Cold Fusion (3 page)

But I didn’t want to die here. Once Eddie had told me about the video footage, I’d have been happy enough for a giant wave to sweep through the dunes and finish me, but I didn’t want to exit this life with my face mashed down into a nylon 1950s carpet. The old man cornered me, raising his fist. I flung up an arm to block him—too slowly—only enough to turn a knockout blow to a stinging crack in the mouth. And then I hit him back.

It wasn’t much. I was sober, and I didn’t have his motivation. I caught him one punching shove in the chest. He staggered back and thumped down neatly into his chair. I waited, breathing hard, for him to spring back up. But after a moment he grunted, turned his bleary gaze back to the TV and started to snore.

Sick laughter rattled me. Was that all it took to defeat the monster under the bed? I’d sometimes dreamed of having a stand-up, knock-down fight with him. It would have taken place somewhere public and lasted for ages. It would’ve been scrupulously fair, and afterwards—when I’d beaten him by my superior strength and wits—he would’ve shaken my hand.

As it was, I picked up his limp fist and put it on the arm of his chair. I checked his pulse, leaned over him and pulled up one eyelid. He was fine, just out cold courtesy of three quarters of a bottle of Sark. I put the remaining quarter near to him so he wouldn’t start bellowing at my ma for it when he woke up. I set the coffee table upright and straightened the sofa. She hated an untidy house.

She was sitting on the bottom stair when I let myself back into the hall. As soon as she saw me she jolted upright. She was also the last woman in Scotland to carry a lavender-scented cotton hanky in her pocket at all times. She whipped it out, shaking away its crisply ironed folds. “Oh, Kier—your face!”

She was crying. I’d have cried too if I hadn’t known her main concern was for the street and the village and anyone else in this arsehole’s armpit who might see that good old Dave Mallory had hit his kid somewhere visible this time. I dodged her swipe with the hanky. My jaw was still aching from Alan Frost’s sedating blow. I didn’t want anyone else to touch me for a very long time. “I’m all right. He’s passed out in front of the telly. Will you be okay with him?”

“Oh, yes. He never hurts me.” She sobbed and blew her nose. “He’ll shout and grump at me for an hour, and then he’ll wander off to bed, unless…”

“Unless I’m still here to piss him off.”

She knew I had nowhere else to go. I waited to see if that would make any difference, but she only stood there. Well, it was fair enough. I was twenty-five years old, and since I’d walked out on the family business, I was no longer entitled to a room in this house.

“All right,” I said as gently as I could, because if I was alone in the world, at least the world was out there for me. Hers was bounded by these four walls. “Look, I came back because I—I thought I should face the Maguires.”

“Oh, Kier. That wouldn’t have helped. She was their only one.”

I was done here, then. I took the handkerchief, found a clean bit and wiped my lip, because leaving a bloodstain on your ma’s cheek after kissing her goodbye was bad by any standards. “Take care, Ma. I’ll call you when I’ve got a new address, okay?”

My hand was on the latch of the front door when she stopped me. “He was trying to quit,” she said fiercely, as if I’d denied it. “Drinking much less. And then this.”

I’d heard that song all my life. I’d listened and believed. Maybe the difference now was that I already had so much guilt on my shoulders that this last brick of it had to drop out of my rucksack and into the gutter where it belonged. “Ma, he was trying to quit before they cut the fishing quotas. Then before he found out I was gay. Then before he totalled his car out joyriding with Richie McNab. He just drinks. And that’s fine. I’m no better than he is. But that part of it’s not my fault.”

* * * * *

I was on my way past Mackie’s when a figure appeared in the doorway. “Running away back to sea?” a broad north-coast accent enquired. “They’ll never let you aboard with a face like that. Come inside.”

Reluctantly I followed Mackie junior up the steps and into the bar. Mackie senior was nowhere to be seen, and I guessed the torch had passed, father to son as our local God intended. If I’d stayed put on my old man’s fishing boat, none of this would have happened. He might have got leathered and chucked me overboard one night, but…none of this. I hoisted myself obediently onto the stool Mackie indicated, watching him take up position behind the bar. Mercifully I was his only customer.

Not even that. “Don’t bother uncorking the Bollinger, Mac. I’m skint.”

“Och, if I can’t give you one on the house on the occasion of your auspicious return, when can I?”

“Fuck you.” I took the shot glass from him gratefully. “Ta, though.”

I sat in silence while he turned away and got on with polishing the optics. The pub offered no accommodation, and I couldn’t have paid for it anyway. The scotch stung my lip. I tasted blood through the malt and caught sight of myself in the mirror. Jesus wept… Surreptitiously I grabbed a paper napkin and tried to clean up. With that accomplished, I began digging through my pockets for change or a folded-up fiver. One shot on an empty stomach had pushed reality back to a slightly less nose-to-nose distance. Another would do the job even better. I was certainly all done with reality for today.

Of course Mackie was watching me in the mirror. Like all good barmen, he had the gift of keeping a subtle eye on his clientele. “You can have a refill, sonny Jim,” he said, snagging my glass back and pouring me one. “But I’ve got to tell you, the one thing I don’t want to see sitting over that bar top from me in ten years’ time is another Dave Mallory getting shitfaced.”

I downed my second drink in one and almost choked. “No chance of that. I’m on my way out of here right now, back to…”

But I didn’t have the energy left in me for that kind of lie. Mackie continued his work in silence, then said, out of the blue, “How’s the writing going, then?”

“The what?”

“Your writing. Didn’t you get some stuff published in the
Northern Poetry Gazette
? I thought you were gonna do some kind of poetic reporting out there on your peace boat.”

Wow. He
was
a good barman. Finding a safe small-talk subject must have been a tall order with me tonight, and I appreciated it. He’d been a close friend of Alice’s too. I tried to dredge up memories of the hot, sweet thrill I’d felt when the
Gazette
had taken my work. It had only been last year. Now it felt like a lifetime ago, and somebody else’s lifetime at that. I’d been a back-of-the-envelope, sea-shanty poet for as long as I could remember, gutting and filleting fish to the rhythm of whatever strange words were blowing into my head off the northern gale. I’d never thought any of it worthy of preserving, and I’d certainly known better than to open my mouth about it at home. In fact it had been Alan who’d persuaded me to send some of it off, as part of a drunken bet when I’d first started opening my stupid soul for gutting and filleting by him.

I set the shot glass sharply down. “Yep. Seamus Heaney meets Moby Dick. That was gonna be me.”

“What happened?”

I’d watched my first whale kill from the deck of the
Sea Hawk
, and it had knocked every word of poetry out of me forever. “Not much. It just all went to shit, like everything else. I tell you what, though.” I drew an arcane pattern on the bar’s damp fibreglass top, remembering. “You’ve given me an idea. Of where I can go next, I mean. I came here to talk to Alice’s mam and dad, but I’m getting some hints that I shouldn’t.”

“Well, I didn’t want to say—”

“Don’t. Everyone else has said—pretty much everything. But in the remote event that the Maguires do want to see me, I’m not about to run away. I’ll go out to Spindrift and doss there for a few nights.”

Mackie looked at me oddly. “Spindrift?”

“Yeah. I used to hole up there a lot when I wanted to write and my dad wanted me to catch fish. Schedule clash, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. Look, Mal, I don’t want to confirm your view that the world’s gone to shit on a sledge, but Spindrift’s not there anymore.”

I tried to take this in. At first it wasn’t so hard. From its name to my sea-washed summer memories, the place had always felt dreamlike anyway, a bubble ready to pop or blow away. You could find it on a map if you were determined—Spindrift Craft Village, a collection of chalets and huts in the dunes, occupied by a shifting population more random and motley still. Artists and sculptors, potters, dreamers…the odd recovering junkie, lost souls a penny a pound. “How can it be gone?”

“It never existed by magic, you know. Turned out old man Calder was financing the whole thing.”

The Much Honoured Hugo Calder, Laird of Kerra
. My junior class had been rehearsed in how to address him before a school outing to Kerra Castle. I recalled the scent of cedars, the twisting and turning of paths around the fantastic red-sandstone Victorian pile. Round turrets in the French style, rhododendrons blazing. “How do you know?”

“He died last year. He’d been a grand old fella—left hand never knew what his right hand was doing—but he’d been supporting all kinds of lame ducks and lost causes over the years. God help them now.”

Artists who couldn’t afford studio space, potters without a wheel. Empty rooms where a dopey kid could hang out, watch the waves and duck under his father’s radar for a while. “Didn’t old Calder have a son?”

“Aye, but he left the property away from him, the money and the land and everything. He was an odd lad, the son—something wrong with him, people always said.” Mackie paused to bring a pint glass to high polish with his towel. “God knows who inherited it all, but the fact is that Spindrift—all that shoreline and the moors behind it—got bought up by developers. Fancy holiday homes, they reckon. Tennis courts and go-kart tracks, the whole tourist works.”

I was struggling to breathe. I knew I’d just found a focus, a limited grief my mind could grasp among the infinite miseries around me, but this news pierced me as nothing else had. Mackie looked as if he knew he’d chucked a grenade. His brow creased in concern. “Look,” he said, “if you can hang around until closing, you can doss down on a sofa in here for tonight if you’re desperate. I’m sorry not to ask you home, but my flat’s rammed, what with Jennifer and the two bairns.”

He had children. I’d forgotten. I was being a selfish pig. “You must have your hands full,” I managed rawly. “How are they doing—the kids and Jen?”

“Oh, they’re fine. Thriving.” Mackie came out from behind the bar with a set of fresh beer mats. He’d begun to distribute them on the tables when he glanced up, peering through the frosting on the glass. “I tell you what, Mal—here comes Ali and Sholto and the farmhands from out by Maguire’s. Do you want to be elsewhere?”

Chapter Three

I should have stayed and faced them. I was nothing but cobwebs by now, though, and I slipped off the barstool and let the wind blow me out the door. Mackie kept his back turned, allowing my cowardly exit some cover. It also meant he wouldn’t have to tell anyone which direction I’d gone.

I hardly knew myself. The wind made the choice for me. I stood at the crossroads on the outskirts of Kerra. The rain had stopped, and a spectral twilight was gathering in the west, shades of blue and bronze you wouldn’t believe could coexist until you saw them mounted in a wild north Highlands sky. The night would be cold. I tried to imagine Spindrift—the dunes, the long stretch of barren coast—covered in neat holiday villas. The vision wouldn’t come. I’d loved my time there, but I’d be the first to admit it was one of the bleakest places on earth.

The wind gave me a shove. Half buried in roadside seagrass lay the old sign for the craft village, a piece of painted driftwood meant to lure tourists off the beaten track. It had worked on the odd one. A handful had never left. The place was less a village than a commune, a colony. Where had its refugees gone?

I had to see. It was a bad investment of my last remaining strength, but I felt a drag like the need to gawp at a car crash. I set off.

Four miles of sandy track. Average walking speed, four miles an hour. It should have been manageable. I’d run it and biked it dozens of times. By the time I reached the top of the first hill, my pack was weighing like a dead star on my shoulders and my average walk was two steps and a stumble into the marram. Somewhere around here was a border zone, a barrier. Blindly I crossed it and knew that I too would not be coming back, not tonight. And the night would be cold. I would never have said I was tired of my life, but there’s more than one route to that weariness, and some you follow without knowing, right past the point of no return.

The colony was still there. The hub of it was an abandoned meteorology station, an ugly huddle of flat-roofed blocks with rusted aerials still attached. All around it stood the chalets that had housed the Laird of Kerra’s waifs and strays. Odd that they had never known whose protective wing was over them.

That
we
hadn’t. I stood shivering on the crest of the last dune. Briefly I tried to kid myself that Mackie had got his wires crossed and the place was intact. For a second I thought I saw lights in the main building, the rooms that had once housed the shops and the wholefood café. No—a gleam from a distant trawler, maybe, flickering off the glass. I wondered if the doors were locked. Without the people and the paintings, the mosaics and music and handblown glass, I doubted there’d be anything to steal. All I wanted was shelter, a place to spend the night.

I didn’t even want that enough to seek it very hard. I stopped in the lee of the first hut I came to and shrugged the weight off my back. I tried the door, but somebody—the developers, probably, protecting their new property—had locked up after all. I decided this would do. This was the chalet I’d often holed up in anyway, the one left empty because the sea wind hit it so hard. I’d liked it because from here I could see the sculptures and outdoor artworks that lined the track. A couple were still in place. The vast ceramic spheres hadn’t fared too badly, though their glaze was frost-crackled and their gold-streaked blues and greens bleached pale. The turf had climbed their sides, beginning to encapsulate them like giant earth-eggs, rich and strange. Farther away, swaying and glimmering in that same elusive light I’d seen from the dunes, the ten-foot-high flower globes made of aluminium scrap had been reduced to a few sorry blossoms.

I sat down by my rucksack. In summer, the hut had sheltered a fringe of yellow poppies, and these were still here too after a fashion. A strange whisper-music was rippling over the turf. I listened, closing my eyes.

The dry brown poppy chambers lend

A temporary larynx to the wind.

Who had written that? I dug through my memories of poems and poets, but nothing came back, and out of habit I pulled a scrap of paper from my ruckie’s front pocket and scribbled the words down. Once I saw them in my own handwriting, it slowly sank in with me that they weren’t a memory at all. They were my words, new ones, forged here on the anvil of the sand.

Well, big fucking deal. If they were my first creative stirring in months, they were probably the last. Probably the
Gazette
had been short on submissions that quarter. I noticed that my scrap was the envelope from my Peace Warrior letter, and I crumpled it up hard and shoved it as far into my rucksack as it would go.

My knuckles brushed glass. I flashed back to sitting with Alan Frost on the deck of the
Hawk
one night. We’d been shoulder to shoulder, watching the aurora. He’d been impressed that I’d produced a quart bottle of scotch from my pack. I hadn’t picked up many habits from my dad, but that was one of them—always to keep supplies with you in case of an emergency. Alan had hardly qualified as that. Still, we’d exchanged toasts out of chipped enamel mugs, and his first kiss had tasted of malt and cold fire.

I curled up, pressing my back to the chalet’s wooden boards. This was the emergency right now. I could let the nail bomb of loneliness and betrayal explode in my chest, or I could douse before it went off. I uncapped the bottle, thanking God that I hadn’t wasted too much of my good Ardbeg on that toast beneath the Norwegian stars.

* * * * *

I woke once in the night. I must have been dreaming that I was back on the ship with Alan, because my skin was tingling, the hairs on my arms trying to rise. He’d laughed when I’d told him I could feel the electrical field of the northern lights, but I’d been sure of it. Now the same weird currents were passing over me. I sat up a little. The bottle slid off my chest, and I didn’t bother to retrieve it. I’d clearly had enough—the aurora had spilled down out of heaven and into the Spindrift huts. Every window in every chalet and cabin was alight.

The air pulsed silently with power. I didn’t know how, but my marrow gave back an answering reverberation, as if I were standing close to a nuclear core. The lights became a blaze. Then, somewhere far off, glass shattered with a sound like silver music. The windows went dark, and a rich, cultured voice said, “Damn!”

* * * * *

Sunlight, chucking grit into my eyes. I didn’t want to know. I turned to escape it, to roll over on the turf and get on with the business of dying of hypothermia. The earth tipped out from under me, and I dropped like a sack of potatoes onto concrete.

“Shit. Fuck.” I sat up, or tried to. Some passing Viking had apparently lopped off my head and used my skull as a carousing cup. My limbs were weak and stiff. I hadn’t expected to live through the night, but if I had, I should be waking up to the tawny golds and greens of a sand-dune dawn. Instead there was concrete beneath me. Four blank walls of concrete around me, whitewashed and painfully bouncing back the sun. Overhead—I looked, and the effort dumped me onto my back again—a damp-stained ceiling with a single bare bulb.

I was fully dressed, including woolly hat and boots. My rucksack was leaning against one wall. I tried to remember if I’d somehow checked into a youth hostel, because as well as the plain walls and basic lighting, there was a narrow camp bed.

Apparently I’d just fallen out of it. A blanket was tangled around me. I grabbed the edge of the frame and hauled myself into a sitting position, then onto my knees, and then by slow stages I stood up. I controlled the heave of my guts. The bare mattress wasn’t luxurious, but it looked clean and I didn’t want to puke on it.

“Christ,” I said hoarsely to the empty air. “What
happened
to me last night?”

“You drank a bottle of scotch and passed out.”

I jolted upright. You wouldn’t have thought I could identify a voice from one word pronounced in a dream, but it was easy. Whoever was in the next room—youth-hostel receptionist, prison warder, arresting copper—was the same man who had so succinctly said
damn
before the northern lights went out. The next room? Yes, there was one. There was a doorway, anyway. I staggered into it and stood there, clutching the jambs on each side.

I was staring into the cafeteria of the old Spindrift shopping block. My bearings thudded into place around me. I’d spent the night in the little galley kitchen where I’d put in lunchtime shifts now and again to help pay for my keep. The cupboards had been stripped out of it, and all that was left of the café itself was a cavernous space. No identifying marks, no lovely if precarious driftwood seats and tables. Even the mosaic mermaid that had once graced an entire wall had been half chipped away, her tail left in a heap of scale-shaped tiles on the concrete floor.

“Bloody hell. Where did everything go?”

There was one bench against the far wall. It had never been part of the café while I’d worked there. Laid out on its surface with scrupulous neatness was an array of equipment like something out of an H.G. Wells novel, or a low-budget Frankenstein film. Metal rods and plates, huge glass flasks, gleaming coils… The whole view blurred like the dream it probably was, and I clutched at the woodwork tighter. A man was standing there too. His back was to me. Until he moved, he had seemed so much of a piece with the whole steampunk setup on the bench that I hadn’t noticed him. Then he turned, wiping his hands on a cloth, and suddenly I didn’t know how it was that I’d ever noticed anything else in the whole wide world.

He was six foot two or taller. His height and lean, spare build were emphasised by the oil-stained coveralls he was wearing. His hair was dark, his eyes a shade between blue and grey that altered with the room’s shifting light. I couldn’t work out why these ordinary factors had combined to paralyse me.

“The furniture went to the reclamation yard in Thurso,” he said. “The ovens and cooking equipment were sent to the Calder Foundation hostel. The paintings were returned to the artists who made them, and where these couldn’t be traced, were also donated to the hostel. The scrap from the ventilators and extractor fans—”

“Okay, okay. I get the idea.”

“You asked me about
everything
.”

“It was kind of rhetorical.” I rubbed my brow. “Wait. I passed out where—by the chalet? You brought me here?”

That was a much easier question. I’d thought so anyway, but my companion seemed to struggle with it. After a moment he nodded curtly. “Dragged you, I’m afraid. I hope you’re not bruised. Look, I’m rather busy. But I can give you something to eat before you go.”

I was too hungry to mind the hint, or I would be once the hangover mists cleared. “Yes, please. That would be great.” Was the guy some kind of electrician, sent to dismantle the wiring? It looked more as though he was trying to set something up. Thick black cables ran across the cafeteria floor, snaking off in all directions. The blue-grey eyes were shadowed with fatigue. Maybe Spindrift was sheltering one last mad inventor before the walls came down. I took a couple of unsteady steps from my doorframe and held out a hand, recalling my manners. “Thank you for hauling my arse indoors. I’d probably have frozen otherwise. My name’s…”

He just stood there, his hands by his sides. He wasn’t going to reach back to me. It felt less like discourtesy than distraction, as if he’d started to think about something else and completely forgotten about me. The timing was good, I decided. Local hero that I was, perhaps I didn’t need to be giving out my name to someone who so far had seemed disinclined to let me freeze or starve.

“I tell you what,” I said, turning my gesture into a thumb-wave back over my shoulder. “Is the old shower block still working? I’ll, er… I’ll go and clean up.”

I left him watching the distance, and I followed another black cable down the corridor and the flights of concrete stairs into the shower room. The meteorologists had only left a basic loo and enamel bath behind them, and I wondered if the cubicles and nice tiled floors had also been a gift of the old laird. I’d taken them for granted when I’d stayed here before, but I hadn’t seen civilised bathroom facilities since Stavanger. That was the trouble with unknown benefactors. Would old man Calder have consented to take my hand, if I’d gone to him to say thanks?

I recalled him vaguely from our school trip. Unsure of why I was thinking about him now, I went to switch on one of the showers. My mad scientist was in residence here, it seemed—there were a few toiletries precisely set out on a shelf, and I stripped out of my cold, damp clothes and guiltily snitched a handful of shower gel. The Laird of Kerra had come out to spend a few minutes on the lawn with the rowdy schoolkids. He’d been tall and lean as a heron. Good-natured, in a distant sort of way, as if thinking about something else.

The water began to heat up. Gingerly I stepped under it. Strange that the boiler had been left switched on, though I wasn’t about to question the gift horse—a cold shower would probably have killed me outright. Gasping, squeezing my eyes shut, I stood under the jets. Wow, I’d better apologise to the man upstairs about his shower gel. This was something expensive. Very subtle, and my brain had already made a scent connection between him and the clouds of hot sandalwood rising around me. I wasn’t prone to strong first attractions. I couldn’t work out what it was about six foot two of skinny, dark-haired nutcase that was making my cock stiffen, half dead with cold as I was, Alan Frost or no Alan Frost.

Wait a minute. Wait, wait, wait. I switched off the shower. No towel, so I dried myself off as best I could with my T-shirt, dived back into my jumper and stood thinking. Kindly old heron lord, stalking about the gardens of his stately home… He’d looked down on me with slate-blue eyes, spoken a few words in a deep, rich English voice and gone back to his study of the rhododendrons. Wee thug that I’d been at the time, all I’d taken from it was resentment that a Sassenach held all this land while decent home-bred Scotsmen had to struggle. My handsome inventor upstairs had only a touch of brogue, a first-generation Highlander’s voice.