by Molly Flatt
‘But . . . I . . . you have email!’ Alex declared triumphantly. ‘And a phone!’
‘We maintain a small property on North Ronaldsay equipped for such purposes. You are welcome to fly over and use it, weather permitting, of course.’
Alex cast around, panicked, as if a sacred circle of radio masts might suddenly spring up atop of the hills. ‘But you didn’t . . . I can’t—’
‘Sorry for the inconvenience,’ said MacBrian, who didn’t sound sorry at all. ‘Here we are.’
Numbly Alex followed MacBrian into the ugly building, passing a metal sign engraved with GCAS’s name and logo. There was also a warning that ALL VISITORS MUST REPORT TO RECEPTION. 24-HOUR SURVEILLANCE IN OPERATION. The lobby, which contained nothing but an unmanned reception desk, was dim and musty-smelling. It also appeared, Alex noticed with sinking disbelief, to be lined with oil lamps. Iain, who must have rejoined them without Alex noticing, walked round to take their coats. Stripped of her cape, MacBrian was squat and muscular, with a greying pixie crop. She wore leggings tucked into sturdy ankle boots and a navy tunic cinched by a leather belt, with a large silver figure-of-eight brooch pinned above her left breast. If it wasn’t for the moles, she would have been a ringer for Alex’s old Brown Owl.
‘But how do you work?’ Alex persisted. ‘How do you research? How do you write?’
‘Books,’ MacBrian said. ‘Pen and paper.’ Something flickered behind her shark’s eyes. ‘We have an excellent on-site library.’
‘You must have some kind of generator?’
‘We’ll make sure you have everything you need. Now we’d like to start the interviews as soon as possible. But first I’ll show you to your room, give you some time to prepare. This way, please.’
As MacBrian led the way through a side door and into a deserted, whitewashed corridor, Alex tried to talk herself down. Her father, an intransigent technophobe, would be delighted to hear that she had been forced into a two-day digital detox. She could just imagine the gentle jibes he’d give her when she told him how panicked she had initially felt. And he would be right; the lack of electricity would force her to rest, to connect with herself rather than others, to re-immerse herself in the natural world. Eudo would hardly collapse without her hand at the helm over a single weekend. Right? She could rely on Lenni, and this would in fact be the ideal opportunity to stress-test their new team. And then there was Harry. Wouldn’t her inability to send Harry a single email, photo or text give him exactly the space he needed to realize that his life was incomplete without her?
Feeling better, she turned to MacBrian, somehow sensing that they’d got off on the wrong foot. ‘So how long have you been at GCAS, Director?’ she asked. ‘I’m always delighted to meet a fellow woman in leadership.’
‘A long time,’ MacBrian said. ‘A lifetime, you might say.’
Alex gave a low chuckle. ‘I know how that feels. So you worked your way up the ranks?’
‘Indeed,’ MacBrian said. ‘I was only appointed Director here on Iskeull earlier this year.’ She stopped at a door.
‘But that’s fabulous,’ Alex gushed. ‘Congratulations!’ She leaned closer. ‘Finally dislodge some old duffer who’d been incumbent for decades?’ she whispered, playfully elbowing MacBrian’s thick waist.
Before she knew it, Iain had grabbed her from behind, his fingers locked in a vice around her upper arm.
‘Excuse me!’ Alex spluttered. ‘What do you think you’re—’
MacBrian said something sharp and indecipherable. Iain dropped his hand and stepped back without a word.
‘What the hell?’
‘My – our – apologies,’ MacBrian said. ‘Captain MacHoras was simply being over-protective. Everyone is a little . . . tense right now. Director MacCalum was an extremely popular man, and his death was an untimely tragedy.’
‘Oh God.’ Alex turned from glaring at Iain and put her hand to her mouth. ‘He died? Jesus. I’m so sorry.’
‘We’re all very sorry, Miss Moore,’ MacBrian said. She was studying Alex’s face. ‘It has caused incalculable pain. And made my position very difficult. Very difficult indeed.’ She turned the knob. ‘I’ll be back in an hour. You should have everything you need.’
As soon as MacBrian had shut the door behind her, Alex slumped down on the bed and took stock. The iron-framed bedstead was one of only two pieces of furniture in the high-ceilinged room. The other was a nightstand, on which stood a ewer and jug, a folded towel and a misshapen bar of handmade soap. The walls were streaked with damp, and a single window of thick, warped glass looked out onto rain-lashed cobbled streets. On the plain bedspread beside Alex was a chipped tray bearing a glass of milk, a dark heel of bread and a round of white cheese.
A draft whistled in from the window frame and Alex wished, suddenly, that she was in her flat. She longed to be curled up on the sofa with Harry, watching YouTube videos, familiar and safe and warm. The silence of Iskeull, the rawness and scale of its nature, the chilly reception she had received from Iain and MacBrian, even the rain – they all conspired to make her feel more like old miserable-shadow Alex than she had in a long time.
But then she thought again of how proud her father would be of her, and of what Chloe would say, and she made a concerted effort to push the self-pity away. The room, she told herself firmly, was a masterpiece of homespun elegance that would cost 500 quid a night in Gloucestershire. And sure, Iain might be on the troglodyte end of the male spectrum, and MacBrian might be somewhat lacking in social graces, but then that was academics for you. The poor closeted brainiacs were obviously in the midst of dealing with a tragedy, not to mention a considerable organizational shake-up. Unlike old Alex, new Alex knew better than to take their behaviour personally. New Alex relished opportunities to push her boundaries. New Alex had the courage and humility to walk a mile in their shoes, as her mother liked to say, even if those shoes were orthopaedic-looking ankle boots. She peeled off her soaked shorts, changed into fresh jeans and ripped off a small piece of bread.
By the time the knock came, Alex had polished off all the food and was in the midst of a power-nap. Blearily, she opened the door, to find MacBrian standing in the doorway beside a tall, thin woman holding a leather bag.
‘This is Bride MacDiarmid, our resident doctor,’ MacBrian announced. ‘She’d like to conduct a physical examination.’
‘Oh. An . . . oh?’ Alex looked at the doctor’s bag. ‘I wasn’t really expecting—’
‘We ask all of our contributors to provide us with a full medical history and undergo a few rudimentary checks, so that we can incorporate physiological and genetic factors into the research.’ MacBrian paused. ‘So far everyone has consented, but of course, if you don’t feel comfortable . . .’
‘No, no.’ Alex smiled and opened the door wider. ‘Of course. That’s fine. I’m surprised, that’s all. Impressed, actually. It’s so rare to find an academic project with such a holistic approach.’
‘Very good.’ MacBrian moved aside to let MacSomething Else pass through. ‘I’ll wait outside.’
At first Alex tried to coax some small talk out of the monosyllabic doctor, but as the checks became increasingly unrudimentary, she lapsed into silence. When the doctor snapped on a pair of gloves, Alex gave herself a bracing reminder that she was dealing with the penetrating methodologies of science here, not the broad strokes of PR. She even felt a faint frisson of pleasure at being treated like some kind of entrepreneurial athlete. By the time she had straightened her clothes, she had already turned the scene into a comic vignette to retell in London over a stiff cocktail.
The doctor spent several minutes making notes, then embarked on a series of precise questions about Alex’s family tree. Thankfully, Alex was able to answer to a decent level of detail. Her American grandmother, Dorothy, had traced the Moores all the way back to the Mayflower. And although the thoroughly English Wrights thought researching their bloodline was conceited, she had recently dug everything she could out of he
r mother’s side for a project Eudo had run in partnership with FitBand. On the mental rap sheet she was able to claim a healthy smattering of depression, an anorexic cousin and an obsessive-compulsive great-grandfather. As the doctor pressed her with a faintly disappointed air, Alex confided about several Moores whom she’d always suspected to be functioning alcoholics. Physically, her inheritance was robust, even vigorous. There was another cousin in remission from breast cancer and a diabetic aunt, but most of her relatives had died old. Her parents, as her mother loved to relate, had been the bare-minimum burden on the NHS.
Alex received the impression that the doctor had been hoping for something a little juicier. She hoped they weren’t trying to prove some damaged-genius hypothesis. Talent is a habit, not an inheritance was one of Eudo’s core brand values, after all.
‘It’s so quiet,’ she said when it was over and MacBrian was leading her further along the corridor. ‘My university was borderline chaos. Where are all the students?’
‘It’s a national holiday,’ MacBrian replied tightly, her eyes fixed ahead, her stride brisk. ‘They’ll all be taking a break in the farmland or spending time in the town.’
‘Ah yes. I got a glimpse of the town through my window. It looks so quaint. I’d love a tour.’
‘Perhaps later. Once we’ve made some progress with the interviews. The rest of the faculty are extremely eager to meet you. However, I managed to reserve this afternoon for you, me and our Head of Scholarship to talk – before the others insist on their pound of flesh.’
‘I’m sorry again,’ Alex said, after a pause. ‘I’m afraid I rather put my foot in it with my comment, earlier. Were you very close? To your predecessor, I mean?’
‘Not personally. We had somewhat divergent views on how to run things here.’
‘But he was a good Director, you said?’ Alex probed.
‘He was an extraordinary . . . extraordinarily good at what he did.’
‘And popular, you said?’
‘Very much so.’ There was a distinct tightening of MacBrian’s jaw.
Ah, Alex thought. ‘Do you mind me asking,’ she said gently, ‘how he died?’
‘Perhaps,’ MacBrian said, stopping outside an identical-looking door, ‘we could focus on asking some questions of our own first?’
The room they entered was the same size and shape as Alex’s bedroom, except that here the furniture was a flimsy-looking antique table and three mismatched chairs. The chill was softened by a small open fire that gave off the heady whiff of peat. Seated at one of the chairs, behind a sprawl of loose papers, was a lanky middle-aged man.
‘Miss Moore!’ he cried, scrambling up from his chair.
‘This,’ MacBrian said, ‘is our Head of Scholarship, Taran MacGill.’
Taran MacGill had a long face, a big nose and straggly iron-grey hair. He was wearing crumpled brown trousers and a stained oatmeal jumper with the same logo-brooch as MacBrian’s pinned onto his chest. He was staring at Alex as if she were a particularly rare and beautiful species of snow leopard.
‘Alex,’ Alex said. ‘Please call me Alex.’
He gave a crooked smile. ‘Alex, then. And please call me Taran, Alex. How very . . . fascinating to meet you.’
As Taran shook her hand, damply and for far too long, Alex began to harbour some serious suspicions about the impartiality of the selection criteria used to recruit GCAS staff. Despite Iain’s muscle-bound stature, MacBrian’s statement crop, the doctor’s thinness and Taran’s general dishevelment, their monochrome colouring and stark features pointed strongly towards a common ancestry.
‘Before we begin, Miss Moore,’ MacBrian was saying, ‘Professor MacGill and I would like to express in advance our gratitude for your willingness to collaborate in our investigations with full openness and honesty.’
‘Absolutely.’ Alex extricated her hand from Taran’s. ‘I’m very grateful for the invitation. You seem to have a wonderful set-up out here. Who . . .’ She paused, fishing for a diplomatic way to frame the question. ‘Now, how does the Chapter here work exactly? Is it a – a family enterprise?’
‘We’re all—’ Taran began.
‘It is a rather unusual arrangement,’ MacBrian interrupted. ‘GCAS is an umbrella organization that operates across seven islands located around the world. Each of those islands is owned and run by its original indigenous tribe. We are all united in a shared endeavour to protect our unique native ecologies and promote the free flow of human thought between our continents. Here, on Iskeull, we go straight back to the Picts.’
‘But that’s incredible,’ Alex said. ‘Like the street artists near our office. They’ve been squatting in this historic warehouse for months, refusing to move, because the council have sold it off and some Russian magnate’s trying to turn it into a boutique hotel.’
There was a brief silence.
‘I’d imagine it’s difficult, though?’ she ploughed on. ‘Oh, you must have an awesome sense of community, but don’t you feel a little isolated? Especially with the whole anti-tech leylines thing? How do you get your news?’
‘Ah, but you see we have access—’ Taran began.
‘We have access,’ MacBrian said, ‘to a different kind of news. Collective storytelling, you might say.’
‘You mean spoken word?’ Alex shook her head and blew out a puff of air. ‘God, you know, with all due respect to your comms team, I can’t believe you guys don’t get more exposure. Interdisciplinary, international, sustainable, authentic . . . I mean, there are some real similarities with what you’re doing here and what I’m trying to do with Eudo. If more people in London knew about this, oh my God – well, let me just say, they would go insane.’
‘I’d love to—’ Taran began.
‘They’d destroy it,’ MacBrian snapped.
There was another tense silence.
‘No, no, you’re right,’ Alex said, after a moment. ‘It’s so sad, but you’re so right. You’d have tour companies and bloggers and billions of spores rampaging over your ecology in no time.’
‘Yes, well.’ MacBrian pulled out the chair beside Taran. ‘We’re on a very tight schedule. Do you think we could start?’
‘Of course.’ Alex smiled graciously and sat.
MacBrian took the chair on Alex’s other side, then opened a notebook, moved a red bookmark to the back and clicked up the nib of a biro. ‘Are you ready?’
Taran had a gratifyingly intense expression of anticipation on his face. Alex arranged her features into the very picture of collaborative transparency.
‘Shoot.’
7
‘We need your story,’ MacBrian began. ‘Your personal account of exactly what happened on the night of February the seventeenth. The article in Flair was helpful to a degree, but we need to know your every emotion, sensation, thought.’
Here we go again, Alex thought. She settled back in her chair.
‘Well, to understand what happened on the seventeenth, you’ll need a bit of context. At the time I was working as a marketing manager at a security software firm – you can probably find out where, but I’d rather you didn’t name them in the research paper, if that’s okay? But I’d sort of stumbled into the job after uni and, honestly, it made me feel dead inside.’
‘Dead?’ MacBrian, who was already scribbling furiously, looked up.
‘Totally. Oh, there was nothing wrong with it in particular, but there was nothing right, either, and I knew it wasn’t where I had expected to end up by the time I was thirty. In terms of personal life, I had a wonderful fiancé – that’s Harry Fyfield, feel free to include him in all this, he’s been absolutely central to my journey. But I was so ground down, I couldn’t even summon the energy to organize our wedding.’ She shook her head. ‘I really was quite a different woman from the one you see now.’
‘Different? In what way?’
‘Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? What was holding me back? I was always coming up with these grand projects that w
ere going to unlock my true talent – art classes, creative-writing courses, coding lessons, marathons – but somehow I could never make a go of anything I tried. After a burst of enthusiasm, it would always sort of . . . fizzle out.’
‘Your true talent.’ MacBrian’s eyes narrowed. ‘And what do you think that might be?’
‘Well, obviously now I realize it’s all about helping others – building communities, inspiring people to be their best selves – but for a long time I had no idea what I really wanted to do. Oh, I was confident when I was a child, very precocious, I had all sorts of big dreams. But the rot began when I was around eleven years old.’
‘The rot?’ MacBrian exchanged a look with Taran. ‘What do you mean by rot?’
Alex chuckled. ‘My poor mother could tell you all about that. I won a scholarship to a fancy school, and suddenly there was all this pressure to perform. I had gone from being a big fish in a small pond to just the opposite, and I guess that’s when I started to doubt my abilities. I started to build up this narrative inside myself that everything I did was doomed to fail. I began to invent excuses not to go out with my friends, contracted mysterious illnesses that meant I had to stay at home. And I spent more time alone mucking around on the computer, made less effort with schoolwork. Thereon in, I can only assume it became a self-fulfilling prophecy.’
Alex sat back and reached into her pocket. There were the seeds of a promising podcast here; she liked that bit about the ‘narrative inside’. It wasn’t until she had patted a full circuit of her hips that she remembered her phone was lying broken in her room.
MacBrian was writing again. ‘And there was a second shift – a reversal of that narrative inside, if you will – on the seventeenth?’
‘Exactly, Director – exactly. I couldn’t have put it better myself. You see, on the morning of the seventeenth, my boss, Mark, offered me a promotion. I suppose that the prospect of plodding on with my miserable non-life for another decade made me finally come to my senses.’ Alex gazed contemplatively into the fire. ‘By that point I must have had almost twenty years of untapped potential inside me, ready to erupt.’