Lie of the Land (28 page)

But there was still something watching him, in the empty dream-streets of Glasgow, at Heron Point, or out on the hill, an invisible intelligence probing him, analysing him. Carl got the feeling that whatever it was hadn't quite made up its mind. A judgement would come, but there was still time for him to influence the outcome by adding to one side of the scales, or by taking away from the other.

In his new dream there was no god's-eye, only himself, and nothing obviously awry with the world apart from the fact that there was no one else in it. The streets were the streets and the sea was the sea. Yet his dream-self this time knew that something was present, undeniably so, something that was under the sea and in the wind-creaking trees at night and behind a thousand untenanted windows. It was in all those places, and in none of them. It might be God, or time, or death, or life. Something eternal, anyway.

He remembered a conversation with Howard, about SCOPE.

‘There were people in the National Emergency Authority, officials who knew about black projects, who opposed SCOPE once they found out what it was designed to do.'

‘So what did they do about it?'

Howard took a deep breath, resigned to the telling of it. ‘They raised their concerns through the proper channels,' he had said.

‘And then?'

‘They were told that everything was in order, or that their concerns were being addressed.'

‘And the opponents of SCOPE were happy with this?'

‘Some of them were, yes. The ones with families to feed, mainly.'

‘And those that weren't?'

There was a long pause as Howard looked out of the window, at the shifting light on the hills. He kept it simple. ‘If they pressed too hard, they either died in accidents or killed themselves, or just disappeared.'

He looked directly at Carl, searching for the realisation that stopping SCOPE had been impossible. There was too much money and power behind it. And Carl had been made to understand the risks Howard had taken to warn people, to warn him.

Ammonite in hand, Carl shook himself at the thought of Howard, stood up and set off again for Heron Point, picking his way over the rocky shoreline, stooping every now and again to pick up an interesting stone or shell. He could see it now, see how it was going to be with the committee and Gibbs and Adam Cutler. It hadn't been designed to end up that way – he was sure it wasn't intentional. But the people who were running the operation, who were applying Howard's survival system, could enforce their will, if that's what they wanted. The law of unintended consequences had struck again. There was always a god's-eye, of some sort, trying to control how people behave.

The shoreline came to an end at the base of a spur that jutted from the headland, and he had to take an old sheep track that zigzagged up the rugged grassy slope and onto the headland's heathery peak. After climbing for a few minutes he stopped to look back. Through binoculars he could see a flotilla of ducks, close in against the shore. He'd seen geese head south the other day; maybe the ducks were doing the same and had just stopped for a rest.

He lifted the 10-bore. There was nothing pestilential about roast duck. If he crept back down the path he could fire down on them from a range of about thirty metres. With a bit of luck, he could chalk up another species on his hit list. They were just targets at the other end of a lens. Necessity dictated that he view them as nothing more. A man can behave like a machine, can act on what needs to be done, and there's no need to for conscience to come into it.

Isaac, cocooned in his hooded coat, looked up from his sandpit as the gunshot boomed around the bay. With three litres
of home-brew inside him Terry slept on his couch, not hearing anything, except the dream-shouts of his pursuers, and the crying of a girl.

32

Christmas. He'd heard a kid, a girl of about five, say the word the other day to her dad, but the guy didn't know what to say in response. Others had mentioned the idea since then, mainly adults prompted by their kids whose kids had told other kids, and so on. What can you say when your son or your daughter asks about Christmas? Sorry, it's been cancelled. Maybe parents should say it's no longer appropriate to celebrate, or how there are no more toys because of what happened. Carl wondered how SCOPE and the redzone had been explained to curious young minds. Dad tells me X. A pal tells me Y. Put all the stories together, and the kids might end up concocting their own version of the truth. They might grow up believing any number of implausible reasons why the world became the way it is.

Christmas had once been toys – the bigger and noisier the better. Carl could remember a few of those must-have big-ticket items coming his way. Like a lot of parents back then, the amount of money his own had spent on presents was inversely proportional to the amount of time they spent with their kids. He remembered one girl in his student days, beautiful, brittle as sugar glass; her dad swam in Middle Eastern oil and he threw cash and presents at her, though he hardly ever saw her. He'd sent her a brand new top-line computer that had sat in the hallway of their shared student flat, boxed and unopened, for a week or more, until the Fairy Princess could be arsed to have a peek inside.

There had been money to spend and then, quite suddenly,
there was no money to spend. Cue stress and marital difficulties. How come it always seemed to be the guys that walked out?

The sharp, still world of frost and clear skies had given way to wind and rain, sluicing against the window of Room 7, but it was still very cold. On days like this there wasn't much he could do out of doors. He could see that now and he no longer had any real urge to go squelching around the hills repairing a Stone Age broch. Eventually, figured Carl, every animal, human or not, learns to accept captivity, though that doesn't mean to say there's no corner of hope. That nugget of hope can be kept and taken out every now and again and looked at, like a lover's photo in a locket. Then you close it up, put the nugget back in your pocket and get on with the grind.

He lay on the bed, fully clothed against the cold, a scarf around his neck. The other day Isaac had shown him some crayon drawings, and it made him half-remember his own offerings as a kid. What had his own dad said when faced with a page full of his son's scribbles? Maybe he said, ‘Brilliant, son, well done.' Maybe he'd been genuinely enthusiastic about stick men with giant clubbed arms and tiny drainpipe legs, or big yellow suns and multi-coloured dogs with all their legs down one side. That response was possible, but Carl doubted that his own father – business going tits up, money worries mounting – would have been remotely interested in his son's early artistic endeavours. In any case, he couldn't remember any such encounter, traumatic or otherwise, with any degree of certainty. But he could remember snippets of arguments, sure enough, and to be honest, his dad did have a point. An ocean of liquid wealth had suddenly dried up, leaving a patchwork of puddles for little fish like him to gasp and flap in. It was almost funny. Servicing the insecurity industry could have given the man a good living, yet he'd turned his back on the Navy to buy a seafood restaurant in Leith. A little fish right enough, cursing his luck and the big ideas of his wife.

As Carl lay on the bed smoking a spliff, he got the feeling that Isaac had not been happy with his critique of his drawings: obviously a single cursory ‘nice' just didn't cut it. But what can you say about stick men? You have a real eye for composition, young man. No. But the kid clearly thought his drawings were good enough to impress. Maybe Carl should have gone along with it by making generally encouraging noises, even though the felt-tip scribbles were just the basic elements of people and things. The kid was okay, once you got used to the fact that he was just a kid, and a confused one at that. They get hurt without understanding why.

Carl could relate to that. At least Isaac was past the shitting and crying stage. After a while, when Carl spent long enough in his company, he could see that there were thoughts in Isaac's head that were worth knowing. And they're honest, kids – they can't lie. Not when they're young.

Bugger it. Carl was stoned and cold, it was pissing down outside, and he was hungry. He checked the time. Pretty soon, Simone would be out around the village, helping to check on the older folk to see if they needed anything at the same time as George liked to read to Isaac sitting by the residents' lounge fire. Carl could creep into the kitchen and help himself to whatever food was available, just like old times. His habit was being fed: there was usually a bowl of something left out for him. It was better that way, better than sitting round the table, stewing in thick silence. George had said they'd write ‘Carl' on a plastic bowl and leave it on the floor.

George, he'd noticed, had developed quite a skill for making him feel guilty for eating their food and for dirtying their sheets. Whenever someone in the village was ill, he would always refer to Carl's pneumonia, and slow recovery. Maybe the old prick reckoned on bully-boy tactics, just like his son: if you don't come to some kind of arrangement with my daughter, then we'll stop
feeding you and we'll kick you out into the cold. Anyway, Carl had started to sneak down in the afternoons, about two o'clock, when no one was in the kitchen, as well as late at night. Looping his scarf around his neck, he padded downstairs, two pairs of Terry's socks on his feet.

The bowl of food was there, laid out for him in the still-warm kitchen. No name was on it, so far, and the bowl was on the worktop not the floor. Mutton and turnip stew. He grabbed the bowl and headed back upstairs to his room. When he'd finished, he sparked another joint, and lay back on his bed, the ache in his empty stomach drifting to the background again, though it was always there.

Rain on the window. Music from his palmpod. Tetrahydrocannabinol in his bloodstream.

The old is dead, and there isn't going to be any miraculous resurrection.

‘It's nothing to do with me,' Carl had said to Isaac. ‘Everyone crying and your granny leaving and not coming back – that wasn't my fault.'

But even as he'd said the words, part of him said yes, it was his fault, and yes, he could have made a better effort doing something to stop SCOPE. And there was Terry, sitting over in his caravan, not washing, smoking Hendrik's blow as soon as he woke up, if he slept at all. It was hard for Carl to watch that, even though he'd only known the guy for a while. Terry was lonely, and he needed a friendly face.

‘Maybe they'll finish the job,' Terry had said, slumped in his chair, one day, wreathed in smoke. ‘Adam and the rest will come for me one night and do me in.' He'd looked up at Carl. ‘Now they don't have to worry about the consequences.' Terry laughed. ‘Like CivCon, or the Gestapo. A knock on the door and the bastards'll black-bag me in a dawn raid and whisk me away. Shoot me in the quarry this time rather than slice my fucking . . .'

‘All right,' Carl had soothed. ‘I don't think that's on the cards somehow.'

‘Why not?'

Carl was silent for a moment, watching Terry flick his ash, tap-tap-tapping the joint on the rim of the ashtray, waiting for an answer. Tap-tap-tapping, even when there was no ash to flick. On edge.

‘Why would they come for you?' he said at last.

Terry shrugged. ‘Maybe they got a taste for it. Who could stop them if they came though the door, right now? You?'

Squaring up to Casper, let alone the rest of the boatyard crew, wasn't a prospect that Carl could imagine turning out in any way other than badly – for him. Maybe they did have a taste for it, and were enjoying flexing a bit of muscle, going round to polytunnels and greenhouses and hen-coops to see if people were hiding food. Enforcing Howard's system.

‘You're just being paranoid,' said Carl. ‘Besides, you said you couldn't remember what happened.'

Tap-tap went Terry's spliff on the ashtray. Tap-tap-tap . . .

‘I can.'

They'd looked at each other.

‘It's coming back to me, the more I try to remember, little snippets, in the dark, getting shoved around, and then the moonlight on something, flashing, a blade, you know, glinting in the moonlight . . .' Terry's voice broke, and the joint trembled in his hand. ‘And, uh, then I was screaming and I, uh, could feel . . . I didn't meant to . . . I didn't . . .' His hand shook as he raised it to his eyepatch.

Carl felt the colour drain from his face. He pursed his lips. ‘You sure?'

Terry sniffed. ‘Yeah, I've been thinking about it, sitting here. I've remembered.' He gave a short laugh. ‘Not much else to do but think.'

Now that he thought about that conversation, he wasn't sure if he trusted Terry's account of losing his eye. Can memories be recovered like that, after some blanked-out trauma? He sat up, went to the bathroom to splash cold water on his face. A knife glinting in the moonlight – how very cinematic.

There was a possibility, sure there was, but then he thought it might be a false memory because Terry wanted desperately for it to be the way he said it happened. To give matters their unvarnished truth, Terry might be lying. But he hadn't been lying about not using violence on Gemma. The rumours said Dr Morgan confirmed that the girl and Terry had sex, but there was no sign of force.

It was wrong. How wrong? Was the crime one of degree, of measuring initial intent, or was that just fudging the issue?

Carl tried to imagine someone being inside him when he did not desire it. When he wanted it to stop. What was he doing with Terry anyway? How could he associate with such a man?

He looked at his face in the bathroom mirror. The beard kept him warm, as did the hair on his head. There was no room for style or fashion any more. He'd forgotten why he'd shaved it off in the first place. There was only the simple truth of keeping warm in the winter. Maybe he'd shave it off for summer, like they did to sheep.