Rise (8 page)

‘Ross,’ she murmurs. ‘Sit at peace.’ She gives her youngest another chunk of scone.

Moving here, to Kilmacarra, gave enough oomph to the book idea to actually sell it: first to herself, then her hungry agent, her publisher. And – in a break of luck that has never ever before happened in the history of Hannah Jane Anderson – to an actual TV production company who have punted it on, provisionally, to actual TV. In a running motion of tumbling dominoes, the thing has raced off, with very little substance to sustain it. What was she thinking? How do you write a convincing cavewoman?
We’ve done teenage vampires to death, darling. We need something fresh. But still kind of . . . savage, yeah?

The first speaker of the evening is her husband. His cheeks are scarlet. He has been weird all day. A thrill as the room falls silent. It’s a layered silence, of coughs and chewing, of expectations and disbeliefs. Amuse us, says the crowd. You’re talking shite, it echoes back on itself. The chairwoman smiles, Michael begins. A heckle right away.

‘One, three, six, nine,

We don’t want your wind tur-bines.’

A flash of camera clicking, as the
Courier
chap pivots to catch the culprits. The beast is stirring. Hannah’s skin spangles; a revenant of that forgotten life of opinions and beliefs when she could wear her hair spiked and shout and feel and march. March for the miners, march against Nazis, sit down to stop traffic at Charing Cross. March with placards, with paper bags on heads (that was a genius CND protest; thousands of them lying ‘dead’ in George Square). Sometimes, you didn’t know quite what the march was for, but it would be lunchtime and a
Socialist Worker
seller would shout ‘Are yous coming on the march?’ And the entirety of the Queen Margaret Union would rise from the refectory and take to the streets.

Her son wriggles on her knee.

‘Why are they shouting at Daddy?’

‘They’re not, sweetie,’ she whispers in his ear. ‘They’re singing.’

She doesn’t intend to say anything tonight (translation:
Please, Hannah. You can’t be seen to be politica
l
). But her mouth has that cold, nervy dryness, running all the way to her throat. It tastes of outrage.
I don’t want this. I am middle class, articulate. I believe in democracy, for Godsake. You cannot make me. You can’t
.

She’s always sensed she didn’t care for windfarms; but had listened without dissent to Michael’s careful justifications. Because he’s always careful, isn’t he? And this is not the time for further crackly edges to their life, not now when they are smoothing, buffing, my God you can almost see your face in the shine of them. But, last month, Hannah drove to Dumfries for a friend’s poetry launch. She’d not been down for a couple of years, remembered the journey as a dull, long slope through practical farmland. Barely noticed the first one. Two, then three – ach they were just like big lamp-posts, really. Or pylons, or a wood, a forest, my God, a sea. All the way down the motorway: windfarms. The shock of them, teeming across the landscape. Arms akimbo, occupying, demanding. Fingers pointing, far as the eye can see.

You were profligate
.

Like exclamation marks all across the hills. There was an ugly beauty about them, and a need, yes, a need. But not here, she thinks. Not in Kilmacarra.

‘Why can’t we put them in the sea?’ someone calls.

Hide them there? She’s heard that’s why whales strand; their sonar addled. Great threshing turbines lurching through the watery darkness, to slice off fins and tails. Mince up baby dolphins. But what to do, what to do? Her children need power, they will continue to need it, long after she is gone. The computer on which she writes needs power, and plastic and lethal metals that leak. Use a pen and paper. Paper munches trees; trees clear sheep; sheep clear people; people munch land. It is a horrible game, where nobody wins. Hannah just wants left alone. Here is nice, it’s good. The thought of giant turbines, circling Kilmacarra. Panic. Noise. The flicker-flicker light and hum of no more peace. The
what if there is nothing you can do?
The fact of her husband, orchestrating it.

Kilmacarra Glen has been their home for fourteen months. Her love affair has developed slowly, the way the best ones do. Swirling in hints, but no cohesion to the thing, the way a story starts, so that you’re afraid to reach for it at all. Then it keeps nudging at you, until it’s obvious. Like this place. A broad, open valley swept by glaciers, studded with farms and rocks and secrets. Ancient cairns and standing stones marching in a row, making a linear cemetery miles across the great Moss. Some folk think the stones form a calendar. Others see war graves from prehistory. Beardie-weirdies (and possibly Mhairi) reckon they channel spiritual energies, like ley lines or cosmic telegraph poles. But no one knows. Hannah likes that. The stones are there, have been for five thousand years, and that’s enough. Anyone who can’t accept that, well, they have no poetry in their—

—
Don’t you care about this place
?

—
Of course I care. That’s why I’m doing it
.

Ross leans into her breasts. This is new Hannah. No more poems. Writing for young adults means more words, less deliberation. More money too, especially when you factor in the school visits and festivals. This book she’s toiling with; they’ve commissioned an accompanying teachers’ booklet – all tied up with the telly interest.
Mmm. Teenage Stone Age. Romance, violence, history, social issues – love it! Can you stick in a bit of supernatural too?

She strokes the dimple on her baby’s knee. Baby. He goes to school next year. The wee soul is bored. Euan said he’d be home in time to watch his wee brother, but there’s no sign of him, and it’s getting dark. At least Euan’s out, though, not huffing in his room. Beside her, Mhairi fluffs up her bosom, folding her arms so her hands wedge under her armpits. They’re a funny pair, her and Mhairi. In a village that is essentially one street, you’ve little choice over who or what you cleave to. But she thinks she’d be friends with Mhairi wherever they’d met. Both make something out of nothing: Hannah writes, Mhairi cooks – and was once an artist, though she keeps that quiet. First time they met, Hannah had found this wild, hairy woman round the side of the café, building a bonfire of thin boards and canvas. She’d picked one up. Hard-etched charcoal sketches, trees around a circle of gravestones; thin and flat, curved on top.

‘These are really good.’

‘No, they arny.’

‘Oh.’ She’d put the paper down. Noticed another, then another, awaiting their conflagration. ‘Where is this?’

‘
Na màthraichean a’gal
.’

‘What’s that when it’s at home?’

‘You’ll no have the Gaelic then?’

‘Nope.’

‘Weeping Women, I think. But most folk call it Crychapel Wood. Anyroad,’ she’d flung another canvas on the fire. ‘These . . .’re a loada shite.’

Full and prickly she is, like an overripe gooseberry. Look at her, scowling at Michael.
Raging, so I am
. Mhairi is always raging. There are times she can be magnificent. Hannah likes this about her friend, the way she sweeps you up in her convictions. Gives you a little buzz. Hannah Anderson, forty-four. Seeker of cheap thrills. She coughs on a bit of scone. At least she can still make herself laugh.

‘You all right?’ Mhairi whispers.

‘Went down the wrong way.’

‘You dissing ma scones again?’

Two press officers stand at the back of the room. They were distributing information leaflets when Hannah arrived – and doing lots of smiling. Still recently enough that it’s not forgotten, the council PR unit was the subject of some unpleasantness involving social media and allegations of spying. Even in the remotest spots, Big Brother, it appears, is watching. The backlash to this was a suspension, some resignations (which provided the by-election backdoor to her and Michael moving here) – and lashings of transparency. This is a council with nothing to hide. An advert in the local paper. Free buses to ferry people from the remotest crofts. Public dissent is being welcomed, nay, encouraged. It is being bored into submission before her eyes.

The hecklers are fading as Michael explains the planning process in tedious detail. Hannah breathes on Ross’s hair. The coppery whorls shiver. Ross fidgets some more. Did she really think being a local councillor’s wife would be any different to being a minister’s? They have multi-member wards here; it doesn’t need to be Michael that’s taking the lead. She thinks he may be doing it to test her.

I am a good wife
.

Their MSP has sent careful apologies, despite Mhairi inviting him to attend. Good old SNP. We are all in this together! A concept that works, nicely, when you’re down in the trenches. She remembers the last elections at Holyrood, Michael’s thrill as the results came tumbling in, as the contours of the map of Scotland changed. A nationalist landslide. All that rhetoric, the unalloyed lust for freedom and justice that was gaining greater momentum as they rolled towards referendum. A vote for optimism. Change. Hannah even did a barbecue for the local branch. It was beginning to feel exciting. But power brings puffed-up men and disappointing choices. Not for a second had she thought the fuzzy green mantle they planned to wrap Scotia in would mean her glen being trashed.
You should have read the small print
, Michael quipped.

Yes. Same as when I married you
.

But she hadn’t said that. She didn’t mean it.

This windfarm is one more thing for them to snipe about. Oh, they rarely fight, not any more. It’s all careful sidesteps, tight smiles. Silences. Calm and bland as milk. Some days she wonders if Michael is simply in opposition to her. Her pals at uni teased her for going out with a Divinity student. But they didn’t know. Under the quietness of him, how, when he did speak, she could see the words coming out, all lit and dancing, how they were so important to him, that he thought and weighed them first. How he dazzled her eighteen-year-old self with talk of sacrifice and glory. How his skin was slippery-slick. How he split the darkness in her, the blue-white veins of him, how her gold hair lay on his white shoulders, how she spoils the things she loves because she is greedy, greedy. Stupid. How he wore his white slash at his throat and you think these awful truths and folk ask you both for help, for ever asking you for help and who helps you?

Politics were always there, with Michael. It was one of those daft marches she met him on. Anti-apartheid, she thinks – something to do with oranges anyway. Politics and Faith: it was about sharing and giving and MAKING A DIFFERENCE. Who could not love that? And now Michael’s politics have morphed from passion to profession: that was going to be their glue. She would be proud and supportive of her husband once more, they would be gleaming and good and full of promise. She owed him that. Over Ross’s restless head, she fiddles with her bracelet. He’s right. She should have read the small print. He doesn’t know that, last time, she voted for another party.

Michael is getting frustrated. ‘Can I just stress, this is only a pre-application consultation at this stage.’

‘Aye, and we all know what consultation means. It’s aw done and dusted, eh? What, is that you getting free electricity for life now, Michael? Eh? Getting your own wee pipeline straight into the manse?’

‘Order now. Please!’ The chair, who is the local primary headmistress, thunks her little gavel. ‘Councillor Anderson. Please continue. Everyone’ll have the chance to ask questions later.’

‘Thank you, Brenda. As I was saying, a windfarm development has been in our local plan for quite some time now. All residents should have been aware of this – the plan is available on the internet, in libraries—’

‘Aye – just you mind that we dinna get decent broadband here and you’ve shut all the libraries doon.’

‘Angus, please. Will you let me finish? The Scottish Government has an ambitious renewals plan and this council has consistently been a favoured area for developers seeking to harness natural resources for energy.’ Michael smooths his hands across his chest; an unconscious gesture that makes him vulnerable. Hannah’s heart flares.

‘We’re very fortunate we’ve got Señor Escobar here tonight, from Sentinel Power, come to give us an idea of the kind of development we’re talking about, the benefits it’ll bring to the area. Now, can I just add, he doesn’t need to be here, but – at the council’s request – he’s volunteered, because – and I quote . . .’ He glances at the brochure he holds: ‘“It is vital that new projects promote community engagement in the planning process, and ensure that barriers to this engagement are minimised.”’ He regains his composure in the safety of these words, looks quite chuffed, as if he’d written them himself.

‘It’s high time we got some investment in this area,’ says a voice at the front.

‘Aye, and if there’s jobs—’

‘It’s blackmail, is what it is. It’s aye the wee folk get shafted. Folk wi nae voice, wee places wi nae clout—’

Angus Caulfield calls out again. ‘Barriers to engagement? So where were the public notices in Gaelic then?’

‘Och, Angus. That will come. Like I said, this is just a preliminary—’

‘So how long will it take to go through?’ asks a woman Hannah doesn’t recognise.