Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘I meant, why did you change your mind about the fix?’ She told him. By the time she had finished, she was crying in his arms.

‘Oh, Hope,’ he said, stroking the back of her head.

And nothing more. After a while her shoulder and her neck hurt. She sniffed, blinked, pulled away and sat back at the other side of the sofa, legs curled up. A slug-trail of snot glistened on Hugh’s shoulder. Hope tugged out a tissue and dabbed it off, then settled back again.

‘Nothing to say?’ she said.

Hugh sipped his whisky and looked at her. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said.

‘Oh, damn it!’ Hope felt all the more irritated with him and with herself for having picked up Hugh’s Leosach genteel swearing. She reached for the bottle and poured a small dram into the empty glass, and a larger volume of water. Even so, the first sip felt like fire in her mouth. She waited for the sensation to subside to a spreading glow. Along with it came the realisation that she’d crossed a line, trivial though the transgression was. Hugh watched without comment, then raised his glass.

‘ Slainte ,’ he said, in an ironic tone.

‘ Skol . Now, talk, for crying out loud.’

Hugh took a deep breath. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You know I’d prefer you to take it. I’ve said so often and often. I’ve never understood your objection. In fact I think it’s irrational, to be honest. But I’d rather you didn’t take it at all than take it because you feel defeated. That isn’t you, Hope.’

‘Well, I do feel defeated,’ Hope said. ‘Because I am. Or I will be. Like I said, it makes no difference in the long run what I do. It all ends up in the same place, with me swallowing that thing. Hah! Might as well wash it down with whisky right now, and get it over with.’

She actually reached for the tablet. Hugh’s hand shot forward and grabbed her wrist.

‘Not like that,’ he said.

She relented, not that she’d really intended to do it. She’d got the reaction she’d wanted. Well, maybe. She sipped the whisky, regarding him. After more than three months without alcohol, even this small amount was making her feel a little light-headed, a little loquacious and pugnacious.

‘So, like what?’ she demanded.

‘Like, somewhere where you’re not pressured all the time, where you’re not being got at. Where you can make your own mind up. We could just go.’

‘Go where?’ Hope demanded. ‘I’m not going to the other side, and everywhere on this side is just like here, and everywhere outside them both is a shit-hole and either a failed state or a tyranny where the fix is bloody compulsory.’

‘Just because Jack Crow told you to go to Russia,’ said Hugh, teasing, ‘there’s no reason to rule out the other side. I mean, there’s work in Russia.’

‘There’s work, all right,’ Hope said. ‘Work or starve. And there’s always a lower depth for that, all the way down to scavenging the rubbish dumps. No thanks.’

‘Anyway,’ said Hugh, ‘I wasn’t thinking of Russia. I was thinking of Lewis.’

‘Lewis?’ Hope wasn’t sure whether to take him seriously. ‘From what you’ve told me, Lewis is even more infested with social workers than London.’

‘Yes, it is,’ said Hugh. He took a long swallow of whisky. ‘Thing about social workers in Lewis, though. You can see them coming from a long way off.’

Hope laughed. He had that dry, disillusioned, defiant note in his voice that was the up side of the Leosach gloom, and a wry gleam in his eye. This was the Hugh she knew. Not the strange man who stashed a powerful air pistol and a bottle of single malt and who saw people from the past walking through walls. But they were the same man, that was what she would have to get used to.

‘Besides,’ he said, ‘it’s a different country. Different laws, different health and social services and everything. They still don’t have all the databases joined up. Not by a long chalk.’

‘Yeah, but come on,’ she said. ‘It’s hardly practical for us to move to Lewis.’

‘I’m not talking about moving,’ Hugh said. ‘More like a long holiday, and if we have to stay longer, well, we can both work. You can work from anywhere, and there’s plenty on Lewis that I can do.’

‘I don’t see much demand for fancy joinery on the long island.’

‘No, but – they’ve started dismantling the wind turbines, my dad’s been lured back to the farm from the croft by the wages they’re holding out to him. Plenty of on-site work there for me too – even theoretical knowledge must be worth something, it must come in handy.’

He didn’t sound like he was convincing himself.

‘And what about your work right now?’ she asked.

‘The Ealing jobs? Each of them just takes a few days, so I can leave at short notice if I have to. The whole lot finishes in a couple of weeks. Beginning of June at the latest. By then it’s just a matter of taking Nick out of the nursery a month before the summer holidays start anyway.’

‘A month…’ The reminder troubled her. ‘You know, my next check-up’s a month from now. If I haven’t taken the fix by then, they’ll know I lied to Dr Garnett, and then they’ll really start turning the screws. So all that leaves me is two weeks in June to decide about the fix. Two weeks of this no-pressure situation in Lewis? Huh.’

Hugh looked a bit hurt.

‘OK, it’s not much, but it’s better than staying here. Isn’t it?’

Hope shrugged, and gazed moodily into her glass. She swirled the dilute whisky around, and breathed the fumes.

‘It isn’t just a matter of time,’ she said. ‘It’s a matter of knowing there’s something I can do if I do decide not to take it. I mean, it’s a big step. It would mean going on the run, basically. And Lewis has never struck me as a good place to start running.’

‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘It’s a place to stop running. I have lots of friends and relations on Lewis. All we have to do is keep moving around for six months. Social services up there aren’t so efficient or well-resourced that they can go on chasing us. They go after easy targets, because they measure success by targets, so to speak. No doubt they’ll want to make an example of someone, but if we make that enough hassle for them, it doesn’t have to be you.’

‘That’s a bit selfish,’ said Hope

‘Yes. And?’ Again with the wry smile.

‘It would just set up somebody else,’ Hope said.

Hugh looked her straight in the eye.

‘Oh!’ Hope said. ‘That’s… You think that’s what it’s all about, for me. That I don’t care what happens to any of the other mums in this situation, so long as it doesn’t happen to me.’

‘“Do it to Julia”,’ Hugh said, in a heavy voice, so she could hear the quotes.

‘Who’s Julia?’

‘In Nineteen Eighty-Four , remember?’

Hope had only scrappy memories of the book, which had been compulsory reading in Year Two English in high school. There had been something horrible about rats, which she had tried to put out of her mind. And the teacher had explained how it was really all about how the West and China had always been allies against Russia, from the Cold War all the way through to the Warm War. That had troubled her a bit, because she was sure she remembered being scared of China when she was a small child. But she hadn’t said anything, because China was definitely friendly now, and Russia definitely wasn’t. In Russia the government watched people all the time, with cameras everywhere, and everyone was afraid to say what they really thought. Whereas here we had transparency and accountability. Everything was transparent and people were accountable. Or everything was accountable and people were transparent. One or the other.