Lie of the Land (33 page)

Carl shook his head. ‘It's sharp enough.'

‘Will it cut into a deer, through the ribs, into the guts?'

‘No,' said Carl, smiling. ‘Not that you'd want to cut through ribs anyway, and not into the guts.'

They walked up towards the house.

‘Will you show me?'

‘Show you what?'

‘How to cut through the ribs.'

‘What is it with ribs? Leave the ribs alone.'

‘You don't cut the ribs?'

‘No.'

‘Will you show me?'

‘Show you what?'

‘Where to cut into a deer and how to do all the cutting. You can still do all the shooting, if you like.'

‘Gee, thanks. But you shall go to Oxford, young man, get
debagged, sent down, then take over at the old man's firm. No cutting ribs for you.'

‘Oxford – is that a place?'

Carl stopped walking. A lump came to his throat as he looked down at the boy. Oxford may as well be on the moon; the outside world was just a concept, unknowable and unreachable. In all probability, Isaac would reach adulthood before having the chance to get within ten miles of Oxford, or any other town for that matter. The thought stuck in Carl's throat.

‘Yes,' he said quietly, picking up the pace. ‘It is a place.'

There were kids down at the shoreline, one of them carrying what looked like an oil drum.

‘It's Pavel and Kieran,' said Isaac. ‘We're building a raft.' He bolted back down the track, then turned and shouted, ‘Bye.'

Carl raised his hand.

Sometimes he got the yearning for a cup of tea or coffee. People had become dependent on caffeine, of course, and some couldn't function until they'd had at least two strong hits in the morning; it would be nice, though, just to get a little lift every now and again. Thinking about good coffee, he looked up the slope to Ben Bronach, and along the dark line of the basalt ridge, and tried not to think about what he had to do today. Isaac was keen to learn, so that was good. Carl went inside. Maybe he should trim his beard.

Sometimes his heart felt so heavy, like it would sink down into his boots. Sometimes the old pain would take hold, and a black awareness would come over him. But he made it pass. It took effort, to shake off the mood, though these episodes were rare now. As memory pressed down on him, he would rise to meet it, strong enough to bear the weight. There was no reason why he couldn't exist like this way for years. It was possible. It could be done. For so long as he could imagine an end, when something better would arrive, he could go on without too much trouble now that he had acquired a way of living.

But that kind of thinking only took him to one place.

Clearly, it wasn't going to work out with Simone; it was Alec John's anniversary; the Oxford thing with Isaac; and earlier on he had thought about Howard and Eric; it was a witch's brew of all the negative stuff. But then there was his daughter's smile of recognition, her soft, pink feet in the cot as she slept; that was like mainlining an antidote to misery.

That kind of thinking took him to a better place. If she were lucky, she would grow up with all the good stuff that a parent can give to a child. Everything grows from inheritance.

There was also a carcass in the cold store, waiting to be butchered, some weed in the house, and a 1,000-film cine-viewer that someone had lent him. The accessible half of Inverlair estate could do without him for one afternoon.

In the upstairs bedroom he'd already prepared the essentials: fresh white sheet pinned flat to the wall; heavy dark blankets pinned and taped to the window, a big comfy chair, and speakers in the corner. Now all he needed was the stepladder from the shed.

A problem presented itself.

The best position for the ladder and cine-viewer was behind the comfy chair and against the bedroom door. The door would have to be closed to keep out the light from the landing, and that meant that if anyone came into the house they'd come upstairs, maybe without him hearing, and barge into the room. In all likelihood, the bedroom door would push the ladder over, and that was not good news for the cine-viewer sitting on top of it.

Simple: he'd lock the front and back doors so that no one could come in.

He fetched the metal folding ladder from the shed. As he turned the key in the front door of the house, he stopped. Locking a door. Turning a key. Keeping something out.

‘What the hell,' he muttered, turning the key. He needed some time to himself, some harmless escapism.

He bounded upstairs for three hours and eight minutes of
The Fall of the Roman Empire
, Alec Guinness giving good stony Stoic Emperor. Marcus Aurelius wasn't afraid, if you believed his
Meditations
. Maybe the fear simply hadn't made it into print, and all that the emperor left to posterity was a carefully polished image of himself, redacted in all the right places and purged of all weakness.

About two hours into the film, Carl heard a banging from downstairs, at the front door. He groaned.

‘Pause,' he said. A two-metre wide, impossibly beautiful Sophia Loren froze.

‘Coming,' he shouted. ‘No need to break the bloody door down.'

He should remain stoic, accept with equanimity the fact that his film, his time off, impulsively taken, had been interrupted.

It was Old Bead-patch himself at the door, and Carl felt his anxiety return.

‘Didn't see you head up to the ridge today,' said Terry. ‘Thought you might be ill or something.'

‘No,' said Carl, leaning on the door jamb. ‘Christopher Plummer is up to no good.'

Terry looked blank.

‘Watching an old swords-and-sandals classic.
The Fall of the Roman Empire
. Alec Guinness plays . . .'

‘. . . Marcus Aurelius,' said Terry. ‘The passing of an empire. It happens. Now we can start again.'

Carl nodded, one hand on the door handle, closer to closing it than to throwing it wide in welcome. That much he made obvious.

Today, Terry's eye patch was orange with green beads. Earlier in the week it was white beads on black. Maybe the guy really had made one for every day of the year, like Carl had heard. He'd have come from the village hall, where his young flock gathered to hear their shaman's drug-fuelled gibberish.

‘Will I leave you in peace, brother?'

‘No offence – but yes,' said Carl, keeping his voice level, his
eyes scanning the horizon. ‘It's been ages since I've had a bit of downtime. Absolutely ages.'

‘That's not a problem,' said Terry. ‘Are you staying here now?'

Carl ignored Terry's sudden grin. ‘For a while, at least.' He bristled, feeling he should downplay the significance of his living arrangements. ‘We'll see what happens.'

Jess waddled up to the door, nudging Carl's legs.

‘Right,' said Terry, his wry amusement fading. He nodded. He understood how things were, finally, after weeks of trying to inveigle his way back into Carl's company. Or recruit him to the cause, as Carl suspected. ‘I'll catch you later then.'

‘Sure. I'll be along at some point.'

As Terry walked back down the track, Carl felt relief, and a surge of guilt. A line had been drawn, and it was obvious now on which side each belonged. Unless he apologised for not inviting Terry in, and quickly, the insult would harden into a barrier, a permanent separation. Perhaps that's as it should be. Best leave Terry to his sordid little arrangement with Hendrik and Maganda, and his new religion that involved Gemma and a few other kids, and peyote, although Carl didn't know for sure what was going on. He didn't want to. Bizarre what some people would believe when there was nothing left to believe in. Carl ruffled Jess's ear, then closed the door. He turned the key in the lock.

‘Do I hear a sigh of relief?'

Jess padded through to the kitchen and flopped into her basket.

‘Not impressed with my hospitality, huh?'

The dog gave a deep, shuddering sigh, and curled up, cosy by the warm stove. Carl poured a glass of water and took it upstairs to his private Odeon. Sophia was still looking worried, eyes and mouth wide. Marrying Omar Sharif's wily provincial potentate, rather than Stephen Boyd's dashing but irrelevant Roman noble, was clearly giving her trouble. Film might be a world of illusion,
but good ones had a grain of truth, emotional or otherwise. It was great to lose yourself in films. To forget. That's what good ones did: they flowed over you like flashing water and made you forget who you were and the fact you were watching a film. Is there anything wrong with that? Is there any harm in forgetting, for a while, your space and place in time, even now?

Carl stuffed a few more leaves into his pipe and lit up. There was only a splash of fuel in the lighter he'd found in the shed. Chuckling, he thought of the folk in the village who were trying to invent matches by taking the phosphorus out of old lifeboat flares. If they couldn't perfect their technique soon, maybe they'd all have to wait for lightning to strike a tree. Thank you, great Sky God, for sending us the power to cook and stay warm. Prometheus, or whoever, could then set off with a flaming torch, running from house to house.

‘Play,' said Carl.

Sophia Loren took up where she left off. King Omar Sharif was given the girl. No contest, when there's an empire at stake. After a while he shouted, ‘Pause.' He sat there, listening to the sound of the house, another man's house, settling around him. He chose some Led Zep from Alec John's old CD collection and thrashed about on the drumkit for a spell.

With the thick end of the drumstick, he crashed down, hard, on the cymbal. It bucked and gonged and quivered into silence. He sat there, the drumsticks in his hands, another man's house around him and around that, another world that wasn't his world. No matter how long he stayed here he would always feel that he belonged somewhere else, that he was an outsider. He had tried hard, and had learned a new set of rules; he had focused on his daughter, on Isaac. Kids are so impressionable, they absorb habits and opinion, distill it all into their own poison, their own love. It was all transmitted, from one mind to another. It was all in the implanting.

Carl got up and went downstairs to the living room. In a black bin bag, taken from Terry's uncle's house, he found what he was looking for. He smoothed the old newspaper – yellow and brittle round the edges – flat on the drop-leaf table. His first big story. His first front-pager. Just short of nineteen years ago.

‘And over the top he went, fighting the good fight,' he muttered to himself. Jess came shuffling through from the kitchen; he reached down and scratched behind her ear, the way she liked. From the drawer of the dark sideboard he took a pair of scissors.

‘Just in case you take me for granted,' he said to the dog, cutting round the article. ‘At any point I could resume my flourishing career – so watch out.'

The dog breathed heavily at his feet, unconcerned.

Out in the shed, he found a box of Alec John's stuff and, in it, an empty frame. Two years ago the photo of the long-dead Mrs Stoddart had been placed tenderly between her husband's folded hands. They were together, not far from Howard. In place of the photo he positioned the newspaper article, clicked the glass back into the frame, and hung it on the same hook in the porch. Through the window he saw two kids, a boy and a girl, running up the track from the main road. Carl went outside to wait for them and noticed Isaac ambling some way behind his friends, whacking bramble bushes with a stick, trying to look cool.

‘If there's a party at mine,' said Carl, ‘then nobody invited me.'

‘It's Gary,' said the girl, out of breath. ‘He's run into the redzone and hasn't come back.'

‘What?' Carl started off down the path then stopped, turned and ran back into the house. ‘What did he do that for?'

Isaac ran after him. ‘Is it Pulse Day today?'

‘Um, no, I don't know,' said Carl, rummaging through the side pockets of his rucksack. ‘What was that stupid fu—' He shook his head. In truth, he had no idea when the next pulse in the delta signal was due. He used to know, used to have it marked
out months ahead on the calendar. He found what he was looking for.

Car key. Deltameter.

Bolting from the house, he ran down the track to the stone byre. Both doors were flung apart and he whipped the dustsheet from Howard's car. Every so often he turned the engine over, checked the tyres. If the thing started now, when he actually needed it, he could be at the roadblock in seconds.

‘Get in.'

Isaac and the other two got in. As she climbed into the back seat, Carl saw a fresh scar on the girl's pale upper arm.

‘You kids still playing your stupid games, cutting yourselves open?'

The girl, Katy, pulled down her sleeve and glared at him. Carl jumped in. The car started first time.

‘We don't need the safety chips any more. Gary said adults had put them in to keep us prisoners,' she said. ‘Gary said we should cut them out.' Then she shouted, ‘You made the world the way it is, fucking adults, so don't start giving me advice and telling me what to do.'

Carl said nothing. The car swung out of the old byre and bounced down the rough stony track. They sped off up the main road the mile or so to the roadblock.

‘Maybe Gary won't be giving any more orders,' he muttered, eyeing the sullen girl in the rear-view mirror. He wondered if Isaac had asked for his own chip to be cut out. The idea made him queasy.

At the line of red boulders Carl stopped the car and they all got out. There was no sign of Gary, or the rest of the kids. Carl took out the deltameter.

Nothing.

He searched through the log, worked out when the last pulse should have been. Two days from now. Not today.

Not today.

‘There they are,' shouted Katy, pointing down towards the sand dunes. ‘Gary's with the rest.'