by Ken MacLeod
She’d never asked Nigel what he really believed, but Hugh had told her about the adolescent arguments he’d had with his father, and what came through these accounts and everything she’d seen and heard of the man was a studied ambiguity, an outward conformity to usage that gave nothing away of what went on behind his bright, sharp eyes. Above the armchair in the corner was a framed tapestry, in silver thread on a collage of black velvet and blue-black silk, that Mairi must have worked over many a winter evening. Its lower quarter displayed a chain-stitched Bible quote: In My Father’s house are many mansions… If it were not so, I would have told you. The word of God, verbatim from King James, unexceptionable to the most orthodox visitor, to elder or minister of the Kirk. But the picture above it was of a brilliant light in a starry sky above a blocky line of rooftops. It could have been the Star of Bethlehem. It could as well have been a UFO over a capital, or an airliner on approach over a low-build industrial estate in west London. The picture was as unexceptionable as the text, and as haunting. There were mystics, obsessives and New Agers who took these words of Jesus as a hint that he had other worlds in mind, and indeed in his care. Was Mairi, in the ambiguity of that needlework, alluding to such speculations?
Eating, and soon conversation, drove the question from her mind. Nigel was witty, Mairi warm, Hugh taciturn, and Nick just this side of insufferable: overexcited and tired at the same time, splashing his plate and the tablecloth around it with ketchup, talking too much, interrupting, leaving the table to consult the roaming Max. From where Hope sat, she could see out of the window, across the grassy shoulder of the hill on which the house was built and over to the higher hill beyond, a steep heathery mound with a rocky outcrop at the summit, above which even at this distance she could make out, as black specks, the pair of eagles who made that rock their roost. Their presence had spared the horizon a windmill, and for that Hope gave silent thanks to something – to division, to contradiction, to ambiguity perhaps.
A god of small mercies.
‘The wee fella’s doing all right,’ said Nigel.
Hope had just got Nick settled, despite his insistence that it was still daytime, and had joined the others in the big front parlour, a chillier and more formal room than the kitchen, with a wide bay window overlooking the village and a corner of the loch. Its distinctive smell was of furniture polish and a faint aroma of pipe smoke, which made Hope’s monitor ring tingle. Hugh had already produced the slightly depleted bottle of Glenmorangie (which made her wonder whether he’d also brought along his air pistol) and placed it on the coffee table amid four small glasses and alongside a teapot and four cups.
‘Yes, he’s doing fine,’ said Hope, taking a seat.
‘Lively enough,’ Nigel went on. ‘Bright.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘No problems from you not taking the fix, then?’
‘No,’ said Hope, a little taken aback. She waved a flat, open hand, fingers spread. ‘A few childhood illnesses, nothing serious.’
‘Uh huh,’ said Nigel, leaning forward and pouring tea for everyone. ‘I understand you’re in a wee bit of trouble over it.’
‘Well, yes,’ said Hope, accepting tea and a drop of milk. ‘That’s part of the reason why we’re here. Apart from, you know…’
‘How wonderful we are?’ said Mairi. ‘Don’t worry, we understand.’
‘But what are you expecting to get out of staying here?’ Nigel asked, settling back in his deep armchair, propping cup and saucer on the arm. ‘You’re welcome, of course, as long as you like, but this is hardly a refuge from the big, bad world.’
‘No, no,’ said Hope. ‘We just want – I just want a bit of space to make up my own mind.’
‘That’s all right, then,’ said Nigel. He shot her a sly glance. ‘I was a wee bit concerned that you might be thinking that an association with the Kirk I attend would give you the conscience let-out.’
‘Good Lord, no! Sorry, that just slipped out. But anyway, no, it never crossed my mind. I take it your church is against the fix?’
Nigel shook his head. ‘Not at all. It’s a blessing. “The fourth commandment requireth all lawful endeavours to preserve our own lives, and the lives of others”, as the Shorter Catechism has it, and the fix most definitely counts as a lawful endeavour. As do all the other advances – come on now, it’s an age of miracles we live in! The blind see and the lame walk. Why should we reject that?’ He raised a hand, as if to forestall an objection. ‘But of course, the Church also takes a stand for liberty, lawful liberty that is, and I wouldn’t dream of prying into your reasons for such a personal decision. I think the pressure being put on you and others is not a good thing at all, at all.’
‘Well, I’m glad to hear it,’ said Hope, a little stiffly.
Mairi stretched across and squeezed Hope’s hand. ‘Don’t you worry,’ she said. ‘We’ll stand by you, whatever you decide. Nigel’s just a bit formal in his way of putting it.’ She turned to her husband. ‘Isn’t that so?’
‘It is indeed,’ said Nigel, just as gravely as before, then he relaxed and grinned. He put the cup and saucer back on the table, and reached for the whisky bottle.
‘I have a wee hankering for a dram and a pipe. It’s a fine evening. Why don’t we step outside?’
The lip of the bottle hovered over each glass in turn. Hugh and Mairi nodded, Hope shook her head.
‘I’ll take a cup of tea out with me,’ she said.
Rather to her surprise, it was the back yard and not the concrete veranda at the front they went out into. In the crook of the L-shape of the house, it was fenced and pebbled, the side facing the house a dry-stone wall at the foot of the green bank where the hill had decades ago been dug out. Mairi brought out a brace of stools, on which she and Hope sat while Hugh and Nigel used the wall as a bar.
Overhead the pale sky darkened, pricked by the first stars. A match flared as Nigel lit his pipe, carefully downwind of Hope; she didn’t feel a thing.
‘I remember seeing the Northern Lights from here,’ said Hugh, looking upward.
‘We used to call them the Merry Dancers,’ said Mairi.
‘That’s lovely,’ said Hope.
Nigel pointed with his pipe stem to the hills in the west, black against the red sunset.
‘Remember the windmills? The ones along there are gone, we took them down this past month. I have a longer drive in the morning.’
‘I was thinking of going along with you,’ said Hugh.
‘Were you indeed? Now that’s not a bad idea at all. But not tomorrow, or the day after for that matter, and then it’s the weekend. I’ll put the word out on the site, see if there’s anything going. You have the car and take Hope and the boy to the beach or the hills. Make a wee holiday of it.’
‘Won’t you be needing the car?’
‘Ach, I’ll grab a lift on a lorry,’ said Nigel, thumbing his pad. He finished the message and winked. ‘I’m good at that.’
Hope drove. She could see Hugh was a little surprised by which door she went for, and said to him over the top of the Nissan: ‘Hey, I’m a west London girl! Think I can’t drive a Chelsea tractor?’
Hugh laughed and got in the back, after sending Nick down to open the gate.
But in truth it was a long time since she’d driven anything, and she was grateful she had the gravel brae, short though it was, to get the hang of the gears and pedals. Nick closed the gate behind them, standing on it as it swung towards the post, after a quick glance over his shoulder to make sure their backs were turned, and not realising they were watching him in the mirrors. He slid the bolt to, clambered in and settled on the booster seat in the front, proudly fixing the seat belt himself.
‘Which way?’ Hope asked.
‘Left,’ said Hugh. ‘Then left again at the junction.’
This took them out of the village and along the side of the little loch beyond the shoulder of the hill on which the house stood. The day was warm and overcast, the air still. Perfect fishing weather, of which someon
e in waders was already taking advantage, casting a fly far down the loch. Ahead the view opened to a machair and a beach.
‘The beach!’ said Nick.
‘In a minute,’ said Hugh, leaning forward from the back. ‘I just want to show you something first.’
Hope drove on past the end of the loch, past the machair and the crofts around it and up the sloping road along the side of the hill that overlooked the bay. As she approached a small cluster of buildings to the right, Hugh asked her to pull over on to a side road that passed directly in front of it.
‘Come on,’ he said, jumping out.
Hope looked up. It was a small school building. On the hill above it stood the last legs of a windmill, around which a few vehicles were parked and people in overalls and hard hats worked. A generator thumped, beside some kind of winch.
Hugh led them around the side wall, overlooking a patch of asphalt playground, a shelter, and some adjacent sheds. It was still termtime, but not playtime. The children were in the classrooms.
‘You can see right in!’ said Nick.
‘Never thought of that,’ said Hugh.
‘It feels wrong, seeing a primary school without a screen,’ said Hope. ‘I don’t mean wrong wrong, just… odd. Unexpected.’
‘Uh-huh,’ said Hugh.
He walked on up a rutted, unpaved road on the hill behind the school, past the place where the tower was being dismantled, until he’d reached a point where he could look down at the site.
‘I saw that being built,’ he said.
‘Why are they taking it down?’ Nick asked. He sounded uneasy as much as curious.
‘We don’t need the wind towers any more,’ said Hugh. ‘We get all the electricity we need from the sun fields in the Sahara, and from wave-power stations, like that one you can see way out in the sea.’
‘But still,’ Nick persisted. ‘We might need more electric. Like Max.’
‘Very clever,’ said Hugh. He glanced across at Hope. She laughed.
‘I don’t have the answer to that either!’
‘Oh, I know the answer,’ said Hugh. He squatted down to look Nick in the eye, man to man. ‘Yes, we could leave the towers up and we’d have more electricity, but the thing is, the turbines and blades and so on wear out, and people have to work to make new bits for them or to fix the old bits. And when you add it all up, it turns out to be more work than the electricity is doing for us. It’s like pouring water into the bath when the plug’s out. It never fills up. We’d be better off if these people did other work instead of fixing the wind turbines all the time.’
Hope wasn’t sure if Nick was quite able to grasp the concept of opportunity cost, but then neither were most adults. But he nodded, looking serious.
‘What’s the big wheel thing?’
‘It’s called a winch. They’re using it to haul the cable that used to carry the electricity out of the ground, where it was in a sort of pipe. Because it turns out there’s lots of other uses for that cable, maybe in India or China or Africa. And they’re winding it on to these big reels that are stacked up there, and when enough are stacked up, a lorry will come to take them away, like the lorries we saw on the road.’
Nick suddenly pressed his face against Hugh’s shoulder.
‘Don’t like it,’ he said. ‘Don’t like it.’
‘Why not?’ asked Hugh.
‘Scary,’ said Nick. ‘Dark.’
‘It’s all right, Nick,’ Hugh said, with forced cheer. ‘It won’t leave us in the dark.’
Nick faced away, up the hill.
Hugh straightened. ‘Let’s go up there,’ he said. ‘I’ve got something to show you at the top.’
Nick raced ahead as they toiled up the heathery slope.
‘What was all that about?’ Hope asked.
‘No idea,’ said Hugh. ‘You know how kids are. One day they’ll be scared of a colour, or a shape, because it reminds them of a bad dream or something that troubled them on television.’
‘I suppose.’
‘You know,’ Hugh confided, in a low voice, ‘I got a funny feeling there myself.’ He glanced over his shoulder, back at the site. ‘Not scared but… like there was something wrong with what I was seeing. Like… you know those puzzles in comics, “What’s Wrong With This Picture?”. Some detail out of place?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘It was like there’s some hazard down there that everyone’s overlooked.’
‘Elf ’n’ safety?’ Hope sing-songed.
‘Something like that,’ Hugh said. ‘Oh well. Maybe I just picked up some nervousness from Nick.’
‘He’s an odd little chap!’
They both laughed, clearing the air.
Nick waited for them at the skyline.
‘What are you going to show me?’
‘Over there,’ said Hugh, a few steps below, pointing ahead, ‘there’s a big dark loch, and…’
Hope and Hugh cleared the rise and looked down. Ahead of them was a hollow between low hills, and in the bottom of that hollow, a few paces away, was a shallow loch you could throw a stone across.
‘Oh,’ said Hugh. ‘Not quite how I remember it.’
‘Has it got smaller?’
‘I think maybe I’ve got bigger,’ said Hugh.
But Nick was pleased enough to go to the water’s edge and be shown how to skip stones. Hope joined in, laughing at Hugh’s surprise as she demonstrated her own mastery of the knack.
‘Want to go down to the beach?’ Hugh asked, just before Nick got bored.
‘Yes yes yes!’
They turned and went down the hill. As they passed the site, Hope noticed, Nick kept his eyes averted. She didn’t say anything, but reached down and held his hand.
At the car, she hesitated. ‘Do you want to drive round and down, or…?’
‘Run down!’ said Nick.
They crossed the two roads, looking carefully to left and right though there was no traffic within sight or sound, and Nick scampered off ahead of them down the marram-covered dunes.
Hugh stopped for a moment, looking out towards the horizon.
‘I once wrote a poem about this place,’ he said. ‘Want to hear it?’
Hope nodded.
Hugh grinned self-consciously and declaimed:
‘The waves roll like logs into the bay
and splinter, hissing, up the beach.
Violent, even on the calmest day.
God does not know how long they took
to grind these cliffs exceeding small
to a thousand million tons of sand.
‘The new cemetery on the headland fills
with headstones like hilts in a stabbed back.
The minister stands on slowly shifting hills
and does it by the book: “Their souls are immortal,
their bodies
rest till the resurrection.”
‘Their souls are electrochemical
tracks in others’ brains. Their bodies
under the sharp, salt-water grass
are earthed.
The Atlantic ignores the land.’
Hope mimed a startled recoil of the head. ‘You wrote that?’
‘When I was in school, like. I mean, I was fifteen.’
He sounded defensive.
‘No, no, it’s not bad, I just never thought…’
‘I had any poetry in me? Not now I don’t. But we had to do it for English.’
‘No, I meant… it’s kind of harsh. What brought that on?’
‘Ach,’ said Hugh. ‘I had not long discovered materialism, and my father had just discovered Presbyterianism.’
Hope considered him gravely. ‘I think that excuses it,’ she said.
‘Race you to the beach,’ he said.
‘Not in my condition.’
‘Oh. I forgot.’
She clouted his shoulder.
They raced each other down to the sand.
18. Not Even God
That Sunday morn
ing, Hugh retrieved an old suit, shirt and tie of his from a wardrobe. They fitted well enough, though he kept running his finger under his collar. He borrowed a Bible, left his phone on the bedside table, and after breakfast walked with his father to the church. Hope and Mairi had plans to take Nick for a drive to the nearest beach – in the last couple of days he’d taken in a big way to playing in breaking waves, and Mairi had bought him a drysuit at one of the village shops. Mairi’s own shop was closed for the day, in her only deference (other than not doing any housework) to Nigel’s Sabbath-keeping. The previous evening, Nigel had pitched in with Mairi and Hope in preparing as much as possible of today’s meals in advance: peeling the potatoes and carrots, boiling a chicken in the pressure cooker, even setting the table for breakfast. The irony that all this work was being done on the actual, original, Biblical Sabbath didn’t seem to bother him at all, and Hugh had long since given up baiting him on the subject.
The rest of the village had long since given up on keeping the Sabbath. Most of the shops were open. The tide was out and the seaweed smelled like bad breath. Tourists and visitors strolled about in the sunshine, buying tat and hiring cars, bikes and boats. Among them, carefully ignoring them, little trickles and rivulets of more soberly clad people – men in dark suits and Homburgs, women in skirts below the knee and wearing often elaborate hats, children in smaller versions of the same outmoded outfits – walked from a few houses and from the car park to the church down by the shore, and, as if to their own surprise, converged as a congregation of three score or more.
After they’d gone to bed on the Saturday night, happily tired after a day walking in the hills and running on a beach, Hope had suggested to Hugh that she accompany Nigel to the church.
‘No,’ Hugh had said, without hesitation.
‘Why not?’
‘You’d find it strange.’
‘That’s the point.
I’m curious.’
‘Maybe another time. When you know Nigel better. Trust me, you’d find it boring and alienating.’
‘You mean you’d find it embarrassing.’
‘Yes,’ he’d conceded.
