by Bella Pollen
Tom reached into his briefcase and handed her a thin blue leaflet.
‘Naval Protection Services.’ She opened the report to a sub-heading on the first page. ‘Outer Hebrides. Radio Mist Distance Indicators.’ She flicked through pages of tables, technical data and graphs. ‘What is this?’
‘It’s a safety report for Gebraith.’
‘Our Lady of the Isles.’
‘Quite. Where religion meets radar, as I believe it’s been rather wittily dubbed.’
Nicky painted things he was interested in. He liked to find out how things worked. A study of a bird’s beak, a missile firing-range. A nuclear power plant.
‘When you called me,’ Tom continued, ‘I checked on the status of Clannach and I found the department’s feathers were in a state of advanced ruffle about this report.’
Letty dug a nail into the palm of her hand. If Nicky had found out about the proposed plans for Clannach, he would have been in no doubt as to how she’d feel about them.
‘The blueprint for Clannach is being lifted directly off the Gebraith model, but this report claims that Gebraith’s surrounding areas, i.e. the hills, dunes and beaches, have all been contaminated by something called Cobalt-60.’
‘Cobalt-60?’ She frowned with recognition.
‘Cobalt-60, or CO-60 as it’s referred to in the report, is a radioisotope used to track missiles. The report claims that significant amounts of CO-60 have been leaked onto the launch pad during the course of the last ten years.’
‘And this CO-60. It’s dangerous?’
‘Highly toxic. If this report is correct, it could have caused a great deal of harm to the island.’
Letty stared at him, appalled. ‘What sort of harm?’
‘Radiological.’
‘Dear God.’ She covered her mouth with her hand.
‘The report claims to have been commissioned following an accidental spillage that was brought to the MoD’s attention two years ago.’ Tom shrugged. ‘Apparently, the missiles on the range were not stored safely. The magnesium in the cone head connected with sea water and that’s how the original leak occurred.’
She closed her eyes. So Nicky had known and said nothing. Magnesium. Cobalt. She saw the codings on his painting. CO-60, MG-137. They weren’t colours. They were chemicals.
‘Schyndell. Gebraith. One nuclear power, the other nuclear weaponry. Nevertheless much ties them together. Containment, waste treatment, risk of uncontrolled radiation—’
‘We talked about this.’ She shook her head in agitation. Nicky and I – we argued about it. This is exactly what I was worried about.’ Operator error. She stared unseeingly at the report in her lap. ‘What about the islanders, have they been warned?’
‘Letty, you’re missing the point.’
‘But they’ll need to be—’
‘Letty, listen, will you? If this report is true, it will have implications for the Clannach project.’
‘Why do you keep saying ifthe report is true?’
‘When this came in, everybody was so busy reacting to the content, they didn’t initially look into where it had come from.’
‘Stop being so bloody cryptic, Tom,’ she said calmly, though her heart was thudding. ‘Where did it come from?’
‘That’s just it. No one knows. This report was not commissioned by the MoD, or any other government body for that matter. Look.’ He took the document from her and flicked through to the last page. ‘It’s not even signed with a name, just initials. BB.’ He looked at her keenly. ‘Letty, I believe the report is fake.’
73
God rot the little bastard. Alba clenched and unclenched her fists as she checked the blackening sky. Rain was sluicing down the glass, wind howling through the pipes of the Raeburn. She went from window to window scanning for any moving smudge that might turn into a boy. The storm should have forced Jamie’s return long before now. The little deviant was obviously staying out on purpose to land her in trouble. She could get away with a cuff round the head; she could get away with any number of pinches or dead arms, in fact, all forms of torture within the normal parameters of sibling warfare, but an unprovoked slap to the face was a major breach of the Fleming Geneva Convention. If Jamie was still out sulking in a storm when her mother returned, the crime would increase ten-fold in severity. It wasn’t that she cared about being punished. She had already decided on solitary confinement for the rest of her life and her mother simply wasn’t imaginative enough to top that but it would be better if Jamie came back. None of them was allowed to go to the cliffs on their own. Especially Jamie, especially in this weather. She scrutinized the landscape again. He knew to be careful, but it was raining hard and it would be slippery, misty as well. And then there had been that look in his eyes, a glittering brilliance she’d never seen before.
She had hit him hard, really socked him, and she felt the curdle of shame. She’d gone too far, but hadn’t it been justified? Eight years she’d been forced to deal with her brother, more than half her life co-opted into mopping up his spittle, feeding him, watering him; Christ, mucking out a pigsty would have been less trouble. And all this time he’d been hopelessly indulged, allowed to grow up in a dream world. So, now if he was chasing about the island after some childish fantasy then why the hell should she get a soaking just to bring him down to earth? Let him take responsibility for once. Let him get cold and wet and frightened. His little milk teeth could chatter till they dropped out of his gums for all she cared. She remembered the time she and Georgie had got trapped at the mouth of Loch Aivegarry on the incoming tide and been forced to swim for their lives through the channels. When they’d arrived at the house, two frozen automatons, barely able to speak, had their parents been sympathetic? Not in the slightest. They’d terrorized them with tales of drownings and autoamputation of frostbitten toes, then forced them to squat in a cold bath into which they added hot water at a sadistic trickle. ‘I told you to keep an eye on the tides,’ Letty kept saying furiously. ‘How many times have I told you?’
So no, she would not go after Jamie. She sat down at the table but the rain continued to fall from the sky and the clock ticked. With each passing minute, the ludicrousness of Jamie’s outburst drifted back and she felt a sick uneasiness. What if he did something stupid, really stupid, as in attempt to climb down the Kettle to look for the bear? Suddenly a horrifying image of his foot sliding on the wet grass passed through her head and abruptly she knocked back her chair. ‘All right,’ she said grudgingly. ‘Bloody hell.’ Swearing calmed her. The sound of her own voice calmed her. Relief at having made the decision to go gave her the latitude to hate him even more. Giving in to his manipulation was a breach of her resolve and he would be punished for it, as Georgie and her mother would also be punished, because, as usual, she was getting the sticky end of the lollipop, and it wasn’t fair. Meanwhile it was mid-afternoon, her mother would be back soon and she was supposed to have laid the table and heated up the slop that passed for lentil and ham soup. On the mantelpiece she caught sight of Jamie’s collection of bird skulls. She identified a crow and a curlew, alongside something larger that he’d picked off Islay Sound – a cormorant, perhaps. On a whim, she placed the skulls on three separate plates, arranging them on the table flanked by a knife and fork. She tore a strip of paper from Letty’s writing pad and bent it into a placement card. ‘Enjoy’, she wrote, then she propped up the card in front of her mother’s plate setting and slammed out of the front door.
74
The weather was closing in fast. Jamie was thankful for his coat as he stumbled across the bog, hardly bothering to aim for stepping stones. More than once he sank to his knees but he was oblivious to both the wet and the cold. His body was on fire. His heart, too big for his chest at the best of times, drummed as if a moth were trapped against his ribcage and by the time he reached the cliffs, he was close to hyperventilating. He threw himself down on the ragged side of the Kettle and attempted to untangle the strap of his binoculars from hi
s pocket. ‘Bear!’ he shouted. ‘Dada!’
No reply, only the pattering of rain on his anorak hood and the wind playing Chinese whispers in his ears. He squirmed closer to the edge and peered over. The bottom of the Kettle was roiling with water. Out to sea, a long wave crested white, sending spray and specks of yellowing foam into the air.
‘Dada!’ he yelled again. The wind stole his voice and laughed in his face. A fulmar, hugging the ledge a few feet beneath him, looked up and squawked with distaste.
‘Bugger off, fulmar,’ Jamie said wildly, then giggled hysterically at his nerve. He tried wiping his jumper sleeve over the convex lens of the binoculars but the wind was gathering strength and it was no longer possible to hold them steady, and besides, the Kettle was too high and narrow for him to see into the tunnel. He stuffed the glasses back into his pocket and shuffled round the perimeter on his stomach. When he reached the ridged spine that funnelled down to the bottom, he stopped and appraised the descent with what he hoped was a professional eye. Alick had been down with a rope to rescue sheep and the day his father had climbed down had been the day he’d found the cave. Forbidden, dangerous, off-limits, yet . . . possible. And then Jamie couldn’t rid himself of the notion that he was meant to do it.
It began easily enough. The heather at the top was bunched and thick enough to take his weight but as he progressed down the clumps grew sparser. After thirteen or fourteen feet, the spine narrowed and steepened and Jamie spread-eagled himself across its width, hugging the sides of the drop with both arms and digging his fingers into the soil. He was wet through and the sharpness of the rock pressed into his chest. He didn’t feel quite as confident as before but scrambling back up seemed like an impossible feat and surely it was easier to cooperate with gravity than defy it? He took a deep breath, searched for courage and continued down, itsy bitsy spider, synchronizing his arms and legs, descending inch by precarious inch, but after another few minutes he discovered his left foot waving ineffectively in space and he was compelled to press his head into the mossy slope to stop himself falling.
‘Dada!’ he yelled, but when all he tasted was earth, the dread realization hit him. He was stuck.
The shriek of the fulmar came a fraction of a second before its wings brushed against the back of Jamie’s head. Instinctively, he took a swipe at it and his body came away from the cliff like a winkle kicked off a rock. Down he plummeted, another fifteen feet. There was an intense pain in an indefinable part of his body, and at the same time his head jerked backwards and smashed against something solid.
And then everything went dark.
75
Georgie stole a sideways look at Aliz. He was working the pedals with his boots undone and the laces dangled from the eyelets like spaghetti. When he turned and grinned at her, a loose electrical charge ran through her body. Love, sex, passion, longing, these things had always seemed inaccessible, adult emotions, and certainly the preserve of somebody less self-conscious, less graceless than her, but under Aliz’s hesitant touch, every awkward curve and angle of her body made sense for the first time. She had placed his hand on her stomach and he had groaned. She could still feel the imprint of his fingers pressing against the arc of her ribs, his thumb hooking her white cotton pants over the small mound of her hip bone. There was heat between her legs and a graze where sand had rubbed between their lips. She touched it with her tongue as the mobile van clattered over the watery potholes of the road. She wondered about running away from home. Packing a bag, leaving a note. She thought of the huge backlog of things she had been storing up to tell someone and she thought of all the time she could take to say them. Suddenly every scrappy thing she knew, every tug of emotion she’d suppressed, every tiny bead of information in her abacus of knowledge felt relevant to her future and for the first time in a long time, the world glowed with possibility.
Out of the window, a flock of geese took wing. Georgie watched them assemble into a V formation, their long necks stretched out, their feathers glinting white under the thin seam of light in the dark sky.
Aliz stopped the mobile van at the yellow gate. When he blinked, his eyelashes closed down on his cheek like velvet claws. He took her hand and pressed the tips of her fingers one by one.
‘Can you meet me tomorrow?’
Georgie nodded. She would meet him every tomorrow, she thought, and wondered whether she was already pregnant.
Happiness suffused her. She wafted into the house, floated through the kitchen door, his name whispering in her head, Aliz, Aliz, Aliz. Every time she said it, a tiny pair of bellows blew at her heart, making it glow red, making it spark and when she heard a voice telling her that she looked chilled to the marrow, that her clothes and hair were soaked from the rain, she assumed her mother must be talking to someone else. How could she be referring to a person whose heart and soul were on fire, but then she heard a strangely familiar voice and she plummeted down to earth with a jolt.
Tom Gordunson rose slowly from the kitchen table. ‘So how’s my favourite goddaughter?’ He kissed her on the cheek and sized her up with a rueful laugh. ‘Look at you, good God, you look radiant . . . and, well . . . a little damp.’
‘When did you . . . ? Why are you . . . ?’ Georgie looked from Tom to her mother. ‘I don’t understand.’
‘It was all somewhat last-minute,’ Tom apologized.
‘I wanted to surprise you all, darling,’ Letty said. ‘It’s been such a long time since we saw Tom and—’
‘Has something happened?’ Georgie interrupted.
‘Come and sit with us.’ Nervously, Letty pushed out a chair.
‘Yes, and I want to hear all your news,’ Tom added.
‘No.’ Georgie stayed standing, thoroughly spooked. She had finally shouted her secret to the sea and her words had summoned up Tom Gordunson like the ghost of miseries past. ‘What’s going on? Why are you here?’ She glanced at the canvas lying between them. ‘What is that? What are you doing with Dada’s painting?’
Letty looked at the floor.
‘Georgie, I want to talk to you about your father,’ Tom said.
No.’
‘About Berlin.’
‘I don’t want to.’
‘Georgie, believe me, it’s all right.’
No!’ Aliz, Aliz, Aliz, she chanted in her head.
Letty looked upset. ‘Tom, please,’ she begged in a low voice. ‘If she doesn’t want—’
‘Something happened there, didn’t it?’ Tom said urgently. ‘Something happened in East Berlin?’
No,’ Georgie said again. She covered her face with her hands but she could remember the raw fear on her father’s face as the Grenzer pulled them over. The jump and ring of the telephone in the interrogation room. She could smell the lignite in the air. She saw the albino sausages stagnating on her plate.
Georgie, my George, her father’s voice had been teasing, but his face had been hard and set, even in the restaurant. You really don’t have to eat the damn things. He’d signalled to the waiter. Now, unless you want the pleasure of boiled tablecloth for pudding, let’s go and fetch the car.
There was always the before and after, Georgie thought; something monumental happens and life divides sharply. What little peace of mind her mother had left, she was about to blow apart.
‘There is a time’, Tom coaxed, ‘when all secrets have to come out.’
‘Mum?’ she pleaded.
Letty touched the tips of her fingers to Georgie’s hand. Her eyes were suddenly brilliant and clear.
‘Whatever it is, Georgie, tell us.’
She began haltingly. Berlin was a long story hinging on a single moment. A short sentence and a swift handover. Tom asked a few questions, but listened attentively, drawing on a cigarette, his eyes never leaving her face. Once again Georgie was struck by the incongruity of his looks, the heavy eyebrows and shaggy head. His manner, his voice, were unfailingly gentle and measured, yet there was something almost animal-like about him, something sharp and da
ngerous beneath the undisciplined exterior, and now he leant forward as though sensing the moment had come.
The exchange had happened inside the church. After the car had been towed to the garage and their laborious paperwork had been signed, she and her father, Georgie told them, had walked through the empty streets, hand in hand.
She had stood at her great-grandfather’s headstone and shivered with some vague sense of apprehension. She thought about Gisela, her leg scabbed and tender from the phosphorus, she thought about her battling the treacherous currents of the river as her mother and sister drowned in her wake.
Her father wanted to make an offering or light a candle, she couldn’t remember which excuse he’d used. ‘Stay here,’ he ordered. ‘I’ll be back in less than a minute.’ And she nodded, too cold to move and overcome with a powerful longing for home. Berlin was the saddest place she’d ever been. There was no spirit there, no hope or humanity. The city was in the thrall of a depression that had permeated even the hollow spaces inside her bones. How she envied Alba. Not singled out for a special trip with her father, going about her normal day, oblivious to a world more complicated than school and homework and fish-finger suppers. A minute passed and then five. The afternoon was closing in. She began picking her way through the dilapidated headstones towards the church. She wandered through the big doors and up towards the altar. When she reached the pulpit, she turned and headed down one of the side aisles but there was no sign of him and only the echo of her footsteps on the stone flags of the floor. Back at the heavy entrance doors, she exited, but he was not waiting for her outside. ‘Dada?’ she called a little uncertainly. She came back in and started purposefully up the other side of the church, peering through arches and around balusters. She’d spotted the shadow of his overcoat before she’d actually seen him. He was behind a pillar, speaking with someone in a low voice, but she’d been so relieved to find him that she’d filed away the conversation, just as she’d filed away every hateful detail about Berlin. It hadn’t been until Norrell and Porter had posed the question of an illicit meeting that the scene had returned to her with all its damning implications.