Of course it’s not just building roads any more. The old Highways Department took over all the public works. One of them was insulation. Lagging pipes was the first emergency job. Loads of insulation had to be laid on in the last summer before the first Big Freeze. That’s why all of us who work for the Highway are called laggers. Well, it’s one reason. The other is that ‘lagger’ used to be the swear word for people like us. It came into fashion just after ‘neds’ went out.

  Not that I mind. I always wanted to be a lagger. Ever since I was about eight years old, anyway. That was when some new plastic water mains were laid in the street round the corner. Me and my wee gang were tearaways. We weren’t as bad as folks said we were. OK, we did break all the windows of the JCB digger one night. But we thought the guys who laid the pipes were great. They had yellow plastic helmets and bright yellow plastic waistcoats and big muddy boots. They looked tough. They looked like we might want to be like when we grew up. Them and fighter pilots and the characters in Grand Theft Auto. Guess what. You need university to be a fighter pilot. Two of my pals died five years later doing Grand Theft Auto in real life. Handbrake turns don’t work so well on country roads. Funny that.

  Anyway.

  Apart from the truckers the other people in the room giving us the eye were locals. Five natives and five incomers. The natives were in their usual suspicious huddle. They just gave us a long enough glance to figure out we weren’t about to attack them. Then they turned away. Their backs were about as welcoming as rolled-up hedgehogs.

  Four of the white settlers sat in a more relaxed way around another table. Two couples, I guessed. English accents, or maybe posh Scottish.

  ‘ – so then Malcolm sold his flat in the New Town and bought – ’

  Sudden pause. They looked at us, and then they looked down their noses. On the bridge of each of these noses was a black squiggle, like the bottom half of a glasses frame. The latest gadget from Carbon Glen. It seemed our faces weren’t online anywhere as bad guys, because the incomers all looked up and blinked and went on talking.

  ‘ – she’s still with the World Trade Organization, and she’s very worried – ’

  This checking us out stuff was as much of an insult as what the trucker had said. One look at their faces told me they’d had the Reverse treatment. It’s supposed to turn back the clock, but it doesn’t. Not quite. Smoothes out the skin and tightens up the muscles. Helps the bones and joints too, I’m told. But it never wipes away all the signs of age. It’s illegal in Scotland, because it does things to your genes. There’s laws against GM crops, for crying out loud. GM people are an even bigger no-no. But what few cops there are in the Highlands are too busy – or have too much sense – to hunt down Frankenfolk. Place is crawling with them.

  The woman behind the counter, a broad-in-the-beam local who for sure had not had the Reverse treatment, was still tonging strips of bacon into rolls so fresh I could smell them, when I noticed the fifth incomer checking us out.

  This lassie was a crustie. Her black hair was in matted braids. Her face was not bad and had been washed in the last day or two. Over the back of her chair was a hide jacket. She wore a shapeless woollen sweater. Long legs in some kind of tweedy tartan trousers. Feet in buckle-sided boots propped on a plastic chair. She was sitting at a small table by herself, over by the window around the side of the counter. She had a white teapot and a cup of green tea in front of her. Beside them on the table was a scatter of pages printed off from the day’s papers.

  She looked us up and down in a lazy way and then looked back at her papers. When we sat down at the empty table beside her she paid us no attention. She did swing her legs off the chair and lean forward over the off-prints. I could smell her. It wasn’t a stink. Sweat and wool and something like the sea.

  Finished the bacon roll and on to my second coffee. I was fiddling with the cross-bolt, turning it over my fingers. We were talking about the day’s job when I felt a stare on my neck. I turned and saw the lassie looking hard at me, then down at my hands. No, she was looking at the thing in my hands. Then she looked away. She shrugged into her big jacket, picked up a bulging carrier bag, stood up and walked out.

  4. AILISS

  ‘Nice ass,’ said Euan.

  ‘Well boys,’ I said when we’d watched her out, ‘about time we did the same.’

  ‘Not walking like that,’ said Euan, getting back at me.

  I nodded to agree we were evens. Euan was already rolling his cigarette. He wagged his tongue back and forth against his top lip. One up to him.

  ‘Move your arse,’ I told him. ‘You can go shotgun. Smoke all you want.’

  I couldn’t be sure if this was one up to me.

  As we drove back up the street we saw the girl from the cafe trudging along the side of the road. The Tesco bag was weighing her down on one side. I slowed the truck and wound down the cab window.

  ‘Want a lift?’

  The girl opened her mouth and said something. Out of the corner of my eye I saw two hurtling shapes, black and spiky as ninja knives. As my head whipped round to follow them I saw them skimming above the loch at about twenty metres. The sound of the fighter jets hammered over us a moment after they’d disappeared.

  ‘What?’ I asked.

  ‘I said, “Where are you heading?”’

  ‘Strathcarron way,’ I said.

  ‘Fine,’ she said. She crossed the road and walked around the front of the truck. Murdo opened the door and moved over and squashed into the middle seat. The girl stepped up and swung in. She put the bag down between her boots and slammed the door. As she turned back with a smile and a thank you her hair flicked and I could see she didn’t have a phone on her ear.

  I let the engine’s flywheel bite again and released the brake. We slid forward out of the village. I glanced sideways. Murdo was wrinkling his nose. I didn’t mind the smell at all.

  ‘What’s your name?’ I asked.

  ‘Ailiss,’ she said, looking ahead and around like a kid at the front of the top deck of a bus.

  ‘I’m Jase,’ I said. ‘This is Murdo.’

  ‘You’re not from here,’ she said.

  I could just about tell she was. Her accent was a bit like Euan’s.

  ‘I’m from Glasgow,’ I said. ‘Murdo’s from Stornoway.’

  ‘The Highway comes from all over,’ Murdo announced. ‘You don’t look like a native yourself.’

  ‘I was born in Strome,’ she said. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. ‘Five miles down the road.’

  ‘A white settler of the second generation,’ said Murdo.

  ‘You know a lot about me, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘I do that,’ said Murdo. ‘You have – ’

  I knew what he was going to say next. I was glad he was close enough to give him the dig of my elbow.

  ‘What?’ he said.

  ‘Don’t bug the lassie,’ I said.

  ‘I was just making conversation.’

  ‘Aye, well make it different.’ I kept my eyes on the road. ‘Sorry about that, Ailiss.’

  She flicked a hand. ‘No problem.’ She turned to Murdo. ‘You’re right, my parents were from down south. They were just so typical, they collected pine resins for aromatherapy …’ She went on about this for a bit.

  But I could see where her hand went while she spoke, maybe without her even thinking about it. It went to her knee, then crept to the top of her boot.

  ‘I live past Strathcarron,’ she said, as I slowed at the turn-off.

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘We’ll drop you at the site. You’ll have to walk or hitch from there.’

  ‘I’ll walk,’ she said.

  ‘Not far to go then?’ said Murdo. Still prying.

  ‘Not far at all,’ she said. ‘Up behind Strathcarron.’

  Now I know for a fact there’s nothing up behind Strathcarron. There’s nothing at Strathcarron, except the old railway station, some empty houses and the ruins of a restaurant. Up the hills behind it there’s waste howling wilderness. It was empty even before the freeze. There’s bugger all people between here and Kintail. Bugger all beasts for that matter. You’d be hard pressed to find enough dead sheep to feed a crow.

  I kept my trap shut about all this and I glared at Murdo to do the same.

  We crossed the Carron bridge and pulled up just before the site road end, two or three hundred metres from the old station.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Ailiss. She hopped out, hauled her bag after her, waved, shut the door and strode off along the road. The end of the loch was to her right and the site to her left. She didn’t look to either side, or back.

  ‘Well,’ said Euan as he climbed down from the lookout bucket to the running-board, ‘there goes a girl who is not afraid of bandits.’

  Murdo and I both laughed.

  ‘What?’ said Euan. He handed the shotgun in through the cab window. I clipped it to the rack behind the seats.

  ‘She’s armed,’ I said. ‘At least a knife, and maybe a gun as well. And she lives up in the hills behind Strathcarron.’ I waved at the range in front of us.

  ‘And she has no food in that bag,’ said Murdo, ‘except some sugar and a packet of Rich Abernethy biscuits. It’s all stuff like batteries and disinfectants.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ demanded Euan.

  I started the engine again and began the turn, over an earth-covered culvert and on to the site. As the security guard waved a scanner at us I glanced up the road for traffic. There was none. The girl was a couple of hundred metres away, walking fast.

  ‘She’s a bandit,’ I said.

  5. SITE WORK

  We had brought a Caterpillar digger on the back of the truck. Getting it off was hard work. Our thick gloves made the chains awkward to handle, but they were too cold to touch with bare skin. The heavy padlocks and hasps were frozen solid. It took a lot of tapping with a hammer to get them loose. The tailgate ramps were stiff. We had to melt ice off them with a blowtorch before Euan could drive the Cat down to the ground. He had just eased the tracks over the edge of the flatbed and was inching forward, waiting to tip forward on to the slope of the ramps, when I saw a black cloud in the west. Way down the loch. By the time the Cat was on the ground you couldn’t see Lochcarron.

  I looked around. It was weird to be standing in bright sunshine with that black wall of cloud on the way. All over the site – there were about twenty guys working there – people were yelling, hauling tarpaulins over equipment, shutting down machinery, and running for shelter. Only the guards stood their ground. Their armour would take more than a storm to damage.

  ‘Time to go, boys,’ I said.

  Euan jumped out of the Cat and locked the door behind him. Murdo pulled his parka hood up and headed for the nearest depot. I heaved the two boards one by one into the back of the truck and banged the tailgate up, slammed the bolts across.

  I could hear a hissing from the sea a couple of hundred metres away.

  I ran after Euan towards the doorway where Murdo was standing among a crowd of others, staring past us and waving. Beckoning, urging us on. A gust of wind pushed us like a giant hand on our backs. The hiss became a drumming roar. We had just got under the roof when hailstones the size of golf balls started hitting the tarmac. They hit so hard they shattered. I felt a sting of ice on my face, and covered my eyes. Everybody backed further inside, pressing against machines and tools and coils of pipe.

  For ten minutes it was almost as dark as night. The ground in front of us turned slowly white. The hailstones hammered on the roof. I could see them bouncing off the side window of the depot and wondered why it didn’t break. Then I remembered it was probably made of toughened glass, just like the truck windscreen and the Cat’s cabin windows. This thought reminded me of something, but I couldn’t think what. With all the noise I could hardly think at all.

  Then the hailstorm passed as suddenly as it had started. The sky was still overcast, and the wind fresh, but the squall had marched off up the glen. We walked out, boots crunching on chunks of ice.

  ‘The ground needed it,’ said Euan.

  ‘Yes indeed, it’ll be good for the crops,’ said Murdo.

  ‘Aye, the spring sowing needs it,’ I said.

  We went on with this farming talk until it stopped being funny. That didn’t take long.

  I led the way to the yellow dome of the site office. A local lassie looked at us from behind a desk as we trooped in.

  ‘Site engineer?’ I asked.

  ‘He’ll be back in a minute,’ she said.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  Her hands were moving on the keyboard but she was watching the news. It scrolled down a screen tacked to the wall beside a calendar. March was a bare girl on a wet rock somewhere hot. April would be a hot girl on a bare rock somewhere wet. On the screen the top news was a Siberian town that had sunk two metres overnight. They’re thawing while we’re freezing. Russian kids in army uniforms helped folk into long trucks with huge fat wheels. The rest of the news was the usual. Truck-bomb in Tehran. Ambush in Kabul.

  ‘The Bodach’s been busy,’ said Euan.

  The Bodach – the old man – is what the locals call Osama Bin Laden. Nobody knows if he’s still alive or not. Maybe he’s getting the Reverse treatment but he’s not in a healthy line of work. His gloating videos still come out every now and again. But that doesn’t prove anything. You could say the same about Mick Jagger.

  A man in a suit and wellies hurried in with that look of someone who has just been for a pee. His belt was one notch too tight for his belly and his thinning hair had been flattened by twenty-odd years under hard hats. Red cheeks and sandy eyebrows and sharp blue eyes.

  ‘Liam Morrison,’ he said, shaking hands.

  ‘We’ve brought the Cat,’ I said after we’d introduced ourselves.

  ‘Good,’ he said. He ambled to the desk and pawed at loose paper. ‘The chart, Kelly?’

  ‘It’s in here somewhere,’ she said. ‘Got it.’

  Over by the curved wall a printer whizzed. Kelly got up and came back with a metre of paper. Liam looked around for somewhere to spread it, then held it up against the wall.

  ‘That’s your line for the trench,’ he said. ‘It’s all marked out on the ground. From the river to the railway. Yellow posts and green string, mind. The red one’s for the site sewage line.’

  We peered at the drawing and got this clear in our heads.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  ‘You better take it,’ said Liam. ‘Don’t get it wet.’

  We all laughed and Liam nodded and we headed out.

  ‘“Don’t get it wet,”’ Euan muttered.

  ‘Taking the piss,’ I said. ‘But he’s polite for a boss.’

  ‘The gentleman will have his little joke,’ said Murdo.

  Lack of water was what had brought us here in the first place. The hailstorm was the usual way water falls from the sky around here. Not much of that, and not much rain, not even much snow. The rain that does fall comes in heavy bursts that run off in flash floods. The snow that does fall, up on the tops, doesn’t melt near soon enough. The Highlands are drying out. So the Hydro stations that kept the Highlands lit up in the old days don’t get enough water to work. Wind power turned out to be a crock as soon as the weather went wild. It’s either so calm the blades don’t turn or so stormy the pylons get blown over.

  So here we were, climbing on to the Cat and getting ready to dig a trench to hold a cable. One end of the cable was coiled up on the bank of the Carron. The rest of it ran out along the riverbed and across the tidal flat and along the bottom of the loch. All the way out to the new nuclear power station on a wee island between the mouth of Loch Carron and the Isle of Skye. The wee island is called Eilean Mor, which means Big Island. The power station was built on it because nobody lives there to object, and also because it’s easy to guard. In the Sound of Skye there’s enough military and naval hardware to scare off the Bodach himself.

  The first part of our job was to dig a trench from the Carron to the back of the old railway station. The railway line was a ready-made route across country to Loch Luichart. At Loch Luichart, about twenty kilometres inland, was one of those dry Hydro power stations I told you about. Somebody had decided that this would be just the place to plug the new power into the grid. It had all the machinery, but it was lying idle.

  The trains don’t run any more on the Kyle line – too many landslides – so the rails were free to carry heavy equipment. Any day now the machine would come chugging down from Inverness. Then it would slowly chug back, digging a trench alongside the railway track as it went. Same trick for laying the cable. All we’d have to do was follow behind and shovel the dirt in, and lay prefab concrete covers over any stretches where the cable had to be trailed over bare rock.

  All very straightforward. But first we had to dig this trench through a couple hundred metres of soil that was on the way to freezing solid. Tomorrow’s permafrost. And the day after tomorrow’s swamp, if Alaska and Siberia are anything to go by. But that’s the day after tomorrow’s problem.

  Liam Morrison had done his bit with the theodolite and laser gadget. His two assistants (I could see from the names on the drawing) had done their thing with sticks and string. The line they’d marked out for the trench to follow stretched straight from the Carron’s left bank to just east of the station. Easy.

  Our only instruction was to dig a metre deep all the way along it. By the time Murdo had got the Cat to the side of the river we were lined up and ready to go. Point and shoot.

  Nothing’s ever that simple.

  6. WARNING LABEL

  The Cat was so new you could still see yellow and black paint that had never had dust on it. It was a new model and all. It had a big chain winch. It had a drill attached to the digger scoop. Beside the drill was the nozzle of a heat blaster, hose-piped to the engine, for thawing frozen ground.

 

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