by Adam Thorpe
‘That’s all we had in common.’
‘Is that so? They were found on your croft,’ he said, as if reading from the same script Judith had used.
She explained to Ewan what Bob had explained to her.
‘So you’ve no idea what they’re up to?’
‘No. Do you?’
‘Not quite. Not yet,’ Ewan said, examining him fiercely from under his fair eyebrows, which met in the middle. ‘But I stand on the beach and look at the bird tracks and remind myself that what looks chaotic and random is always purposeful.’
‘Maybe where birds and animals are concerned,’ said Judith. ‘I’m not so sure about humans.’
Bob told himself that there were lots of beaches Ewan could be standing on. ‘What’s your speciality, Ewan, nature-wise?’
‘Rabbits.’
‘Rabbits?’
‘Have you heard of risk theory?’
‘’Fraid not.’
‘Foraging,’ said Ewan, suddenly more animated, ‘involves a trade-off, right?’
‘Does it?’
‘It does. It’s basic. A trade-off between finding the best food and getting killed by your enemies. Starvation versus predation. I’m studying the behaviour of rabbits in the presence of sea eagles.’
‘That must take some doing,’ Bob said.
Ewan nodded. ‘Like, for how long do they come out of their burrows and expose themselves? How close do they keep in a group? Because the group has more eyes and is more vigilant and there’s less chance of you, as an individual rabbit, being eliminated.’
‘The dilution effect,’ Judith clarified.
‘Safety in numbers?’ suggested Bob, feeling he was spoiling things.
A mobile went off. It was Ewan’s: he left the room without an apology, talking into it. Judith sat on the broad windowsill with her hands girlishly tucked under her thighs.
‘Ewan is not stupid,’ she said.
Bob stood looking out of the window at the loch glinting in the brief grip of sunlight. ‘Clearly not.’
‘Anti-predator response is a bit old-fashioned, these days, but he’s doing things with it that are new. It’s kind of all maths, in the end.’
‘Not to the rabbits, I guess.’
Judith briefly stretched her smile even further than before, then told him that instinct was a kind of maths. ‘They’re hard-wired to react, not make links between things, work out a causal relationship. Like, why should a stone crack a nut? Because of the hardness. The squirrel just cracks the nut; she never thinks about the hardness. It’s instinct, honed by evolution.’
‘Probably,’ said Bob, lost in the movement of her lips. ‘But instinct can also lead you astray.’
She stared back at him. ‘Instinct is instinct.’
‘Not in a machine environment.’
She frowned. ‘Like what?’
‘A nuclear power station. A cockpit.’
‘Fascinating,’ she said. ‘I never knew rabbits flew planes.’
Ewan walked past the front of the house balancing a three-bladed propeller on his head, as if playing at helicopters.
‘There’s our wind turbine. He thinks the best spot is on the north side. Near the sand filter. I’m not so sure.’
Bob thought Ewan had been a bit rude, not coming back to tea. But he was glad he hadn’t. ‘He’ll take off if he’s not careful.’
‘I don’t suppose you approve, as a bird enthusiast.’
‘Oh?’
‘It’s not very good for birds.’
‘Flying?’
‘Wind turbine.’ She put on a terrified face. ‘I’m swooping into one. Slap slap slap slap.’
‘True,’ he smiled. ‘Birds don’t like propellers. And vice versa.’
‘This is hardly going to be very grand,’ said Judith, looking at him carefully. ‘Hardly of industrial size and capacity.’
‘You could tie silver ribbons on the blades,’ Bob suggested.
‘Really?’
Ewan had disappeared. Bob could easily imagine him taking off vertically, his compact body whisked over the sea until gone for ever.
‘Ewan’s not so great, as a mechanic,’ she said.
‘What type is it?’
‘Search me. Normal, I guess. Why, are you an expert, Mr Webb?’ she added, leaning forward conspiratorially.
‘I installed one for my school,’ Bob fibbed. ‘I can have a peep.’
Veteran of stopgap maintenance regimes on prop-driven planes deep in the bush, he worked it out quickly. The wind turbine was an off-the-shelf model designed for normal English winds: the package included a shut-down system, but the blades were glorified planks. The kit was propped against a wall in a roomy outhouse facing the garden in which a huge vegetable patch bore labels in kids’ writing over its bare earth: more hope than vigour. The tower’s pole stretched the length of the outhouse. Ewan was back to his constitutional grumpiness.
‘You need blades with variable pitch,’ Bob said, who missed oil on his hands, the turn of the bolt. ‘They adjust themselves to the wind speed. And maybe you need the type that bend back and twist, just to be safe. And I’d recommend a furling system rather than relying on a shutdown. You don’t want your tower to collapse. And talking of the tower, that pole looks a bit short, given some of it’s buried.’
‘It was gonna go up on the roof,’ said Ewan.
‘Not a good idea.’
‘Why?’ asked Judith.
‘A house creates a heck of a lot of turbulence. Planting it well away somewhere in the grounds where you’ve a view of the sea, that would solve the problem. Hills are bad news, but cliffs are good.’
Ewan’s sour look went sourer: his pug nose curled up like an oyster hit by a squirt of lemon.
‘Cliffs? What’s good about cliffs?’
‘The air hits with a wallop, lots of bumps, but then just flows over it fairly easily, if there are no hills or trees.’
‘Sheep?’ joked Judith.
They walked round to the outside of the high garden wall. You could see the glitter of the sea between a broad cleft in the hills, beyond a spread of machair.
‘Carry out your data checks just here,’ Bob said. ‘The wind speed, and where it generally blows from. I’d say you’d get enough air – the prevailing wind’s off the sea – but I’m worried about those south-easterlies.’
Ewan’s nose almost disappeared. ‘South-easterlies?
‘Those gales that go on and on. They turn north-westerly in the end, all that hail and sleet we had last month, but you still want to check. You could get a certain amount of figures off the Met Office, I suppose. But you want to get the ground info, too. Air’s weird, it can do crazy things. A hill with a certain shape can make it deviate in a completely unexpected way. You can’t generalise. That’s why airports are all different.’
Ewan did not look happy. The sun caught on a wave far out. He said, ‘How come you know so much about wind?’
A bird of prey was circling overhead, silhouetted against the bright sky. They all looked up at its peeping. ‘Well,’ Bob said, ‘birds use wind all the time. Along with thermals.’
‘What is it?’ asked Ewan, pointing up.
‘Buzzard, looking for a juicy mouse.’
‘I’d have said it was a hen harrier,’ Ewan said. ‘By the way, I’d always thought black-headed gulls don’t hang about here in the winter.’
‘They don’t.’
‘Oh, but they do. Complete with their black heads. Their summer plumage. According to the expert.’
‘The expert?’
‘You,’ said Ewan, thin lips doing their best to smile.
Judith tried to shut him up, but he carried on regardless, in an accent that seemed to thicken for Bob’s benefit. ‘Someone in the Tinker’s Arms, whose name I canna remember, told me. “You’ve not got a clue,” I said. And he said, “Witever. I was informed so by the bird expert from England. And that’s all about it, son.”’
‘The music was a bit lo
ud at the time, the stroboscope flashing.’
Judith giggled.
‘Aye, maybe that was it,’ said Ewan, his dryness wrinkling the air itself.
His mobile buzzed and he went off, talking into it. Like a grown-up, thought Bob.
‘Never mind Ewan,’ Judith said. ‘He doesn’t like mystery.’
‘Do you?’
‘It’s what got me into science. Asking the right questions. But never expecting the right answers.’
‘I’ll see you around, Judith. We’ve got some extremely soggy machair on the peninsula.’ He was hoping she would offer him a lift, gaining more time together.
‘Are you OK walking?’ she said. ‘It’s only about half an hour. I’m on office duty now, more’s the pity.’
It took forty-five minutes, but he didn’t mind. He was on the croft’s path, just rounding the hill, when the shot sounded.
It was so close it made his ears buzz, and the boggy ground at his feet seemed to splatter. He ducked down pretty quick among the heather and tussocks, wishing they were a bit taller, and reckoned this was it. He had no idea where the shot had come from, so his own gun ranged around rather helplessly.
He lay for half an hour in a state of cold, muddy expectation. Every sound was heightened, as if his tinnitus had temporarily taken a break, although the blood kept thudding in his ears: he could even hear the dry heather bells shifting and ticking and the chirrups of distant seabirds. This is all too interesting to lose, he thought. A small winged creature settled on his coat, and it was then he noticed the hole in his pocket.
He had a vague memory of feeling the pistol’s jerk on his thigh: he gingerly checked its clip. It was missing two rounds, only one of which he’d intentionally squeezed off, over the loch that time. The gun was old, 1965 Bulgarian military issue.
Back home, he stripped it on the kitchen table and found sand around the firing pin, which meant that it was no longer free-floating – gunked up enough to fire when the slide cycled. He also studied the trigger parts and the safety catch looked a bit worn, but the sear notch wasn’t at all rounded, so it couldn’t have let the sear bar slip.
Whatever, he was lucky it hadn’t gone off at any time before, hitting himself or someone else: Astra, Judith, Marcie, a stranger. The sand inside was white, not Dubai’s. He should never have taken it to the beach: he’d lost a camera in Hawaii like that, decades back. One day, perhaps, experience would teach him something.
Accidental discharge, anyway. Which is what his father used to say about his son’s procreation when the bastard had been at the gin and felt joky, settling into the settee.
Bob stripped and lubricated the beast, cycled it without a round and inserted a full clip. The gun was old, but he was sentimental about it. He dropped it a few times on the table, muzzle first, but nothing happened. He was ninety-nine per cent reassured that he wouldn’t have a testicle blown off. Only eventual personal extinction could rate one hundred per cent.
‘How did it go up at the Centre?’ asked Marcie, with the usual mug of coffee and a ginger biscuit. Her skirt was turquoise, her face soft and round.
‘Do I need to ask how you knew?’
‘Nah,’ she said.
‘The tea and cake’s not as good as here,’ he smiled.
‘They’re a brainy couple though, aren’t they? There’s not much they don’t know about wildlife.’
‘Are they a couple?’
‘They go on holiday together in this converted van,’ she said, wistfully.
‘Brains aren’t everything,’ he went on, covering his disappointment. ‘Quite a few of the guys in Broadmoor have very high IQs.’
‘Broadmoor? Jesus. What’s Broadmoor got to do with anything?’
He was looking at his scanned post when Astra came in. The post included the decree nisi to sign, all tight-lipped legalese. His marriage was to be dissolved UNLESS anyone objected. This was it, then. Finito. In a few weeks the decree absolute would come through and the dissolving would be complete. There’d be no UNLESS.
He pre-empted Astra’s target practice by bundling him into his arms and dangling him upside down by the ankles. The delighted squeals brought his mother hastening out of the gallery area.
‘That’s probably against at least two laws, you know.’
‘There are nae laws on this island,’ Bob growled, ‘except obedience to the Saaabbath. Which means –’ Astra’s miniature legs had powerful pistons inside – ‘all wee bairns should be seen and not hearrrd, or go strrrraight to hell!’
‘Not in this case,’ said Marcie.
His words made Astra squeal louder, swinging himself towards Bob’s groin with flailing arms. Bob felt the child needed to see someone professional, but chuckled along. Astra’s long hair brushed the pinewood floor. The child suddenly relaxed, his eyes closed, and for a split second Bob thought he had fainted.
Then a tiny voice emerged: ‘Swing me,’ it said.
Bob swung him gently like a pendulum, as he’d swing the twins, years ago, one after the other. Twenty-five years of marriage ending on a lawyer’s dry snigger. A final signature required. How would he disguise the postmark? He could send it to Al, and Al could post it from there.
‘That’s what Kier used to do,’ Marcie murmured, her lower lip crumpling in a way that Bob had to make a huge effort not to imitate in turn.
‘I’ll need to use your printer,’ he said.
He posted the decree nisi, duly signed, to Al’s PO box on the Virgin Islands. From one island to another. A favour from an old friend. He’d slipped some white sand into the sealed envelope, to nestle among the papers; Olivia and her arty particle would appreciate that. Best wishes from the land of buccaneers.
He sat by the loch and got pished. On his own with the Talisker. Just this once. Quality time. Total class. On the other hand, he was now a free bird. The sheep’s grinning skeleton was unsettling. He talked to it. That helped. He shouted shite for ten minutes, over the dark-chocolate waters. Nobody to hear but the waders he could not even identify. Oh fuck it, let’s say oystercatchers. Who cares? He waded into the marshy bit through the reeds and rolled up his sleeves and tried to tickle trout. It was hilarious. His father was watching from the opposite bank, fishing in a light drizzle. Bob’s bared arms were black with peatiness. He shook his fists and shouted and threw stones at his father, who shook his head.
‘I don’t care! I’ll land them like fucking bricks! I’ll do what I fucking like!’
You always have done, whispered Olivia, standing next to his father. Voices carried far in this glen, it was so quiet. He pulled out the Makarov and used up an entire clip, getting rid of them across the water, but he was so pished and cold he missed them entirely.
5
THAT NIGHT HE dreamt of Joseph H. Kenley. Not for the first time. Kenley did what he liked too.
He showed up in multi-pocketed bush gear, waving a Bible. Holy machete lore, he’d call it. His willowy form, his long limbs and fingers, his Bambi eyes, the tribal scars nicked over his sharp cheekbones: just the same.
‘Your wife has sent me because she loves you,’ Kenley said in the same earnest tone he’d use about his divine mission, brown eyes bloodshot from too much cola nut, too little sleep, and whatever else he was on: cocaine, rum, LSD. Bob hadn’t seen it at the time. He looked out of the kitchen window and saw the red earth of a compound, a lad in a camouflage jacket smoking right by the glass with automatic rifle shouldered, the forest trees bunching up beyond the barbed wire, and other men laughing, playing cards. But on the windowsill there was still the tea caddy and his keys and an opened packet of digestives, clear as day. No sign of the 707 he’d thumped in right by the loch.
‘You’ve occupied my peninsula,’ Bob said. ‘You’ve brought your men where they shouldn’t be. This isn’t right. That’s not part of the deal. You gave me your word you wouldn’t come back.’
‘Then fly them out, Captain Winrush. Fly them out.’
The rest was a blur. He woke u
p in the attic bedroom, shivery but too hot under the blankets. A breath of the usual malaria, a whiff of the old life. The systems breaking down. A mixed bag.
He was bad for twenty-four hours.
Olivia was calling his name from the Worcestershire garden, which had a huge meadow behind it full of white horses cantering about instead of the estate. Why was she calling him Kit? He staggered to the front skylight, opened it to a near-windless day full of sparks. The hill’s slope on the left descended from the giddying ridge to a lone figure at the bottom, standing with her eyes shielded by her hand.
‘Mr Webb, I presume?’
He let Judith in after stumbling on the attic bedroom’s steps, turning his two new Yale locks with difficulty. She wondered why he needed to lock up at all: no one did on the island, apart from the odd second-homer.
‘Automatic,’ he mumbled.
‘You’ve been on a bender, Kit,’ she said.
He nodded sheepishly. He didn’t want to get into the malaria thing, invent travellers’ tales.
‘I was on my way to your machair,’ she said. ‘The curtains were all closed. It’s two o’clock in the afternoon. My father died of a stroke when I was fifteen; he’d lain on the floor for a day and a night, they reckoned.’
‘Alone too, was he?’
‘A drunkard. Separated from my mother when I was five. I stopped seeing him. He was only the other side of town. Edinburgh’s not so big, after all. That was bad, but I was a judgemental teenager. So you see I was acting on precedent.’
‘Thank you,’ Bob murmured. He felt terrible, but he was over the worst. She made the coffee nevertheless.
‘You don’t look like a boozer,’ she said.
He nearly replied that, as a pilot, he couldn’t be. Instead he shook his head and said, ‘We all have our days. I think it was the whisky.’
She said, in a mock-American voice, ‘The news was received with amazement.’
She relit the Raeburn, got the hearth fire going, refilled the paraffin heaters, forgot there was no electricity and opened the fridge door to packets of rice and spaghetti. She made him a hot-water bottle and generally fussed. It was rather nice, and he said so.
