Descent (3 page)

‘What?’

‘It’s half past five.’

‘Jeez. Best be heading back, then.’

I stayed where I was. ‘When we saw the light … it can’t have been later than half three.’

‘Four,’ said Calum, frowning at his own watch. He sounded as if trying not to worry.

‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘So what happened in the last hour and a half?’

He headed down the hill, and again I followed.

‘I suppose,’ he said as I caught up, ‘the … ball lightning or whatever knocked us out, and we just sprawled there.’

‘Somebody would have seen us.’

‘No while the fog was still down.’ He waved a hand to the left, toward the crude bridge we’d crossed, and the patch of burned heather near it. ‘Anyway, even after it lifted, we’d just look like a couple ae drunk lads sleeping it off where they’d made a fire.’

This didn’t sound likely to me.

We took flying leaps across the Cut at a section where the banks had collapsed, then scrambled down and washed our hands and splashed our faces. Back on the path, we bashed black dust out of our hoodies and swatted at the backs and seats of our jeans. After a mutual check we assured ourselves that, while still a mess, we wouldn’t actually get stared at on the street. This turned out not to be the case, but we made it back to Sophie’s flat without incident. By now it was after six, and Sophie and her parents were at their tea, as her father pointedly told us when he let us in.

‘What happened to you?’ he asked.

Calum replied before I could.

‘We were walking round the Cut,’ he said. ‘Went up a hill and got caught in fog on the moor. Couldnae see where we were going. We kind ae blundered about for a bit then after we both tripped and fell onto a patch of burnt heather we reckoned it was best to wait till the fog lifted.’

Sophie’s dad looked at us sceptically.

‘Well, that’s no the kind of tripping you look like you’ve been daein,’ he said, baffling me. ‘Wait a minute.’

He came back with two objects, one for each of us. For a moment, I held a slab of bevelled black glass in my hand and couldn’t for the life of me remember what it was.

‘Phone home now, the both of you,’ he said. ‘You got calls about half five, parents wondering where you were. After that – do you want to stick around, have a bite?’

‘Uh, no thanks,’ I said. ‘I think my tea will be in the oven.’

This was not exactly true, but I didn’t want to sound posh.

Calum nodded. ‘Aye, mine too. Best be off. But thanks. Say hello tae Sophie for us.’

Outside, we each duly phoned home. I repeated what Calum had said, and got an earful in reply.

‘Sorry, Dad,’ I said. ‘I’m just on my way now.’

‘As long as you’re all right,’ he said, in a relenting tone. Then he added, ‘You
are
all right, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, I’m fine thanks. Just a bit grubby from the ash.’

‘OK,’ he said. ‘See you soon.’

Calum had rung off a moment earlier.

‘Everything OK with your old man?’ I asked.

‘Aye, sure, he said my ma was a wee bit worried but no much.’

‘Same here, more or less.’

Calum grinned. ‘Aye, yours hae more imagination.’

‘Why didn’t you say what really happened?’

‘Tae Sophie’s da?’ Calum looked surprised. ‘He’d have thought we were making it up, and he’d wonder why. Yi heard what he said about “tripping”. If I’d said we’d got knocked out by a strange light from the sky, he’d have thought that for sure. That or us having it off wi’ each other.’

I laughed. ‘Oh, give me a kiss!’

‘None of that,’ said Calum, in a tone of mock severity.

‘None of what?’

‘Homophobic mockery, and that. I could knock six points off your Social.’

‘Ooh, get her.’

We went through another round or two of this, laughing louder each time, then clapped each other on the shoulder and went our separate ways.

My way home took me through a maze of housing estates and over the Lyle Hill, a rocky rise straddling the border between Gourock and Greenock and overlooking the Firth. As I hurried up the long slope of Lyle Road, I found myself gazing at the anchor and double-barred cross of the Free French war memorial on the hillside ahead. The gorse, grass and whin on the summit behind it pulsed yellow and green in the westering sun as if lit from within by flickering neon. The sculpture itself seemed more solid than usual, a shape rather than a symbol, weighty and enigmatic as a megalith. Two or three people stood on the platform, ignoring the memorial, attention fixed on the view. I glanced over as I passed, trying to see whatever it was they were looking at. Just sea and hills.

Over the top and walking downhill, past the golf course with its club-clicks and cries and curlew calls and smell of mown grass, I saw Greenock and Port Glasgow spread out before me, a song of sandstone and cement, and thought I could see into every house and block, like an app, and at the imagined sight of tens of thousands of people having their evening meal or working late or getting ready to go out I was overcome by a wave of wonder at how much good was going on, and how you heard about the bad things that happened so much that you overlooked the immensely disproportionate majority of other acts done to the real benefit of self and others without which none of this would be here at all, and the vast exercise of virtue, of skill and thought and care that had gone into the very buildings, literally built in, what though some of them were built on foundations of slavery: of capital coined from cotton, tobacco and sugar lashed from sunburnt skin in plantations far away and long ago.

A little further along and down the side of the hill I came to myself and felt I had been walking for hours. I looked at my watch and no, it was six thirty-two and forty-one seconds and I was about ten minutes’ brisk walk from home. So I walked on, fast, and the first thing I thought was: why am I thinking like this? The second was: what happened?

I didn’t think that whatever fell on us – or just beside us, if Calum was right – could have been ball lightning. The heat that had reduced grass and heather to ash must have been intense and local. The object had been bright, but not glowing, therefore reflecting not radiating. Our impression that it was a weather balloon had been contradicted only by the speed of its descent. Its appearance had remained solid and substantial.

We’d had an encounter with an unidentified flying object. I turned over the phrase in my mind. It was literally true. I was quite careful with myself – I didn’t jump to the conclusion that the unidentified object
was
identified – and as an alien spacecraft, at that.

No. Looking back, and taking into account my state of mind, I was still thinking rationally. But like anyone else I had the default UFO template in my head. In my early teens I’d explored the topic in enough breadth if not depth to make its tropes indelible, however much I now disdained them. Aliens crowded in, all oval heads and almond eyes and long, probing fingers. I pushed them away. This was easy to do, actually, because my thinking had become mercurial, and quite different from the stubborn, dog-with-a-bone worrying that was habitual to me at that age – and still is, come to think of it.

The road passed the side of the golf course and my route swung into a long street of low houses and bungalows, a locally limited surge of the same suburban-style sprawl that had covered the hills at the back of the town where I’d just walked from. On grey gravel spilling from driveways I crunched over broken stems of crinoids. Small children scooted about on bikes or kicked footballs across the quiet road. At the end of that street was another abrupt transition, to the older West End of Greenock, laid out like Edinburgh’s New Town on an Enlightenment grid. The slab-concrete and picture-window dwellings of third-division footballers and call-centre middle managers gave way to the more substantial red or buff sandstone villas of doctors and ministers, of well-paid workers and the well-off retired. No change, however, in the proportion – about a tenth – of houses whose windows were boarded up.

I turned sharply up the street that marked that boundary and then into our own street, diagonally across from the clubhouse at the eastern end of the golf course. At the foot of the steps up the short steep slope of green to our house I stopped to get my story straight. Sweat stuck my shirt to my back and chilled under my armpits. My heartbeats boomed on my eardrums. Blood moved grainily in my veins, the tickle of its trickle like sand falling on skin. I had evidently been walking very fast, almost running, and I couldn’t understand how I could have taken so long to get from Sophie’s place to mine.

I looked at my watch and saw that the time was six forty-four and twenty-seven seconds. Twenty-eight. Twenty-nine …

Six forty-five and twenty-five seconds. I’d been standing at the foot of the steps for almost a minute. It had felt like longer. I pulled myself together, unlocked the gate, locked it behind me and bounded up the steps. I unlocked then locked behind me the outer and inner doors, after a minute of bafflement as to what I was doing in the narrow space between them.

The hallway smelled of the polishes for wood and brass. I walked through it towards the smell of cooking. The table was folded out and laid in the living room but dinner hadn’t started yet. In the kitchen beyond, down a step into the back of the house, my father stood over the cooker, stirring a vegetable curry. He looked up.

‘Ah, there you are, Ryan. Good of you to drop by.’

‘Aw, c’mon, Dad, I told you what happened. Sorry I’m late. We just went off for a walk.’

He rested the wooden spoon against the rim of the pan and straightened up.

‘I don’t mind you going off for a walk, even if you did say you were going to be studying. I do mind you leaving your phone behind. That’s just childish.’

‘OK, OK.’

‘You had what could have been a serious accident.’

‘We just tripped and fell.’

He nodded. ‘Exactly. You should know better than to blunder about in mist, too. If you’d had your phone, you could have called home, told us not to worry, and sat tight till it lifted.’

‘OK, OK,’ I said again, despising myself for how teenage and petulant I sounded but unable to think of anything better to say.

My father grunted and gave the curry another stir, then sucked a smidgin from the spoon with a slurping noise that revolted me.

‘Make yourself useful,’ he said. ‘Chop some coriander.’

‘Good to know you trust me with a knife,’ I said.

‘Don’t push it,’ he said.

I wasn’t pushing it, but I refrained from correcting him on this point. Instead I manoeuvred round him, rattled about in the cutlery drawer, and scissored a clump from the coriander pot on the windowsill. I rinsed it under the tap and got busy with a knife and chopping-block on the work surface beside the cooker. All the while I was timing my actions in seconds, anxious not to drop into another missing-time dwam.

‘You’ve chopped it fine enough,’ my father said, in an amused tone. I passed him the block and with the edge of the blade he scraped rather than tipped my efforts into the pot. Five seconds it took him.

‘Why do you keep looking at your watch?’ he asked, stirring again.

‘I’m …’ My first impulse was to deny it. Then I’d had enough of evasion and plunged boldly ahead. ‘I’m trying to keep track of how time feels and compare it to time on the clock – subjective and objective time, you know? Because I’m noticing how different they are when you get absorbed in something like just now when I was rinsing the
dhania
under the tap or you let your mind drift like when I was walking home and looking at the town and thinking about how much is going on in it right now and all the historical and geological time that’s piled up in every stone and that we see at every moment piled up again in, in –’ I recalled a phrase from something I’d read ‘– the light-world of our eyes.’

My father almost dropped the spoon. He laid it carefully on the chopping-block and turned to face me. I had seen him almost every day of my life, but never as he seemed at this moment: heraldic, monumental, archaic. I had to remind myself who he was. His name was Richard Sinclair and he was forty years old. He was an accountant, currently and precariously if lucratively employed by one of the local Healthcare Trusts. He had a dozen visible white hairs amid various shades of brown, and three low-amplitude, long-wavelength lines across his forehead. These lines moved closer together and their fissures deepened.

‘Ryan,’ he said, ‘are you on drugs?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not.’

Something darkened around the light-world of his eyes.

‘I’m not sure I believe you,’ he said.

His words felt like heavy stones added one by one to a rucksack on my back. My knees almost buckled. I rallied a smile.

‘Oh come on, Dad,’ I said, with a laugh, ‘if I was on drugs, my pupils would be dilated.’

Suddenly he looked normal again. He frowned and stared at me.

‘They are dilated.’

‘I’m sure it’s just the light,’ I said, then giggled because this was accidentally true.

Dad frowned and shook his head.

‘Go and wash yourself.’ He sounded disgusted.

Upstairs in the bathroom, I saw why. My face was pale, making the remaining streaks and flecks of ash stand out. My irises were narrow rings around solid circles of glossy black, like annular eclipses of a blue star by an obsidian moon. My clothes were more than just a bit grubby. Soot was all over them. I had carbon footprints. I stripped off my shirt and jeans and threw them in the laundry basket. I washed my face and arms and neck and considered shaving, then decided I didn’t have time. I nipped across the landing and along a narrow corridor and up the stair-ladder to my attic bedroom where I pulled on fresh jeans, an old T-shirt and worn-out trainers.

In these I padded downstairs and back to the living room. My father and my mother, Lizbeth, were at the table as was my sister, Marie. Two years older than me, Marie was in her first year at Glasgow University. She didn’t like living at home, but couldn’t afford to rent so much as a shared bedsit in Glasgow.

All three looked at me as if they’d just stopped talking about me. I sketched a wave.