Cold Fusion (5 page)

“It’s okay,” I told him. “If you’re worried about, er, the gay thing or anything. I’m not into hitting on strangers. And I’m attached.”

“I’m not worried,” he said, as flatly as I deserved for such an outrageous lie. “I just don’t like touching people. I offended you when I wouldn’t shake your hand.”

“I wasn’t offended.” Another lie. Why was I trying to hide little things about me when I’d already told him the worst? “Okay, I was. But there must have been touching involved when you carried me indoors.”

“I said I don’t like it, not that I can’t.”

So haughty, as if it should be obvious. He sounded very English on pronouncements such as that. I was needled in spite of myself. “What makes you the lord of the manor around here—handing out chalets to the peasantry and suchlike, when they’re not yours to give? And why would you want to heat empty huts?”

“Are you always this aggressive, Mallory?”

I leapt upright. “I am
no’
aggressive!” My dad was aggressive. That was who was aggressive around here, and I’d seen and suffered so much of it that I knew way better than to turn it on anyone else. I marched to the edge of the sea, which sighed at me and snaked an icy wavelet at my boots as if in reproach. I turned around and went back to Vivian, hands in my pockets. “I’m sorry. I wondered what you were doing out here, that’s all.”

“I’m working.”

“Oh. You mean you have a job here, someone employing you to fix up the wires?”

“Not quite. I’m a particle physicist.”

I sat back down again, this time careful to observe his three-inch rule. If he was nuts or deluded, I ought to treat him carefully. Sure, he’d disappeared off to university at around the same time I and my North Kerra mates had been finding work in factories and shipyards, but particle physicists went to CERN to poke holes in the fabric of the universe, didn’t they? They didn’t stick around to blow up toasters in the backside of beyond.

“Okay,” I said cautiously. “And what does that entail?”

“A lot of thinking, mostly. Silence, solitude. Miles and miles of cables.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “My father said I could remain here and use up the time I had left for my work. He understood about silence, and thinking, and time.”

I’d never had a father who understood anything more abstract than next week’s lottery numbers. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to lose one. I looked into his face, but his elegant profile was impassive. He was probably thinking about his wiring again, and my condolences for his loss died on my lips. “When do the developers move in?”

“They’re not developers. I don’t know where that rumour came from, unless NorthEx started it themselves as a cover.”

That rang a deep Peace Warrior bell in my mind. I tried to resist—that part of my life was over—but the fragments of memory flew in. A name on a list of illegal Arctic drillers, painted on the side of a giant North Sea rig. “NorthEx… The oil company NorthEx?”

“That’s right.”

“What the hell do they want here?”

“A new field’s been discovered off Durness. This site will be ideal for the refinery.”

I sat up straight. My guts twisted coldly. I’d already made the gesture of leaping up and walking away, so I sat very still. This wasn’t the kind of news—no petty personal resentment—that would make me jump and stride anyway. This took the legs out from under me.

“Vivian,” I said urgently. “I know you don’t want to talk about your dad and his property, and fair enough. But you have to contact whoever he did leave the land to and tell them they can’t do this. That you’re gonna contest the will, start a huge lawsuit, whatever it takes to make a fuss and delay things.” I rubbed my hair up the wrong way in frustration. “I can’t believe it’s gone this far. How did they get planning permission? Isn’t this place part of a wildlife reserve, or a site of scientific interest, or—?”

“No. It’s a wasteland. It was safe during my father’s lifetime, although he received many offers for it from NorthEx and their competitors. I don’t know who he made his heir.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? You were his only son!”

“I asked him not to tell me, and he agreed.”

Great. Two nutcase English aristocrats, living alone in their Victorian fantasy until each was as mad as the other. I sank my face into my hands. “For Christ’s sake.”

Something brushed my shoulder. A fleeting warmth reached my skin, flashing through three layers of clothes, deep and sweet and…

Wholly imaginary, as it turned out. I jerked up my head, and Vivian’s hands were clasped loosely in his lap. “Don’t concern yourself about it, Mallory,” he said. “None of this matters.”

I snapped. “It might not matter to you, you ivory-tower freak. But to people who
haven’t
grown up in a fucking castle with five billion acres of land to play with…”

He turned to me. Face-to-face, those three inches felt like no distance at all. I lost my point and sat in silence, barely breathing. I felt as if I’d been poking a mountain lion with a stick through the bars of a cage at the zoo, and someone had opened the cage.
A gaze as blank and pitiless as the sun…
Those were Yeats’s words, not mine, although I’d have killed to have written them. Yeats’s apocalyptic beast, staring at me muzzle to nose on a far-flung Scottish beach. I shouldn’t have called him a freak. I held my ground, though my mouth had gone dry and my heart was beating fast. “How the hell can you say this doesn’t
matter
?”

“Because of my work here.”

“What?”

“Soon none of it will matter. Not drilling, not fracking, not nuclear waste. Soon all of that will be gone.”

“Oh, my God. What do you think you’ve invented up there—cold fusion?”

His expression altered. That should have been a relief, but now I had the sensation of being under his microscope, flattened between slides for analysis. What was he looking for? I didn’t have anything he could possibly want.

“No,” he said after a moment. “I haven’t invented it. I’ve made it work.”

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help myself. I didn’t want to do it in his face, so I lurched upright and backed off. Everything was catching up with me—my journey, the reception I’d met with at home, the quart of scotch I’d knocked back on an empty gut the night before.

“Cold
fusion
?” I knew all about cold fusion. Peace Warrior taught it like gospel in their lectures and online courses. The holy grail of environmentalists across the globe, a something-for-nothing energy source which lasted forever and produced no waste. But that was all it was—a quest, a dream of a golden age. “Cold fusion’s a myth. Discredited back in the eighties. There isn’t a serious scientist left on the planet who still believes in it now.”

“Nevertheless.”

I put a hand to my mouth and breathed deeply through my fingers until I calmed down. “Are you telling me all those cables up there—your kettle, and that poor wee toaster you detonated this morning…”

“All part of my experiments, yes. In fact the cold fusion part of it’s not the problem. I’m struggling to connect things. That’s why I need help with my—”

“With your fucking wiring. Right. I tell you what, your lordship—if you don’t get your head out of your arse and start dealing with some real problems, there won’t be anywhere left for nutjobs like you to come and waste their time anymore.”

I stared out over the water. The sun was high now, striking blue-black notes from the horizon. The wind had changed direction to an onshore blast that would steal the very life from your marrow if you stood still in it long enough. I walked away into its jaws. Already it had torn up the surface to bright rags, a random glitter-dance all the way out to the Arctic. The world was vast and meaningless. How had I managed to believe I could make any kind of a difference to it?

Not quite random, no. My eyes had filled with tears. Through their sharpness I picked out movement in the water, a sudden focus. Six dark shapes—no, seven. Raked-back dorsals and gleaming bulbous brows—friendly, almost comical, rising and falling through the waves. They were close, barely fifty yards out. Revelation shook me. I hadn’t run off to join the
Sea Hawk
because I hated my dad, or because I was so filled with rage at the rape of the planet. It had been because of this—life in the water, the spirit of the ocean and Scotland herself made flesh for me to see. I’d wanted them to live.

I turned round, waving. “Vivian, look!” I yelled. “Pilot whales!”

But the stone where he had been sitting was vacant. A line of footprints led away from it, crisp at first and then vanishing in the soft sand. I was quite alone.

Chapter Four

Some sounds only emphasise silence. Wave wash, wind in the seagrass. Here at Spindrift, it was the song of the silver flowers, whose remaining two blossoms masked an emptiness more colossal than if there’d been none left at all. I stumbled back up the path. The main block looked utterly abandoned. I couldn’t imagine life inside at all. Maybe I’d extinguished the last flicker.

I couldn’t bear the thought. I broke into a run. Peripherally I noticed that the mosaic around the entrance was still intact, a whole wall of thick glass tiles and clay squares fired to glimmering rainbow bronze in the morning sun. I pushed open the door. “Vivian?”

Nothing but wind-song silence. What made me think I had the power to drive away a dedicated nutcase from his work, I didn’t know, but I’d been fairly toxic to my fellow man of late. I thought about what I’d called him, and I felt sick. I’d had no right. Now he was gone, another soul passed beyond my ability to beg forgiveness, and…

No. He was still here. He was sitting cross-legged on the floor of the café, so motionless that I’d taken him for part of its patterns of sharply cut-out shade. In front of him was an array of short wires and bolts, neatly divided into two piles.

“Vivian,” I repeated uncertainly. “Listen, I—I’ve got a big mouth. I didn’t mean to call you names back there. I’m sorry.”

He regarded me quietly. Slowly I worked out that he didn’t care one way or the other for my apology. One heap of bolts and wires was for him, one for me. I was willing to bet there’d be an exactly equal amount in each.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come back. I thought I’d set some things out just in case.” He looked skinny and lonely there in the cafeteria’s stripped-out space. He was still wearing his woollen hat, dark curls escaping.

“Yes, I came back.” I hoped I didn’t sound as if I were talking to a three-year-old. I wanted to be gentle to him, and I didn’t quite know how. It was like trying to reassure an icicle. “Didn’t I say I’d help you with your wiring?”

“Yes, you did.”

“So what do you want me to do?”

“I think the connections are blowing out because the cold fusion surge is too much for the couplings I’ve got set up at the moment. I want to try replacing them with these. There’s rather a lot, I’m afraid.”

I rubbed my eyes. Something had heated my shower this morning, and something had burned my toast, but it wasn’t cold bloody fusion. Somewhere off in the building’s depths there had to be a generator, or maybe the village was still hooked up to the mains, the supply coming and going as Vivian buggered about with it. Well, I wasn’t making such a shining example of my own life at the moment that I couldn’t afford to waste a day playing along. “Okay. Where do we start?”

We stood more chance of powering the nation with that smile than with his cables and couplings. I was going to have to be careful here—I could see myself going to great lengths to elicit that beautiful grin.

“The chalets,” he said. “They don’t need to be heated and lit, but it’s a good test if they can be. A functional system, you know?”

I didn’t. I decided I didn’t need to. I crouched in front of him. “Right. You’ll have to show me how these things work, though—I don’t have a clue.”

“It’s simple. Just very repetitive. I’ll hook up the first one, and then we’ll divide the rest between us. Wait a minute while I get…”

I knelt among the bolts and wires and waited. Out of interest, I glanced at my watch and timed him. Exactly sixty seconds later he reappeared, and I wondered what magical piece of equipment he’d been to fetch, and whether it had taken him a minute or whether whatever was wrong with him had kept him marking time outside the door until his actions could match his words. “What have you got there, then—your sonic screwdriver?”

“My what?”

“Your…er, never mind.” A feeble joke about how he liked life in outer space died on my lips. He was holding a tube of antiseptic cream. “What’s that for?”

“Your mouth. It looks quite bad today.”

I’d forgotten. I put my fingers to the place where the old man had walloped me the day before. Alcohol and the anaesthetising wind had kept it numb until now. I took the tube, uncapped it and put some on. Vivian watched me closely, as if I might be in danger of doing it wrong. I was glad to have something to do, because I certainly couldn’t speak. Already I knew enough about him to put the cap on nice and tightly before I handed it back to him.

“Your father beats you,” he said gravely.

I couldn’t have admitted it to anyone else. All my life I’d taken stories to school about doors I’d walked into, bikes I’d tumbled off. But his dispassionate observation called up an answering firmness in me, and my throat unclenched.

“He used to. Not anymore.”

Good enough for Vivian. His capacity to take me at my word was restful. He nodded, apparently satisfied, and suddenly I was too, the outrage and fright I’d been carrying around for years evaporating in the café’s blazing light.

“Bring those, then. We’ll start with your chalet.”

* * * * *

I didn’t know why he thought of it as mine, except that he’d found me outside it. He unlocked it with a key from the fob at his belt and pushed the wind-scoured door open. Then he handed the key to me. It felt like a gesture, and I almost thanked him, until I realised he was also unhitching five more of the dozen keys on the fob. He was just assigning me my workload.

“Why all the security?” I asked, pulling up my collar against the sawdusty chill of the place. I could remember sitting here during summers so hot that the resin had melted out of the boards. “Are you scared someone’s gonna steal your secrets?”

I couldn’t keep a teasing edge off my tone, but he answered me seriously. “No. The technique isn’t stable yet. Once I can keep the power running for more than a few minutes, and I can reproduce my results off-site, we’ll have to be very careful.”

I wasn’t sure who
we
was. If he meant me, I was touched, but I hadn’t done anything to earn it, and I didn’t want the burden of anyone’s blind faith right now. “Your secret is safe with me,” I said, hoping the absurd line would make him smile again, but he just nodded seriously.

“Good. At the moment I’m locking the chalets because copper wire’s at a premium. My last batch was stolen. It was inconvenient to replace.”

“Well, people are desperate.” I looked around the bare single room. Even as it stood, it was better than some of the miserable bedsit apartments in Kerra. I thought about my ma, cashing in her premium bonds to keep the old man’s trawlers patched and in business for one more season. “Your dad used to do a lot of stuff for desperate people, didn’t he? I didn’t realise. But he had dozens of charities on the go—hostels and things like that. And this place.”

“That’s right. I’ve connected my new couplings into the existing wiring. It’s underfloor, so you’ll need to take up these two boards in each chalet. I haven’t screwed any of them down, just secured them. All the tools you’ll need are in this box.”

I gave up. I crouched beside him and watched while he unfastened the floorboards. I wasn’t much of a hand at DIY, but still my instincts twitched as he pulled up a wire with his bare hands. I couldn’t ask him if the power was off at the mains. I knew by now that he would only affix me with a beautiful, numinous blue-grey look and tell me there
was
no mains—only cold fusion. And then I would laugh again and probably not be granted his mysterious forgiveness this time.

“Here,” he said, extracting one of his precut lengths of cable and a handful of bolts from the tool bag. “You can see where I’ve tried to patch it. If you can undo that stretch of wire, feed this new one through these couplings like this and refasten it…”

I was always much better at doing a thing than learning it by being shown. “Okay. Let me have a go.”

He sat back on his heels and watched while I unscrewed the first section. I tried to look confident and not as though I expected to be electrocuted at any second. Vivian, for all his standoffishness, was funny and attractive, and best of all, he didn’t seem to care that I had killed my friends. I could at least pretend to believe in him for now.

And he was easily pleased. That wiring had really been playing on his nerves. I set the new cable in as he’d told me, glanced up and found him lit up with approval and a kind of relief that the job was finally in hand. “That’s it. Now, there are ten of those in each chalet.”

“Ten? Bloody hell, Vivian.”

“Yes. If you lift the second board, you’ll see the other nine in here. The power is good, but it surges too hard for this network. If we relay it through all these couplings—each one of them has a surge protector, if you look closely—we may be able to make it work. Well, you have the hang of it. I’ll see you in three hours’ time.” He straightened up. For a second I thought he was going to clap me on the shoulder, but the impulse never got any further than his eyes. Then he turned and strode out.

So I knuckled down and began work on my set of sixty couplings. I felt like an absolute idiot, and couldn’t help wondering if Vivian was back in the café, cracking a beer with his mates and roaring with laughter that he’d managed to con another lost traveller into wiring the middle of nowhere into the middle of nowhere else. This sensation was so strong that I paused after I’d finished work on the second chalet, about ready to go grab my rucksack and move on. But I was quite enjoying this. Already I’d found a method, a rhythm, and having occupation for my hands was keeping my mind off the thorns.

The beat of labour gives the ground / To silver-flower song, and all / Is swept up in sea-music to the sky.

Yes, that was true. My writing hadn’t been childish, emotional gestures. It had helped me get at the truth of ordinary things, to find out why they mattered. I unlocked the third chalet and went back to work.

By half past four I was hungry. I didn’t expect Vivian to reappear until the three hours were up, and so I went in search of him, defiantly leaving my last two batches of wiring undone.

He was on his hands and knees in the sunlight, head down, peering beneath the floorboards with a torch. I should have been past noticing such things, but he had a very nice backside. The seam of his overalls followed his arse crack like a welcoming smile. Compact and muscular. I couldn’t help thinking it would look better still with a couple of pounds on it, so I cleared my throat. “Hoi. I’m calling a tea break.”

He gave a short cry, jumped hard and dropped his torch. I wanted to laugh until he sat up and faced me, and I saw how pale he was. “Mallory,” he said hoarsely. “It’s four thirty-seven. Unless you’ve worked too fast, you can’t have accomplished the task I set you.”

“That’s right.” I pushed my hands into my pockets. Who did he think he was? I’d paid off my night’s shelter and my bits of burnt toast about an hour ago, I reckoned, though I didn’t like to think about intangibles like coats and Savlon and his total absence of judgement. “The last two parts of my task remain unaccomplished. You know how you said you don’t eat while you’re thinking?”

“Yes.”

“How long have you been thinking for this time?”

He pulled off his watch cap and ruffled his hair. This was the most endearingly human gesture I’d seen him make, and I fought down the impulse to go and smooth the dark curls back into order. “What day is it?”

“Thursday. In September. On Earth. Wow, you do lose track, don’t you?”

“Thursday?” The particle physicist did a quick count on his fingers and got to four before hiding the gesture from me. “Rather a long time. I was so close, you see. Or I thought I was.”

“Four days?” I went to help him to his feet, trying not to notice how the long, supple body rose with passive power at my touch. “No wonder your belly’s kissing your backbone. Come back to the caff. I’ll make you my traditional family tin of Heinz soup.”

“I’m afraid there isn’t any.”

“No Heinz? What kind of a mad scientist do you call yourself? Okay, then, beans on toast it is.”

“There’s nothing. And nothing to heat it if there was, not until I can get this wiring to work.”

Oh, Viv, give it up. Put a new fuse in the toaster and switch on the bloody genny.
I squeezed my lips shut. That was how you spoke to someone you’d known for ages, not less than twelve hours. I’d even shortened his name. “Why don’t you have any food out here?”

“I just forgot.”

“Well, one of us is gonna have to leg it back down into Kerra before the Co-op shuts.” I looked him over. His colour hadn’t returned, and no wonder, after a four-day fast. “I guess it had better be me.”

“I didn’t think you’d want to go back there.”

“I’d rather walk barefoot through a sea of upturned plugs. But this isn’t much of a garret to starve in, and…”

“You’re not that kind of poet?”

I did a small double take. I didn’t know why I was still holding on to his arms, except that they were vibrant and warm beneath his layers. “Er, no. I mean…I’m not. Any kind of poet, that is.” I shut up before my language skills could fail me entirely.

“My father always took the
Northern Poetry Gazette
. He enjoyed your work there very much.” He detached himself from me gently. “Neither of us has to go down to the village. I’ll finish my work here—and the unaccomplished parts of yours—if you would take this to the place where the lane meets the single-track road. There’s a white rock, a big piece of quartz. Just put it under there.”

He’d produced from somewhere a sheet of paper in a transparent file pouch. There was writing on the sheet, but before I could read it, he folded it up and tucked it into the pocket of my coat. Then he frowned. “Wait a minute,” he said, extracting it again. He turned me round like a piece of furniture—a desk, in this case—and laid the paper on the back of my right shoulder while he added to the note. “There. It isn’t far—only eight-tenths of a mile.”

“Eight-tenths of a mile?” I was surprised he hadn’t refined it further, but maybe he was making allowances for me. “All right. I won’t read your private mail, but what magic happens if I put this under the white stone? Do the fairies fly our order down to the Kerra shop?”