Country of the Blind (22 page)

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Tam suggested they walk on the road, partly so as not to leave tracks, and partly to avoid the ankle-snapping treachery of the clumpy fields on either side. He walked in front at first, before relieving Paul who was helping Bob limp along on his one good leg. Spammy straggled along at the rear, having earlier dismayed them by kneeling over the dead driver and rifling his pockets. He held up a lighter by way of explanation.

"I saw him havin' a fag. We might want to light a fire."

They came to where a dry, hard-earth track met the roadside on the left, the chevrons of mucky tractor tyre-tracks arcing out across the tarmacadam in both directions. There was little light left, just a low glow playing off the underside of the sparse cloud cover in the distance. Tam looked up the slope, where the track followed a drystone dike towards the edge of a wood, into which the dusty trail disappeared.

"That'll do," he said. "Right. Naebody stand on these tyre marks. Try an' move fae stone to stone," he instructed, indicating the sunken boulders that jutted out of the track like acne. He sent Paul ahead first, while he and Spammy carried Bob - legs and arms - over the chevrons and as many yards along the trail as they could manage.

By the time they reached the edge of the forest the sunlight was completely exhausted, but the clouds were shuffling disgruntledly out of the way of a bright and insistent moon, and the trail remained enticingly visible before them. They came to a clearing where the track ended, a circular area occupied by three large piles of felled and stripped tree trunks and a small hillock of gravel and pebbles, which looked like it was being either gradually built up or gradually depleted by the attentions of the small dump vehicle that sat motionless in front of it, its metal scoop resting on the ground like it was a grazing brontosaurus.

There were three exits: the track, leading back down to the road, and two paths. One led downwards in roughly the opposite direction, continuing to skirt the edge of the pines, and the other led up, higher into the hill and deeper into the woodland.

"Decisions, decisions," said Spammy as they stood motionless in the clearing. Bob hopped over to one of the timber piles and fished out a sturdy length of wood to serve him as a walking staff.

"Ach, fuck it," Bob said. "If we're gaunny run an' hide, let's dae it properly."

Their gradual progress along the path was made to the slow, thudding rhythm of Bob's stick as he thrusted it down to bear his weight on alternate steps. Everyone was tired and sore but no-one would admit it when any of his companions enquired. For each of them, the feeling of walking, of moving, of once again - to whatever extent - controlling their own fates urged them 124

forwards despite the pain. Eventually, however, they came to a small hollow as the clouds returned with their big brothers to chuck the moon back out of the swingpark.

All the time they had been passing small piles of trunks by the edge of the path, awaiting collection and transportation, and near to those were carpets of discarded boughs and branches. They worked silently and quickly to build the lean-to, Tam, Paul and Spammy dragging and placing the trunks against the needle-strewn mound that jutted into the hollow, Bob laying branches across the top for insulation.

Spammy's suggestion of lighting a fire for added heat was vetoed on the grounds that in the unlikely event that they didn't burn themselves and the whole fucking forest down, it might act as a homing beacon for any pursuers, as they couldn't be sure how close they were to roads or houses.

"I'll be pickin' skelfs oot ma hands all night," Paul moaned as they lay down side by side and huddled together for warmth. "That's when I'm finished pickin' bits of glass oot ma shoulder."

"Ach, shoosh," Bob muttered. "I've had hauf a tree through ma leg the night, an' you're talkin' aboot skelfs."

"Aye, but they say size doesnae matter," Paul countered. Bob farted loudly in lieu of a rejoinder.

"Aw for fuck's sake," Paul protested.

"Jesus, Bob, that's a liberty," added Tam. "This is a confined space."

"I hope they've nae sniffer dugs," mumbled Spammy.

They all laughed. Wee boays at scout camp.

Tam suspected none of them would actually sleep, but he reckoned without the effects of having barely done so in several days, combined with the exertion of their hike and the sheer mental, physical and emotional exhaustion from all they had been through. He had felt the power drain languidly from his limbs as soon as he took the weight from his feet and lay down, and realised they had been running on fumes for several miles. Within minutes they were sleeping like. . .

Unlike some, Tam McInnes never found himself looking back upon his life and wondering where it all went wrong, because he knew exactly, to the year, month and day. It all went wrong when some prick in a suit who had never lifted a shovel in anger decided that record productivity and decades of loyalty counted for less than the fact that you could get cheaper labour in Mexico. Well, that wasn't the whole truth, really, but it was easier to put a face on your need to blame. There was a political agenda that none of them had known about; in fact that no-one was ever supposed to know about, but for some documents being leaked to a journalist a few years later. Tam had read 125

all about it in jail, which seemed cruelly ironic. He was serving his sentence for the burglaries that had started as an act of revenge for what Sir Michael Halworth had done, when he discovered that Sir Michael Halworth was really just a willing cog in a far bigger machine.

It was about ideology, about politics, about power. The big bosses in the States had probably been toying with the idea for years, and to people of that mentality it must have been tantalisingly tempting. But they were never going to do it in America - well, not in those days. In the battle with the Japanese for domestic sales, waving the stars and stripes was about all they could do in the face of an increasingly superior product. Shutting down plants in Michigan and fucking off to Guadelajara might just have been misinterpreted by the American public as a less-than-patriotic gesture.

For a long time they couldn't do it in the UK either, despite the fact that the British operation was usually barely in profit. And the only reason it was in profit at all was that it was heavily subsidised - the government trying to keep things ticking over until the recession lightened and people started buying new cars again - which was also the reason the company couldn't pull out. Not only would it be regarded as a hellishly ungrateful breach of trust, but it wouldn't have done a fuck of a lot for Anglo-American relations. Enter the Thatcher administration.

On the surface, Tam remembered, it appeared that the Yanks were unilaterally shipping out, muttering about obstructive unions and restrictive industry regulation, amidst crocodile tears of regret from the government and many

"you've only got yourselves to blame" speeches. We chased the jobs away, they said. We have to learn our lessons from this: we have to be more competitive, we have to streamline, we have to abolish the restrictions and archaic union practices that have hamstrung not just our car industry but all our industries.

"The lessons of Meiklewood", was the irritating phrase that chimed throughout dogmatic declamations down through the Eighties. We have to wreck the unions. We have to slash jobs. We have to worry less about health and safety, because it eats into profit. We have to decimate wages, because we're in a global labour market now, and that means we're competing with the Third World.

Never forget the lessons of Meiklewood.

Of course, it was all a fucking stitch-up. What had later been discovered by this investigative hack was that the government instigated the whole thing. They had very quietly decided to pull the plug on the subsidies, and tipped the wink to the Americans, assuring them that there would be no public blame, and that there was no potential for damage to "the special relationship". Why?

Christ, why not?

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The government had nothing to lose. The money that would have gone into subsidising Meiklewood could be spent on something useful instead, like nuclear submarines, or tax cuts. And the loss of a few thousand jobs wasn't a drawback, it was a bonus.

Mass unemployment wasn't a government failure, it was a government strategy - as everyone well knew. It was the weapon they used to break unions, force down wages, dictate conditions. But it was more sophisticated than that. It wasn't merely a question of finding any three or four million people to haunt the thoughts and weaken the resolve of every disgruntled employee. It was a specific three or four million people, Tam knew. It was three or four million people like him.

They hadn't been out just to break their strength - they had been out to break their spirit. To do is to be; the Tories took away what they did. They took away what they were, took away what their fathers had been, took away their past and their legacy, and left them not just without means, but without purpose. And a man without purpose offers little resistance as a foe. He has nothing to fight for, and no comrades in arms.

Steel. Coal. Ships. Cars.

They closed whole industries.

Scotland had to change, the Tories insisted. Its days of heavy industry were gone, and its future, as envisaged by Thatcher, was as a "service economy". Tam would have found the idea hilarious if the reality hadn't been so fucking painful.

Picture it.

The Fegie Park Public Relations Agency - "We'll make sure they get the message". Get your point across with force. Lethal force if necessary. The Barrhead Advertising Bureau. Guaranteed to get your name seen, with prime-site positioning: railway bridges, bus shelters, derelict buildings and more. Previous campaigns and slogans include: "Fuck the Pope", "Up the Ra",

"Priesty Young Team ya bass" and "Ulster Says No".

Glenburn Financial Services - sound investment advice for when you fancy playing the futures market with your next giro.

A service economy. Gie's a brek.

Tam couldn't believe it. Then with more pain and anger it gradually sank in that the Tories had never really believed it either. It was just an excuse. Disembowelling the country's industries, breaking its backbone and bringing the unruly northern colony to its knees was the primary objective. Sure, they could vote
en masse
against the Tories at every opportunity - and they did - but the bastards were probably laughing up their sleeves about it back in London, like adults at the tantrum of a petulant but powerless wean: 127

"You can whine about it all you like, but we're not changing our minds. Now stop crying or we'll really give you something to cry for."

Meiklewood had been quite a nice district. Not exactly affluent, but certainly respectable. Tam's had been a modern wee council scheme, built in the Seventies, and it had looked fairly pleasant - although admittedly people's tolerance for bad taste in those days extended to architecture as well as clothing and hairstyles. But colour-schemes and exterior wallcovering materials notwithstanding, it was always neat, always clean. People looked after the place because they had known a lot worse. They had jobs and they had self-respect, two things that could make stray chip pokes and lager cans fill the mind with a far greater dismay than if you actually had something serious to worry about.

They had been happy there, him and Sadie, and the wee yin. He had been a man of modest dreams, he knew, and had felt a degree of pride at where he was, what his family had, and what he might realistically hope to bring them. He had left school at fourteen, as had two of his brothers. Only Greig, the youngest of them, was allowed to stay on, with the other three helping his da bring money home. Greig went to university, up in Glasgow. These days he was
teaching
in a university, down south, a professor of physics. There were brains in the family, he definitely knew that, and he had felt a sense of progress and achievement that Paul would get the chance to use his. Tam hadn't sat at night and wondered what if, bitterly reflecting on missed potential and chances denied him, but he did feel a dull ache of regret at times, and that was soothed by the thought of his son being able to spread his wings. Sibling strife and petty jealousies aside, when it came right down they had all felt pride in Greig, and in the part they had played, but that would be nothing compared to the pride Tam would have in Paul, and in himself for having got his son that far.

Then the plant closed.

Certain powers had made the law jump through hoops to keep him inside for almost the full seven years, but it was only when he got out of prison that Tam realised the full extent of the price to be paid. He had walked, like bloody Rip van Winkle, unsteadily and in weeping disbelief, from the bus stop and through the scheme to the old house. That was when he realised that jail had just been where they kept him while they got his real punishment ready. He had known about it, heard the tearful and increasingly blameful bulletins from Sadie in letters and visits. Pressure, strain, and inevitably, disintegration. But when he heard it, it was just news from the other world, the one he'd been banished from. His world stayed the same, and with his emotions frozen and anaesthetised, the only meaning the other world had existed purely in the words from Sadie's mouth and the letters on the page. Just 128

stories.

What he had shut out, what he couldn't afford to face during all those years inside, was that the world Sadie's words created was the world he would have to live in later. The one he used to live in hadn't been taken away for a time decided by the judge. It was gone forever.

The scheme looked like Sarajevo without the tanks. Chipboard seemed to have become a popular alternative to glass in a great many of the window frames, enjoying the same insulation qualities at a lower price, but perhaps sacrificing a certain degree of transparency. However, glass itself had not gone out of fashion; rather it was now employed as a road surface material, making the streets glisten and sparkle, kaleidoscopically reflecting the blue flashing lights of the patrol cars and ambulances. Stray dogs snapped angrily at each other in the overgrown gardens, where the balding and broken hedges slumped above walls daubed with slogans uniformly promising violence and retribution against various groups or individuals for unspecified transgressions.