Peter Hamilton - If at First...

He knew what he needed, the release which came from drink and women, gluttoning out, sluicing away the memory of Edwards in a wash of basement-level normality.

He had a good feeling as he walked into the Wheatsheaf at Edith Weston; esper intuition or old-fashioned instinct, it didn’t matter which, the result was the same. Static-charged anticipation. He opened the taproom door grinning.

The Wheatsheaf’s landlord, Angus, had come up trumps; his new barmaid was a tall, strapping lass, twenty years old with a heart-shaped face, wearing her thick red hair combed back from her forehead. She was dressed in a long navy-blue skirt and purple cap-sleeve T-shirt. A deep scoop neck showed off the heavily freckled slope of her large breasts to perfection.

Eleanor Broady. Greg stored the name as she pulled him a pint of Ruddles County, topping it with a shot of Angus’s homemade whisky. It lasted longer that way, he couldn’t afford to knock back pints all night.

Greg sat back and admired her in the guttering light of the oil lamps. The Wheatsheaf was a run of the mill rural pub, which reverted true to the nineteen-hundreds ideal with the demise of the big brewery conglomerates. Flash trash fittings melting away surprisingly fast once mains electricity ended and beer had to be hand-drawn from kegs again. Either relaxing or monumentally dull according to individual sensibilities. Greg liked it. There were no demands on him in the Wheatsheaf.

He was wedged in between a group of local farm workers and some of the lads from the timber mill, billeted in the village’s old RAF base. The resident pair of warden dodgers were doing their nightly round, hawking a clutch of dripping rainbow trout they’d lifted from the reservoir.

Eleanor was a prize draw for male attention. Slightly timid from first-night nerves, but coping with the banter well enough.

Greg weighed up her personality, figuring how to make his play. Confidence gave him a warm buzz. He was seventeen years older, but with the edge his espersense gave him that shouldn’t be a problem. What amused her, topics to steer clear of, he could see them a mile off. She’d believe they were soul twins before the night was out.

Her father came in at eleven thirty. The conversation chopped off dead. He was in dungarees, a big stained crucifix stitched crudely on the front. People stared; kibbutzniks didn’t come into pubs, not ever.

Eleanor paled behind the bar, but stood her ground. Her father walked over to her, ignoring everybody, flickering yellow light catching the planes of his gaunt, angular face.

‘You’ll come home with me,’ he said quietly, determined. ‘We’ll make no fuss.’

Eleanor shook her head, mute.

‘Now.’

Angus came up beside her. ‘The lady doesn’t want to go.’ His voice was weary but calm. No pub argument was beyond Angus; he knew them all, how to deal with each. Disposal expert.

‘You belong with us,’ said her father. ‘You share our bread. We taught you better.’

‘Listen—’ Angus began, sweet reason.

‘No. She comes with me. Or perhaps you will recompense us for her schooling? Grade four in animal husbandry, she is. Did she not tell you? Can you afford that?’

‘I worked for it,’ Eleanor said. ‘Every day I worked for it. Never ending.’

Greg sensed how near to tears she was. Part of him was fascinated with the scene, it was surreal, or maybe Shakespearian, Victorian. Logic and lust urged him up.

Angus saw him closing on the bar and winced.

Greg gave him a wan reassuring smile – no violence, promise.

His imagination pictured his gland, a slippery black lens of muscle nestled at the centre of his brain, flexing rhythmically, squirting out milky liquid. Actually, it was nothing like that, but the psychosis was mild enough, harmless. Some Mindstar Brigade veterans had much weirder hallucinations.

The neurohormones started to percolate through his synapses, altering and enhancing their natural functions. His perception of the taproom began to alter, the physical abandoning him, leaving only people. They were their thoughts, tightly woven streamers of ideas, memories, emotions, interacting, fusing and budding. Coldly beautiful.

‘Go home,’ he told Eleanor’s father.

The man was a furnace of anger and righteousness. Indignation blooming at the non-believer’s impudence. ‘This is not your concern,’ he told Greg.

‘Nor is she yours, not any more,’ Greg replied. ‘No longer your little girl. She makes her own choices now.’

‘God’s girl!’

It would’ve been so easy to thump the arrogant bastard. A deluge of mayhem strobed through Greg’s mind, the whole unarmed combat manual on some crazy mnemonic recall, immensely tempting. He concentrated hard on the intransigent mind before him, domination really wasn’t his suit, too difficult and painful.

‘Go home. ’ He pushed the order, clenching his jaw at the effort.

The man’s thoughts shrank from his meddling insistence, cohesion broken. Faith-suppressed reactions, the animal urge to lash out, fists pounding, feet kicking, boiled dangerously close to the surface.

Greg thrust them back into the subconscious, knowing his nails would be biting into his palms at the exertion.

The father flung a last imploring glance to a daughter who was genuinely loved in a remote, filtered manner. Rejection triggered the final humiliation, and he fled, his soul keening, eternal hatred sworn. Greg sensed his own face reflected in the agitated thoughts, distorted to demonic preconceptions. Then he was gone.

The taproom slowly rematerialized. The gland’s neurohormones were punishing his brain. He steadied himself on the bar.

There were knowing grins which he fended off with a sheepish smile. Forced. A low grumble of conversation returned, cut with snickers. An entire generation’s legend born, this night would live for ever.

Eleanor was trembling in reaction, Angus’s arm around her shoulder, strictly paternal. She insisted she was all right, wanted to carry on, please.

Greg was shown her wide sunny smile for the first time, an endearing combination of gratitude and shyness. He didn’t have to buy another drink all night.

‘Kibbutzes always seemed a bit of a contradiction in terms to me,’ Greg said. ‘Christian Marxists. A religious philosophy of dignified individuality, twinned with state oppression. Not your obvious partnership.’ He and Eleanor were walking down the dirt track to his chalet in Berrybut Spinney, a couple of kilometres along the shore from Edith Weston. The old time-share estate’s nightly bonfire glimmered through the black trees ahead, shooting firefly sparks high into the cloudless night. A midnight zephyr was rucking the surface of Rutland Water, wavelets lapping on the mud shallows. He could hear the smothered-waterfall sound from the discharge pipes as the reservoir was filled by the pumping stations on the Welland and Nene, siphoning off the March floodwater. The water level had been low this Christmas, parched farmland placing a massive demand for irrigation. Thousands of square metres of grass and weeds around the shore that’d grown up behind the water’s summer retreat were slowly drowning under its return. As the rotting vegetation fermented it gave off a gas which smelt of rancid eggs and cow shit. It lasted for six weeks each year.

‘Not much of either in a kibbutz,’ Eleanor said, ‘just work. God, it was squalid, medieval. We were treated like people-machines, everything had to be done by hand. Their idea of advanced machinery was the plough which the shire horses pulled. God’s will. Like hell!’

Greg nodded sympathetically, he’d seen the inside of a kibbutz. She was chattering now, a little nervous. The restrictive doctrine that’d dominated her childhood had stunted the usual pattern of social behaviour, leaving her slightly unsure, and slightly turned on by new-found freedom.