Intrusion (22 page)

Geena was shaking her head slowly in amazement. ‘That’s appalling!’

‘Aye, it’s appalling. Now this was before my time, the last case like that was before I was born, but people have long memories in small communities. So when I first got curious about the second sight – I found the term in an old book on Highland folklore that was lying around in our house – I asked my pals at high school, and they sort of tapped their noses and talked behind their hands about certain folks in the locality, and next time I was home I asked my dad about it, like, “Dad, is it true that old Mrs Macdonald has the second sight?” I guess I was
about, uh, thirteen or so, not a little kid, and for the first time in my life my dad takes me out the back, literally behind the woodshed – well, the peat shed – and gives me a clip on the back of the head. Not hard, not to hurt, but like a glancing blow, you know?’

Geena nodded. ‘Uh-huh. I’ve had a few myself.’

‘Right. It was enough of a shock to me, I can tell you. So now he’d got my attention, so to speak, he told me what I’ve just told you about what had gone on, the investigations and that. He said never to mention the subject again. And I didn’t. Until now.’

Hugh felt a pang as he said that. He hadn’t even told it to Hope.

Geena was giving him a very quizzical look.

‘Why did you get interested in the second sight in the first place?’

‘I was a curious lad,’ Hugh said.

Geena considered this.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘none of this really matters any more. The point is your wife now has a good case for not taking the fix, and maybe identifying this gene will clear up all the superstition about the second sight.’

Hugh glared at her. ‘You don’t understand,’ he said. ‘There’s just no way I’m going to open that can of worms. No fucking way. I’ll tell Hope about it, and it’ll be her choice, but I’m sure she’ll agree.’

‘You think?’

‘Yes. I know my wife better than you do.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Geena. ‘But I’m betting otherwise.’

‘Like it’s any of your business.’

‘I just wanted to help,’ said Geena, sounding upset.

‘I know, I know. I appreciate that.’ Hugh frowned. ‘Why did you want to help us, anyway? Why take these risks? Is it because you’re a Christian, or what?’

Geena snorted a laugh. ‘I’m not a Christian! What makes you think that?’

Hugh pointed. ‘That cross around your neck.’

Geena looked away, then back. ‘It’s a cross I have to bear,’ she said.

‘Family pressures?’ Hugh guessed, with some sympathy.

‘Good God, no! My parents are as godless as I am. It’s a … cultural thing. I’m from a Catholic community – Goan, you know?’

Her voice had taken on a higher pitch: light, over-casual.

‘Oh, I get it,’ said Hugh. ‘Same reason as my colleague Ashid’ – he jerked a thumb over his shoulder – ‘wears the round cap, even though he isn’t a Muslim. Community identity, loyalty to—’

Ashid’s voice suddenly boomed from the hallway, through which, in one of those bloody-typical moments, he happened to be lugging a bucket of rubble.

‘You’re a bloody fool, Hugh!’

Hugh turned, embarrassed, into the full beam of Ashid’s grin. The plasterer’s gaze basked in Hugh’s discomfiture for a second or two, then switched to Geena. He patted the top of his head and tapped his chest.

‘You and me for the same reason, eh? To show the cops we’re not bloody Hindus! Every time they stop me they check me over and I tell them I’m a good Muslim and then they send me on my way with the same joke: they miss the jihadists, hah-hah! Like their fathers missed the IRA!’ Ashid mimicked a posh English accent, very badly, to add: ‘Sporting chaps the IRA were, at least they didn’t blow
themselves
up!’

Geena giggled. ‘Yes, that’s it!’

Ashid waved and went on. When Hugh turned back to Geena she was blinking rapidly and sniffing.

‘What’s the matter?’

Geena turned away and blew her nose, then turned back. ‘Sorry, nothing. It just upsets me sometimes. The stops. You’d think with all the information they have on us they’d not bother, but they do.’

‘You get hassled by cops?’

Geena gave him a
what planet are you on?
look. ‘Yes. And so does your friend, by the sound of it.’

‘He’s never mentioned it.’

‘People don’t,’ said Geena, in a bitter tone.

‘Ah, I’m sorry about that, I didn’t realise. Still,’ he went on, trying to lighten the mood, ‘I know what it’s like not mentioning things.’

Geena gave him a pitying look this time. ‘No, Mr Morrison. You don’t.’

After half a minute of silence, she spoke again: ‘I think we’re about finished here.’

‘Thanks for trying to help,’ Hugh said, ushering her to the door.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Geena.

That evening, after the ten o’clock news, Hugh waved a hand in front of Hope to ask her to disengage from her glasses, on which she was surfing. She took them off.

‘Yes?’

‘I’ve got a confession. Today a very pretty girl came to see me at work.’

‘How nice for you.’

Her tone was light but wary.

‘Ah, that’s not really the confession.’

‘I didn’t think it was, somehow.’

Hope put aside her glasses and leaned back. Hugh leaned forward and began talking.

When he finished, her eyes narrowed, as they had when he was going through the bit about the witchcraft accusations.

‘That’s all?’ she said. ‘That’s everything? You don’t have any more secrets you’d like to get off your chest?’

Hugh thought about it. ‘No.’

‘Good.’ She sounded miffed, as well she might.

However, to Hugh’s surprise, she took the rest of his account of the morning’s events in her stride. She insisted that the new information didn’t change anything. The gene was probably for nothing more than a susceptibility to hallucinations. She certainly didn’t want to make it the basis for any appeal.

‘I couldn’t bear it,’ she said. ‘For Nick.’

‘The publicity?’ Hugh asked.

‘The being made to feel different.’

‘They make him feel different already,’ said Hugh, with some bitterness.

‘That’s just prejudice,’ said Hope. ‘I’d hate for it to be science.’

Something was bugging her about the science, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

The following morning Hope finished the nursery walk and the breakfast dishes and the beds before 9.30, then sat down at the table and fired up her glasses, stared at the endless scroll of language-mangled queries and thought: fuck this.

Let Searle handle the questions for today. She couldn’t concentrate. She hadn’t slept well. Hugh’s late-evening belated confession had shaken her even more than the one last week, the one that had started with her confrontation with him over the gun. That Hugh, in their apparently open, weepy, letting-it-all-come-out-at-last conversation, hadn’t actually told her what was evidently one of his biggest bugbears about his hallucinations, and one of the main reasons why he’d kept it bottled up so long – that really, really pissed her off. Especially given that this aspect of his story was directly connected with the matter of social services and child protection, not to mention
making Lewis seem an even less attractive place in which to get away from all this for a while.

She loved him, but, aagh.

Hope jumped up from the table and stalked over to the sink, where she’d earlier noticed that the regularly recurring pinkish algal slime on the dish drainer was back. She dried the almost-dry plates and mugs racked there and put them away, then pulled on an apron and rubber gloves and filled the sink with hot water and started scrubbing the empty drier. When that was clean, she noticed that the sides of the sink were grubby, and scrubbed them.

That bit of displacement activity out of the way, she ambled around the flat, tidying up. Nick put away his toys every evening, or at least stacked them against the living-room wall, but it was amazing how many he could scatter around in the hour between getting up and going to nursery. She dusted the bookshelves and took books down and opened them and turned over pages of heavy, glossy exhibition catalogues of artists, photographers and designers, and thin, dense-printed textbooks of economics and business administration and management studies, each little more than a taster for the DVD or CD in a plastic envelope attached to the inside back cover, and therefore almost completely useless. Somewhere in the flat there had to be a DVD player, but she couldn’t think where. As if searching for a scientific answer to that question, she moved on to Hugh’s battered old engineering manuals and science references, some of them handed down from his father like a family Bible and likewise unchanging and full of small type,
with constants and formulae defined for all time in bold black font barbed with serifs, a King James Version of truth. Then her browse took her to cookery books – again, the most used handed down, this one from Hope’s grandmother – and as she flipped through recipes whose results were appetisingly and artfully photographed in an advertising style her arts-trained eye could recognise at a glance as early 1980s, she lit upon a faded glossy pic of a beef casserole. She could almost smell the steam, and a sudden craving told her exactly what they’d be having for dinner this evening.

She went out into bright sunshine to Tesco. The New Trees had reached forty feet and their broad, overlapping leaves cast an almost unbroken shade. On East West Road Hope blinked in the glare and hastily put her glasses on, waving a hand to flip them to polarising mode. One or two people in the street gesticulated or waggled their fingers as they walked, but without glasses. Contacts, the very latest thing. The thought niggled, somehow.

In the store she bought a kilo of beef and some root vegetables – it wasn’t the weather for a casserole or anything heavy, but she was the one who was pregnant and if her body or the baby’s said it needed iron or whatever she wasn’t going to argue, and anyway Hugh would eat anything after a day’s work – and as she bagged them under the checkout scan and gazed abstractedly at the floating virtual display of the magazine downloads on offer, the niggle returned to her mind. She paused to focus on the niggle, and it vanished beneath the surface of her mind like a minnow into a deep pool as a shadow
falls. Hope frowned, and deliberately turned her mind away. She knew it would come back if she didn’t concentrate; it was like letting a search run in the background, sooner or later up it would come.

Back at the flat, she tied on an old blue-and-white-striped butcher’s apron, turned the slow cooker on to high, and got to work, peeling potatoes, slicing garlic and onion, chopping carrots and a turnip, dicing meat, searing and simmering amid increasingly savoury smells. Every so often she wiped her hands on the apron, leaving smears of blood or flour or stock-cube crumbs. Just as she’d turned the cooker down to simmer and put the Pyrex lid on the pot and picked up the big knife to place it in the sink, the missing thought rose to the top of her mind’s stack and pinged for attention.

Rhodopsin
, it reminded her, and
tachyons
.

That was it, that was what had been bugging her ever since Hugh had mentioned the word last night. Rhodopsin was the visual protein for whose gene he and Nick had a mutation, and she knew she’d come across the word before, in another context. Three months ago she’d read in
The Economist
that scientists at CERN had detected possible tachyon effects in a suspension of rhodopsin derivatives.

Hope put down the knife, wiped her hands again, and scanned the shelf of Hugh’s old reference books. She pulled down an encyclopedic dictionary of physics, searched, and found.

Tachyons. Hypothetical particles that moved faster than light, and, therefore, backward in time. From the future into the past.

She went over to the table and picked up her glasses carefully by the edges, nudging the earpieces open with her wrists. She ran a semantic search on the topic, and found little beyond the initial
Nature
paper, a small flurry of letters in
New Scientist
, and the same
Economist
article. No follow-up, no further research reported. It looked like one of those discoveries that flared for a moment then faded. But still …

It got her thinking. If something derived from rhodopsin detected particles moving backward in time, and Hugh had a mutant version of rhodopsin … was it possible that the visions he saw were caused by tachyons? Not directly, surely – no tachyon flux could behave like light, and she doubted that the particles could be focused on the retina – but stimulating the brain to form an image nonetheless. Hope knew from her art training that the visual field was mostly an internal construction anyway, a vast canvas corrected and updated piecemeal by the pencil torch of the optic nerve’s input, whose bit-rate was far too low for it to produce the whole panorama at once. So some visual reconstruction cued by odd fleeting particles didn’t strike her as impossible.

In which case, the barbarians Hugh saw weren’t from the past. They were from the future.

Which – if you followed through the logic of the wild speculation – raised the awkward question of how they saw him (and indeed, in one instance, her), as Hugh had insisted they did. Because in that case, they would be seeing into the past. Was there such a thing as an anti-tachyon? Not part of the Standard Model, that was for sure! So then, she’d have to
fall back on the hypothesis that these interactions were hallucinations, construction of Hugh’s brain, in which case … why even go down the physics route; why not admit the whole thing was a hallucination? And yet, and yet – Hugh had claimed his boyhood pals had seen something real, under the hill above the house … Did these lads have the same mutant gene, or was there a quite different phenomenon involved?