by Ken MacLeod
‘I’m not sure I do,’ said Hugh.
‘These visions you have aren’t something bad. They aren’t something to be ashamed of. They’re one part of your brain telling you things about yourself. Mostly good things, apart from that one scary episode. You’re all right, Hugh. You’re all right. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Hugh, with a wry smile.
‘And you don’t need that thing in the box any more.’
Hugh looked dubious, almost stubborn.
‘Maybe not, but I don’t want to risk it. I don’t mean risk what I thought might happen when I was thirteen. I mean risk doing something to what’s keeping me stable, right? Even if what you say is how it is, and I hope so, maybe the thing in the box is important to me psychologically. Like a symbol, you know? If it’s all in my subconscious – well, the subconscious has a thing about symbols. I don’t want to disturb that.’
‘You’re a grown man now,’ Hope said. ‘You don’t need a security blanket.’
For a moment Hugh’s expression didn’t look very grown-up at all.
‘I might find I needed more of the drink, instead.’ He poured himself another generous slug. ‘It’s funny. My private name for the box was “the suicide box”.’
‘You weren’t feeling suicidal?’ she asked, shocked.
‘No, no,’ said Hugh. ‘Not for one second. It was just a wee private joke to myself. You know, about the old ruling-class tradition of what to give someone when they’ve really fucked up and need to make a graceful retirement from the scene? Doesn’t mean anything more than that.’
‘OK, OK,’ said Hope.
There was an uncomfortable silence. On the screen, strange organisms were extrapolated from faint exoplanetary atmospheric traces of organic molecules that hinted at a different genetic code.
‘Are you sure you were just joking,’ said Hugh, awkwardly, ‘about having a dram yourself?’
‘Not entirely.’
His cheek twitched. He rubbed his chin just under the mouth. ‘Were you really considering taking the fix?’
‘Damn right I was,’ said Hope. ‘I’d decided. The only reason I didn’t was that I’d hidden this box’ – she flicked it with a fingernail – ‘beside yours.’
‘Why?’
‘Fiona – the health visitor – gave me it, and I didn’t want to think about it, so I put it somewhere—’
‘I meant, why did you change your mind about the fix?’ She told him. By the time she had finished, she was crying in his arms.
‘Oh, Hope,’ he said, stroking the back of her head.
And nothing more. After a while her shoulder and her neck hurt. She sniffed, blinked, pulled away and sat back at the other side of the sofa, legs curled up. A slug-trail of snot glistened on Hugh’s shoulder. Hope tugged out a tissue and dabbed it off, then settled back again.
‘Nothing to say?’ she said.
Hugh sipped his whisky and looked at her. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said.
‘Oh, damn it!’ Hope felt all the more irritated with him and with herself for having picked up Hugh’s Leosach genteel swearing. She reached for the bottle and poured a small dram into the empty glass, and a larger volume of water. Even so, the first sip felt like fire in her mouth. She waited for the sensation to subside to a spreading glow. Along with it came the realisation that she’d crossed a line, trivial though the transgression was. Hugh watched without comment, then raised his glass.
‘Slainte,’ he said, in an ironic tone.
‘Skol. Now, talk, for crying out loud.’
Hugh took a deep breath. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You know I’d prefer you to take it. I’ve said so often and often. I’ve never understood your objection. In fact I think it’s irrational, to be honest. But I’d rather you didn’t take it at all than take it because you feel defeated. That isn’t you, Hope.’
‘Well, I do feel defeated,’ Hope said. ‘Because I am. Or I will be. Like I said, it makes no difference in the long run what I do. It all ends up in the same place, with me swallowing that thing. Hah! Might as well wash it down with whisky right now, and get it over with.’
She actually reached for the tablet. Hugh’s hand shot forward and grabbed her wrist.
‘Not like that,’ he said.
She relented, not that she’d really intended to do it. She’d got the reaction she’d wanted. Well, maybe. She sipped the whisky, regarding him. After more than three months without alcohol, even this small amount was making her feel a little light-headed, a little loquacious and pugnacious.
‘So, like what?’ she demanded.
‘Like, somewhere where you’re not pressured all the time, where you’re not being got at. Where you can make your own mind up. We could just go.’
‘Go where?’ Hope demanded. ‘I’m not going to the other side, and everywhere on this side is just like here, and everywhere outside them both is a shit-hole and either a failed state or a tyranny where the fix is bloody compulsory.’
‘Just because Jack Crow told you to go to Russia,’ said Hugh, teasing, ‘there’s no reason to rule out the other side. I mean, there’s work in Russia.’
‘There’s work, all right,’ Hope said. ‘Work or starve. And there’s always a lower depth for that, all the way down to scavenging the rubbish dumps. No thanks.’
‘Anyway,’ said Hugh, ‘I wasn’t thinking of Russia. I was thinking of Lewis.’
‘Lewis?’ Hope wasn’t sure whether to take him seriously. ‘From what you’ve told me, Lewis is even more infested with social workers than London.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Hugh. He took a long swallow of whisky. ‘Thing about social workers in Lewis, though. You can see them coming from a long way off.’
Hope laughed. He had that dry, disillusioned, defiant note in his voice that was the up side of the Leosach gloom, and a wry gleam in his eye. This was the Hugh she knew. Not the strange man who stashed a powerful air pistol and a bottle of single malt and who saw people from the past walking through walls. But they were the same man, that was what she would have to get used to.
‘Besides,’ he said, ‘it’s a different country. Different laws, different health and social services and everything. They still don’t have all the databases joined up. Not by a long chalk.’
‘Yeah, but come on,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly practical for us to move to Lewis.’
‘I’m not talking about moving,’ Hugh said. ‘More like a long holiday, and if we have to stay longer, well, we can both work. You can work from anywhere, and there’s plenty on Lewis that I can do.’
‘I don’t see much demand for fancy joinery on the long island.’
‘No, but – they’ve started dismantling the wind turbines, my dad’s been lured back to the farm from the croft by the wages they’re holding out to him. Plenty of on-site work there for me too – even theoretical knowledge must be worth something, it must come in handy.’
He didn’t sound like he was convincing himself.
‘And what about your work right now?’ she asked.
‘The Ealing jobs? Each of them just takes a few days, so I can leave at short notice if I have to. The whole lot finishes in a couple of weeks. Beginning of June at the latest. By then it’s just a matter of taking Nick out of the nursery a month before the summer holidays start anyway.’
‘A month…’ The reminder troubled her. ‘You know, my next check-up’s a month from now. If I haven’t taken the fix by then, they’ll know I lied to Dr Garnett, and then they’ll really start turning the screws. So all that leaves me is two weeks in June to decide about the fix. Two weeks of this no-pressure situation in Lewis? Huh.’
Hugh looked a bit hurt.
‘OK, it’s not much, but it’s better than staying here. Isn’t it?’
Hope shrugged, and gazed moodily into her glass. She swirled the dilute whisky around, and breathed the fumes.
‘It isn’t just a matter of time,’ she said. ‘It’s a matter
of knowing there’s something I can do if I do decide not to take it. I mean, it’s a big step. It would mean going on the run, basically. And Lewis has never struck me as a good place to start running.’
‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s a place to stop running. I have lots of friends and relations on Lewis. All we have to do is keep moving around for six months. Social services up there aren’t so efficient or well-resourced that they can go on chasing us. They go after easy targets, because they measure success by targets, so to speak. No doubt they’ll want to make an example of someone, but if we make that enough hassle for them, it doesn’t have to be you.’
‘That’s a bit selfish,’ said Hope
‘Yes. And?’ Again with the wry smile.
‘It would just set up somebody else,’ Hope said.
Hugh looked her straight in the eye.
‘Oh!’ Hope said. ‘That’s… You think that’s what it’s all about, for me. That I don’t care what happens to any of the other mums in this situation, so long as it doesn’t happen to me.’
‘“Do it to Julia”,’ Hugh said, in a heavy voice, so she could hear the quotes.
‘Who’s Julia?’
‘In Nineteen Eighty-Four, remember?’
Hope had only scrappy memories of the book, which had been compulsory reading in Year Two English in high school. There had been something horrible about rats, which she had tried to put out of her mind. And the teacher had explained how it was really all about how the West and China had always been allies against Russia, from the Cold War all the way through to the Warm War. That had troubled her a bit, because she was sure she remembered being scared of China when she was a small child. But she hadn’t said anything, because China was definitely friendly now, and Russia definitely wasn’t. In Russia the government watched people all the time, with cameras everywhere, and everyone was afraid to say what they really thought. Whereas here we had transparency and accountability. Everything was transparent and people were accountable. Or everything was accountable and people were transparent. One or the other.
‘Oh, nothing like that!’ Hope said. ‘Look, I’ve tried and tried. Argued online. Argued with the faith mums to their faces. Come on, I even joined the Labour Party.’
‘Quite a sacrifice,’ said Hugh. She couldn’t tell if he was being ironic. He sounded aggressive. ‘Done your civic duty. Gone through the proper channels.’
It was the whisky talking, she thought. Disinhibition. He’d been off alcohol for three months too, and he’d just drunk about three times more than she had. She was feeling a bit dis-inhibited herself. She drained the glass and put it on the table, then moved forward along the sofa on her knees.
‘Come here,’ she said, and wrapped her arms around him and pulled him down to the couch.
13. Genetic Information
‘There’s a girl at the door asking for you,’ said Ashid, smirk on his face, head poking up through the floor from behind the top of the ladder. This house was even more of a wreck than number 37 had been.
‘Is she selling something?’ Hugh asked, putting down a diamond-bladed saw.
‘I don’t think so,’ said Ashid. ‘Indian. Christian. Very black.’
‘Oh, great,’ said Hugh, following Ashid down the ladder. ‘Probably saving my soul.’
The suspicion that the young woman was peddling religion hardened as Hugh caught sight of the tiny silver cross on a chain around her neck. The sight also explained how Ashid had known what religion she professed. Standing in the open doorway in puffa jacket, slate skirt, and flat shoes, her arms down and hands locked in front of her, she looked prim enough to be a missionary. The mission to building workers. Sorely needed. The Meddling Little Sisters of St Joseph the Worker. Early twenties, he guessed. A few years younger than him. But somehow more assured. Confident.
‘Hello?’ said Hugh. ‘Can I help you?’
‘Hi,’ the young woman said. ‘Hugh Morrison?’
‘Yes?’
His tone was, what’s it to you?
‘My name is Evangelina Fernandez.’
Knew it, thought Hugh.
She paused, as if expecting him to recognise the name. Or, perhaps, confused by the way he’d looked for a moment as if he had.
‘But you can call me Geena,’ she went on, evidently giving up on the recognition thing. She stuck out a hand. ‘I’m a sociology researcher.’
Marketing, was how Hugh interpreted that. So, wrong wrong wrong, Ashid. She was selling something.
He shook her hand solemnly. ‘Pleased to meet you. I’m a carpenter.’
‘I know,’ she said. ‘I looked you up, and found your location tag.’ She glanced past his shoulder. ‘Could I come in for a moment, please?’
‘Oh, sure, come on. Mind your step.’
Hugh guided her into the big front room, finished but bare. It smelled of plaster and paint and new wood.
‘I’ll give that stool a wipe,’ he said, looking for a cloth clean enough.
‘It’s fine,’ said Geena. She scuffed a hand across the back of her skirt, a gesture that suddenly made her seem a lot less prim. ‘Dirt-repellent fabric.’
She perched on the stool and looked at him as if confirming something in her head.
‘Uh… tea?’ he asked. ‘It’s about time for…’
It was about eleven.
Geena nodded. ‘Milk, no sugar, thanks.’
Hugh went to the kitchen, brewed up a pot, called to Ashid, then carried two mugs through to the front room. He dragged up a trestle and another stool, and sat down.
‘Thanks.’
They sipped for a moment.
‘So… what’s this about?’
‘Um,’ said Geena. She looked around, as if for inspiration, or as if she was checking for cameras. There weren’t any. Hugh felt uneasy. He hadn’t been alone with a woman or child in an unsurveilled, unrecorded room since… Lewis, he guessed. At least Ashid was in earshot. Well, probably not, the sound of the radio almost certainly drowned their conversation out, but it was the principle. Ashid was in earshot of a scream, at least.
‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I’ve thought and thought about this, and now I’m here I feel, uh…’
‘Unprepared?’ Hugh prompted.
Geena laughed, some tension dissipating. ‘Yes!’
She put the mug down on the trestle and placed her hands on her knees.
‘Tell me, Mr Morrison, is there anything unusual about your vision?’
‘Twenty-twenty, last time I got it checked,’ said Hugh.
What was this about? Glasses? Laser eye surgery?
‘I don’t necessarily mean your acuity,’ she said, with unnerving precision. ‘I mean… have you ever noticed that you see things a little differently from other people?’
Hugh warmed his hands around the mug. He felt cold all of a sudden. This wasn’t about marketing.
‘If you’ve looked me up,’ he said carefully, ‘you’ll know I went to university. I did a year of philosophy, and if I remember right, that’s one of the classic hard questions. Qualia, isn’t that it?’
‘Yes, but that wasn’t my question.’
‘Perhaps you should start again,’ said Hugh.
‘Yes, indeed,’ said Geena. She took a deep breath. ‘Has your wife ever mentioned a woman called Maya?’
Hugh blinked. ‘She may have done.’
Some minor incident at the nursery gate, he recollected. Hope had laughed it off, telling him very little, but he’d noticed that she’d got the bee in her bonnet about the Labour Party shortly afterwards. He’d worried, but he hadn’t pried.
‘Oh, good. Maya’s a friend of mine. She thought she could help, uh, Hope, and I think she did, for a bit, but I’ve come up with something that can help you in a big way.’
‘What makes you think we need any help? What’s this about? Are you trying to sell us something?’
‘What?’ She sounded baffled.
‘Sociology research. Sure you don’t mean market rese
arch?’
‘No, no, I really am… I’m a postgrad at Brunel, you know, in Uxbridge? And I’m doing research at SynBioTech, in Hayes.’
‘I thought you said sociology.’
‘STS… sorry, science and technology studies. I sit in on a lab and observe the engineers.’
‘Oh,’ said Hugh, ‘I know about all that. Like they’re a strange tribe.’
‘Like they’re a strange tribe,’ she said, in the tone of someone who’d heard it before.
‘And you pretend you don’t know if science works or not, yeah?’
‘Please don’t tell me the one about jumping out of a window,’ Geena said.
Hugh had been about to. He felt abashed.
‘I suppose it’s like having an unusual name,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Like Hope Abendorf.’
Hugh spluttered tea. He wiped the back of his hand across his mouth.
