Sputnik Caledonia

by Andrew Crumey

  ‘It’s called the Lodge,’ Coyle explains, leading his son up from the riverbank to the dark and empty road. ‘Walk behind me, keep close to the hedgerow, and we’ll be there in less than ten minutes.’

  Kid obeys, figuring after a moment that the Lodge must be the name of the hotel, but is it real or do they put up a new sign every day? Better if they did, thinks Felix, keeping pace with the adult in front. Every day a reinvented world – he’d complete the mission and go back to find that Jodie was called, whatever, Nathalie or something. Like everybody keeps being this new person, the same but different, maybe you’d recognize them in the street but maybe not, and in an infinite universe that’s the way it’s got to be, the scientists proved it. There was that film, Wizard of Oz, Jodie said her mum was called Dorothy after it. And she gets blown away and everything goes in colour and all these really really like boring hick dead-end useless people get a life at last, even the schoolteacher that turns into a witch because she’s basically quite an interesting character when you think about it. And the thing about those guys with the magnifying glass is that they showed it has to be real – the witch, the yellow-brick road, the whole damn package. They’re all arrangements of atoms and letters and numbers on a lottery ticket and every story you can possibly think of is true. Felix can see the hotel now, they’re walking up the driveway and it’s got sort of a magic-castle look to it, he thinks, though basically that’s an effect of the lighting which makes it seem mysterious and dramatic and so forth, in daylight it’s probably nothing, like just somebody’s big house or whatever. But right now it could be Oz, it could be the planet Gallifrey, it could be like any menu in the whole of creation.

  Kid heard once that the Wizard of Oz is basically God, it was on some TV documentary he skipped through, archive footage, interview with Liza Minnelli and so forth. Only the Wizard’s not God because he turns out to be this crummy shyster, guy who’s the fairground magician in the other world, it’s all a trick with mirrors and stuff to make him seem so powerful when actually he’s nothing. Somebody on the documentary, professor with funny glasses, saying it’s like Hitler or Stalin or whatever, as in this little guy with a megaphone, all these leaders are wizards or something like that, kid changed channels and watched a thing on MTV instead. So maybe the spaceman Robert Coyle’s like this kind of a fake wizard, telling Felix to walk beside him and slow down, take it easy, now they’re stepping into the entrance lobby of the Lodge, wood-panelled sort of a place with antlers on the wall and a guy behind the desk looks like he’s a reptile. Maybe Robert Coyle’s a fake and a rapist and a murderer but the reptile couldn’t give a shit, he’s handing over the key and Felix is being gently urged by his father towards the lift at the far end of the lobby next to the entrance to some kind of posh lounge. Maybe it’s all fake – the lift doors opening, the mirrored compartment unoccupied and inviting the two of them to immerse themselves in its gleaming interior during their short ascent. Sure, it’s fake and make believe and the whole of it could burst like a bubble and blow away like spit but the point is that nobody cares and that’s the First Law of Life. Act like all of this is meant to be happening.

  9

  Joe’s slippered feet were propped like clock hands on his favourite footstool while he watched the evening news over the rim of his whisky glass. ‘He’s looking old these days.’

  ‘Who?’ said Anne, glancing up from her book.

  ‘That newsreader. Gone awfie grey.’

  The presenter was describing the worsening situation in some place no one had ever heard of. Fraudulent elections, ethnic tensions, resurgent fundamentalism. ‘Now there’s concern about what the Pentagon thinks could be a nuclear-weapons programme.’

  ‘Here we go again,’ Joe moaned.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Next in line for Uncle Sam’s shooting gallery. Hope they know how to build decent air-raid shelters.’

  He’d been in a foul mood since coming back empty-handed from his second pointless trip to ASDA. Anne knew he just needed to get out the house, September was always the hardest month for them both. She looked at the screen and saw a shabby street lined with flat-roofed concrete buildings; a crowded open shopfront where a swarthy-faced man, backed by shelves of glass jars, was leaning on the counter trying to hear the portable radio perched beside him. Others listening too, all male, from small boys to a toothless satchel-faced greybeard in dark robes, huddled intently.

  ‘See his T-shirt?’ said Joe, pointing at one of the younger men. ‘Hard Rock Café. And a Coke bottle in his hand.’ Already the shop had disappeared forever, but not the image in Joe’s mind. ‘That’s how the Yanks do it – sell it to them first, and if that doesn’t work then blow them up. They’ll be doing it to us one day.’

  ‘Bombing us?’

  ‘Aye, the moment we stop paying the protection money. Nearly happened under Wilson and they soon sorted that, didn’t they?’

  ‘Best not get worked up about it,’ Anne said gently. ‘And you don’t normally start on the whisky so early in the evening. What’s happened to your parsley? Did you run out?’

  Joe scowled at her. ‘I’m reckoning I need to cut back on that. Maybe not so healthy as I thought.’

  ‘Better than whisky, though.’

  He raised and admired the well-filled glinting crystal tumbler in his hand. ‘At least it’s Scottish so it can’t do me too much harm. If it was good enough for my faither then it’s good enough for me.’

  Joe’s faither had died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-seven and as Joe always said, there are three reasons why Scotland has the highest heart-disease rate in the developed world: too much booze, too much work, and too much stress off the English. Anne watched him swirl and swallow the golden liquid, pitying the defiant belligerence in his voice but feeling powerless to ease it. ‘Your parsley’s Scottish, isn’t it?’ she said.

  ‘Produce of more than one country,’ Joe said darkly.

  ‘But one of them might be Scotland,’ she suggested somewhat desperately, aware that a leaf-sorting process with the aid of a magnifying glass stood about as much chance of success as the Pentagon’s proposed search for uranium in this new country they were talking about on the news, thought she’d seen it mentioned once in a cookery book. Probably more of a cumin and cardamom kind of place.

  ‘It’s all genetically modified crap nowadays,’ Joe said. ‘It was on the radio, how parsley’s got a kind of drug in it.’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘So that’s me finished.’

  ‘It surely won’t kill you.’

  ‘No, I mean finished with the parsley. From today I’m a rehabilitated junkie.’

  ‘But what about your whisky? Has that not got a drug in it?’

  ‘Aye,’ Joe conceded. ‘But I know where it comes from and what it’s doing to my system. You go in the supermarket and buy all your food that’s full of additives and God knows what, you could be putting anything in your body. You look at the kids today and think what it was like when we were young. It’s the food and drink that does it, the tap water too, for all we know. Turning everyone into yobs and zombies. Them with their ASBOs or whatever they call it.’

  ‘I think the telly’s got something to do with it,’ Anne said, then tried to return to Wilhelm Meister, which she hoped to finish before bedtime, though in this final section she’d found herself getting a bit lost. So many of the characters were turning out to be miraculously connected to ones she’d seen before, like the poor wee kiddie who’d been abused and was getting looked after by a man with no name, and now it was sounding like this man was really the father and it was his own sister who was the mother, well, it was like something off Jerry Springer, but old Goethe must have known what he was doing and planned it all beforehand because that was surely how any book got written. Or did he make the whole thing up as he went along? It had never really occurred to Anne before – perhaps some writers put down a sentence and then another and another and they keep going just to s
ee where it all ends. So there’s no plan. Things happen, same way they do in real life. The book was saying nothing’s an accident, everything’s connected, call it conspiracy or politics or the mind of God – but the book itself was an accident. There were countless others Mr Tulloch might have given Robbie to read but this was the one that came off his shelf. It had an introduction at the front, Anne hadn’t thought to look at it before now but was in need of guidance.

  ‘To the great mass of readers, who read to drive away the tedium of mental vacancy, employing the crude phantasmagoria of a modern novel, as their grandfathers employed tobacco and diluted brandy, Wilhelm Meister will appear beyond endurance weary, flat, stale and unprofitable.’ Not much explanation there, and hardly a good advert by the book’s own translator, Thomas Carlyle, who you’d think would have been a fan. ‘Few among us will disturb themselves about the allegories and typical allusions of the work; will stop to inquire whether it includes a remote emblem of human culture, or includes no such matter; whether this is a light airy sketch of the development of man in all his endowments and faculties – or is nothing more than a bungled piece of patch-work, presenting in the shape of a novel much that should have been suppressed entirely, or at least given out by way of lecture. Yet every man’s judgment is, in this free country, a lamp to himself; whoever is displeased will censure; and many, it is to be feared, will insist on judging by the common rule.’ It really wasn’t so bad; she’d been enjoying most of it, apart from all the stuff about Hamlet.

  ‘Our generation knew hardship and suffering,’ Joe said to his wife, or the screen, or himself. ‘That’s why we wanted to do something about it. Now it’s a wee bit entertainment on a news channel, firework display in some country nobody cares about. We knew what it was to be in an air raid but it’s a dying memory, that’s the problem. Going to school next day,’ he bleakly reminisced, ‘seeing an empty desk for a kid that was killed.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Anne said from her book.

  ‘If ever we get a socialist back in Number 10 we’ll have B52s coming over the scheme faster than you can blink.’

  Anne looked up. ‘Do they still have B52s?’

  ‘Of course they do.’

  ‘I thought it was cruise missiles and stealth bombers now.’

  ‘Comes to the same thing. They’ve got the whole place mapped out, Anne. GPS and all that, it’s a con. Make everyone desperate to drive around with a wee bugging device the army can home in on. Did you not hear how they killed that fellow in Iraq?’

  ‘Who was that?’

  ‘One of the leaders. Made a call on his mobile phone and they had a missile ready and waiting to fire. Bang.’

  ‘Sounds a better way of fighting a war than blowing up civilians.’

  ‘Would be if they could fire their missiles straight.’ He flicked through the channels and paused at an arts-review programme, a sculpture exhibition in a white-walled Glasgow gallery. ‘Look at that, load of RSJs in a warehouse.’

  Anne glanced at the brightly painted lumps of metal and agreed they looked like items in a children’s play park. But that’s art: make things up without a plan and let people figure it out for themselves. When old Goethe was Wilhelm Meistering away he didn’t know how the story was going to end; it was a game, and maybe that was why Robbie liked it so much at fourteen or fifteen years of age. He was making up stories himself by then, like that nonsense about going inside the installation, his headaches getting worse though the doctors were still saying it was migraine and he’d grow out of it. And the voices: Robbie was afraid to tell his father about them, as if they were evidence of mental weakness, but Anne understood because sometimes she heard things too, ghosts or spirits or more probably the workings of imagination, though with Robbie it must have been different, a symptom of something organic. The cancer was alive in his brain sooner than anyone realized.

  She stared at the arts programme, which left the playground gallery for a group of studio pundits. ‘Now theatre,’ said the presenter, a woman with a posh Edinburgh accent, ‘and a new production of the hit Broadway musical whose name we’ve got to be careful about saying correctly.’ The poster flashed on the screen showing the title in big letters: F*U*C*K.

  ‘That’s the absolute limit,’ Joe blurted. The whisky glass was tilted before his lips and he looked unable to decide whether to tip and spill another warming sip into his mouth or send it flying in the direction of the screen.

  The presenter spelled it out. ‘F.U.C.K. stars Kieran Holloway and Stacey Rowlands in the story of a group of women call-centre workers who lose their jobs and decide to start a nude housework agency, making a strict rule that anyone offering clients more than dusting and ironing will be instantly sacked, as the title says, “for unlicensed carnal knowledge” . . .’

  ‘Can you believe that?’ said Joe. ‘A musical called fuck.’

  ‘I’ve heard of it,’ said Anne.

  ‘Heard of it?’ Joe boomed with volcanic indignation. ‘Of course you’ve heard of it, you hear it every time you walk past any kid in the street.’

  ‘No,’ said Anne, closing the book she would have to finish later. ‘I mean the musical.’

  ‘It’s disgusting, calling it a name like that.’

  ‘Only a word,’ said Anne. ‘They had The Vagina Monologues.’

  ‘Bloody nonsense.’

  ‘And there’s FCUK.’

  ‘Another disgrace.’

  Anne smiled. ‘We’ve been eating coq au vin for years and it hasn’t killed us.’

  Joe couldn’t see the funny side of it. He turned up the volume to hear what the panel thought of it, the first speaker being a dour man with thick-framed glasses and no hair who said he thought the anodyne songs in F*U*C*K were exactly the kind of thing American special forces could use as a torture method on detainees.

  ‘There, you see,’ said Joe. ‘Says it’s like Anaddin.’

  Beside him sat a middle-aged woman with a ring through her nose. ‘I loved it!’

  ‘Might have guessed,’ Joe moaned.

  ‘It’s Aristophanes meets The Full Monty with a score worthy of Sondheim.’

  ‘God help us.’

  ‘I’d like to see it,’ said Anne.

  Joe’s eyebrows nearly shot off the top of his overheated head. ‘What! How can you be interested in that trash?’

  ‘But it’s a comedy,’ said Anne. ‘And the title’s not a swear word, it’s initials.’

  ‘So that’s all right, is it?’ Joe took a hefty swig to calm himself.

  ‘It’s like M*A*S*H.’

  ‘Mash is something you have for your dinner, not an obscenity.’

  The reviewer on television was still enthusing, and just getting into her stride. ‘It’s a genuinely subversive vision of female empowerment.’

  ‘Let’s see what else is on,’ said Joe, aiming the remote.

  ‘No, wait,’ said Anne. ‘Why don’t we try and get tickets?’

  ‘Are you kidding? I’m not going to see that rubbish.’ He finished his whisky and stood up, swaying momentarily.

  Anne watched the familiar pantomime of indecision. ‘Are you F.U.C.K-ing off up to the loo, then?’

  ‘Eh?’ He hadn’t quite heard her.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Joe stretched and flexed. ‘I’ll maybe go out for some air.’

  She looked at him sympathetically. ‘Try and relax. Fifty trips to ASDA aren’t going to help anything, especially when you come back empty-handed every time.’

  ‘I’m not going there, Anne …’ He looked like he didn’t know where he was going. He needed some kind of escape, that was all.

  ‘Sit down, Joe. It’s always like this every year and we get through, don’t we? It’s another day, that’s all.’

  ‘What, like it’s only a word? Only initials?’

  ‘That’s right. One more year and we’re still here, you and me.’

  ‘And Robbie isn’t.’

  ‘I know that,’ Anne said quietly. ‘But Wednesday’l
l pass and that’ll be another anniversary over with. Why don’t we go and see a musical for a change?’

  ‘No way,’ said Joe. ‘I’m not wasting money on American drivel like that.’ He was still standing with his empty glass in one hand and the remote control in the other. He tossed the remote on the chair where he’d been sitting and went to the kitchen to put the glass beside the sink while Anne gazed at the closed book on her lap and thought of all the years that had come and gone like this. A moment later she heard the clunk of the front door as he went out.

  10

  They’ve reached their room for the night, Felix and his dad who unlocks the door and switches on the light, ordinary-looking hotel room, Felix follows him inside and sees two single beds, one of them crumpled like it’s been laid on earlier, guy’s trolley case at the foot of it, small black one standing upright with the handle extended. Guy must like to travel light. He closes the door.

  ‘That’s your bed,’ he tells the kid, pointing to the one still untouched.

  ‘But it’s not time to sleep yet.’

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I’m only explaining.’

  ‘You don’t have to.’

  Tense sort of a moment, like you get in small spaces, especially when involving adult–kid interaction. They’re meant to be father and son so might as well act like it. Kid sits on the end of his appointed bed and surveys the room, mid-price, kind this guy can easily afford with his magic card that buys anything. Remote control stuck on the side of the big black television set, sort of a plastic slot it fits into, remote holder, stops you losing it though not as practical as it looks because the whole point about a remote is that it isn’t on the set. As in, it’s remote, duh. Kid goes over and takes it from the holster while the guy kicks off his shoes and lies down. Kid returns to where he was sitting on the bed, presses the button and the television comes on, blue information screen about the channels available to guests as in which ones are the sex movies you need to pay for, Stegosaurus would like that, the kid’s real dad, or is he? Says he’s real but you never know, anything’s possible. Top of the screen says Welcome, Robert Coyle. Like that’s the name he used when he checked in and it’s on the hotel computer, it’s in their files, it’s coming through wires from the front desk where the reptile sits and it’s there on the television like it’s actually true now. You see it on television, it’s real. Kid stares for a moment at the information screen and there’s like this really really poor music playing like in a lift or something only they didn’t even have it in the lift. Violins and stuff. Kid starts going through the channels, guy lies with his eyes closed and doesn’t care.