Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘Yes, sir,’ the class chanted, prompted by Miss McPhail.

  ‘That’s lovely. And I hope you’ll all say your prayers tonight and be at Sunday School at the weekend.’

  When Robbie got home his mother challenged him straight away. ‘Jessie told Janet you were cheeky to the minister.’

  ‘I wasn’t, honest.’

  ‘Now go up to your room and wait for your dad to come back.’

  Robbie passed the time in an African prison. There were huts with roofs made of big leaves, and guards in Nazi uniforms, and he was tied to the floor with the Reverend Donaldson sitting next to him slurping from a bowl of soup. The reverend offers the soup to Robbie, accidentally spills some of it on him, yet Robbie feels nothing. ‘I think I’ve got leprosy, sir,’ Robbie tells him calmly. ‘You can make it out of here, but leave me behind.’ Trapped by wicked Germans, the famous Professor Robbie knows the only hope for mankind is for him to die without revealing the secret he has discovered – the formula explaining how all the bits of atoms fit together like parts in an Airfix kit, and if you smash them in just the right way then you get an incredible explosion, able to blow the Reverend Donaldson and everybody else to smithereens.

  When Mr Coyle returned he called Robbie downstairs and demanded an explanation. Janet had been sent to the kitchen to do her homework and Robbie found the living room eerily calm, the television having been switched off. His parents occupied two thirds of the recently acquired three-piece suite whose hire-purchase terms implied a strict code of use so as to prevent spills, and Robbie stood to attention beside the coffee table awaiting his fate. His father’s face was impassive, but his mother, he noticed, had a sorrowful look, as if she’d been crying. ‘We don’t want you getting in trouble at school when you’re doing so well,’ she said.

  ‘But I only asked the minister how he knows God’s real. What’s wrong with asking a question?’

  ‘It was the way you asked,’ said his mother. ‘Just don’t go getting too big for your boots, Robbie.’

  His father had meanwhile been collecting his thoughts. ‘What do you mean by God?’ he asked.

  Robbie pondered. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Then how could you expect anyone to tell you if God’s real?’

  This puzzled Robbie since his father regularly debated with unwitting Christians who came to the door and invariably went back down the path defeated. Maybe his dad was a believer after all, and those doorstep arguments were only a way of passing the time. Robbie asked him, ‘Did God make everything?’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Coyle. ‘Your mother and me made you, and we were made by your grandparents. That table was made by men in a factory, and so was this cup. The light coming through the window was made by the sun, and the sun was made by dust and gravity.’

  ‘But who started it all? Why?’

  ‘Nobody did,’ said his father. ‘The universe has always been here, it never had a beginning and it doesn’t have an end. It’s infinite. Go for a million billion miles and you’ll still have just as far to go if you want to reach the end of things. Live for a million billion years and you’ve had no life at all, compared to infinity.’

  Mrs Coyle said, ‘I don’t think this helps, Joe …’

  ‘Let me finish, pet,’ he said firmly. ‘Now, son, next time you see the Reverend Donaldson, just ask him this. In the Bible it says that first of all there was nothing, and then God said let there be light, and there was light, which was the first thing. Well, where did the light come from? You’ve got to have something that’s shining and making all the light, so it doesn’t really make sense, does it? And another thing: if God spoke before he switched the light on, that means he must have made sound first. But it doesn’t say that in the Bible …’

  ‘Joe,’ said Mrs Coyle softly, ‘that really isn’t the point.’

  ‘Will you mind not interrupting me or I’ll lose my thread. Now, son, all I’m saying is that if you want to get into discussions about things then you need to know your facts, you need to be polite, and you need to be completely logical. But you weren’t, were you? You asked an old man, who’s spent years and years believing in God, how he knows that God’s real. That was a damn stupid question to ask him, don’t you think?’

  ‘Joe, please …’

  Mr Coyle was reddening with irritation. ‘Can you not go and see to the tea, Anne?’ Then he addressed Robbie again. ‘Let me tell you how it all started. When people lived in caves and wore animal skins they didn’t know how anything worked. If it rained, they said it was because of the rain god, and when they wanted to grow crops they prayed to the rain god because they were afraid that otherwise they might starve. All these people started out free and equal, but then there were one or two of them put on fancy gear, feathers on their heads and the like, and said they knew all about the rain god. These were the priests, and they started telling everyone what to do. And because the people were frightened and ignorant, they obeyed.’

  It reminded Robbie of the African village. The German soldiers had run away and the Reverend Donaldson goes round the huts, telling the people with leprosy what to do. ‘We all get a wee bit ill now and again,’ he says soothingly to a lady with no arms. ‘That way we know what it’s like to feel healthy.’

  ‘Eventually things started to change,’ said Mr Coyle. ‘People worked out that water evaporates from the sea and condenses as rain. So there was no rain god any more, but there was still a god of war or love. Then they thought of evolution, so there was no need for those gods either. In the end there’s no reason for any of them, except as a way of making people feel less frightened about dying, though it doesn’t seem to work too well at that either.’ Robbie’s mother was coming back from the kitchen. ‘So you see, son,’ Mr Coyle concluded, ‘you just have to be logical about these things.’

  Mrs Coyle sat down again, and Robbie stared at his parents’ faces. For a moment, the only thing to be heard was the traffic outside and the transistor radio in the kitchen, accompanying Janet’s art homework with a song that went Oo-ee, chirpy chirpy cheep cheep. Eventually Robbie said, ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Aye,’ said his dad. ‘You can switch on the telly now.’

  8

  Sometimes Mr and Mrs Coyle would have a ‘wee night’. Grown-up friends would be invited; peanuts would be served from wooden bowls left strategically placed around the living room; tins of beer would be opened, their discarded ring-pull tops serving as toys or jewellery for the excited children in the half-hour of socializing they were allowed before being sent upstairs. These wee nights mostly weren’t wee at all; they necessitated a major rearrangement of the living-room furniture, with chairs being carefully positioned so as to allow ease of access, and the gate-leg dining table being opened to its full splendour to bear the weight of all the sausage rolls, Scotch eggs and tinned Russian salad it was called upon to support. There might even be dancing, with Mrs Coyle’s favourite Carpenters record doing a few turns on the radiogram.

  The children learned there was to be a wee night with Moira, whom they’d not seen since she had babysat almost a year previously. In fact the night was to be one of the more truly wee, since the only guests would be Moira and her new boyfriend David, who taught science at a Glasgow secondary school. While Janet eagerly looked forward to being with Moira again, Robbie was more excited about meeting a real scientist for the first time in his life, and as the date of the wee night drew nearer, his mental image of David crystallized in increasing detail, until Robbie knew with complete certainty and confidence that he was shortly to become the trusted companion and assistant to a man with the wisdom of Dr Who, the courage of Captain Kirk, and the physical appearance of Tony Curtis in The Persuaders.

  The fellow who showed up at the door alongside Moira was so totally unrecognizable that for at least the first ten minutes Robbie was struck completely dumb. David was short and skinny with receding hair and a thick moustache that hung over his mouth and served as a trap for the peanuts and crisps
Robbie was told to offer him, reminding Robbie of the filter-feeding mechanism of blue whales which he’d seen on a wildlife documentary. He wore a caramel-coloured corduroy jacket and brought from his inside pocket a pipe which he lit, filling the room (and, as it turned out, the entire house) with a pungent odour that matched his marine appearance.

  ‘Robbie starts secondary school next year,’ Mrs Coyle told the visitor. She was wearing an orange dress that Robbie had never seen before and sat forward on the edge of her chair in a way that made her look both nervous and uncomfortable. ‘Janet’s there already, doing well at art. Robbie’s more interested in science.’

  ‘That’s good,’ David said between noxious puffs. ‘What sort of things do you like, Robbie?’

  ‘Space. Stories about other planets.’

  ‘Secondary science isn’t really like that,’ David informed him, a remark as disappointing as his appearance. ‘It’s physics, chemistry, biology.’ He took the glass of whisky Mr Coyle had poured. ‘Chemistry’s the most interesting, because that’s the one with all the experiments and bangs and clouds of gas.’

  ‘You’re biased, darling,’ Moira laughed, nuzzling against him, an ornate sherry glass delicately held in her hand while Janet sat silently beside her in the third space on the settee. Chemistry, with its clouds and smells, sounded to Robbie no different from what his mum did in the kitchen every Sunday when roasting the dinner.

  ‘I want to learn about gravity,’ he told the teacher.

  ‘You will,’ David said bluntly, and Robbie retreated with the peanut bowl, leaving the adults to talk now that Mr and Mrs Coyle were both seated with their guests.

  ‘I hear you’re a union man,’ said Mr Coyle, going straight for his favourite subject.

  ‘EIS rep for the school,’ David replied. ‘We’ve got pretty much all the teaching staff signed up.’

  After listening to the men exchange union initials for a few minutes, the women broke off into a conversation of their own while Robbie, sitting silently and ready to be called on for nut duty at any moment, idly flipped his attention from one grown-up speaker to another, as though scanning radio frequencies.

  ‘You ought to try yoga classes, Anne. You might even find there’s one where you could take Janet, too.’

  ‘That’s right, Joe, we’re having to consider a work-to-rule.’

  ‘And are your mother’s legs any better?’

  ‘The only way we can get anywhere is through collective action.’

  Robbie stared down at the peanut bowl on his lap and began counting the contents. He’d never noticed before how interesting peanuts could be – each one was different from the rest, if you looked closely.

  ‘Of course there’s a socialist way of teaching, and that’s what we try to do now. It isn’t the old rote learning, top of the class or dunce’s cap nonsense any more. Comprehensive education is about equality.’

  Mr Coyle had already explained to Robbie that the secondary school he was to attend was the new and modern kind in which children weren’t segregated by ability. Being clever didn’t make you more special than anybody else; it was no different from being a bit taller or a bit faster, or having blue eyes instead of brown. Since everyone’s different it means that everybody’s really the same. Like peanuts.

  ‘And I hope you like chicken, Moira, because I’ve made coq au vin. It’s a Fanny Cradock recipe.’

  Moira’s sudden intake of breath was enough to tear Robbie’s attention away from his laboured fascination with the bowl; Moira had a hand to her mouth in a gesture that made him wonder what was so terrible about Fanny Cradock’s cock o’ van. ‘Did I not tell you, Anne?’ she said with a heavily apologetic air. ‘I’ve gone vegetarian.’

  The sense of domestic calamity was enough to interrupt the men in mid-flow. ‘Vegetarian?’ Mr Coyle sceptically echoed. ‘Since when?’

  ‘Nearly a year,’ said Moira. ‘I became a Buddhist.’

  The raising of eyebrows this caused sent tremors of interest through the two children.

  ‘A Buddhist?’ Mr Coyle again repeated, incredulously now. ‘You mean you meditate ‘n’ that?’ Moira nodded with an air of sublime contentment. ‘But do you not need to get your head shaved and go to a monastery?’

  ‘There’s lots of ways of being a Buddhist,’ Moira told him. ‘I do it my way.’ Janet was gazing at her with strengthened admiration, and if Mr Coyle noticed then it could only have added to the threat he felt at having a mystic loony inside the four walls he rented.

  ‘Since you’ve only been doing it for less than a year, do you not think you could have a night off for the sake of a piece of chicken?’ he suggested.

  ‘Joe, don’t,’ said his wife. ‘It’s no problem at all.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Anne, I was sure I told you.’

  ‘I expect you did and I forgot.’ Mrs Coyle said there was plenty of other food she could eat. ‘And I could make you an omelette if you like … or does that count as an animal?’ She and Moira laughed, Janet joined in.

  ‘That’s a very good question,’ said Mr Coyle, smiling too, but with sarcasm rather than humour. ‘The chicken or the egg, eh? If you’re going to be reincarnated as a chicken then you’ve got to be an egg first, so I suppose you don’t eat eggs, do you, Moira?’

  ‘No, Joe, I don’t eat eggs.’

  ‘Bread?’

  ‘Yes, I eat bread.’

  ‘Ah, but it’s got yeast in it, and that’s alive, isn’t it, David?’

  ‘Joe,’ said his wife, ‘let’s drop it.’

  ‘Yeast is a fungus,’ David declared, ‘so it’s no problem.’

  ‘What about a sea urchin?’ Mr Coyle suggested.

  ‘Come on in the kitchen, Moira,’ said Mrs Coyle, standing up. ‘Let’s see what we’ve got. No sea urchins, that’s for sure!’ The three females exited the room, creating their own half-heard island of laughter behind the closed kitchen door while Mr Coyle continued to contemplate the infinite paradox the wee night had unexpectedly raised.

  ‘Well, David,’ he said, raising his whisky glass with a clink of ice, ‘as a scientist and a socialist, I’m sure you regard all religions as the opium of the masses.’

  ‘Certainly,’ David agreed, taking a puff on the pipe which might have been part of the reason why the women were so eager to escape, and which was now making Robbie consider joining them. ‘But Buddhism isn’t a religion, Joe.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘It has no god.’

  ‘What about Buddha, then?’

  David briefly exchanged his pipe for his glass as a way of keeping his whiskery lips occupied, then said, ‘Millions of uneducated people worship Buddhist idols, and for them it might as well be a religion, which is why Mao has done the right thing in China. But Buddhism’s really a philosophy, not a religion. In fact, when you read Engels, you can see that Buddhism and Marxism have quite a lot in common. You know how Engels defined dialectics? The science of interconnections. That’s what Marxism’s all about – it says that everything in the universe is connected to everything else.’

  Mr Coyle looked doubtful. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever thought of socialism in those sorts of terms.’

  ‘It’s true, though,’ said the teacher. ‘You take any person, Napoleon, say. Did Napoleon change history? No – history made Napoleon. He was a product of particular socio-economic conditions, that’s what Marxism tells us, and it was only at a particular stage in the historical evolution of the class struggle that Napoleon could have emerged. If he’d been born in the Middle Ages then he’d never have become an emperor. And if Napoleon had died when he was a baby, somebody else would have grown up and done pretty much the same things he did. We’re all connected to each other through the dialectics of history.’

  Mr Coyle gave a dismissive laugh. ‘That’s very clever, David, but I don’t think it’s got much to do with anything the lads at our branch meetings would understand.’

  ‘Maybe not,’ David conceded, ‘but revolutio
ns aren’t started by people at branch meetings; they come from the intelligentsia, the petit bourgeoisie.’

  Robbie took in this lesson while staring at the peanut bowl. He liked the sound of the petty boor-joys, whom he imagined wearing pretty, frilly nineteenth-century clothes, jigging about like idiots in ballrooms. He wondered if the student who leapt in a river to save two children was one of them. If James Deuchar hadn’t jumped, would the Daleks of history have made somebody else take the plunge instead?

  From the kitchen, more liquid female laughter rippled into Robbie’s consciousness. Here, though, everything was in deadly earnest, as the revolution was plotted that would send Sam Dunbar straight from the putting green to a firing squad and make it possible to buy yourself a new spacesuit without having to traipse from Marks and Spencer to C&A in search of the best deal.

  ‘If you ask me, David,’ said Mr Coyle, ‘it’s the intellectuals who cause all the worst problems for the labour movement. When you’ve got a truly popular force uniting workers then you don’t need all these Fabians and the like.’ It sounded to Robbie like a rude grown-up word.

  David was shaking his head, spreading grey smoke before taking the pipe from his mouth, waving its spittle-moistened end in the air. ‘If you want to get the means of production into the hands of the workers then it’s no use waiting for an uneducated mob of coal miners and shipbuilders to storm Buckingham Palace, because it won’t happen. Look at the sort of direct militant action that’s happening now. Look at the revolution in Northern Ireland. If that was only about some Paddies with religious differences I don’t suppose the special forces would be quite so keen on shooting dead every Marxist they can lay hands on.’

  Mr Coyle had had enough, and Robbie could sense the tension as his father rose to his feet. ‘I’d better see how Anne’s getting on. Fancy another drink?’ He went through to the kitchen, leaving his peanut-attendant son alone with the revolutionary in a smoky silence whose seconds lasted longer than either found comfortable.