Authors: Ken MacLeod
Hugh looked over at Hope.
‘Now … sure you’re not nervous about leaving the cab?’
‘Yes, I am, but I’m a bit more willing to risk it in daylight. It’s not like we’re in the middle of the night and the middle of the motorway. Anyway, hunger rules right now.’
‘Don’t it just.’
They stretched their legs, had McBreakfast, bought drinks and snacks for the rest of the journey, and piled back into the cab, hands overloaded, laughing.
As they crossed the Road Bridge, the biotech towers of Grangemouth glittered to the left, and the Forth Rail Bridge and the vast array of tall windmills decommissioned but not yet dismantled on the horizon beyond it loomed to the right. Nick couldn’t decide what to look at, and compromised by surging from one side of the cab to the other.
‘And what’s that thing out there?’ he asked, pointing across Hugh, to the right, at a derelict platform in the middle of the Firth just beyond the Rail Bridge.
‘It’s a place where they used to fill up the oil tankers,’ said Hugh.
‘What’s oil tankers?’
That explanation kept Nick occupied most of the way to Perth. A junction ahead offered one route to the north, the other to the west. Just before the choice had to be made, Hugh’s hands hesitated over the steering wheel; then he shrugged and sat back. So the vehicle stayed on automatic, all the way up the M90 to Inverness. It took about an hour and a half. A long, slow ascent, it felt like, then a descent so fast it
made your ears pop, like in an aeroplane. Along the way, Hope felt almost oppressed by the sheer density of New Trees and other plantations that pressed close to the sides of the motorway, for most of the time masking all the scenery except the windmills. Beyond Pitlochry they were in the Cairngorms National Park, from which synthetic organisms were excluded. Here, the view opened out, and natural trees and heather did losing battle with flash-flood erosion. Snow patches shone on summits and lurked in shadowed corries.
‘I’ve heard it said,’ Hugh told her, looking straight ahead at the road, ‘that up near one of these summits there’s a wee stretch of burn that stays frozen all through the year.’
‘A tiny glacier!’
‘Exactly. And it gets a bit less tiny every year.’
‘That would be big news, if it’s true. So why haven’t I heard?’
Hugh shrugged. ‘It’s a rumour. And the rest of the rumour – wouldn’t you just know it? – is that it’s kept secret. The place is supposed to be in an area of the park that’s strictly off limits, to keep nesting eagles undisturbed or something like that.’
‘That just raises the question of how anyone knows about it at all.’
Hugh tapped the side of his nose. ‘Some park ranger who had a dram too many in a bothan. So the story goes.’
‘And where did you hear it?’
‘Ach, years ago in Aberdeen, drinking with some climbers.’
‘It’s taken you all this time to mention it?’
‘You have a point there,’ said Hugh. ‘To tell you the truth, it
was one of those memories you file and forget, if you see what I mean.’
Hope didn’t, but she decided to let the matter drop before Nick got curious.
The motorway gave out on the approach to Inverness, and with it the automation. Normally the lorry would turn off to the Business Park and pick up a new driver at this point, but the codes on Hugh’s phone overrode that. He took the wheel, to Hope’s silent disquietude and Nick’s noisy admiration, as the lorry approached the Kessock Bridge, and another splendidly distracting view on both sides.
Hope relaxed as Hugh drove on, with every appearance of confidence, across the Tore roundabout, turned left outside Dingwall, left again at Garve … She supposed the skill of lorry-driving was like cycling: once learned, never lost. The long road west was four-lane all the way, a smooth ride that Hugh kept below sixty. For some reason he didn’t explain – it could have been arbitrary, a mental coin-toss, or else the outcome of some intuitive summing of the likelihood of any security inspection – he had chosen to head for the Uig, Skye-to-Tarbert, Harris ferry rather than the more obvious Ullapool-to-Stornoway, a shorter drive but a longer voyage. Hope kept Nick entertained by pointing out eagles and buzzards, camera drones and jet fighters, deer herds and wolf packs, through a monotonous succession of glens and moors. After they’d turned left at Strathcarron, the scenery itself held his gaze: the long stretch of the sea-loch above whose southern shore they climbed and descended on switchback braes; the
precipitous view over Strome; the bleak moor of Durinish. Then the swoop back to another wide four-lane highway, and the scary climb up and over the Skye Bridge. Across Skye, Nick was kept variously occupied by crisps, the Cuillin and the Quiraing.
On the ferry to Tarbert there was no problem keeping him amused for the hour and a half it took, or afterwards in the slow progress through the huddled port. The boredom and fractiousness only kicked in after the steep ascent to the island’s plateau, a glacier-scored surface reminiscent, as Hugh put it, of space-probe photos of Callisto, but less lively. Nick cheered up as they crossed into the strange synthetic woodlands of Lewis, and on to Stornoway, and the grandparents.
‘Who would have thought it?’ said Nigel, watching the container lorry roll away from the pier towards the unloading dock. ‘Cars from Africa, and in boxes like toys!’
‘Plastic models, scale one to one?’ said Hugh.
‘That’s it!’ Nigel laughed, and clapped him on the back. ‘Well, let’s get you all into ours, wicked petrol-burning steel contraption that it is.’
Nigel had for years cultivated an air of ironic grievance that his car, a decades-old Nissan 4x4, was not allowed off the island.
Hugh picked up his own pack, Nigel hefted Hope’s, and they set off towards the car park, with Hope and Mairi, Hugh’s mother, walking ahead with Nick between them, capering along and swinging from their hands. It was late
afternoon, about six, but the sun was higher than it would be at the same time in London, so it felt earlier. Every time he came back, Hugh had the same slight disorientation. Stornoway was disorienting in another way, too. Strung around a natural harbour, under a wide sky, the town almost made you turn in a circle to take it in as soon as you arrived. It could make you dizzy. Ever since he’d started at the Nicolson Institute, the big school after wee school, Hugh had experienced Stornoway as a textbook example of uneven development, the sort of place you’d see in television documentaries about African Lion countries where at some point the presenter, as if by contractual obligation, would let slip the phrase ‘land of contrasts’. He’d written a poem for second-year English composition that began:
Colour washes, council schemes,
seagull cries and jump-jet screams.
Ocean air and petrol stink,
Free Church elders, too much drink …
And so on. Typical teenage verse: moralistic, observant of the obvious. But all the things he’d mentioned were – to be fair to his earlier stuck-up self – still very much in evidence, apart from the ‘too much drink’, alcohol consumption having been driven out of sight and out of mind here as everywhere else. Fighter jets and choppers still came and went from RAF Stornoway, the gulls were noisy and arrogant as ever, the vehicles to this day were more polluting than those you’d find on
the mainland, and on top of all that, yet more contrasting features had been stacked: the windmills, the tower-block developments like fence-posts around the older part of town, the USS
Donald Rumsfeld
bristling in the bay, the shrimp boats and inshore trawlers slipping past it like canoes under the bowsprit of Cook’s
Endeavour
. The stiff breeze still came off the Atlantic, strong and fresh.
As for Free Church elders, well … the closest to that in the vicinity, by appearance at least, was Hugh’s father, in his usual get-up for a visit to the big city: Homburg hat over the bald pate that lay in Hugh’s probable future, close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair underneath the black brim at the sides and back, black natural-wool coat over a serge suit and blue cotton shirt and silk navy tie, polished brown brogues spattered with droplets of mud from the puddles of a recent shower. Hugh glanced away to hide his half-smile, his almost smirk. His father tried to dress the part, but he’d never quite get it right.
Fourteen years ago, half Hugh’s life ago, Nigel had without warning gone native in a big way: learning Gaelic, keeping the Sabbath, minding his speech, and regularly attending the local Free Church. He never publicly or privately professed its doctrines, but he never contradicted them either, and in Hugh’s university days had sometimes enjoyed baiting him with arguments against the mainstream understanding of biology and geology, with which sciences he shared with his son a purely pop-scientific acquaintance, and a certain disdain arising from their common study of electrical engineering. In
all of these – the Gaelic, the Wee Free adherence, the Young Earth Creationism – Nigel was placing himself in an eccentric minority even for Lewis. Within that minority he was himself a minority of one, as a non-native Gaelic speaker, a non-native churchgoer, and a man whose first name was so unusual for Lewis that he didn’t need a nickname. (With only one Nigel in the parish, if not on the island, there was no need for a disambiguating ‘Nigel Turbine’ or ‘Nigel Sassenach’.) His surname was Leosach all right, traceable to an ancestor who’d been cleared off the land near Mangersta some time in the nineteenth century, and who, after many wanderings, had settled in Hendon. Hugh had never understood why his father had adopted his ancestral religion and way of life, like some black-faced sheep let loose upon the heather, but he occasionally surmised that it was some perverse revenge on the forces and interests that had driven that earlier Morrison from his croft and his wife from her spinning wheel and creel. Certainly Nigel had made no attempt to convince or convert Hugh, Hugh’s sister Shonagh, or Mairi, who, as a hereditary and incorrigible but entirely nominal adherent of the Church of Scotland, had taken it all with a detached, tolerant bemusement.
Hugh, of course, had reacted with all the self-righteous moral indignation and disappointment appropriate for a fourteen-year-old. Even today, he couldn’t recall the scene he’d made without an inward groan and an outward blush.
*
‘It’s those damned books you’ve been reading! You’ve been filling your mind with rubbish!’
‘I think you’ll find,’ his father said mildly, ‘if you care to look into them yourself, that they were written by men of some intellect, of parts and learning, to say nothing of shrewd psychological insight and worldly wisdom.’
‘There are better books in the house, and all the great literature of the world out there on the net, right at your fingertips. Wouldn’t it be a better use of your time to read them?’
‘Novels?’ said Nigel. ‘At my age you lose the taste for fiction. Read novels and plays and the classics yourself, while you can still enjoy them and you’re young enough to learn something from them about human nature.’
‘You could still read science, history, philosophy … ’
‘Well I do,’ said his father. ‘As avidly as ever. Just not on a – not on the Lord’s Day.’
‘A day you waste completely!’
‘Waste it? I take a well-earned rest, one whole day in seven. One day when I not only don’t work, I don’t even think about work, or watch or listen to the news. And your mother appreciates not having to cook or clean that day. It stands us both in good stead for the other six, I can tell you that!’
‘Sitting about reading old books, and three hours listening to sermons and singing psalms? Call that a rest? Wouldn’t a walk do you more good?’
‘I can take a stroll up the glen, if it’s a fine afternoon, for a bit of quiet meditation. Not even the minister has a word to say against that. It’s not like the old days, though you might find
the old folk raising their eyebrows.’ A sly smile lit his sombre face for a moment.
‘But – it’s the hypocrisy of it all! How can you pretend to believe … all that … and put up with and conform to a load of stupid rules that don’t have any justification but—’
‘You will not tell me,
boy
,’ said Nigel, shaking his forefinger at Hugh with an odd flash in his eye, a mixture of anger and irony, ‘what I do or do not
believe
. And I do not
pretend
to believe anything.’
‘That must make it difficult, when you hang out with Wee Frees!’
‘Look, Hugh, I already know the men of the congregation, from the sites and the locality. Most of them make no more claim to be godly than I do. The few that do, the communicant members, the elect, are not a problem. They don’t exactly proselytise, you know! When spiritual matters come up in conversation, I keep my own counsel.’
‘Silence is consent!’
‘Not around here, it isn’t. As for the rules – well!’ Nigel spread his hands. ‘What am I losing? Sunday television? Give me a break! To put it exactly! And the rest? Swearing is vulgar, and offensive in mixed company. Theft and murder are wicked by the light of nature, likewise dishonouring your parents. Drinking and dancing? There are no pubs except in town, and the Stornoway pubs are not my scene at all, at all. I was never much of a one for the shebeen, the bothan or the ceilidh, and all your Hielan’ fiddle-de-dee music can set my foot tapping but it doesn’t move me more than that, never
has. I’m free to drink in moderation and within my means, which I do, to smoke if I want to, which I don’t aside from the occasional pipe, and the thought of adultery has never crossed my mind.’