Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘Hello.’

  Robbie turned and saw the girl in the white dress. He wondered if he was about to be thrown out for being totally useless and didn’t know what to say in his defence, so he settled for the first thing that came out of his mouth. ‘I was looking at the pictures.’

  ‘My name’s Dorothy.’

  It was as if she were holding it up for him in bright painted letters, expecting his opinion. He kept his hands clasped politely behind his back.

  ‘I got named after the girl in The Wizard of Oz – have you seen it?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ It was a very old film and as far as Robbie could remember it had never been on television.

  ‘Have you not?’ Dorothy sounded surprised. ‘There’s this girl goes to a magic place and all these people she’s known in her real life get turned into different ones like a witch and a lion and that. It’s dead good.’

  It had all been so easy when he was spilling Irn Bru on her table but now there was nothing to occupy his hands, and he’d never before realized how important it is not to think about your hands when you’re trying to think about how to make your tongue move, because maybe there’s a nerve goes between all of them and your brain pulls them like strings on a puppet, so it can’t cope with working too many bits at once.

  ‘What’s your name?’ she said.

  ‘Robert.’

  ‘Why did they call you that?’

  He’d never really thought about it. ‘I don’t think it was from a film,’ he said, feeling envious of the Hollywood pedigree that would give Dorothy a sure-fire conversation starter for the rest of her life.

  ‘Do you want to dance?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Me neither, I only come because I’ve got to. That’s my dad over there.’ She pointed to the cardiganed man, who was sliding an LP from a paper sleeve browned with age, and was too distant and preoccupied to notice his daughter. ‘Do you go to church?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Don’t you believe in God?’

  It was even worse than having no money – he’d been stupid enough to come to St Mary’s church hall an atheist. He’d definitely get thrown out now. ‘I don’t know,’ he said evasively.

  ‘You’ve got to love Jesus and repent your sins otherwise you’ll go to eternal damnation. Do you know what that is? It’s these flames that burn you up only you don’t go black and charred, you just keep burning forever. You don’t want that, do you?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  She was sizing him up like a new recruit. ‘They’ve got a ping-pong table – do you want to see it?’

  ‘All right.’ It sounded better than eternal damnation and was sure to be an improvement on the music here.

  ‘Come on,’ she said, leading him to a swing door at the other end of the room where a large handwritten notice directed over-eager lemonade drinkers to the toilets immediately beyond. Opposite the toilets was another door with a sign saying Staff Only.

  She looked back to make sure no one could see them. ‘In here,’ she said, opening the door.

  ‘Are we allowed?’

  ‘It’s OK.’

  She switched on the light and closed the door. They were in a small, cluttered storeroom with wooden shelves along one wall, piled with art materials and discarded decorations. Robbie and Dorothy had to share the limited floor space with the folded ping-pong table standing forlornly upright beside them, as well as somebody’s bike.

  ‘We can’t play table tennis here,’ Robbie observed with logical precision.

  ‘It goes outside in the hall. The youth club use it.’

  The light above them was a bare bulb hanging from a wire, and the air their entry had displaced had set it swinging gently but perceptibly. She was standing close to him, and for the first time he noticed the thin silver necklace she wore. ‘When I was wee my dad sometimes used to let me play in this room,’ she said. ‘I pretended it was a house.’

  ‘I used to play games like that.’

  ‘Houses?’

  ‘No, spaceships.’

  ‘This room’d make a good spaceship.’

  She rested her hand on the upper edge of the folded table and gazed at her fingers. Robbie, following her lowered eyes, looked too and saw that they were very thin, delicate fingers, gentle and artistic, and they were nearly touching his arm.

  ‘Sometimes people get caught kissing here,’ she said without looking at him.

  ‘What happens to them?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Don’t they get told off?’

  ‘Maybe a bit. But telling off isn’t the worst that can happen to you.’

  ‘Not like eternal damnation?’

  ‘No,’ she said, still looking intently at her fingers. ‘You only get that for doing really bad things like not believing. Have you ever kissed anyone?’

  It was an interrogation even more perilous than her questions about religion. ‘Yes,’ he lied.

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  Then she said, ‘Do you want to kiss me?’

  He couldn’t quite believe that he was actually here, right now, with this girl who genuinely wanted to be with him and was treating him like a film star or something, taking him totally seriously, it had all happened so fast and so unexpectedly when only a wee while back he was looking at pictures on the wall and now here he was, with a girl asking if he wanted to kiss her. That was amazing. But at the same time it felt more real than any moment in his whole life. All the rest was imitation.

  ‘Would you mind if I kissed you?’ he asked solemnly, and she turned her face up towards his. Her eyes were closed, she said nothing. He took this as a yes.

  He was a space rocket and she was the launch tower. There was a tiny bridge between them, and a man in a control room counting down. As his face slowly moved closer to Dorothy’s he felt some kind of force field electrifying him and making him tingle. When their lips touched he was blasted into space.

  Everything was dark and the mission was very brief, but Robbie would describe his feelings afterwards to the flashing lights of a press conference. ‘You see the whole world from up there, small, precious and beautiful, and you realize how lucky we all are to live on this planet. It’s both glorious and humbling, reassuring yet somehow scary. It’s something I’ll never forget.’

  They disconnected with a last faint click as their access chambers repressurized. Dorothy opened her eyes and looked at him gravely. ‘I can’t go out with you,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘My dad won’t let me. If he knew we were here he’d kill me. We’d better go back.’

  The threat of cardigan man coming after him was enough to break the spell; Robbie made straight for the door.

  ‘Wait,’ she said, but it was too late. Robbie had abruptly opened without listening to make sure no one was there. Coming out of the toilet at the same time was Sheena Dunbar, who stopped in her tracks and at first looked unhappy to have encountered him, then strangely pleased when she saw Dorothy emerge behind, switching off the light and closing the door.

  Sheena stared at the two of them. ‘You’re not allowed in there.’

  Dorothy went silently back through the swing door into the hall, leaving Robbie to try and explain himself. ‘We were just looking …’

  ‘Who’s your girlfriend? Do your mum and dad know?’

  ‘Don’t tell them.’

  ‘Why not?’ She drew closer to him and lowered her voice. ‘Were you winching?’

  For the first time he could see in her face a hint of admiration. ‘Aye, so what?’

  ‘So … she’s a slag.’ Sheena turned and strutted aloofly back to the hall; Robbie followed afterwards. Dorothy was behind the lemonade table again and refused to look at him, but the intangible bond still hovered in the air between them. The rest of the time went quickly; Robbie no longer cared about anyone else here or what they did. It was all the other kids who were ignominious: he was a hero
at a press conference.

  Sheena said nothing about it when her dad arrived to pick them up, and as soon as Robbie got home he went to share his news with the only person in the whole universe he could confide in.

  ‘Did you see it?’

  ‘I don’t really have eyes as such. I’m more what you’d call a disembodied transcendental higher intelligence.’

  ‘But did you see it?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Even when we kissed?’

  ‘You bet.’

  ‘And will I see her again?’

  The answer came after a while. ‘Yes.’ It was like reading tea leaves of sound; anyone else would have heard only the quiet hiss of a radiogram tuned between stations, but the magic marble focused the random noise into the authentic voice of the Red Star. ‘You wish you’d gone and said goodbye, don’t you? Then you could have arranged a date. Sam Dunbar wouldn’t have minded, your father would never find out. Sam and your mother are very good at keeping secrets, you know . . .’

  ‘Where will I see her again?’

  ‘I can’t tell you that.’

  ‘But you know everything, don’t you? The whole of the past and the future?’

  ‘There are lots of pasts and futures. Which you get is up to you.’

  ‘Take us both to your planet.’

  ‘Whoa! You want to cross the inter-dimensional void?’

  ‘Can’t you give us a date there?’

  ‘You’re a twelve-year-old kid!’

  ‘But you could make me older, couldn’t you? And braver? Then I could meet her in your world and we’d both be grown-ups.’

  ‘What you’re requesting is a gross violation of the special theory of relativity.’

  ‘Please take me.’

  ‘We’d have to wipe your memory, create a different life for you.’

  ‘I’d give you my pocket money.’

  ‘I mean erase and rewrite, start from scratch. Whole new story. Could be very disorientating.’

  ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  ‘Oh no you don’t. Here we go . . .’

  ‘I feel weird …’

  ‘Faster.’

  ‘My head’s hurting.’

  ‘Faster.’

  ‘It’s sore. I’m spinning.’

  ‘Faster.’

  ‘Stop this! Mum!’

  ‘I guess we’re not in Kenzie anymore.’

  PART TWO

  1

  ‘Are you listening to me, soldier? Can you hear me?’

  Robert Coyle opened his eyes and saw a circle of men’s faces staring down at him where he lay on the hard, cold ground. It was the oldest of the men, the most superior in uniform and demeanour, who was speaking to him.

  ‘Come on, get up, otherwise I’ll have to call for the medics and you can be sure you’ll be deselected forthwith. You only slipped on the ice, man. If nothing’s broken can we please continue?’

  Where was he? For a moment his mind was a slate as smooth and blank as the ground he lay on; then he remembered that he’d been getting off the bus with the other volunteers and had foolishly slid on a glassy patch of frozen tarmac. Perhaps he was concussed. One thing was certain: he’d given himself an icy arse and made a complete tit of himself.

  ‘Here, let me help you.’ One of the other volunteers reached down and aided Robert to his feet. There had been no introductions on the bus journey through the forests and minefields of the security cordon, no conversation as they passed each checkpoint on the deserted road into the most secure research facility in Scotland. Instead the six of them had sat separately and silently, watched by two armed guards and the pipe-smoking Party minder at the back; but now that they were safely within the Installation, it seemed permissible to extend some basic human courtesy. Robert smiled in gratitude and shook a white snowy dusting from his greatcoat.

  ‘This way,’ the adjutant barked. ‘And mind the ice. We don’t want any more accidents.’ He led the volunteers across the empty expanse of the vehicle area towards a long, low wooden hut at whose door a helmeted sentry, his breath billowing in the frigid air, snapped crisply to attention. Inside it felt immediately warmer, and soon the volunteers were seated in a brown-walled briefing room heated by an iron radiator whose pipework, snaking along the walls like a road map, provided the nearest thing to decor. There were a dozen or so desks for the volunteers to choose from and they instinctively distributed themselves as they had been on the bus, in isolation from each other, while the Party man took his place at the rear. The silence in which they waited was like the prelude to an exam; Robert hoped he’d do better here than at Cromwell.

  He sat in the middle of the room, staring forwards at the simple oak lectern which stood beside a white screen with a slide projector aimed at it, not yet switched on. A blackboard was fixed to the wall, well wiped, but Robert was still able to discern, in a lower corner, an imperfectly erased string of symbols which appeared to be part of a scientific equation, together with the legible but cryptic inscription: scalar field. He wondered where it might be, this grassy pasture inhabited by tile-skinned lizards that must have been the subject of a seminar.

  Such dreaminess was what had got him kicked out of the best university in the Republic – in the general paper he’d been meant to write about the social impact of quality versus quantity but instead had ended up describing how as a small child he’d always wanted to be a spaceman. His tutor said it was an interesting approach to urban regeneration and one he would have ample time to ponder in the regiment he was now being assigned to under Article 17 of the Military Service Act.

  From the open door at the back of the room, out of Robert’s view, a guard called the men to attention, and they all stood rigidly while a senior officer strode smartly past them towards the front. Around fifty years old, with neatly shorn grey hair visible beneath his perfectly positioned cap, and with his baton held smartly under his arm, he walked purposefully to the lectern, then stopped and turned to survey the new recruits.

  ‘Sit down, lads,’ he said, his carefully measured tone of familiarity only adding to his dignified air. Once they were all seated he introduced himself. ‘My name is Brigadier Archibald and I am commander-in-chief of military operations at the Installation.’ His clipped accent was redolent of a frugal Scottish upbringing and a belief in the virtue of hard work and cold showers; he would have made a good headmaster. ‘Officially, the Installation does not exist. It is on no map and is referred to in no document. Right now you are in a non-existent place.’ The comment brought the hint of a smile to the edge of the brigadier’s thin lips, as though he had cracked a joke. ‘But everything that we do here is real enough, oh yes.’ Gathering his thoughts, he took a few paces, pensively turning the baton beneath his arm. ‘It is entirely possible that you have heard rumours about this non-existent place of ours.’ He halted and stared at the volunteers with cold blue eyes that had seen decades of patriotic service and tolerated no nonsense. ‘You might even have indulged in speculation about the nature of the special duties for which you have all freely volunteered.’ He looked from one recruit to another. ‘Let me dispel straight away any half-baked, nonsensical and irrelevant ideas that might have formed in your heads, and let me instead tell you exactly what you need to know about the Installation, and what you are allowed to know.’ The brigadier’s mobile neck was like that of a crow, enabling him to fix his gaze on whoever he wished without the need for any movement below the level of his collar. He was looking straight at Robert now. ‘This is where we made the Bomb,’ he said simply, allowing a moment of silence so that the information could sink in. ‘Yes,’ he resumed, ‘that’s right – you’re in the most secret, the most important, the most valuable military asset in the whole of the Republic. If the imperialists ever decide to commence hostilities, you can be sure that this non-existent place – which they’re sure to have found already from satellite photographs – will be top of their target list.’ The brigadier straightened. ‘I consider it an honour, as we
ll as my duty, to be first in line.’

  Robert watched the brigadier once more begin pacing, speaking to the windowless walls as much as to the young men. ‘The Installation was created over thirty years ago, right at the end of the Patriotic War, when the invading Nazi scum who terrorized this land of ours for five dark years were defeated by the People’s Army. The Central Committee knew that if such horrors were to be prevented from ever happening again, then Britain needed to have its own nuclear deterrent alongside that of our Soviet allies.’ He stopped. ‘You all know the proud achievements which resulted from this. Our nuclear tests were the fear and envy of the world. Granted, our bombs might not be the largest, but they’re the best designed.’

  Beside the blackboard was a door that now sprung open. The brigadier turned to look at what all the recruits had seen already: a sleek, fair-haired woman in civilian clothes.

  ‘Ah, Rosalind,’ he said. ‘Is Professor Kaupff ready?’

  ‘He’s on his way.’ She looked to be in her late twenties – quite a lot older than Robert or any of the other volunteers – and had the ease to match. Her hair was pinned neatly in a bun behind her head; her drab blouse and long utilitarian skirt were the typical outfit of any office worker or shop assistant; yet the signal they sent, just as powerfully as the epaulettes on the brigadier’s shoulders, was one of superiority. Rosalind stood by the open doorway staring at the volunteers with a curiosity whose casualness appeared almost insolent; and it was only when her dark eyes met Robert’s that she folded her arms with a flicker of defensiveness.

  ‘Yes, the Bomb,’ the brigadier resumed with a tone of nostalgia. ‘The technological miracle that has maintained world peace for nearly four decades and epitomizes the special relationship between the British Democratic Republic and the USSR. It was a huge undertaking, involving hundreds of scientists and technical workers, secretarial and administrative staff, support personnel – and you will shortly meet the man who did more than anyone else to make it a reality. But that was only the start. Nuclear power, chemical weaponry, navigation systems, artificial satellites; all have been developed here. The Installation nowadays is a complete town, totally closed to the outside world, containing families, schools, bars, a cinema – everything you’d expect to find in any normal community. You’ll be lodged with resident families who’ll look after your domestic needs, and all the people you meet will be involved in the hidden life and work of the Installation in one way or another. The golden rule is that you don’t ask unnecessary questions, and you don’t answer them. Whatever your superiors tell you may, in the interests of security, be a lie but you can rest assured that it will be a significant lie, told for good reason, because here in the Installation, everything has a purpose. Nothing is accidental.’