Chasing Angels (36 page)

‘I’m scared to ask!’ Kathy replied.

‘Well, we could get a fan put in under him there, and we could put in a coin-operated machine to work it—’

‘
Don’t!
’ Kathy screeched, covering her ears.

‘And every time the tourists wanted to check him out underneath, they would have to put fifty pence in the machine, and up would go the kilt! It’d be like that Marilyn photo, you
know the one? With the white dress up round about her ears!’

‘Mavis, you’re bloody
warped!
’

‘Well, it’s just an idea,’ she giggled. ‘Could be a great wee private money-spinner for us, a perk of the job if you like!’

Kathy looked at the statue again. The artist chap had captured Rory to the life, he’d even given him that scowl he had when he was too displeased to bother telling you so. And somehow
he’d managed to reproduce the authentic wry expression in Rory’s deep-set blue eyes that made you want to slap him. No wonder, she thought, the cleaner was too spooked to work alone in
the extension, she’d be none too happy about it herself.

‘We could try putting a bag over its head,’ she offered.

‘What’s the point of that?’ Mavis asked. ‘We’d know it was still Rory, wouldn’t we?’

‘So tell me,’ Kathy asked her. ‘Is he a
real
Scotsman then?’

‘Well, we had a talk about that,’ Mavis said, rubbing her burnt thumb, ‘and we’ve decided not to tell you. If you want to find that out, Kathy, you’ll have to do
what everybody else does – lift up his kilt and look!’

She had never told anyone why or where she was going when she went to Glasgow, only that she would be away on business, and her recent visit, the longest and, as it turned out,
final one, happened during winter when the Centre was closed. Rory had insisted on driving her to Glasgow; he was, he said, going on his annual shopping expedition anyway.

‘So,’ he said, ‘why are you actually going to Glasgow?’

She was surprised, because he had never questioned her previous absences. ‘My father’s dying,’ she replied.

‘I didn’t know you had one,’ he said.

She looked wryly at him. ‘Well, Rory,’ she said, ‘there’s a lot of people have said the same thing about you over the years, even the ones who knew your
father!’

He grinned, stopping the van where she asked, at Glasgow Cross. ‘Why am I dropping you here?’ he asked. ‘It would be easier to take you right to where he lives.’

‘Not for me,’ she replied curtly.

‘Don’t you want me to know where you come from?’ he asked, smiling. ‘Is it that bad?’

‘I didnae say that, did I?’ she demanded. ‘It’s a while since I was last here, I fancy a walk through the old neighbourhood, I’m a nostalgic kind of creature.
OK?’

‘In a pig’s ear you are!’ he scoffed, driving off and leaving her.

She waited till he was out of sight before walking along London Road. He was right, of course, she didn’t want him to take her right to Con’s door. If he did there would be a
connection in her mind between the West Coast and the East End of Glasgow, and she didn’t want that; the two places were completely separate, both geographically and emotionally, even if they
did have a connecting door. And now that door was closed for ever, never the twain ever would meet. Sitting on the train, watching familiar station names flash past, Crianlarich, Tyndrum, Rannoch,
Corrour, there was quiet satisfaction about finally being finished with the life she had been born into. She went over in her mind everything that had happened, from Con’s interminable,
lingering death, the funeral, meeting poor, repressed Angela Crawford, forcing Frank McCabe to cough up the loot and to face up to his worst nightmare, that the knowledge of his little
transgression hadn’t died with Aggie after all, and the news about her brother Peter, or Brother Peter as he apparently preferred to be known these days. That had been a high point, she had
to admit, the thought of Peter, who spent his entire life criticising other people and instructing them in how to live their lives, was now being told how to live his life. That, she knew, was what
cults did, they laid down their own rules, those of a highly individualistic mind set couldn’t be prime material. So what could’ve happened to him to make him surrender his opinions,
she wondered. All Peter had ever wanted was to get the best of everything, and he had never cared how he did so or who he stood on, put down or abandoned in the process either. If she had ever been
asked to venture a guess on who in her family would have reached the top and be living the good life, she would instinctively have chosen her brother, even before Harry, or at least, the Harry she
thought she knew. Harry, she always thought, would be successful and happy, but still there; Peter would’ve gone elsewhere, indeed Peter had, but this wasn’t how she could ever have
imagined him spending his life. And Harry had mentioned his client, Peter’s mother-in-law of all things, and her concern over her daughter’s wellbeing. There had been no communication,
she said, all letters were ignored and attempts to contact her by phone were blocked. Well, cults did that too, everyone knew that. The way to control every thought and action of the adherents was
to be the only influence in their lives, and that was done by slowly but surely cutting them off from past ties. She had read newspaper reports of desperate families trying to convince relatives,
usually sons or daughters caught in cult webs, that they were being controlled, and those operating the cult turned this against them. Your family are the ones trying to control you, they’d
say, if they really loved you they would understand and accept that you’re happy, that you belong here, therefore if they are trying to take you away, they don’t love you and are trying
to harm you. It was standard brainwashing procedure, well documented and often described. Kathy had never understood how anyone could be taken in by it, but she had always assumed that the ones who
were must be young, weak and vulnerable. Her brother was in his fifties now, and by all accounts he had been involved with the Higher Seekers for years. It made no sense. Not that she was concerned
about Peter; why should she be? He had never been concerned about her, about any of the family for that matter. He hadn’t even attended his mother’s funeral, citing ‘important
business’ as his excuse. She remembered her grandmother, Old Aggie, opining that Peter had avoided Lily’s funeral because he was ‘too sensitive’ to face his grief, and how
she had attacked Aggie for it. Presumably ‘important business’ was, then, basic cult code for refusing to relax the ban on family contact. It made sense that a family crisis, like the
death of a close relative, would’ve been a danger point for the cult’s control, presumably, given that at such times entire families would meet, thereby intensifying the strength of
feelings, however latent, feelings the cult had worked hard to eradicate. So she didn’t care one way or another about Peter, he had made his choice and it was no business of hers, it was just
that she was curious about how someone as self-centred as him could’ve become entangled in a cult. It couldn’t have happened to a better person, she decided, poetic justice, hoist by
his own petard, whatever a petard was, and she laughed every time she thought of it. She was curious, that was all, she’d just like to know.

Everything was as it should be at the cottage. Rory had kept it heated so that even in December there was no hint of dampness, and the frequent rain in the Western Highlands ensured dampness at
the best of times. Tourists often remarked on the full burns and rivers, and they stopped to film the many waterfalls cascading off the hills when it rained, all rushing to the sea through lush
greenery. As visitors were only there for a couple of weeks, it seemed churlish to point out that the high rainfall causing all those photo opportunities also made for a general dampness that could
seep into your soul during winter. Cat was as cantankerous as ever with her, as affectionate towards Rory, and given Rory’s lamentably low level of interest in local gossip, she knew she
would have to wait till she saw Mavis to be brought up to date. He did have one piece of news, though, Mavis and Donnie were now grandparents; Kirsty and Kenny the chef had produced their first
child during her absence. ‘Boy or girl?’ she asked. ‘Aye, one or the other,’ he replied. Over the years the easy approach to relationships of the Macdonalds had taken them
over. During her days at the house up the hill, she had been constantly amazed at how years could pass between Rory’s visits home, but he walked in the door as though he’d been in Fort
William for a couple of hours, and his parents treated him the same way. They slipped into whatever groove they had been in when they had last met, there was no awkwardness, no getting to know you
again strangeness, and these days Kathy and Rory were the same. He didn’t ask if her father had died; he assumed that as she had gone to Glasgow because he was dying, the fact that she had
now returned meant that he
had
died. He asked no questions about the events, if she wanted to tell him he knew she would, and if she didn’t, well that was fine too. Once she had
mistaken the Macdonald way as uncaring, which sat uneasily with her knowledge of and affection for Angus and Bunty, but she understood it now for what it was, a total acceptance that went beyond
emotional ups and downs or, in the case of her own family, explosions. Having been thinking about the fate of her brother recently, she remembered how her mother had described her two children.
‘The same,’ Lily had said about Kathy and Peter, ‘but different’, and it struck her that over the years she and Rory had become like that too, but unlike the situation
between her and her brother, they were comfortable with each other like that. Life, she thought contentedly, was strange.

It was the dreams that did it, that stabbed through her contentedness. That the child cried and would go on doing so from time to time, she had long ago accepted, but another twist had now been
added. The child cried and, as always, she chased through the streets she had left behind long ago looking for it, but instead of being unable to find it, she now did. She would follow the sound of
the plaintive screams from one long gone East End street to another, with the child always just beyond her reach, sure that around the next corner she would finally be able to hold it and console
it, telling it how sorry she was that she had failed it, that she would do anything,
anything
for another chance. Only now she would see the child and pick it up, its cries mixing with her
own sobs of relief and joy, but when she looked into its face she would find Peter staring back at her. The horror of the usual dreams was bad enough, she thought, but now it had become positively
bizarre! And what was worse, there were other dreams, entirely non-threatening, where she would be happily going about her normal business and would then be arrested by the sound of someone
whistling ‘Pedro the Fisherman’. It had been Peter’s tune, the one he whistled as he came up the stairs of the old Moncur Street tenement, and she couldn’t remember how many
decades it had been since she had last heard it. It was a whistle, that was all, but each time she would awake as though being pursued by the hounds of Hell. She tried to rationalise it. It was
only natural, she told herself, that family memories should surface in the wake of Con’s death, she had, after all, laid her background to rest when Con had been cremated, and like it or not,
and she never had, Peter was part of that background. Maybe the death of your last parent was like drowning, she mused, maybe it made all your life pass before your subconscious. But it would stop
soon, as long as she didn’t dwell on it and make more of it than there was. It would pass in a while. In a longer while, then.

It was January and she wouldn’t start work at the Centre again until the end of March. These winter breaks were usually welcome because they meant she could become Lillian again, but this
time she couldn’t settle. Thanks to Rory’s persistence she had a smattering of computer knowledge, and if she didn’t exactly surf the net, at least she could dip a toe in it now
and again. After a few defeats she managed to find some information about the Higher Seekers, just to satisfy her curiosity. They were an elite little organization, they believed in salvation
through culture, and they didn’t just accept any passing refugee from the days of Flower Power. No standing at bus stations picking up lost teenagers with suspect promises for the Higher
Seekers, they accepted only university graduates. Brain power mattered to the Higher Seekers, because they were ‘the chosen’ whatever that meant, and therefore no mongrels would be
entertained, only pedigree stock. She wondered if some escapees from the Third Reich might have started it. Their headquarters was a commune in the middle of the Mojave Desert that they called
Gabriel’s Gateway. She wondered why the Angel Wally hadn’t called it after himself, but maybe even he had spotted the consumer difficulty of putting that above the door. Behind the gate
the Higher Seekers bought and sold international art collections and, in their spare time, meditated with ‘teachers’ until they too reached the status of angels. She had to admit that
that was quite an eye-catching offer, it beat the Reader’s Digest selling techniques into a cocked hat, no problem! Other cults waited to be beamed up by some passing spacecraft and
transported to Nirvana, but she’d never heard of one that promised each follower their own pair of wings! Other, lesser mortals, collected stamps, ran marathons or followed football teams,
but not the Higher Seekers, they thought themselves towards personal means of flight! True, there was only one to date, dear old Wally who’d thought the wheeze up, but if the others were
good, he had decreed, if they studied with their gurus and worked hard to rid themselves of outside influences, especially family and friends, one day they too would become angels. Not could, but
would. Kathy kept thinking that for Peter the Messiah this would be a bit of a comedown, but still, he would look fetching in feathers. The group was self-sufficient and self-protective, and those
who were permitted to join the so far solitary celestial ranks underwent a long apprenticeship, being sent to hellholes all over the world, but hellholes carefully and strictly controlled by the
cult. She remembered odd reports of Peter being seen in various countries, Canada, Alaska, though no one ever knew what he actually did for a living, even those who had encountered him in these
unlikely locations couldn’t say, because Peter had managed not to fully answer their questions. Well, cult orders could certainly explain his globetrotting. And there were those postcards
that arrived less and less often, much prized by Old Aggie as proof that her grandson was special, was somebody. There had been something about that too on the Internet, something written by an
ex-Higher Seeker. She clicked on the ‘back’ symbol, and there it was. In the first three years contact with family and former lives was scaled down to the minimum, but after five years
there was a rule that it must stop completely. If they survived this weeding process they were excused duty in the far-flung cult spots of the globe and taken to Gabriel’s Gateway, which
sounded like Heaven, Valhalla and Utopia rolled into one. There were strict rules governing how many pictures could be put on walls, and what sort; pop art was strictly banned. The only approved
music was classical and, of course, the staple of all dictatorial regimes, newspapers, magazines and books were banned, as were radio and TV, and marriages were only permitted from inside the cult.
It was very difficult to see what possible attraction any of this held for anyone and, inevitably, there were some who did escape, poor, disillusioned souls, still partly brainwashed, who were
pursued and told in writing that they would die horrible deaths.