He swore he could smell it. The salt, the algae, the fish. The forest had changed, there were hints of quicker degradation on the leaves, perhaps from sodium in the air or from parasites, opportunists in the new space. He tried to scan for difference, a greater distance communicated in the bird calls.
He shivered in the cold nights, bundled in thick leaves and branches, wrapped in his rags and arms, looking up at the glimmering networks of ice-points in the terrifying sky.
He found tracks, rough sketches in the topsoil. He tensed his body, stopped and listened. Waited. A hammering, an engine, a calling out. His blood rushed and he seemed to feel, solidly, the entire mass of his head. Was something there? Really there? Had he heard it or not? He looked at the evidence. How old were the tracks? He couldn’t see steps, individual prints. He searched for oil, industry, anything artificial through the leaves, then he stopped again. His pulse slowed, he became steadier, told himself to calm, continue forwards, same as always.
The forest seemed to grow over again. The thinning might have been temporary, freak, not evidence of habitation at all. The only sounds he heard were birds. In time the birds could mimic everything.
Through the undergrowth ahead he saw a light, a flash. The sun got in. He dug for the source and pulled out steel. A fork. He held it in his left hand, instinctively assuming a mealtime posture.
XI
He walked at a slow pace until he heard it. A low sound, a drift rising in volume to a colossal roar, then a fall, a repetition. The sound so big and wide he was afraid. He was still. The forest ahead, but less of it.
The edge was sudden. He wasn’t able to comprehend, at first, that the white through the thin bush ahead was the sky over the Atlantic. He went through easily, not like he’d imagined. Suddenly he had walked out into nothing, all this empty, staggering space and sun.
His first thought was to go the other way, turn back, find shade. His body – cut, thin, swollen in places, with sores across it – burned. Ahead of him was twenty feet or so of level ground, clear, then rocks sharply descending to the sea. He didn’t notice much. He thought he’d notice everything. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. There was nothing, just this noise, this roar, this heat.
He heard something, like crying, he thought, a long moaning sound coming out from the level ground before the rocks. He thought it must have been himself. Then he heard it again, the sound, strange in the wind, with the waves thick in it, a young, long moaning sound.
A dark shape moved on the edge of his vision. Whatever it was, moving, it wasn’t alone. Close enough, he saw the animals, hogs. Seven of them grazing on the thin bushes, wandering freely. He couldn’t tell if they were wild, abandoned.
He tried to think, but it was hard. He had almost nothing left. He felt the effort of thoughts building, dissolving in his head. But something went the other way. A shape developed on the slope down, a building coming into form. It didn’t seem practical, even possible, on the steep slope, but it was there, it was real. He went closer to look.
More buildings suggested themselves out of the rock, simple, almost cave-like spaces cut into stone. By one he saw bright colours, blue, red, yellow, a line of clothes hung between the building and a bare tree. He heard the fabric move, flapping loud and empty in the sea wind. He saw a path, thin and barely there, a light sketch drawn on the pebbles.
He looked out over the water, stood in the raw air.
He was at a height now, fifty feet or so above the water. Only the loudness of it, against him, kept him upright. He had nothing to hold on to. He focused on the waves, their repeated rise and fall, afraid of looking or thinking any further. He could not comprehend it, the limit of a continent. He was unsure what it meant, now, to be here. His eyes were different in the forest, diverted, set to insects, berries, water signs and tracks. And now, ahead of him, was the vast arc of the horizon, the wide edge of an available world.
The waves shook his thin body. He watched them as a child would, thrilled by their momentum and promise, and stupidly, broadly stunned each time they broke and spilled. He reeled back on the boom of it. A thousand gunshots every time. He imagined the strange and large wooden ships populating the horizon, then saw them disappear.
He looked down at the path, which wound towards the first of the buildings, where the bright clothes hung. But it didn’t stop there. It continued, past the building, coming out on the water. He thought he could probably manage the route. There, guarded by the rocks from the waves, he could swim.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to:
Edinburgh public and University libraries – my favourite places in the city, and a refuge over many years; everyone at the Scottish Book Trust, for their support; the Manchester Fiction Prize, for giving me the time to finish the manuscript; and my friends, especially Richard Strachan.
Rachel Conway, my agent at Georgina Capel Associates, whose wit, clarity, and understanding came as a godsend; James Roxburgh, my editor, for his ferocious intelligence and enthusiasm; Megan McLaren, for giving expert feedback on a chapter; and the brilliant Sarah Ream, for helping immeasurably from an early stage. Thanks, also, to the many other people involved in putting the book together, from copy-editing to design.
Note: the microbiology featured in several chapters is always speculative, and sometimes wholly invented.
About the author
Martin MacInnes was born in Inverness in 1983. His work has featured in The White Review, Ambit, Edinburgh Review, and several other journals. He held a residency at Cove Park in 2015, and the previous year won the Manchester Fiction Prize and a Scottish Book Trust New Writers Award. He lives in Edinburgh. Infinite Ground is his first novel.
First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2016 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.
Copyright © Martin MacInnes, 2016
The moral right of Martin MacInnes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.
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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library.
Hardback ISBN: 978 1 78239 947 6
E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 948 3
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