Lie of the Land (11 page)

He walked out from behind the trees, adjusted his headphones and headed south in time to the music throbbing in his ears. Thank Christ for solar power.

•

On the main road out of Inverlair where there was an opening in a line of rowan trees, a gravel track led to a rusty metal gate that was wide enough to let a lorry through. Hidden by low branches Carl saw a washed-out sign for Levanche Aggregates, Inverlair Quarry. The metal gates were chained together and a wheelless windowless old car was taking root among the bushes. Carl climbed over the chest-high gate and continued down the rough track and into the quarry. Warning placards atop wooden posts, all flattened by the wind, urged site visitors to
WEAR PERSONAL PROTECTION EQUIPMENT
and
DON'T TAKE UNNECESSARY RISKS
. As far as the pregnancy was concerned, it was a bit late for any of that. He crunched on down the stony track, into the great gouged pit.

The main part of the quarry must have been over 300 metres wide and at least 50 deep, one side open, leading down towards a sagging ballast-filled pier where the cargo ships had loaded up with gravel sand and aggregate. Long gone now, everything rust and rot: prefab site office with broken windows; corrugated-iron works shed rattling and squeaking in the wind; corroded tank and concrete bund for waste oil; lorry trailers with flat tyres; a long conveyor-belt machine, angling into the air, a dead dinosaur like Eric. Like himself.

At the far end of the quarry another dirt track ploughed up and through banks of peat, until it opened out again into a
steep-sided lagoon. Signs warned of deep water. Young pine trees had taken hold on the lagoon's stony slopes, along with gorse and tufts of heather. Wind ghosted in gusts across the dark water.

Nobody was watching him here.

On a stone track overlooking the lagoon, Carl picked up a fist-sized stone and hurled it underarm down towards the deep water. The splash echoed round the pit, setting birds to flight. Some of them sped from the quarry's floor, twittering in fright, flashing towards the safety of holes in the sand cliffs, at the far end of the lagoon. When the sun was out it was warm, but the cool breeze sped the clouds, and it was cold in the shadows, spines of winter needling into autumn.

Carl made his way down the side of the quarry towards the lagoon. The wind dropped away and, sitting next to a pile of huge boulders, he felt some heat in the sun in the rocks and on the ground. He unzipped his jacket and pulled out his water bottle.

There was sand on the quarry floor, around the lagoon. The plaque at the village viewpoint said the sea level had fluctuated since the last Ice Age. Maybe that explained why he had his own private inland beach.

Tenacious buggers, those young pine trees, half-submerged on the slopes of the lagoon, green shoots bursting through the gravel, some of them saplings barely knee-high. The earth was reclaiming this man-made scar in the landscape, creeping down the sides of the quarry, covering the pit and the tracks, the mounds of till and rusting machinery. Healing over. Carl sat with eyes closed and out of the wind until the next cloud, a big one, came and blocked the sun. Shadow lowered the temperature and sitting there became uncomfortable after a spell. He got to his feet. The book in the hotel said there was a prehistoric structure, and some caves, up in the hill. There was nothing else to do but walk and hide and think. Despite what George had said, people probably blamed him for everything that had happened; when they found out about
Simone they'd blame him for that as well. Fair enough. Rather than question their own lack of awareness, their blindness, they could pin SCOPE on him and Howard. Simone's brother seemed to have Little Man Syndrome. Carl doubted whether being an uncle again would cause him unbridled delight.

•

Two hours later he was 300 metres up on the opposite headland, at the remains of a Bronze Age broch, trying to envisage what this pile of stones had looked like, standing twelve metres high and with two-metre thick walls. There was tightness in his chest and weakness in his legs. But he'd managed the climb, all the way, whereas the week before he hadn't.

People had looked out from here once, he thought, across the same hills and bay, out to where sun and cloud danced on the same leaden Atlantic. Hungry people, perhaps, watching from this spot. How healthy had the prehistoric diet been? It seemed to consist mainly of nuts, berries and fish. How could you square a healthy diet with dying young? Simple: death had more than one trick up its sleeve. It could seep into your bones with the drizzle, or it could strangle you with your own umbilical cord. A harsh winter. The point of a sword. These were the ways before Alzheimer's and cancer and the industrialised race to extinction. Erase the main road from the picture, the forest plantation too, and you could be looking at a million years ago.

The broch was anywhere between 2,000 and 4,000 years old, according to the book in the hotel, but there wasn't much left now. The thing had collapsed in on itself, or been knocked down. A defensive structure, built to keep watch over a wide area with one face towards the sea and the other inland. Inverlair was an ideal spot: a river at the head of a sheltered bay. But something, someone, would have come along to break the peace. Did the invaders export their desperation, taking by force what Inverlair had?

SCOPE would fail – everything man-made did, sooner or later. SCOPE would retreat, mast by mast, and those who were left could take over again, could . . . what? Scavenge over relics? Worship the fucking masts like some death cult?

Looking down the hill towards the village Carl could see the spill of big stones from the collapsed broch, some of them completely grown over. He walked down the slope and knelt, touched one of the buried stones. Within this grass swelling, this bump, was a missing piece of the past, and it would stay there unless he freed it. Perhaps he should help the rock get reborn.

Stamping with the heel of his boot, he struck a solid edge under the grass, worked around in this way until he had the outline, then with his hands he pulled the sods and black soil from the broch stone. After a few minutes of effort, sweat running into his eyes and down the small of his back, lungs straining, he'd worked the boulder loose, like a molar in its socket.

Straining every sinew, he extracted, a heave at a time, a hundredweight of rectangular stone, dragging it free of the centuries and onto the grass. Many stones were buried further down the slope.

Gasping for breath, Carl sank down next to the slab, dark earth reeking from the hole. After a few minutes, he sat up. Already the soil was drying on his hands; cold sweat on his face, nails topped with a line of dirt. There were dozens more stones to dig out. Big ones on the outside, smaller ones forming the inner wall of the broch; the whole thing tapering upwards for seven metres, just like the book said. His arms were shaking with the effort and his lungs were sore. Maybe he could dig more out, maybe all of them, in time.

He lifted his binoculars and scanned the village. If he could see them clearly, then they could see him. He searched the backs of houses, upstairs bedrooms and kitchen windows. Did he see a movement in one, someone ducking behind a curtain?

Carl patted the stone he had just dug up, the first of many. He could do it. He could resurrect the dead.

That would give them something to talk about. The nutter on the hill. The guy who knew about SCOPE and who didn't try to stop it. The guy who killed his friend.

After a while he stood up, drank some water from his bottle. It was too early to go back yet; too early for the awkward silences and the hints and the looks. Simone wanted a conversation, but he doubted if anything he had to say would improve the situation, although, now that he thought about it, he wasn't sure if he could find any words of significance at all. Sometimes it felt like a dream, and at other times everything came sharply into focus; a reality he had no idea how to handle.

Best not to think about it. It was easier to push it away. He had to push it away.

13

Sitting on the roadblock on the north road out of the bay, Carl pulled Howard's deltameter out of his pocket. Howard must have had it in his own pocket, his body wet and cold from six days lying on the hill. Carl sniffed the phone, expecting the lingering scent of putrefaction, but it just smelled of plastic. One day he would be able to leave the redzone; the deltameter would tell him when it was safe. It would point the way to when he could get back into his car and drive.

Better park Howard's car somewhere. Garage it. Top it up with biodiesel every now and again. Run the engine. Keep the tyres inflated, ready for when he could take off. To where?

Somewhere. The road would open. The masts would fail and the delta field would open, and he could drive on to where he wouldn't feel like someone in a cage. But that was for the future; just now he was an inmate who would have to do his time.

There was an old stone cottage a short distance away from the road, chimney at either end, and no windows or door. It stank of animals and shit. Two rooms, the corroded hulk of a stove in one, and no floorboards or furniture in either. No internal walls as such but there were beams standing, holding up most of the ceiling. The bottom three steps of the wooden staircase were missing. Carl looked up. The roof was intact, apart from over one gable-end.

He tried the staircase and it held, so he tried a foot on the first step, let it take his full weight. The wood protested, and he thought the whole lot would come crashing down. But it didn't. He climbed and poked his head up, level with the upper floor to see
what was what. A metal bed frame in one of two rooms, and nothing else. Musty smell of decay and the sheepshit stink on the ground floor.

The staircase held him. The bare floorboards in the bedroom held him. Carl edged towards the bed, testing every step, pressuring the wood, listening, waiting to plummet. The skylight in the bedroom was still unbroken. The cobwebbed stalk of a light fitting, minus bulb and shade, hung in the middle of the ceiling. He sat, gently, on the bare metal springs of the old bedstead. It squeaked. Ribbons of wallpaper had peeled and drooped; most of the paint that had once been on the ceiling lay in flakes on the bare floor.

Carl lay back and waited, his feet still on the floor, ready to rise at the first sign of trouble. But bed and floor held his weight. He lifted his legs onto the springs; they still had their bounce, and it wasn't too uncomfortable, no, not at all . . .

He closed his eyes.

Eric. Lesley. Sarah. Eddie. All now populating a dream world. Were they real, or had he dreamed his previous life? This life involved Simone, and the dreaded by-product of real sex. It wasn't even that; it hadn't been sex, not really. What had it been? Comfort. A gift from terror. She hadn't been wearing underwear. Didn't say anything to him, afterwards, just left the room. Spunk on the carpet. He blanked the details, the pressure, and the urge.

At least with CivCon and food riots he knew what he was dealing with – all that stuff had origins that could be understood, oppression that could be traced and plotted. Even an ugly world moulds itself around a person, and they become the impression it makes of them.

After a while he found closing his eyes easier than keeping them open.

He was grateful for extinction.

•

It was dark when Carl came back to the hotel. As he reached the back garden he heard a stag's bellowing moan echo round the dark hills, sounding his power. George had told him they'd be shagged out in a few weeks after the rut was finished. Carl let himself in quietly and listened for activity. The clock, ticking in the lobby, was the only sound.

His eyes grew accustomed to the dark. There was always light, he just had to give himself the chance to see it, to stand and look until the black released the objects it was holding. Carl made his way to the kitchen, found the lamp on the table, and the box of matches. He opened the door of the stove to warm up. Lighting the lamp, he sat at the kitchen table.

Outside, the wind was picking up. In the silence he could hear dry leaves scraping against the back door. Fried fish and potatoes were warming in the oven, enough to take the edge off his appetite. As he chewed the food, he thought of the sleeping village, and him creeping back to it, stealing into this house, like a burglar breaking in. Was it a foetus or an embryo? He knew there was a difference. It was all a matter of time. Maybe it was awake, percolating its mother's nutrients, more thing than person, inside the sleeping Simone; maybe he and it were the only two entities awake in the village.

He heard a noise in the corridor.

The door opened. It was Simone, in her dressing gown, yawning, candle in hand

Carl collected himself. ‘I thought I was being quiet when I came in.'

‘People are never as quiet coming in as they think,' she said. ‘I just wanted to tell you something.'

Carl stiffened.

Simone warmed her hands on the stove. ‘Adam told me that they could use someone at the forestry. One of the guys hurt his arm. If you're feeling up to it – I don't know if you are – you could fill in for him.'

‘Doing what?'

‘I'm not sure. Helping cut more of those probably.' She pointed at the basket of logs by the stove.

Instinctively, he wanted to say no. He didn't want anything to do with Simone's twat of a brother, or anyone else for that matter. He thought for a second.

‘I've never used any forestry machinery before. Maybe I'd just get in the way.'

‘You don't have to use any machinery. He said he could use you.'

The wind gusted against the kitchen window, moaning in the chimney flue as the rain started.

He told her he would think about it.

•

Hard workers. All of them. Cutting wood. Catching fish. Growing food and fixing things. Everyone mucking in, unless they were too old or too young. Everyone doing their bit. Everyone except him, the parasite feeding off the hard work of others, eating their food, absorbing their heat, shagging their women. Too clever to get his hands dirty like the hard workers. He can hardly hold a hammer. Where does he go during the day? What's he doing mooching around the hills when there's work to be done? Let him get on with it. Get a grip. Get his head down and lend a hand. Do his bit. Muck in.