Descent (21 page)

‘My friend Calum thinks that’s not funny. He thinks we’re living under it.’

Gabrielle dabbed toast in some egg yolk. ‘Well, he may have a point there, but it has nothing to do with why religion’s dying out, that’s for sure.’

‘I nearly switched to Divinity,’ I said, leaning back and shaking out my paper napkin, scrunching and wiping, feeling replete. The café was brunch-busy, hazy with steam and cigarette vapour, clattering with conversation and cutlery. About half the customers huddled around phones, arguing about the Forum. ‘Just for the scholarship, you understand.’

‘You should have done it,’ said Gabrielle. She sipped sweet lemon tea and regarded me solemnly. ‘You don’t need excuses.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘English is great and science is still my thing. I want to write about science.’

‘English is so
past
,’ she said. ‘Sure, we need people who can write about what we do, but they don’t have to be English graduates. Theology graduates who don’t believe any of it – that would be useful.’

‘Useful?’

‘Uh-huh. For science. For the cause.’

‘For you, science is a cause?’

‘Oh, God,
yes
,’ said Gabrielle. She laughed and shook her head, making her hair flick. ‘See what I did? But yeah, it’s like … what we could have instead of’ – she flipped a hand toward the church across the road – ‘
that
. A big picture we could all see ourselves in. But this time true.’

I stared at her. ‘I don’t think you need me to write things,’ I said.

‘Hah!’ She swatted at air, but you could see she was pleased. ‘You wanna be a hack, be my guest.’

‘I’m in,’ I said, meaning more than I said.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘I like it when people are rational.’

‘So do I,’ I said. ‘By the way, have you ever been inside a flying saucer?’

She gave this more thought than it deserved. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘Why? Have you?’

‘Just wondering,’ I said. ‘And no. I’ve dreamed about it, though.’

‘Oh, me too!’ said Gabrielle. ‘I’ve always thought it would be great. And you know, we just might really.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Airships,’ she said. ‘The new materials, there’s some that can sort of suck in air and blow it out, except it’s electrostatic.’

I closed my eyes and swung my head back and forth for a moment. ‘That’s … interesting.’

‘We could go and see their stall.’

‘What?’

She frowned. ‘It was on the site for the Forum. One of the defence companies, British, British, ah …’ She snapped her fingers.

‘British Avionic Systems?’

‘Yes!’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘If it doesn’t take you out of your way.’

Gabrielle looked out at the rain, then back at me. ‘No rush. Coffee?’

‘Yes, good idea.’ I made to get up.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You got the breakfasts.’

‘Yeah, but—’

‘Sit.’ She pushed down on the top of my head. Her hand’s light touch felt electrostatic.

‘All right.’

I watched her going to the queue. In tight jeans, short leather jacket and floral-uppered Docs she looked very different from last night. And we were getting on a lot better than we had been. I wondered if these facts were connected. She had left her damp, copper-coloured, frilly umbrella hooked by the handle over the back of her seat. While I was waiting, I opened my phone to check on the economic-policy debate panel. I caught Baxter in full flow, standing behind the table, shaking his fist in the air while other panellists looked on with fixed expressions of bemused disdain.

‘… so ridiculous in my life!’ he was saying. ‘You’ve destroyed a huge part of the capital market. You want to replace it with planning – that’s bad enough! But is that enough for you? Oh no! You’re far too clever for that! Too clever by half, I should say. You already know everything that can be said against
planning
. You read all that can be said on that subject years ago. Hayek, Mises, Roberts, Ramsay Steele … all old hat to you. Your mentors dealt with that stuff in a seminar on the roots of neoliberal ideology.’ He mimicked covering a yawn. ‘You’ve got the answer to all these hoary old objections worked out. And what is it? We wait with bated breath.’ He glared, hand cupped behind an ear, then mimed a start of surprise. ‘Oh yes! Crowd-sourcing! Expert systems! Data mining! Distributed algorithms – good Lord, how many of you know what an algorithm is? What else? Oh yes, here we are: dynamically reactive weighted matrix-algebraic optimising!’ He turned to the other panellists. ‘You do know about that one, don’t you? Yes? You do? Good! I’m sure you’re all ready to defend and explain it. I’ll be very interested to hear what you have to say, because you know what? I just this moment made that one up. Slogans and buzzwords, that’s all you have, that’s what you’re relying on to—’

‘Democracy!’ someone shouted from the audience.

Baxter affected a cocked head, hand behind his ear. ‘What’s that? Democracy? You think that’ll help? Do “Concorde” and “groundnut scheme” and “British Leyland” not ring any bells? If you’ve never heard of any of them before – and I wouldn’t be surprised – look them up, and tell me if—’

‘Who’s that?’ Gabrielle asked, from behind me. She put a tray on the table and her chin on my shoulder. I wasn’t sure I could take another breath.

‘Some Renewal MSP.’ I peered at the screen caption as if I needed to read it. ‘Jim Baxter.’

‘So it is,’ said Gabrielle, moving away only to haul her chair round the corner of the table and sit beside me. ‘A dangerous man.’

‘Why dangerous?’ I asked.

He didn’t look dangerous. On the small screen he looked comical, waving his arms, his rant a squawk from the phone’s speakers.

‘The
People’s
Republic of
China
,’ he was saying, random syllables underscored with a pistol finger, ‘has taken over the
world
without firing a
shot
. This is
not
even contro
ver
sial! And
yet,
in all our—’

Gabrielle switched him off, then shifted her chair so that she could face me.

‘Don’t you realise? He’s one of
our
MSPs. We’re both in his constituency. And I saw him when he was campaigning. He knocked on our door.’

‘He knocks on doors?’ I said, impressed.

‘Oh yes,’ said Gabrielle. ‘None of that lazy do it all online stuff for him. He actually said to me, you haven’t campaigned properly in an election if you still have the same shoes at the end as you had at the start. Renewal’s new, so they have to do things the old way.’

‘What was he like?’

‘Well, he only had a few minutes, and he started off all affable, talking about freedom and enterprise and so on, sticking up for small businesses and young families, all that. And then …’ She frowned, as if trying to remember. ‘Hard to put a finger on. Something dodgy in the body language. Emphasis on
local
people, young
mums
, hard-working
families
…’

I laughed. ‘Motherhood and apple pie?’

‘Apple pie?’ She didn’t seem to get the allusion. ‘No, but he did talk about corner groceries, and there was a bit about motherhood, all right, and everything he said was sort of subtly old-fashioned. Like he was appealing to people who’ve never really got used to immigrants and refugees and working mothers.’

‘You mean, the very old?’

Gabrielle shrugged. ‘Don’t underestimate that as a share of the vote. Anyway – I didn’t like him.’

‘Fair enough,’ I said. I leaned forward to depress the cafetière plunger and I considered telling her what I knew about Baxter, and decided not to.

Later, as we walked across the Links to the Meadows in the continuing rain, I held her copper-coloured girly umbrella over us both, and she put her arm around my waist to stay close and underneath.

And that was us, us.

Gabrielle, tiny beside the standing stone, tinier yet on my phone screen, waved and pointed to something above and behind me.

‘Look!’ she called out. ‘A flying saucer!’

I snapped the pic and turned to the vast Orcadian sky. Low over the low hills came, not a saucer but a bright globe, silent as a balloon, swift as a small aeroplane and about the same apparent size. I gazed at it stupefied for a moment, then tracked it with the camera as it passed over our heads, a couple of hundred metres up, and on out over the sea where it vanished in the glare and glimmer. Gabrielle was doing the same – by the time I’d hurried over to where she stood, she had the UFO identified.

‘It’s a test flight,’ she said, looking up from her phone. ‘Says here it’s piloted.’

‘Wow,’ I said. ‘British Avionic Systems, by any chance?’

‘That’s the one,’ she said. ‘How did you know?’

I grinned and put an arm around her. ‘You talked about it the first day we met up.’

‘Did I?’ she said. ‘I’m impressed you remembered.’

‘We were going to have a look at their stall,’ I said. ‘Actually, I don’t remember if we did or not.’

I thought back to that day. It had been wet, hadn’t it? Yes: Gabrielle sticking close to me under the brolly. The Meadows muddy, some clown on stilts getting stuck, debates under canvas marquees and geodesic tepees, the smell of grilling patties and deep-fried doughnuts, face-painted kids, balloons, buzzing camcopter swarms, huge crowds, arguments, the warm, muggy, sticky all-embracing hug of a popular front in formation. I remembered looking on a phone screen at Jim Baxter’s strange rant, but not a visit to the stall of the company he’d worked for before he went into politics.

‘Probably not,’ I concluded.

‘Looks like we missed out, then.’ She replayed the video capture, froze and zoomed. ‘Look at that, just a silver ball. Heck, look closer.’ She worked her thumb, until I could see in the globe’s mirror sheen the distorted reflection of her face looking up, and the upraised phone. For a laugh, she zoomed to the highest magnification, to show the reflection of the phone’s camera lens and within that a bright pixel or two: the reflection in the lens of the globe itself.

‘I mean, how does that work?’ she said.

‘Reflection of reflection of reflection?’

‘No, I mean it looks like a solid polished steel ball, but it can’t be. The air’s passing right through it, isn’t that the idea?’

‘Metamaterial,’ I said, with a handwave.

‘Like that explains anything.’

‘I’ve written about it,’ I said. ‘Well, them. There’s lots.’

‘Yeah, yeah. I can’t read everything you write.’

‘Really? I’m hurt.’

‘Come on,’ said Gabrielle. ‘I don’t think
you
read everything you write.’

‘Now I’m
really
hurt.’

‘Time I took a picture of you, then.’ She waved an arm. ‘Which stone do you want to pose beside?’

I looked around the wide, incomplete stone circle, sizing up backgrounds of hills, the next field, sea and sky.

‘Over there. Maybe take it from …’

I pointed.

‘OK.’

We strolled off in divergent directions. As I walked up to a slab that seemed to get taller and paradoxically thinner as I approached, I considered whether I should mention my long-ago close encounter to Gabrielle. If I did, she’d be hurt – really, not in banter – that I hadn’t told her before. Bewildered, even. I’d had long enough – just over three years, to be exact. She’d wonder what else I hadn’t told her. She might ask Calum, and he might brag to her of how he’d fooled me into thinking that he (and by implication, she) was part of a secret race. Calum was a pal, my oldest and closest friend, still was even if we didn’t see much of each other, and it was exactly the sort of thing I wouldn’t put past him – precisely because he was a pal. He was loyal, but he’d see this as a laugh. Perhaps I should, too.

I laid my hand against the rough stone, and turned.

‘Smile!’ Gabrielle shouted.

I couldn’t not.

‘Right a bit, I’ll get both stones.’

I moved. She waved. ‘Got it.’

I grinned and waved back, then turned to press my hands and forehead against the stone, a tall, neatly split sedimentary slab, probably hacked and hauled from a nearby shore in some feat of skill and cooperation that made me wonder, and made me proud. Beyond that, unimaginably far beyond that, the rock itself, cemented by silent relentless pressure on the floor of a vanished sea from eroded particles of mountains more ancient yet.

‘What were you doing there?’ Gabrielle asked when I rejoined her. ‘Praying to the old gods?’

‘Just thinking,’ I said. ‘About the folk who raised it. Our people. We’ve been in this land ten thousand years.’

‘Yeah,’ said Gabrielle. ‘Since the ice left.’

I glanced sidelong at her, and smiled, and didn’t say that some of us might have been here for longer.

We headed back to the hired car, piled in and drove up to the Ring of Brodgar, then to Skara Brae of the grassy mounds around stone beds and shelves and kitchen sinks and on to the Broch of Gurness. By the time we’d circled Gurness’s green ramparts and explored its stone labyrinth it was late afternoon. We bought paper tubs of ice cream in the visitor centre and dawdled back to the car park.

‘Tomorrow, Birsay and Maes Howe,’ said Gabrielle, licking sticky fingers and looking at the unstamped sites on our visitor pass.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Today we get stunned by the Stone Age, then impressed by the Iron Age, then tomorrow get gobsmacked by the Stone Age all over again.’

‘It’s like that, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Going from Skara Brae to here. You can see at Skara Brae what Gordon Childe saw, where he got this idea of our communist ancestors in their cosy hobbit-holes and then seeing here at Gurness the origin of classes with the walls and the wealth and all the work that must have gone into it.’

‘In real life we’d have
smelled
our supposed communist ancestors,’ I said. ‘From here, probably.’

‘Well, their midden heaps, anyway,’ said Gabrielle. She wrinkled her nose. ‘I couldn’t stop thinking about what those mounds of shells and bones must have been like to live among.’

She was in the driving seat. I glanced at her profile as she turned the ignition, and saw again the faint imprint of the strange heritage I’d imagined for her. Like Calum’s, her family did indeed trace its ancestry to the Travelling folk, and I’d once regaled her with another romantic notion I’d picked up: that the travellers and tinkers went all the way back to the Iron Age, as itinerant metallurgists tramping the trade routes, making and mending, forging and smelting, giving rise to legends of dwarven mines and of anvils ringing in the deep forest. That she’d found entertaining, if fanciful. Calum’s tale of a conscious conspiracy, a genetic and memetic heritage of secret doctrine, would be a different matter. I forbore, again, to mention it.