Descent (2 page)

A shudder goes through the craft, and the screaming is drowned out by a steady roar as the ramjets ignite. I’m pushed against the back of my seat. We’re still going straight down, no longer free-falling but accelerating. The scream’s pitch and volume rise above the roar, which continues unabated. My weight’s axis swings, pressing me down hard on the seat then again and more strongly back as the spaceplane swoops its hairpin turn around the end of its drop and begins to climb on a course that is not vertical but feels like it. The sky goes from blue to black as the blood returns to my eyes.

I look out, over the slanted sliver of starboard wing. We’re climbing above the ocean. Far below us, pillars and castles of cloud are lit and shaded by the early sun. Not far to the west, a huge brightly lit sphere rises on a parallel course, gradually falling behind: it is the balloon that carried us up and from which we dropped a couple of minutes ago.

It passes out of sight, and I continue to stare out. A smaller, dimmer light rises from below us, overtakes, then drops back into view and paces our ascent for a few seconds. No one else seems to notice. I can’t look away. It dances, then darts off, dwindling to a point, then nothing.

I blink and replay the past ten seconds in my glasses, zooming the view. In close-up, it’s evident what the source of the light was: a fragment of fabric from the now burst balloon, caught in an updraught and then in our slipstream until a random gust whipped it away. I’m unconvinced. Some code in the spectrum of its colour taunts me and tells me I’ve seen that light before.

The ramjets choke off as the air thins and there’s a second or so when I feel as if I’m falling, as indeed I am but on an upward trajectory, then the main engine kicks in for the final push to orbit. For a few minutes I’m pressed back harder than ever, and then without warning or transition we’re in free fall. In the sudden silence I hear fellow passengers gasp or squeal with delight.

I have no time to share the thrill or enjoy the view. For me, this is judgement day. Within a few hours, I have to justify my life. What I’m searching for, in the back captures and the memories they evoke, is anything that will serve as explanation, as exculpation, as excuse.

The thing is, we weren’t supposed to be on the hill. Our parents thought we were at Sophie’s with Ellie and Aiden, revising for our maths exam. Sophie and Aiden had a grip on topics the rest of us flailed for, and improved it by matching wits with each other and us. Also, helping classmates counted for Social, so they offered. Incentive problem right there, you think. But they were too competitive towards each other to play tricks.

About half past two Calum leaned back from the table and stretched. He looked out of the window and then he looked at me.

‘Cut?’ he said.

The Cut is a walk, along the bank of an obsolete aqueduct that follows a contour around the hills, from the loch and the reservoirs to the town. Out of nowhere, my legs ached for it.

I shook my head. ‘My dad’ll kill me.’

Calum nodded down at the table. His phone and mine lay with the others’, sustaining the trigonometry problem that shimmered in the midst.

‘OK,’ I said, standing up.

Ellie gave Calum a look. He smiled at Sophie.

‘Fresh air,’ he said, chair scraping. ‘Back in a bit.’

Sophie said nothing, Aiden didn’t notice as usual. Ellie pouted. Then all three heads bent again over the five phones.

I followed Calum through the hallway and out. He closed the front door with barely a click, then capered down the steps and clanged the gate. Across a quarter mile of descending rooftops we looked to the moor and the hills.

‘Wa-hey!’ Calum said.

‘It’ll do us good anyway,’ I said.

‘Aye,’ said Calum. ‘
Mens sano
in whatsitsface, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

(The experience began, I think, between the moment we both wanted the walk and the moment we decided to leave our phones behind. That’s how it always begins. You wanted a walk. It was a wet afternoon and you fancied a drive. The night was vile and you were minded to check on the cow.)

It was a Saturday afternoon in May, the air damp under bright low cloud. Gorse on the hillside opposite blazed like surrogate sunshine. A faint smell and haze of burning tyres hung in the air. The smirr gave us a good excuse to have our hoods up, which was handy just in case our parents were relying on more than our phones to keep tabs on us. We walked down to the main road and over the footbridge, barely looking down at the stalled traffic, then over the railway bridge at Branchton and up the foot-worn zigzag path through gorse and bramble to the Cut. I glanced each way for thoughtless mountain bikers, took a step or two across the broken tarmac and looked over the Cut’s bank. The past week’s rain had raised the water level, but the flow was still sluggish, barely stirring the clumps of algae upon which froglets and tadpoles pulsated, blobs of black jelly with a double sheen from their skins and from their surface-tension meniscus cloaks.

We set off to the right, westward, facing a view out along the Kip Valley across the Firth of Clyde to the hazy hills beyond. The weather had kept all but the most determined of the usual weekend walkers and cyclists away. Old folks in singlets and shorts, grimly power-striding past us; lads and the odd lass on mountain bikes, spraying us with gravel. A police drone drifted around the shoulder of the hill, then turned away over the valley. Along the same flight path a few seconds later came a smaller civilian drone, swooping close enough for us to see the solidarity sigils on the underside of its wings. The smoke column from the blockade on Inverkip Road wavered into the air in front of us. As we drew level with it we could see the burning tyres heaped across the middle of the road, bracketed by oil-drum braziers at the kerbs. The narrow passages left for vehicles to snake through guaranteed each driver an earful of harangue along the way. A police car parked on the verge, blue light flashing, meant that the cops intended only to sit and watch.

‘Wonder what it is this time?’ I remarked.

Calum grunted. ‘Disnae matter, it’s all the same.’

We mooched on, agreeing that the country was in a terrible state and that something should be done about it. In the light of what was to be done, and so soon, you might imagine us quivering with radical zeal. You would be wrong. Sixteen years old, smack in the middle of the pissed-off mid-to-late teens demographic, our generational rebelliousness consisted of a yearning for order. We’d had years of what seemed like its endless, pointless opposite.

‘Bet you the revolutionaries are behind it,’ I said.

‘Aye, nae doubt there’s one or two in there. They’re aye stirring things up.’

‘They wouldn’t have anything to stir up if people didn’t have legitimate grievances,’ I added, trying to be fair, ‘like not getting paid for weeks on end.’

‘All very well tae say that,’ said Calum. ‘But people have legitimate channels tae take up that kindae thing. No need tae make things worse for everybody else.’

I laughed. ‘Except the revolutionaries – for them it’s a case of, “The worse it gets, the better”!’

We shared dark chuckles and knowing looks. We thought ourselves wise to the ways of the revolutionaries because we knew all about their claptrap, dangerous, discredited ideology and cynical tactics from school assemblies and from the news services. As good sixteen-year-olds we treated these with about as much respect as we gave the likewise pervasive warnings about smoking, drink and drugs, but even so the exposures had an effect. We’d seen the revolutionaries’ leaflets and their irregular bulletin,
What Now?
, and we’d even occasionally seen revolutionaries themselves, handing their agitprop out at railway stations and bus stops, but like most people we ostentatiously binned the sheets unread. I had secretly read one once in the school toilet and found it so boring that I’d been tempted to use it as bog paper.

Despite their manifest unpopularity the revolutionaries seemed like an invisible army of tens of thousands, and their hidden hand was seen behind every strike, road blockade, power cut, net outage, traffic snarl-up and workplace occupation in the country. No one caught actually involved in any of these had ever been proved in court to be a revolutionary, and the only thing the police could nail the overt revolutionaries for was littering.

‘If the filth are nae up to the job,’ Calum expounded, ‘it’s time they made way for the army.’

‘Aye, right,’ I said. ‘And if the soldiers aren’t—?’

Calum glanced sidelong at me, and jerked a thumb over his shoulder at the blockade. ‘A few good blokes with spanners and tyre irons could scatter that lot.’

‘Like your dad’s three mechanics and two apprentices, you mean?’

‘Maybe not, but guys like them. Well, like them but …’

He waved his arms and shrugged at the same time. We both laughed.

‘Ah, fuck all that,’ said Calum. ‘So long as the fucking teachers aren’t on strike for the exams.’

‘Watch it,’ I said. ‘My mum’s a teacher, and she’d never go on strike.’

‘Ease off, man, you know what I mean.’

At a shoulder of the hill, we came upon a beam of wood thrown across the Cut, just downslope from the ashes of a recent small fire and a clutter of empty cans. A microwave mast broke the skyline. Calum turned and marched across the narrow bridge, arms outstretched, pretending to slip and sway. I followed, less ostentatiously. By unspoken consent, we set off up the hill. The summit wasn’t far, and we reached it after a few minutes’ walk through soaking heather and long grass. We stood by the square of barbed wire around the mast and gazed around at the moorland behind the hill and the expanse of sea and shores below.

Calum took a long breath. ‘Feels cleaner up here.’

‘No stink of tyres,’ I said.

My face felt chill and damp. I looked up. The cloud was low enough to make the top of the mast indistinct. Within a minute, mist had descended on us. Visibility dropped to ten metres.

‘May as well go back down,’ Calum said.

I shrugged and agreed. But going down the slope wasn’t as easy as coming up had been. We couldn’t walk straight down, and turning this way and that to cope with hummocks and terraces meant that we weren’t entirely sure which way we were facing at any given moment, and that a downward course wasn’t necessarily taking us straight back to the Cut.

‘We should have reached it by now,’ I said, stopping.

Calum peered into the now pervasive and swirling whiteness.

‘Aye, maybe wait till it clears.’

We stood still. The fog seemed to be rolling downhill. Before long we were suddenly under open blue sky, above the layer of cloud that had now settled over the Kip Valley. Looking about, I saw that the microwave mast was in a quite different direction from where I’d thought it was. We’d worked our way down the hill all right, but into a saddle between two summits.

‘Fuck,’ said Calum. ‘Trust this tae happen when we don’t have our fucking phones.’

‘You wouldn’t have a compass about you, by any chance?’ I asked, mimicking an English accent.

‘Why the fuck would I have a compass?’

‘On a keyring, or a knife or something?’

‘Nope.’ He shook his head.

‘Not to worry,’ I said. ‘Sun’s in the south and west, just keep it behind us and we’ll be going in the right direction.’

Calum gave me a sceptical look. ‘We’ll be lucky to dae even that with fog all around us.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Like in that physics thing about diffusion.’

‘Like common sense.’

I shrugged. ‘Best we can do, unless you want to just wait it out.’

‘Nah – folk’s’ll be worried. Cannae go far wrong anyway.’

I glanced up and to the side just to check where the sun actually was in the sky, and saw a pinprick of light at the zenith.

‘Look!’ I said, pointing. ‘What’s that?’

Calum saw it too.

‘It’s getting bigger,’ he said.

The light became a bright sphere, shimmering and expanding.

‘Weather balloon,’ said Calum.

‘Why’s it coming down?’

We gazed up at the now silvery sphere for a few more seconds as it became bigger and – I suddenly realised – far closer than I’d thought.

‘Fuck, that’s no a—’ Calum grabbed my arm. ‘Come on, it’ll be right on top ae us!’

We sprinted pell-mell across the heather. I remember a moment when the hillside in front of me was illuminated brighter than the day, then a moment when I could see nothing but white light.

My back hurt in several places. There was bright light in my eyes and something gritty in my nose. I sneezed, then moved my arm to shield my eyes. The knuckles of my right hand had black stuff on them. The light was just the white cloud of the overcast sky. I sat up, to find myself in the middle of a circular patch of burned heather about three metres across. Calum lay on his back alongside me, eyes closed. His arms and face were carelessly smeared with soot. At my anxious poke he went through the same startled awakening as I had. For a moment he looked frightened and perplexed, then with a visible effort he composed his features into a puzzled look.

We stood up, pointed at each other’s faces, and brushed at our clothes. The soot and ashes were dry, although the grass and heather all around were beaded with moisture. We were on the hillside, a couple of hundred metres away from the route we’d taken up from the Cut.

‘What the fuck!’ said Calum, with a shaky laugh.

‘Do you remember the light?’

‘Of course I fucking remember the light. It was just a minute ago. Must have been ball lightning or something.’

‘How could it burn all this and leave us …?’

‘Easy,’ he said. ‘It burnt aw this, and knocked us out at the same time, and we fell onto the patch that got burnt.’

‘But the burnt patch would still be hot, so why aren’t we burned?’

‘Aye, you’ve got a point.’ He walked out of the black circle, and I followed. Fine black powder puffed underfoot like moon dust. I sneezed again. As I wiped the back of my left hand across my upper lip I caught a glimpse of my watch, and yelped.