Descent (18 page)

‘This happened last time,’ I said. ‘I checked the university site, and it confirmed him until a few hours later, when he was gone. I think he has some way of spoofing the systems. I’ll look again tomorrow.’

‘Fuck looking tomorrow,’ said Calum, standing up. He gathered up his stuff and stalked off to the Parliament entrance. I followed him, pausing just through the doors as he strode up to the security barrier. There was a bit of a queue, but the processing was fast. He vanished through to the reception area and a few minutes later returned to flourish glossy papers under my nose.

‘It’s aw there,’ he said, as we went out. ‘Cunt’s name’s on a printed list under the desk, which they hae as back-up in case the electronics go down. Baxter’s name and office number’s up on a big board ae they wee alphabet tiles, same reason. And here’s his mugshot and bio, in hard copy in Yir Wee Scrote Vistor’s Guide Tae Yir Fucking Elected Fucking Representataes. I paraph’ase slightly, yi unnnerstaun, Sinky, I cannae stand the fucking patronising affectation ae scribin’ official communications in Synthetic Fucking Scots. Anyhoo. Whitever. Yi can also find his bio and pic in the Standard English and Urdu and Polish and you name it leaflets, and nae doubt in the ones in Teuchter and Gaelic and Tinker fucking cant an aw.’

He seemed somewhat disproportionately exercised by the linguistic equality policy, but I let it pass.

‘Hard to fake, that,’ I acknowledged.

‘What I don’t get,’ said Calum, ‘is if he’s using false IDs, and he is at least sometimes, why the fuck does he use the same name every time?’

‘We don’t know that,’ I pointed out. ‘Maybe he just does it with us. He could be using other names with other people.’

‘Why, though?’

I shrugged. ‘To fuck with our heads. Or with my head.’

‘You’re getting a bit paranoid, Sinky.’

‘I am that,’ I said. ‘Come on, let’s go seek out squiffy young ladies and spicy chicken wings.’

I like to tell this story as the one about how I went to a wedding ceilidh and fell for the woman in the white dress. It’s not quite as tragic as it sounds.

Calum strode confidently in front of me into the reception rooms of the Skandic Hotel, showed his invitation to the guy on the door, waved to a guest already inside and hustled me along for an introduction before any question could arise about my being included in the invitation. We plunged into a small crowd of wedding guests – smart suits and big dresses, flower crowns and fascinators – in the midst of which Calum hailed his parents; his father said hello and pumped my hand, his mother pecked me on the cheek and remarked on how I’d grown. Calum quickly strategised finding seats and drinks, and sent me off to grab somewhere quiet with a view.

‘Say this for our Sophie,’ said Calum, upon returning with a brace of pints to the corner of the small and currently almost empty side room with two rows of tables, the rearmost of which he’d selected as our base of operations, ‘she’s in the right business. She’s got an eye for a trend, aw right. Out there it’s carnage, man, lampshade ladies bouncing aff each other like dodgem cars.’

‘I noticed,’ I said, after a sip. ‘And the colours – God! My eyes are still hurting from what I saw in the corridor. It’s like in first year when I wandered into a steampunk do in the Student Union, except instead of black it’s full-spectrum Victorian vulgar. Like an explosion in a dye factory.’

‘Goths discover pastels?’

‘Aniline,’ I corrected. ‘“Pastels” just doesn’t do it justice.’

‘Poof.’

‘Explain, my man, or I shall demand satisfaction.’

‘Only lassies and gay blokes know stuff like that.’

‘High school chemistry, old chap, no suspect knowledge of costume history required. But just to be on the safe side, let us agree to characterise the mode of the moment as “goths discover garish”.’

Calum gave me a long look of mock dubiety. ‘So long as you dinnae know the names ae the colours,’ he said, ‘I might let yi aff.’

At some point, I knew, he was going to revisit our latest encounter with the Man in Black, but I didn’t want to go there right away. Since my previous encounter with Baxter, and my conversation with Sophie, I’d had more than a year of not having nightmares, and not thinking much at all about the experience that had started it all off, and I had a qualm that raising it again might bring them back.

‘Speaking of Sophie,’ I said, changing the subject rather deftly, I thought, ‘what was it you said I didn’t see?’

‘Didnae say anything about what you didn’t see,’ said Calum.

‘You said I didn’t see something.’

We were sitting side by side, backs to the wall, keeping an eye on the room and the door, not quite ready yet to plunge in but alert for any possibilities that drifted our way. Calum regarded me sidelong.

‘Oh, aye, that.’ He rubbed the side of his neck. ‘Well, tae be honest Sinky, I’m kindae gobsmacked yi didnae notice she was flirting wi yi.’

‘Flirting?’ I shook my head. ‘You’re right I didn’t notice. I thought she was just being friendly.’

‘“Just being friendly”?’ Calum scoffed. ‘That’s what people say about dogs humping yir leg or jumping up on you.’

‘Oh, come on, that’s just being—’

‘Insulting? Aye, OK, but … If she’d carried on like that wi another guy when she was going out wi me, I’d have been well pissed off, I can tell you.’

While recalling our conversation with Sophie that afternoon, my mind went back sixteen months or so to her meeting me in the Library Bar at the Teviot, and as the scene replayed in vivid jump-cut flashback I remembered how close she’d been when she sat down beside me, how intently she’d looked and spoken and listened. I remembered how attractive I’d found her, and her quizzical stare and the slight shake of her head as she’d left.

I smacked the heel of my hand against my forehead.

‘Oh, fuck,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘I just remembered. You know I told you about the time Sophie spoke to me last year? Just before I met the mysterious Reverend Baxter.’

‘Aye,’ said Calum.

‘I just realised she might have fancied me then.’

‘And you didnae notice at the time?’

‘Well …’ I tried to think myself back to where I’d been. ‘I kind of did, but … I guess I discounted it, sort of, because I thought she was still going out with you.’

‘Maybe she was,’ said Calum, thoughtfully puffing on his pipe. ‘I mean, I’m no sure if it was before or after we broke up. But even if she had been, I don’t see the problem.’

‘Well, old chap, I suppose I have to put it down to a certain loyalty to your good self.’

‘Ah, the hell wi that,’ said Calum. ‘All’s fair in lust and counter-insurgency.’

‘Gee, thanks for telling me now,’ I said.

‘Oh well,’ said Calum, ‘water over the dam and that. Anyway, she’s wi another man now, or at least she was last time I checked.’

‘You checked? How? Has she become a bit less reticent on the old social media front?’

Calum raised his eyebrows. ‘You noticed that too, huh? Nah, she’s still way careful whit she puts out about herself. Apart fae business, obviously, she’s taken tae this Fabrications internship like she’s joined a new religion. But I heard it on the grapevine.’

‘Ah, I see,’ I said, in a sceptical tone. ‘Heard about her means asked about her. Sounds like you’re still hung up on her.’

Calum took a few more puffs, then put his pipe down, and began turning it over and over, taking it apart and putting it back together. While we’d been talking, a dozen or so more people from the wedding bash had come into the room. A couple of tables had filled up. Conversations were quiet but constant, the laughter polite rather than raucous – most of the guests in here looked like members of the older generation catching up, getting the weight off their feet. A tiny camcopter drifted in and dawdled around just below the ceiling, no doubt taking candid pictures for the wedding album.

‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Honest, Sinky, it’s over. But seeing her again this afternoon, and what you said about her bursting a bubble, and the Man in Black business – it’s brought back something that’s kindae been on my mind. A wee confession, like.’

‘Oh?’

Calum glanced around, evidently decided the room was just noisy enough for confidentiality, and leaned forward. ‘I ken you stayed a bit mair hung up on that weird thing that happened tae us than you let on, tae me at any rate. Philosophy and scepticism and that, and aw the religion and anti-religion stuff, aw that came out ae it, am I right?’

‘Yes,’ I said, warily. ‘It was … realising that was what was behind all these interests that made me drop them, well, not let them fill my mind kind of thing, and it was talking to Sophie or her talking to me that was bursting the bubble – or lancing the boil, more like.’

He grimaced. ‘Well, putting it like that’s a bit yuck, but … Anyway. What I wanted tae confess, right, was that I might have made your obsession wi it worse than it needed tae hae been. Because I lied tae yi.’

‘What about?’

‘About aw the stuff I said my da telt me, about our family secrets, being descended fae Neanderthals and aw that shite.’

‘I’m not sure I ever really believed that,’ I said, with an indulgent chuckle.

‘And him gien me a wee talk about the Men in Black,’ Calum went on. ‘Never happened.’

‘But surely the visit happened?’ I said. ‘You showed me the guy’s picture just an hour—’

‘Oh, aye, yon photie’s real, aff the card the supposed Cooncil inspector flashed about. Our mystery visitor, he wis real aw right. And yir old man did ring up mine on the Sunday, and I did get a grilling about whit happened and bit ae an earful about no telling him. And my family really is descended fae Travellers, back tae Ireland and maybe tae the shipwrecked Spanish sailor ae legend. But the rest ae it wis shite I made up tae impress you.’

‘Impress me?’ I cried. ‘Fucking hell, man! Like you ever needed to impress me.’

‘Whit d’yi mean?’

‘When we were wee,’ I said, with the condescension of the third-year student for the fourth-year schoolboy, ‘I thought of you as just the coolest dude. A guy I looked up to, and I don’t mean because you were taller.’

I shrugged one shoulder, feeling I’d said too much.

Calum laughed. ‘You’re the one who wis aywis being held up tae me as a good example by my ma and da. “Why can yi no be mair like that nice Sinclair boy, study hard and scrape out the dirt fae under yir nails and be kinder tae yir wee brother?”’

‘Well, exactly,’ I said. ‘Goody two-shoes, moi. Middle class as you can get, son of an accountant and a schoolmarm, for goodness sake. Whereas your dad was, well maybe technically even more middle class, being a small business owner, but he wore overalls and often enough worked with his hands, with metal tools and got oily, and you had the attitude to go with it. So naturally, you were the bee’s knees as far as I was concerned. Cool hand Duke, you were.’

Calum punched my shoulder, not too hard.

‘OK, OK,’ I said. ‘It’s not like I still feel that way, you understand, so don’t worry. What I don’t see is why you wanted to impress me in the first place.’

He stared at me. ‘Oh come on, Sinky,’ he said. ‘We both saw the light, but you got a fucking alien abduction and later on a face-tae-face chat wi an MiB out of it! I wisnae one hundred per cent sure yi were nae making it up, but if you were it wis one hell of a clever stunt. And on the Sunday evening, I wis well pissed aff wi you having telt your da and then him getting the tale back tae mine. So I thought, hah, if Sinky’s putting one over on me, I’ll dae it tae him right back. Turn it around, I thought, gie him the idea that
no
having an abduction experience wis special. Or maybe, no seeing Greys, or seeing something else … then I got the idea ae seeing them as they really are. I made that drawing ae the insect thing—’

‘
You
drew that!’ I said.

He misunderstood my small shock at having my half suspicion confirmed for surprise at his ability, and gave a self-deprecating laugh.

‘Ach, I wis aywis good at drawing, but I wis kindae shy about it. Afraid it wis kindae a poof thing. Never showed it aff tae any ae my mates, except Sophie back in High School. She telt me I should dae mair wi it, and I did raise the question ae daein Art wi my ma and da, but yi ken how it is wi my kindae parents – waste ae time and aw that, never get yi a proper job, et cetera, fucking working-class attitude aw right – so whitever talent I had fae that got turned tae tech drawing instead ae art.’

‘That’s a shame.’

Calum shook his head. ‘Stands me in good stead now, I can tell yi that, in my engineering studies. Anyhow, I already had the idea ae telling yi I’d found it in an old book, and the oldest book I could think ae credibly claiming tae be in the family wis the Bible. Not that we actually had a family Bible, mind, at least none I ever saw. So I went online, ran a quick search on insects in the Bible, found that bit in Revelation and went, Ah-hah! and inked in my final drawing tae fit the description. Stuck the chapter and verse Roman numerals in, nice authentic touch I thought, then I wondered about putting in whit looked like the verses around it. Rummaged about online, considered lifting the relevant page fae the Latin Vulgate, maybe using Gothic script tae complicate matters a wee bit, and then I thought naw, that’s too obvious. So I just went tae a game designer freeware site and found a wee programme for generating unique one-off fantasy alphabets and combining the resulting letters intae believable-looking words, for yir in-game ancient prophecies and inscriptions and runes and that. Ran the app, printed random text around the picture, then went over aw the letters wi the same Rotring pen I’d used tae ink the drawing. I knew you’d check it, see, and spot if it wis just printed. I left it up tae you to figure out it wis fae a Bible, because that way you’d think you’d discovered something I didnae ken about the old book, and that’s whit wid hook you.’

‘And it did,’ I said.

Calum grinned and rubbed his hands. ‘Aye. You fell for it. Hook, line, and sinker, Sinky!’

Our glasses were empty. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I stood up.

‘Same again?’