by Ken MacLeod
Garnett smiled complicitly and sat down.
‘Your monitor ring, please.’
Hope slid it off and passed it over. Garnett placed it on her hand-held and scrolled the readout, which gave a more detailed account than the automatic log the device transmitted.
‘All looks fine,’ she said. ‘And you’ve been keeping it on all the time.’ She handed back the ring, with a half-smile and raised eyebrows. ‘Let’s keep that up, shall we?’
Hope nodded.
‘No need for a scan this time,’ Garnett said. She tapped at the screen a few times, ticking boxes. ‘Just one more thing, Hope.’
‘Yes?’ Hope knew what was coming.
‘I see you haven’t taken the fix yet. Time’s getting on, you know.’
‘If you look at Fiona’s – Mrs Donnelly, the health visitor’s – report, you’ll see what I have to say about that.’
‘I have looked, of course,’ Garnett said, frowning down at her screen. ‘It’s all here.’ She looked up. ‘I was rather hoping you’d changed your mind.’
Hope shook her head.
‘Well,’ said Garnett, ‘that puts me in rather an awkward position, I’m afraid. If I sign off this visit without an agreement with you about the fix – just an agreement in principle, just ticking the box saying you’ve agreed; you don’t have to do it right away – the report gets copied to Social Services, automatically. And just as automatically, you become a case. Now, I know you’re willing to take that consequence, and I see that Fiona’s gone through everything with you, all those options you’ve refused to take. I won’t go through it all again. But…’
She leaned forward and reached out open hands, pleading. ‘This time I’m asking you for my sake, I’ll be quite honest about it. If this goes through as it stands, without that one little tick, my insurance premiums go up because of the added risk to the foetus, and I can say goodbye to my quarterly bonus. Apart from this, you know, my record’s perfect. Would you really want to spoil that for me?’
‘Why should your premiums go up,’ Hope demanded, cutting across the appeal, ‘when your own scans and so on show the baby – the foetus – is completely healthy anyway?’
‘Come now,’ said Garnett, ‘you know that’s not how insurance works. It’s all about probabilities. And then there’s the absolute certainty of legal issues arising – that all goes on my insurance too. This principle of yours, whatever it is, is really going to cost me, Hope. I’m asking you to consider that. Please.’
Hope suddenly felt utterly weary about the whole thing. She couldn’t articulate her objection even to herself, let alone anyone else. Hugh supported her but didn’t agree with her. Her MP had nothing to offer but sympathy mingled with suspicion. The Labour Party certainly wasn’t going to help her. The argument was dying down on ParentsNet. The only victory she’d had was the ending of the school-gate harassment, with the help of Maya’s flash mob. That would be no help with the problem inside the gate, once the insurance issues kicked in.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘All right. Put me down as agreeing. Tick your box and be done with it.’
‘Thanks so much, Hope,’ said Garnett.
In the moments when Hope had considered giving up, she’d imagined that at least this moment would be one of relief. She didn’t feel relieved at all.
Back at the flat, Hope tied on an apron, made herself a coffee and sat down at the kitchen table to think. She still felt defeated and down. Her choices, given that she wanted to continue the pregnancy – and she did, oh how she did! – remained what they’d always been: to take the fix; to feign some faith position that would give her a conscience exemption; or to continue to refuse. The last of these would mean escalating pressure, all the way up to having some court order slapped on her and being finally, physically, forced to take the fix. The second was beneath her dignity, and if she tried it Hugh would throw a fit.
That left the first. The fix. It wasn’t so bad. If the foetus was as healthy as all the evidence showed, the fix wouldn’t even do very much. It would, on the other hand, do a lot for her. Just swallow one little tablet, and her troubles would be over. She winced at that way of putting it to herself. She was still thinking of it like a suicide. And so it would be; it would be killing something of herself. But what? Was it even an admirable part? She had no colours nailed to her mast, no principle to betray. Just this wordless objection. What if it was just spite? Just stubbornness? That was certainly what everyone else thought. Probably Hugh, too, loyal though he was. And Nick wouldn’t thank her for the disruptions in all their lives if she fought this thing to a finish – a finish that would, in any case, be just the same as if she hadn’t fought it all.
Ah, the hell with it, she thought.
She jumped up, suddenly decisive, and strode through the kitchen door to the hallway. She opened the cupboard, switched on the dim energy-saving bulb, kicked aside boots and toys and gloves on the floor, stood on tiptoe and reached up to the shelf. Her groping fingers connected with nothing. Damn. The carton containing the fix was still right at the back, where she’d flicked it. What a surprise. She sighed, fetched a chair from the kitchen, and set it down carefully in the cupboard. After giving the chair a preliminary shake to make sure it didn’t wobble, she stepped up. Now she could see the top of the shelf. The little yellow-and-white carton was indeed at the back. Right next to it was a frayed brown cardboard box, a bit bigger than a shoebox, whose top she couldn’t see over. She reached for the smaller carton, blew dust off it, and stuck it in her apron pocket.
She wondered what was in the other box. She didn’t remember leaving it there, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t. Probably an empty box that some gadget or toy had come in and that she’d tossed up there with the vague idea that it might come in handy to return or pack whatever the object had been. She hooked a finger over its rim and gave it a tentative, experimental tug. The box barely moved. Inside it, something clinked against something else.
Not empty, then. What could she have left up there? It annoyed her that she’d forgotten. That wasn’t something she usually did. Well aware that she was indulging in displacement activity to delay the inevitable, irreversible moment of swallowing the fix, she grasped the cardboard more firmly and pulled. The box slid across the shelf, with more rattling and clinking, and a friction suggesting a weight of two or three kilograms. She drew it off the shelf, on to an upturned palm, and stepped backward off the chair. Now on secure ground, she lowered the box with both hands and looked inside.
A 70cl bottle of Glenmorangie, the lid’s seal unbroken. A battered cardboard box a few centimetres square. And a large metallic-looking automatic pistol.
She almost dropped the box. Hands shaking a little, she laid it down on the seat of the chair and stared at its contents. She closed her eyes for a moment and shook her head. When she opened her eyes, the gun was still there. She’d never been this close to a gun. Apart from on the hips of police and other officials, and in the hands of soldiers, she’d never seen a firearm in real life at all. She picked up the small cardboard box and prised open its furred and ragged flip-lid. Inside were lots of small lead pellets, rounded at one end, flared at the other. Air-pistol ammo. That was a small relief. Technically the pistol wasn’t a firearm, but by legal definition it was. Its relative lack of lethality didn’t make it any less illegal, or any less of a shock to find in her house.
Hugh had never shown the smallest interest in guns, other than the odd passing mention of how common shotguns and rifles were on the long island, where – for anyone other than a licensed game warden – they were just as illegal as here. But it must have been Hugh who’d hidden away the box. For a moment Hope considered another explanation: that it had been left by the flat’s previous owner. But – quite apart from the likelihood of its being discovered in the process of moving out and moving in – whoever had left the gun had also left the whisky, and that didn’t ring true at all. The single malt had probably cost a hundred pounds. Nobody w
ould willingly abandon, or easily forget, something like that. And Glenmorangie was Hugh’s favourite whisky, though he could seldom afford the indulgence. It had taken him about a year to get through one bottle, before Hope had become pregnant with Nick. She wasn’t bothered that he had another bottle stashed away. He might even be keeping it to wet the baby’s head.
But what the hell did Hugh think he was doing stashing an illegal weapon in the house? Hope found herself looking over her shoulder. From where she stood, just inside the cupboard, she couldn’t see any cameras. She leaned backwards and looked up and down the hallway. She could see one lens above the front door and one at the opposite end, above the doorway to the kitchen. None at the sides.
She replaced the ammunition box and picked up the pistol. It was heavier than she’d expected. Though she knew rationally that it couldn’t explode, she handled it as if it were a ticking bomb. Angling it so that she could see the muzzle without pointing it at herself – she knew that much – she saw that the actual small air-pistol muzzle was set a centimetre or so back inside the barrel, presumably to make the replica more convincing. She placed the pistol back in the box, took the whisky bottle out and placed it on the floor, then climbed up and put the box back where she’d found it.
She took the whisky bottle through to the kitchen and set it on the table beside her glasses. After gazing at it for some time, she picked it up, shoved it to the back of a kitchen cupboard, put on her glasses and got back to work. It was only when she took her apron off at 3.20 to go and pick Nick up that she noticed again the yellow-and-white carton in the pocket, and realised that she’d put it completely out of her mind. She couldn’t understand quite why, but this made her feel happy. She stuck it in her jeans pocket and went out.
About nine that evening, after Nick had finally fallen asleep, Hope sat beside Hugh on the sofa in the living room and turned over the pages of one of her art books. Hugh was watching the television – like her, he preferred the implied sharing of the screen to glasses, even if they weren’t both watching, and even if, as now, the sound was going to the ears of only one of them. A BBC Horizon programme: the latest pictures of the latest Earth-like extrasolar planet to be imaged, the fourth with visible signs of life. For Hope the fascination of this had worn off since the global excitement over the first, though every so often she’d find herself pulled up short by the thought of life lit by the rays of another star. The strangeness of it, the sense of plurality, of possibility, of decentring… she imagined that this was how it must have felt for the first generation after Copernicus. Of course by now the clamour was for signs of intelligent life. There was even, in the tones of some of the regular news anchors and commentators and columnists, and for that matter people in the queue at Tesco, a feeling that the astronomers had somehow let everyone down by not having spotted the lights of cities and the jets of starships: they promised us little green men, and all they have to show us is little green patches!
Hope had no longing to meet aliens. She had a dark suspicion that it would not be a welcome encounter. But now and then, when the thought drifted through her mind like the clouds did in scenes from the space telescopes, she found an odd consolation in the now-certain knowledge that, altogether elsewhere, life, of whatever kind, went on.
She closed the book and walked quietly into the kitchen. She returned bearing a tray with the bottle of Glenmorangie, a small jug of tap water, and two heavy glasses. She set the tray down on the long low table in front of the sofa, and sat back, looking at the screen. White whorls swirled above jigsaw-piece shapes, some blue and some of other colours, pixels of vermilion and verdigris. A Chinese woman in a white coat talked. An American man with white hair gesticulated. A classroom full of black-haired students nodded and made a note. Back to the planet, this time a view of the night side, sharper in focus but more enigmatic in interpretation. The saccade of Hugh’s gaze suddenly snagged on the bottle. He sat upright and flicked at his ears, turning the sound off.
‘What’s that for?’ he said.
‘That’s what I was going to ask you,’ Hope said.
She reached for the whisky bottle and picked with her thumbnail at the notch in the dotted double line of the seal. Slowly she peeled the strip of soft heavy metal away, and then pulled off the entire seal.
‘Nasty stuff,’ she said, looking at the shard of painted alloy. ‘You could cut yourself. Surely it’s not made of lead?’ She folded it into a tiny parcel and dropped it on the tray. ‘You know, like bullets? Or airgun pellets?’
Hugh’s face reddened.
‘Speaking of bullets,’ Hope went on, ‘I’ve always thought this looked like one.’
She set the bottle back on the tray and tugged from her side pocket the carton containing the fix, opened it and tapped out the plastic and foil bubble. She turned it this way and that, letting the dull glint catch Hugh’s eye. ‘The fix. A magic bullet.’
She tossed it and the flowery-lettered carton on to the tray, then wiggled her monitor ring off her finger and dropped it there too. It bounced and rang to a stop. She picked up the bottle again and twisted the cork, easing it out.
‘Something to wash it down,’ she said. She placed the open bottle and the cork on the table.
‘Now wait a minute,’ said Hugh.
Hope sat back. ‘I’m waiting,’ she said. ‘You know where I found that bottle, and what I found it with. I’m waiting for an explanation.’
‘Oh fuck,’ said Hugh. He shifted on the sofa, leaning back into the corner. ‘I didn’t mean for you to find that.’
‘I appreciate that,’ said Hope. ‘In both senses of the word, you know?’
Hugh gave her an aw-shucks grin and open-handed shrug. ‘I feel very protective towards you and Nick,’ he said.
‘That’s not why,’ she said. ‘Or it would be in a more convenient place. Like under the bed.’
‘It has to be somewhere the boy can’t reach.’
‘You still haven’t said why.’
Hugh licked his lips. ‘My father gave it to me, when I was thirteen or so.’
‘You could have left it with him,’ she said. ‘Come on.’
‘Well, you know how it is.’
‘No, I fucking don’t know how it is!’ She put her hand across her mouth, with the vague idea that no one who looked at the camera recording could use it to lip-read. ‘It’s illegal! You could get us both arrested!’
Hugh shifted again on the couch. He sighed and stretched out a hand to the whisky bottle, and looked at her.
‘Do you mind?’ he said.
‘Go right ahead,’ said Hope, with a flourish of her hand like a waiter showing someone to a table. ‘I was thinking of having a dram myself.’
His hand jerked back. ‘No, sorry.’
‘Only joking,’ said Hope. ‘Have a dram. I don’t mind.’
Hugh poured himself a costly measure and added a splash of water. He leaned forward, hand wrapped around the glass. He took a sip and closed his eyes, inhaling.
‘Ah, that’s good,’ he said.
‘Don’t rub it in,’ said Hope.
Hugh scratched the back of his head. ‘All right. Think of it as medicinal. Or as a truth drug.’
‘OK,’ said Hope, leaning back with her arms folded. ‘Talk.’
‘All right,’ said Hugh. ‘Um, why. Well.’ He took a longer sip. ‘I thought I might need it, some day, if…’ He twisted his lower lip against the edges of his upper teeth. Sniffed. ‘There’s something I have to tell you.’
Oh fuck, thought Hope, fearing the worst and unable to imagine what it could be.
When he finally got it out, and when she finally understood what he was getting at, it was such a relief that she had trouble not laughing.
‘You thought… you might find yourself… in the past?’
‘Yes,’ said Hugh, nodding vigorously. ‘Or that someone might come for me, out of the past, and… you know, I might need some…’
His voice trailed off, as if he foun
d what he was saying ridiculous.
Hope closed her eyes. ‘Oh, Jesus.’ She opened them again. ‘But you said yourself, it’s just sight.’
‘No,’ said Hugh, his voice heavy. ‘Some of it is, the people. But no – it’s smell too. And that land I saw, I felt I could have climbed through to it. I felt the wind on my face. I could smell the smoke. And I heard the footsteps behind me.’
Hope felt the tiny hairs on her cheeks and the back of her neck prickle.
‘Smells and sounds can be hallucinations too,’ she pointed out.
‘I know that! Don’t I know that! But I’m telling you, that was what made it seem more real. I was terrified. I had nightmares. That’s why I asked my dad for the… for the thing.’
‘And you’re telling me you still have that fear you had then?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s just that… it’s like superstition. Like you might come to think of something as lucky, because it seemed to work once or twice, and, you know, better safe than sorry. So I keep it like a… a talisman. And anyway, like I said, I still see them sometimes. The barbarians. And hear and smell them, for that matter.’
‘But they’ve never threatened you at all?’
‘Just that one in the culvert. He… I suppose it was he… really did seem to be coming after me.’
‘But apart from that?’
Hugh shook his head. ‘No, no, never.’ He smiled, as if clouds had broken for a moment. ‘And the first was Voxy, and she seemed to grow into you.’
‘Yes, you told me that, thank you,’ Hope said, with some asperity. She hadn’t felt exactly flattered by his account of how he’d fallen for her. It was as if she had fitted a previous fantasy image. As quickly as the thought recurred, a more reassuring interpretation occurred to her, and it cheered her up immensely. All of a sudden things made sense again.
‘But I think I understand,’ she went on. ‘Let’s leave aside your second-sight theory, OK? I don’t know anything about that, and it doesn’t seem likely to me. Look at what we get if we assume it’s all psychological, it’s all in your head.’ Hugh looked poised to interrupt. She raised a hand. ‘No, wait, hear me out. Lots of people, far more people than ever admit it, see people who aren’t there. It’s quite common in kids. Take your case. You start off with an imaginary friend, OK? And then you become embarrassed by her, and she disappears. As you get older, you see others, but just when you’re at or near puberty and feeling all sorts of stresses you don’t understand and can’t process, you have a really quite disturbing and scary vision, hallucination, whatever. You start having nightmares. So you ask your dad for something that reassures you, that you feel keeps the bad thing at bay. And it does. After that… right up to now, right up to your most recent encounter, sort of thing, the visions become much more benign. The one you saw when you met me, it was a kind of blessing on us, wasn’t it? It was saying I was the ideal girl for you, an ideal you’d begun to form when you were quite small – just becoming aware of the difference between boys and girls, and how that had something to do with how your parents loved each other, and at the same time you were just a little bit ashamed of the warm and tender feelings you had towards these, yuck, girls – and that grew with you. You see?’
