Intrusion (3 page)

She read it over, decided it was too complicated for
Memo
, and ran it through an app called MyTxt4Dummies. It came out like this:

Syn Bio has made our world better. It cleaned the air. It gave us New Trees. It gave us the fix. The fix makes babies better before they’re born. So what’s with this foreign woman saying no to it? She isn’t even a god-botherer. Time to put up or shut up, missus!

She sent it in, in time for the evening rush-hour version of
Memo
. She was ashamed to have her name on it, but she needed the money. She wasn’t employed by SynBioTech. She wasn’t employed at all. She had a grant from the Institute for Science Studies at Brunel University, on a postgraduate research project on laboratory culture in advanced biotech dry labs. A social-scientific study of the culture of engineers, for whom ‘laboratory culture’ meant something that grew on a Petri dish under a warm lamp. Her name was Geena Fernandez, but that wasn’t what her colleagues called her, behind her back.

They called her ‘the science bit’.

Hugh Morrison shook wet snow off his hooded Barbour jacket and hung it up in the cupboard in the hall just beyond where the bikes stood. As he did so he glanced at the shelf at the top of the cupboard. The frayed cardboard carton that he thought of as the suicide box – it contained a bottle of whisky and a pistol – was still there. The pistol was a high-power air-pistol replica of an automatic, and thus doubly illegal, but quite undetectable by sniffing for explosives. Hugh had no intention of committing suicide with it, or with the whisky for that matter. Hope didn’t know about the contents of the box, and the carton itself was above her eyeline and she was unlikely ever to notice it. The cameras in the hall didn’t see into the cupboard – Hugh had made sure of that when he’d banged them in – and there were no cameras in the cupboard.

He turned out of the cupboard and into the hall. Through in the kitchen, Hope looked at him over her shoulder from the sink, a smile just beginning. A little closer, Nick hurtled towards him, arms open, Max the toy monkey bounding in pursuit. A metre or so behind the boy and the toy, just below the eyeline between Hugh and Hope, quite solid, a stocky man with long red hair and a blue-dyed face walked at a diagonal across the narrow passageway. The hide pieces wrapped around his feet and strapped around his calves made a wet sound as his heels came up, and a faint, distinct thud as his heels came down. The fur of his sleeveless jacket was beaded with water, his check trousers soaked to the knees, but his hair and his arms were dry. He gave Hugh a sidelong glance a second before he stepped through the wall, and jerked his head a little to the other side, looking away, as if Hugh were an apparition he was aware of but did not care to face.

Hugh dropped to a squat, opened his arms and caught up the boy and the robot. He carried them both hugging and laughing through to the kitchen. As he stepped across the path the apparition had trod, he caught a distinct whiff of rank unwashed human mingled with the fresher smell of brine.

Hugh had grown up facing the new Atlantic, looking out at icebergs while wind-power blades beat the air overhead. Most of the people he knew were locals – the natives, they called themselves, the Leosich – but although Hugh had been born on Lewis, he knew he wasn’t a Leosach. One day when he was
about five years old he was playing with his toy spade in some left-over cement and sand at the edge of a new windmill site overlooking Cliff Bay. As usual in certain conversations at that age, he was talking about himself in the third person.

‘So then he mixed them up like this,’ he explained to Voxy, who was kneeling in her muddy skirt at the other side of the mess, ‘and then with the other hand he picked up the water.’ Hugh lifted a rusty paint tin full of rainwater. ‘And he tipped it in and sort of stirred it, no I mean he shoved the spade under the mix and lifted and then turned it over as he poured the water on, skoosh, and—’

‘Who are you talking to?’

Hugh felt a jolt go through him. The water splashed. He set the tin down, dropped the spade, and looked up. Murdo Helmand, a tall Leosach with a glass eye from the war, stood in bright yellow overalls and hard hat looking down at him. Murdo Helmand worked sometimes on the new windmills.

Hugh didn’t know why he felt like he felt when he’d been caught doing something bad, but he did.

‘Nobody,’ he said.

Voxy gave him a hurt look across the mound of half-mixed concrete. She stood up. Hugh stared at the two wet patches where her knees had pressed on the thick woolly fabric wrapped around her legs and tied at the waist with some kind of hairy string. He couldn’t look at her eyes. After a moment, he was seeing nothing but the trampled green grass and yellow flowers behind where she’d been.

‘Nobody!’ he repeated, angry this time, his eyes stinging as
he looked again at Murdo Helmand. He wasn’t going to cry. He wasn’t.

‘Nobody?’ said Murdo Helmand, teasing. ‘So you were talking to yourself, were you?’

‘Yes,’ Hugh said, relieved. ‘I was talking to myself.’

Murdo Helmand laughed. ‘Only crazy people talk to themselves.’

He winked with his good eye (back then glass eyes showed only black and white) and strolled away to laugh with his mates on the site. Hugh felt hot. He didn’t know where to look, so he looked down.

‘He looked down,’ he said, but not out loud, ‘and he picked up the spade and went on mixing the cement, and it got sort of like mud and then he looked up but he couldn’t see Voxy, and he felt really sorry because Voxy had been with him lots and was always nice, well maybe not always.’

With the back of his hand, splashed with wet cement and water, Hugh wiped under his nose. It felt gritty. He sniffed, and something stung inside his nostrils and he sneezed. He tried again with the opposite wrist, which was clean, and that was all right.

He stood up and looked around. From where he stood, on the side of the new site, he could see straight out to sea. The site was a hundred metres or so above the wide sandy beach, facing out on a bay between the two headlands: one all crags and cliffs, black with the white dots of gulls and gannets; the other rounded and green, a huge mound of grass-pinned sand, with a small cemetery on its slope. The breakers rolled straight
in, crashing on the sand. Behind him the hill went up to a horizon a hundred or so metres away. He was forbidden to climb that heathery slope, because over the hill was a loch. He had, of course, climbed the slope, and nervously approached the loch’s rush-bordered shore, then turned away and run back, muir-burned heather twigs blackening and scratching his legs. Hugh firmly believed, though he had never been told, that the dark waters of the loch covered a crashed fighter aircraft with the skeleton of the pilot still in its cockpit, and that an eel with a body as thick as a man’s and of proportional length swam in it, and on occasion emerged from it to gulp down a stray lamb or unwary child.

On his left and a little below him was the windmill site, a broad flat excavation filled with concrete and sprouting metal rods and plates. Generators chugged. Lorries toiled up the slope from the road. The components of the tower were stacked like pieces from a kit for an enormous toy, around which a score of workers swarmed. Leosich and incomers, men and women were hard to tell apart in their yellow overalls, though more incomers than Leosich and more men than women wore the white hard hats of engineers and overseers. Down-slope from the windmill site was the local school building, Valtos Primary, due to reopen in August. Hugh knew he’d have to go there. He was quite looking forward to it, but he hadn’t been able to explain to Voxy what it was all about.

‘I don’t see how you can learn things sitting inside,’ she’d said. ‘Only the new priests do that, and they don’t know fuck all.’

Hugh had found this very funny, but when he’d swaggeringly repeated it to his mum, she’d frowned and asked him where he’d heard
that
sort of language and she hadn’t been too pleased when he wouldn’t tell her because he didn’t want to snitch on Voxy.

Voxy! Hugh walked carefully around the perimeter barriers of the site, looking for her. He didn’t call out – he knew he didn’t need to. But he couldn’t see her anywhere. All the time Murdo Helmand’s taunt kept coming back to his mind, like he could hear it inside his head.
Only crazy people talk to themselves.
But he wasn’t crazy and he hadn’t been talking to himself. He’d been talking to Voxy. He’d always known that other people couldn’t see Voxy, but it hadn’t seemed important. It was just one of those things, like that other people couldn’t hear things you said in your head (except Voxy, of course, who could). Now it seemed very important indeed, because it meant that if people saw or heard him talking to Voxy, they would think he was talking to himself, and only crazy people talked to themselves.

Hugh never saw Voxy again, and whenever he saw people that other people didn’t see he didn’t speak to them. Some of these occasions were more significant than others. Now and again he thought about Voxy, but fewer and fewer times as he grew up. The funny thing was, though, that whenever he thought about Voxy, he saw her in his mind as she would be now, if she’d grown up in pace with him. He could still remember her as she’d appeared when he was a little kid, and she was a slightly older and cleverer kid, but when he spontaneously thought of
her, it was always as a girl, or later as a young woman, about the same age as himself. In his adolescence she featured sometimes in his sexual fantasies, but not often, and he came to turn his mind away from her as a figure in such fantasies – he became uncomfortable with it, not because he felt it was wrong, or thought of her as a sister or anything like that, but because she was in a sense too real, more real than the images of real girls he knew, or the women in the pictures he found on the net.

One evening, in his third year at university, he met her. She was singing in the Students Union bar of Aberdeen University. Hugh was standing at the serving hatch, waiting for a pint of bitter, when he heard a woman’s voice and a guitar. Nobody sang in bars any more, not even in Students Union bars, so he turned around. The woman was sitting cross-legged on the bench at the rear wall, head down, strumming a guitar that lay across her knees. She wore tight blue jeans tucked into high brown boots, and a wool open-mesh jacket over a tight T-shirt. Her dark brown hair was piled in a loose knot, skewered by what looked like a wooden knitting needle, on top of her head.

‘Twenty pounds,’ said the bar person. Hugh handed over the coin and took the plastic glass, without looking away from the woman, and let the guy behind him move to the head of the queue. The woman was singing some English folk song. As she hit the chorus, she tossed her head back, and Hugh saw her face for the first time. He nearly dropped the glass. He actually splashed some of the beer, which at a pound a gulp was something he’d never done before.

She looked exactly like he’d imagined Voxy would look now.

His startlement passed. He took a sip and edged towards the rear wall, weaving around standing groups and Formica-topped woodchip tables and orange plastic chairs. The fluorescent lighting, dim but harsh, glared off the Union bar’s white walls and colourful DrinkAware posters of vomit pools, car crashes, liver dissections and facial injuries. White noise and discords were just audible enough on the sound system to disrupt normal conversation and jangle the nerves, but not loud enough to drown out the woman’s singing.

A small crowd, a dozen or so, had formed a semicircle around her, and elsewhere in the room heads had turned to face her, some with tentative half-smiles, some with looks of vague puzzlement, a few with frowns. Hugh elbowed into the semicircle. The abstracted, unfocused gaze of the woman’s big dark eyes snagged on the intensity of his look. He responded to the eye-locked moment with a quick, casual nod, as if she were someone he knew, which he felt she was. Her double-take became a triple, but it didn’t shake her voice by a note.

She was into the final chorus and one or two of her listeners had joined in by the time Hugh felt a parting in the press of bodies behind him, then a nudge.

‘Excuse me.’

Hugh turned to meet the vaguely familiar face of a male student: glasses, ponytail, piercings, strands of beard, busy important frown. Oh, yes: Craig, the Student Union’s social secretary, recognisable from his campaign flyers a few months earlier. Hugh stepped aside. Craig took a few paces forward and stopped, leaning slightly forward from the waist.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the woman, ‘but I’m going to have to ask you to stop singing.’

The woman shrugged. ‘I have stopped,’ she said. She had an accent that Hugh could only identify as English, and that sounded to him posh. The accent wasn’t in the least like Voxy’s, but the voice was. Her complexion and her eyes made him think of rowan and heather, of peat lochs under grey skies.

A few voices were raised in objection.

‘Fuck off, Craig!’

‘She’s no using a mike!’

‘Oi!’

Craig turned and glared, then spread his hands. ‘Nothing to do with me, folks,’ he said. ‘It’s the law, and you know it. If we allow singing or music in here, we’ll lose our licence.’

‘Aw, fuck, can you no turn a—’

‘Same goes for swearing,’ Craig added. ‘Creating a hostile environment.’

‘It’s all right,’ the woman said. She stood up and waved her forearms. ‘Thanks for the support, everyone, but leave it.’