Ken MacLeod: Intrusion

‘I don’t see how you can learn things sitting inside,’ she’d said. ‘Only the new priests do that, and they don’t know fuck all.’

Hugh had found this very funny, but when he’d swaggeringly repeated it to his mum, she’d frowned and asked him where he’d heard that sort of language and she hadn’t been too pleased when he wouldn’t tell her because he didn’t want to snitch on Voxy.

Voxy! Hugh walked carefully around the perimeter barriers of the site, looking for her. He didn’t call out – he knew he didn’t need to. But he couldn’t see her anywhere. All the time Murdo Helmand’s taunt kept coming back to his mind, like he could hear it inside his head. Only crazy people talk to themselves. But he wasn’t crazy and he hadn’t been talking to himself. He’d been talking to Voxy. He’d always known that other people couldn’t see Voxy, but it hadn’t seemed important. It was just one of those things, like that other people couldn’t hear things you said in your head (except Voxy, of course, who could). Now it seemed very important indeed, because it meant that if people saw or heard him talking to Voxy, they would think he was talking to himself, and only crazy people talked to themselves.

Hugh never saw Voxy again, and whenever he saw people that other people didn’t see he didn’t speak to them. Some of these occasions were more significant than others. Now and again he thought about Voxy, but fewer and fewer times as he grew up. The funny thing was, though, that whenever he thought about Voxy, he saw her in his mind as she would be now, if she’d grown up in pace with him. He could still remember her as she’d appeared when he was a little kid, and she was a slightly older and cleverer kid, but when he spontaneously thought of her, it was always as a girl, or later as a young woman, about the same age as himself. In his adolescence she featured sometimes in his sexual fantasies, but not often, and he came to turn his mind away from her as a figure in such fantasies – he became uncomfortable with it, not because he felt it was wrong, or thought of her as a sister or anything like that, but because she was in a sense too real, more real than the images of real girls he knew, or the women in the pictures he found on the net.

One evening, in his third year at university, he met her. She was singing in the Students Union bar of Aberdeen University. Hugh was standing at the serving hatch, waiting for a pint of bitter, when he heard a woman’s voice and a guitar. Nobody sang in bars any more, not even in Students Union bars, so he turned around. The woman was sitting cross-legged on the bench at the rear wall, head down, strumming a guitar that lay across her knees. She wore tight blue jeans tucked into high brown boots, and a wool open-mesh jacket over a tight T-shirt. Her dark brown hair was piled in a loose knot, skewered by what looked like a wooden knitting needle, on top of her head.

‘Twenty pounds,’ said the bar person. Hugh handed over the coin and took the plastic glass, without looking away from the woman, and let the guy behind him move to the head of the queue. The woman was singing some English folk song. As she hit the chorus, she tossed her head back, and Hugh saw her face for the first time. He nearly dropped the glass. He actually splashed some of the beer, which at a pound a gulp was something he’d never done before.

She looked exactly like he’d imagined Voxy would look now.

His startlement passed. He took a sip and edged towards the rear wall, weaving around standing groups and Formica-topped woodchip tables and orange plastic chairs. The fluorescent lighting, dim but harsh, glared off the Union bar’s white walls and colourful DrinkAware posters of vomit pools, car crashes, liver dissections and facial injuries. White noise and discords were just audible enough on the sound system to disrupt normal conversation and jangle the nerves, but not loud enough to drown out the woman’s singing.

A small crowd, a dozen or so, had formed a semicircle around her, and elsewhere in the room heads had turned to face her, some with tentative half-smiles, some with looks of vague puzzlement, a few with frowns. Hugh elbowed into the semicircle. The abstracted, unfocused gaze of the woman’s big dark eyes snagged on the intensity of his look. He responded to the eye-locked moment with a quick, casual nod, as if she were someone he knew, which he felt she was. Her double-take became a triple, but it didn’t shake her voice by a note.

She was into the final chorus and one or two of her listeners had joined in by the time Hugh felt a parting in the press of bodies behind him, then a nudge.

‘Excuse me.’

Hugh turned to meet the vaguely familiar face of a male student: glasses, ponytail, piercings, strands of beard, busy important frown. Oh, yes: Craig, the Student Union’s social secretary, recognisable from his campaign flyers a few months earlier. Hugh stepped aside. Craig took a few paces forward and stopped, leaning slightly forward from the waist.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said to the woman, ‘but I’m going to have to ask you to stop singing.’

The woman shrugged. ‘I have stopped,’ she said. She had an accent that Hugh could only identify as English, and that sounded to him posh. The accent wasn’t in the least like Voxy’s, but the voice was. Her complexion and her eyes made him think of rowan and heather, of peat lochs under grey skies.

A few voices were raised in objection.

‘Fuck off, Craig!’

‘She’s no using a mike!’

‘Oi!’

Craig turned and glared, then spread his hands. ‘Nothing to do with me, folks,’ he said. ‘It’s the law, and you know it. If we allow singing or music in here, we’ll lose our licence.’

‘Aw, fuck, can you no turn a—’

‘Same goes for swearing,’ Craig added. ‘Creating a hostile environment.’

‘It’s all right,’ the woman said. She stood up and waved her forearms. ‘Thanks for the support, everyone, but leave it.’

A few hands clapped, Hugh’s included. The woman turned away and clicked open the snaps of a guitar case. The crowd dispersed, part of it following the social secretary in a still-protesting huddle. Hugh stayed where he was. The woman packed away her guitar. She seemed to be on her own.

‘That was good,’ said Hugh.

‘Thank you.’ She frowned. ‘Do I know you?’

‘No,’ Hugh said. ‘But…’

He didn’t know what to say.

‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘I thought you looked vaguely familiar.’

‘Maybe I just looked familiarly vague.’ Hugh was at that time working on the theory that when you couldn’t think what to say, you said the first thing that came into your head, however flippant or banal. It seemed to work for everyone else.

The woman gave a small, unimpressed laugh.

‘Could I get you a drink?’ Hugh said.

‘Oh, would you?’ She sounded surprised. ‘Thanks awfully.’

‘What are you having?’

‘A vodka and lime, please. That’s not too girlie, is it? You can say it’s for yourself, can’t you?’ She grimaced. ‘I don’t have my cert updated, and anyway…’ She shrugged one shoulder, then looked away.

‘Yeah, I know,’ said Hugh. This time he knew what to say, but didn’t because the woman herself so plainly didn’t want to speak about it: the humiliation and annoyance of having to show she wasn’t pregnant before she could buy alcohol. Instead, he sighed sympathetically, then smiled complicitly. ‘Mind my pint.’

He put the glass carefully on the nearest low table, and rejoined the queue. By the time he got back the beer was flat. He didn’t much mind.

‘Thanks, uh…?’

‘Hugh Morrison.’

‘Thanks, Hugh.’ She sipped, regarding him.