Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘I’m hungry,’ says Felix, flicking the select button repeatedly. Old films, drama series, kind of crap his parents watch.

  ‘I’ll phone down and order us something,’ guy says from his horizontal eyes-closed as in not asleep but sort of pretending to be kind of position.

  ‘Isn’t there a restaurant here or something?’ Some art-review show on the screen, man with stupid glasses, people in a gallery.

  ‘I don’t want to go to the restaurant,’ the guy says. ‘It might compromise the mission. We need to stay here until morning.’

  Kid thinks, I ran away for this and it’s worse than an evening with Stegosaurus. Says, ‘If I have to watch this crap all night I’ll go mad.’

  ‘Then don’t watch it.’

  ‘What else is there to do?’

  Guy sits up. For a moment it’s like the dreaded why don’t we play Monopoly situation as in sort of thing Stegosaurus says whenever he remembers he’s supposed to be somebody’s father which is like when he runs out of beer or the adverts come on, but the crisis passes. ‘What do you want to eat?’

  ‘What is there?’

  This kills some time. As in they look through sort of a big book full of leaflets and information and stuff that tells you what to do if you need a shirt ironing or a taxi or you’re sick. There’s a room-service menu and the kid opts for the double cheeseburger with fries but minus the salad because he doesn’t like anything green that looks too much as if it was once alive. Guy phones down and orders, including a club sandwich for himself. Kid doesn’t exactly know what a club sandwich is, but it doesn’t sound like food for a spaceman on a mission. Not a real mission, anyway. More like a James Bond nineteen-seventies re-run kind of mission. There’s kind of this post putting down the phone silence sort of moment and then the kid says to the guy, ‘Are you really a spaceman?’

  Guy looks at him. ‘Yes.’

  Straight question, straight answer. Like his name’s on the information screen on the television so that’s fine. Except it’s not his name.

  Kid says, ‘Are you going to tell me about the mission now?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But I thought …’

  ‘Then don’t think,’ says the guy, lying down again to rest. ‘You’ve passed every test so far, you’re doing well.’

  Kid wonders how many tests there’s been. The card, coming here – what else? Is everything a test?

  ‘There’s a lot that’s wrong with this world,’ guy says. Well, duh. He raises his head, props himself by his elbow as he lies on his side and goes, ‘The thing you have to understand, Felix, is that everything is connected. All the little pieces, all the things that on their own don’t make any sense. When you put them together you see the whole picture.’

  ‘Then why not give me the whole picture?’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because if I did then the plan wouldn’t work.’

  As in, the only point of the kid being involved is that he doesn’t get it. Well thank you, Mr Spaceman. Kid says, ‘I could walk out of here.’

  ‘Of course you could.’

  ‘I could go to the police.’

  ‘I know,’ the guy says calmly. ‘And you’d have nothing to tell them except that you stole something from a shop.’

  ‘I could say you’re a paedophile and you abducted me.’

  ‘But that wouldn’t be true.’

  ‘Then what is?’ says the kid. ‘What exactly is true?’

  Guy shrugs like he doesn’t know. Or like he doesn’t want the kid to know. ‘The truth is that everything is connected.’

  The kid’s annoyed. Only reason he’s here is because of that thing with the cashpoint card. Wants to know how it works and if he can have one too. Get one of those cards, you’re set up for life. Never have to work, never have to worry.

  Guy says, ‘You’ve handled yourself perfectly. When we came here, in the lobby, that was most impressive.’

  The kid feels proud. It’s not often that people say he’s done well. ‘I’ve got a rule,’ he explains. ‘It helps me get through situations. I call it the First Law of Life.’

  Guy raises an eyebrow. ‘Tell me.’

  So the kid does. ‘Whatever happens, always act like it’s meant to.’

  Guy smiles. ‘I like that. But you know, there’s a Zeroth Law of Life.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Whatever happens, it’s meant to.’ Then the guy lies down again and closes his eyes. So it’s all a test and it’s all meant to be a test and everything is connected. That’s just about the sum total of what the kid has learned since running away and teaming up with this con man and it’s worth damn all if you don’t count the £500 wad which is the only good part. So why can’t they move on to the Second Law of Life? Why go back to zero? Next lesson he gets, it’ll be the Minus First Law and there’s no knowing where it’ll stop.

  Kid stares at the suitcase at the foot of the guy’s bed and eventually says to him, ‘Have you got a gun in there?’

  Guy opens his eyes. ‘No.’

  ‘Lots of spare socks?’

  ‘None of your business.’

  Kid keeps staring at the suitcase. As in, what’s the point of it? Guy’s got a card buys him anything he wants. Change of clothes – get yourself another £500 and buy it. Things get dirty, throw them away. What a perfect way to live, every day you buy a new life with your magic card. Kid thinks: that’s my idea of heaven.

  Guy says, ‘Why not read something?’, and now it really is like being with Stegosaurus who’s got this thing that kids watch too much television nowadays and they should be reading books or going out on their bike though when did Steg ever do either of those?

  ‘There’s nothing to read.’

  ‘Newspaper?’

  Guy’s pointing at something on the desk-type table thing over at the wall, a folded newspaper, and if it was Steg asking then the kid would tell him where to go but this has to be another test and if a man’s got a card that works in any cashpoint in the universe then he’s a man worth sticking with. The only kind of money that means anything is infinite money. So the kid mutes the TV and goes over to the table thing, maybe you’d call it a writing desk, headed notepaper neatly placed on it. The Lodge. And a white ballpoint pen with blue letters printed on the side, same fancy font. The Lodge. Like it’s this really amazing brand. But only kind of hotel that means anything is an infinite hotel, and this hotel sure as hell isn’t infinite. As in it’s only got about twenty rooms or something. Kid saw a thing on BBC Four (don’t ask why) about this infinite hotel invented by a man called Hilbert. You show up and they say sorry we’re full. And you say no problem, why don’t you ask all the guests to change room, then I’ll be able to fit in. There’s some way it works, kid can’t remember now, but those scientists proved it’s real. Kid lifts the ballpoint, clicks it a couple of times, figures it’s crap and puts it in his pocket. Lifts the newspaper too, it’s the local rag he never reads, his mum gets it, pictures of school football teams and sad losers doing sponsored walks. Left here so that guests can read the listings as in there aren’t any, it’s like here you are, suckers, you chose to stay in this crummy place, now see for yourself that there isn’t a cinema or a restaurant or a club worth going to. This town is so full of nothing. This is like a totally finite town.

  Kid opens the paper, looks at the pictures, doesn’t see anyone he recognizes. As in this is his tiny little finite town and he doesn’t know anybody in it and they don’t know him. Which is good because it means he can walk up to any cashpoint and draw an infinite amount of money. Photograph of an old lady standing outside the town library, kid never goes there, it’s for old people and random wasters who can’t afford a computer. Old lady’s been working there for a hundred and fifty years or something and now she’s retiring well big deal. And on the opposite page, bald man in a suit, David Luss, education spokesman, visiting schools in the area, used to teach in one, like so what? Does he want a m
edal or something?

  Kid turns the page and sees the notices. Births, deaths, marriages. Which is basically it, as in life. Three things, and they can’t even put them in the right order. Though once you’re over twenty-one you might as well be dead, kid thinks, as in everybody who ever did anything interesting did it when they were young. Maybe call it thirty at the outside, got to allow for late developers.

  There’s a section called In Memoriam and the kid knows what that means. As in somebody still remembers you. He’ll be there one day and it’ll be the whole infinite universe that remembers him, they’ll all have been to his funeral, music’s going to be something by Nelly Furtado but he can’t decide which. Nelly will be there in person, crying her eyes out, and it’ll be most impressive.

  Robert Coyle: forever in our hearts.

  Kid reads it and freezes.

  11

  Joe didn’t know where he wanted to walk but he needed to feel one foot going in front of the other, that was all. Easier for Anne since she was a woman, used to being in the house, but Joe was born to work, even if he’d been on the scrapheap since he was forty-five year of age. His son and then his job, both gone within the space of a year, and no hope of seeing either of them again.

  Young kids loafing outside the chippie Joe passed, found himself momentarily bathed in light and warmth and the rich reek of vinegar and thought about getting himself a poke of chips and a pickled onion but kept walking, and behind his back, he could see it out the corner of his eye, they kids were staring at him like he was a joke.

  Maybe it’s a war they’re needing, thought Joe. Not the computer-game kind they show on the news but the real sort, falls on your head and deafens you. Glasgow got hammert by the Jerries, so it did, though people only ever go on about the London Blitz, cheerful cockneys, pearly kings playing spoons. Anybody says Gorbals, it’s all flick-knives and razor gangs and you’d think it was the ordinary folk there who were the enemy, which in a manner of speaking they were, mind, because before Churchill was ever fighting Nazis he was putting tanks in Glasgow to stop a revolution. Working class in those days meant nearly everybody, thought Joe, now all the work goes on in sweatshops some place other side of the world, might as well call it Gorbalistan, making the trainers and stereos for these kids hanging round the chippie in their FCUKs.

  Taking his customary route through the town, he was soon looking down from the bridge to the river, eerie in the nocturnal lamplight but safe enough this end, stretch where people walk their dogs and the main risk is getting shit on your shoe. Joe descended the steps and surveyed the empty bank; a bat zipped and twirled like an overgrown moth. Kenzie never felt the Hun’s wrath, wee mining town like hundreds of others throughout Scotland, but Glasgow and the Clyde, they suffered. And now we’re all meant to shake hands and be pals in the United States of Europe.

  Going to school, seeing another vacant desk; somebody’s child, gone just like that, killed by German millionaire arms manufacturers, same as Robbie was killed by Uncle Sam, never mind what all they experts maintained with their fancy names for bad luck. Cancer happens, they said, but nothing happens without a reason. A bomb goes off, there’s somebody made and planted it, even the kind explodes in a person’s mind. No, Joe survived one war only for his son to die in another, and he could remember what it felt like, looking up and seeing that Jerry plane with big black crosses on its wings, six year old, peeing himself with fear, thought his mum must be inside the shelter after they got split in the rush. She’d left him behind and the Jerry was going to drop a bomb on him and he was going to die.

  He felt a spatter of rain from the overcast sky but it quickly passed and the path remained dry beneath his feet. Before long he was at the old memorial with its bench half burned by vandals, the standard obscenity spray-painted on the side of the sandstone pillar like a casual afterthought. Evil wee bastards, thought Joe, but what else can you expect when they’re getting bombarded day and night by the same foul message? His maw almost mental when she found him and got him inside, tears on both their faces. She simmered down and wiped her eyes and felt his pants that were all wet, nothing they could do about it in an air-raid shelter full of people, all as feart as he was, Joe knew now. That smell of piss you got in the shelters, he never understood as a child what it really meant.

  First thing Joe thought when they planes hit the Twin Towers: now they know what it’s like. Awfie sad, of course, terrible tragedy for all they innocent people, lives destroyed. But now they know. Six year old, looking up in the smoke-filled sky over Glasgow, seeing black crosses on a Heinkel’s wing and thinking where’s my maw? Now they know. Because when did America ever suffer an air raid? Only once if you count Pearl Harbor but by God did they make a fuss about it! The day that changed the world, a turning point in history, on and on and on and on about it, weeping and wailing like they were the only people on Earth ever got bombed. Of course it’s sad but do they think it’s so unusual? Just because it’s right there on their doorstep, live on their television stations that are normally full of pop music and adverts and crap, a bit of reality for a change.

  Second thing Joe thought: serves them damn well right. They treat the world like it’s their bloody aircraft carrier, coming and putting their nuclear poison here, and the least slap they get they’re greetin like there’s no tomorrow. All they marbles Robbie waded in, Joe would have liked to drop them out an aeroplane on New York. Here you go, Yanks, have them back, we don’t want them in our neck of the woods anymore. A hundred thousand wee glass globes falling out the sky like nuclear rain, every one of them a dead child. One dead child, Joe’s own. One extra cancer victim, a statistic nobody wanted to count.

  And how they damn well bleat about it. There was this fat American woman they interviewed on the telly, ordinary housewife in sunglasses loading her car at the supermarket and she was saying to the reporter, why do they hate us so much? Why are they jealous of what we’ve got? It was like she just couldn’t figure it out, couldn’t add two and two the gither in her fat skull and Joe damn near choked on his single malt as he shouted at the screen, remember Marie Antoinette you daft cow, let them eat cake.

  He could still smell that shelter him and his maw were in while the sirens wailed. Sweat, piss and fear. And the dull thuds of bombs exploding, each a shudder that ran through the grown-ups wondering if it was their tenement had got hit. An old woman who kept saying the bombs were getting further away, said it every time one went off though they weren’t. And his mother holding him in her arms, singing softly. She loved music, had a big harmonium in the house, used to fascinate him, though how did she ever acquire such a thing or learn to play it? All sorts of tunes; music-hall songs, folk ballads. Joe could hear one in his head right now, like a sea shanty whose reedy chords put the rhythm back in his step as he reached the end of the lamplit section of the riverside path and walked into the darkness, following exactly the same route he’d taken in daylight and had trodden a thousand times before that, a score he couldn’t get out of his system. A sad song, it was, because anything you play on a harmonium sounds sad but also holy and uplifting, if only he could remember the words. His mother was sitting at the big black thing, pumping the bellows with her feet, the room dark with only a single lamp glowing beside her, throwing long shadows, and her hair tied up in a bun.

  It was a sound in his head, but why should it have come back to him now? Joe didn’t know and didn’t need to think too much about it; instead he savoured the memory of his mother at the harmonium, such a sombre great thing like you’d find in a funeral parlour, but a lively tune she played for all its sadness, strange how you can have both at once. Not like your pop songs nowadays with their boom-boom-boom and only one topic, no, Joe couldn’t imagine people of eighty year old, one day humming to their selves in a care home about get on down shake your ass baby. But your folk songs, they’re the music of the ordinary working people, which is why nobody’s interested anymore. Be a pop star, then you need never work again. A verse c
ame to him:

  ‘I wish the wind may never cease

  Nor fashes in the flood,

  Till my ane son comes hame to me

  In earthly flesh and blood.’

  He remembered it now, song about a woman who’s lost her son. Yes, that was why it had come back without him even noticing. Must have been swirling in his head while he watched the telly with Anne, swirling like the whisky in his glass; and like the alcohol, it had tilted his mind, stirring memories of his mother, the air raid, all the junk of his old and tired imagination, but at the centre of it was the frozen void where his child had been. It jolted him, this simple realization of the meaning of his own automatic actions, just as he was jolted but not surprised to find he’d already reached the stretch of bank running near the site of the old installation, where he’d met the missionary earlier. Another half-mile and he’d cross the bridge and take the circular route home, same as he’d been doing for years, even when the weans were wee and Janet would be complaining about the distance. Should’ve brought a torch with him, not the safest place for a night-time stroll, but it was the song in his head led him on.

  It fell about the Martinmas