Intrusion (7 page)

She crossed Dawley Road at the cottages and headed down Blyth Road, then turned left into Trevor Road and Printing House Lane, a canyon of factories and office blocks, to where the road crossed the canal, and picked her way down crumbling concrete steps to the canal bank. As always, the chance association of the names set off an earworm of Betjeman’s poem.

No phantom swimmers in this canal. Fringed by tall poplars, cruddy with litter and crusted with ice, the water’s only visible life was a disconsolate duck and the monstrous ripples of the ten-metre-long flexible barges of biofuel that swam beneath the surface like lake monsters. Geena walked carefully along the uneven and ill-maintained towpath for a hundred metres until Maya appeared around a bend up ahead.

Maya waved. Geena waved back. They converged on an iron-mounted beam of greying wood that Geena assumed was something to do with the canal and that now served as a bench. It was just dry enough to sit on. Holding the hot soups out of the way at each side, Geena exchanged air-kisses with Maya and sat down beside her, lunches between.

‘Thanks so much,’ Maya said, pouncing on the vegan sandwich.

‘You’re welcome,’ said Geena.

They popped the tops of the soup cups and inhaled the steam for a moment.

‘Ah, bliss,’ said Maya, and sipped.

Geena had met Maya when they were both studying sociology at Brunel, and they’d kept in touch in the two years since
they’d graduated. Maya was a difficult person to get a handle on, and some of that difficulty showed in her appearance. From a distance she looked almost like a crusty, but close up you could see that her fair hair wasn’t in dreads but in springy ringlets, freshly coloured and shampooed; her woollen-patch jacket smelled as if just out of the washing machine, her man-style shirt was cut for women and buttoned on the left, the T-shirt under it had a neat eyelet trim around the neck, her blue jeans had barely a crease and her boots shone. Even dressed for the office in neat blouse and skirt and a warm flared coat, Geena felt slightly dowdy and scruffy beside her.

Maya’s look, Geena had discovered from some old photos she had shown her, was a cleaned-up version of that of her parents at the time they’d met, when they’d both been full-time climate campers, their lifestyle a permanent protest against other people’s lifestyles. The couple had kept that up on a part-time basis, somewhat hampered by the string of part-time jobs they’d had to take to support Maya and her sibs, until Maya was about fourteen years old, at which time their entire preoccupation had been made redundant by syn bio tech. Without missing a beat they’d moved seamlessly into campaigning against
that
. Now, though, they did their campaigning in a mainstream manner, writing and lobbying rather than squatting in muddy greenfield sites, living up trees, or running onto runways.

‘How’s life in the Advice Centre?’ Geena asked.

Maya sighed. ‘Same as usual. It’s like living in a fucking soap opera.’

She went on to talk about some of the problems the Centre’s drop-in clients dropped in with. Most of them arose out of sublet living: inter- or intra-family disputes, rent arrears, repairs … Hayes, like all the outer suburbs of London, was still recovering from a decade or so of battering from the tsunami-like surges of population movement that had begun when Peak Oil and Peak Debt had made suburban living unaffordable. Eastward from Hayes, in through Southall, Ealing and Acton, regentrification was taking place – which brought its own problems to high-street Advice Centres, as former squatters and renters were pushed out by new buyers. Outward – as in West Drayton and Uxbridge, where Brunel University was situated, and where Geena shared a couple of rooms with her boyfriend – the suburbs were still little more than redbrick shanty towns, every neat semi, bungalow and villa occupied by at least two households and every garden by its goat and chickens.

‘You’d think,’ Geena said, after Maya had finished outlining a particularly tedious tangle, ‘that people could just sort these things out online.’

‘That’s the worst of it,’ said Maya. ‘They do go online. That’s why the guy I was just telling you about got so stubborn. Turned out the advice he was taking was from a parser some law student had knocked up to read Home Office databases and cobble them into essay cribs that he sold to his mates, behind a lawfirm front screen that everyone knew was a joke except this poor bastard who found it at the top of a search.’

‘And other poor bastards too, no doubt.’

‘Oh, I’ll meet them, waving their glasses and standing on
their rights.’ Maya wiped her mouth and scattered vegan crumbs to an investigating pigeon. ‘Anything interesting going on in your place?’

‘SynBioTech’s shining towers? I wish.’

‘Saw your piece in
Memo
.’

‘Oh, Christ, that! Well, it was a bit more subtle when I wrote it, let’s say.’

Maya gave an understanding laugh.

‘Funnily enough,’ Geena went on, ‘it got picked up by the trawl, and …’

She told Maya the story all the way to the bit about Hope Morrison.

‘That’s really, really interesting,’ Maya said. Her eyes were bright. ‘Somebody really should do something for her.’

‘Oh, don’t,’ said Geena. ‘Don’t start all that again.’

‘All what again?’ Maya sounded hurt.

‘Campaigning,’ Geena sang, drawing out the word to draw the sting of what she’d just said. At Brunel, Maya had been heavily into campaigning. Her rebellion against her parents had taken the form of standing up for people who wanted to be left alone. To Geena it seemed to have exactly the same relationship to Maya’s parents’ passions as her clothes did to their fashions: a neater, cleaner, more bourgeois version of the same thing, cut from the same cloth.

‘The rights of the individual and all that rubbish,’ Geena added, emphatically.

Maya shook her bouncy shampooed ringlets that from a distance looked like dreads.

‘Oh, don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I just think it’s so important that people in that position know they’re not alone. That’s all.’

‘Well, if you’re sure … ’

‘Oh yes,’ said Maya, smiling. She stood up and banged her arms around her chest. ‘About time we got moving, no?’

‘Yes,’ said Geena. She crushed up their litter and bagged it, stood up and hugged Maya.

‘See you again soon,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ said Maya. ‘I’ll get the lunch next time.’

‘No, no.’ Geena knew she wouldn’t, anyway.

‘OK, thanks. Bye!’

‘Bye. And remember,’ Geena added, mock-stern. ‘No campaigning.’

‘No campaigning,’ Maya said. ‘Promise.’

Smile, wave, turn.

As she walked back along the canal bank, Geena thought: what have I done? What the fuck have I done?

She felt quite sorry for Hope Morrison.

Saturday morning began at seven, as most Saturday mornings did, with Nick bouncing up and down on the end of the bed. Hope yelped as a badly directed bounce ended on her foot, jolting her fully awake.

‘Nick,’ she pleaded, ‘just go and play with Max.’

Nick walked on all fours up the bed and clambered in between Hope and Hugh. Hugh, his back to Hope, grunted
and pulled the duvet over his head. Hope wrapped an arm around Nick, feeling the heat of his body through his pyjamas.

‘Well, snuggle in and let’s go back to sleep,’ she said, nosing his hair.

Nick squirmed. ‘Want breakfast.’

‘Get it yourself,’ Hugh said, from under the duvet and under his breath.

Nick heard. ‘Can I, can I, can I?’

‘No you cannot,’ said Hope. ‘Let’s just snooze for a bit, OK?’

‘I’m not sleepy,’ Nick said. ‘I’m hungry.’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ said Hugh.

‘Hugh!’ Hope chided.

‘Yeah, yeah, sorry.’

‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck,’ said Nick, enjoying himself.

‘And you stop saying that.’

‘Daddy said it.’

‘Yes, but he shouldn’t have. Now go to sleep.’

Nick sat straight up, pulling the top of the duvet with him.

‘Going to get breakfast,’ he announced.

Hope sighed. This was how it always ended. Nick wasn’t badly behaved most of the time, but Saturday mornings were far too exciting to spend in bed. Hope could understand that. Nick seemed to enjoy nursery (once he’d been prised off her leg each morning) but for him every new weekend was a fresh wonderland of freedom. Hope had a memory flash of how Saturday mornings had been before Nick was born. Oh well. Everything had an up side and a down side, and on balance she
didn’t regret it. She got up, winced at the cold, and pulled on her dressing gown and slippers in a hurry.

‘Let’s get breakfast,’ she said.

‘Yes!’ said Nick. ‘I’ll get Max. He’s hungry too.’

‘Hugh, do you want a coffee and toast?’

But Hugh was already snoring again. Hope went through to the kitchen and made eggy soldiers for Nick and toast and honey for herself. As they ate, the garden brightened outside. The sky, visible by ducking down and looking up, was blue.

‘Railway walk?’ Hope asked.

‘Yes!’ said Nick. ‘Railway walk, railway walk!’

So that was that. Saturday, sorted.

The railway walk was Parkland Walk. The nearest entrance was a kilometre or so along East West Road to the east of Victoria Road. Hope, Hugh, and Nick with Max on his shoulder set off about eleven. Hugh had the buggy folded up and concealed in a small rucksack, just in case. Parkland Walk followed the path of an old railway line, through a long cutting for most of its route. It was the first time they’d been there since the late autumn, and Hope felt a little down on seeing it still looked like winter. Mud, dead leaves, bare branches, a few buds, shopping trolleys, litter, frost in the shadows. But Nick ran ahead, breaking thin ice and splashing through puddles in his wellies and sending Max shinning up trees.

After a while she said to Hugh: ‘We could just go on walking.’

‘What?’

Hope waved a vague encompassing hand ahead.

‘There are walks everywhere, they all connect up. Canal banks, cycle paths, that sort of thing. We could walk from here to anywhere in Britain and hardly go on the main roads.’

‘We could,’ said Hugh. ‘If we didn’t have to sleep or eat.’

‘We could camp out,’ said Hope, ‘and live off the land.’

‘The berries don’t come out for months,’ said Hugh. ‘And the squirrels are skinny even when you can dig them out. Mind you, the roadkill keeps well at this time of year. Like a deep freeze, practically. And we could recharge the monkey at fuel stations, if we took the adaptor. Yeah, that sounds like a plan.’

‘You’re not taking me seriously.’

‘That I’m not. And why would we want to walk to anywhere, anyway?’

‘If we had to get away.’

‘Jeez.’ Hugh didn’t sound amused. ‘That’s not how you do it. There’s no
away
.’

‘People talk about going off grid.’

‘Yeah, they do. They talk about it. On the net. Nowhere’s off grid any more.’

‘There must be,’ said Hope. ‘There must be a place.’

Nick had stopped by the side of the path up ahead, and squatted down to gaze into the dark space underneath a huge holly bush. Max, programmed to occasionally ape its owner’s actions, squatted beside him. As Hugh and Hope approached, they heard Nick talking, as if to someone under the bush. His
elbows were propped on his knees, and he gestured with his hands and forearms, each motion mimicked by Max.

Hope turned to Hugh, smiling, and raised a finger to her lips.

‘Cute,’ she murmured.

Hugh nodded. But he waited only a few seconds, and then coughed, and scuffed the ground as he strode forward.

‘Yes,’ he said to Hope as he reached for Nick’s hand and scooped Max to his shoulders. ‘There is a place.’

He sounded happy.

There was a place. Hugh was fairly sure it existed and wasn’t one of his visions. The other lads, Malcolm and Donald, had seen it too. The reason he couldn’t be entirely sure was that the lads were Leosich themselves, and they could have had the second sight too, for all he knew, and spoken of it no more than he did. But he was almost sure there was more to it than that, even to this day: that the glimpse his pals had shared, and denied, was of some far reality. Hugh’s guesses as to the nature of its reality varied on a sliding scale of scepticism and self-mockery: an objective phenomenon, a space-time anomaly, a land under the hill, a fairy land, Tir Nan Og …

They’d all been about twelve years old at the time: old enough for big school, the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway. Old enough to look with a sort of affectionate pity at wee school, Valtos Primary, when they came back to Uig for the
summer holidays. Seeing the parish again after a couple of terms in the town was unsettling. The black houses and the white, the sheep-fanks and bothans, the corrugated-iron sheds, the dry-stone walls another inch deeper in the grass, the ruins and the new build, the rusting cars and tractors in the middle of fields, all seemed primitive and petty, almost shameful to be associated with, something you’d outgrown like childhood toys. Only the windmills and the wooden houses looked modern.