Lie of the Land (18 page)

They reached the bottom of the lane.

‘I'm going to see Terry,' said Carl.

‘No bother,' said Alec John. ‘See you tomorrow. Nine o'clock, or thereabouts.'

•

It was warm inside the caravan: the tiny solid-fuel stove didn't have to work too hard to heat the space, despite the chill. Using a steel ruler, Terry ripped out another page of Leviticus, rolled some leaf and a sprinkle of bud, glue-sticked dabbed along the edge, and it was ready to spark. ‘D'you fancy being a ghillie, then? The hours are long and, at six extra spuds a week, the pay leaves a lot to be desired.'

Carl was scrolling through the comedy section of Terry's film files, thousands of them on the palmpod. He accepted a puff from the joint. ‘He invited me out tomorrow. Didn't say anything about being a ghillie, though.'

Terry frowned. ‘No? That's strange. I thought he would've.'

‘Why?'

‘Well . . .' He looked at Carl. ‘He didn't tell you?'

‘Tell me what?'

Terry flexed the steel ruler he held in his hands. ‘He's got emphysema. The nanomeds were keeping it in check, but Dr Morgan says there are none left.'

‘Jesus,' said Carl. ‘He didn't say a word.'

‘Without treatment, he'll find it harder and harder to breathe,' said Terry. ‘Eventually, he won't be able to walk twenty feet, never mind up in the hills. The old guy always sidles in at an angle to things. He'll want to see what you're like before asking you outright.'

‘Fuck,' said Carl, stunned. ‘I had no idea.'

They were silent for a while.

Carl considered what Alec John had said and, more importantly, why the guy had made his offer in the first place. What was going on here? What was in the stalker's mind? Maybe Terry was wrong, and there was no secret trial period that might lead to a permanent position. Maybe it was all a mistake.

Carl wasn't sure he even liked the idea; it sounded like another random event over which he had no influence. He'd endured enough of those to last a lifetime.

‘I don't know the first thing about being a gamekeeper,' Carl said. He squinted at Terry. ‘There must be other guys here. Better candidates for the job.'

Terry shrugged, relighting his joint with a taper from the stove. ‘Maybe so. But you're the one he asked.'

What to feel? Confusion, anxiety? But there was pride too. It wasn't the easiest combination of emotions for Carl to deal with. He stood up. He sat down again.

There was a knock at the door, voices and laughter outside.

‘Come in.'

The door opened and a teenage girl popped her head round. ‘Hi,' she giggled. ‘Sorry to disturb the mood.'

Terry sat up. ‘I can't possibly imagine what you lot are after,' he said. ‘You guys finished that half ounce already?'

‘No way was that half an ounce,' protested the girl. ‘Graham's got a set of scales.'

‘Has he now.'

She nodded slyly. ‘Uh-uh.'

Terry opened a drawer where some cannabis bud was drying. He took out a thumb-sized section of stalk and threw it to the girl. She was pretty, with short black hair and dark eyes, wearing a ragged denim jacket.

‘I'm surprised you lot didn't float across the bay to get here.'

The girl smiled. ‘Thanks.' She put her hands in her jacket pockets and took out an egg from each. ‘Don't say we're not good to you.'

‘I'd never say that,' said Terry, accepting the eggs. ‘Cheers.'

The girl rejoined her mates, and the group shouted and goofed their way back up the track to the main road. Terry shut the door, held the handle for a second. If Carl hadn't been so focused on Alec John Stoddart, he might have picked up the electric shift in the air.

‘You think you'll make a go of things with Simone?' Terry said, handling the eggs he had just been given.

Carl snorted. ‘You're kidding, right?'

‘You know,' said Terry, ‘I tried it on with her, just after I moved up.'

‘With Simone?'

Terry nodded. ‘Yeah. Tried – and failed.'

‘She blow you out?'

‘Completely. Reckon she thought I was bit of a Jack the Lad. That's the thing with some places: you get labelled, and you soon run out of options because of it.' He sighed. ‘Unless you're prepared to settle down with anybody who's just as needy and desperate as you are.'

Carl pursed his lips. Where was this going?

Terry considered the two eggs the girl had given him. He set
them down gently in a bowl. ‘You don't have many options, Carl. That's for sure. And Simone's a nice person, smart – usually. Maybe you don't see much of that, but it's there. She's a looker as well.'

Carl shook his head, incredulous. ‘I'm sure she's all of that, but . . .'

‘People are clinging on to each other,' insisted Terry. He picked up one of the eggs again. ‘Everything's changed.' He was speaking almost to himself now. ‘You've got to take what you can – know what I mean?'

Unsure of what Terry meant, Carl agreed, though, unlike the first time, this time he felt the electric shift in the air, the misalignment of personal signals. If only he'd been aware enough to realise that the tension wasn't focused on him.

Terry put the cracked egg he was holding down on the worktop and, picking up a tea towel, discreetly wiped the slime from his fingers.

August

20

The meeting didn't so much end at an appointed time as dissolve, a crowd of a hundred or so evaporating over the course of an hour, dwindling to a dozen stifled souls. Onlookers, really. There was nothing to discuss. There was no gradual adaptation, no consultation. People could only absorb what they were being told. Then the last dregs wandered away, confused, into the summer haze that warmed the bay. Necessary business had been conducted in near silence, with Howard Brindley in the chair, the guise of formal proceedings ensuring a hushed acceptance. Six days had passed, and the delta field was still impenetrable.

After leaving the meeting, Carl made his way down to the pier. It was a beautiful still evening. In another time he would have watched, in awe, the bright horizon of shifting silver, and the sunset bloody on rags of high cloud. He might have relaxed, at another time. How long ago was that?

From the end of the pier he looked back down the length of the village towards the head of the bay, at the people drifting home in silence from the meeting. Nothing existed around him. Everything appeared to recede into the distance – even what was close at hand. It wasn't a dream after all. It was here and now, and he was in the middle of it. It was real, zooming in and out of focus, sharp and raw and then diffuse, dreamlike. Is that what shock does? Is that how it works?

He looked around, amazed at what he saw.

Ropes and prawn creels and piles of rain-bleached netting. They looked real. Apparently, that was the case. They seemed to
retain an everyday purpose. That was how the world worked: it was composed of little details, like roads and cities and living people.

Carl stood with his mouth open, but no sound came out. Brindley's words from the meeting were buzzing in his head. One moment he was able to understand what had happened – he could grasp it. Then he found it so ridiculous he felt like laughing.

During the meeting, Howard had seemed in control, dispassionate. He'd organised it all, compartmentalised his numb flock to ensure their survival; had assumed the worst – that the masts would prove as durable as their manufacturer had claimed and the signal would last two to five years. Maybe this time the marketing hype would be accurate.

Two joiners, two bricklayers, four mechanics, an electrician, foresters, an architect, those with livestock, a doctor, gamekeeper, a retired district nurse, fishermen, gardeners. In all, thirty-eight names were read out during the meeting. Those with essential skills were identified, as were the very young and the very old and those too ill to be of much use. George Cutler's job, as emergency committee chairman, was to record all the names and their allocated tasks; a technician who could keep the water treatment works operating; guys who could hotwire the forestry machines. Now that the electricity was off, they'd need to use the solar freezers in the community centre.

The name Carl Shewan had not been read out.

He made his way back to the hotel from the pier, just the gulls wheeling in the air and a dog trotting along the shorefront. Standing in the silent lobby, he thought he heard a cry from the hotel annexe, a woman sobbing. Maybe the waitress, Simone.

Her body.

Her smell.

His semen on the floor, where she'd walked away. No underwear. A dream of oblivion within a real nightmare.

In Room 14, he counted back to the exact time when the delta
field sprang into existence, and adjusted the timer on his palmpod accordingly. The on-screen seconds counted. Six days, eleven hours and seventeen minutes.

•

Look at her photo.

Don't look at her photo.

There was the committee to think about, George reminded himself through the tears. Planning and organising to attend to. He looked at his wife's photo, properly, for the first time in years. Depending on where she'd been when this SCOPE system was switched on, she could well be dead by now. If she'd been sitting on her sister's couch sipping tea, then she might still be alive. How could she be dead? How? She'd been forced to sleep by these delta waves. It caught him again, all thought of his official responsibilities rendered nonsensical. Worse: obscene. George cried again, sobbing quietly into his hand, a strangled high-pitched sound that he forced back down into his throat. Confronted with words like hypothalamus, sinusoidal and entrainment, he felt impotent.

Brindley and that journalist from Glasgow, they'd known about SCOPE for a long time, especially Brindley – he knew what the risks were; the thing about the crystal filters and magnetic resonance. He'd even worked on it, the bastard. George dried his eyes with a hankie, blew his nose, and washed his face.

Maybe Brindley had done all he could to stop it. Maybe the same went for Shewan. And maybe the pair of them should be strung up from the nearest lamppost.

Look at the photo. Listen to her advice, her instruction. Right, love, I'll get on it straight away.

Downstairs, Simone had also just dried her eyes, blown her nose, and was splashing her face in the kitchen sink. Isaac was playing outside, in the sandpit, with Pavel.

‘You okay?' said George.

Simone's voice was thick and uncertain. ‘Fine.' She grabbed two steaming cups of black coffee and headed outside. George watched Simone and Fiona, sitting side by side on the bench, their kids building their worlds in the sandpit. It was normal. Nothing out of the ordinary. Why pretend at being normal? Because if you believe it for long enough then that's how everything will turn out. That's how to defeat pain and grief – exorcise them with the spell of the ordinary.

George grabbed the folder containing the electoral roll, and set off for the community centre. There was nothing ordinary about this situation. But he was the chairman. That was his role. He had to concentrate on whatever it was he needed to do.

•

Howard Brindley studied the PowerPoint maps projected on to the wall. The emergency committee, he knew, were looking for answers; guidance. First, he outlined a computerised food rationing system, then he set out the geographical context – the main hubs of Berlin, Paris and London marked in blue; SCOPE's rural network of masts in red – down to the Scottish scale.

‘This is not an exhaustive map of SCOPE transmitters,' he said. ‘It was based mainly on our company's register, and we were only subcontractors for the northern region. I managed to get some info from the east, from a contact I had there. Even in Scotland we didn't have the whole sector. And there are thousands of smaller nodes in towns and cities, in lampposts, on street corners, made by other firms.' He turned back to the map. Nobody was really taking in anything he said. The copper was doing his best to pay attention, but George and Councillor Matheson and that retired architect, whatever his name was, were zombies. ‘As I was saying,' said Howard, his voice dropping. ‘There will be other notspots, but where exactly I can't say.'

He paused. ‘I think mapping the extent of our own notspot would be useful. The delta waveform fluctuates, so to have an average of several sweeps would be needed.' He looked around. ‘And . . . it's good that the community centre has photovoltaic panels on the roof. That's . . . good too.'

‘You said sweeps?' said Gibbs.

Howard took a mobile out of his pocket. ‘Yes, this will plot the field intensity, a reading every fifty metres or so will do it. Once I've done, say, four sweeps around the bay, I'll feed the readings into the palmpod to give us a map of our safe zone.'

George clenched, unclenched his fists. ‘Safe,' he repeated, looking around as if he didn't know where he was. Who was safe?

‘Yes,' answered Howard. ‘Someone might get too close to the field. If there are fluctuations then it could be dangerous. It would also be useful to know exactly how big a notspot we're in, and what that means for our resources, living space, and so forth. We can't waste time waiting for the masts to fail. I imagine winters can be pretty harsh up here.'

This moment had occurred to Howard, again and again, over the last few months. Here he was, telling shell-shocked people about SCOPE and how to organise for survival. It wasn't a concept any more. He was here, and the thing he'd dreaded had happened. And now he found that he couldn't just get on with it. He'd thought about this so often that it had become polished, like a lecture he could just rattle through. But instead of attentive students, there were broken people in front of him. His cleverness hadn't taken that into account.

If he'd acted sooner, a lot sooner, then none of this would have been necessary.