Cold Fusion (30 page)

“We need to make sure you get the chance.” Dr. Erskine had emerged from Viv’s room and was watching us with her arms folded. Behind her was Sondheim, barely concealing his eagerness to extract the living essence of the Calder lioness. “Come along, young lady. We have to do this now.”

Chapter Eighteen

Alfred set up camp in the city. Having a new Calder to look after restored him to grumpy life, and he took three rooms in a hotel down the road from the hospital, waving away my protests at the expense. The old laird had left him a generous fund, he said, to be used at his discretion for the benefit of the family. I thought it far more likely that Hugo had rewarded his long service with a bequest which he was now spending on us, but I didn’t have strength to argue.

He made me go to this chintz-wallpapered, frilly-curtained room for six hours out of twenty-four on each of the three days that followed. He’d worked out a schedule. Viv must never be left alone, but nor must I be left alone with him. He was hanging on by a thread whose snapping would drop me into an abyss, and I didn’t know by what power the steward or the lioness thought they could catch me, but at any rate I wasn’t to be tried. I could stay by his bedside from six in the morning till midnight, with either Cressida or Alfred on the watch from the armchair, taking their rest shifts in turn.

I accepted my orders quietly. I knew that I’d been falling apart, that I wouldn’t do Viv any good by losing my mind with sleep deprivation. Nevertheless I couldn’t lie down in my rented bed, and spent most of my six hours staring at the flowery wall. My mobile was by my side, the hospital no more than a thirty-second dash away. The road curved round in a crescent, and I could actually see the lights of Viv’s room from mine. Sometimes my tired brain closed the gap between Glencathadh and here, and I imagined I was looking out over the slopes to Alfred’s tin-roofed croft in the snow.

For the rest of the time, I kept my station. Viv had gone beyond my songs or stories now. Wherever his soul was—his bright nature, his grasp of the subatomic swirl in the universe around him—I sensed that he was far beyond my reach. I kept his hand in mine because there was no other place for it to be, as long as I was with him physically, but no more chills or fevers ran through it, not even the dreaming twitch I’d felt or imagined before. He’d come successfully through his surgery, by which Erskine and Sondheim meant that he was still alive, and they and their teams were watching the wound site at the back of his neck—the place where they’d stripped his bone and screwed him back together again—for any signs of infection.

They were watching for any signs of life. Now I had the Internet at my fingertips again, I could amuse away my dark hours by researching just how experimental this stem cell therapy was, how unlikely to succeed. I was reading through a particularly grim set of results from a study carried out on rats when my phone beeped in my hand.

My fingers went too numb to close the Internet screen. It was like one of those dreams of needing to make an urgent call and finding the buttons on the keypad replaced with hieroglyphs, or toffee sweets that melted into sticky pools at your touch. I sprang off the bed—dropped the damn phone—watched it skid away beyond retrieval under the cast-iron frame. It was four o’clock in the morning, the doldrums time when the energy of the old day is spent, and the new one still uncertain, not yet born. Sick people slipped away at this ebb tide.

I was dressed, so all I had to do was dash out into the lamplit street. A cold wind was blowing the last of the autumn leaves around, strange vortices that broke around my feet as I ran. Cressida must have got a message too, and stopped to read or hear it. She came pounding up the pavement from the hotel just as I reached the hospital doors. She was quite a vision in her striped pyjamas and slippers, a dressing gown hastily thrown on top, but I couldn’t wait for her.
He’s fighting
, I heard her yell, and then some other words, snatched away by the breeze and the roar of an early-morning lorry. I ran for the stairs.

I knew the labyrinth well by now. I’d followed its corridors in a numbed-out haze so often that I scarcely had to look. Something was going on in the ICU, some flurry or emergency, because the doors were wide open, white coats and scrubs dashing back and forth. I darted between them, got into the stream of them—they were headed my way—and let them bear me along.
Fighting
, I heard Cressida shout again in my brain. Fighting not to slip away between the two tides of the day, my beautiful lover, the only thing in the world that meant a damn thing to me now. I was going to lose him. This was it.

I skidded round the corner and into Vivian’s room. The bed was hidden entirely behind the screen of bodies. Orders were getting snapped back and forth, medical jargon that flew past me like silver darts, bright and incomprehensible. Alfred was marching up and down the room, his arms folded, head bowed. Tears were streaming down his face. I forgot everything I’d promised—the good behaviour, the courage—and shoved my way through the crowd to reach Viv’s bed.

His eyes were wide open. They sought and found mine. He made a strangled sound and reached for me, ripping the cannula out of one hand. His fist closed in my T-shirt, dragging me down. I held him—helped Dr. Erskine hold him down—while one of the medics extracted the tube from his throat.

Cressida arrived in a rush of expensive perfume and night air. “I told you!” she gasped. “He’s fighting the life support. Trying to breathe on his own.”

The voices around me faded out. Sondheim had appeared, and only the slightest notions of medical decorum were preventing him and Erskine from high-fiving across their patient’s bed. The air popped like champagne. Still clutching me, Viv sucked in one huge breath. He broke into racking coughs, and I lifted him, but it was just rawness from the tube. The next breath came and the next. Very far off in the distance, I could sense a subdued party breaking out among the medics who’d worked on him, the doctors whose careers might springboard from this breakthrough, the people whose affections he’d commanded even from his bed, unconscious. Even without a word.

The word was for me. I held him, cradling the back of his skull, while Dr. Erskine herself reattached the displaced cannula. His gaze was alight with recognition. He raised his free hand to my face. “Mallory.”

* * * * *

“I dreamed I was a mermaid.”

I got my head up off the magazine article I’d been reading aloud. This was happening a lot. The latest goings-on at the Hadron Collider in Geneva fascinated him, but I only understood one word in five, and the rhythms of my incomprehension were soothing. I’d nosedived gently onto the paper for the third time, a fortnight of interrupted sleep catching up with me. Maybe some of the print had come off on my brow and he could read it that way. He was pale as a cod’s underbelly, but I was beginning to be able to tell his natural colour from the drained shades of illness. There was life underneath his ivory now, beautiful oxygenated blood. “You look like a mermaid.”

“Well, the…what’s the male equivalent?”

“A merman. Did nobody tell you fairy stories?” I rolled up the magazine and gently tapped the crown of his head with it. “I bet you made your poor dad read stuff like this to you at night.”

“I was a merman, swimming out to sea off the coast of Spindrift. You thought I was somebody normal—”

“Oh, dream on. I would never think that.”

“And you stopped your boat beside me to see if I needed help. I really wanted to go back to shore with you, but…” He frowned, memory shadows gathering, and captured my hand. “I had to go on by myself. Deep and alone, or I knew I’d never be allowed to see you again.”

“You know something? I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I cried before I met you.”

“Sorry.” He passed me a box of tissues, then made them redundant by sitting up far enough to kiss the tears off my face. “And somebody was singing to me. That part was awful, actually. I have perfect pitch, and he was dreadfully off-key.”

“Oh, my God. I’ll off-key your arse for you, you mannerless—”

The door swung wide, admitting a burst of chatter from the corridor. I stopped my growling attempts to bite Viv’s ear off and jerked upright. “Oh, Cressida. Hi.”

She came striding in, Alfred on her heels. She wasn’t a woman to expect slavish porterage, and was carrying as many bags as she could manage, but she’d been doing some serious shopping. The old man was laden down too. “Morning, gentlemen. God, Jenners is fun, isn’t it?” She held her arms wide, bags swinging. “Do you like my new gear?”

I liked her. That was the magic. Anybody else in such eye-popping tartans, topped off with a paisley shawl, might have made my eyes water, but she carried it all before her, with her height and her beaming Calder smile. “You look amazing.”

“So do you, now you’ve had time to have a shave. And Vivian looks…” She perched on the chair Alfred set out for her. I didn’t suppose Viv had ever given the old man too much to do in the personal-valet department. With a teenage female Calder to attend, he was clearly in his element. She inspected her brother. This was only their fourth such meeting, and Viv hadn’t quite stopped watching her like a cat who’d unexpectedly come across his double in the dark. “Vivian looks even better than he did yesterday.” She put out a large hand in a lilac-lace glove and shyly patted his knee. Her eyes brightened with tears. “I’m so glad.”

I gathered up the pile of science magazines I’d been trying to read aloud. “I’ll ship out for half an hour, let you two do some more catching up.” I’d managed that yesterday, as far as the canteen, at any rate. I’d come back to find them looking awkward but pleased with themselves, like Ferdinand and Miranda discovered in Prospero’s cave. “Viv, I’ll have my mobile on.”

Cressida gestured me to sit back down. “Don’t go. I just popped in at the hotel to collect our post. One for me, one for…” She laid a white business envelope in Viv’s lap. “One for you. If mine’s what I think it is, I’m going to have to run straight off and sort out some paperwork.”

Viv’s hands were still clumsy, hampered by the cannula. He nodded at my offer to open the envelope for him—changed his mind when he saw the logo and did his best to hide it under the sheet. “It’s all right. It’s nothing.”

“It’s from a marine salvage company.”

“Is it?”

“You know it is. The one you hired to raise the
Sea Hawk
’s launch.” I hadn’t had the chance to talk to him properly about this yet. Erskine had advised me not to excite him, so I’d avoided the tale of how my ex had arrived to offer me one life-saving favour. He seemed to attribute Cressida’s presence to the general air of miracles that prevailed in his cubicle room. All that could wait, but I needed to find out one thing. “Is that the bill?”

“Oh, no. That’s been paid. This is just their report.” He glanced at the first paragraph. “A very long one. Did my investigators do what you needed, Mallory?”

“Yes. Absolutely. But it must have cost a fortune.”

“I thought it quite reasonable, considering the man-hours and equipment.”

God only knew what the laird of Calder thought was
reasonable
. “You set that up from the Loch Dubh service station, didn’t you—when you borrowed that lady’s iPad and my phone. You had to borrow a fiver to pay for your coffee.”

“I didn’t have any cash on me at the time. That doesn’t mean…” He exchanged a glance with Cressida, and I guessed this was something they’d discussed during their half hour. “It doesn’t mean I don’t
have
any. My father left the castle and land to my sister, and his money and assets to me. Isn’t that so, Cressida?”

She nodded. “It’s as if he expected us to meet up and pool our resources. Vivian doesn’t need to be bothered with running a huge estate. But, Mallory, you look as if you’re about to explode. What’s wrong?”

I hardly knew where to begin. “Well—for God’s sake, Viv. If I’d known at the time that you were loaded, it would have made hiding you and protecting you a hell of a lot easier. You wouldn’t have had to spend five days snowed up in a shack.”

“In the Rowans,” he gently reminded me, as if the name would always be dear to him no matter how many acres of Scottish soil he ended up sharing with his sister. He recaptured my hand. “And how could we have been any safer, love? Any…any happier?”

Cressida glanced up from her papers. “Oh, heavens,” she said, turning the envelope into a fan and then hiding her eyes with it. “I’m fresh out of boarding school, you know. I can’t be looking at this. I’m going to see our solicitors now. The NorthEx lawyers don’t want to admit that the sale of the Spindrift land was fraudulent, but they don’t have a leg to stand on—or they won’t once
my
crack legal troops have finished with them, anyway. Once the land’s been transferred back into the Calder estate, I can do what I want with it.” She turned to Alfred, seated at her right hand with every appearance of remaining there forever. “What do you think, Macready? Holiday homes? A nice golf course?”

“With respect, my lady, I believe—”

She dissolved into laughter. “I’m sorry. Spindrift will be what it’s always been—a sanctuary for lost souls. I might improve the plumbing, though.” She got up, collecting her psychedelic shawl, her Harris tweed handbag and her gloves. She patted her brother on the cheek, then gave me a critical once-over. “You know, Mallory, you really could be very attractive. You should let me take you shopping sometime.”

Vivian restored to life, Spindrift redeemed. I would do anything for Cressida.

Well, almost. I kissed the hand she held out to me, making her grin and blush scarlet. “Let me think it over.”

Chapter Nineteen

This would be our last run of the year. Storms were forecast for the Christmas week, and I wasn’t about to risk my newly painted three-boat fleet. Besides, Viv and I had been conscripted to help out at Calder Castle with the half-dozen seasonal parties Cressida had planned. If the whole population of North Kerra didn’t end up drinking sherry by her fireside at least once, it wouldn’t be her fault. Already she was a familiar figure in the village streets, buying her sugar from the Co-op, checking to see that the children weren’t too battered and the adults relatively sane. People wondered at her—laughed at her a bit behind her back, and loved her, as we did. She’d chosen the paint for the boats with her own fair hands, and far from scaring off the fish, the gaudy colours seemed to be drawing them in. We’d be able to make her a grand first return on her investment. Mallory & Calder Marine had done a good first month’s business, our only top limit the quota.

We were getting there now. I could tell by the drag of the boat. My dad would carry on at this point, chucking his excess overboard at any sign of the man from the inspectorate. I had no intention of killing a single thing I didn’t have to. Cressida’s purchase of shares had bought state-of-the-art nets, their mesh sized to let juveniles escape. As far as was within my power, every fish I landed had a destiny on someone’s plate. I wanted my profit, but I wanted clean hands too.

“Viv!” I yelled, rousing him from handsome introspection in the prow. “Haul in!”

He ran for the winch. We had a beautiful day for our last outing, clear skies and a millpond all the way to the horizon. He’d gained a pure-muscle stone in the last month and somehow even made his fisherman’s dungarees look good. Beneath them he wore a cable-knit the colour of his eyes, sleeves rolled back to reveal corded forearms. He was Doc Sondheim’s medical miracle, the cell-transplantation technique spreading outwards to other Drescher’s patients. It was as if all the health in the world had just been waiting for him, held in trust.

This was the oldest of my dad’s boats, the one whose hand winch I hadn’t got round to replacing. I’d wrenched every muscle in my twelve-year-old back on the damn thing, and still found it a tough pull. Viv made it look effortless. I had to keep an eye on the net as it began to draw in, or I’d just have stood and stared. He’d come out with me every day he could manage from the moment he’d been strong enough to clamber aboard, and I’d promoted him slowly from lightweight tasks to a full deckhand’s duties. Now he was invaluable. There were calluses on his fine scientist’s hands. I hadn’t meant to take Scotland’s best physicist and turn him into a fisherman, but there it was. I couldn’t keep him home, much as he loved our harbourside flat. He’d been terribly seasick on his first rough water, scaring the life out of me, but had bounced back from that as well, and now could withstand whatever the ocean threw at him.

Distracting beyond words. The net slipped out of my hands. Where was my crew? “Hoi,” I called out, trying to keep a straight face. “Mackie! Jen! This isn’t the Love Boat, you know.”

They emerged from the hold, flushed and sheepish. With their kids in school and the pub on winter opening hours, they’d been able to come out with me and earn enough to rent a house fit for a two-child family, and here they were hell-bent on making a third. I didn’t see the erotic appeal of ice and fish guts myself, but there was clearly something in the air. I nodded them to their places around the net. “Okay, Viv, wind her in. Heave-ho, you layabouts! Let’s try and get home before dark.”

Yet I wasn’t really in a place to question Jen and Mackie’s choice of trysting place. Our catch once in and laid on ice, I had nothing to do but watch Viv help clear the deck. He moved with a loose-boned grace that melted my joints, and it had been a whole fourteen hours since I’d given him more than a pat on the back. The Mermaid was built for day-fishing only. There were no cabins, no shelter other than the wheelhouse and the hold. I leaned against the prow rail, and he made things worse by coming to stand in front of me, his smile putting the diamond-bright sunset to shame. Worse again by running his hands down his waist, his hips, as if wondering at his own strength.

“Is it all in working order, then?”

“The body? Yes. I neglected it even before I was ill, you know. I never knew its possibilities.”

We both knew quite a few of them now. I wriggled, glad my rubber overalls would hide anything short of full erection. “Well, I have to say it all looks pretty fine.”

“It feels fine.” He stretched, the breeze ruffling his hair. “It all feels so good. I’d like to do something else with it now.”

“With the body?”

“Yes, please.”

“What’s wrong with our warm bed at home?”

“Nothing at all. But we’ve never done it at sea before.” Mischief glimmered in his eyes. “Jen and Mackie get to do it at sea.”

He was still sweetly awkward with the sex words. I could only wring a
fuck
from him in the absolute throes of passion. He’d either make an allusion like
do it
or go for the anatomical term, cracking up some of our most intimate moments.
Mallory, I love your penis.
That had sent me rolling off the bed in snorting hysterics, dragging him with me, completely bewildered as to what he’d done. “You want to do it at sea, do you?”

“If we could.”

“Right now?”

“If it won’t offend Mackie and Jen.”

“Much they worry about damn well offending us.” I whistled and waved to catch Jennifer’s attention. I was captain of this vessel, after all. “Jen, you and Mackie get us underway for harbour. Viv and I are gonna start work in the hold.”

She gave me a thumbs-up. Viv liked me to take charge, so I grabbed him by the hand and hauled him off. I went before him down the ladder, and by the time I’d watched him clamber down, dungarees and all, I no longer cared about our catch in the ice-filled crates or the smell that had sunk into every inch of the hold over the years. It was part of my childhood’s backdrop, and the Laird of Kerra seemed oblivious to it too, unfastening his overall straps and then mine, backing me up against the bulkhead. He liked to take charge in his turn, and we locked horns deliciously these days for the privilege of the top spot. He was so strong now. He could hitch me up on a table or against a wall and sort me out with no trouble at all, newfound skills in full play.

It was his turn to get splinters in his backside today, I reckoned. I took advantage of his moment of imbalance, stepping out of the dungarees, seized him and whipped him round. He burst into that unrestrained Calder cackle as his spine hit the woodwork, and I covered his mouth, shushing him frantically. “God’s sake, Viv.”

“Sorry,” he said, an unashamed lie if ever I heard one, kissing the palm of my hand, shoving my dungarees down too. “Oh, Mallory. Do it to me. I can’t… Oh, wait.”

I stopped unzipping his jeans. He was looking over my shoulder, his gaze suddenly troubled. Fear had set up camp on the edge of my imagination, and I never quite lost sight of its cold fires. “What is it? Don’t you feel well?”

“I feel fine. It’s just… Do you remember that shelf you fixed up so that it
wasn’t
exactly five degrees off horizontal?”

I caught my lip between my teeth and looked up at him. “I remember.”

“It’s dropped down again. It’s catching my eye. I won’t be able to think about anything else.”

I couldn’t have that. I let him go, leaned over the crates on the far side of the hold and tugged the shelf back into position, ramming home the little wooden prop that had fallen out. He was still the same man. Crowds in supermarkets and busy car parks still could overload him, an untidy room cause him such distress that I now kept things neat for him out of habit. He was still the same genius who required no cure or alteration, and yet I was afraid I had altered him.

I went back to him—kissed him, ran my hands into his hair. “Viv, am I stealing your life away? You spend all your days out here with me. What about your work?”

“Stealing my life? You saved it.”

“Not me. Cressida did, and even that psycho ex of mine.”

“You don’t understand. If I hadn’t met you, Cressida couldn’t have done anything for me. I’d given up long before I got ill. I wasn’t interested. I was disconnected, just going from day to day in the lab.” He put his arms around me. “If I pick up my cold fusion experiments again, I’ll have to work for years before I can obtain the same results I did with the calderium. And if I succeed—you know what happens if I succeed, love. Our lives won’t be our own. The oil companies will fight me. I’ll end up in hiding again, on the run.”

“No. We’ll be better organised this time.” I grinned. “We’ll have Alfred.”

“Better than an army. I still want the life you saved.”

I wanted it too, and my own at his side. I loved our days together. I felt no call to go and hurl myself back into the Peace Warrior fray, even if they’d have me—my fishing business, small and sustainable, would benefit people on land as well as help protect my stretch of coastline. I felt guilty for not wanting to save the whole world anymore, but it meant I couldn’t blame Viv for not wanting to provide it with clean power. “All right. Let’s have it.”

“And in summer we’ll go back to the Rowans?”

That meant a lot to him. He watched patiently for my answer while I parted him from his jeans and underwear. “Yes,” I said, brushing kisses across his chest, the sensitive bumps where his ribs met his breastbone, still too close to the surface for comfort but padding out in muscle every day. “We’ll see to Aunt Lil, and we’ll take all her stuff back.” I’d found loads of it in one of my dad’s dockyard sheds, all her nice solid furniture, the floral curtains too. “We’ll stay for a few weeks, fix the place up. I’ll show you how to do all kinds of things with your body.”

“Oh, really?”

“Mm.” I disentangled from my waterproofs, pushed my jeans down and shivered in pleasure as his cock rose against mine. “Plastering. Grouting.”

“Will there be tools?”

“Lots of them, I should think. I’ll bang some nails into the woodshed so we can hang them up. Order of size, or category?”

Now it was his turn to shiver. “Oh, lovely. Let me think. Order of size…
within
category. Oh, God, yes.”

I nudged my hips forward. All this dirty talk had brought him near to the brink, and because I found him so sexy, the things that pleased him were beginning to have a startling erotic effect on me too. He moaned and I grabbed him, taking advantage of his still-skinny frame. In a couple of months’ time it wouldn’t be so easy to hitch him up against a wall, take his weight when he wrapped his legs around my hips.

“At the end of every day we’ll tidy up,” I told him, pushing hard again. “Every…little speck…of dust.”

He was shaking with laughter and oncoming climax. “Oh, Mallory. I love you.”

“I love you too. We’ll do everything you want, I promise. Everything.”

“Right now all I want to do is…” He paused, gasping, clinging to me. What would it be? He could make
ejaculate
sound hot as hell, but I found his scientist’s language cripplingly funny, and I didn’t want him to throw me off-track now. To my surprise he met my eyes calmly. His pupils had dilated so wide that they’d eaten up all of his blue, and yet he’d found a foothold of serenity, an island in the tide. “I just want to come.”

I could sort that out for him. I clamped my hands round his bare arse, jerked him against me and began a hard, sweet grind. Thank God the
Mermaid
’s engines started up and drowned our cries. She forged through the water, rocking us, and in the Atlantic’s shifting embrace we both surged over, frantic, bruising each other with teeth and clenching fingers. I didn’t let him go when we were done. He was quivering, aftershocks hitting him, and I felt the heat of his tears on my face. I held him, bearing his weight, wanting to stay in this strange, sealed-off womb with him forever, the place where our old lives had been knocked out of us and the world could start anew. The
Mermaid
jolted, changing course, and we set out for home.

* * * * *

Cressida was waiting on the harbour. Alfred must have driven her down in the old Calder Land Rover, whose newly painted family crest was gleaming in the setting sun. The old man was comfortably settled behind the wheel, newspaper in one hand, steaming cup of coffee in the other. I grinned, crossing the gangway with my first crate of fish. Who ran around after whom in Calder Castle these days? “Hi, Cressida. Everything all right?”

“Fine, thank you. I hoped to catch you two gentlemen coming off the boat. I thought you might like to see this, Kier.”

She held out an envelope to me. Fortunately the lads from the haulage company had also arrived with their refrigerated truck, and I could transfer my crate into their hands. “Thanks. What is it?”

“Have a look, have a look.”

She was excited, practically bouncing. One of the many things I liked about her was her love of high heels, which in combination with her lively fashion sense turned her from a conspicuous girl into someone you couldn’t miss if you tried. There wasn’t a speck of self-consciousness about her. Even Viv had to stand on his toes to give her a kiss, which he always did—grave and ceremonious, continental style, cheek to cheek. I watched them, half-distracted, pulling the magazine out of the envelope.

This time the
Gazette
had run five whole pages of my poems, with a biography and editor’s note that Kier Mallory was a bright new light on the Scottish poetry scene. I didn’t know about that, but I was thrilled—for a few moments, too happy to speak, and my Calder bookends looked on benignly while I turned the pages. I’d sent off what I hoped was the best of my recent work, all but the Rowans poem, which lay wrapped in an old T-shirt of Viv’s, together with the Spindrift mermaid’s scale and my blue shell.

“Wow,” I said at last. “Thank you. I didn’t even realise this was out yet.”

“Calder Castle
always
takes an advance copy of the
Gazette
.”