Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  He said be careful and the kid is being careful. He’s knocked the game, he’s walking to the door. Steg said don’t be late and the kid is going to be late, very late indeed. So late he’s never coming back and it feels terrific.

  Thing is, there’s stuff in the world the kid needs to see. As in really go there, not just watch it on cable. India, say, or the Antarctic. Hospital operating theatres. The tunnelled maze of a sewerage system. The kid needs to see these things, just like he needs to go through every possible ordering of his socks or the features on his DVD, because otherwise he feels edgy, and the kid feels edgy all the time at the thought of that great big world escaping him, all its channels going on without his presence. Boardrooms, locker rooms, motorways, tree houses, abandoned cottages, frozen lakes; all the things he’s seen in pictures, on a screen or in his head. The bit where some railings are bent and a small kid can pass through; the spot on the planet where a lion is eating a springbok right now; mountains, mountaineers, mountaineers right at the top of mountains and others at the bottom; the people in the mountain shops who sold the mountaineers their gear; it’s all happening, it’s all there in the Special Features menu of life on Earth, makes five pairs of socks look so damn easy to get through, and the kid is missing it all but he needs to consume as much as he can before the meteorite hits because That’s The Way It Is, makes him so edgy to think about it, walking towards the exit, seeing the presidential guard of Uzmania, actually an old guy who’s looking the other way, staring out into the street, and the kid thinks I bet he’s as sad as the rest of them because he knows inside his heart, in that place where we know things but don’t know that we know them, he knows we’re all going to die, the power switch is going to be flicked, the screen’s going to go dead and we’ll hardly have begun to go through those Special Features. He knows it and I know it, thinks the kid, but I know more than him because I’ve seen the Death List and his name is on it. And the kid walks right past him, straight in front of the presidential guard whose line of sight encourages the kid to gaze momentarily skywards: an aeroplane, a little dot in the sky full of people who are going to die too when the meteorite comes and the power switch gets flipped. It’s all reality, hyper-reality, ultra-reality, the infinite matrix of nows and happenings and the kid has made his choice, he’s outside in the street, the neodyms worked and the inductance loop was foiled. He’s free. He knocked the game and he’s a winner.

  3

  Joe Coyle was studying the herb section in ASDA. ‘Take a look at this,’ he said to a passing assistant, a girl of eighteen or nineteen who stopped to see what he wanted. Mr Coyle was holding a small cardboard box of dried parsley. ‘Fifty-seven pence,’ he said.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘For twenty grams.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the girl.

  ‘And do you know how many grams there are in a kilogram?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘One thousand. That means you’re charging £28.50 for a kilo of parsley.’

  The girl looked puzzled. ‘You want a kilo of parsley?’

  ‘Not at that price!’ Mr Coyle laughed. ‘I could grow a kilo of parsley in my garden for nothing.’

  ‘Then why don’t you?’

  Joe smiled and took a breath. He couldn’t see why this assistant was being quite so dim, though they always were, whenever he challenged any of them about the price of dried herbs. ‘It’s not even parsley you’re paying for, is it? It’s mostly cardboard. And the glass jars are worse.’

  ‘Packaging costs money,’ the girl conceded, willing to give up half a minute of box-stacking to hear him out.

  ‘So really when I come here I’m buying a lot of cardboard and plastic with a bit of food thrown in for free?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said. ‘You could always go to the fresh fruit and veg section.’

  ‘But you don’t have parsley there.’

  ‘Don’t we? We should. Come and let’s have a look.’

  She led him along the aisles to a part of the store he knew perfectly well – he came here every day. Like a hunter anticipating the smooth operation of a well-laid trap, Joe watched the girl pick through coriander, basil and thyme, all sprouting delicately from plastic pots in cellophane wrappers.

  ‘No parsley there,’ Mr Coyle declared triumphantly.

  ‘It’s better value than the boxes.’

  ‘Not if it isn’t there, though. You can’t call empty space good value. Zero pence for zero grams.’

  She turned and looked at him. ‘You could always do your shopping somewhere else.’

  An older female staff member approached and intervened. ‘Morning, Joe, how’s Anne?’

  ‘Not too bad, Agnes.’ The young assistant slipped quietly away, leaving her superior to deal with the customer’s complaints, which suddenly had nothing to do with parsley any more. ‘Have you seen what’s going on in your wine display?’

  ‘What’s that then, Joe?’

  ‘Come on and I’ll show you.’ Mr Coyle snaked back through the aisles with his new companion, walking briskly with the air of an expert, until they reached a dense array of dark bottles. ‘Says here it’s three for the price of two.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘But that’s for the Cabernet Sauvignon – all these bottles are Merlot. Are they in the same offer?’

  Agnes looked ruffled. ‘Maybe there’s been a mistake …’

  ‘Great way to sell wine, isn’t it – pretend it’s reduced when it isn’t?’

  ‘That’s not how it works, Joe.’

  ‘Not that I’m accusing you personally, mind. I know your hands are tied by the people at headquarters. Same in all the shops these days, the staff have got no control over what they sell, it’s all decided by the ones at the top who only look at balance sheets and never spend a day on the shop floor seeing what people actually want …’

  ‘I’ll get it sorted, Joe. Mind how you go, and give my love to Anne.’

  Then Mr Coyle was alone with the Merlot, still not sure if three bottles would cost him £8.58 or £12.87. It was the Australian kind he liked, always thought it funny that you could get wine from Australia, place full of kangaroos and boomerangs, Robbie had one of those but could never make it come back. No, we can’t make anything come back. Chile, too, he didn’t mind drinking Chilean wine now Pinochet was gone, damned CIA with their coup against Allende, long time ago, of course, but you need people with long memories to bring the likes of General Pinochet to account – and who was the biggest friend of that murdering bastard?

  ‘Maggie Thatcher,’ he said to the person who happened to be passing. It was the girl again.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘That’s who looked after him when he came here.’

  Her face screwed up in the sort of puzzlement she’d felt when failing maths at school. ‘Are you still looking for parsley?’

  ‘Oh, never mind,’ Joe said with the resigned impatience his years entitled him to. Young people these days only want to listen to music squawking out their damned earphones, interested in nothing but internets and eye-pods and God knows what else. All it’d take would be another Pinochet or Thatcher to show up on Big Brother, as long as they were good-looking and ran around showing off their bare arse, and everybody’d love them. Death camps and slavery – these kids’d vote for it on their mobiles.

  He went to the checkout empty-handed. No wine or parsley today. ‘Cheerio, Agnes,’ he called as he walked past the fag desk but she didn’t hear him.

  It was sunny outside and the Big Issue seller was up for a wee bit banter as usual. ‘How’s business?’ Joe asked him.

  ‘Not sae bad.’

  ‘You do realize you’re being exploited, don’t you?’

  ‘How’s that, then?’

  ‘Look at the price on the cover – how much does it really cost to staple some pages together? Where’s all the extra money going to, that’s what I want to know.’

  ‘I don’t think it works like that.’

  ‘CDs
are the worse thing,’ Joe opined. ‘I mean, what are they? Bit of plastic, no moving parts, £15.99. Saw one the other day, they wanted more than twenty pounds.’

  ‘Outrageous.’

  ‘Where does it go, this money we throw away? Do you know how much they charge for parsley in there? A weed, for God’s sake.’

  The magazine seller shook his tanned and leathery head in sorrowful agreement. ‘There’s nae justice in the world, that’s for sure.’

  ‘And did you notice when everything started to change?’

  ‘When was that, then?’

  ‘1979. Year Maggie Thatcher got in. That’s when it all started.’

  ‘Aye, she was a bitch for sure.’ The magazine seller looked old enough to remember her but could have been aged anywhere between twenty-five and sixty.

  ‘Plant I used to work in,’ said Joe, ‘out at Clydebank, thriving business. Kind of heavy industry that made this country great. What happened to it?’

  ‘I can guess.’

  ‘The asset-strippers moved in and sent us all right down the Swanee, four hundred men. We’d had problems there all through the seventies, of course.’

  ‘Three-day week, winter o’ discontent …’

  ‘Aye, all that. I was union treasurer.’

  ‘It was a different world then.’

  ‘Certainly was,’ said Joe. ‘And when they launched the coup they knew who they were after.’

  The Big Issue seller’s eyes shrank even smaller in his sunburned face. ‘What coup was that, then?’

  ‘The one that put Maggie in. It was the CIA did it, same as Chile, only this time they managed without the aeroplanes and missiles. Blowing up an elected president wasn’t good for their image, even if he was a Marxist.’

  The magazine seller was struggling to keep up. ‘Marxist? Who was that – Jim Callaghan?’

  Joe shook his head. ‘No, you’ve got to go back to Wilson. I never liked the man much and I’d hardly call him a socialist but he was still too left-wing for the Americans, too dangerous. That’s why they made him resign and then they put Callaghan in his place.’

  ‘I don’t quite remember that …’

  ‘Oh, it was a surprising thing. One minute Wilson’s riding high in power, the next he’s resigning for no reason. They say now it was because he thought he was getting that … what do you call it? Thing where you lose your memory.’

  ‘Alzheimer’s?’

  ‘Aye, that one. But it was a plot. The CIA bought Wilson off and put in Callaghan, then he turned out to be a dud so they picked Maggie.’

  ‘Bingo.’

  ‘Too right,’ said Joe. ‘Look what she did for America.’

  ‘And look what she done for us.’

  ‘Exactly. Wrecked all our heavy industry, sabotaged the unions and the labour movement with moles and infiltrators, put millions of people out of work. It’s obvious, isn’t it? She was a CIA stooge, and every prime minister since then’s been one too.’

  The Big Issue seller nodded. ‘You’ve got a point there.’

  ‘And that’s where all our money’s going,’ said Joe. ‘Siphoned off to America. The stooges get a kickback and wind up millionaires while we go to the wall. Everyone that buys a copy of your magazine, most of it goes to Uncle Sam, and where does that leave you?’

  The seller shook his head. ‘Stood here like a lemon.’

  ‘And it’s just as bad in there,’ said Joe, pointing to the ASDA entrance behind him. ‘All these supermarkets are owned by Americans now, same as everything else, and do you know how much they charge for parsley? £28.50 a kilo.’

  ‘That’s a lot of cash.’

  ‘A big con, if you ask me,’ Joe said. ‘Biggest con in history.’

  The magazine seller looked doubtful. ‘You think so? What about Jesus getting married and having a wean?’

  Joe nodded. ‘All right, maybe that was equally big. But you know what else they do? They put the wrong labels on things.’

  ‘Who? The Americans?’

  ‘The people in ASDA – it amounts to the same thing. They put a wee label saying three for two, but they deliberately stick it in the wrong place, so there’s us filling our baskets thinking we’re getting a bargain …’

  ‘When all along we’re spending more money.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Joe. ‘And a nice big cut goes straight to the Yanks so they can keep fighting their wars and telling us all how free we are. You know, I wouldn’t mind them so much if they could only talk better. Why do they have to drawl all the time like they own the place?’

  ‘But they do,’ the Big Issue seller said with a shrug, and Joe left him to his task, crossing the street and walking past the parade of small shops whose names changed, it seemed, almost every week, as one after another tried to compete with the big supermarket nearby. The Common Market had a lot to do with it, of course. A car beeped when Joe crossed another street, impatient young type in a suit, fancy Mercedes, thinks he’s something special but ought to know you should give way to pedestrians when going round a bend – don’t they do the Highway Code any more? Not that Mr Coyle ever took lessons but there was no need when he was young, public transport being what it was. Common Market was Ted Heath’s big idea – Joe remembered giving Robbie stickers to take to school and give to his pals, ‘Say No to Europe’, and then Robbie coming home saying Mr Tulloch thought integration was a good thing, well he would say that, wouldn’t he, damn fool Liberal voter with all his German writers he made Robbie read, filling his head with foreign nonsense. What’s wrong with Scottish writers? Aren’t there enough of them to keep anybody busy for a lifetime?

  The things being said about Mr Tulloch now – that article in the local paper claiming he interfered with a boy, total slander but when a man’s dead and gone you can say what you like about him, that’s the problem. If Tulloch was alive they could ask him. And if Robbie was still with them they could have asked him too. But there was never anything like that, Robbie would have told them if there had been, they were always frank about everything.

  Joe stopped in his tracks, a wee thought had flown inside his head like a bumblebee. Something else he was meant to be getting. Retraced his steps mentally, backwards across two streets, Big Issue seller, ASDA. Was he meant to buy wine? No, it was a con in there. But he’d walked into town looking for something apart from the parsley he never bought. Something Anne wanted. It was tapping and nagging, the bumblebee against the window pane, up and down and never finding an exit.

  Joe walked on. If a bumbee stung a bumbee’s bumbee, what colour would the bumbee’s bum be? Like it was yesterday, explaining it to Robbie, the wee soul, five or six year old. Bumbee tartan, he told him. What’s that, dad? A kind of tartan. What kind, says Robbie. Kind that’s fake.

  Not that Mr Tulloch was ever a practising, no evidence of that despite whatever they people he used to teach are saying now, thirty or forty year after the event. Of course he was a nancy but things were different in they days, effeminate wasn’t the same as being a bum-bandit. Didn’t even occur to Joe and Anne to worry. World was simpler then. Now it’s full of paedophiles who’ve learned how to do it from web rings, probably would never have hurt a fly if they hadn’t found a name to give themselves, make them into a community. European Economic Community, that was the next stage of German grooming after they stopped calling it Common Market. Joe told his children at the time, they were eating their tea in the living room and Ted Heath showed up grinning on the evening news, saying how it was an end to conflict, and Joe said to Robbie and Janet, the Germans tried beating us on the battlefield and they couldn’t do it, now they’re going to take over another way instead. There they were, the Krauts, lost the war, whole country in ruins, and America bought them wholesale with the Marshall Plan. They own the place, Mr Coyle said, both his children looked round and for the first time it was like they didn’t believe him, not only Janet but Robbie too. That was Tulloch’s doing.

  European Union they call it nowadays
but how long before it’s United States of Europe, Joe wondered. They’ve even got all the wee stars on their flag, just like the Americans, next they’ll put stripes on it, tiny at first so people won’t notice – they’ll be too busy watching Yank rubbish on the telly – but the stripes’ll get bigger until one day it’s the American flag flying all over the continent, everybody spending dollars and cents instead of euros and cents. But he was no fool, not Joe Coyle, he was as smart as the next fellow, and he’d go on speaking his mind till the day they came and shot him.

  Now where was it he was meant to be going?

  4

  The kid’s away, the magnets worked, he’s round the corner and legging it. But don’t forget the First Law: act like this is meant to be happening and people will believe it. As in slow down, take your time. Kid gets to the big swing park and reckons he’ll take five on the empty bench in the corner. Sits and pulls the game from his inside pocket and it’s like totally crap but Spud’ll give him a fiver for it, as in instant money, and he can do this anywhere he wants, go in and swipe as long as it’s got the right kind of security tag, they nearly all have because it’s one company does ninety per cent of in-store security systems and if their system’s got a loophole the size of Gibraltar it’s not his problem.

  Only himself on the bench and a woman with two little girls at the other end of the park, he watches them on the swings, matching skirts and bare legs waving. Kid was their age once, a long time ago. He was a child then he stopped, gave it up as a bad habit. He must be twice as old as those girls. They’ve got like their entire life to lead all over again before they even catch up with where he is now, and by then he’ll be gone. Correction, they’ll be gone, because they’re probably on the Death List.