by Adam Thorpe
‘Depends which people you’re talking about.’
‘Those who read his blog.’
‘That’s Judith and maybe his mum. Apart from him. He’s not exactly sociable, so no one’s interested.’
Bob sipped the excellent coffee. ‘You’re so right, as usual. Hey, I want to buy a painting, by the way. A bit of the café in my house.’
‘Really? I was wondering when, actually. You choose.’
‘The one of that cliff, lots of thick white swirls at the bottom.’
She beamed. ‘That’s mine.’
‘I didn’t even know you painted.’
‘I stopped when Keir died. I don’t know if I’ll ever have the urge again.’
They stood in front of it. The paint had been applied with a trowel. It was £250.
‘What do you like about it?’
‘It’s probably where my gulls roost,’ he said, touching a clot of white. ‘I want to be reminded, even when I’m at home. Stops me brooding.’
‘I feel all tingly inside,’ sighed Marcie.
‘Maybe that’s the urge,’ he said, as Astra burst in.
The project kept trying to revive itself, passed from meeting to meeting in glass towers. Other grey suits passed by, to talk their language of flexing, winning, unrolling, delivering; of goals and strategy; of initiatives and processes and framework and change. ‘It’s not rocket science,’ they’d insist. The twenty-odd turbines would provide electricity for 21,000 households, most of it exported to the mainland. Bob listened, heard each group out, said his position was unchanged no matter how much the money on the table, and suggested they try to go frugal instead of fattening the belly. Blackouts would be one solution. Eating by candlelight. Three-day week, remember?
‘We hear what you’re saying,’ they’d say, in turn, as Antonov hee-hawed outside. But that was a fib. They just thought the islanders were backward.
The last time, as they were leaving, one of them – his hit-man look softened by oval glasses, a mumsy fringe and projecting teeth – turned by the porch and said, ‘You think we’re baddies. Wrong. We’re the good guys; we’re the knights in shining armour; we’re saving the world.’
‘You’re not saving the world,’ Bob said; ‘you’re making money. Except that it’s now the recession.’
‘Nylon and rubber tyres were invented during a recession.’
‘They saved the world too, did they?’
A cloud of midgies came to Bob’s rescue and the men stumbled off.
The sea eagles circled, mewing, as he walked to the beach for his dip. They kept an eye on him; the sea didn’t, it just seethed blindly around his waist before the plunge. There were a few cloudless days that first summer, when the sand dazzled and the flat-calm water broke malachite-green on the empty stretches with nothing but a sigh. The Centre visitors – mostly teenagers – played cricket, with Judith as longstop, but Ewan hit the hard rubber ball so far beyond the boundary it vanished into glitter, and (like Ulrich) never came back. Otherwise, Bob kept his distance from the manse, even though a section of Ewan’s blog had been discreetly removed.
He stayed loyal to the café, where Marcie’s new paintings filled the walls and a tall Ghanaian photographer called Kojo had filled the place of Keir. He had been shooting a re-enactment of waulking songs for Woman’s Weekly, fallen for Marcie’s charms and the landscape in that order, and swapped Leeds for Bargrennan. Astra’s pinpoint attacks were now shared. Bob pretended not to know much about Africa and the two men got on like a house on fire. Once, walking the beach on a misty day, he saw Kojo in the distance and thought for a split second that it was Joseph H. Kenley.
Now and again, a person-sized lump of jetsam would be sprawled on the sands ahead, but it was always harmless. Harmless to Bob Winrush, that is; not to the fishes or the birds, stopping themselves up with bottle tops, nylon cord, rubber crumbs, the plastic silt he’d freighted for years.
The birds never did what he ordered them to do, so his field reports felt hesitant, full of deviations and qualifications. They weren’t scientific enough: when it was the laying season, he cared about the eggs too much, and the fluffy juveniles, and the whole thing.
Of course, under pressure, he caved in and told Sophie and David where he was. Before they headed respectively for Cambodia and Peru, they stayed a full fortnight over the decent weather, arriving together on the first bright day of the spell, fresh from Olivia’s new Shropshire place, which leaked in several places. Apparently Olivia and Ben kept bickering, mainly because Ben being an artist was not very practical, he filled the dishwasher wrongly, that sort of thing. But his work was ‘cool’, said David.
‘He takes details from famous old paintings, but only of reflections, the blurry upside-down bits in pools and rivers. Then he puts them the right way up and enlarges them, massively.’
‘So?’
‘They look awesomely modern. Impressionist or even abstract. He says it’s ironic.’
‘Sounds a bit like cheating to me,’ Bob said.
‘Sour grapes, Dad.’
Sophie was impressed by the view. ‘I thought it was even wetter here and just incredibly windy all the time?’
‘Nah. That’s just a myth to keep folk away.’
‘How’s your biplane project?’
He showed them the drawings. ‘First things first. I need to build a hangar.’
Angus MacLean took them out porpoise-spotting, and told them yarns that they believed. They reckoned the Bargrennan Music Jamboree beat anything in Spain, Hungary or wherever, but they couldn’t see why their father bothered about the birds.
‘They’re only gulls,’ Sophie insisted, when they went again to the beach. ‘They feed and fight and lay eggs and sleep. And screech, unfortunately.’
‘No one’s perfect,’ he told them, bent to his telescope. He was tracking an individual as it swooped over the ocean: it had no black tips on its snow-white wings – an outsider, an anomaly. It was called McAl. ‘Not even you two. Though you come close.’
Judith stirred in the sun. ‘And me?’
‘You’re the exception that proves the rule, sweetheart,’ he said, still squinting through the scope’s eyepiece, turning up the magnification. ‘But do selkies really count?’
She stubbed out her day’s one cigarette in the sand, flicked it into their picnic basket and leapt up.
‘You bet, pilot.’
And plunged back into the surf as he lost the bird and plunged in turn into the sky.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I was brought up with aviation as the natural backdrop to my life: my father Barney Thorpe worked for Pan Am for thirty-five years, taking early retirement just before Lockerbie; my brother Jimmy joined the RAF at the age of 16, while my grandfather was briefly in the Royal Flying Corps after serving as an infantry officer during the First World War; lastly, this book has gained immeasurably from the detailed advice of my nephew Daniel, who has been working as a landing agent at Frankfurt airport for eight years. My own three months working in Pan Am wash-up provided insights that would need another book to extrapolate.
Many others have been an aid and inspiration to this novel; I owe a particular debt to two UN arms experts, Mike Lewis and Brian Johnson-Thomas, who know as much about arms smuggling as anyone and have been extremely generous with their time. I thank Val Rice, my father’s former secretary, for tirelessly checking details, and Barbara O’Grady and Maureen Blaydon, former Pan Am stewardesses, for their insider knowledge. Likewise, I am grateful to ex-PC David Buckley for his insight into police procedure.
Thank you also (as ever) to Zoe Swenson-Wright, my agent Lucy Luck and to Sharon Black for their careful reading and invaluable suggestions; to Tessa Thiery and Andrew Rissik for providing regional particulars; to my editor Robin Robertson and all the crew at Cape for guiding in the beast safely; to my children Josh, Sacha and Anastasia for promptly answering erratic queries, and to my wife Jo Wistreich for her insights, support and on-board patience.
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Copyright © Adam Thorpe 2012
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First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
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