Descent (36 page)

‘Oh, yeah, well, I got a leak from inside BAS. Just luck in a way.’ I stopped myself from spinning yet another lie as if I’d already forgotten why I was there and what I’d so recently sworn to do. ‘Actually, no, it wasn’t. That’s … kind of why I’m here. I’ve got something to tell you.’

‘Really? Go on.’

She raised her eyebrows and widened her eyes, as if expecting some delightful surprise. I was still rattled, still shaking inside from the response I’d got from Calum and Gabrielle: a response I should have expected, and would have if I’d applied the smallest gumption to forethought. A minute’s thought would have set me right; but, as someone once said, thinking is painful and a minute is a long time. Was I now about to stray into another minefield, having expected nothing more than a patch of rough ground?

‘Well, it’s kind of a long story,’ I said, floundering, ‘and it concerns you because … well, a few weeks ago I sort of suddenly realised or at least thought I did that, well, when I looked back it was all
about
you, that it’s
always
been about you, and—’

She slipped off her stool and flung her arms around me, damn near knocking me off my seat.

‘Oh, Ryan! That’s so sweet!’

Her misunderstanding was so unexpected, so perfect, and so welcome that I was tempted then and there to say nothing more, or at least to delay telling her the truth. I returned her hug, and then put my hands on her shoulders and gently pushed her away.

‘Yes, Sophie,’ I said. ‘There’s that, yes. But there’s a lot more, and you really have to hear it, and maybe when you’ve heard it all you won’t even like me.’

She stepped back and sat up again, with a frown that was more puzzled than angry or wary.

‘Try me,’ she said.

And oh, how I tried her. I held nothing back. Well, almost nothing. After what I’d learned about myself in my conversation with Calum and Gabrielle I was in no shape to repeat the various evasions that had smoothed my confession to them. I told her nearly everything, including things I hadn’t told any of the others, and things I haven’t told you.

It wasn’t as one-sided as it sounds. Sophie had plenty of questions and interjections and expressions of disbelief. This took some time. It took the rest of the afternoon and half the evening, and the conversation that began in the studio continued through a long walk, up Hope Street and along Sauchiehall Street, across Kelvingrove Park. It ended at last in the Aragon, an old and oft-renovated pub on Byres Road.

‘And that’s it,’ I finished.

I faced her across a table in an alcove, our small eddy in a swirl and roar of students. Half a shared platter of chips was getting cold on the table between us, reeking of vinegar. I wiped my mouth and fingers with a tattered paper napkin, and took a swallow of Glasgow Pride and a long draw on my pipe.

‘That’s it?’

‘Everything,’ I said.

Well, nearly everything. And what I’d left out was nothing that need concern her, anyway.

‘Ryan, you are one devious, shifty, thoughtless, heartless, worthless, obsessive, perverted, voyeuristic, neurotic, idiotic, selfish, self-centred, cowardly, pathetic excuse for a human being.’

‘That sounds fair,’ I said. ‘Mind you, I’d have put it a bit more harshly myself.’

‘I still like you.’

‘You do?’

‘I’ve always known what you’re like,’ she said. ‘But I’ve always liked you anyway.’

‘You did?’

‘Yes. Liked you and lusted for you.’

‘Damn. I wish I’d known that years ago.’

‘When we were both free and single?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, wait,’ she said. ‘We
are
both free and single.’

I hadn’t thought of myself in that way at all. I had fancied myself still besotted with Gabrielle, nobly sacrificing my passion to her decision, still carrying a torch for her while she went off with Calum and had children with him – the one thing I couldn’t do for her. Even when I’d apologised to them that morning for my behaviour and said I knew and accepted that it was all over between me and Gabrielle, I’d been lying my arse off as usual.

I’d still hoped to win her back, somehow. Eventually. When the kids had grown up, or at least were old enough to take the disruption without lasting trauma. Or when she saw through Calum, a fine chap and a good pal but probably not great husband and father material, being far too engrossed in his work, or when … but there even I have to stop. Some things are just too embarrassing for words.

At that point I did the first really brave and sensible thing I’d done all day, and in many a day. I reached across the table with both hands and clasped Sophie’s as they rose to meet mine and said, ‘Not now, we’re not.’

And not now. We’re still not free and single, and Sophie and I are both happy with that.

I arrive at the office about twenty past ten on my late mornings, bringing with me coffee and tea in cardboard cups from the machine. Baxter may or may not be in his office, but his secretary Safiyya is always in the office we share at the front. She takes the tea, thanks me; we exchange a few pleasantries and get on with our work. If Baxter is in he calls out for a coffee for himself, and I go and get one for him, and take it in.

‘Morning, Ryan,’ he says. ‘Found any flying saucers yet?’

‘Nope.’

‘Keep looking,’ he says.

It’s a ritual, a running gag that’s got old and tired but that we both keep flogging along. We talk for a bit about whatever the real science or technology issue of the day is, and I go back to the front office and crack on. Contrary to what the now-stale joke implies, UFOs aren’t a big part of my research for Baxter. No more than one per cent. A watching brief.

There are far more interesting things going on, in space, in Africa, in China, in the labs and factories of Scotland itself. For some of them we have to come up with a response – a comment, a reaction, a policy. There are constituents to help and surgeries to hold and caucuses to plot and votes to carry, or to lose. That’s the day-to-day stuff, the routine; and then there’s the longer term, the strategic picture.

What I watch for most intently, and report to Baxter at once, are any signs of strain and stress: advance tremors of the crisis we both for different reasons expect. Nothing much so far: the Big Deal holds, the New Improvement continues. We’ve had a few false alarms. I usually manage to talk Baxter out of talking them up. Not always, but I can’t protect him from himself all the time. He’s quite the Cassandra, the economic and political drama queen. Maybe that’s not such a bad reputation to have when the crunch comes, as we know it must. All our generation know. Baxter’s ten years older than me, a little too old to be part of my generation, and Safiyya – in her early twenties, just out of university – is too young. I recognise my kind.

We’re a strange generation, a peculiar cohort: those of us who were just young enough and just old enough to have lived the moment of the Big Deal as part of our conscious youth. We all have a sense of insecurity, of possibility, arising from certainty; from the sure knowledge we share, that the world can turn on a penny. Any stability is apparent, and can flip from one day to the next. All that is solid can melt into air. We all know that in our bones.

I sometimes find myself thinking about what that spook who called himself McCormick said. The revolutionaries dissolved their organisation and went into business, and now there’s no way of telling who is a revolutionary and who is not. Because everyone knows everyone is watched, and everyone watches, no one knows, really, deep down, what any other thinks. All understandings are unspoken.

In that long Saturday of long conversations that changed my life, Sophie never did tell me she wasn’t a revolutionary. Nor did Calum. Nor Gabrielle. I’ve never asked. All I know is that I’m not, and that I know what Baxter knows. That’s enough.

Baxter’s wryly liberal about office hours; a certain employment law he noisily objected to and voted against is kind to parents; and with glasses and phones everyone’s always on call anyway. So most days, even days I haven’t watched Gabrielle go to work, I can watch her go home. She picks up her little girl from the nursery where Calum left her in the morning on his way to work, at around the same time as I pick up our little girl from the nursery where Sophie left her in the morning, on her way to work. Out of the corner of my eye I can see Gabrielle holding Tanya’s hand as she skips along University Avenue, at the same time as I hold Angela’s hand as she skips or trudges or otherwise drags her cheery or weary way up Dalry Road beside me. I try not to look too much.

Sophie has a longer day than I do, but much the same commute: five minutes to Haymarket, twenty minutes on the new-improved train to Queen Street, ten minutes’ walk to Hope Street, and the same in reverse coming back. For me going home it’s fifteen minutes from Holyrood to the Mound, five minutes by tram or fifteen minutes by foot to Haymarket, then five minutes’ walk to the flat. Vary each of our journeys by the time it takes to leave or to pick up Angela.

Angela and I get in before Sophie most days, and most days I get the dinner going before Sophie comes in. Sophie’s work is too much like cooking for that to be recreation for her, and it’s the other way round for me. Sometimes, while I’m in the kitchen and Angela’s parked in front of children’s telly and Sophie’s verifiably on the train home, I send a message to Gabrielle. It’s always the same message: nothing to report. Gabrielle sends me a :-) and a X back.

It’s all innocent. Sophie knows I watch Gabrielle. She doesn’t know I text her. Calum does. It makes me feel a bit guilty sometimes, but it doesn’t keep me awake at night. Not even the dreams keep me awake at night. What sometimes does, as Sophie snores beside me – she denies this, but she does snore – and I slip my glasses on and gaze up through the ceiling and the floors above and the roof and the clouds at the real stars, is remembering what the spooks told me about what Baxter knows.

It was why, they told me, he’d accept the story about the manufacturing flaw, even though he’d probably suspect it was false, and why he’d insist that the radar reading was nothing very important.

‘What Baxter knows,’ McCormick said, ‘is that whatever it was that fell from the sky and knocked down you and your pal,
it wasn’t one of ours
. And whatever it was that made the false echo on the radar at Machrihanish wasn’t one of ours either.’

Sometimes I find myself, as it seems, lying awake at night and looking at the stars, and I realise I don’t have my glasses on, and I know I’m in the dream. Usually I wake up before it completes its course. Now and then I’m in it to the end.

This is how it ends.

I peer out of the tiny round-cornered thick-paned window beside me, the left temple of my forehead pressed to the glass, and see the blue curve of the Earth below, and ahead of us, approaching – the space station. It’s far bigger than any of the space stations that are really up there in low Earth orbit, a huge spinning torus straight out of Kubrick and von Braun, and quite impossible to miss with the naked eye from the ground. It’s like nothing we have yet. But I don’t feel as if I’m in the future. I feel as if I’m in the present. In fact, in the dream I
know
I’m in the present. This space station has spaceships docked round its hub. Some of them are drop-jet spaceplanes like the one I’m in, and others are like nothing I’ve ever seen: gnarly old vessels pockmarked with micrometeor impacts and ablated by solar wind, bristling with vanes and blades and spikes, like mailed fists in the face of the night.

Of course I know what they are.

They’re starships, they’re ours, and this is now.

There are sharp kicks of deceleration as course and speed corrections are applied in brief burns of the main and secondary motors. The delicate ballet of ship and station concludes with the shuddering embrace of docking. The view from the window is of steel plate and rivets. One by one, the passengers’ seat-belts are unlocked and retract, and one by one, hand over hand, we float down the cabin to the exit through an airtight concertina connection and out to the station. There’s no processing to go through here, no security checks; all that has been done at embarkation far below and hours ago. Every passenger knows where they’re going, or is meeting someone who does.

Following the rest, I swing into a long tube with a continuously rolling ladder. Foot on a step, hand on a grip. My weight increases as I’m carried down toward the rim of the spinning station. At the bottom I’m in one gravity. I stride confidently away, along a long wide corridor that curves up in front of me and behind. It’s a busy place; people are hurrying, this way and that. I know there is somewhere I have to go, someone I have to talk to, someone who must know everything, and who will decide my fate. I know that I’m in some kind of trouble, but I’m not afraid. I’ve reviewed my life so far on the way up, I have all the evidence I need stored in my glasses, and I’m confident that everything can be explained and justified.

My pace quickens. I’m keen to get this over with. I’m already looking forward to getting back. And then—

Always this happens. Always it surprises me. In the quick-flowing crowd of strangers from all over the world going the other way, I see two faces that give me a jolting shock of recognition. A man and a woman, both tall and good-looking, both in a uniform that looks out of place here but that no one looks twice at, except me.

It’s the Space Brother and the Space Sister. Between them and with them walks a shorter figure, a lad in his mid-teens. His skin is a little paler than theirs. He’s a fine young man, not full grown yet. I can see the family resemblance: there are elements of his features that resemble the Space Sister. There are others that remind me of my own face.

The Space Brother and the Space Sister recognise me at the same moment as I recognise them. Their faces light up. Their heads turn to the lad between them, and nod towards me. He gives me a searching look, and a warm but watchful smile as they approach. All three nod and smile as they come level with me, and then express with a subtle twitch of eyebrows and lips some chagrin or mild regret: they have to keep going, they have somewhere to go. The crowd carries them past, and me on.