Descent (4 page)

‘Hi, Mum, Marie.’

‘Hello,’ they chorused, giving me glassy smiles and then looking away to exchange significant glances. I sat down.

We all helped ourselves to vegetable curry, brown rice and nettle aloo. I resisted the impulse to gaze in wonder at the detail of the soggy leaves, or to watch the rainbow colours the overhead light made in the rising steam. I let the conversation swirl around me, contributing no more than the occasional nod or monosyllable. Every so often I glanced at the television above the fireplace, running in the background as usual and showing the evening news. The Russian, British and American navies had ships on the move on a variety of convergent courses that criss-crossed the Atlantic in a confusing manner. A map came up and I thought I could see a pattern that eluded the talking heads whose speculations flitted as subtitles. Then it eluded me too, and I glanced away and returned my attention to the conversation. As I did so I found myself comparing my present behaviour with memories of how I normally behaved at the dinner table. They seemed to match. I didn’t usually have much to say. Situation nominal.

‘What do you mean, nominal?’ Marie asked, giving me a quirky smile and tilt of the head, fork halfway to her mouth.

How much had I said? Had I been prattling away without realising? I tried to remember what my family had been talking about. Something about something in the news, I seemed to recall.

‘Oh, just the situation,’ I said. ‘The general situation, that is. It’s nominal, in the mission-control sense, if you see what I mean.’

‘I’m afraid I don’t,’ said Marie.

‘Well, you know,’ I went on, waving my hands about, ‘when the engineers at Baikonur or Canaveral or that place the French have in South America or the Chinese or, anyway whatever, when they’re in a countdown and they’re giving a systems check and everything’s OK and working as it should they say it’s nominal.’

‘Put down your fork and knife,’ said my mother. ‘You’ll have someone’s eye out.’

This was such a Mum thing to say that I spluttered with laughter as I complied.

Dad frowned. ‘If that’s what you mean, the situation is far from nominal.’

‘The general situation?’ I asked.

‘You could say that,’ he said, with another significant glance at Mum and Marie.

‘Yes, that’s what I am saying, and I see your point but my point is …’

I’d forgotten what it was. Fortunately my mind was working with mercurial speed and laser precision again, and I immediately understood what I’d been trying to articulate and continued: ‘My point
is
, right, that this crisis we’re all talking about is just what happens every day and we live from day to day without knowing what’s going to happen tomorrow or even what’s just happened unless we check our phones every few seconds we don’t know if another war has started or the ATMs have stopped working again or the revolutionaries have made another cyber attack or the EU has collapsed or everybody except you know the responsible people like us has gone on strike or the army has taken over but we all know any of these could happen any time or something I haven’t thought of and anyway what is actually holding everything together and keeping us going from day to day is the knowledge that it could all end tomorrow or like I said has already ended since the last time we checked the news and all the time we think of it as something we’re waiting for and will watch when it comes and therefore we don’t feel it as something that could happen to us or is happening to us right now so in that sense as I said the situation is nominal.’

At this point my mouth was a bit dry so I took a sip of water. I had by no means finished my discourse but Dad, Mum and Marie took my pause as a conclusion and started talking about something else entirely. The television moved on to a nature programme, and my mother turned up the volume. A man climbed a high ladder into a tree, and lowered a cylindrical box to a woman waiting below. She placed the box in a big transparent plastic bag and removed the lid, to reveal a drowsy dormouse. As she lifted it out and placed it on the bottom of the bag, the little creature awoke and scurried around. The woman passed a wand under the bag, peered at a read-out, and connected a bell-jar to a gas-filled bladder. She popped the dormouse under the glass dome and puffed gas in. The dormouse rolled over. She picked it up gently and pinched the skin on its back, then injected a microchip, poked the tip of the injector into yet another device, and laid the little rodent on a scale. The dormouse recovered after a few seconds, and was placed back in its bed in the nesting box, which was duly closed and hoisted back up the tree.

‘This is the twentieth generation we’ve tracked like this,’ the woman explained. ‘It’s probably the last, actually. A few years ago we noticed a trend for the dormice to become less stressed from handling, and to have a better adult body weight, and we puzzled over it until we looked back over the stats and realised that it was the result of natural selection – the individuals least stressed by being chipped had bigger litters, and so on. So in studying the population we were inadvertently changing it.’

After dinner I offered to wash up but Dad said pointedly that perhaps it might be a good idea for me to catch up with the revision I’d missed that afternoon. I took the hint and a mug of coffee and went upstairs.

Sitting at my desk in a corner under the sloping ceiling of the roof-space attic bedroom, I stared at a geometry problem in the maths textbook on my tablet. No matter how I tugged the lines around I couldn’t make the angles add up. The room darkened. I switched the desk lamp on, and was about to try another solution when I became distracted by the minute, complex shadows cast by the grain of the wood on the surface of the desk.

After some time I sipped at the coffee (black, instant, expensive) and found it cold. I swallowed it all. It may have been the caffeine surge that jolted me out of my odd mental state. I stood up and stepped to the skylight window and looked out at the rooftops and lights of Greenock.

What the
fucking fuck
is
happening
to me?

Did I just fucking say that out loud?

I listened for echoes and concluded I hadn’t.

I texted Calum. He rang back in less than a minute.

‘Evening, Sinky.’ Somehow less than cordial.

‘Hi, Duke.’ Calum’s nickname was better than mine, derived by some primary-school playground word-association daisy chain that went: Calum, CalMac (the ferry company), Rothesay, Duke of Rothesay, Duke. You had to be there and seven years old. ‘You OK?’

‘Uh … aye. Fine. Hunky-dory. You aw right?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘What’s up?’

‘You’re not having any … weird things going in your head, like?’

‘What kindae things?’ Baffled, guarded.

‘Uh … like, uh, time slowing down then speeding up? Finding yourself rattling on? Mind racing away like … like something fast racing away?’

‘Naw. Nothing like that. Is that what’s up wi you?’

‘Aye,’ I said.

‘You ever done any ae that stuff?’

‘What stuff?’

‘Acid, an’ that. Magic mushrooms.’

‘Of course not! I’m no a fuckin’ eejit.’ Lapsing into his accent, I noticed.

I heard his breath across the mike of his phone, and interpreted this as a sigh.

‘Ah … well, Sinky old pal, I got a wee confession tae make …’

‘You slipped me one!’

A moment of offended silence. ‘For fuck’s sake, Sinky! That’s the paranoia talking. My wee confession is that I was an eejit a couple years back. Tried the old magic-mushroom trip.’

‘And you didn’t invite me along? Jeez.’

‘I was wi another crowd at the time. Fucking wasters. Anyway. Haud the horses for a wee second and listen to me. What you’re describing sounds like what I went through on my trip. It’s no that scary when you know what’s going on, see what I mean?’

I rallied my rationality. ‘That, Duke, is the problem. I don’t know what’s going on. I am in an interval of ludicity. Lucidity. And ludicity, come to that. And I am unable to account for my unaccustomed loquacity. Given that I did not partake of any drugs.’

Another long pause. ‘Uh, man, can you be absolutely sure ae that? I mean, we were knocked out for an hour or mair, and—’

‘An hour or mair or more on the moor in a mare’s nest.’

‘Will you fuckin’ stop
daein
that? What I’m trying to say is, you could have picked up magic mushrooms or something while we were both out ae it, we couldnae know.’

‘Nae know nae know nae know … Allow me to repair to a separate interface, hold the line please, an adviser will be with you shortly …’

I dropped the phone, scribbled with a shaky fingertip on a scratch pad and peered at the result. I picked up the phone again.

Calum had rung off. I rang him back.

‘You aw right?’ Calum asked.

‘Of course I’m all right. I told you to hold.’

‘You were babbling about interfaces or something, and then there was this crash and I thought you were fuckin’ deid, man.’

‘I appreciate your concern.’ I paused to remember what it was I’d been doing. ‘Ah yes, according to Professor Internet here psychoactive mushrooms are out of season, so …’

‘So, that disnae mean—’

‘So, that means a direct effect of the encounter we are both so not talking about, or some episode of somnambulistic fungivory upon the psilocybin genera, or …’

‘Or what?’

‘Or somebody slipped me a mickey.’ I thought about this possibility. ‘You bastard!’

‘Wisnae me, that’s for sure, and yi ken that fine.’

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Yes. We’ve been over this already. Hm. So back to some direct effect of the funny light on the brain. Ah. Speaking of brain …’

‘Aye?’

‘That lucidity I mentioned?’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘I can feel it going.’

‘You seeing things? Hearing voices?’

I looked around, and listened carefully.

‘No. Well, I’m seeing my room and hearing you, but that’s real. I think.’

‘It’s real aw right. Listen, mate, you might hae concussion. From when we fell down, like. Stay where you are, call your ma or da, call a doctor, get yirself tae hospital.’

‘I know about concussion,’ I said. ‘This isn’t concussion.’

‘You could be coming down wi meningitis or something.’

‘Same again,’ I said. ‘Different symptoms. Look, Duke, my parents have drilled into me what to watch out for. Whatever this is, it’s not that.’

Long pause, or perhaps another time-warp.

‘OK,’ Calum said. ‘OK. I’ve just gone and looked these up, and you’re right. Maybe you better just get some sleep.’

This seemed like good advice, until I took it.

To understand what follows, you have to think about where my bed was. Imagine, if you will, climbing the steep, creaking stair-ladder to the attic. You emerge in a vestibule with an overhead light. The ceiling slopes behind you, making you duck as you take the final step. Old books are stacked against the wall facing you. To your left is an open door to a room that occupies one side of the roof space. It could be a bedroom. Right now, it’s a cluttered box room, as you can see by the light cast from a small, locked skylight window set in a continuation of the same sloping ceiling.

To your right there’s a half-open door. Stepping through, you almost bump into a desk chair and desk facing a corner lined with bookcases under the ceiling slope, against which you almost knock your head. Pictures and photos – some still, others moving – are tacked to odd spaces on the wall and ceiling. There’s a keyboard and docking station on the desk, a recent-looking tablet, and a couple of scratch pads as cheap as the paper notebooks and school exercise books they lie among. An empty coffee mug, an angled lamp (switched off), toy robots and other small action figures, desktop detritus.

You turn now to the main part of the room, which is dimly lit by a long skylight window that juts from the roof. One pane of it is propped open a few inches – the built-in stopper won’t let it open further – to let in the night air (and nothing much else, a cat at the unlikely most). Nothing overlooks that window – it faces the blank gable end of the house next door, and it needs no curtains. Above it, the sloped ceiling gives way to another ceiling low and flat, just high enough to be comfortable for an adult of normal height. The wooden walls are half covered with posters – bands, football teams, female rock stars – many of which move in silence through loops of stereotyped action: a sweat-flying-off guitar thrash, a penalty shot to the back of the net, a smile and a sweeping flick of the hair. A small bookcase, stacks of electronics, a guitar leaning on the wall; clothes, boots, shoes, dusty old toys strewn across the worn carpet. The floorboards creak underfoot at the lightest step.

Along the wall facing the window, up against the far corner, is a single bed with a small bedside table. An adjacent wardrobe with clothes hanging on the outside from pegs and from the top of the half-shut door, takes up most of the remaining space beside the little table.

On the table is a glass of water, an old radio alarm clock, a watch, a torch and a phone.

And in the bed, under a duvet, there’s me, asleep.

OK, you get the picture. There’s no feasible way into the room, except up the creaky stairs and across a creaky floor, littered with trip hazards.

You’re not there. You’re in my imagination.

I woke at 03.35 by the clock radio’s red, fading LEDs, and gazed at the ceiling. The night was still dark, though light from streetlamps and sky-glow came from the window. A scatter of fluorescent star and moon and flying saucer and rocket shapes, stuck on the ceiling about ten years earlier, glowed faintly. I found myself suddenly wide awake, but undisturbed. For the first time since yesterday afternoon, my mind ran clear. The only discomfort I felt was thirst. I rolled to one elbow and sipped water, then put down the glass and settled my head, hands clasped behind it, back against the pillow.

The array of tiny five-pointed stars, crescent moons, rockets with portholes and fins, and flying saucers with flanges and rivets, made me feel a slight pang for childhood, now so far – six years, seven – in the past. There were more wee toy stars than I remembered. Surely I couldn’t have stood on this bed, and patiently peeled them one by one off their waxy backing-paper and stretched out to stick all these up! No, my mother had helped, I remembered: it was she who’d done most of the patient peeling and sticking, from sheets and sheets of shapes.