Intrusion

by Ken MacLeod

  As soon as she had put the block in place, however, she regretted it and at the same time realised its futility. There was an unlimited number of other phones, after all, which any of these three people – Maya, Geena and Joe – could use to contact her. She could restrict incoming calls to her known contacts, but that risked missing important calls, or friends whose number had changed. That was the futility. On the other hand, blocking these particular phones would at least show she wasn’t in regular communication with the supposed terrorist suspect Geena, and the libertarian loose cannon Maya, and this Asian guy who was evidently a friend of Geena’s.

  The regret came from something else. She might be missing out on something wonderful, as well as spurning a genuine offer of help. Well, she was definitely doing the latter, though how significant that was depended on the former. The more she thought about it, the more uncertain she felt. Was it really so awful, being an object of scientific attention? Even for the kid? There was no question of anything physically intrusive – their genetic samples, after all, were already taken. Blood spots on the Guthrie cards, genome sequence in the solid-state storage of computers. For her and for Hugh and Nick, no more would be involved, surely, than a few parapsychology experiments, whose inconclusive and disputable character was almost spookily predictable. Academic ethics would ensure the anonymity of the subjects. Nick needn’t even know what it was all about. Better that he didn’t, actually, what with the double-blind protocol and all that.

  And wouldn’t it be wonderful, in a way, to find that you or your child had a wild talent?

  Well, yes, but Hope knew that this sort of thing was evasive, anecdotal, it slipped through your fingers like water. Most likely because there was nothing there in the first place. It was all nonsense.

  She slid the patio doors open a fraction, stuck her head through and called to Mairi that she was taking a short walk. An indistinct but positive-sounding reply floated back, as if carried on the shop’s soapy smell. She made her way across the mossy strip of lawn behind the shop, stepped over a token fence and then took a larger step across the strand-line seaweed and on to the stony beach. The shop was near the end of the village, just past the church and before the bridge where the road turned off to Stornoway or continued up the glen. Nick had moved a little farther along towards the bridge and the old pier.

  He stood close to the edge of the sea, on a boulder, gazing intently down at the encroaching margin of incoming tide, now about a metre away. Hope placed her feet carefully on stone after stone amid the shingle, approaching him as stealthily as the tide. As she came within a couple of metres of him, she heard him talking.

  ‘It’s like watching the big hand of a clock, if you look at it long enough you can see it moving, but it’s faster than that.’

  He paused, and after a moment went on: ‘A clock is round and has two hands, except they’re not really hands, they’re more like thin sticks, coming out of the middle, and the little hand moves round two times in a day and the big hand moves around one time in an hour, and that way you can tell the time any time of the day.’

  ‘But you can’t always see the sun.’

  ‘Oh, right!’

  It was like listening to someone talking on the phone. No, not quite, Hope thought. It was like hearing only one side of a conversation. She stopped and stood still, balanced precariously on two round slippery stones, one foot on each.

  ‘O… K…’ Nick said, looking up and around. ‘If that’s how you do it… I think it’s about an hour before noon. And that means it’s time I went and found my mummy and asked her for tea and a chocolate digestive.’

  He cocked his head slightly, as if listening, then laughed and turned round.

  One of Hope’s feet slipped off its stone and she stumbled, flailing her arms, then regained her balance. She crunched across pebbles to Nick.

  ‘Hello, Mummy.’ He didn’t look surprised to see her, or offended that she’d snuck up on him.

  ‘Time to get off that rock, I think,’ she said. ‘The tide’s nearly around you.’

  Nick looked down, then held out his arms towards her. She lifted him off the boulder and swung him around and set him down on the shingle.

  ‘Did I hear something about tea and a biscuit?’ she said.

  ‘Oh yes please,’ said Nick.

  They set off towards the back of the shop.

  ‘But I don’t think he understands about tea,’ Nick said.

  ‘Who doesn’t?’

  ‘Max.’

  Hope looked down. ‘But Max isn’t with you.’

  ‘Oh no, wait,’ said Nick. He turned around and called out: ‘Max! Max!’

  The toy monkey popped its head up from behind a boulder a few metres away, then bounded from stone to stone and jumped into Nick’s arms.

  ‘He’s with me now,’ he said, in a voice that meant he thought he’d got away with something on a clever technicality.

  ‘You can tell him it’s like getting your battery charged up,’ Hope said.

  ‘What’s like?’

  Hope leaned down and tickled Nick’s tummy. ‘Tea and biscuits.’

  Nick giggled.

  ‘I don’t think he understands…’

  His voice trailed off.

  ‘Batteries?’ Hope said. ‘Surely Max understands batteries?’

  ‘Oh yes, of course he does,’ said Nick.

  But he didn’t try to explain biscuits as batteries to Max; in fact he said nothing at all as they walked back to the shop to recharge.

  * * *

  They sat around the table in the back room of the shop. Mairi had her back to the window, keeping half an eye on the front of the shop, and sharing a pot of tea with Nick. Hope sipped instant coffee. Mairi chatted to Nick, telling him about the village, and about the local sealife, the seals and trout and the herring and mackerel out in the ocean, and the gannets that dived from the cliffs.

  ‘Was the sea always here?’ Nick asked.

  Mairi glanced at Hope, half amused, half querying.

  ‘The sea has not always existed,’ she said.

  ‘Where did it come from?’

  Hope, rather unfairly, expected Mairi to start talking about the six days of creation. Now, which day was the sea created?

  ‘The water came from space,’ Mairi said, ‘billions of years ago.’

  ‘Oh, I know that,’ said Nick. ‘I saw it on the telly. Comets! Whoosh! Splash!’

  ‘Careful you don’t splash your tea.’

  ‘All right, Granny. But that’s not what I meant. I meant the sea out the back there.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ said Mairi, glancing over her shoulder. ‘No, Nick, that loch wasn’t always there. Thousands of years ago, in the last ice age, the sea was much farther out. The islands like Pabay Mòr and Pabay Beag that you saw the other day, across from Valtos with the beach, and the big islands to the south like Berneray and Taransay and Scalpay and even Uist, they were all hills of the same Long Island back then.’

  ‘So you could walk out there? To the wee island?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Mairi. ‘You could walk out there too. That would all have been a glen, you see, and the island would have been a hill.’

  ‘So where was the water?’

  ‘It was all in the ice, piled up above the hills.’

  Nick thought about this.

  ‘But all that ice must have pushed the land down, so the sea—’

  ‘Wasn’t as far down as it might have been!’ Mairi cried. She clapped her hands together. ‘Clever boy! Yes, and today the land is still coming up with the weight of the ice off it, and the sea is still rising too with the ice melting into it. So it’s complicated.’

  ‘But,’ said Nick, frowning, ‘long ago there was ice on the top of the hills and the sea was way out, like if the tide had gone out a really really really long way, and stayed out for years and years and years, so there was grass and trees and things where the loch is, and there were animals and people and villages and smoke and everythi
ng.’

  Mairi shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I don’t know about the villages, but all the rest, yes. It would have been a bonny glen.’

  ‘And they had boats made out of bent branches and skins.’

  ‘They did that,’ said Mairi. ‘They’re called coracles. That’s how the Gospel came to Scotland, when Columba paddled across the sea from Ireland in a coracle.’

  ‘And they had gliders made out of skins and bent sticks too.’ Nick planed his hand above his head. ‘Flying over the glen!’

  Mairi shook her head. ‘No, dear, there’s no evidence – they didn’t have gliders, the people in the ice age and after.’

  ‘They did so!’ Nick sounded indignant. ‘I saw them!’

  ‘Where did you see them?’

  He looked down into his cup. ‘Pictures,’ he said, quietly.

  Mairi ruffled his hair. ‘Of course. It must have been a story, or on the telly.’

  ‘It was pictures,’ Nick insisted.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ said Mairi. ‘It was pictures, that’s all.’

  She stood up. ‘Well, I’d better get back to the counter, and I’m sure you’d like to get back out in the sun. Enjoy it while it’s here, eh?’

  After they’d both gone, Mairi to the shop and Nick to the shore, Hope sat with her glasses on but seeing nothing.

  When Nick had been a year younger, he’d been troubled by vivid dreams just before falling asleep. He’d called them pictures.

  No way, she thought, was he going to be an object of scientific investigation. Not by her doing.

  21. Tunnel Vision

  Hugh’s phone was ringing. The trouble was, the phone was in the back pocket of his jeans, underneath his one-piece waterproof overall, and he was lying on his back in a safety frame underneath a turbine, spanner in hand and a brace of screwdrivers in his mouth. Normally in that circumstance he’d have let the phone ring out and go to voicemail – yesterday morning the same thing had happened and the message, when he’d finally taken it, was some Asian-sounding guy claiming the implausible name of Joe, probably a cold-caller – but this time the ringing wasn’t normal. It was a peculiar harsh bray that he hadn’t heard before, at least not since he’d set the phone up a couple of years ago. He wasn’t quite sure what the ringtone meant, but he was sure it was nothing good.

  He elbowed the concrete and rolled the frame out from under, put down the screwdrivers and spanner, and stood up carefully in the low-ceilinged turbine chamber beneath the half-dismantled tower. He unzipped his overall and reached in awkwardly to the back pocket. The phone was still ringing when he took it out, and the screen was flashing bright red letters that told him exactly what the ringing meant:

  The burglar alarm in the Islington flat was reporting a break-in in progress.

  Shit shit shit. Hugh punched through to the house wifi to find out what was going on. The camera in the hall, facing the door, showed the wood around the locks splitting. Thud followed thud. There was no sound of the alarm: it was a silent alarm, which right at this moment would be alerting the nearest police station. For a moment Hugh felt a grim satisfaction at the thought.

  The door jamb gave way, splinters flying. The door banged wide against the wall, and the police burst in. Hugh stared in disbelief. He hadn’t expected this at all. The first officer through wore a visored helmet and a flak jacket. He arrived at a slowing run, carried by the momentum of the final swing of the battering ram, and stopped just short of colliding with the bikes. The rest, the squad of six or so who crowded in after him, were in standard police uniform. They looked alert but not anxious as they edged past the bikes, loomed into the view of the camera for a moment, then dispersed to the various rooms.

  Hugh, hands shaking, flipped the view to the other cameras, splitting the screen sixfold to accommodate as many of them as he could. The uniformed figures gave cursory glances around, and here and there some peered into cupboards and under beds, but the one thing they all did was look for the cameras. One by one, quite eerily, a glance would alight, a face would appear close-up in goldfish-bowl distortion, and then a hand would come up holding a multi-tool open as pliers. The view would sway, swoop, and go dark, presumably from within a pocket or bag, though a confusing babble of sound still came through, including that of the cameras clinking together.

  All this took place – Hugh found when he jolted himself out of his trance of shocked fascination – within about two minutes of the door being burst open. Nothing useful was coming from the phone, just darkness and noises. He stared at it for a few seconds nonetheless, as if hoping that something would make sense, or make a different sense. He knew that the moment he reacted would change his life for ever.

  He moved. He called Hope. She’d be down at the shop, not long started this damp Thursday morning.

  ‘Hope?’

  ‘Yes? What’s wrong?’

  ‘The police have just broken into our flat. They’re ripping out the cameras.’

  Silence for a moment. She must be feeling the same sensation he had, like standing in the doorway of an aeroplane before a parachute jump.

  ‘What do we do?’ she said.

  ‘Is Nick with you?’

  ‘Yes, he’s right here. It’s a bit wet out.’

  ‘Fine. Just go back up to the house, grab some water and food, couple of torches, and wait for me. I’ll be along in, uh, half an hour or so.’

  ‘What do I tell Mairi?’

  ‘Just say you have to go back to the house. Act casual.’

  Hope made an inarticulate noise, breath going out as a snort, going in as a sob, and rang off.

  Hugh scrambled up the ladder and out of the hatch. The site was, aptly enough, windswept, a hilltop overlooking the synthetic forests to the east and in the other direction the hills and moorland to the west. Drizzle drifted in swathes. The cloud cover was not far overhead. He could see right to the coast, and through the rain he could almost make out the village, about thirty minutes’ fast drive away. He glanced around, and spotted his father talking with one of the dozen or so other workers on the site. He hurried over.

  ‘Excuse me, Nigel.’

  Nigel gave him a worried look.

  ‘Something wrong?’

  So his expression must be as much a giveaway as his voice.

  ‘Maybe. I need to get back to the house.’

  ‘Is everyone all right?’

  ‘Oh, yes, nothing like that. It’s just… a bit of an emergency.’

  Nigel handed over the car keys.

  ‘Will you be all right?’

  ‘Yes, sure, Donald can give me a lift back. Want me to put in a word with the foreman?’

  ‘Yes please,’ Hugh said, though he didn’t think keeping the job was top of his list of worries at the moment. ‘Thanks, Dad. See you.’

  Nigel wiped droplets of water from his eyebrows, caught Hugh’s elbow and turned him aside.

  ‘Is this it?’ he asked in a low voice, not looking at Hugh.

  ‘Could be,’ said Hugh. ‘Police have broken into our flat.’

  Nigel swung around, facing him.

  ‘What could that be about? Not Hope, surely?’

  ‘I don’t know. Nothing wrong we’ve done, anyway.’

  Nigel’s eyes and lips narrowed.

  ‘I’ll come with you.’

  Hugh shook his head. ‘No. I need you to… be around, and not to know where I’ve gone.’

  Nigel considered this for a second, then nodded.

  ‘Don’t do anything foolish,’ he said, as if Hugh were still a teenager, setting off for a night in Stornoway.

  Hugh clapped his father’s shoulder and ran to the Nissan. He strapped in, backed out of the awkward space in which it was parked, and bumped down the unpaved track to the road. He turned on the headlights and drove as fast as he dared, swinging around bends, hurtling along straights. Across the moor and into the glen and along to the village. It took him twenty-five minutes. He left the car outside the front gate and sprinted up the drive and
around the back of the house.

  Hope and Nick stood in the open doorway, wearing wet-weather jackets, boots and hats, and each clutching a small backpack, as if they were going for a walk in the rain. Hugh skidded to a halt, brushed Hope’s cheek with a kiss and Nick’s head with a pat, then sidled past them and into the house. He stepped out of his boots, stripped off his overall and hard hat and slung them in a corner of the scullery, and ran upstairs to the bedroom. It looked untidy, with the dress that Hope must have thrown off to pull on her trousers crumpled on the bed. Hugh took from the dusty top of the wardrobe the air pistol and pellet box he’d left there as soon as he’d arrived. He fingered inside his shirt pocket to make sure he still had the printed-off map, then picked up from the dressing table the old Silva compass he’d left hanging by its lanyard on the mirror. The little radio was still in his trouser pocket, with a new AA battery in it, along with one spare.

  His booted feet thundered down the narrow staircase. He rushed through the living room and into the hallway and pulled on his jacket and boots. He stuck the air pistol in the jacket pocket. He jammed on Nigel’s waterproof hat.

  Hope and Nick watched him from the doorway.

  ‘Why are we in a hurry?’ Nick asked.

  ‘Something interesting to see,’ said Hugh.

  ‘Then we’ll need binoculars,’ Nick pointed out.

  Hugh tied his bootlaces, stood up, and grabbed the smallest pair of binoculars hanging in the clump of instruments on the coat hooks. He zipped up his jacket, closed the door behind them all and went out into the thin rain.

  ‘Where do we go?’

  Hope’s upturned, enquiring face was beaded with water. She looked a lot less agitated, and more trusting, than he’d expected. This was more than he deserved. He had expected calls and emails from social services, maybe a visit, perhaps some legal pressure, the sort of thing that could be evaded for long enough by a simple change of address. He’d already sounded out an aunt in Tolsta and a cousin in Garynahine. But at another level, he had contemplated the escape he now had in mind. Why else had he made the map, and brought the pistol? The plan had had the quality of a daydream. Now it seemed the only way out. It also seemed delusional.