Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  HIS NOBLE ENDEAVOUR. THIS MONUMENT TO HIS HEROISM

  WAS ERECTED BY PUBLIC SUBSCRIPTION, 3RD JANUARY 1863.

  Mrs Coyle shook her head in sympathy. ‘Poor lad.’

  ‘They’d all be dead by now anyway,’ said Mr Coyle. ‘You see, Robbie? What difference does it make in the end whether or not he decided to be a hero?’

  ‘That’s a terrible thing to say,’ Mrs Coyle declared, and Janet agreed.

  Mr Coyle shrugged. ‘It may be terrible, but who can deny it? Unless he’s up there now on a cloud looking down at us, it makes no odds what he did.’

  Mr Coyle had many times invited God to strike him down for his blasphemies, but had so far survived. His own experiences as a child, he’d told his offspring, had been enough to convince him that the Catholic Church in which he was raised was only another way of controlling people’s minds, along with capitalism, television and golf, the latter being one of Mr Coyle’s pet hates. ‘If God doesn’t like what I’m saying then why doesn’t he send a thunderbolt right now?’ Mr Coyle had told a pair of Jehovah’s Witnesses standing at the front door one evening while Janet and Robbie lay on the floor watching Mission: Impossible. Robbie wanted to go to the door to get a look at the brave souls who dared challenge Mr Coyle’s unarguable logic, but was sent back to the living room for his own protection. ‘At least he was a good socialist, I’ll say that much for Jesus,’ was the comment Robbie overheard from his father. ‘It’s these people who want to bow down and worship him I can’t abide.’

  Standing at the memorial, Robbie now said to his father, ‘Don’t you think it was a good thing that man done, jumping in after they children?’

  ‘No,’ said his dad, ‘I think it was daft. It meant a grown man died instead of a boy, that’s all. And where were the children’s parents? What were they playing at, letting them fall in like that?’

  Janet and Robbie had been lying on their tummies on the floor watching Mission: Impossible. A newly developed super-fast airliner was flying high above the clouds, and in seat 13C a man of dangerously foreign appearance was preparing to bring out a gun. Some rows ahead, an elderly actress recently seen in a hospital drama enjoyed by Mr and Mrs Coyle got ready to faint. ‘How can you prove to me there’s a God?’ Mr Coyle was saying to the two neatly dressed Christians at the door. Then the elderly actress swooned theatrically, and the one playing Barbara Perkins went to give assistance but found the sleek barrel of an imitation gun pointed at her crisp firm breast.

  Far below, a hostage-taker was falling backwards, his gaze directed through the plaster mouldings of the ceiling to the silver dot in the sky where a bullet, he felt sure, really was held completely stationary in mid-air, in complete contravention of the laws of physics, so that he immediately learned the appalling truth of his situation. Everything around him, he realized, must be an illusion. He had joined the People’s Liberation Army after the gunning down of his brother during a demonstration intended to be peaceful; he had volunteered to participate in capturing the French Ambassador in the full knowledge that he might die, convinced his sacrifice would not be in vain, and this morning he had recited his prayers with a feeling of lightness and ecstasy. But now, in his final moment, he understood that every passenger in the aeroplane was an actor; so too were the French Ambassador and his secretary, who would later remove capsules of fake blood, and crack jokes with the guards whose blank rounds had been so convincing. The hostage-taker watched his life become an airborne speck and knew his death to be futile; so too, therefore, had been his very existence. He was no more than an incidental character in a story he’d been unaware of; and in the final credits – his epitaph – he would be known only as ‘Terrorist # 2’.

  ‘Galileo stood at the top of the Leaning Tower of Pisa,’ Mr Coyle explained once the family left the monument to continue their Sunday walk. ‘He dropped a cannonball and a wee marble; both hit the ground at exactly the same time. The cannonball was bigger and heavier, which meant gravity was pulling it more strongly; but it was also harder to budge. The two effects cancel out; everything falls at the same rate.’

  ‘What about a feather?’ Robbie asked.

  ‘Air resistance slows it down.’ Aristotle believed a feather floats slowly because its natural realm is the sky; a stone hurries to return to the ground where it belongs. Everything has its proper station in the world. ‘But that’s rubbish,’ said Mr Coyle. ‘Like the idea that people should know their place. We’re all equal, Robbie; you and me, we’re as good as anybody.’

  ‘What are you telling the boy now?’ Mrs Coyle intervened, turning to examine the pair walking behind her.

  ‘Just teaching him what’s what,’ her husband replied.

  Mr Coyle originally came from a part of Glasgow called the Gorbals. It sounded very much like Goebbels, a name that had figured significantly in the documentary after which Robbie had been told to ‘Belsen up to bed’. The Gorbals was a ghetto for Glasgow’s poor, though Mr Coyle always spoke warmly of it, insisting it was never as bad as people made out. There had been sensational books about razor gangs, films showing criminals and drunks, but that was only because the ruling class are afraid of poverty and live in constant fear of revolution.

  When they got home Mr Coyle positioned himself behind the raised pages of a camera magazine while Mrs Coyle decided to Paxo off to the kitchen. Robbie and Janet watched a film in which harsh-voiced German soldiers were killed in a variety of ways.

  Robbie was troubled. James Deuchar must surely have been a good man; yet what scale or balance might measure and prove it? How to demonstrate, just as Galileo had shown the equivalent descent of all falling bodies, that a man who gives his life for a just cause is worth more than a uniformed actor blown up in an imagined spectacle?

  ‘Dad,’ said Robbie, ‘why would you save me and Janet if we fell in a river, but not somebody else’s children?’

  The glossy cover of Photographer’s Weekly showed a heavily made-up woman on a couch who now descended to reveal the all-knowing face of Mr Coyle. ‘It’s every parent’s natural duty to protect their own children.’

  ‘Is that all?’ Robbie asked. ‘Just something you’ve got to do, like going to work?’

  The magazine sank lower still, onto Mr Coyle’s lap. ‘No, I’d want to save you because I love you.’

  The words had the ominous finality of a judicial sentence.

  Robbie said, ‘Can’t you love somebody else’s children too?’

  ‘Not the same way,’ said his father. ‘It’s instinct. It’s how we’ve evolved. It’s why you’re here.’

  Mr Coyle then spoke about giraffes, saying they all used to look like horses until one day a giraffe was born whose neck was half an inch longer than usual, so it could reach leaves half an inch higher up the trees. There was a bad year, not much to eat, and most of the regular giraffes starved to death, but not the one who could nibble that extra half-inch. It grew up and had lots of baby giraffes, similarly blessed. That was evolution.

  Robbie liked this story; all you had to do was keep repeating it over the generations, and you could see why giraffes ended up with long necks. Except that he couldn’t see why the same thing hadn’t happened to horses.

  ‘Dad,’ he said, ‘why didn’t the giraffes just get big long noses like elephants, then they could still reach up into the trees?’

  ‘Because the special giraffe that got born one day had a neck that was half an inch longer than usual, not a nose.’

  ‘But surely another giraffe could have been born with a long nose?’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Coyle. ‘Otherwise giraffes would look like elephants now, but they don’t, so it never happened.’

  It was fairly plain to Robbie that people could be born with long noses – Mr Connor two doors along being a prime example – so he couldn’t see why the same wasn’t true for giraffes. Come to that, why hadn’t humans evolved giraffe necks, or elephant trunks? Was Mr Connor the advance guard of a new master race? But his father had expla
ined evolution, and there was no more to be said about it.

  ‘So do you only love me and Janet because that’s the way you’ve evolved?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Mr Coyle, and the reclining woman on Photographer’s Weekly began once more to ascend.

  ‘If I was bad, would you still love me?’

  ‘Of course, even if you killed someone. Even if you were Hitler. It’s my parental duty.’

  An infernal cycle presented itself to Robbie’s imagination, in which successive generations follow a script laid down for them millions of years previously. On a wild and fierce night in 1860, a man departed from the script by doing something for which there could be no logical explanation, no justification other than pure goodness. James Deuchar defied the gravitational pull of death; therein lay the kernel of his immortality.

  3

  Next morning Robbie’s bed was wet again. He sincerely hoped his condition would improve before he grew up because he was sure it would count against him when he applied to be an astronaut. The Boy’s Book of Facts included a section on ‘careers’ in which necessary qualifications and personal attributes were itemized for every occupation a young man might care to undertake: plumber, soldier, engine driver. Astronauts, the book declared, would need excellent powers of concentration and a cool head. Peeing the bed wasn’t specified as a cause of automatic disqualification, and Robbie would of course point out to the selection panel that a small bag within an astronaut’s pressurized suit is there to collect every weightless drop of urine passed while waking or asleep; nevertheless he knew it made him look like someone whose head was far from cool, since in all his comics not a single hero ever woke to find his mattress soaked through every intervening layer of bed sheet and folded towel, all because he’d had a drink after seven o’clock the night before.

  The problem was that he had a vivid imagination, and his mum said this meant he spent too long in his own thoughts instead of going out and playing. The word sounded like a cross between ‘livid’, meaning angry, and ‘Vivian’, a fat woman in the baker’s who was always laughing. ‘Vivid’ was a confused and insoluble state somewhere in between.

  A man on television gave advice to children wanting to go into space, saying they must first work as US Air Force test pilots. Robbie told his dad later that night; Mr Coyle folded his newspaper, looked disapprovingly at his son and said, ‘You’d only end up getting sent to Vietnam.’

  In that case, Robbie countered, he’d be a Soviet cosmonaut.

  ‘You don’t speak Russian.’

  ‘I’ll learn.’

  The Americans and Russians were enemies, but the Russians were better at sending people into space, and Robbie’s father had once said that some of his friends in the Trades Council went on a delegation to Leningrad and found it a very happy place where there was no crime or unemployment, women worked as lorry drivers or mechanics, and people could do whatever they liked, within reason. In America there was segregation and organized crime, and hidden capitalists controlled the lives of millions, helped by the CIA. Anyone wanting to be an American astronaut would wind up dropping napalm on children, according to Mr Coyle, while in Russia the only hard bit was learning the alphabet.

  Robbie asked him, ‘Why do some people not like the Russians?’

  ‘Because the workers there had a revolution against the capitalists, and one day the Scots’ll get the gether and do the same. We nearly succeeded in 1919, until Churchill sent the army into Glasgow to stop it.’ Then Mr Coyle began to speak of a future socialist paradise in which everyone would be equal, dressed in a classless uniform which sounded to Robbie a bit like the costumes of higher life forms in Star Trek. Money would no longer exist. ‘Why should one man get paid twice as much as another for doing exactly the same work?’ Mr Coyle said. And it was true; when did anybody in Star Trek ever open a wage packet, or put his hand in his pocket in search of change? Come to that, did they even have pockets? In the age of socialism, Robbie realized, such things would no longer be needed. It would be a world without competition or strife, his father promised, with no more war, since there would be no capitalists left to encourage hostilities. Every factory and shop would be owned by the state. You wouldn’t have to traipse from C&A to Marks and Spencer and back again to find the best deal, said Mr Coyle; you’d just go by free public transport to the nearest, most convenient shop, and what you’d get there would be exactly the same as you’d get anywhere else. And when you bought a cup of coffee you wouldn’t have to wait and see whether you got it in a big mug or a wee teacup, because coffee would be served in a standard size, for a standard price (they do it with beer, so why not everything else?). Of course, not everyone might be happy in the new utopia. The people who used to run the shops and factories, for example. But they’d be made to realize they’d lived a life of selfishness, sponging off their fellow man, always grabbing and clawing and trying to be richer than anyone else. In a capitalist society, you could only better yourself at the expense of others: if you got richer, it meant someone else was getting poorer, and that’s not fair. Most of the capitalists would accept that in their old ways they were no better than thieves, but if the retraining and education didn’t work then they’d be asked to leave, so that everyone else could get on in peace.

  Mrs Coyle, coming out of the kitchen into the living room, decided to chip in. ‘It’ll never work. Do you really want us to live like Russians?’

  ‘If Russia’s got problems it’s only because there’s half the world agin them,’ her husband retorted. ‘And look what they did for us in the war. We’d never have won without the Red Army. The Americans only joined in when they knew they could be on the winning side, same as they did in the First.’

  ‘Well, it’s time to Red Army upstairs, Robbie,’ Mrs Coyle announced.

  ‘I’m still talking to the boy,’ Mr Coyle protested from his armchair.

  ‘Filling his head with nonsense, that’s what you’re doing.’

  Mr Coyle flushed. ‘You call it nonsense to say we should all be equal?’

  ‘I say you can’t go against human nature. And this lad needs his sleep – you’ve got school in the morning, Robbie.’

  Mr Coyle was having none of it. He turned to Robbie, who stood immobilized wondering which parent to obey, and said to him, ‘You see what we have to put up with? The prattle of women.’

  Mrs Coyle went out in silence and from the kitchen came the thud of cupboard doors, leaving Mr Coyle to resume his lecture while his face assumed a triumphantly beatific look. ‘It’s not human nature that makes people exploit each other,’ he told Robbie. ‘It’s animal nature, a relic of the beasts we’re descended from. But people progress, the species improves. Capitalism’s the law of the jungle, and we’re evolving beyond that.’ While giraffes had for aeons been putting all their efforts into perfecting their necks, humans were on the way to becoming spacesuited socialists. ‘Are you putting on the kettle?’ Mr Coyle called to his wife, smiling at Robbie with a conspiratorial wink.

  ‘No,’ she shouted back. ‘I’m having a revolution. If we’re all going to be equal then you can do it yourself.’

  4

  The Coyles’ next-door neighbours were the Dunbars, who had a telephone, a car, took package holidays in Spain, and would face summary execution come the uprising.

  It was Sam Dunbar’s fondness for golf that really seemed to irritate Mr Coyle more than anything. ‘Look at him!’ he said, standing inside the front door staring through the net curtain of the hall window at Sam, in tartan cap and white golfing shoes, depositing a bag of clubs in the back of his car in readiness for a session.

  Sam’s two daughters were a few years older than Robbie and seemed to him like grown-ups already, objects of fearful fascination. He’d see them come and go in their secondary-school uniforms, smiling beings from another world.

  It was a pity they’d probably be shot, and all because their father thought himself a cut above the rest of the scheme. Sam Dunbar worked for th
e GPO, from which it was deduced he must get a good salary and cut-price phone calls. The Coyles could afford a phone, but Mr Coyle cited a number of reasons against getting one. He didn’t want to be pestered about union subscriptions, or have to listen to the problems of his older sister who lived in England and existed for the Coyles only by way of Christmas cards inscribed in evenly sloping handwriting. Most of all, Mr Coyle feared installation of a telephone would prompt MI5 surveillance, for being treasurer of the local branch of the ATWU made him an inevitable target for the authorities.

  Cars were unnecessary since the public-transportation system was perfectly adequate, and so Mr Coyle had never learned to drive one. As for holidays in Spain, why go there when there was so much to see in Scotland? The Isle of Bute was a lot more interesting than Majorca, and even had a fairly bustling nightlife if that was what you wanted. This left golf, to which the plain objection was that it was totally pointless.

  ‘Just look at him!’ Mr Coyle said as Sam Dunbar came back out to his car. ‘What’s he like in that bunnet? Chic Murray, eh? The Tall Droll with the Small Doll!’ Pleased by the resemblance he discerned between his next-door neighbours and a famous Glasgow double act, Mr Coyle would for a while call Sam and his petite wife Maureen ‘Chic and Maidie’ when referring to them in private.

  ‘I think he looks very smart,’ Mrs Coyle ventured. ‘Maybe you should get yourself a hat like that.’

  ‘I’m not going to the plant in one of those.’

  ‘I don’t mean for work. And I could do with getting you a new pair of shoes an’ all, for if we go out.’

  ‘You’re not using the housekeeping to get me shoes. Besides, we never go out.’

  ‘That’s why you need new shoes.’

  Robbie and Janet were in the living room watching the final of Top of the Form, a competition played between teams of strange-voiced English schoolchildren and presented by a man with crinkly hair held rigid by Brylcreem. ‘Forms’ were mysterious things found only in English schools, where boys in smart uniforms played cricket and grew up to be prime ministers or television announcers. Anybody wanting to go to one of those schools had to pay lots of money and then their name was put on a form. If you were top of the form that meant you were the best, and you’d get first choice when it came to deciding between being a politician or a presenter. At least, that’s what Robbie had understood of his father’s explanation, from which he’d also learned that there were schools in England where children didn’t go home at night but stayed in dormitories, and there were some in Scotland too, for the offspring of English lords who owned castles and were only interested in grouse and salmon and forests, decking themselves out in kilts to go to fancy balls, then heading straight back to London as soon as the party was finished.