Intrusion

4. A Scar of Thought

Fiona Donnelly rang the doorbell at 10.15 the day after Hope’s queries to her friends. She was about forty-five years old and she was a district nurse. She’d been alerted by Hope’s monitor ring, which like all such devices logged its results with the local health centre and the national database. Her visit had popped up on Hope’s diary when she’d fired up her glasses that morning, and Hope had nodded in agreement. Mrs Donnelly had been her visitor when she was pregnant with Nick.

Still, when Hope opened the door and saw Mrs Donnelly standing there in the little basement-flat front yard under a light dusting of snow, she felt a slight pang of dread, like she always did when she saw someone in uniform on her doorstep. It wasn’t much of a uniform, just a hooded blue fleece over a blue tunic and trousers, with a few badges and discreet sensors – cameras, mikes, sniffers – pinned here and there over the chest, but there it was. Authority. Hope had had a slight nervousness about people in uniforms since she was a girl in Ealing, back when Ealing was still des res and she was about ten, and the men from Environment had come to take away the Aga.

‘Hi, Mrs Donnelly,’ she said. ‘Come on in.’

‘Fiona, please, Hope. It hasn’t been that long. Let’s not be strangers.’

‘No, no,’ said Hope.

Fiona took off her fleece, shook the ice particles off it, looked about for a peg and hung the garment on a handlebar. The two women walked crabwise past the bikes, and sat down at the kitchen table.

‘Coffee? Tea?’

‘Tea would be lovely, thanks. No milk or sugar.’

Hope put the kettle on and rustled up tea bags. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Fiona slip a computer out of her tunic pocket and wave it in front of her chest before setting it down on the table. The nurse peered and poked at it for a few seconds, then sat back, no doubt relieved that no molecules of dangerous substances had been detected in the air.

Over cups of tea Hope and Fiona did some catching up. After about ten minutes Fiona pushed away her empty cup, tapped the tabletop beside her computer and moved to business.

‘Work OK?’ she said. ‘Not too stressful?’

‘Oh, no,’ said Hope. ‘Not at all. It can run itself if it has to, and if it gets too stressful – can’t imagine, but if – I can just let them know I need some time off. They’re always happy to have me back after I’ve been away.’

‘Fine, fine.’ Fiona’s finger twiddled on the tabletop, writing. ‘Any general health problems? Anything that might not have shown up on the logs?’

Hope shook her head. ‘I’m fine,’ she said. She straightened her back and wiggled her shoulders. ‘I should get a bit more exercise, and take a few more stand-up breaks, but with all this snow…’

‘Yeah, I know. Global warming. Well, so long as you keep that in mind. Get outside more than just the school walk and the shops, OK?’

‘Oh, I do, I do, we go for walks at weekends…’

‘Fine, fine – like I say, keep it in mind, make a little extra effort. Anyway… we’ll book you in for a first check… next month?’

Hope put her glasses on, invoked the diary, tapped the table and synchronised diaries with the nurse’s computer.

‘OK, the twelfth of April, fine. Twelve-thirty.’

Fiona looked down at the tablet, sighed, and looked up.

‘Now,’ she said. ‘Sorry I’ve got to say this, but… I’ve got to. You’ve thought about the fix?’

‘I’ve thought about it.’

‘And are you going for it this time?’

Hope compressed her lips and shook her head.

‘Why not, if you don’t mind me asking?’

‘I do mind you asking,’ Hope said, more lightly than she felt. ‘But I just don’t want to do it, and that’s that.’

‘Do you have any safety concerns about it?’

‘No.’

‘Faith issues?’

‘No,’ Hope said. ‘I don’t.’

‘Shame,’ said Fiona. ‘Because I could have set your mind at rest about safety, and given you some tips about placing a faith objection.’ She put a forefinger against the side of her nose, and tapped, gazing idly out of the window at the bare branches of the bush outside. ‘You’re absolutely sure you don’t have a faith objection?’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Hope. ‘We – Hugh and I – have been over all this.’

‘Much as it pains me as a not very good Catholic,’ Fiona said, with a wry look, ‘I have to tell you that there are non-religious faith objections, if you see what I mean. Off the top of my head, uh, Green Humanism for one…’

Hope burst out laughing.

‘Green humanism? What’s that? Humanism for little green men?’

‘It’s about leaving human nature alone, as I understand it,’ said Fiona, a little stiffly. ‘As well as the rest of nature. No mucking about with genomes. I gather they also object to the New Trees.’

‘Well, there you are.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve got nothing against New Trees. And I could hardly pretend to, because Hugh works with new wood all the time. Well, half the time, but you know what I mean.’ Hope propped her elbows and began waving her hands. ‘Look, Fiona, Hugh and I have been through all this. It’s not enough to claim you believe something, you have to show it in some way, and I’m just not prepared to do that if I don’t actually believe in something, and the fact is, there’s nothing out there for me to pretend to believe in, let alone actually believe in.’

‘Well in that case, my dear, I’m afraid you’re stuffed.’

‘So to speak!’ Hope acknowledged Fiona’s joke. ‘But isn’t it enough that I just don’t want it?’

‘No,’ said Fiona. ‘It isn’t enough.’

‘Why not?’

‘Well, if that was enough, if just saying no and not giving a reason was enough, where would we be? It would be just chaos.’

‘It’s enough now,’ Hope said. ‘Or was until a couple of days ago. And I don’t see chaos.’

‘Well…’

‘And anyway,’ Hope went on, ‘the ruling is being appealed, so I’m not in any legal difficulty by not having the fix.’

‘I’m sorry, Hope, but you are. The ruling stands, and unless it’s overturned on appeal or the law is changed, we have to take it into account.’

‘We?’

‘The Health Service. We have to do our best to persuade.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Hope. ‘But I can’t actually be compelled. Not yet.’

‘Uh, that’s not strictly true, Hope. The local health centres have all changed their policy in line with the ruling. There’s a provision already for court orders. We hope it won’t come to that, obviously.’

Hope felt a cold jolt.

‘But there must be thousands of mothers in my position! You can’t take all of them to court!’

Fiona rubbed the back of her neck, between the collar of her tunic and the curve of her pinned-up hair.

‘Well, no,’ she said. ‘But I’ll be honest with you, the idea is that a few cases will be enough to make the rest fall into line. You just have to hope your number doesn’t come up.’

‘This is so fucking unethical,’ said Hope.

‘No, it’s not,’ said Fiona. ‘Not on any ethics I was taught, at work or anywhere else.’

‘What about my choice? Doesn’t that count for anything?’

‘Yes, it does. You do have a choice. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’

‘It’s no choice if it’s hedged about with conditions I can’t meet.’

‘But the conscience exemption—’

‘That goes against my conscience!’

‘Look,’ Fiona pleaded, ‘the centre will give you every opportunity, they’ll bend over backwards to accommodate everyone who has a genuine conscience-based objection, they’ll hand out exemptions like Tesco vouchers. But what they can’t accept is people just saying no for no reason.’

‘I don’t get it,’ said Hope. ‘If faith kids are allowed to be just the same as nature kids, the problem can’t be that bad in the first place. I mean, you’re not allowed to beat your child just because the Bible says you should. You’re not allowed to rely on praying over a sick child, no matter what your beliefs are. If the child’s sick enough, you’ll still get hauled up for neglect if you don’t call a doctor. So the fact that the nutters can get away with this one means the fix isn’t all that important – it’s regarded as a good thing to have, I’m sure, but not having it can’t really be thought of as that bad. So why can’t I just say I don’t want it?’

‘It’s the principle,’ Fiona said. ‘When we had conscription, we allowed conscientious objection. But you had to convince a board that your objection was genuine conscience and not just cowardice, because otherwise every coward or anyone who just didn’t want to be bothered could claim it was conscience. You can’t have people dodging an obligation just because they don’t feel like it.’

‘That’s not what I’m saying!’

‘I’m sorry, Hope, but from where I’m sitting, it is.’ Fiona shrugged. ‘I sympathise, obviously, but all I can say is, I hope you’re not one of those picked to be made an example of.’

The remark stung. Hope stared across the table at Fiona: friendly, businesslike, almost motherly. In the grey light from the window and the white light from the LED fixture, she sat in a halo in which she looked serene, concerned, informed, everything a visiting nurse should be. She’d sat across this table so many times, held Hope’s hand, helped to bath Nick when he could be cradled in the crook of one arm. Hope knew she had her best interests at heart.

‘Oh, thanks,’ said Hope. She looked away. ‘Well, the site can run itself but I don’t earn any money that way…’

‘Of course, of course,’ said Fiona. ‘Thanks for the tea.’

‘That’s fine.’

Fiona gave a tight smile. She reached into her tunic pocket and took out a small yellow-and-white carton, about the size of an aspirin packet. Printed at the top of one side was SynBio in friendly, flowery pink font. She placed it on the table, carefully, but her hand shook a little and Hope heard a hollow, plasticky rattle.

‘Just in case you change your mind,’ Fiona said. ‘One tablet, down with water. The sooner the better, obviously, but it can sort out quite a lot even after six months.’

Hope shifted her gaze from the packet to Fiona’s face. She flexed one shoulder.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

Fiona made for the hall.

‘You will think about it, won’t you?’ she said as she shrugged into her fleece.

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Hope, opening the door.

Fiona gave her a tight smile and went out, into the now thicker snow. Hope got the door closed before she started crying. Fiona wasn’t a villain. Fiona was just a person who represented an impersonal system closing in and grinding them down. That was how Hope saw her.

That morning, Hugh arrived at his work shortly after 9.30. He wasn’t late: as far as he was concerned, the billed-for day began when he set off on his bicycle, and he’d set off at 8.00 prompt. The shower had ended as he reached Acton – or rather, he was out from under its cloud, which he could see behind him whenever he glanced over his shoulder. Which was often, given that many of the vehicles on the road were almost as quiet as his bike, and a lot faster and heavier, and the cyclists more dangerous than any of them. Unlike most of the heavier vehicles, bikes were steered by humans, and almost all by cyclists. Hugh rode a bike, but he didn’t consider himself a cyclist.

As he whizzed through the traffic and raced across junctions and around roundabouts, Hugh found himself preoccupied – though not distracted, because the parts of his brain that dealt with cycling in traffic had long since laid down reflexes that operated below the level of his conscious thought – by the vision, indeed the full-sensory hallucination he’d had the previous evening. Sight, sound and smell; and to all appearances an awareness of Hugh’s presence, though perhaps not that of anyone or anything else in the hall or in the house.

Hugh, for reasons that will later become painfully clear, was a confirmed scoffer about anything that smacked of the supernatural or even of the paranormal. He was less troubled by his visions than might be supposed. In his early teens he had read with delight the poem of Lucretius, in a tatty old paperback published by Sphere Books in 1969 with a Max Ernst picture on the cover. He’d found it in the attic of his parents’ house, which had once been a Free Church manse, amid a stash of dusty old rationalist works, presumably from the minister’s library. (Hugh had only made sense of this when he’d noticed that most of the books were critiques of the historical record of the Roman Catholic Church.) On the inside cover, the pencilled words were just legible:

No source for the quote was given. For years, Hugh had attributed the lines to the long-departed minister himself, inspired no doubt by the prevailing weather of his parish. It was an obscure thrill imparted by the lines that impelled him to turn over the pages of the book, and then to read it. He found a great deal in those pages that left imprints on his brain, but none more than the poet’s explanation of how the existence of the gods was known: because they were seen and heard, in visions and in dreams. From their distant milieu between the worlds – in outer space, as Hugh read it – faint images were transmitted, which sometimes impinged on human senses, producing impressions of the gods: correct impressions, as far as they went. The existence of the gods was an entirely empirical matter.

From this Hugh had concluded, to his great relief, that when he saw and heard people that other people couldn’t, he wasn’t crazy. He was seeing things all right, but seeing things that really were out there, in a quite literal sense. At thirteen he’d heard and read enough about dark matter and exotic particles and quantum uncertainty and the possible infinity of possible universes to be convinced that the nature of things was as yet unfathomed. Perhaps he was seeing the same gods that the Greek materialists had perforce admitted that they – like everyone else – saw. A few years later, further reading and online searching led him to speculate that the people he saw, in their barbaric attire, were perhaps real people from the past – not that he was seeing ghosts, but seeing into the past, reflected in some mirror of the face of fleeting Time – and that they, in seeing him (as he did not doubt they did), saw into the future. He even wondered, idly, what they made of him – a mage perhaps, able to conjure strange powers.

The Leosich had a name for the phenomenon, he’d learned on oblique enquiry. They called it the second sight. That sounded natural enough to satisfy the strictest materialist – and, indeed, the Leosich saw nothing supernatural in the phenomenon. It was simply a gift some people had, no more remarkable than any other talent. It even followed the rules of Mendellian inheritance for a recessive gene, which (Hugh thought) quite possibly explained its former incidence among the locals.

There was a reason why his enquiry had to be oblique.

At Ealing, Hugh turned off the Broadway and around a few corners into Bidwell Crescent, a long residential side street of Victorian-built semi-detached houses. It differed from his own street, Victoria Road, in that it was three times longer, the houses were built of red brick rather than sandstone, most of them didn’t have basement flats, and about a third of them were empty: doors barred with nailed cross-planks, windows masked with charred and spray-bombed chipboard, front plots or patios choked with weeds that in turn were being choked out by the fast-growing saplings of New Trees whose branches’ shapes – circular or rectangular, smooth or serrated, soft and pale or hard and dark – indicated to Hugh’s practised carpenter’s eye the type of product-plantation from which their seeds had (somehow, despite much small print and large promises) escaped.

He pulled in at number 37 and swung off his bike. He lifted the bike on to one shoulder and trotted up the steps to the door, which was already open. A buzzing in the sky made him glance up, though he knew what it was. He always looked back at police drones. This one, he watched out of sight, over the rooftops to the west. It was the drones you didn’t see you had to worry about. These flew at fifty thousand feet and struck without warning. This one was no doubt just keeping an eye out for Naxal pop-ups in Southall.

Inside, the floorboards were gritty with cement spatters and soft with dust. The stairway had been torn out. Access to the first floor was by ladder. Hugh parked his bike behind a stack of paint tins, unfurled his overall and climbed into it, and set his dust mask on his forehead. The elastic tugged at his neck hairs, then settled. He followed the Radio One sound into the front room, waved at Ashid the plasterer, backed out and stepped into the kitchen. The kettle was not long boiled. Hugh brewed up an instant coffee in the unwashed mug he’d used the day before, and ambled into the dining room. There, he stood and sipped for five minutes, contemplating. The electrics were in place. Ashid had finished the plastering and painting. The floor was a tip. All that remained to be done was the woodwork. Its raw material was most of what made the floor a tip. Hugh’s tools, trestles and workbench, and some rubble and splashes from Ashid’s work, made the rest.

Cornices. Window frame. Door frame. The overmantel. Skirting boards. Their components had been grown to function, and now had to be cut to size and fixed in place. Hugh put his empty mug down on the raw windowsill and got to work. Through the morning the music from the radio trickled in whenever he paused. On the hour the news updates came: the war, the weather. The war was spreading from India and the weather was coming from Russia. Overshadowing both: the Warm War. No change.

Aberdeen. A city making a sharp turn, from oil rigs to windmills, with bits flying off – jobs, businesses, whole districts – from the centrifugal force of the swerve. A city of sharp edges, with a hole at its heart. You came out of the station and found yourself facing roadways, flyovers, walls; you had to walk half a kilometre and turn corners just to find shops. Apardion, the Vikings had called it, and Hugh liked that name. It called to mind a cold and barbaric past, like something out of the Conan stories, out of the Hyborean Age – itself named after the Greek word for the people of the far north, the Hyperboreans, the folk from beyond the north wind. The people in the sunshine beyond winter…

The barbarian he’d seen last night, for instance – he could have been a Hyperborean. Aberdeen, when Hugh and Hope had been students there – that had been Hyperborean too. That summer. The last good summer. The last one when you could feel the Earth’s warming in your bones. Ever since, you could see the warming on television and online, you could see the droughts and dustbowls and bergs, but you couldn’t feel it. What you felt was cold and damp. Hugh remembered taking the bus with Hope from the campus into town on what now seemed like many long, warm evenings, talking non-stop through the ride, walking and then reeling between the remaining city centre pubs, and taking the bus back after midnight with the sky still bright to the north and a half-light gloaming at street level when the nightly hours-long power cut had extinguished all the street lamps.

How keen he’d been then to learn, to graduate, how eager he’d been to get to work, to get the wave and wind turbines turning! Green power to pick up the slack and fill the gap left by the black coal and the peak oil and the unbuilt dirty nukes. And then, wham, sudden as a mine closure, solar panels had started spreading across the Sahara like lily pads, powering half of Europe and the African Lion economies into the bargain, and syn bio tech had come on stream, springing full-grown from the bench like the Incredible Hulk bursting his lab coat, a great green monster that sucked carbon from the air and sprouted wood, pissed oil, and shat diamonds.

Hugh found his gaze wandering to some uninstalled window panes out in the lobby. Precisely sized to fit the frames – you couldn’t cut the panes. There was nothing to cut them with. You could cut glass with diamond, but these panes were diamond. Laminated industrial sheet diamond. The very existence of such a thing still astonished Hugh. He’d read all kinds of excited speculation about its possible applications as a new structural material, but the diamond age was still a long way off. The stuff could still only be made in laminated sheets, or thin films like the surface layers of Hope’s work glasses. Even as sheets, though, it was already being used in America for far more than windows: there, you could buy entire prefabricated houses as kits – walls and windows and roofs – and just glue the slabs together. This would come here, he knew, before too many years had passed. It would not be long before the whole of a house would be pre-shaped diamond and new wood, and its assembly a job that any clueless householder could do with an Allen key and a tube of superglue, like flat-pack furniture from IKEA. And then building-site work would be – what? Digging a hole and maybe laying foundations.

When Hugh had been a lad, back on the wind-power farm where his father was an engineer, he’d looked up to the labourers. The steady labourers, that is, not the natives like Murdo Helmand of the glass eye, who when he wasn’t working simply drank. A lot of the Leosich were like that: they worked when they felt like it, and the rest of the time they drank. They got around the prohibitive alcohol taxes by distilling their own spirit, a harsh thrapple-burning usquebaugh they called peat-reek. Others – or sometimes the same people; the groups overlapped, or alternated, serially – frowned on the drink and went to church and sometimes under the preaching they got the curach, the concern about their souls, and after moping for a while found that God had their names in His book, and they changed their ways. They gave up the peat-reek and the ceilidh and the poaching. But they never shopped the location of the illicit stills and the smoky bothans, or the snares and shotguns. The English and Polish labourers were different: calm, deliberate men with steady hands and steady girlfriends, and when he was a wee lad they’d been Hugh’s idea of a man. He’d always felt slightly awkward, slightly soft and posh and middle-class in their company, and in that of their kids – boys and girls alike, as it happened. He’d known he was going to be an engineer, he’d always known that, but he’d determined to be as tough as the roughest bricklayer on a site.

And now here he was, sawing new wood to size. Joinery. A posh, soft, middle-class job. That was just the way of it, all over the bloody world. When Ashid the plasterer knocked off for a break and came in with coffee, he – as nearly always – talked about his PhD in economics. He had a grudge that he deserved better.

At least you got as far as a fucking PhD, Hugh thought, wiping the back of his wrist across his mouth. What he said was: ‘Things will pick up.’

Ashid laughed. ‘This is things picking up.’

Hope left the carton containing the fix on the table all morning, ignoring it while she worked. Every so often she’d take off her glasses and look at it. When she stopped for lunch, she reached over, picked up the packet, and opened it. Inside were a folded leaflet and a plastic and foil card with a single bubble about a centimetre long. She turned it over in her hands. The bubble was transparent. The fix itself was a grey, almost metallic-looking capsule that tapered from the middle to two blunt ends. Like a fishing weight. A magic bullet. After a while she pushed the leaflet and the card with the fix back in the box.

She didn’t want to leave this lying around, or even in the medicine cabinet. She wanted it out of her sight. She didn’t want to leave it where Hugh might come across it. She walked through to the hall, stepped into the cupboard, stood on tiptoes, stretched, and placed the carton on the edge of the high shelf. Then she gave it a quick tap with her hand and sent it skittering to the back, against the wall.