Intrusion

20. Conversations

Hope sat by the patio doors in the back room of Mairi’s shop, overlooking the shore. Through the glass panels she could keep an eye on Nick, firmly injuncted to stay within sight and at the moment beachcombing amid the stinking seaweed with every appearance of absorption and enjoyment. The rest of her attention she divided between her work in China and sorting out some spreadsheets for Mairi. It was mid-morning on the Wednesday after they’d arrived, and Hope was beginning to think about coffee and biscuits.

Mairi was in the front of the shop, minding the counter, chatting to the occasional customer, and knitting ruffled scarves at an astonishing speed from native wool. The heathery perfumes of soaps and unguents pervaded the whole shop, as did background music of generic Celtic sound, on endless shuffle.

For the first time in months, Hope felt relaxed and at peace with herself and the world. Hugh had just the previous day started work on the same site as Nigel, way up in the hills above the synthetic woodlands, partly doing basic stuff like removing bolts with a powered spanner, and partly the more complicated and delicate job of disconnecting and dismantling the turbines. He’d come back tired that evening, but with an outdoor glow, and in a cheerful mood.

The phone rang. Hope tapped her ear lobe. ‘Yes?’

‘Hello? Am I speaking to Hope Morrison?’

The speaker sounded Indian.

‘Yes,’ Hope said warily.

‘Very good, Mrs Morrison. My name is Joe, and I wish to speak with you urgently on a matter of considerable import—’

Hope rang off. Jeez. Hadn’t had one of these for years. Thought they’d all been call-screened to extinction. Now she’d have to update her phone-spam blocker, if she could ever find it on the menu.

The phone rang again. Same number.

‘If you don’t—’ Hope began.

‘Excuse me,’ said a new voice, female, London-accented. ‘Sorry about that. We’re not a call centre. Joe really is called Joe – he just has his own form of courtesy, and it’s easily mistaken for the usual spam intro. My name is Geena Fernandez. I spoke to your husband last week, and—’

‘Oh,’ said Hope. ‘You. I’ve blocked you from calling me.’

‘I know, Mrs Morrison, that’s why I asked Joe to call you on his phone. Please let me explain, it won’t take long.’

Hope stood up and stepped to the window, checking on Nick. He was squatting beside a tidal pool, arm in to the elbow. The sun shone on the water, making the pool as bright and bottomless as the loch.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘What is it now?’

‘Mrs Morrison, do you know about tachyons?’

‘Of course I know about tachyons,’ Hope snapped, using the irritation in her voice to cover her surprise. ‘And I know about rhodopsin, thank you very much.’

There was a pause of about two seconds. Hope smirked to herself.

‘So you know about the connection between them?’ Geena asked.

‘I read. I’ve made my own speculations.’

‘Ah!’ Geena sounded relieved. ‘Well, now it’s more than speculation. Let me put Joe on for a moment.’

The male voice came back. Hope listened as Joe outlined his professional background and described his experiment, as he called it. She tried to overcome the prejudice, acquired in childhood and early teens, that anyone on the phone with an Indian or similar accent, describing something complicated, was trying to scam you.

‘It’s a simulation!’ she objected, when he’d finished.

‘Mrs Morrison,’ he said, in a tired tone, ‘yes, it is a simulation, but it’s a very accurate one, using the same methods as are used all the time to make new products, day in and day out.’

‘All right. Put your friend back on.’

Hope slid open the double-glazed doors and stepped out and closed them behind her. The seaweed smell assailed her, then retreated as her nasal receptors became saturated, leaving nothing to smell but the clean fresh breeze off the sea. The tide was coming in, covering the live seaweed, which smelled quite inoffensive, but it wouldn’t reach the rotting seaweed at the top of the shore except in a spring tide and a storm; and that would no doubt leave more dead seaweed heaped up, to rot down in its turn. No vestige of a beginning, no prospect of an end.

‘Me again,’ said Geena, in a bright tone.

‘Right, Ms, uh, Fernandez. Now, listen to me. I’m sure you mean well, and your friend has put in a lot of work, but you haven’t told me anything I hadn’t already figured out for myself. I know what you said to Hugh, and I have a pretty good idea what he said to you. Let me tell you myself, straight out: neither of us has any interest at all in us or our child becoming an object of scientific attention. Not to mention media attention. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, yes, of course, Mrs Morrison, but what I’m not sure you understand is that this gives you a perfect legal ground for not—’

‘Oh God,’ Hope groaned. ‘I am so fucking bored with hearing this. I’m not scrabbling around for any kind of get-out, you know. I just want to be left alone to make up my own mind, and for my decision to be respected just because it is my own fucking decision, OK?’

‘OK,’ said Geena, sounding surprised and relieved. ‘That’s fine, that’s all right. I just wanted to make sure.’

‘Thank you,’ said Hope. ‘Goodbye.’

She caught the sound of Geena saying ‘Bye!’ just before she rang off. She blinked up the number of the phone that had been used to call her, and blocked it.

As soon as she had put the block in place, however, she regretted it and at the same time realised its futility. There was an unlimited number of other phones, after all, which any of these three people – Maya, Geena and Joe – could use to contact her. She could restrict incoming calls to her known contacts, but that risked missing important calls, or friends whose number had changed. That was the futility. On the other hand, blocking these particular phones would at least show she wasn’t in regular communication with the supposed terrorist suspect Geena, and the libertarian loose cannon Maya, and this Asian guy who was evidently a friend of Geena’s.

The regret came from something else. She might be missing out on something wonderful, as well as spurning a genuine offer of help. Well, she was definitely doing the latter, though how significant that was depended on the former. The more she thought about it, the more uncertain she felt. Was it really so awful, being an object of scientific attention? Even for the kid? There was no question of anything physically intrusive – their genetic samples, after all, were already taken. Blood spots on the Guthrie cards, genome sequence in the solid-state storage of computers. For her and for Hugh and Nick, no more would be involved, surely, than a few parapsychology experiments, whose inconclusive and disputable character was almost spookily predictable. Academic ethics would ensure the anonymity of the subjects. Nick needn’t even know what it was all about. Better that he didn’t, actually, what with the double-blind protocol and all that.

And wouldn’t it be wonderful, in a way, to find that you or your child had a wild talent?

Well, yes, but Hope knew that this sort of thing was evasive, anecdotal, it slipped through your fingers like water. Most likely because there was nothing there in the first place. It was all nonsense.

She slid the patio doors open a fraction, stuck her head through and called to Mairi that she was taking a short walk. An indistinct but positive-sounding reply floated back, as if carried on the shop’s soapy smell. She made her way across the mossy strip of lawn behind the shop, stepped over a token fence and then took a larger step across the strand-line seaweed and on to the stony beach. The shop was near the end of the village, just past the church and before the bridge where the road turned off to Stornoway or continued up the glen. Nick had moved a little farther along towards the bridge and the old pier.

He stood close to the edge of the sea, on a boulder, gazing intently down at the encroaching margin of incoming tide, now about a metre away. Hope placed her feet carefully on stone after stone amid the shingle, approaching him as stealthily as the tide. As she came within a couple of metres of him, she heard him talking.

‘It’s like watching the big hand of a clock, if you look at it long enough you can see it moving, but it’s faster than that.’

He paused, and after a moment went on: ‘A clock is round and has two hands, except they’re not really hands, they’re more like thin sticks, coming out of the middle, and the little hand moves round two times in a day and the big hand moves around one time in an hour, and that way you can tell the time any time of the day.’

‘But you can’t always see the sun.’

‘Oh, right!’

It was like listening to someone talking on the phone. No, not quite, Hope thought. It was like hearing only one side of a conversation. She stopped and stood still, balanced precariously on two round slippery stones, one foot on each.

‘O… K…’ Nick said, looking up and around. ‘If that’s how you do it… I think it’s about an hour before noon. And that means it’s time I went and found my mummy and asked her for tea and a chocolate digestive.’

He cocked his head slightly, as if listening, then laughed and turned round.

One of Hope’s feet slipped off its stone and she stumbled, flailing her arms, then regained her balance. She crunched across pebbles to Nick.

‘Hello, Mummy.’ He didn’t look surprised to see her, or offended that she’d snuck up on him.

‘Time to get off that rock, I think,’ she said. ‘The tide’s nearly around you.’

Nick looked down, then held out his arms towards her. She lifted him off the boulder and swung him around and set him down on the shingle.

‘Did I hear something about tea and a biscuit?’ she said.

‘Oh yes please,’ said Nick.

They set off towards the back of the shop.

‘But I don’t think he understands about tea,’ Nick said.

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘Max.’

Hope looked down. ‘But Max isn’t with you.’

‘Oh no, wait,’ said Nick. He turned around and called out: ‘Max! Max!’

The toy monkey popped its head up from behind a boulder a few metres away, then bounded from stone to stone and jumped into Nick’s arms.

‘He’s with me now,’ he said, in a voice that meant he thought he’d got away with something on a clever technicality.

‘You can tell him it’s like getting your battery charged up,’ Hope said.

‘What’s like?’

Hope leaned down and tickled Nick’s tummy. ‘Tea and biscuits.’

Nick giggled.

‘I don’t think he understands…’

His voice trailed off.

‘Batteries?’ Hope said. ‘Surely Max understands batteries?’

‘Oh yes, of course he does,’ said Nick.

But he didn’t try to explain biscuits as batteries to Max; in fact he said nothing at all as they walked back to the shop to recharge.

They sat around the table in the back room of the shop. Mairi had her back to the window, keeping half an eye on the front of the shop, and sharing a pot of tea with Nick. Hope sipped instant coffee. Mairi chatted to Nick, telling him about the village, and about the local sealife, the seals and trout and the herring and mackerel out in the ocean, and the gannets that dived from the cliffs.

‘Was the sea always here?’ Nick asked.

Mairi glanced at Hope, half amused, half querying.

‘The sea has not always existed,’ she said.

‘Where did it come from?’

Hope, rather unfairly, expected Mairi to start talking about the six days of creation. Now, which day was the sea created?

‘The water came from space,’ Mairi said, ‘billions of years ago.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ said Nick. ‘I saw it on the telly. Comets! Whoosh! Splash!’

‘Careful you don’t splash your tea.’

‘All right, Granny. But that’s not what I meant. I meant the sea out the back there.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Mairi, glancing over her shoulder. ‘No, Nick, that loch wasn’t always there. Thousands of years ago, in the last ice age, the sea was much farther out. The islands like Pabay Mòr and Pabay Beag that you saw the other day, across from Valtos with the beach, and the big islands to the south like Berneray and Taransay and Scalpay and even Uist, they were all hills of the same Long Island back then.’

‘So you could walk out there? To the wee island?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mairi. ‘You could walk out there too. That would all have been a glen, you see, and the island would have been a hill.’

‘So where was the water?’

‘It was all in the ice, piled up above the hills.’

Nick thought about this.

‘But all that ice must have pushed the land down, so the sea—’

‘Wasn’t as far down as it might have been!’ Mairi cried. She clapped her hands together. ‘Clever boy! Yes, and today the land is still coming up with the weight of the ice off it, and the sea is still rising too with the ice melting into it. So it’s complicated.’

‘But,’ said Nick, frowning, ‘long ago there was ice on the top of the hills and the sea was way out, like if the tide had gone out a really really really long way, and stayed out for years and years and years, so there was grass and trees and things where the loch is, and there were animals and people and villages and smoke and everything.’

Mairi shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I don’t know about the villages, but all the rest, yes. It would have been a bonny glen.’

‘And they had boats made out of bent branches and skins.’

‘They did that,’ said Mairi. ‘They’re called coracles. That’s how the Gospel came to Scotland, when Columba paddled across the sea from Ireland in a coracle.’

‘And they had gliders made out of skins and bent sticks too.’ Nick planed his hand above his head. ‘Flying over the glen!’

Mairi shook her head. ‘No, dear, there’s no evidence – they didn’t have gliders, the people in the ice age and after.’

‘They did so!’ Nick sounded indignant. ‘I saw them!’

‘Where did you see them?’

He looked down into his cup. ‘Pictures,’ he said, quietly.

Mairi ruffled his hair. ‘Of course. It must have been a story, or on the telly.’

‘It was pictures,’ Nick insisted.

‘Yes, dear,’ said Mairi. ‘It was pictures, that’s all.’

She stood up. ‘Well, I’d better get back to the counter, and I’m sure you’d like to get back out in the sun. Enjoy it while it’s here, eh?’

After they’d both gone, Mairi to the shop and Nick to the shore, Hope sat with her glasses on but seeing nothing.

When Nick had been a year younger, he’d been troubled by vivid dreams just before falling asleep. He’d called them pictures.

No way, she thought, was he going to be an object of scientific investigation. Not by her doing.