Descent (16 page)

I laughed. ‘That’s what my mother tells me!’

‘A wise woman, indeed.’ Baxter leaned back, regarding me with lowered eyelids. ‘Have you ever considered studying for the ministry?’

‘What?’ I nearly splashed my whisky.

‘I’m quite serious.’

‘So am I,’ I said. ‘And I’m an atheist.’

‘Well, that needn’t stop you taking a degree in Divinity. And your study might give you some grounds to reconsider. It’s merely your current opinion, after all. You were baptised, were you not? As far as the Church is concerned, you’re still in the fold, albeit as an Anglican.’

I laughed. ‘I can see how that would be more of a problem!’

Baxter acknowledged the jest with a tight smile, and then frowned. ‘What I see in you, Ryan, is a young man who takes these matters seriously. From what I hear, you evidently know the Bible very well; you’ve obviously read up on apologetics, theology, biblical criticism, history, archaeology, philosophy … you’d be off to a flying start at New College, ahead of most of the actual candidates for the ministry, frankly. And what’s more, you’re genuinely interested in these subjects.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m flabbergasted.’

‘You should be flattered.’

In a way, I was. Having just lost my main ambition, inchoate though it was, the prospect Baxter dangled before me was oddly tempting. A postgraduate degree from the theological college could open up a wide variety of academic careers, quite aside from any question of belief. And I knew, from my mother’s way of thinking as well as from the occasional liberal Christian I ran into in my sceptical evangelising, even belief could be nuanced and finessed.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, let me think about it. Let me get a round in.’

‘No, let me,’ said Baxter, rising. ‘Now, now, I still owe you for using that ashtray, as well as for the coffee. Same again?’

‘A beer this time, I think. Whatever the guest beer is.’

‘Good idea.’

He disappeared inside. While he was gone I found myself wondering if he was the same man as I’d met at home a couple of years earlier. He was so much more relaxed, fluent and assured than his younger version that he might almost be that Baxter’s not-so-evil twin. More probably, I thought with a wry smile at this lapse into paranoid thinking, he’d just matured. People could. I knew I had.

‘Took the liberty of ordering a plate of nachos,’ said Baxter, as he sat down with the pints. ‘Ah, here they are.’

‘Thanks,’ I said, to him and to the waitress, as the smell of hot melted cheese took over my brain.

There was a minute or two of silence as we noshed in.

Baxter wiped the back of his wrist across his mouth.

‘By the way,’ he said, ‘when you checked and couldn’t find me, back in Greenock – what did you think I was? I mean, I can see the point of a bogus meter reader, or a bogus social worker – but a bogus
minister
? What on earth did you think I was up to?’

I looked away for a moment, then sighed. ‘This is so stupid,’ I said. ‘I thought you were a Man in Black.’

‘But I was a man in—Oh, I
see
!’ He laughed. ‘Like Will Smith in the movie? Good grief. What gave you that idea? Had you recently seen a UFO, or something?’

‘Well, as it happens, I had,’ I said. ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think it was an alien spaceship or anything. Just something weird. A light that fell from the sky and knocked me out, one day when I was up in the hills. At the time I thought it was ball lightning, maybe, but, well, you know how it goes.’

‘Oh, I know how it goes,’ said Baxter. ‘The brain does play tricks on us sometimes, eh? This ball lightning – did it leave any physical traces?’

‘Burned a neat circle in the grass, which—’

‘Let me guess,’ said Baxter. ‘Was dug up the following day, quite coincidentally?’

‘Yes!’ I said. ‘How did you know?’

He put his elbow on the table and leaned forward and raked his fingers through his hair, then propped his chin on his hand and gave me a weary look.

‘How do you think?’ He straightened a little, running thumb and forefinger up and down his larynx, as if confirming with relief the absence of the dog-collar. ‘We men in black, ha-ha, that is to say men of the cloth, and women too, of course … we hear stories. We’re
told
stories. People come to us with their problems, even non-religious people, as if we were some kind of spiritual Members of Parliament – and about as much use, come to think of it! I’ve heard everything – if not personally, then from older colleagues. I myself was once asked to perform an exorcism. An exorcism! Imagine. I’ve heard tell of ghosts, angels, saints, the Blessed Virgin Mary – that was from a nice old Catholic lady in the street who thought I was a priest of her confession – and, oh yes, grey aliens and flying saucers and all the rest of it. And you know what, the physical evidence always, always is missing or ambiguous when you go back and check. The picture was overexposed, the footprints have melted, the claw marks in the wallpaper were …’

He shook his head, or perhaps shuddered. ‘Anyway, I wouldn’t worry about it, whatever you saw. And I don’t want to know any more about it. Just put it out of your mind, Ryan. Rest assured, it’s a more common experience than you’d think.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s pretty much how I see it.’

And at that point, I think, it was. And I’ll say this for him, and for Sophie – that night, and many hundreds of nights after it, the dreams didn’t come back.

We seemed to have finished our pints.

‘Another?’ I said.

Baxter stood up, rubbing the palms of his hands together, with a ‘the night is young’ gleam in his eye.

‘I was wondering,’ he said, ‘if you wouldn’t like to have a pint or two with some New College students. See what they’re like, maybe get an idea of the sort of courses on offer, you know?’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure. I mean … aren’t theology students likely to be a bit … quiet?’

Later that evening, standing under a fine drizzle on the tiny, crowded, raucous patio of the Jolly Judge, a pub down some steps from the Royal Mile, I found myself clutching my eighth pint and shouting something about Karen Armstrong’s misreading of Karl Barth’s introduction to Feuerbach into the ear of a biker in black leathers who in turn was trying to make herself heard above the voice and through the pipe smoke of a bearded American Calvinist in a red T-shirt displaying a Guevara-style portrait of the famous Belgian Marxist economist, Ernest Mandel.

‘Total depravity,’ the American kept saying. ‘Total fucking depravity. You gotta hang onto that, man.’

‘Will you fucking shut the fuck up about that,’ said the biker, as if tested beyond endurance, ‘or I’ll stick a fucking tulip up your arse, and that stinking pipe of yours after it. Now,’ she went on, turning to face me and lighting one cigarette with the end of another, ‘what you atheist fuckwits don’t get about the apophatic tradition, see, is that it’s not some kind of ad hoc rescue hypothesis, like some kind of fucking Thomas Kuhn epicycle thing, no that’s not right but you know what I mean, right? But is in fact, in fact, completely in line with …’

I forget what it was in line with. I do remember that later still, sitting inside and stuffing my face with crisps to try and give the alcohol something more to soak into than the now distant memory of half a plate of nachos, I mumbled to the biker that I really owed James Baxter for introducing me to such a brilliantly entertaining crowd.

‘Who?’ she said, swaying slightly over a glass of red wine.

‘Baxter,’ I said. ‘You know – the Church of Scotland chaplain. He was here earlier.’

She was experimentally making sucking noises by placing the heel of her hand across her eye socket and jerking it away. With the other eye – what would later be known as ‘her good eye’, if she made a habit of this tic – she gave me a funny look.

‘No, he’s not,’ she said. ‘The chaplain.’ She carefully removed the end of a fall of her hair from the glass and sucked the wine off the tips, then tucked the hair behind her ear, from where it fell again. ‘I am.’

I checked on my phone. She was.

‘Fooled again,’ I said. ‘Fuck me.’

‘Is that an invitation?’ she said, tossing back her hair and striking a pose, then falling off her chair. She climbed back and added, ‘Then you’re out of luck. My wife wouldn’t stand for it.’

‘Total depravity,’ said the American, loftily passing by, somehow carrying five pints in two hands. ‘Total fucking depravity.’

‘Irresistible grace!’ the biker shouted back, over her shoulder. ‘Perseverance of saints!’

She fell off the chair again.

I stood on the steps in front of the Scottish Parliament and looked out over a sea (well, a loch) of marquees, tents, booths, bothies and benders that spread from the plaza across the green and, to my right, over the other side of the road, lapped against the first steep slopes of Holyrood Park. Above it floated banners, blimps and balloons, amid a thin haze of smoke from fast-food stalls, communal braziers and individual sticks of weed. Camcopters of various sizes buzzed and darted, making wireless connections to similar encampments in the Meadows and St Andrews Square and to other venues across town, and then onward and outward to the phones and screens of a million or so remote participants. My ear-phones skipped through a spectrum of hot-spot music channels, from which I selected a faint fiddle sound as a suitable backing track to my wait for Calum.

The late-July sky was blue, the morning heat already rising. The Scottish Futures Forum was well into its first full day, a Saturday. The theme for the week-long event – a Scottish Government initiative, projected as a creative mash-up of corporate trade and recruitment fair, social forum and nostalgic Occupy re-enactment – was The New Improvement. Its end would segue into August and the Edinburgh Festival kick-off, in the hope of pulling and retaining international visitors. Judging by the numbers of Asian, South American and African delegates and tourists I’d seen going in and out of the Parliament, the languages in conversations I’d overheard, and the colours of the crowds below, this was working.

With my third-year exam passes and distinctions under my belt, I was in a hopeful mood and frame of mind, looking forward to checking out future employment or postgraduate funding opportunities. Relieved (in every sense) of my aspirations to be a humanist philosopher, I’d decided on English Literature as my final-year subject. I hadn’t decided what to do after that. I vaguely contemplated getting funding for a PhD, or taking a journalism course where I could leverage my interest in and knowledge of science (not a strong point with journalists, in my view) into some preparation for a career in reporting and commenting on all the exciting developments that already accompanied the economic recovery and that were further projected under the Forum’s rubric of a new Improvement. The first Improvement, harked back to here, was the transformation of Scottish agriculture and industry in the eighteenth century in the course of Scotland’s original passive revolution, an apt and curious template for the slow upheaval that the Big Deal had enabled.

‘Hi, Sinky!’

Calum came bounding up the steps. We clasped hands and clapped shoulders.

‘Good to see you, man,’ I said.

We eyed each other with wry smiles – this was probably the first time we’d seen each other in a suit and tie. Like me, Calum was keen to check out the Forum, and he’d vaguely mentioned a family occasion in the evening. After a minute or so of catching up and checking that no one close had died or anything we turned to business and made our way down the steps and into the crowds. I hadn’t decided where I was going, but Calum had – the recruitment stall of a satellite-manufacturing company – and was navigating us there by phone.

‘This is insane,’ said Calum, after we’d picked our way through a crocodile of high-school students, all of them talking loudly.

‘What is?’ I said.

‘All this,’ he said, with an encompassing sweep of his arm. ‘I mean, this is supposed to be how the country’s gonnae decide its technology strategy! Out ae the debates here! They’re going to make a plan for the next five years – a five-year plan, aye, right, we get the message. It’s socialism, Sinky, that’s what it is.’

‘Socialism?’ I said. ‘When was the revolution?’

‘While we were busy doing our Highers, I reckon,’ said Calum.

‘The Big Deal?’ I laughed. ‘Prevented a revolution, more like. It actually
saved
capitalism. The banksters and all the other rich bastards were totally fucking up the capitalist system with their outright fucking bare-faced criminality.’ I added what was by now a well-trodden joke: ‘The authorities went after them for tax evasion, but had to settle for getting them for the St Valentine’s Day Massacre.’

‘You can laugh. State control ae finance! We might as well be in fucking China, man.’

‘You been listening to your da again?’

‘Aye, well.’ Calum shot me a slightly abashed smile. ‘Maybe
you
should listen tae him sometime. Nae loans or grants for business expansion coming his way, I’ll tell yi that.’

We ducked into a big marquee on the first green. Inside was mercifully cooler and quieter than outside. The camcopters were few, small and silent. Scores of stalls stood in long rows, between which people mostly our age drifted, or clumped around some particular attraction. Flat screens suspended from the marquee’s roof cables seemed to be the thing, but their effect was to cancel each other out in an eye-straining clamour of colour and movement. Calum headed straight for the nearest space company stall, above which a bunch of thread-tethered ten-centimetre cubical balloons bobbed. I followed him, and selected from the stacks of leaflets and memory sticks and company-logo gewgaws (a pen, a key fob, a sheet of card that folded into the cube-sat’s shape, an LED torch) while he talked earnestly with the young man and woman behind the table. The conversation ended with him handing over his CV, which the woman uploaded to her phone and handed back.

‘How did it go?’ I asked him as we wandered on.

‘Fucking great,’ he said. ‘Practically a job interview on the spot. If I keep my head down and nose to the grindstone and that, this time next year I’ll be working wi them.’