The Colony (17 page)

Her mum had enough on her plate, in the weeks and months after her break-up with Karl Cooper, without her daughter adding to her problems by complaining about a troublesome ghost called Jacob Parr.

Parr was scary. How could he not be? He was from another time. He knew that he was dead. He’d returned reluctantly, apparently compelled to do so. Whatever had forced Jacob Parr to summon himself into ghostly life and visit her, Edith thought the really frightening aspect of the whole business. Someone or something had done it. It scared Jacob Parr, whatever it was, and he was dead and you would have thought the dead had nothing to be afraid of.

She didn’t even want to think about that, really. Parr himself was uncomfortable discussing it. He made it obvious he’d come against his own wishes. He was churlish and sometimes seemed barely in control of a mean temper. But he’d been told to come to her and he’d obeyed and he was frightened of whoever had done the ordering and so was Edith, who thought you had to be something very sinister and serious indeed to scare the life out of a ghost.

She’d told her mother Parr was kind. And he could be. But he was a creature of moods. Most of the time, he was melancholy and wistful. Sometimes he was boring, regretting aloud the way he’d frittered away his last years before the drink had killed him. Edith’s personal opinion was that it was a bit late in the day to moan about that now. Get a life, she was tempted to say, listening to him go on. But he’d had a life, hadn’t he, and he had completely wasted it.

Once, he showed her his scars. They were furrows ploughed into the flesh of his scrawny back by the leather knots, he said, of the lash. He’d been lashed on two occasions. Brine had been thrown over his bleeding back in bucketfuls to clean the wounds. The salt from the seawater had stung more than the flogging, he said. But he’d been caught drunk on smuggled grog and Captain Ballantyne had been a master, he said, who knew no shred of mercy before the mast.

He only ever came to her when she was alone. For this reason, she didn’t know if any of the other girls at the school could have even seen him. She knew he was real and not a figment of her imagination. The song had proven that. He had enjoyed singing in his lifetime. He enjoyed it still. He had enjoyed teaching her to sing and play The Recruited Collier.

He’d learned the words of the song himself by listening to others sing it, he told her when he came to her on the evening of the day of her mother’s visit to the school. But he could have read the lyric written, so he could, he said. Reading had been a rare accomplishment in his lifetime, among men of his lowly station. But he’d been taught to read aboard the Andromeda by the ship’s surgeon, Mr Horan.

Horan liked me to sing, he recalled, softly, seated at the end of Edith’s bed in his sailor’s whites and his frayed blue coat. She saw that the pewter buckles on his shoes had tarnished with neglect and that his pigtail was starting to free itself in fine strands from the tar into which it had been dipped, which was now dry and crumbling. She could smell an odour, sweet and cloying on his breath, she assumed was grog.

And she knew again that these were details she could not have dreamed or made up. The man had lived and was dead and something fearful had summoned him to her.

Mr Horan did not like the screams in the night from the slave hold, he said. They distressed him. And so he would ask me to sing and to play the accordion to drown out the sound. And in gratitude for this service done him, he kindly taught me to read.

Horan the surgeon was a generous and sensitive soul, Parr said. He was too soft-hearted altogether for the cruel trade the ship he served on plied. Most of the men could ignore it. It tormented him. Life was hard and life at sea even harder. The pay on the slave vessels was good and it was steady. Best to take your wages and watch where your eyes and ears strayed and pay as little heed as was possible to the occupants of the hold on the leg of the voyage from Africa to the West Indies, or to the coast of America. Such was the strategy of sensible men.

But Thomas Horan seemed incapable of doing that. Parr did not know whether it was conscience or curiosity. Something impelled him to communicate with members of their human cargo. They did not benefit from his medical skills. Ballantyne would have forbidden it and it would have contravened the company rules. But Horan spoke to them. They stirred his interest and his compassion in their bleak and fearful plight.

It was because of Mr Horan, Parr explained that night, that he had come to Edith. Horan had kept a journal aboard the Andromeda. He had done so in secret. It was Edith’s job to seek this journal out, should it still exist. And when she had discovered it, she should give it to her mother to read. It was vital that her mother read Horan’s journal.

‘Does it contain answers my mother needs about New Hope?’

‘I do not know what it contains,’ Parr said. ‘I never so much as saw it.I know nothing more than what I have been told to tell you. You must seek the journal out and show it to your mother. That’s as much as I can say.’

‘How do you know about the journal, if it was written in secret?’

‘I have been told.’

‘Told by Thomas Horan?’

‘Horan is long dead.’

‘So are you.’

‘But Horan rests in peace,’ Parr said, with a chuckle.

And you don’t, Edith thought, because you’ve been sent to see me, by someone who scares you, someone party to Horan’s secret, someone who has the power to make a ghost do things against its own stubborn will.

She saw that Jacob Parr was smiling. And she knew that she was seeing her spectre for the last time. He’d fulfilled his obligation. He had passed the message on. The message about the physician Thomas Horan’s journal had been the whole point of her haunting. It was all to do with Captain Ballantyne and New Hope Island and the expedition her mother was shortly to join.
She wondered would she fall asleep that night and awaken in the morning unable to remember the song he’d taught her, like in a fairytale. She didn’t think that she would, any more than she would forget about him. He smiled at her, a last show of his rotten teeth before rising soundlessly from where he sat and walking out of the door, closing it softly behind him.

She wondered how she could possibly find the secret journal containing the information her mum required. She didn’t even begin to know where to look. She was allowed an hour a day on the computer and thought that an internet search was the obvious thing. But she was unlikely to find it on Google, was she, if it had remained a secret for nearly 200 years?

She could ask their history teacher, Mrs Atkinson. She was always banging on about sources, wasn’t she? She was always saying that the sources were so much more interesting and reliable than the text books were. She should have a decent idea about where those sources were most likely to be stored and found.

Edith thought it a very tall order for a 14 year old. She would have to make a list. She knew that there was a Maritime Museum in Greenwich in London but didn’t think that 14 year olds would very likely be given the run of the library there. She thought that Thomas Horan might have living relatives who had inherited his stuff. But she thought it unlikely they would welcome enquiries prompted by the ghost of one their ancestor’s shipmates.

The thing was, she had a feeling that this was a matter of great importance and urgency. She had to find a way to accomplish it. She just had to. She was totally the wrong person for the job but it was vital and there was no time at all to waste.

Karl Cooper was uncomfortable about two aspects of the forthcoming expedition and neither was a matter he was really in a position to do anything about.

He was slightly anxious about being obliged to share the spotlight with Jesse Kale. He would need Kale. The forensic archaeologist could use his skills to identify the landing site of the spacecraft that had taken the community away from New Hope and to another galaxy.

The site would have been exposed to a level of heat and mass that would have left physical traces. It was all very well for a cosmologist to speculate on the theory; but the fact would, in the first instance, be down to Kale. He would be the one to find the concrete proof of extra-terrestrial interference. He would point to the evidence. Cooper had to find a way of preventing Kale from taking the glory at that juncture, too.

His second problem was the presence on the project team of Jane Chambers. He was not proud, in retrospect, of the way he had treated Jane. Neither, though, did he wish to be publically judged for what he’d done. She had been discrete since the event. And that could be seen as magnanimity on her part.

Or it could be seen as pragmatism. She was a high profile expert on the science of disease. It would impact badly on her career for her to be perceived as anything other than cool and unflustered. Seen as a victim, she wouldn’t have the same detached air of sophisticated authority she enjoyed with the public when she presented television programmes now. Put bluntly, it would play very badly for Jane to be seen as the loser in love she undoubtedly was. She was far better off career-wise evoking admiration in the public rather than inspiring their pity.

Neither would it do his career prospects any good to be seen as a cad and a user. Nobody would benefit from a truthful account of what had taken place between them. Things were better left as they were; slightly ambiguous but with no one pointing an accusatory finger or taking to the pulpit outraged.

He was slightly concerned about Lucy Church. He thought that she’d fancied him. He’d seen the star-stricken signs, unmistakeable, when she’d interviewed him in his observatory. She was impressed by his looks and his intellect and probably his fame and the fact that he had made his own way in the world. He had just that morning read the piece she’d written about Kale and though she had obviously been briefed to flag up Kale’s credentials, she’d been unable to resist a dig at his privileged upbringing.

Cooper had enjoyed no such silver-spooned start in life. He was a tool-fitter’s son and his mother had been a domestic help. He’d dragged himself out of a Wigan terrace and it was only natural for people to admire him for coming so far as he had.

Cooper wanted to sleep with Lucy Church. He was fairly confident that the Hebridean adventure would create the right chemistry for that to happen. But if Lucy was as attracted to him as he thought she was, she might start to try to find out more about him and might discover that his track record with women was not exactly sweetness and light. She was a journalist, after all, and had a reputation for thoroughness. She would know how to dig.

If she didn’t do that and just took him at face value and slept with him, her doing so gave him another potential problem on the trip. Jane probably harboured feelings for him still. Almost certainly she did. And if Jane knew he was sleeping with Lucy Church, that provocation might goad Jane into telling a few home truths about him to Lucy.

Cooper smiled to himself. These were the sorts of dilemmas success brought a physically attractive man. They were not exactly a novelty to him; he was used to complications. They were nothing he could not handle when the time came to deal with them. He would find a way to subtly undermine Kale. He would entice sexy Lucy Church into bed. And he would somehow charm or placate poor spurned Jane in a way that would make her feel flattered and special.

He was genuinely excited about New Hope Island. There was no doubt in his mind that he would find his proof and vindication there. But it wouldn’t end with evidence and contact with the visitors. That would only be the start of a chain of glorious events that would shake the world and its assumptions.

Ballantyne was still alive. He was sure of that. They would not have been so negligent as to let the leader of the transposed community simply perish. Keeping a mortal man alive and well for two centuries would be a completely unremarkable achievement for a civilization as advanced as that of the visitors.

The nearest feasibly inhabitable planet had been identified by French astronomers in 2011. It was 20 light years away, in the Goldilocks Zone, beyond the solar system. To travel from there to earth would require technologies a quantum leap from conventional rocketry. And the visitors had done it at the end of the 18th century. A hundred years before the people of earth achieved a few dozen metres of manned flight in an aeroplane fashioned from wood struts and canvas and wire, they had already been capable of roaming the cosmos. They had in all probability come from far further away than the planet the French had discovered and believed could sustain life.

The captain of the Andromeda, the founder of the New Hope Island colony would be alive. And Cooper would be the first man from the modern age to meet him and shake his hand and ask the questions in his first interview about what had happened to him. The ratings would be stratospheric. The event would make Karl Cooper a household name around the globe.

It would give his broadcast career the boost it needed, take him to the next level. No longer confined to the subject of space, it would be a short step to sharing the stage with world leaders as his interview skills teased out what the global public wanted to hear. He would have the profile and status he craved and, frankly, deserved.

He looked at his watch. He was two hours away from an appointment with the stylist who chose his clothes. The weather on New Hope would demand performance clothing, but he was fucked if he was going to look bad as a consequence of extreme weather. It was Cooper’s opinion that in their brightly coloured layers of bulky, breathable waterproof membrane, even when they were trekking relentlessly towards the Pole or scaling a Himalayan peak, adventurers these days tended to look like nothing so much as Telly-Tubbies.

He was not going to look like a Telly-Tubby. There were ways of insulating yourself against the elements without inviting ridicule. It was what his stylist was paid for and she was pretty good at her job. She’d told him there were retro brands with names like Patagonia and North Face that manufactured performance clothes in shades other than fluorescent orange. ‘Think Mallory on Everest,’ she’d said, over the phone. That had sounded encouraging, until Cooper remembered that Mallory, while undoubtedly looking fabulous, had actually died on Everest.