Ken MacLeod - Intrusion

‘O… K…’ Nick said, looking up and around. ‘If that’s how you do it… I think it’s about an hour before noon. And that means it’s time I went and found my mummy and asked her for tea and a chocolate digestive.’

He cocked his head slightly, as if listening, then laughed and turned round.

One of Hope’s feet slipped off its stone and she stumbled, flailing her arms, then regained her balance. She crunched across pebbles to Nick.

‘Hello, Mummy.’ He didn’t look surprised to see her, or offended that she’d snuck up on him.

‘Time to get off that rock, I think,’ she said. ‘The tide’s nearly around you.’

Nick looked down, then held out his arms towards her. She lifted him off the boulder and swung him around and set him down on the shingle.

‘Did I hear something about tea and a biscuit?’ she said.

‘Oh yes please,’ said Nick.

They set off towards the back of the shop.

‘But I don’t think he understands about tea,’ Nick said.

‘Who doesn’t?’

‘Max.’

Hope looked down. ‘But Max isn’t with you.’

‘Oh no, wait,’ said Nick. He turned around and called out: ‘Max! Max!’

The toy monkey popped its head up from behind a boulder a few metres away, then bounded from stone to stone and jumped into Nick’s arms.

‘He’s with me now ,’ he said, in a voice that meant he thought he’d got away with something on a clever technicality.

‘You can tell him it’s like getting your battery charged up,’ Hope said.

‘What’s like?’

Hope leaned down and tickled Nick’s tummy. ‘Tea and biscuits.’

Nick giggled.

‘I don’t think he understands…’

His voice trailed off.

‘Batteries?’ Hope said. ‘Surely Max understands batteries?’

‘Oh yes, of course he does,’ said Nick.

But he didn’t try to explain biscuits as batteries to Max; in fact he said nothing at all as they walked back to the shop to recharge.

They sat around the table in the back room of the shop. Mairi had her back to the window, keeping half an eye on the front of the shop, and sharing a pot of tea with Nick. Hope sipped instant coffee. Mairi chatted to Nick, telling him about the village, and about the local sealife, the seals and trout and the herring and mackerel out in the ocean, and the gannets that dived from the cliffs.

‘Was the sea always here?’ Nick asked.

Mairi glanced at Hope, half amused, half querying.

‘The sea has not always existed,’ she said.

‘Where did it come from?’

Hope, rather unfairly, expected Mairi to start talking about the six days of creation. Now, which day was the sea created?

‘The water came from space,’ Mairi said, ‘billions of years ago.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ said Nick. ‘I saw it on the telly. Comets! Whoosh! Splash!’

‘Careful you don’t splash your tea.’

‘All right, Granny. But that’s not what I meant. I meant the sea out the back there.’

‘Oh, that,’ said Mairi, glancing over her shoulder. ‘No, Nick, that loch wasn’t always there. Thousands of years ago, in the last ice age, the sea was much farther out. The islands like Pabay Mòr and Pabay Beag that you saw the other day, across from Valtos with the beach, and the big islands to the south like Berneray and Taransay and Scalpay and even Uist, they were all hills of the same Long Island back then.’

‘So you could walk out there? To the wee island?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Mairi. ‘You could walk out there too. That would all have been a glen, you see, and the island would have been a hill.’

‘So where was the water?’

‘It was all in the ice, piled up above the hills.’

Nick thought about this.

‘But all that ice must have pushed the land down, so the sea—’

‘Wasn’t as far down as it might have been!’ Mairi cried. She clapped her hands together. ‘Clever boy! Yes, and today the land is still coming up with the weight of the ice off it, and the sea is still rising too with the ice melting into it. So it’s complicated.’

‘But,’ said Nick, frowning, ‘long ago there was ice on the top of the hills and the sea was way out, like if the tide had gone out a really really really long way, and stayed out for years and years and years , so there was grass and trees and things where the loch is, and there were animals and people and villages and smoke and everything.’

Mairi shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I don’t know about the villages, but all the rest, yes. It would have been a bonny glen.’

‘And they had boats made out of bent branches and skins.’

‘They did that,’ said Mairi. ‘They’re called coracles. That’s how the Gospel came to Scotland, when Columba paddled across the sea from Ireland in a coracle.’

‘And they had gliders made out of skins and bent sticks too.’ Nick planed his hand above his head. ‘Flying over the glen!’

Mairi shook her head. ‘No, dear, there’s no evidence – they didn’t have gliders, the people in the ice age and after.’

‘They did so!’ Nick sounded indignant. ‘I saw them!’

‘Where did you see them?’

He looked down into his cup. ‘Pictures,’ he said, quietly.

Mairi ruffled his hair. ‘Of course. It must have been a story, or on the telly.’

‘It was pictures,’ Nick insisted.

‘Yes, dear,’ said Mairi. ‘It was pictures, that’s all.’

She stood up. ‘Well, I’d better get back to the counter, and I’m sure you’d like to get back out in the sun. Enjoy it while it’s here, eh?’

After they’d both gone, Mairi to the shop and Nick to the shore, Hope sat with her glasses on but seeing nothing.

When Nick had been a year younger, he’d been troubled by vivid dreams just before falling asleep. He’d called them pictures.

No way, she thought, was he going to be an object of scientific investigation. Not by her doing.

Hugh’s phone was ringing. The trouble was, the phone was in the back pocket of his jeans, underneath his one-piece waterproof overall, and he was lying on his back in a safety frame underneath a turbine, spanner in hand and a brace of screwdrivers in his mouth. Normally in that circumstance he’d have let the phone ring out and go to voicemail – yesterday morning the same thing had happened and the message, when he’d finally taken it, was some Asian-sounding guy claiming the implausible name of Joe, probably a cold-caller – but this time the ringing wasn’t normal. It was a peculiar harsh bray that he hadn’t heard before, at least not since he’d set the phone up a couple of years ago. He wasn’t quite sure what the ringtone meant, but he was sure it was nothing good.

He elbowed the concrete and rolled the frame out from under, put down the screwdrivers and spanner, and stood up carefully in the low-ceilinged turbine chamber beneath the half-dismantled tower. He unzipped his overall and reached in awkwardly to the back pocket. The phone was still ringing when he took it out, and the screen was flashing bright red letters that told him exactly what the ringing meant:

The burglar alarm in the Islington flat was reporting a break-in in progress.

Shit shit shit. Hugh punched through to the house wifi to find out what was going on. The camera in the hall, facing the door, showed the wood around the locks splitting. Thud followed thud. There was no sound of the alarm: it was a silent alarm, which right at this moment would be alerting the nearest police station. For a moment Hugh felt a grim satisfaction at the thought.

The door jamb gave way, splinters flying. The door banged wide against the wall, and the police burst in. Hugh stared in disbelief. He hadn’t expected this at all. The first officer through wore a visored helmet and a flak jacket. He arrived at a slowing run, carried by the momentum of the final swing of the battering ram, and stopped just short of colliding with the bikes. The rest, the squad of six or so who crowded in after him, were in standard police uniform. They looked alert but not anxious as they edged past the bikes, loomed into the view of the camera for a moment, then dispersed to the various rooms.