Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘I’ll get you this time, you wee devil!’ A thick bright stream arced from the pistol Joe shoved through the open window, and the cat dodged and leapt, unimpressed, to the foot of the privet hedge, where it lingered insolently, eyeing him from a safe distance before turning to slide beneath the foliage with a final triumphant flash of its anus. ‘And don’t come back!’

  ‘It’s only a cat, Joe.’

  Happened in the clubhouse toilet, Joe heard from the friend Sam was playing with that day. Wondered what was taking him so long, went to check, had to climb over the locked cubicle and there he was, face down on the floor in his own urine, trousers in a knot round his ankles. Poor Maureen. To lose a spouse is a terrible thing at any age – but your own son? No, you’d need to bury a thousand husbands and a million bloody cats before you knew that burden.

  ‘Better close the window before we get cold.’ With a twinge of pain, Anne propped herself on one of the high wooden kitchen stools and leaned her stick against the neighbouring table. She’d been on the waiting list for a hip replacement for the last four months. ‘This leg’s giving me H-E-double-L today.’

  Joe turned. ‘Did you remember your blue pills?’

  Anne nodded. She and Joe were in life’s extra time, medical science’s gift to humanity, when every day becomes a row of slots in a plastic drug dispenser.

  ‘Those blue pills are no better for you than the old ones,’ Joe grumbled.

  ‘Doctor thinks they’re worth a try,’ said Anne, turning off the radio.

  ‘Doctors? Don’t trust any of them. They get fat off kickbacks from the pharmaceuticals and that’s the only reason you got prescribed they blue pills.’

  ‘Dr Roe’s not like that,’ Anne said patiently. ‘She thinks I need my calcium building up.’

  ‘Then why don’t you drink more milk? Or eat chalk, that’s what pregnant women used to do. You know, a lot of the time the doctors aren’t giving you real medicine anyway. The drug companies need guinea pigs, so the doctors give half their patients the real thing and the other half a placido.’

  ‘Placebo.’

  ‘You think it’s going to cure you, so you feel better.’

  ‘And what’s wrong with that?’

  ‘It’s not real, that’s what’s wrong. It’s fake.’

  ‘If it makes you feel better then I don’t care how it works. And Dr Roe says these blue ones are helping my calcium.’

  Joe tutted and looked out the window in further search of the cat, almost disappointed it was gone. ‘Take some bicarb, that’d do you as much good.’

  ‘It’d only make me burp.’

  ‘If you’re needing calcium, that’s where you’ll find it. Better still, dissolve it in milk.’

  ‘With a piece of chalk?’

  Joe went to the cupboard and opened it. ‘Should have some here. Baking powder would do …’ He rummaged intently.

  ‘Are you sure there’s calcium in bicarb?’

  ‘Of course I’m sure.’ He was reaching through an archive of spices amassed over many years and never used.

  ‘But it’s bicarbonate of soda,’ said Anne. ‘I’m sure soda isn’t the same as calcium.’

  Joe stopped, extracted his arm from the cupboard and looked at his wife with a puzzled expression. ‘Aye,’ he said after a pause. ‘You’re right about that.’ Undeterred, he resumed his probing. ‘The calcium’s in the bicarbonate bit.’

  ‘I thought that was carbon.’

  ‘Well, you would do,’ Joe muttered, ‘seeing as you never learned any science. But it’s not just carbon, is it? It’s bicarbonate, and that means carbon with some calcium in it. We’ll soon have your bones sorted, pet. Look at me …’

  ‘Aye, just look at you.’

  ‘Hardly a day’s illness in my life, and you know what that comes down to.’

  ‘Luck?’ Anne suggested.

  ‘No,’ said Joe. ‘It’s because I stay away from doctors, they’re the ones that kill you. My wee cup of parsley in the morning keeps me right.’ For years it had been his habit to drink an infusion of the herb in warm water with his breakfast each day; he’d read somewhere that it was good for you and he’d been confirming its benefits ever since. ‘I keep telling you to try it, Anne.’ He’d been telling her this for a decade and a half, and Anne had long ago decided that the drink was disgusting as well as useless, but as long as it kept Joe happy she had no reason to complain. ‘I’ll bet there’s calcium in parsley, that’s why I’ve never needed my joints fixing.’

  ‘No,’ said Anne, ‘there’s other bits of you suffered instead.’

  Not only was there no bicarb; Joe saw that his parsley supply was running low. ‘I’ll take a wee walk into town,’ he decided, closing the cupboard door.

  ‘You do that,’ his wife agreed. ‘Calcium off down the road and I’ll wait here till it’s time for my next blue pill. And if I see the cat again I’ll give it your apologies.’

  2

  The kid was in WH Smith in Kenzie town centre looking at the PC games and like hanging around but not too much because rule number one is not to be conspicuous and the only way to knock something like a PC game is pretend you’re going to buy one as in you’d like your dad or your grannie to buy you one but they don’t know anything about PC games so they’ve asked you to choose and then you’re looking at them, flipping them forwards one by one on the display rack, sometimes lifting one out to look at the cover, like you’re meant to be there and everything’s fine.

  That’s the First Law of Life, kid reckons, twelve years old so he’s been around, seen a few things though not enough, never enough. Whatever you’re doing, act like it’s what you’re meant to do. Maybe it isn’t, maybe you should still be with one or other of the dinosaurs, your dad Stegosaurus who’s meant to be looking after you this weekend but doesn’t give a shit, or Maiasaura who’s gone on a two-day shopping trip with those old hags she refers to as ‘the girls’ and expects you to be dropped off by Steg tomorrow night so you’ll be, as Maia puts it, ‘fresh for school’ the following day, like you’re a pack of strawberries in ASDA.

  But the kid is not with Maia, he’s not with Steg, and he’s not a soft fruit reduced for quick sale. He’s got a life to lead and he’s made his decision. Time to move on from the Cretaceous era, leave the reptiles to cope with the meteorite that’s about to hit them. At least it’ll make them talk to each other for once. Missing child: who’s to blame?

  You do it all in strict accordance with the First Law. Tell Steg you’re going shopping, then he swings his head from the football game on television, open can of Heineken cocked in his hand, says, ‘Eh?’ Might as well have told him you’re leaving on the next space shuttle. Going shopping, you repeat, as in going out, duh. ‘Who with?’ asks Steg, the way he knows he has to, being the responsible adult in charge and so forth, and you tell the spiny lizard that you’re meeting up with Spud and Marko at the Springdale Centre like you always do. He thinks about it. Commentary from the television, camera pans, tiny ball you can’t even see, cheering. Can of Heineken stays completely immobile in his hand, way things look when a giant rock enters the solar system a billion miles away. Don’t worry, Dad, it’s cool. You and me and Glasgow Rangers will all still be here a thousand years from now, like don’t worry yourself about it.

  ‘All right,’ says Stegosaurus. ‘Be careful. And don’t be too late.’

  What the fuck, thinks the kid, is that supposed to mean? Here he’s now in WH Smith, looking through the PC games deciding which to knock, and Steg’s telling him to be careful. Damn right he’s careful, he could get lifted for this. Society’s to blame, that’s the trouble. Through a process of evolution it’s come up with stuff like football and beer and the men such as his dad who consume them all brainlessly, swinging their tails through the primeval forest.

  You’re going to knock a game, you’ve got to do it right. He’s got the two wee magnets in his pocket, trick he learned off the Internet, fools the inductance loop they’ve got in the
security machine at the exit if you know the move, and he knows it. He’ll walk clean past the barrier, did it last week with Gore War II: Vengeance Day. Security guard’ll be standing there in his stupid uniform looking like he’s the presidential escort from Uzmania and the kid’ll go by with a great big grin on his face and a new game inside his jacket. It’ll work because he knows the magnet trick and more importantly he knows the First Law. Act like it’s meant to happen.

  But which game? It’s the usual problem: too much fucking choice. Does his head in. Even in school dinner, it’s like computational nightmare, combinatorial hell. Thing is, the kid wants to try everything. As in, you’ve got three things on the menu, ABC, and can only take two, so kid likes to sample all possible combinations, namely AB, AC, BC, on successive occasions. What you might call an urge for completeness, though Maia reckons it’s a form of obsessive-compulsive autistic-spectrum hyperactive Asperger’s blah blah blah inherited from Steg, while Steg couldn’t give a shit. Other example: clothes. As in, five pairs of socks, one for each school day, each pair different, Maia’s decision, reasons of hygiene. Cleaned each weekend by Maia while the kid is with Steg who hasn’t evolved the capacity to work a washing machine and even if he had, couldn’t be arsed to open the fucking door and push the button.

  The problem. Five pairs, P, through P5, and five days, D1 through D5, commonly known as Monday to Friday. One solution: Pn on Dn, where n runs 1 through 5. That’s how dumb morons with no imagination would do it. But how many other ways? As in, one week you do pairs 1,2,3,4,5 in standard order but then next week you do 5,4,3,2,1. They’re all clean, aren’t they? There’s no Law of Life says you’ve always got to wear the Pringles on Wednesday.

  Solution. By choosing a different ordering each week, the kid can get through the whole cycle in 120 weeks. Which means he’ll be fourteen by the time he finishes and he’ll have new socks by then so it’s basically shit, but he still has to try a new permutation every week, he really has to. Because that’s The Way He Is.

  You watch a DVD, Taste of Blood, say, he liked that film. Maia was pissed off when she found out Steg had let him see it but it wasn’t so scary, they only made it an 18 because it’s got the word fuck in it and who the fuck says that a twelve-year-old can’t be allowed to hear the word fuck? It’s not like grown-ups don’t say it all the time in front of their fucking offspring when they’re fucking well coming to collect them and wanting to know what the fuck the kid has been eating all weekend, like has it been sweets and fish and chips as usual you fucking moron? And so on. Well, then, let’s say for the sake of argument (some argument) that it’s Taste of Blood, certificate 18, on sale in the DVD section of WH Smith but not worth knocking since the kid’s seen it already.

  Here’s how it works. You get the basic movie: watch that first. But then there’s Commentary, and it’s cool to watch the whole film again with Commentary. And there’s Special Features. Deleted Scenes. And of course Subtitles, the kid being particularly fond of watching films with English For The Hearing Impaired. Makes him aware of stuff he hadn’t noticed. Such as his sense of hearing. Though what he’d really like is a Special Feature which is Commentary For The Hearing Impaired, like all these people off-screen would be shouting really loud, it’d be excellent.

  The trouble with these Features is that a ninety-minute film turns into a six-hour marathon. At first the kid went for a totalizing approach but it was too much hard work and nowadays he has to be more selective though he still tries to see all the trailers, out-takes and deleted scenes because if he can’t get to watch them he feels edgy and wishes he’d like never started you know.

  So he’s standing in WH Smith in his light blue jacket that he’s unzipped and he’s deciding which game to knock and it’s like the whole choice thing again, the agony of having too much. When you’re a dinosaur everything’s easy. You’ve got the kind of teeth that grind plants or the kind that tear meat, simple. But then evolution happens, diversification, the kid’s seen it all on Discovery Channel, he’s an infomnivore. Evolution creates variety aka consumer choice, which is good. That’s progress. It’s PlayStation, Xbox or PC. And the kid has opted today for PC, something of a miracle, really, that he’s managed to settle on one out of three, though anyone taking the longer view of this, as in the kid himself, knows that the present scenario is only stage two of a grand trilogy, so to speak, because he knocked a PS2 last week and he’ll be back with his little magnets for the Xbox version to complete the set.

  That’s what it’s all about: completing the set. Like you’re a boy and you need to find a girl otherwise you don’t have the full series, you’re sort of a pilot episode with no conclusion. You’ve got to find a girl and go through all the permutations with her but the kid doesn’t think he’ll ever find a girl who can recite the complete episode list of Doctor Who series one to three in the correct order, which would be his kind of girl. Someone like Rose, the Doctor’s assistant in series one and two, a perfect ultimate time-traveller’s fantasy babe.

  The kid’s best friend Marko told him that Sarah Walker wanted to go out with him and the kid went and asked Sarah about it and she laughed. So now the kid has put Marko on the Death List, which is the names of all the people who’ll be incinerated when the meteorite hits Earth. There’ll be this huge explosion spreading like a tsunami of liquid fire, shattering every window pane in his school and demolishing it, circling out to consume the Springdale Centre and all its shops, even WH Smith where he’s standing now, everything turned to lava and ashes, rolling across the town and hitting the flat where his dad the Stegosaurus has been living since he moved out, a bright flash drowning the television screen and the walls imploding, the Heineken can melting as its contents vaporize. It’ll all happen, it really will.

  The kid’s going to survive, though. His mum and dad, his friends, his enemies, his teachers, they’re all doomed because they don’t know the Way It Is. They don’t know that cosmic disasters are the norm, they’ve been happening for billions of years, again and again, like changing your socks. It’s a great big spin cycle and planet Earth’s number is going to come up soon, has to. And the kid’s making damn sure he’ll live through it.

  That’s why he’s run away. Steg and Maia are no use to him: they’re extinct already. Marko and Sarah Walker can burn too. The kid knows he’ll need food and shelter and a change of clothes after a day or two but he couldn’t exactly walk out of his dad’s flat with a Samsonite full of worldly possessions, could he, duh? The First Law says you always act like it’s meant to be this way, and he’s meant to be running away with nothing except a couple of magnets, but those magnets are gold dust, he’s tried them and he knows. Any shop he pleases, he can walk past the security barrier, so who needs money when you’ve got a pair of neodyms? It’s almost as good as Doctor Who’s psychic paper.

  All right, here’s the plan. Knock a game and go round to Spud’s house, offer him it for a fiver. Tell Spud there’s more if he wants, tell him there’s a trick to it but don’t give too much away. Thick Spud supplies petty cash, maybe a place to sleep tonight, bedding. Spud is temporarily useful but not to be retained for too long since he’s on the Death List, he’s one of the drowned, not the saved. Spud is a dinosaur of the small kind, sort of a raptor. He’s extinct.

  Could be any game as long as it’s one that Spud hasn’t got already, but the kid wants this to be part two of his grand game-theft trilogy so he goes for the PC version of the PS2 game he knocked last time. Spud hasn’t got it, the kid’s pretty sure about that. Life is so darned sweet, he thinks. Stealing is the sweetest feeling in the world.

  For a long time the kid has been stealing from Stegosaurus on a regular basis and his dad is so fucking brainless he hasn’t even noticed. The kid thought to get some cash before leaving Steg’s flat but the only liftable stash he found was a couple of pound coins, sort of loose change you’d throw in a charity tin, and how much do you have to steal from a Stegosaurus before he gets the message that you exist
? More than a couple of pounds, that’s for sure. Kid should have lifted the flatscreen out the living room, that would’ve left an impression.

  Stealing is basically so simple, as in you lift something, like a PC game on a rack in WH Smith, and you act like you’re reading the stuff on the cover, in accordance with the First Law, while holding the neodyms, one in each hand, being careful not to let them click strongly together which is not only noisy but also damn painful if you get your skin caught between the powerful magnetic pair. And you do the move, the one you’ve practised and done before so you know it works. You lean towards the sloping rack like you want something from the top row which is furthest from you, you lean into it and over, and your jacket is sort of like a tent of theft, a robber’s hideaway, a crook’s curtain that covers the left hand’s deed while the right is used for misdirection. The game’s inside your jacket in less than a second, safely tucked in the pocket they always put there so you can steal things, because why else would you want a pocket in such a stupid place?

  It feels so good, the weight of that game in the kid’s pocket. So hard and heavy and it’s cost him nothing. It’s his way of saying: you’re all on the List. This shop is going to burn and I’ve saved one little plastic box with a shiny disc inside it. You’re all going to die and this shiny piece of plastic is going to survive. Or something. To be honest, the kid doesn’t really know why stealing feels so good, he guesses it has to be some kind of Darwinian adaptation, as in there used to be people that were honest but the environment has changed, their strategy doesn’t work any more. His dad the Stegosaurus says if you want to get anywhere in life you’ve got to work hard, like at school and stuff, and look where he is now, sitting in front of the television with a can of Heineken in his hand, waiting to be annihilated. It’s well sad, so it is. The kid’s dad works in logistics whatever that means and apparently spends most of his day dealing with emails. That is so fucking dull. That is like the biggest and dullest thing you could ever imagine. That is like walking really slowly across the primeval swamp swinging your big spiky tail and all you do is eat leaves all day long. Eat leaves and look for another dinosaur to do sex with. And hope nothing interesting ever happens, you’ve got big bony plates on your back to make sure of it. Something interesting comes along, those bony plates will bounce it away and protect you. Don’t even need to turn your head to look at it. That’s what his dad’s like.