Descent (20 page)

‘Uh, no, not funny—’

‘Inappropriate,’ she said. ‘Even boys noticing. Jeez.’

‘It’s not like that at all,’ I said. ‘I mean, we probably wouldn’t have thought about it except we were at the Forum this afternoon talking to one of our friends who’s studying fabric technology and interning for a textile company and she was talking about fashion and the big frocks and that and I suppose it was at the back of our minds.’

‘The Forum?’ said Gabrielle, sounding properly interested for the first time. ‘How’s it going?’

‘Great,’ I said. ‘Very busy, lots going on. Calum and I were there looking for jobs or scholarships.’

‘That’s what I was hoping to do,’ she said. ‘Until I realised that the day my good friend Cathy had me roped in to be her little miss fairy-tale princess was the Forum’s very first Saturday. I expect all the good jobs will be gone by tomorrow.’

‘No, no,’ I said, ‘there’s still loads. I’ll be going back tomorrow.’

‘Oh, right,’ she said. ‘Well, I might bump into you there.’

‘That would be good,’ I said.

‘Not very likely, though,’ she said, turning away. ‘Seeing it’s so big.’

Well, I thought, now or never.

‘We could always meet up,’ I said. ‘What sort of jobs are you looking for?’

‘Oh!’ She favoured me with her attention again. ‘I’m in second year at Heriot Watt, so it’s just something temporary.’

‘What are you studying?’

‘Genetics,’ she said. ‘Well, and genomics and evolution and all that. I’m looking for work in biotech or syn bio.’

‘Brilliant!’ I said. ‘I saw lots of bio stalls. I could show you.’

‘I’m sure I can find them myself, thanks,’ she said, but with a smile.

She moved her now empty plate about vaguely as if looking for somewhere to put it down.

‘Let me take that,’ I said. ‘And maybe come back with a refill and a wee cupcake?’

‘Yes to the wine,’ she said. ‘No to the cupcake, thanks.’

‘They looked very inviting.’

‘Too messy,’ she said, making brushing gestures over her lap.

The queue had become a slow-moving swarm. I found Calum on the periphery, clutching a bottle of beer and giving intent attention to the bridesmaid in the reddish dress. She had a hand on his left forearm and was leaning close to make herself heard. Calum broke his eye-lock for the fraction of a second it took for him to twitch me an eyebrow. I nodded and moved on, edging slowly towards the glittering prospect of a table of glasses, rendered remote by hems and toes to not step on.

By the time I came back with white wine for Gabrielle and red wine for me, the seats on either side of her had been taken by an older couple who were talking to her. They fell silent as I approached. The guy had the Neanderthal look, but educated – a gent with the gene – and a polite, closed smile. Gabrielle took the glass with a nod of thanks and a flustered glance. I got the distinct impression – which later turned out to be correct – that the couple were her parents. I also got the impression that they were in the middle of a private conversation.

‘Catch you later, Gabrielle,’ I said, putting a cheerful face on it.

‘Just in case you don’t …’ she said. She took her phone out of her handbag and held it out. I tapped mine against it.

‘Thanks,’ I said.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘Maybe call me if you’re at the Forum tomorrow?’

‘That would be great,’ I said. ‘We could meet for a coffee or something.’

She nodded, smiled, and turned away. I gave a general smile and a vague wave to all three of them, and sloped off.

Wa-hey! I thought. Result!

Later that evening I danced with Gabrielle more than once, but it was in the Scottish country dances so it hardly counts. She always had another partner for the couples’ dances – a different partner each time – or was part of a gang of women dancing around handbags and belting out old numbers like they were new, fresh, powerful insights into the human and/or the female condition. Sometimes I’d catch her glance and she’d flicker a smile back, but she was always somewhere else when I got there.

By the time the hotel workers and waiters were gathering up detritus in the big room and giving people long-suffering looks, and Calum was in the small side room listening to his bridesmaid over what I would bet was the same bottle on his side of the table and not by a long way the same glass on hers, and the room with the tables was echoing and unlit, and the cleaners had crept from their lairs to roam the carpets like trilobites on the floors of Silurian seas, Gabrielle was nowhere to be found.

As you see, it was not for want of searching. I called it a night.

I woke on the Sunday morning without a hangover – I hadn’t drunk much at the wedding ceilidh, by my standards at that age – but with the uneasy feeling that I’d had some important insight just before waking, one that was now falling out of reach to be lost for good on the cutting-room floor of the dream studio. This was followed by a panic that I’d slept away the day, but the slant of the sunlight from between the curtains told me I hadn’t, and a quick check of my phone established that the time was only 11.30 and that Gabrielle was not yet at the Forum. Her actual address was obscured on my phone, but her location was within about a kilometre of mine. Interesting.

With that settled I lay back in bed and stared at the ceiling for a while. The room, one of four in a Tolcross flat converted to multi-occupancy during the depression, was small and self-contained. It even had rudimentary cooking facilities in the form of an unsafe electric kettle, a grease-lined microwave, a parsimonious fridge and a stingy hotplate. None of this had impressed any of the girls I’d brought back, and my wall posters – still heavy on the rock goddesses and sports stars, and now with added sci-fi covers and science and sceptic propaganda – had impressed them even less. The white plaster ceiling had enough cracks and discoloured patches to induce pareidolia, and as I gazed at it I let my mind wander.

The obvious subject of my lost insight was Gabrielle, but although I enjoyed the recollection of her from the previous night and conjured a rather creditable sketch of her from the random marks above, nothing more specific sprang to mind. If I closed my eyes, I could see the swirl of the dance, in one of those curious after-images that seem to reside in the brain rather than the retina. Nothing there, either. I deliberately thought further back, to before Calum and I had—

Yes! That was it!

What had been left to my subconscious to process, like an overnight batch update on an old mainframe, was the conversation in the bar and our encounter with James Baxter. I hadn’t hitherto had time or attention to spare for indignation at the deception Calum had confessed. I made up for that now, with a brief red-mist fantasy of throttling him.

But what had really been bugging me was Baxter. How could he be an MSP and former avionics engineer whose back-story apparently checked out, and at the same time have been the man of the cloth whose back-story checked out when he was around, and then vanished as soon as he wasn’t?

The answer, it seemed to me, was this. The latest version of Baxter was the true one, and had been all along. British Avionic Systems, I speculated, had had a hand in building whatever black-budget gadget had dropped from the sky on us. Keeping tabs on us and tracing us to our homes would have posed no difficulty for such an eye in the sky. It might even have planted undetectable bugs amid all the ash. James Baxter was the company’s man sent to scope out and intimidate any inconvenient witnesses. Posing as a Council official and as a minister to suit the occasion and the target, with just enough oddity to conform to the MiB stereotype, would do the job. He’d never have to put false information about himself on websites: all he had to do was spoof any phone used to check his story. This, I was sure, was well within the capabilities of BAS, let alone the MoD.

Even less electronic trickery would have been necessary for him to spot my interest in Revelation. All that he would have needed was a trace of my online searches, which an agent of the state or of a big company could have for the asking, whatever the legal niceties. The same went for my unguarded phone conversations with Calum. We’d suspected this at the time, but now the speculation seemed more solid.

My second encounter with Baxter in his guise of sinister minister was harder to explain. My subconscious hadn’t come up with an answer to that one. But, as I dragged myself out of bed and set about getting washed and dressed, my conscious mind did.

No doubt some low-level, intermittent surveillance of me had continued. My interest in UFOs might have been enough to keep me on the radar. Perhaps, when I’d been seen going from a lunch-time argument with some religious head-banger to a heart-to-heart conversation with my old school friend Sophie – from whose house, after all, our momentous stroll had all those years ago set forth – it had been enough to send Baxter hotfoot from Crewe Toll to the university, a twenty-minute taxi ride. I had an uneasy memory of the little camcopter that had drifted around the Library Bar that afternoon, but even without that he’d have found us easy to eavesdrop. When I’d told Sophie my theory about UFOs, held back only by sheer embarrassment from blurting out the real reason for my interest in the topic and of the encounter itself, Baxter had decided to step in, arriving moments after Sophie had left.

Why he’d urged me to study Divinity I could only guess: for his own amusement, or to distract me from dangerous lines of thought or enquiry. That his intent might have been to counter my mission to preach rationalism did flash through my mind, but I dismissed the notion as the self-aggrandising paranoia that had assigned me my imaginary mission in the first place.

With these questions out of the way, a new one arose.

What was he up to now?

I’d formed an impression from the election campaign that Renewal was a new party aiming to fill the conservative but sensible slot left vacant in Scotland by the collapse of the Tories north of the border: free-market but liberal, patriotic but culturally unionist, tough-love on social problems but not actively spiteful, more vocal about the poor pulling themselves up than about grinding them down, populist on the land question but happy to see the land sold off to the highest bidder, cannily opportunist in calling for more defence spending while decrying further overseas military interventions, advocating the unwinding of the Big Deal by gradually re-privatising the banks, but not urging anything too precipitate … and of course in favour of tax cuts. In short, it looked like an early stab at staking out a centre-right position for the post-Big-Deal world. Few and new though its MSPs were, they were sought-after partners in the current Parliament, in which the splintering of the established parties had left both government and opposition unstable fractious coalitions. If Renewal had existed when I was sixteen, and if I’d had the vote, I might have voted for it myself.

I had no idea why Baxter had left a well-paid and respectable job for politics, of all things, but – I realised, under the shower – I knew how to find out. As soon as I’d towelled myself dry enough to check my phone, I looked up the Forum’s programme for the day. Baxter was scheduled to speak in an hour or so, at a debate on economic policy. However, it wasn’t at the encampment outside the Parliament, but at the fringe sprawl on the Meadows.

I was wondering how I could fit this in with meeting Gabrielle when she phoned. It took me a moment or two of staring at her name on the screen before I responded. The phone shook in my hands.

‘Good morning!’ I said.

‘Good afternoon,’ she corrected. ‘I was wondering … do you by any chance fancy a Sunday brunch?’

‘Uh, yes.’

‘Great! How about that wee place on the corner of the Links?’

‘Green Tree? Opposite the big church?’

‘That’s the one. Full Scottish, mmm.’

I was already smitten. Now I was liking her.

‘It’s just up the road from me,’ I said. ‘When?’

‘In about … half an hour?’

‘See you there,’ I said.

‘The spire of every church,’ said Gabrielle, stabbing a sausage and mangling a quote, ‘is a dagger aimed at the heart of humanity.’ She cocked her head and peered sideways and up, through the café’s rain-smeared window. ‘Though that one always reminds me of a ray-gun with a grip designed for an alien’s claw.’

She straightened up and sat back, hair settling to her shoulders, chewed a bite of sausage, and gave me a ‘What do you say to that?’ look.

‘Couldn’t agree more,’ I said. I was in love. The black pudding was real Stornoway. ‘Alienation, innit.’

Gabrielle nodded. ‘Of course they do good too,’ she said. ‘Like your mum, huh? But still.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘I never did get it,’ she said. ‘We covered this in ELSI.’

‘Elsie?’

‘Ethical, Legal and Social Implications,’ she said. ‘Stem cells? I mean, WTF? There was this woman from Anthropology told us religion was like part of human nature, and I said it wasn’t part of mine.’

Of course it isn’t, I thought. You’re one of a secret race that lacks the god gene. That’s how you know aliens have claws. I smiled, at myself and at her.

‘And then there’s my family,’ she went on. ‘I told her both my parents
and
both sets of my grandparents are atheists, and it might go even further back than that, because my gran says
her
mum never went to church, and her dad – that’s my great-grandfather – had a copy of Thomas Paine’s
The Age of Reason
that looked so old and battered he might have got it from
his
grand-dad, Seamus the Tink she called him, or Hamish an Duirach sometimes, James from Jura that would be in English, who’d have bought it – if it was his – back when it was more or less illegal under the blasphemy laws or something.’

‘What did she say to that?’ I asked, intrigued by this talk of another inherited old book as well as inherited atheism, to say nothing of a tinker ancestor.

‘She gave me this look and said, “Yeah, there’ve always been village atheists with their clay pipes and pint pots, but they can’t change the village,” and I said what about Sweden and China and eastern Germany and Czechoslovakia and Israel and then it all sort of got side-tracked into what counts as socialism.’ She was laughing. ‘Socialism!’