Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘Cameras?’

‘There are no cameras in this house, but it’s something else, something you couldn’t see isn’t there.’

‘What’s that?’

‘The paper snowdrift.’

He stepped aside and waved her into the room, a bright but cramped space, half of whose ceiling sloped in parallel with the house roof, and a quarter of whose floor was fenced off by an oblong box of chicken wire over the horizontal window that relayed light from the big skylight set into the sloping ceiling. Under the window were a sewing machine and a bright red cardboard box of drawers, all partly open and overfilled with fabrics and sewing equipment. To the right of the door was a desk with a screen and keyboard, the adjoining corner and walls lined with bookshelves.

‘When I was a kid,’ Hugh went on, sweeping his hands at waist level, ‘this was all piled with the old minister’s secular books. When he retired he took his volumes of theology and sermons and Bible commentaries with him, you see, but he left all his non-religious books behind. Some of them anti-religious, even.’

Hope felt puzzled. ‘Why would a minister have anti-religious books?’

Hugh shrugged, with a forced downturn of the mouth. ‘Know your enemy, I suppose. And dropping in the odd allusion to the awful things the godless say must lend a bit of credibility and spice to a sermon. Besides, quite a lot of them were attacks on the Catholic Church.’ He smiled. ‘I remember finding one that listed the degrees of punishment for clergy who engaged in illicit intercourse, starting with, you know, a monk with a quadruped…’

‘Quite eye-opening, I should imagine.’

‘Yeah. I had great fun in that heap.’

Hope peered at the thick spines of the books on the shelves, many of which were illustrated with small grey photographs of churches or stern, bearded men.

‘Looks like Nigel has made up for the loss of the minister’s books… What happened to the others?’

‘Oh, they’re still around somewhere, as far as I know.’ He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Probably stacked in a dusty corner of the attic.’

Hope sidled past him to stand under the window, turning over the patterns and pads on top of the cardboard cabinet – ooh, sketchbooks! – and gazing out at the hill behind the house and at the sky behind it, still bright with the sun high in the west at eight o’clock.

‘You should dig them out,’ she said.

‘Hmm,’ said Hugh. ‘Don’t know if the old man would be too pleased. Anyway… time to go downstairs.’

Mairi didn’t do pinnies. She wore an embroidered denim shirt loose over denim jeans, and walked with quick clicks of cowboy-boot heels. Her brown hair had not a strand of grey, but the shade looked natural. Hope guessed that, unlike Nigel, Mairi wasn’t too proud or too conservative to swallow the gene-tampering tabs that kept the colour flowing from the follicles. She kept a small shop down by the shore, selling local craft-made tourist tat, some of it her own, and local delicacies: oatcakes, black puddings, smoked gannet chicks, barrel-salted meat so salty that just thinking about it made Hope’s mouth water, even though she didn’t like the stuff. Mairi dished up a late dinner with an impressive economy of effort and means: for the adults, slow-roasted mutton that had been in the bottom of the oven all afternoon, for Nick, a fast-baked tray of crumbed processed-meat shapes from the top of the oven; boiled potatoes and carrots on the side. As the plates steamed beneath their noses, Nigel said a slow-spoken but brief grace that concluded: ‘We ask this in the name of the Son. Amen.’

Or was it, Hope wondered, ‘in the name of the Sun’?

She’d never asked Nigel what he really believed, but Hugh had told her about the adolescent arguments he’d had with his father, and what came through these accounts and everything she’d seen and heard of the man was a studied ambiguity, an outward conformity to usage that gave nothing away of what went on behind his bright, sharp eyes. Above the armchair in the corner was a framed tapestry, in silver thread on a collage of black velvet and blue-black silk, that Mairi must have worked over many a winter evening. Its lower quarter displayed a chain-stitched Bible quote: In My Father’s house are many mansions… If it were not so, I would have told you . The word of God, verbatim from King James, unexceptionable to the most orthodox visitor, to elder or minister of the Kirk. But the picture above it was of a brilliant light in a starry sky above a blocky line of rooftops. It could have been the Star of Bethlehem. It could as well have been a UFO over a capital, or an airliner on approach over a low-build industrial estate in west London. The picture was as unexceptionable as the text, and as haunting. There were mystics, obsessives and New Agers who took these words of Jesus as a hint that he had other worlds in mind, and indeed in his care. Was Mairi, in the ambiguity of that needlework, alluding to such speculations?

Eating, and soon conversation, drove the question from her mind. Nigel was witty, Mairi warm, Hugh taciturn, and Nick just this side of insufferable: overexcited and tired at the same time, splashing his plate and the tablecloth around it with ketchup, talking too much, interrupting, leaving the table to consult the roaming Max. From where Hope sat, she could see out of the window, across the grassy shoulder of the hill on which the house was built and over to the higher hill beyond, a steep heathery mound with a rocky outcrop at the summit, above which even at this distance she could make out, as black specks, the pair of eagles who made that rock their roost. Their presence had spared the horizon a windmill, and for that Hope gave silent thanks to something – to division, to contradiction, to ambiguity perhaps.

A god of small mercies.

‘The wee fella’s doing all right,’ said Nigel.

Hope had just got Nick settled, despite his insistence that it was still daytime, and had joined the others in the big front parlour, a chillier and more formal room than the kitchen, with a wide bay window overlooking the village and a corner of the loch. Its distinctive smell was of furniture polish and a faint aroma of pipe smoke, which made Hope’s monitor ring tingle. Hugh had already produced the slightly depleted bottle of Glenmorangie (which made her wonder whether he’d also brought along his air pistol) and placed it on the coffee table amid four small glasses and alongside a teapot and four cups.

‘Yes, he’s doing fine,’ said Hope, taking a seat.

‘Lively enough,’ Nigel went on. ‘Bright.’

‘Oh yes.’

‘No problems from you not taking the fix, then?’

‘No,’ said Hope, a little taken aback. She waved a flat, open hand, fingers spread. ‘A few childhood illnesses, nothing serious.’

‘Uh huh,’ said Nigel, leaning forward and pouring tea for everyone. ‘I understand you’re in a wee bit of trouble over it.’

‘Well, yes,’ said Hope, accepting tea and a drop of milk. ‘That’s part of the reason why we’re here. Apart from, you know…’

‘How wonderful we are?’ said Mairi. ‘Don’t worry, we understand.’

‘But what are you expecting to get out of staying here?’ Nigel asked, settling back in his deep armchair, propping cup and saucer on the arm. ‘You’re welcome, of course, as long as you like, but this is hardly a refuge from the big, bad world.’

‘No, no,’ said Hope. ‘We just want – I just want a bit of space to make up my own mind.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ said Nigel. He shot her a sly glance. ‘I was a wee bit concerned that you might be thinking that an association with the Kirk I attend would give you the conscience let-out.’

‘Good Lord, no! Sorry, that just slipped out. But anyway, no, it never crossed my mind. I take it your church is against the fix?’