Cold fusion, p.3
Cold Fusion, page 3
I was soaked to the skin, my feet scraping on the cobbles. I gave serious thought to walking straight into the pub. A shot or two of the local distillery’s best, and I’d feel more equipped to deal with my starring role in whatever fucking footage had made its way to the last bloody outpost of humanity before you fell into the Atlantic.
Who the hell had been filming? I could understand if one of the kids in the crew, overexcited and wanting something for Facebook, had pulled out a mobile and started, but when the second RIB got into trouble—no, at that point everyone would have scrambled to the rescue. We weren’t a professional crew, but that rule had been drilled into all of us. Had it been Alan? I dismissed the thought with a mix of nausea and rage.
And, when it came down to it, was I angry because the film had been made, or because it had been broadcast, and everyone here—including, I had to assume, Alice’s parents—had seen it? Why should that bother me? I’d been coming home to tell the truth, condemn myself far more thoroughly with words than any images could do.
I slid to a halt by the pub door. The sleet had changed to hail, making the cobbles treacherous. Above my head the village’s sole phone wire began to cut the wind. My childhood bedroom in the house down the street had opened right onto the telegraph pole, and I’d grown up with that low, forlorn wail. Kerra didn’t run to cable, so all our shaky Internet access came down that frail wire. No doubt the video was online too.
Shit. Was it too late for me to run? Maybe if I burst my heart slogging back the way I’d come, I’d catch the return bus bound for Wick.
A door across the road flew open. I glanced at the pub steps, but I’d missed my chance to duck in there. “Kier! Kier Mallory!”
Not a loud voice. She could throw it like a grappling hook, though, and I stood at bay while my ma, the last woman in the north Highlands to wear carpet slippers and a flowered overall in the street, shot out through our garden gate. We weren’t much of a family for hugging at the best of times. She crossed the road, tugged her hair back in its ponytail as if about to handle a messy job, and fastened a kind of wrestling hold on me. Her cheek bumped bonily off mine. “Kier! Come in the house, quick.”
“Nice to see you too, Ma.”
“Aye, in a minute, in a minute. Come indoors.”
Before anyone sees you. That was the message loud and clear. In the past it had sparked me to angry rebellion, made me clutch my boyfriend’s hand tighter or whip off my hat to reveal that I’d been all the way into town for a decent haircut instead of letting the local barber lawnmower me. Now the narrow hallway with its bare yellow bulb seemed like a refuge even to me, and I allowed her to tow me off the street.
She closed the door behind us and barely stopped short of leaning her back on it. I wondered what kind of time she’d had of it since the news broke about Alice Maguire. Strands of hair were escaping from her ponytail, and she had the air of a woman besieged. “I didn’t think you’d come home just now, Kier.”
“Why wouldn’t I come home after something like this?” From years of habit I glanced down to check I was properly positioned on the plastic runner that protected our godawful swirly hall carpet. She hadn’t snapped at me to take my boots off. Nor had she relieved me of my rucksack or wet coat. “I can go if you like. Don’t worry, I’ll keep my head low.”
“No. No, you’re here now. But—”
“Ma, please tell me. What did they say in this damn news report?”
“You mind your tongue.” Her eyes flashed. “It said that a lad from this village—and they said your full name at least three times, in case any deaf bugger here might have missed it—put his friends in danger by launching those wee dinghies in a storm. That’s what it said.”
Not a word of it was slander. That was exactly what had happened. I bowed my head. “Okay. Well, that’s why I’m back. I want to see Alice’s parents and talk to them, and—”
“And what?”
I jerked round. My rucksack was heavy with rain, the blasted plastic runner slick under my feet, and I almost fell on my arse. There at the end of the hall—like a thundercloud made flesh, a tattooed childhood nightmare in stained T-shirt and sweatpants—was my father.
I was so, so tired of being afraid of him. I’d stared right down the throat of my worst adult nightmare now. He was massive, but I was no slender reed myself anymore. I carefully laid down my rucksack. “I want to talk to the Maguires.”
“You’ll no’ go near those people. You hear me? Joe Maguire’s got a shotgun ready for you if you do. He was kind enough to tell me that in the middle of Mackie’s bar. I told him he didn’t need worry—I’d snap your wee neck for you myself next time I clapped eyes on you.”
Christ, he meant it. He was three sheets to the wind, of course—sober, it would take him an hour or so to work up to outright violence. The reek of cheap whisky hit me. It stripped years off me. All my adult graces fled. I stopped him because I had to, because my ma was behind me, blocking my way to the door. It wasn’t that triumphant moment I’d read about when battered kids grow big and lairy enough to give as good as they get. It was clumsy and shameful, and it nearly sprained my wrist, throwing out my hand to catch him flat in the chest, like slowing an oncoming train. “No. Pack it in!”
He laughed. I didn’t blame him. I’d sounded about ten years old. He knocked my hand aside and drove me back against the wall, gathering up the front of my coat. I didn’t stand a chance. Maybe if I came back in another ten years’ time, having spent that decade on a fishing boat yanking up nets and pulling ropes… He was slightly off balance, that was all, and I used that to spin him round and knock open the living room door. My ma was cowering in the hall, only stifling screams because the one thing worse than a family brawl was letting the neighbours know.
“All right!” I rasped into his face. “Do whatever the hell you want. But not in front of her.”
We lurch-waltzed into the room. I managed to bang the door shut behind me with my foot. I’d always been ashamed to let her find me after a beating—that I’d caused it, that I’d earned it, that I hadn’t been able to stop it from happening again. He never laid a hand on her. He was good old Dave Mallory, life and soul of Mackie’s, a hardworking, church-on-Sundays fisherman of the old school. It had just been me.
It still was. I’d destroyed my parents’ domestic peace from a distance, and now I’d had the balls to come home and do it firsthand. I could almost see his point, as he shoved me across the floor, overturning a coffee table and sending his bloody throne of a swivel armchair into a spin. The TV was blatting out a high-octane game show, and the neighbours would put down the sounds of my humiliating death to that.
But I didn’t want to die here. Once Eddie had told me about the video footage, I’d have been happy enough for a giant wave to sweep through the dunes and finish me, but I didn’t want to exit this life with my face mashed down into a nylon 1950s carpet. The old man cornered me, raising his fist. I flung up an arm to block him—too slowly—only enough to turn a knockout blow to a stinging crack in the mouth. And then I hit him back.
It wasn’t much. I was sober, and I didn’t have his motivation. I caught him one punching shove in the chest. He staggered back and thumped down neatly into his chair. I waited, breathing hard, for him to spring back up. But after a moment he grunted, turned his bleary gaze back to the TV and started to snore.
Sick laughter rattled me. Was that all it took to defeat the monster under the bed? I’d sometimes dreamed of having a stand-up, knock-down fight with him. It would have taken place somewhere public and lasted for ages. It would’ve been scrupulously fair, and afterwards—when I’d beaten him by my superior strength and wits—he would’ve shaken my hand.
As it was, I picked up his limp fist and put it on the arm of his chair. I checked his pulse, leaned over him and pulled up one eyelid. He was fine, just out cold courtesy of three quarters of a bottle of Sark. I put the remaining quarter near to him so he wouldn’t start bellowing at my ma for it when he woke up. I set the coffee table upright and straightened the sofa. She hated an untidy house.
She was sitting on the bottom stair when I let myself back into the hall. As soon as she saw me she jolted upright. She was also the last woman in Scotland to carry a lavender-scented cotton hanky in her pocket at all times. She whipped it out, shaking away its crisply ironed folds. “Oh, Kier—your face!”
She was crying. I’d have cried too if I hadn’t known her main concern was for the street and the village and anyone else in this arsehole’s armpit who might see that good old Dave Mallory had hit his kid somewhere visible this time. I dodged her swipe with the hanky. My jaw was still aching from Alan Frost’s sedating blow. I didn’t want anyone else to touch me for a very long time. “I’m all right. He’s passed out in front of the telly. Will you be okay with him?”
“Oh, yes. He never hurts me.” She sobbed and blew her nose. “He’ll shout and grump at me for an hour, and then he’ll wander off to bed, unless…”
“Unless I’m still here to piss him off.”
She knew I had nowhere else to go. I waited to see if that would make any difference, but she only stood there. Well, it was fair enough. I was twenty-five years old, and since I’d walked out on the family business, I was no longer entitled to a room in this house.
“All right,” I said as gently as I could, because if I was alone in the world, at least the world was out there for me. Hers was bounded by these four walls. “Look, I came back because I—I thought I should face the Maguires.”
“Oh, Kier. That wouldn’t have helped. She was their only one.”
I was done here, then. I took the handkerchief, found a clean bit and wiped my lip, because leaving a bloodstain on your ma’s cheek after kissing her goodbye was bad by any standards. “Take care, Ma. I’ll call you when I’ve got a new address, okay?”
My hand was on the latch of the front door when she stopped me. “He was trying to quit,” she said fiercely, as if I’d denied it. “Drinking much less. And then this.”
I’d heard that song all my life. I’d listened and believed. Maybe the difference now was that I already had so much guilt on my shoulders that this last brick of it had to drop out of my rucksack and into the gutter where it belonged. “Ma, he was trying to quit before they cut the fishing quotas. Then before he found out I was gay. Then before he totalled his car out joyriding with Richie McNab. He just drinks. And that’s fine. I’m no better than he is. But that part of it’s not my fault.”
* * * * *
I was on my way past Mackie’s when a figure appeared in the doorway. “Running away back to sea?” a broad north-coast accent enquired. “They’ll never let you aboard with a face like that. Come inside.”
Reluctantly I followed Mackie junior up the steps and into the bar. Mackie senior was nowhere to be seen, and I guessed the torch had passed, father to son as our local God intended. If I’d stayed put on my old man’s fishing boat, none of this would have happened. He might have got leathered and chucked me overboard one night, but…none of this. I hoisted myself obediently onto the stool Mackie indicated, watching him take up position behind the bar. Mercifully I was his only customer.
Not even that. “Don’t bother uncorking the Bollinger, Mac. I’m skint.”
“Och, if I can’t give you one on the house on the occasion of your auspicious return, when can I?”
“Fuck you.” I took the shot glass from him gratefully. “Ta, though.”
I sat in silence while he turned away and got on with polishing the optics. The pub offered no accommodation, and I couldn’t have paid for it anyway. The scotch stung my lip. I tasted blood through the malt and caught sight of myself in the mirror. Jesus wept… Surreptitiously I grabbed a paper napkin and tried to clean up. With that accomplished, I began digging through my pockets for change or a folded-up fiver. One shot on an empty stomach had pushed reality back to a slightly less nose-to-nose distance. Another would do the job even better. I was certainly all done with reality for today.
Of course Mackie was watching me in the mirror. Like all good barmen, he had the gift of keeping a subtle eye on his clientele. “You can have a refill, sonny Jim,” he said, snagging my glass back and pouring me one. “But I’ve got to tell you, the one thing I don’t want to see sitting over that bar top from me in ten years’ time is another Dave Mallory getting shitfaced.”
I downed my second drink in one and almost choked. “No chance of that. I’m on my way out of here right now, back to…”
But I didn’t have the energy left in me for that kind of lie. Mackie continued his work in silence, then said, out of the blue, “How’s the writing going, then?”
“The what?”
“Your writing. Didn’t you get some stuff published in the Northern Poetry Gazette? I thought you were gonna do some kind of poetic reporting out there on your peace boat.”
Wow. He was a good barman. Finding a safe small-talk subject must have been a tall order with me tonight, and I appreciated it. He’d been a close friend of Alice’s too. I tried to dredge up memories of the hot, sweet thrill I’d felt when the Gazette had taken my work. It had only been last year. Now it felt like a lifetime ago, and somebody else’s lifetime at that. I’d been a back-of-the-envelope, sea-shanty poet for as long as I could remember, gutting and filleting fish to the rhythm of whatever strange words were blowing into my head off the northern gale. I’d never thought any of it worthy of preserving, and I’d certainly known better than to open my mouth about it at home. In fact it had been Alan who’d persuaded me to send some of it off, as part of a drunken bet when I’d first started opening my stupid soul for gutting and filleting by him.
I set the shot glass sharply down. “Yep. Seamus Heaney meets Moby Dick. That was gonna be me.”
“What happened?”
I’d watched my first whale kill from the deck of the Sea Hawk, and it had knocked every word of poetry out of me forever. “Not much. It just all went to shit, like everything else. I tell you what, though.” I drew an arcane pattern on the bar’s damp fibreglass top, remembering. “You’ve given me an idea. Of where I can go next, I mean. I came here to talk to Alice’s mam and dad, but I’m getting some hints that I shouldn’t.”
“Well, I didn’t want to say—”
“Don’t. Everyone else has said—pretty much everything. But in the remote event that the Maguires do want to see me, I’m not about to run away. I’ll go out to Spindrift and doss there for a few nights.”
Mackie looked at me oddly. “Spindrift?”
“Yeah. I used to hole up there a lot when I wanted to write and my dad wanted me to catch fish. Schedule clash, you know?”
“Yeah, I know. Look, Mal, I don’t want to confirm your view that the world’s gone to shit on a sledge, but Spindrift’s not there anymore.”
I tried to take this in. At first it wasn’t so hard. From its name to my sea-washed summer memories, the place had always felt dreamlike anyway, a bubble ready to pop or blow away. You could find it on a map if you were determined—Spindrift Craft Village, a collection of chalets and huts in the dunes, occupied by a shifting population more random and motley still. Artists and sculptors, potters, dreamers…the odd recovering junkie, lost souls a penny a pound. “How can it be gone?”
“It never existed by magic, you know. Turned out old man Calder was financing the whole thing.”
The Much Honoured Hugo Calder, Laird of Kerra. My junior class had been rehearsed in how to address him before a school outing to Kerra Castle. I recalled the scent of cedars, the twisting and turning of paths around the fantastic red-sandstone Victorian pile. Round turrets in the French style, rhododendrons blazing. “How do you know?”
“He died last year. He’d been a grand old fella—left hand never knew what his right hand was doing—but he’d been supporting all kinds of lame ducks and lost causes over the years. God help them now.”
Artists who couldn’t afford studio space, potters without a wheel. Empty rooms where a dopey kid could hang out, watch the waves and duck under his father’s radar for a while. “Didn’t old Calder have a son?”
“Aye, but he left the property away from him, the money and the land and everything. He was an odd lad, the son—something wrong with him, people always said.” Mackie paused to bring a pint glass to high polish with his towel. “God knows who inherited it all, but the fact is that Spindrift—all that shoreline and the moors behind it—got bought up by developers. Fancy holiday homes, they reckon. Tennis courts and go-kart tracks, the whole tourist works.”
I was struggling to breathe. I knew I’d just found a focus, a limited grief my mind could grasp among the infinite miseries around me, but this news pierced me as nothing else had. Mackie looked as if he knew he’d chucked a grenade. His brow creased in concern. “Look,” he said, “if you can hang around until closing, you can doss down on a sofa in here for tonight if you’re desperate. I’m sorry not to ask you home, but my flat’s rammed, what with Jennifer and the two bairns.”
He had children. I’d forgotten. I was being a selfish pig. “You must have your hands full,” I managed rawly. “How are they doing—the kids and Jen?”
“Oh, they’re fine. Thriving.” Mackie came out from behind the bar with a set of fresh beer mats. He’d begun to distribute them on the tables when he glanced up, peering through the frosting on the glass. “I tell you what, Mal—here comes Ali and Sholto and the farmhands from out by Maguire’s. Do you want to be elsewhere?”
