Dark Side of the Moon

by Les Wood

  ‘We’re exposed here,’ said Kyle, looking at the street below. ‘We could be spotted.’

  ‘No,’ said Campbell. ‘We’re okay. The walls are a kind of mirror thing. We can see out, but nobody can see in. Stops perverts standing on the street below, looking up the women’s skirts when they’re walking across.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ asked Prentice.

  ‘Trust me,’ said Campbell. ‘Ah’ve tried it.’

  Prentice laughed. ‘Alright,’ he said. ‘Ah trust ye. Let’s go.’

  They stepped onto the Walkway and started to cross to the Bubble.

  ‘Gentlemen!’ a voice boomed out from behind them. Campbell threw himself to the floor, a reflex more than anything else, while the other two spun on their heels, Prentice grabbing for his knife. ‘And Ladies!’ the voice continued. ‘You are moments away from the experience of the year, the pinnacle of…’

  ‘It’s a fuckin recording!’ said Kyle.

  Prentice laughed at Campbell. ‘Check you!’ Campbell was sprawled on the floor, arms outstretched, face pressed against the glass panels, watching a guy and his girlfriend cross the street arm in arm forty feet below him.

  The pre-recorded welcome message continued to prattle on for a few more seconds, culminating in a blazing fanfare. Prentice and Kyle grasped Campbell under his arms and lifted him to his feet. ‘Ya plonker,’ sneered Prentice. ‘Shitin yourself like that. Show a bit of backbone, will ye?’

  Campbell clenched his jaw. He should have known better. He should have remembered about the motion sensors which triggered the message for the visitors to the exhibition. Should have stayed on his feet instead of collapsing like a frightened poodle. He tried to think of something to say. Something to show he was still in control of the situation, that it was a daft mistake anyone could have made. Nothing came to mind. ‘We’re wasting time,’ he said, turning away from them and marching down the Walkway towards the Bubble, head high, back straight, in an attempt to restore his dignity.

  Kyle and Prentice let him get halfway across before they started to follow. Campbell could hear them speaking to each other in low voices, their words just below the threshold of hearing. He stepped into the Bubble and turned right towards the exhibition room.

  The room itself was enclosed within a smaller space, shut off from the main body of the Bubble. Two mock golden gates stood at the entrance, gleaming dimly in the light coming through from the Walkway. To open them, Campbell quickly keyed the security code into the box on the wall, his heart hammering as the fear he felt at the Walkway door returned. He hadn’t told Prentice that his first two attempts had failed. How the little red light on the keypad had winked mockingly as his fingers trembled above the numbered squares of the keypad. He couldn’t explain why he’d decided to stab in a third attempt, why he’d risked the whole operation on a statistical probability, a twenty percent chance he’d hit the right code, but, for better or worse, it had worked. Perhaps he wanted the plan to fail, get himself the hell out of this stupid situation. Just run away.

  The gates clicked open with the insect buzzing of a solenoid and swung inwards. Prentice and Kyle came up behind, and the three of them stood at the entrance peering into the darkness towards the plinth in the centre of the room. A brass banister ran in a circle around the perimeter of the display area, limiting how close the punters were allowed near the diamond. No way were the riff-raff going to be allowed to get up close and personal with something like this. The Bubble shuddered slightly as a bus rumbled across the junction below them. Ahead, the lasers which surrounded the plinth formed a small galaxy of red pinpoints extending from the floor to the ceiling, and cast faint, blood-tinged shadows on the walls.

  On the top of the plinth, at the apex of a single golden spike, sat the Dark Side of the Moon itself, glowing like a solitary deep red eye, illuminated from below by its own cluster of lasers which were set into a circular array like the rings of Saturn.

  ‘Holy shit,’ said Kyle. None of them had actually seen the diamond in the flesh before. On their previous visit, Kyle and Prentice had only come across the plinth and the security system; the display itself had been empty. Campbell had been strictly on Ground Floor duty since the diamond had arrived; only the Securarama boys were allowed up here during the day – ‘Special Forces’ the other security guys called them. He hadn’t been able to get near the Bubble with them prowling around all the time.

  ‘It’s bigger that I thought,’ said Prentice. ‘How much did Boddice say this thing was worth?’

  ‘Lots,’ said Campbell. ‘Lots and lots, and then add a whole tower of more fucking lots on top of that.’

  They looked at each other, unsure of who was going to take the first step. Campbell took the bull by the horns. ‘Okay,’ he said, walking towards the plinth. ‘Ultra-fucking-cautious from here on. Got it?’

  The others nodded and followed him into the exhibition room.

  ***

  John did his best impression of a sailor in a force ten storm as he wandered over to the admin staff table. He made sure to nudge a few backs, bump a few tables on the way.

  ‘Awwright gurrrls,’ he said as he arrived, spilling his drink on the table. ‘Enjoyin yourselves? Having a gooood time?’ He gave them a leering wink.

  The admin girls looked up at him, their conversation halted by his sudden appearance, glasses half-raised towards lips, heads turning, eyes wide in recognition of the fact they had a seriously drunk half-wit leaning over them. A few of them were well-puggled themselves, but not so far gone their innate sense of self-preservation at the prospect of ridicule and humiliation didn’t kick in. They laughed nervously.

  John blinked slowly, cleared his throat. ‘Izzhis no a great party?’ he said. ‘Ah mean ’sfuckin brilliant, eh?’

  ‘Eh… aye, it is,’ said one of the girls, her smile flickering uncertainly.

  ‘Brilliant, aye,’ said John. ‘Free bar, cannae whack it.’

  ‘So we see,’ said another of the girls. ‘You seem to have been making a fair attempt to get as much out of it as you can.’

  ‘Of course!’ he shouted, drawing some looks from the adjoining table. ‘It would be the baddest manners no to accept the hoshptality of our employers. Verry graishusz of em.’

  The admin girls squirmed in their seats, tried to avoid eye contact with him. Good, he thought, they’re still falling for it: hook, line, sinker and annual subscription to the Angling Times. But the niggling worry at the back of his mind remained. Time to find out.

  ‘Ananurrthing,’ he said, rocking back on his heels.

  ‘Eh?’ said one of the girls, the one wearing a bright red dress with a neckline that plummeted all the way to her pierced belly button.

  ‘Nannurrer thhing,’ he replied. They still looked at him blankly. He tried again. ‘And. Another. Thing.’

  ‘Oh,’ said red dress. ‘What?’

  ‘The great thing about zhiss parrty iszh that evrybiddy joins in. Abslootly evrbiddy.’ He waved his hand around, haphazardly indicating the crowded room. ‘Furrzample,’ he went on. ‘Errz all ra bosses at the top table there, having a good time, laughin an jokin like the rest of us.’ He pulled up a chair and sat down. ‘And… and… even that stuck-up bitch, whasirname? McKinnon. Aye, Miss McKinnon. Even her, she’s here, livin it up, gettin it on.’ He made a big show of looking around, frowning in slow exaggeration. ‘Where is she anyway? Was she no here earlier?’

  ‘Thank God she’s away,’ said one of the girls. ‘She’s a right bloody madam that one. And, no, she wasn’t living it up or getting it on. She was just the same as she is in the shop, a bossy bastard, thinking she’s better than us, all hoity-toity and up her own arse.’ She turned to the others. ‘I don’t know about you lot, but I sure as hell didn’t believe her when she said she had a sore head. I think she just couldn’t wait to get away from the likes of us.’

  ‘You mean she’s left?’ spluttered John. ‘She’s not at the party?’

  ‘Away home to a couple
of paracetamol and a stiff whisky, she told us,’ said another of the girls.

  ‘A stiff dildo more like,’ said someone else, and the girls burst out laughing.

  ‘Aye, that’s the only thing she’ll ever get between her legs!’ said red-dress to more laughter.

  A bowling ball deposited itself in John’s gut, settling in a weighty knot that almost buckled his legs. Christ almighty, why had she left? Surely she couldn’t know what was happening at the shop. Could she? Did she have some secret link to the store’s security systems? Something linked to her mobile, an alert or text message perhaps? It was possible. That was her job after all. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility she had such a set-up. Or maybe he was just being paranoid, freaked out by the pressure of the situation, the stress. Maybe the girls were right and McKinnon was just a snobby bitch who’d had enough of mixing with the commoners, jealous of their shop-floor friendships and cliques, their cosy banter and in-jokes. Better to hit the road before she outstayed her welcome. On reflection, listening to the girls’ opinion of her, that seemed the most likely scenario. He was being stupid, oversensitive, that was all. He forced himself to relax, bring his heart rate back down to normal.

  ‘Heh, you’ve went awful white,’ said one of the girls, a blonde with badly plucked eyebrows and way too much make-up plastered on her face. She was one to talk about skin colour. ‘Are ye okay?’ she asked.

  He broke into a wide smile and stood up. ‘Abslootly fine, never better,’ he slurred. ‘In fact,’ he said as he manoeuvred away from the table, ‘Ah might just strut my stuff on the dance floor. Embdy fancy joinin me?’

  ‘Nah, ye’re alright John Travolta,’ said red-dress. ‘You away and get on down. It’s the getting back up again that might give ye problems.’

  The girls started laughing again, and John careened across the room towards the top table where the bigwigs and head-bummers were sitting, looking as uncomfortable as ever, sickly smiles pasted to their faces, fingers lamely tapping the table in time to the music. The band had just kicked off a new set with a rollicking version of Brown Sugar, big, bold and brassy and a sure-fire floor-filler. John hitched his trousers. This was it. Time for the big finale.

  If people hadn’t noticed him before, they sure as fuck weren’t about to forget him now.

  ***

  Now that they’d actually made the decision to cross the threshold into the exhibition room, they each found a curious desire to be the first to approach the diamond. The three of them formed an almost reverential procession which gradually gathered pace as they drew nearer, footsteps quickening and breaths held in anticipation.

  Campbell, feeling Prentice and Kyle jostling him from behind, held up his hand, drew them to a halt before they got too close. The diamond glittered in the light from the lasers, sitting in the dark like a drop of blood on a dagger-point. It seemed to possess a black weight, a gravitational field, sucking them towards it. The very air seemed thicker here as if it was drawn to condense around the diamond.

  To his surprise, Campbell’s eyes were watering. He pretended to rub them in tiredness to clear his vision. Up close, he could see the detailed elegance of the cutting pattern, the subtle angles and contours of the facets. The diamond was the size and shape of an egg, slightly flattened, and its dark, unnatural colour gave it a brooding malice which unnerved him. It seemed to exist in a world other than their own, a different plane of reality which had somehow manifested itself in the shadowy gloom of this room in the centre of Glasgow. The others felt it too. Campbell could hear their slow, heavy breathing.

  They looked at each other and nodded. There was no going back. Without speaking, they each unhitched their rucksacks and set about their business. Campbell brought out a can of deodorant, while Prentice retrieved Boag’s modified litter-picker from his bag. Kyle circled the diamond’s plinth, inspecting the array of lasers and sensors.

  ‘Oxter-spray?’ asked Prentice. ‘Ah know ye’re a smelly bastard, but this is hardly the time or place, is it?’

  Campbell gave him a sarcastic smile, and sprayed the deodorant in wide circles in front of the Dark Side of the Moon. Immediately, a criss-crossing lattice of red beams flared up around the diamond, reflecting from the microscopic droplets of perfumed mist. The beams ran in impossibly thin lines from the laser source to the little mirrored sensors opposite, just as Boag had reproduced in his model. They formed the same complex three-dimensional grid of horizontal and vertical shafts cut across by diagonal beams from further lasers set into the floor and ceiling. The whole array stood out like red-hot spars of an impenetrable cage surrounding the diamond and its plinth, before fading as the deodorant dissipated.

  Kyle came around from the other side of the plinth. ‘It’s the same back there,’ he said. ‘Exactly as we thought.’

  ‘Okay then,’ said Prentice, interlacing his fingers and making a show of cracking his knuckles. ‘No time for fannying about. Here goes.’ He positioned himself in front of the plinth, stood with his legs apart, bracing and steadying himself. He kept the litter-picker at his side and motioned Campbell to join him. ‘Right,’ said Prentice. ‘Spray the stuff again, and keep it going for a bit longer this time.’

  Campbell moved behind Prentice and pressed the nozzle on the can, sending a fine jet of perfume into the air. He moved his arm back and forwards in a wide arc until all the beams were illuminated.

  Prentice coughed. ‘Fuck’s sake,’ he said. ‘What is that stuff? It’s honking.’

  ‘Minotaur,’ said Campbell. ‘Ah think that was some sort of mythological bull or somethin. Ye must have seen the adverts on the telly. Guy chasin a big cow through a cave.’

  ‘It smells like a bloody cow right enough,’ said Prentice. ‘Anyway, keep spraying.’ He got down onto his haunches and squinted through the gaps between the bars of light, seeking out the pathway he’d used in his practice sessions. It was almost impossible, every potential avenue had a final red barrier punching across the path from below or from the side. But Prentice knew where the weakness was; he’d spent long days lying on Boag’s floor, inching the litter-picker up the steep narrow channel through the strands of wool that ran from just above floor level to the golf ball sitting on its mount at the top of the model.

  But something wasn’t right.

  Now that he was in front of the real thing, somehow it didn’t look the same as the mock-up.

  Not the same at all.

  The angle of the beams was steeper than in Boag’s model; the whole plinth looked taller as it loomed above him. Prentice frowned. How could this be? He gingerly edged the litter-picker into the gap, his precious opening, the one he’d used so often on the model he felt he could do it with his eyes closed.

  It was too tight. The gap was too narrow.

  He got back to his feet, rubbed the stubble on his face. The height. There was something wrong with the height of the top section where the lasers were housed.

  ‘What?’ said Kyle. ‘Is there a problem?’

  ‘Fucking right there’s a problem,’ said Prentice. ‘The model’s wrong. This is different. Boag, that stupid wee wank, has screwed the whole thing up.’

  ‘But the photo, the measurements he took,’ said Kyle, ‘He told us he’d been meticulous, that he’d—’

  ‘Meticulous?’ Prentice rasped. ‘How in God’s name could he have been meticulous when something as simple as how high this thing’s supposed to be is completely fucked?’ He grabbed Campbell and dragged him to stand beside the plinth. ‘Look! This is above shoulder height. In the model it’s lower than this. The angles of the beams are all buggered because the height is all to cock.’

  Kyle looked at Campbell standing beside the plinth. Prentice was right; it was different. Campbell said nothing, just stared at his feet.

  Kyle walked round the plinth again, frowning. ‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Wait a bloody minute…’

  ‘What is it?’ Prentice asked.

  Kyle gestured to Campbell. ‘You,’ he
said. ‘Give me your phone.’

  Campbell continued to stare at his feet, distracted.

  ‘Hey! Dozy boy! Give me your fucking phone.’

  Campbell looked up quickly, wide-eyed. He took his phone from his pocket and handed it to Kyle. ‘I think I know what—’ he began.

  ‘Let’s just check something first,’ said Kyle.

  Prentice shook his head. ‘Will somebody tell me what in the name of crippled Christ is going on?’

  Kyle skipped through a few keystrokes on Campbell’s mobile, brought up his pictures album. He looked at Campbell, looked at the plinth, Campbell again and then back at the phone. ‘I fucking knew it. They’ve changed the bloody plinth, the bastards have switched it.’

  ‘No, they haven—’ Campbell tried to say.

  ‘Show me!’ said Prentice, snatching the phone away from Kyle. He looked at the screen. The picture of Campbell standing beside the plinth glowed in the half-light of the Bubble. It was true. The top section was lower in the picture. Not by much – an inch maybe, not much more.

  But enough to make a difference.

  ‘Bastards!’ said Prentice. ‘The fucking basta—’

  ‘They didn’t switch it,’ said Campbell.

  ‘Eh? What do you mean?’ Prentice said. ‘Look at the bloody picture. It’s fucking lower.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ said Campbell.

  ‘Are you fucking blind as well as stupid?’ said Kyle. ‘Of course it’s—’

  ‘It’s not lower in the picture,’ said Campbell. ‘It’s me that was taller.’

  Prentice and Kyle gaped at him, mouths working like newly-landed fish.

  Prentice screwed his eyes shut. ‘You were fucking taller? Taller? Holy shite, what did you do between then and now, chop a bit off your legs?’

  Campbell shook his head. ‘No. Shoes.’

  Kyle raised an eyebrow. ‘Shoes?’