Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘I didn’t expect you to be here, Miriam. You frightened me.’

  ‘I always get home early on Tuesdays. You ought to know that.’

  ‘Should I?’ He came in and closed the door, leaving the light off, not wishing to disturb her any more than he had to. He sat down on the bed and stared at the radio to which she had quickly returned her attention. ‘Still trying to contact the Red Star?’

  She nodded. ‘It’s so near now.’

  ‘I’ve seen it already.’

  Miriam swung round in the eerie gloom. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’ve been there in my mind, it’s beautiful. It really is heaven. But everyone has a different idea of what heaven is.’

  ‘If you’ve seen it then you should kneel here with me and pray.’

  ‘What for? Salvation? Freedom?’

  ‘Try and you’ll find out.’

  He came and knelt beside her on the floor. It was ridiculous, being on their knees in front of an ancient Bakelite radio; they were like primitive tribal villagers worshipping a technological icon dropped from an aeroplane. The radio hummed and crackled, and from time to time Robert thought he heard the faint intimation of a far-off dance band. It was stupid – but when he closed his eyes and let himself relax he felt a welcome peace; the same relinquishment of effort he had experienced in hospital, critically ill, while the loudspeaker at his ear relayed the voice of the Red Star. Yes, that was when his spirit had died, and since then his soul had been in limbo. The sound was a liquid background, a gentle surf reminding him of Dora; and she was right, the woman breathing beside him now could be anyone, the love within him was a beam he could project on any surface.

  An hour later, Mrs Frank came in noisily carrying the shopping bag she had filled as best she could on her way back from work. She knew her daughter would be in, but the sight of Robert sitting with Miriam in the kitchen gave her a pleasant surprise.

  ‘I’m not going out tonight,’ he said. ‘I hope that’s all right.’

  ‘You’re eating with us? That’s lovely! And what have you two been up to?’ she asked innocently. The look that passed between Robert and Miriam made her pause, but she didn’t follow it up. ‘I’m doing curried mutton – how does that sound?’

  ‘Perfect,’ said Robert.

  ‘Well, I’d better mutton myself out of here and into the living room to get the table ready. Let’s eat in there, shall we? We can make a wee night of it. Arthur will be so pleased.’

  She bustled out, and Robert looked again at Miriam, who, like her mother, could wear entirely different faces depending on the circumstances. ‘Shall we tell her yet?’ he asked.

  ‘Not yet.’

  Mrs Frank came back. ‘Miriam, why don’t you get off your bahookie and give me a hand carrying these glasses through?’

  ‘Why don’t you ask the lodger, Mum?’

  Mrs Frank stopped in her tracks and looked at both of them. They were all three playing a kind of charade, and they were at the point where any of the players might decide to abandon the script and the whole pretence it represented.

  ‘Here, I’ll do it,’ said Robert, getting up. ‘You and Miriam can take care of the cooking.’

  When Mr Frank returned later, the house was filled with the appetizing smell of the meal that would soon be ready. He came striding to the kitchen, addressing his good lady wife before he had even entered from the hall. ‘And what culinary delight is my darling angel preparing for us tonight …? Why hello, Robbie, are you getting ready for another night with the lads?’

  ‘He’s staying here,’ Mrs Frank announced. ‘We’ve all decided to have a wee night together.’

  ‘Go and look in the living room,’ Miriam told him, and when Arthur went there he saw the table elaborately decked with all their best plates and cutlery, paper napkins at the ready and even three candles glowing at the centre beside an open bottle of wine.

  For a moment he was speechless, beaming with a child’s delight at the rare spectacle his family had prepared for him. ‘What a lovely idea,’ he said at last. ‘What a really lovely thing for us all to do.’ Robert had joined him from the kitchen; Mr Frank turned and looked at him. ‘It’s an honour and a pleasure having you with us. I hope you’re in no hurry to leave.’

  Mrs Frank decided to change out of her everyday work clothes into something more suitable for the evening. She disappeared upstairs, taking Miriam with her. ‘Fancy a beer?’ Mr Frank asked his guest, his smile broadening when Robert said yes. ‘Lads’ night in, eh?’ he said with a wink, going to the kitchen and coming back with a litre bottle of Victory and two glasses. ‘Sit yourself down, Robbie. How’s your day been?’

  ‘Don’t ask.’

  ‘Aye, they work you hard here. But there’s nane like Installation folk!’ He passed one foaming glass to Robert and took the other to his armchair. ‘And you’re an Installation man now, Robbie. You’re one of the best. Cheers!’

  The beer quickly made Robert’s head feel light, and it was pleasant for him to be able to sit back and be treated with such warmth. He was ready to be pampered and cosseted, and the Franks were determined to oblige.

  ‘But tell me,’ Mr Frank said in a low voice, while the women were still absent. ‘Have you …’ he glanced round to check that the living-room door was closed. ‘Have you found yourself a lassie here yet? I don’t mean those girls you-know-where. The regular sort.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I have.’

  Arthur’s face fell. ‘I see. Well, if you need to bring her back here, that’s OK. But, you know …’

  ‘I’ll be discreet,’ Robert promised.

  ‘Because it’s not a big house and the walls are a bit thin. Might be frightening to anyone who doesn’t understand how it is that a man and a woman …’

  ‘I know, you told me before.’

  ‘Frank by name, frank by nature – that’s me. But what’s she like, this lassie? Might be someone I know.’

  ‘Might be,’ Robert agreed, then fell silent as footsteps came down the stairs. Mrs Frank entered wearing a dress with a bold geometric pattern, a string of large artificial pearls at her neck, and matching earrings.

  ‘Doesn’t she look great!’ said Arthur, getting to his feet and putting down his almost empty beer glass on the coffee table before going to her. ‘You look just like the girl I married.’ He swung round to Robert. ‘And I’m needing my eyes tested!’

  ‘Och, Arthur,’ said his wife.

  ‘No, seriously, Dot, you look fantastic. And here’s my wee daughter looking magic too.’ Miriam came in wearing a dark blue dress that was plainer and more old fashioned than her mother’s; but she’d put on make-up, too, and her red lips and full bosom reminded Robert that when they had knelt together in front of the crackling radio she could have been any woman in the world.

  They sat down to dinner, which Mrs Frank served single-andedly by means of many journeys to and from the kitchen. A small hatch cut in the wall would have made it all so much easier, Mr Frank observed, but such modifications contravened regulations, and this led him into a lengthy speech about the structural details of the house, its wiring and plumbing, and the various problems encountered in other dwellings of the scheme, none of which Dorothy could solve by trying to change the subject when she sat down to eat with them. In fact it was only Miriam who was eventually able to silence her father by tapping her knife against her wine glass and saying, ‘We have an announcement.’

  Mr Frank’s mouth stood open in mid-vowel, the uncompleted word being ‘generator’. His wife took over. ‘What do you want to announce?’ An optimistic smile was rising on her face which had nothing to do with the wine she had drunk. ‘And who’s “we”?’ For Mr Frank, his beer-warmed mind still swirling in a circuit diagram of its own making, the penny had yet to drop.

  Robert spoke. ‘We want … I mean, Mr Frank, I’d like to ask if …’

  ‘We’re getting married,’ said Miriam.

  Arthur’s mouth showed no sign of closing;
his wife was already crying. ‘Oh, Miriam, I’m so happy!’ She got up and went to hug her daughter while the news reached Arthur’s brain and set about creating a further flood of tears.

  ‘Thank you, Robbie!’ he gasped, choking back his emotion. ‘Thank you, son!’

  No one really noticed the curried mutton after that, but Mrs Frank didn’t mind. The wee night was declared one that would go down in Frank history. The clearing of the table gave Dorothy another chance to pull her daughter away, leaving Mr Frank to reiterate his joy through successive stages of inebriation.

  ‘You said you’d found a lassie …’ Arthur said with some concern.

  ‘I meant Miriam.’

  ‘Oh, that’s all right.’ Then another thought struggled across his mind. ‘She’s never, you know, been with anyone. You’ll have to …’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after her.’

  Fresh tears welled in Arthur’s eyes. ‘My wee daughter! Only seems yesterday when she was on my knee with a dummy in her mouth. Used to want to play horsey all the time, and now she’s a woman. I’m getting old. I hope you’ll give us lots of grandchildren, mind!’ Robert smiled, and Mr Frank let his thoughts dwell on lost times. ‘We’ve had our share of misfortune, you know that. Losing wee Jamie could have destroyed us and it nearly did, but I was never going to let one tragedy cause another. There’s always a ray of hope even when you feel you’re in a living hell, same as there’s always that speck of sadness though you’re the happiest man on earth, like I am now, because whatever happens has to for a reason, that’s what I think. Let me tell you an old story, Robbie – a bit of Installation history, from the time long before they made the Town that’s here now. I’m talking eighteen hundreds, when this was a pit village called Kenzie and the weans used to get taken to the baptismal font and sold to the mine owner before they even had their first teeth. And two wee weans, maybe seven or eight year old, they fell in that river, same as my Jamie did. I read about it all once. And a fellow, name of Deuchar, student at university, he was going past, jumped in and tried to save them. He could have drowned himself. But he didn’t – it was the weans that died, same as my Jamie did. So even if there’d been somebody who saw my boy when he fell in, there was no saving him. The water’s too fast when it’s in spate – you’d need to be an Olympic swimmer. It’s not easy for me to talk about it, Robbie, but me and Dot never discuss this and I’m only glad I’m going to have a new son now that I can share these things with, but I tell you, when I remember what the wee lad looked like with his eyes still open …’

  ‘Please,’ said Robert, ‘we don’t have to do it all at once. There’ll be time.’

  ‘No,’ Arthur insisted, ‘I want to tell you this now, on the happiest day of my life. I really mean that, because being happy doesn’t mean forgetting what’s happened. We’re all going to be happy remembering Jamie, and maybe you’ll even want to call your bairn after him, I don’t mind what you do about that. I only wanted to say that the fellow Deuchar, you might have heard of him from your history lessons. He was the James Deuchar that formed the Scottish Socialists. And when I read that he’d once tried to rescue two weans from that river that took Jamie, I thought to myself, what if Deuchar hadnae made it? What if he’d drowned like the weans? Don’t you see, Robbie, for all we know, the whole of history might have been different. But it couldn’t be different, because everything happens for a reason, and if James Deuchar had thrown his life away then maybe we wouldn’t be here, there’d be no Installation, I’d never have met Dot, there’d have been no Jamie, even though we had to lose him so soon. And if somebody had been there beside the river and saw him bobbing past and jumped in, he could have died as well as Jamie, and what then? There’s maybe someone alive right now, here in the Installation, who’d be dead for no reason, and they’d have missed all these years we’ve seen. I’m sorry, I’m rambling, but do you see what I’m saying?’

  ‘Yes, I see,’ said Robert. ‘Sometimes we make sacrifices for the greater good. I suppose that’s what James Deuchar believed.’

  ‘Of course he did,’ said Arthur. ‘That’s the meaning of socialism. I’m not an educated man and I haven’t read all these clever books by wise people, I’m just an ordinary working bloke who does the best job he can and likes a wee beer when he comes home at night, that’s all I am, a common working man who’s never raised his hand to his wife in anger and only to his offspring when he had to. But the way I look at it now, if somebody had gone and killed himself saving Jamie then there’d be one person more and one person less, and instead of us grieving it’d be another family. What happened to Jamie was an accident and nobody’s fault, it was plain bad luck, but if it hadnae happened then we’d have had two children growing up in this house and they’d both be here still. You’d never have been billeted here and you wouldn’t be engaged to my daughter now, and the weans you’ll have one day would never get the chance of living. So I look at the future, Robbie, and I think of they kiddies yet to be born and I tell you from the bottom of my heart, thank you for letting me die a happy man. Thank you for giving Dot a chance to find peace in her heart. Thank you for making Miriam happy. Love her and be good to her because she deserves it.’

  Robert listened in pained silence. In the kitchen, Miriam was describing to her mother the deal that had been struck. Yes, they would marry, but they would never sleep together as man and wife. If Robert survived the forthcoming mission, he would take Miriam and her parents out of the installation and she would be free to divorce him after the statutory period. If he died, all would receive the same benefits, the only difference being that Mr Frank need never know the marriage was a sham. So Robert had made his sacrifice. Looking at Arthur’s reddened eyes he wondered if, by saving the landlord’s only surviving child, he was making a gesture equivalent to Deuchar’s so long ago. He was saving a woman he didn’t even like, while those he loved and respected were left to fall alone. Did it make him the noblest of men or the most pitiful? Robert didn’t know. The ladies came back and saw Arthur’s face; theirs too were marked by a heaviness and shame that Arthur was thankfully unable to notice. Then they went back to pretending, and of those present, it was only Arthur, his cheeks traced with two thick lines of tears, who could honestly claim to be the happiest alive.

  23

  Try to see him now, though in the capsule the only light is the glimmer of a control panel flicking into activity to signal that the descent is about to begin. It’s exactly like the simulator, so cramped that any movement is impossible, and Robert could almost be fooled into thinking this was only another rehearsal and not the real thing, but for the steady roar of the mother jet preparing to abandon him, and the gentle rise and fall of the bonded vessels’ mutual passage through periodic pockets of mild turbulence.

  Forty-six thousand feet below, Kaupff is about to be buried with full honours and Vine is under arrest. Rosalind is in the control room, watching the twitch of pen recorders monitoring Robert’s thoughts. On the scrolling paper, six jagged lines unfold in partial synchrony portraying mental divisions of which Robert himself is unaware, considering himself of one mind, determined in what he does.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  There is no radio in the capsule; nothing that the ground crew and the helpless passenger could possibly say to each other. But Robert hears.

  ‘I am the voice of the Red Star.’

  Only the sudden flicker of the feeble lights, strangely bright to his starved eyes, tells Robert that the drop is about to happen; but those lights were put in place for the sake of the maintenance technicians working on the apparatus before it was launched, not for him, and soon they switch off again, recreating the perfect darkness deemed essential to the operation and made legible on the ground in another alteration of pen tracks.

  ‘I am the one who brought you here, made every shape you saw, every phantom. Now we must go to another place.’

  Then it happens.

  There is no tumbling of the capsule; the
aerodynamic predictions are of an accuracy that gives cheer to the anxious physicists. Yet for Robert it is not the instantaneous sensation of perfect weightlessness he had been led to expect. Instead it is as if he is rising. He sees Dora, as pure and naked as he is, in that other capsule in the Blue Cat with its curtained window where she too is alone, opening a drawer in her sparsely furnished cell and lifting out the gun he gave her. He tries to call out but the barrel is already hard against her skull like the glass marble focusing everything on his; the shot is fired and she is falling while a dark red spray ribbons from her head across the room. The redness Robert flies towards is darker still; invisible and benevolent in its infinite orbit, its endless cosmic loop.

  ‘Your life is over, Robert – but not your story.’

  PART THREE

  1

  Standing at the kitchen window, looking over the sink into the back garden he had tended for nearly fifty years, Joe Coyle was displeased. ‘It’s that damn cat again.’

  ‘Maureen’s?’ said his wife, slowly entering the kitchen with the cool teapot she’d brought from the living room, leaning on her metal walking stick. The transistor radio, ignored on the shelf, was tinnily talking about another suicide bomb in Iraq.

  ‘I’ll get it this time,’ Joe vowed, reaching for the pink plastic water pistol he’d parked in readiness beside the draining board.

  ‘Better be quick,’ Anne warned while he filled it. ‘I just hope she doesn’t see you.’

  ‘Who, the cat? That’s the whole idea.’ He slowly opened the window.

  ‘No, you daftie, Maureen. I don’t want her getting upset.’

  Their neighbour had bought the animal to ease her widowhood but Joe was unmoved. ‘I keep telling her not to let that damn moggie come in.’

  Sam Dunbar was only sixty-two when he had the heart attack, lean and suntanned, not long back from Tenerife. Right after his best round of golf in years, the way he’d have wanted to go, everyone kept saying at the funeral. Maureen so brave about it. But Joe and Anne knew more about loss than she ever would, and they’d no need to go spoiling other people’s gardens over it.