for Labour. But I’ve little time for Wilson.’

  ‘I’m inclined to agree with you, Mr Tulloch, but we have to think about local issues.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ said Mr Tulloch. ‘Like this new military installation they’re talking about building.’

  The Vernon Estate had been sold to the Ministry of Defence, and now as well as being unable to exercise their right to roam, the people of Kenzie would have to put up with an army base. It sounded an issue of great importance but this was the first time Robbie had heard it raised, and the debate that ensued between his father and Mr Tulloch seemed no more than a good-humoured sparring match. Robbie was startled when the old man looked down at him with a smile.

  ‘This is child number two, then?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Mr Coyle replied, ‘you’ll be seeing him after summer.’ Robbie cringed. So this was to be one of his teachers at secondary school.

  The pair moved on to complete their tour of duty. ‘What will the army do in their new installation?’ Robbie asked his father.

  ‘I don’t know, these things are always kept secret from the likes of us who have to live with the consequences.’

  ‘Will there be nuclear missiles?’

  ‘Who knows?’ said Mr Coyle. ‘It wouldn’t surprise me.’

  There was something almost glamorous about it, the thought of deadly weaponry existing a short walk away from Kenzie town centre. Robbie would be able to practise remote viewing on it, trying to see inside the secret complex. Perhaps such experiments were what it was being built for. The rest of the houses they visited made no impression on Robbie; he was too busy dreaming of the installation whose promised existence made the little town of Kenzie seem significant at last.

  Labour won the council election and Mr Coyle was soon taken up with a new campaign to try and block the army base. In the following months there were meetings and petitions, but Robbie managed to avoid them. Instead, when the summer holiday came, he and his friend Scott began regularly visiting the old estate, which still lay lonely and neglected, the unguarded holes and gaps in its surrounding fence big enough for them to get their bikes through. The crumbling mansion was boarded up; the grounds were wild and overgrown. Near the house, a flat expanse of grass could be imagined as a former bowling green or future landing pad. What had once been well-tended rhododendrons were now the dense tangle of a tropical jungle.

  ‘Let’s go that way,’ Scott suggested one afternoon, pointing into some woods on the estate. They left their bikes on the path then crackled over twigs into the cool under-growth. ‘I’ll be the British and you’re the German.’ He ran off and quickly disappeared, leaving Robbie to creep in search.

  Robbie liked being the German. As well as Achtung and Schweinhund he’d learned other words; vector, tensor. They weren’t exactly German but they might as well have been since they came from The Meaning of Relativity and he hadn’t a clue what they meant, he just liked rolling them in his head. Robbie heard another sound; it must be Scott. He turned, alert, but in the empty sun-dappled woods he could hear only the twittering of finches, crows cawing in the air above, an aircraft miles away. ‘Scott!’ he called, waited, but there was no reply. ‘Scott!’

  His friend was gone. Robbie was alone in the enemy base, on an impossible mission requiring all the psychic powers he could muster. It was suicide to continue, but he had to. He tensored carefully through the trees, hoping the Schweinhund wouldn’t jump out suddenly and scare the Riemann curvature out of him, but found it harder going as the birch wood gave way to denser pine, the ground a soft carpet of pale needles more hospitable to mushrooms than human feet. There was no track here, no route to follow, only a labyrinth of crowded trunks and perilous branches, a place where you could be stuck for thirty years, unaware the war was over. Robbie was lost.

  ‘Scott! Where are you?’

  His voice was weak, made weaker by the hostile forest. One day they’d find his skeleton with toadstools growing out the eye sockets. He stumbled, scraped his arm, saw a thin bloody line mark his papery torn flesh, thought of panicking but was already onto the next stage, the acceptance of certain death, when up ahead he glimpsed the promise of a sunlit clearing and ran joyfully for it. Scott wasn’t there. What he saw instead was something from another world.

  There was a circular pit some fifteen or twenty feet across, the kind of hole a flying saucer would leave behind. An access road leading to it that a tractor could manage, one the investigators could have used. And in the pit, filling it completely, an extraterrestrial gift, was a head-high mountain of green glass, glittering so brightly in the sunshine that it took a moment for Robbie’s eyes to adjust and resolve the miracle into what it was: an enormous heap of marbles. He went to the edge of the pit and grabbed a couple in his hand, setting off a small clinking avalanche. Bigger than the ordinary marbles he played with, and without the coloured centre; these were heavy spheres you could look straight through, crude and flawed with rough surfaces, indentations like the marks of strings or fibres in the mould they came from on another planet. Here was the true secret of the Vernon Estate: the site of an alien visitation, now to become a military installation dedicated to re-establishing contact with a superior intelligence from the other side of the galaxy. Or maybe they were just marbles. Robbie put two of them in his pocket as souvenirs and headed down the access track.

  He should tell Scott about the alien treasure. But Scott might blab, the pair of them would get arrested, interrogated, brainwashed so they wouldn’t remember any of it. Thing was, Robbie knew these wee glass balls couldn’t really be from a flying saucer, more likely industrial waste. Except that they might be. He stopped on the rutted track and drew one marble from his pocket, held it to his eye, looked through it and strained with all his telepathic energy, trying to view the world where the mystic sphere belonged. All he could see was upside-down trees.

  These psychics, though, they could look into crystal balls and find all sorts. Russian bases, other planets, the future – a doddle. Robbie cupped the marble in his palm, willing it to show him the astral life he dreamed of, but it stayed stubborn and inert, not even a wee bit glow to encourage him. Why can’t life be like a story?

  It was more than glass, he knew it. You don’t drag a ton of glass up a special track through
a forest because you can’t be bothered phoning the council to get them to take it away. Robbie thought about it logically, like his dad would. This stuff was hidden for a reason. Nobody was meant to know about it, like the Post Office Tower with its secret transmitters or that damned Concorde, military spy jet they put a few people in to make it look legitimate.

  Could be radioactive.

  Robbie dropped the marble, looked at his palm. No scar or burn but it can take days before your hair and fingernails fall out. Best not get involved. He carried on walking, took the other from his pocket and threw it. He’d only had a few minutes’ contamination, wouldn’t do him any harm. Then he thought what an eejit he was. He went back and picked up the one he’d dropped. It was only a marble.

  Eventually he was able to regain the path where his bike lay; Scott was still looking for him, exasperated by his disappearance, and they went home together in sulky silence. Robbie found his father already home from work, counting out a pile of leaflets on the living-room coffee table.

  ‘Are you going to come and help me distribute these?’ Mr Coyle was about to go and post them through every letterbox in the scheme: Block the base!

  Robbie said he was too tired, but what he feared was that if he went round people’s doors he might not be able to keep quiet about his discovery. Instead he went to his room, hid the marble beneath his pillow, and hoped his dad would never find it.

  12

  When Robbie started secondary school the first thing they had was a talk from Mr Sneddon, the head, who everybody called Archie and Mrs Coyle said looked like Fulton Mackay off the telly. He said how important it was to work as a team and uphold community values but all Robbie could think was how he’d look in an officer’s uniform. Then they got English with Mr Bryan, a fat man with a beard who went on about Shakespeare, and by ten o’clock Robbie was already beginning to think he’d be better off running away so he could get abducted by aliens. Science was next, and the man who came into the room was Mr Tulloch.

  Slim and agile despite his age, he stood before the class with arms akimbo, surveying them with a teasing smile. ‘A fine batch of recruits!’ His eyes rested momentarily on Robbie,in recognition of their earlier encounter, then he started telling them all what science was. Yes, it was test tubes and atoms and frogs’ legs and electric wires, but really it was simpler than that. Science, said Mr Tulloch, is the study of everything that is real.

  Robbie listened with a warm sense of optimism, determined that he wasn’t going to make a fool of himself like he did last year in Miss McPhail’s class. He wasn’t going to put up his hand and say he’d spent the summer learning Einstein’s theory of relativity, even though he had, sort of. He wasn’t going to tell everyone how he still imagined that the radiogram in his bedroom could tune into extraterrestrial signals, or that the metal governor on his shelf was part of a ray gun, or that the marble beneath his pillow came from a time machine. Instead he was going to listen to this famous scientist telling them all about the top-secret project they were embarking on. The rocket was on the launch pad and already the countdown was in progress: 33, 32, 31 …

  Mr Tulloch said to one girl, ‘Do you have a brother in this school?’ She nodded.

  28, 27, 26 …

  He asked a boy, ‘What unit can we use to measure time?’

  24, 23, 22 …

  He said to Robbie, ‘How old are you?’

  ‘19.’

  The entire class erupted. Frank Coulter looked like he might need medical assistance, breathless and bright red with laughter.

  ‘Nineteen?’ Tulloch said with theatrical incredulity.

  ‘I mean eleven.’

  ‘An interesting mistake,’ the teacher mused, quietening the class. ‘But we all make mistakes, otherwise we’d never learn.’ He glared at Frank. ‘And we don’t make fun of people.’

  At the end of the lesson Mr Tulloch drew Robbie aside while the rest filed out, convinced he was to be punished for daydreaming, but the teacher spoke benevolently when they were alone. ‘You’re the one who reads Einstein, aren’t you?’

  Robbie was too embarrassed to speak.

  ‘I know Mrs Lightfoot in the library, she told me she’s been signing that book out to you every fortnight for months.’

  Robbie nodded. ‘I think I nearly understand some of it.’

  ‘That’s good, keep trying. And don’t forget to read other books too. Have you ever heard of a writer called Goethe?’

  It was like being with Dr Muir all over again. ‘No.’

  ‘He was a scientist as well as an author. Or you could try Immanuel Kant, he made a very important discovery in astronomy. If you like hard books about the universe, Robbie, there are plenty of them around.’

  When Robbie emerged from the classroom it was with a glow of pride. Even Frank Coulter could see it. That night he lay in bed listening to the radiogram while the lucky marble formed a barely perceptible lump beneath his head; Mr Tulloch was telling them about the next space mission, and Robbie was to be its pilot. Distant foreign music had been playing on the radio, found through random tuning, but had sunk beneath the interference so that it was only an interstellar hiss that accompanied Robbie’s thoughts. His first day had been a success: he’d learned that science is the study of all that’s real. Made him wonder why the teachers bothered to teach anything else. Then from across the cosmos he heard a faint message: ‘Voice of the Red Star.’ At least that’s what he thought he heard; the name of a radio station on the other side of the Iron Curtain, its signal almost completely shielded by it, the announcer trained through spying or telephone interception to speak with what was nearly an American twang, but not quite; surfacing for an instant then quickly retreating to safety. It was a voice from beyond the event horizon; the place Robbie was meant to fly to.

  Mr Tulloch’s science lessons were unusual, like the man himself. He would make the class perform as molecules, planets, blood cells or blades of grass. They wrote poems about photosynthesis, made words out of the names of atomic elements, created pictures with chemicals. He was enthusiastic but aloof, regarding the human tableaux he orchestrated with a ballet master’s cautious eye, one finger propped against his cheek.

  ‘Tulloch’s what you’d call a confirmed bachelor,’ explained Mr Coyle, who had a label for everything. ‘Lives with his mother, she must be in her eighties.’ Never having married had given the teacher a distorted view of life: that was why he voted Liberal. Nor had Tulloch joined the public demonstrations against the military base, saying it was good for the local economy and would keep a few uniformed idiots safely out of harm’s way instead of shooting people in Northern Ireland. Already the estate was being cleared; the fence was fixed and guarded, and Robbie had never again been able to reach the spacecraft crater.

  ‘Maybe Mr Tulloch never met the right woman,’ Anne Coyle suggested, bringing tea to her spouse, who sat behind a newspaper.

  ‘Or he’s gay,’ said Janet.

  ‘There’s no need for that,’ her father snapped over a crumpling Glasgow Herald.

  ‘But there’s nothing wrong with being gay.’

  ‘You shouldn’t voice opinions about matters you don’t understand – I’ve been through life and I know a slate when I see one. If not being married makes a man queer then what about the Prime Minister? Do you think he’s one?’ The paper rose with a snap, Mrs Coyle Ted Heathed back to the kitchen with a disapproving sniff, and the children carried on watching Top of the Pops.

  The spring term brought a new surprise: the appointment of David Luss as head of science. He walked into Mr Tulloch’s class to introduce himself to the pupils, the Trotskyite wrecker pacing companionably before them and betraying no recollection of the quaking boy who’d formerly served him peanuts and hoped the favour would save him from a bullet in the neck come the revolution. Mr Luss’s moustache was gone now, while the pipe – a sinister affectation, Joe Coyle thought, in any man below forty – was reserved for the staff room, where everyone soon gr
ew sick of it. Science for Luss wasn’t stories or pictures about everything that’s real: it was physics, chemistry and biology, with a separate jotter for each.

  Mr Tulloch had held Robbie back again at the end of a lesson one Friday afternoon to talk about books, when Luss came in and found the two of them sharing a private joke. ‘Sorry to disturb you,’ he said with an irony intended to be subtle.

  Tulloch was unperturbed. ‘We were talking about Goe-the, Mr Luss; do you know his theory of morphology?’

  Luss evidently didn’t. ‘I wonder if we could swap dining-hall duties this week …’

  ‘I’m sure it can be arranged,’ Tulloch replied with casual magnanimity. ‘Now, what are we to do with this young fellow?’ he said, indicating his pupil. ‘Robert has been spending his time reading Einstein, you know.’

  ‘That’s a bit advanced.’ Luss’s visit to the Coyles, like the woman he’d gone there with, were erased from his personal history, airbrushed from his past. He stared blankly at Robbie, then at Tulloch, who took the hint and dismissed his favourite pupil with a friendly pat on the back; but Robbie, thinking the teacher wasn’t yet finished with him, waited unseen outside the open door.

  ‘We need to talk about the strike action,’ said Luss. ‘All the union members are backing it.’

  ‘I’m not in the union, David.’

  ‘Most of the non-union staff are coming out in sympathy.’

  ‘If the strike goes ahead then I’ll be coming in to teach as normal.’

  ‘You don’t mind being a strike-breaker? You know the feelings it can arouse.’

  Robbie saw Mr Bryan waddling along the corridor. He moved away from the door, not wanting to be caught eavesdropping, and was surprised when the plump English teacher turned, ignoring Robbie completely, and entered the science room.

  ‘Ah, Willie,’ Luss greeted him. ‘Reckon you can make Gordon see some sense?’

  Robbie could hear Willie Bryan panting as he caught his breath and looked round the room. ‘Is that Voltaire on the wall?’