Cold Fusion (13 page)

“Okay, okay.” I had another look. I couldn’t keep track of the shifting population, but I saw the pigeons, the kid and the Volvo. No doubt he was right about the sign. “Is it important?”

“No, that’s the point. It bloody isn’t. You see the important stuff, and you automatically filter out the rest. I see everything. I can’t stop.” He doubled up. “Oh, my hands hurt!”

I twisted round to face him. I laid one hand to the back of his skull, as if I could shield his brain from the information bombardment. “I’ll get you something for your hands,” I promised, forgetting that he didn’t like having his hair stroked. “Why does this happen to you?”

“Oh, God.” His voice was muffled against the knees of his jeans. “You’ve surely worked out by now I’m not…what you would call
normal
.”

“How do you know what I call normal?” I thought about Alan, then my father, then my ma in her flowered housecoat, hustling me in out of public view. I thought about the Maguire farmhands, who hadn’t come down the street to Mackie’s pub with pitchforks, but might as well have done. “I’ve got a pretty broad definition. In fact you might be the least abnormal person I’ve met in some time.”

He chuckled faintly. “Really?”

“Sad to say, yes. So what is it? Some kind of autism?”

“Some kind of it, yes. Asperger syndrome. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ve got no filters, that’s all, not in places like this. It’s like watching a kaleidoscope, a sea of broken glass where the pieces don’t quite fit together. My brain won’t assign more importance to a speeding truck than to a pigeon. And I can’t put my pain away, not at all. Please don’t touch me anymore.”

I withdrew my hand. For someone who didn’t want to talk, he was pretty eloquent. I had another glance through the windshield and tried to imagine how it was for him—every flicker of movement as significant as everything else. “Right. Here’s what we’re going to do. I’ll run in and grab the things we need, and you stay here and keep your eyes shut.”

“I can’t. If I try to block it, it gets worse.”

“Then…” I dug into my jacket’s inner pocket. The first thing that came to hand was my Peace Warrior ID. “Concentrate on one thing. Here. Look at this.”

He sat up slowly and took the card from me. Now I had a second to think, I wished I’d offered him anything else. Gradually his expression changed, unstoppable amusement rising through his pain and fear. “Mallory, I think this is the worst photograph I’ve ever seen.”

“Yeah, right. Great. You just amuse yourself with that, and I’ll be back as soon as I can. Meanwhile, here’s the keys. Lock yourself in once I’m gone, and if you see anyone threatening, I want you to drive out of here, Asperger’s or no Asperger’s.”

* * * * *

I shopped as quickly as I could. I certainly didn’t want to leave someone alone in a car park for long who couldn’t distinguish between a pigeon and a speeding truck.

But that hadn’t been what he’d said. I wondered what it must have been like for him, growing up amongst people like me who made such basic, dumb mistakes. He’d said he couldn’t filter out the pigeon, that it meant as much, occupied as much of his attention, as the truck. I shook my head. I couldn’t imagine it. I was being jostled by the crowd near the camping-supplies section, and I couldn’t give a damn about them, filtered them out as easily as breathing, my whole focus on what I needed to buy, provided my credit card held out. I gave my wallet a pat.
Come on, old girl. One last dance.

I was good at shopping runs like these. I’d often made a dash to the nearest supply outlet to stock up the
Sea Hawk
when we’d got a mission call. Packet soups, dried food in foil bags, a stack of cheap T-shirts and undies. A thermal base layer apiece, the unfashionable orange ones that always ended up reduced, a couple of sleeping bags, roll-up mattresses, wind-up torches—most important of all, a decent first-aid kit. I piled everything up on the counter, stuck my card into the machine when told, and resisted an urge to high-five the cashier when the payment against all odds went through. I actually enjoyed this kind of thing. I felt like Bear Grylls, hauling my gear out of the store. Now I could get back to my poor scared genius, drive him up into the mountains and save him with a little more style.

Except that he was sitting on a tall stool at the coffee bar, idly swinging his feet, a cappuccino at his elbow. From somewhere he’d acquired an iPad, and he was intently examining the screen.

I marched over to him. “What the fuck, Viv?”

He glanced up. His gaze was an artwork of sapphire serenity once more, and he took me in unhurriedly, bags and all. “I came to meet you. Would you like a coffee?”

“No! That is—yeah, I would, and something to eat as well. I’ve been tearing around in here trying to get back to you. What happened to your pigeons?”

“My…? Oh, those attacks pass off quickly enough most times. Looking at your photo helped, actually. Though it doesn’t do you justice at all.”

He sounded positively urbane. I tried to catch up. Was this the side of himself he’d turned to Alan Frost? Moreover, was he saying he found me attractive? Bewildered, I set down the bags and took the stool next to him. “How come you have an iPad?”

“That lady over there was kind enough to lend it to me.” He flashed one of his high-voltage smiles across the coffee bar, and a woman sitting by the window with her disgruntled-looking husband returned him an adoring little wave. “As I said, there was something I wanted to check. Have you ever watched the footage of the
Sea Hawk
’s launch going down?”

I almost swallowed my tongue. “Have I
what
?”

“The film one of your crewmembers took of the RIB sinking. It is online, as you said. Here.”

He turned the iPad screen so I could see. The second I started watching, I couldn’t look away. There was Alice, fair hair flying, hands in their Icelandic mitts wrapped around the wheel. Oskar was filming, a sturdy figure in the prow. The footage was good, not like most spur-of-the-moment video clips. The cheerful YouTube logo screamed its incongruity at the top of the screen. I could make out my own tiny self in the distance, driving my RIB across the prow of the Norwegian whaling ship. I was a little speck of nothing, but still Oskar and Alice were following me.

Oskar jerked and staggered as the deck beneath him tipped. Alice hadn’t stood a chance—had plunged overboard at the boat’s first yaw. I didn’t understand it. They were both good sailors. If they’d had a second’s warning—and they should have, the wind and the waves should have spoken to them of their intent to eat the vessel alive—they’d have braced. The RIB capsized, throwing Oskar clear in a graceful arc. No wallowing, no struggle to resurface. The unsinkable boat went down like a truckload of cannonballs.

Viv tapped the screen. He laid it flat on the countertop and looked at me. “What do you think?”

“I don’t think anything.” My voice was a thin rasp. My throat felt too narrow to get the words out. “
Of course
I’ve never seen this.” I slid off the stool and got my balance with an effort. “How could you just sit there and watch people die?”

“Because it’s interesting. Particularly the section forty seconds in, where—”

“I tell you what.” I twitched the iPad out of his hands. “If this was mine, I’d drop-punt it into the Macky D’s bin over there, okay? As it is…” I smoothed my face clear as I could of the desire to strangle someone, and I manoeuvred my way between tables to the lady sitting by the window. “Here you are,” I said, gently laying the device down in front of her. “Thank you for the loan. Please don’t give that gentleman anything else, though—he might look nice, but he’s clinically insane.”

Viv was sipping his cappuccino when I got back to him. He didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow at me as I gathered up the bags. I was turning away when he suddenly asked, as if Alfred or the ghost of his father had tapped him on the head to remind him of his manners, “Can I get you anything? Coffee and a…well, the choice seems to be muffins or muffins. Would you like a muffin?”

“Right now I’d like to shove a muffin up your arse.”

“Er…right. I’ll choose you something, shall I?”

This time I got three steps away. I’d have ignored his soft summons, but there was something in the way he said my name that slowed me down. I needed to give him some rope, even if stars of rage were exploding behind my eyes. Maybe he wanted to apologise. I stopped and turned. “What?”

“I’m sorry. I don’t seem to have any cash.”

“Jesus Christ.” I dropped the bags again. All I had left in my wallet was a five-pound note. Well, I’d come this far. I handed it to him at arm’s length. “Right. Take that, and do me a big favour. Don’t speak to me or look at me for the next hour and a half.”

“Why that long?”

“Because by then I might have calmed down.”

“All right.” He took the fiver and pushed his fringe out of his eyes in a way I’d have found charming if I hadn’t wanted to kill him. “Oh, Mallory—you said I could borrow your phone.”

Chapter Nine

Alan had lied about everything else, so it hadn’t occurred to me that he might have been telling the truth about the weather. The traffic on the A9 thinned as I headed south, and by the time I picked up the single-track into the foothills, we were alone on the road. Ahead of us lay the grand sweep of Beinn Mheadhoin and Derry Cairngorm, the crests already whitening, seeming to shine with their own light against a backcloth of snowstorm grey. The skies were loaded and waiting. The higher we climbed, the worse it would be, and Lilian had kept her eyrie on a desolate stretch of mountain road between the Devil’s Point and Glen Liu.

The first flakes began to hit the windshield. They were fluffy and fat. This was a bad sign—no transition through rain and sleet, just big, dry beauties that intended to lie, layer up and drift in no time at all. I gave thought to turning around, but we were exactly one hour and twenty-nine minutes away from Loch Dubh, and where else would I go? It would be tougher getting back now than soldiering on.

I was keeping an eye on the dashboard clock, out of curiosity and to help distract me from the remaining tremors of anger and misery still twitching my arm muscles, and the raw, aching place in my gut. Sure enough, as the digits clicked from twenty-nine to thirty, I saw movement in the passenger seat beside me. Viv had sat silent and still as a rock for the last ninety minutes. As far as I knew, he hadn’t glanced at his watch, and he couldn’t see the dash clock.

“I’m afraid your coffee will be cold now,” he said, “but would you like your muffin?”

“You’re fucking unbelievable.”

“You said an hour and a half.”

“Before I calmed down, yes. I don’t seem to be on schedule.”

Plastic rustled. A moment later his palm appeared over the gearstick, a piece of muffin poised on it, as if he were trying to appease a grumpy horse with a sugar lump.

“Put it away. I’m not hungry anymore.”

“I’m sorry.”

I sighed and took a firmer grip on the wheel. The snow was starting to vortex, glittering in the last light from the sun. He was different. He couldn’t have made that more clear to me. Maybe I should stop expecting him to behave like everyone else. And an apology was an apology. “Forget it.”

“What did you think about the video, though?”

“Vivian!” I wound down my window a couple of inches. Cold air and snowflakes rushed in, but their sting was better than the red soup Viv seemed so adept at creating inside my head. “I don’t care about the video, okay? I don’t want to hear or think about any of that ever again. Can I put the radio on?”

“Of course. Why not?”

There was no point in being careful of his sensibilities. I wasn’t sure if he had any, or how they worked, and he trod without a second thought all over mine. “Does music upset your Asperger’s?”

“Certain types of it, yes. Freeform jazz especially, or any kind of improv. I can’t bear not knowing what comes next. But anything structured—Golden Age classical, baroque—is fine. I find garage and dubstep very soothing.”

“I dunno about the Golden Age. But I’m sure I can find you some dubstep.” I hit the radio button and punched randomly through the stations. We were at the top of the high-level pass, the world fading out behind the veils of snow. A huge beat filled the car, rattling the speakers—enough to stun both of us into submission, I hoped, and so we sailed into the beautiful, desolate valley of Glencathadh on a tide of Blackburner’s “Dust Eater”.

* * * * *

Aunt Lilian’s house was derelict. I’d been afraid that someone might have tried to convert even this last wilderness outpost into a desirable holiday villa, but I guessed the developers knew when they were beat. Glencathadh wasn’t near any of the Cairngorm ski parks or wildlife hotspots. It was glacier carved, a broad shallow U with ice-polished granite flanks. The wind howled through it unmitigated by any picturesque, sheltering crags. An ugly conifer plantation took up most of its northern slope, machine planned and planted and left to grow scrawny as the wood-pulp industry died. Scrub birch and rowan were beginning to colonise the plantation’s fringe, and among a tangle of their winter-stripped limbs stood the remains of a croft.

I switched the music off, and silence fell like a stone. I remembered this absolute hush. The wind had died, allowing the snow to fall direct from a sky whose belly you could touch with a stretch of your hand. The pines were muffled in swags of white, their sea music hushed. Already drifts were accumulating on the roadsides. A stone track led fifty yards to the croft. It was a silver line now, and by tomorrow would be invisible. I brought the Corsa to a halt by the turning. We hadn’t passed a single vehicle since Coylumbridge. “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Viv sat up. He hadn’t been asleep, but I had the sensation of his return from a great distance. “Sure of what?”

“Trying to hide out here. It looks even worse than I thought it would, and if this snow keeps up, it’ll be a one-way trip.”

“That’s fine.” He rubbed his eyes, something weary and young in the gesture tugging at me. “I’d just like to be indoors.”

“I hope it still has one. Let’s go and find out.”

The Corsa’s tyres were starting to spin and lose grip by the time we were halfway up the track, and I pulled with relief into the shelter of the pines. Larch was growing along the outside edge, fallen orange needles giving me a bit of traction for the last approach. I was as tired as Viv, now I could allow myself to think about it, worn out by the day’s turbulence. Was it really only this morning that I’d woken on my crate bed at Spindrift, in a chalet that was now a heap of ash? Time had stretched so far that fractures were yawning in my mind. In one of them, Alan was with me on the crates, opening me up like a book he’d read a dozen times before. In another he was driving away, reduced to the gleam on the roof of a four-by-four in the distance. In a third was that fucking YouTube clip. They were connected. If I closed my eyes, tendrils would form between them, and I would understand…

“Mallory?”

I jammed on the brakes. We’d cruised into a clearing in front of the croft, and I’d almost hit the far wall. I snapped the engine off and sat staring at the house in front of us. The remains of painted lettering on a stone beside the door identified it as the Rowans. It was built from huge chunks of local granite, roofed in corrugated iron, whose rust glowed briefly red in the sunset light streaming under the low-bellied clouds. Tiles broke and blew away, Aunt Lil had told me. You could screw down a good sheet of iron and patch it almost indefinitely, or nick what you needed for repairs from scrapyards and abandoned barns. Two of the windows I could see were broken, the other three intact. It was a single-storey hut, a bedroom and one other space where you cooked, ate and sat around wondering if you’d live long enough to cook and eat again.

“Shit.” I stared through the slowly tumbling snowflakes. “It’s hardly Calder Castle. It looks about ready to fall down.”

“Isn’t that what we need—a place where no one in their right mind would come and stay?”

The walls had once been whitewashed. Enough of the render still clung to the granite to create a piebald effect. If the wind blew from the south, snow would coat the gaps and we’d disappear entirely.

“Fair point. If anyone follows us out here, we should probably surrender to them out of respect.”

* * * * *

For all her isolation, my aunt had been taking no chances. The door to the cottage was two inches thick and solidly locked. I broke in via the window, reaching past a broken pane to pull back the catch. Viv watched me struggle to lift the sash, which finally squealed up in a shower of paint flakes and splinters. He stood passively, like a knight waiting for his squire to lead up his steed to the mounting block, then allowed me to help him clamber inside.

This had been the old lady’s bedroom. Somebody—probably my dad, who when sober had never let a penny slip out of his grasp—had cleared the place. It had been pretty bleak during her lifetime, and now the room was just an empty space, blank walls and peeling plaster. Viv looked around, taking in the dusky ceiling and the branch-fretted light still trickling in from the west.

“I like this,” he said. “I hope no one ever changes anything about it.”

“There’s not much chance of that, unless someone comes to knock it down.” He flinched, and I regretted growling at him. If the chaos at Loch Dubh services had disturbed him, perhaps he found this hushed little cell to be soothing. “If you like this, just wait till you see the desolation next door.”

Whoever had picked the place over had for some reason left behind the kitchen table and two chairs. They were good ones too, dark oak at least a century old. Maybe the old man’s truck had been too full to get them on board. I remembered sitting with Lilian in the kitchen with our two chairs in this exact position, facing each other across the table while she frowned and tried to work out what to do with me. I’d thought I’d forgotten all this. Memories were springing out at me from every corner of the room, from the cracked quarry tiles and the ancient black cooking range. I’d been happy here, despite her aloofness and the lack of physical comforts. I’d even liked the stuffed horsehair sofa which still occupied the whole of one wall. It had given me a rash, and years of damp hadn’t improved its appearance or smell, probably explaining why the scavengers had passed it by. I’d lain on it for hour after blissful hour, reading in undisturbed silence.

These were good things. Why were they sparking anger in me, reanimating my annoyance with Viv? Damn him and his bloody video anyway. There was no place of safety in the entire world, was there, not even on the deck of a trawler in bloody Norway. Hellfire and shit found you everywhere, and sometimes it followed you home. Projected on the kitchen wall I saw once again Alice Maguire’s helpless dive into the water.

I swung round to face Viv, who was standing with his hands in his pockets, smiling faintly as if well pleased by this hovel where I’d marooned him. I resisted an urge to snap my fingers at him to wake him up. “Do you like it?”

“Yes, I do. It’s very peaceful.”

“Good. Because we’re probably going to freeze to death, and I’d hate that to happen any place that didn’t meet your satisfaction. Honestly, Viv—doesn’t it occur to you to
do
something? It’s still snowing out there, and it’ll soon be dark.”

He met my eyes calmly. “No, I’m afraid it doesn’t occur. But if you tell me, I’ll gladly do anything you want.”

I didn’t want to be marching him around like some kind of marionette. I didn’t understand. He wasn’t helpless—I’d seen him act with lifesaving courage and purpose.

“Start by getting that door open, and bring our gear in from the car,” I told him roughly. “Then start looking round the place. We’ll need any resources we can find. I’m going out the back to see if there’s any dry wood.”

I left him standing there. The house didn’t have much geography for me to recall, but I still managed to turn right instead of left beyond the kitchen’s back door. I collided painfully with Lilian’s sea-monster hatstand. Why the hell would anybody leave that there, to ambush people in the dark? Why had she bought it in the first place? As far as I knew, she’d never owned a hat. I made sure the door was shut behind me before letting loose a moan. Probably I now had a shiner to add to my busted lip. I made my unsteady way into the bathroom across the corridor to have a look.

There was the same fly-spotted mirror above the sink. All the fittings were still there, in fact, too heavy or too tightly screwed down for the most enthusiastic of vultures. Everything was grey with dirt and disuse. Larch needles had blown in through the broken window and gathered in an orange stripe along the base of the tomb-like old bath. I examined my face in the mirror’s dusky shadows. Sure enough, a bruise was rising on my cheekbone. That and the cut lip should have looked worse than they did, but they blended pretty well with the hounded look in my eyes. A scrappy, hunted animal should have a face to match the lifestyle. I’d rejoiced in running away with Viv. I hadn’t been able to lay down my guilt in North Kerra, and Viv’s situation had blended with my own need to escape. I was furious with him because he’d brought the memories with us, plucked them out of the sky via a stranger’s iPad, and because of the way he was, I’d never get him to understand why they were unbearable to me.

I twisted the tap on hard. It was just a reflex, and the pipework clanked emptily. Then to my surprise the faucet gave a shuddering cough, and peat-brown water splashed into the sink. There was no mains. The house was gravity-fed from a stream on the Glencathadh hillside. Gratefully I splashed my face, dried off on the edge of my jacket, and had a cautious look under the cistern lid. There was water in there too. Somehow the pipes hadn’t frozen, and my first task didn’t have to be digging us both a latrine. I tried to take heart from this. I knew from Peace Warrior field trips and demonstration camps what a difference working toilets made. This was a good start, and if I could add heat to our blessings and facilities…

Aunt Lil had sawed and chopped up her own firewood. The long cold night that had killed her must have swept down from the mountains just after she’d had a delivery, or maybe she’d been too ill to deal with it and had frozen to death for want of pieces small enough to fit her stove. I leaned my hands on the top bar of her woodshed, wondering which it had been, and if it had hurt or scared her. My mother had told me in a nervous, offhand
by the way
that she’d died, perhaps fearing my reaction, but I’d been a tough teen by then, ready to outmatch anyone’s indifference. If there’d been a funeral, I’d never known about it. My dad had made all the arrangements, Ma had said, and that had been that. The shed was full of thick lengths of pine. Unless Viv and I were going to share Lilian’s fate, I had to get to work.

I dragged the old sawhorse out of the shed. It was almost dark now, snow falling fast. The wood was well seasoned, but I needed to break it down into chunks small enough to be chopped for kindling, and without a chainsaw, that was an all-day job. Well, I had perhaps half an hour before it was pitch-black out here. I hauled the first pine log up onto the frame and strapped it in place. The old lady had made me work for my keep, and I knew where to reach inside the shed to find the saw. I was out of practice. My first two attempts to slice through the bark miscarried, jolting the blade aside with muscle-wrenching force. I had gloves in my rucksack. I should stop, catch my breath, go about this sensibly.