by Ru Pringle
‘You could help a little. Have something prioritised for us.’
Bolton-Clemens raises a knotty hand. ‘It’s flattering, but I think you overestimate my influence, Mr Blakeslee. My role as under-secretary is essentially to provide a bridge between my department – the MoD – and government; and to advise the Home Office. I am a civilian. It would be quite impractical for me to interfere in everyday military operational matters. If I were to begin attempting to order military officers around – well,’ he runs a thin tongue over equally thin, bloodless lips, ‘I would be given extremely short shrift, I can assure you.
‘Besides, while I appreciate the inconvenience the Security Service is experiencing, this has been a particularly troublesome week, on account of these wretched nationalistic diehards. We are at war, Mr Blakeslee. Though obviously we must avoid public use of such inflammatory terms. Before questioning why the armed forces enjoy materiel precedence at the moment, you may want to familiarise yourself with this week’s casualty reports. Would you have me attempt to prioritise another department’s needs over my own, when lives for which I am responsible may depend on them?’
Sebastian keeps his gaze level. ‘I suppose not.’
The two men regard each other for a moment. A few metres away the door opens, and Lorna’s expectant face appears round it. Bolton-Clemens’ eyes flick to hers. She takes a second to evaluate the situation before ducking back inside.
‘However,’ continues the secretary, ‘there may be … favours I can call in. Ways to leverage the situation. It may be possible to convince pilots of drones attending the front lines to leave their cameras switched on while they return via, let us say, routes less direct than standard operating procedure might require. Satellite time will be more difficult. It’s long been a complaint of the forces that our domestic coverage is inadequate. However, my understanding is that the area you are investigating is west of the main conflict zone. There may be ways to free up time on each fly-past after the MoD’s window for useful imaging closes. It will be a matter of seconds, and you will need to be selective, but I imagine this may be preferable to nothing?’
Sebastian thinks very carefully for a moment. ‘That would be … appreciated.’
Bolton-Clemens nods. ‘I trust you have no objection to me dropping in, now and again? To see how matters are progressing. In the interests of interdepartmental co-operation at this challenging time.’
‘Of course.’ Knock yourself out.
‘Good day, Mr Blakeslee.’
Then the man is striding off down the corridor, the steady tap of his patent leather brogues echoing off the bare walls. Sebastian keeps eyes locked on his narrow, tweedy back until he disappears around the corner.
He lets go a deep breath. Lorna, he sees, is holding the door open for him.
‘Problem?’ he inquires mildly, following her back into the ops room.
‘No more than usual.’ Her look is concerned. ‘Mind if I ask what that was about?’
Sebastian sucks his lips.
‘For better or worse,’ he says, ‘it looks like I owe Sir Trevor Bolton-Clemens a favour.’
THEY’VE FOUND THE CAR. It’s in a village called Lochgilphead.
You feel slightly dazed. For you at least, this is where the hunt really starts. It’s not something you want to admit, but you were starting to think she’d got away with it.
You turn the key and the car’s old three-cylinder petrol engine thrums and rattles to life. The dash readout tells you the hybrid’s batteries are holding even less charge than yesterday. You’ve little doubt the problem is the power cells, and not the motor’s ability to charge them. No big deal, unless they fail completely – but without finding somewhere to plug in, you might need to downgrade your range.
You take the road south. It twists and turns pleasingly. As you settle into its rhythm, you ask your ’phone for a satellite map. A 3D image of the Lochgilphead area from low orbit rotates in your Spex, superimposed on your view of the windscreen. Near the forward edge of the roof, a little winking dot shows your position.
In the real world outside the car, a bullet-peppered sign with the half that’s in Gaelic blacked out thanks you for visiting Oban.
You blow it a kiss as you pass.
CHAPTER 10
______________
Barnhill
SHE IS RUNNING.
She is running over bog.
The bog pulls at her feet with its clammy hands, sapping her. Dragging her inexorably into its cold embrace.
The stars here seem supernaturally large and oddly bright. They don’t twinkle. Instead, they reflect claustrophobically in greasy pools that are thick with decay and things that writhe. It feels like the whole sky is bearing judgementally down upon her. At times, the stars seem like countless unwinking eyes. Watching.
Accusing.
There’s a copse of trees. Part of a woodland. She stumbles through a gap in the rocks into something like an architect’s scale mock-up of a glen. Japanese knotweed snags at her ankles. She tries slapping it away, but her arms are too weak. It starts twining up her shins. In terror, she scrabbles through blaeberry bushes and clumps of moss. The bushes, unexpectedly, are full of thorns, which scratch right through her fingernails, and tear the skin off her palms. The blaeberries burst as she pulls herself through, until their juice is oozing between the bushes like blood, and she’s slipping and caked in it, unable to make progress no matter how she squirms and scrabbles and pleads.
She sees the people then.
Skins she knows to be brown are grey in the deathly starlight. They stare accusingly, even the ones whose faces are missing. She turns away, runs, but she can feel their stares like bullets in her back, and wherever she turns, there they are again, each time crowding a little closer until they start to jostle.
‘Why?’ they are demanding. ‘Why did you do nothing?’
She tries reasoning with them – telling them that she tried, she really did – but her mouth doesn’t seem to be working. It’s like it’s covered with a kind of film that doesn’t let sounds out. The voices are so persistent and close now they seem to be coming from inside her. She turns with a gasp …
… and finds she is alone.
She runs onwards, but the berry juice grows ever deeper, cloying and thick, draining her energy. She’s sinking into it. Endlessly – like falling, but slowed down a million times so she gets to savour the full terror of it. Panting, dragging herself forward on all fours, like a dog, she comes to a camp. There’s a man there. He’s sitting by a fire. A big, burly man with a black goatee and fingers the size of her wrist.
He turns in surprise. Says, ‘Jesus Christ, love – you startled me there.’
She stares at him. She feels like she’s freezing to the spot. Ossifying. Though she wants to – burns to – she can’t move a muscle.
‘You were unkind to me,’ the man tells her. ‘Didn’t they teach you how to be polite at comportment class?’
‘You mean, the police?’ she protests. ‘It was the police! Not fucking comportment class.’
‘I know what I mean.’ He seems angry now. ‘You’re a bitch. A bitch is what you are – a hateful little bitch! You speak indelicately. Nobody likes you. You don’t have any friends. You don’t even have properly coloured hair. It was all fine until you appeared: you in your fancy submarine, trying to change the rules. Don’t you get it, bitch? Everything that’s happening here is your fault. You deserve to die.’
She’s trying to apologise, but again no words will come.
‘You think apologies matter? This is what you did to me!’
And then, quite suddenly, he’s zipped off the top of his head, exposing his brain, symmetrical and soft-looking and glistening, like a pile of guts next to a mirror. Except that when she looks closer – when she reaches out to touch it, gagging from the thick, metallic smell – she realises it’s not a brain at all. It’s an enormous pair of naked buttocks. The
y part like lips, and the puckered mouth between them sings:
It’s all about the bass, ’bout the bass, no treble …
And she feels warm tissue dripping down her hands, like freshly-made blaeberry jam …
HER EYES SNAP OPEN. Before she’s really conscious, with no idea at all where she is, she’s already bolt upright and flinging herself blindly to one side.
She feels her feet connect with a floor. Bare wood. Uneven. Her back slams against a wall.
She is in a small, tatty room. The walls are plastered, but cracked, and patched in a dozen shades and textures. They haven’t been painted in a long time. There’s a tall sash window with a peeling and rotted frame, through which she can see water and low hills. The sun is shining. A decrepit bedside cabinet of vinyl-coated chipboard is beside her. Despite the shabbiness, everything looks – and smells – clean. Yet there’s a tang of something burning. It’s not wood. Its smell is nostalgic for some reason.
Standing before her, holding the room’s open door by its handle, the other hand raised as if to ward off a blow, is a man. He has the most expansive beard she has ever seen. He is the size and build of a bear, and his startlingly turquoise eyes are wide with what looks like horror.
‘Whoah!’ he is crying. ‘Jeez-o now, take it easy!’ His accent is strongly west coast: like the Oban one she knows so well, but thicker. ‘Would you please put down the spoon!’
She sees she is holding a tarnished silver spoon, like a weapon. Her hands are bandaged in something biscuit-coloured, like coarse linen. The spoon is encrusted with porridge. It’s the same porridge that was in the bowl that obviously sat at her bedside until recently, and is now decorating the floor. Some is also on the unfamiliar oversize T-shirt she discovers is all she is wearing.
‘Well now, you’ve certainly got some reflexes on you miss, and no mistake,’ the man is saying, lowering his arm fractionally. ‘Can I take it you won’t be attacking me now?’
Heart pounding, she lowers the spoon.
‘Where the fuck am I?’ She didn’t mean to, but she screams the words. At least it’s not obviously a detention centre or a cell. She hears the thundering of feet on floorboards and a couple of anxious-looking faces – one male and one female – appear at the door.
‘Wow, you’re one seriously jumpy lady. You’ve obviously a story or two to tell. Can’t think what you might have been doing out there in the sound by yourself in a kayak, without proper sleeping gear, and a storm approaching. But that’s by the by, and I won’t ask you just now. Please believe me, though: whatever it is you’re afraid of, you’re safe.’
No. I’m not.
Her look must have translated the thought because his eyes widen. Then they seem to soften, and he says, ‘Well, in my experience things always look better on a full stomach. You sort of woke up before, and we were trying to get you to eat something – you looked half-starved. But you were all kind of delirious and saying something about how everything was your fault, and you seemed pretty anxious about a kayaker. Was he …’ the whiskers part just enough for the tip of a sideways-moving tongue to be visible ‘… a friend of yours?’
Seeing her expression, he pushes on.
‘We had to put you under, because we thought you would hurt yourself.’
Under? She tenses even more, if it were possible. ‘How long have I been here?’
The man blinks at her. The two faces at the door exchange looks.
‘Two days.’
She feels her mouth opening. No sounds come out of it. Her knees give out, and she slumps bonelessly towards the floor.
WHAT’S OBVIOUSLY AN OLD HOUSE proves to be quite large. To give herself a chance to collect her wits, she makes the excuse that she needs to use the toilet. Which she finds that she actually does: quite badly.
She’s shown to a charmingly eccentric room that’s half-floored with a jungle of potted herbs, above which a grand, if rust-stained, Victorian bathroom suite looms like enamel and porcelain ruins. She takes the opportunity to check herself over. There’s a dressing on her wound, although when she pulls an edge back for a peek she sees her amateur stitches are still in place. The wound is stained yellow with iodine, and smells antiseptic. She has rashes of raw skin in her armpits and in a ring around her neck from where the wetsuit has rubbed. Her hands feel like painful boxing gloves.
She bares her teeth. Clenches her fists, and throws back her head.
Two whole days.
What now? Will her contact even be waiting any more?
She hugs her knees as she does what she has to, pulling the antique chain and listening to the rush and gurgle as everything’s flushed away. In a daze she follows the others, who have obviously been loitering near the door, along a threadbare carpet and down creaking steps to a kitchen, where an ancient range is radiating palpable heat. A south-east-Asian-looking woman is frying eggs and vegetables in a huge blackened wok. Seeing the newcomers she nods, shyly.
‘Peat,’ explains the man with the beard, nodding at the range. He motions for her to sit by the age-blackened wooden table. ‘Doesn’t burn like it used to – too decomposed these days – but we can’t easily use renewables here. No one to service them. Besides …’ he raises his palms ‘… turbines or panels would stick out like sore thumbs, and we’re none too keen to be attracting attention. So we’ve gone back to the old ways.’
The saggy old armchair into which she lowers herself proves surprisingly comfortable. The smell of frying is such that it’s all she can do not to leap up, seize the wok, and bury her face in it. ‘And where is here?’
‘It’s called Barnhill. Likely from the Gaelic cnoc an t-sabhail, though it’s hard to tell for certain now. George Orwell ended his days here. Because he was famous, everything got Anglified after that.’
‘The George Orwell?’
‘Aye, that one. Big fuckin Brother and that.’ The man looks at the ceiling as if at an imaginary sky, and she catches his meaning. ‘Man was a prophet, if you ask me.’
They could have found the kayaker by now. If they were looking hard enough. Meaning they would know she was kayaking. Fuck. Two whole days.
‘How many of you are there?’
‘In the community?’ He wafts the question away, as if it’s of no consequence. But tells her anyway. ‘Forty-six of us. At the last count.’
She finds his beard mesmerising. It’s full of different shades of brown and blonde. It isn’t just the length which is startling, though he wears it most of the way to his waist. It’s the amount of his face it covers, and its sheer volume. It makes it very hard to deduce his age. Somehow it seems to adopt the communicatory role it robs from his facial expressions.
‘How do you …?’
‘Survive here?’ He smiles. She can tell by the glint in his eyes and the way his beard bristles. ‘Hydroponics. We also manage the deer up this end, and we’ve angora goats and chickens for milk, wool and eggs. A few Hielan coos …’ He bobs his head. ‘Then there’s fish, of course, though not so many now. Truth be told, we’re spread a little thin, and this was never a fertile island. And we’ve no way of telling which way the Gulf Stream will go. If things keep warming the way they’ve been, and the storms don’t get much worse, we could be okay. If the Gulf Stream switches permanently, those hydroponics might be our only way to survive, and we’ll need a new source of materials. Like most people, I suspect, we’re basically trying to hedge our bets.’
A fair-haired – almost albino – young woman appears from nowhere, and hands her a cracked, steaming mug of something. Distracted by the girl’s strange cornflower eyes, she sniffs at it, then takes a sip.
She has no idea what she’s drinking, but it’s quite the most delicious thing she has ever tasted.
‘Green tea,’ the man tells her proudly, again reading her expression a little too well. ‘Ling here’ – he motions to the woman at the stove, who moves close enough for him to snake a companionable arm round her waist –
‘does something to it that I don’t really understand. Seriously, it’s alchemy: when I try the same thing, it doesn’t taste right. Yet another benefit of multiculturalism the fuckers who think they’re running things seem unable to recognise.’
She nods warily. Having returned to the stove, the woman – Ling – places a plate and cutlery before her, and empties eggs and stir-fried vegetables onto it.
She crams food into her mouth. For a while she is conscious of little else. The vegetables are cooked to perfection in a thin, fragrant sauce with subtle spices she can’t identify. She’s vaguely aware of the others talking amongst themselves as she eats. They seem relaxed. Pretending oblivion, she begins paying attention. There’s little she can glean of obvious use. It’s mostly banal chat about farmyard chores or buildings, or machinery, or walls requiring repair, although they also speak animatedly about needing new antibiotics to control tick-borne Lyme disease, which seems to be a problem here. The older of the two who also visited her room earlier – a freckled, almost painfully thin young man with a wispy goatee and huge jade eyes – describes seeing a pair of Royal Navy fast gunboats off the north end of the island.
‘It was well cool. They went right over the whirlpool at peak.’ The second of the pair, a curvy, caramel-skinned woman with equally large eyes, nods enthusiastically.
‘Were you seen?’ the bearded man asks, as she tries not to betray her alarm. The pale youth pulls an expression which seems to ask: what do you take me for?
‘Do you ever get … visits?’
She asks the question carefully, of no one in particular. Her mouth is dry. The bearded man regards her shrewdly. After a slightly over-long pause, he extends a hand over the table towards her.
‘I’m Hedge Trimmer, by the way.’
