Lie of the Land (13 page)

•

Carl sat on the twenty-fifth broch stone he had managed to unearth and looked down at the bay.

The days were shorter now, and colder. A crow landed nearby, across a gully, on top of an outcrop of lichen-covered rock. He watched it, keeping quite still. This seemed to unnerve the crow.

People threw stones. People took no notice. They didn't just sit, stock-still and staring. The bird hopped from foot to foot, bobbing and blinking, confused.

‘
Corvus corone
,' Carl said out loud. ‘I know what you are.'

Maybe this was the bird that had pecked Howard's eyes out, the one that had tugged and nipped off bits of lip and ear. Here was another scavenger shitting out digested human. There had been plenty of those. The crow hopped and called, squawked enquiry, coal-eye glistening. Carl spied a stone at his feet. He grabbed it. As he did so the crow snapped from the rock and barked away into the grey sky. Carl threw the stone even though he knew there was no chance of hitting the bird. Just taking aim at it would do, but the crow was too quick and the stone climbed, looped to earth, well short of its target.

The bird had come to taunt him; knew the man's habits and had lain in wait for him. Your friend filled my belly. How do you like that? Why don't you just lie down and do likewise? Turn yourself into meat. Give up your corporeal tribute for the greater
good of crowkind. Maybe he should do that; grab whatever pills he could get his hands on; swipe one of George's bottles of malt, swallow the lot. Find a hole to hide in, neck the lot, and fall asleep for the last time. Give the crows and the worms a good feed. Sleep and death would be reliable, this time around.

Out at sea, there was still no white boat. Howard's friends would never come for him. Even if they were able to, they'd stay where they were if they had any sense.

He'd been a journalist, once. You do a job for long enough and that's all you are. He was seeing that now.

Without a job, what are you? People don't like thinking about that, with or without full stomachs. It's easier just to work, without thinking of alternative identities or meanings. He'd been a journalist. But that label no longer meant anything. There were now other labels being written for him to wear.

15

For two days it rained, without let-up, the dry spell well and truly broken. In his room, he considered the calendar on the wall, the months in motion.

The rain didn't stop Carl going up the hill. Three days ago the river through the forest had been a delicate trickle; now it had transformed into a roaring beast, churning peaty froth as it thundered over the falls and out under the road bridge.

He could have hung around the hotel. Easy enough, he could have gone downstairs just to talk to Simone or George, or to pass the time until the rain stopped. Make the effort. Reach out. Somewhere inside him there was an awareness that that was what he had to do. It was stirring – this need to reach out – but it could yet be strangled in his inner darkness, unborn.

He climbed the stile at the back fence, near the stalker's cottage, and headed squelching through the rain up to the ridge towards the broch, spade slung over his shoulder, oilskins keeping him dry and warm. It was true: there was no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothing.

Why sulk in his room? He looked back down the hill at the hotel. It wasn't her fault. It wasn't his fault. Extenuating circumstances. End of the world, and all that. Adam Cutler was a Grade A prick though, he didn't need much clarity of thought to see that.

Not even crows out today. Sheep huddling bedraggled and quiet in any shelter they could find. Cold with it – and getting colder. The steady climb to the broch took about forty-five
minutes; a few weeks before it had taken him twice as long, but now his lungs and legs were strong and he didn't need to pause on the climb. At least there was no wind today firing rain into his face.

Sitting on the low wall he had exhumed from the ground, he wondered how many other communities there were like Inverlair. There were probably some, where SCOPE and mobile coverage had been poor. Isolated rural hill villages or natural depressions. Inverlair was both. Carl watched sun and shadow fight it out on the far headlands, the
Aurora
motoring back into the bay.

Maybe Adam Cutler was just looking out for his sister. Just doing his best for everyone in the village. Like hell he was. He was playing the saviour, the man with the big plan, and he relished the part.

Carl took out his binoculars and scanned Inverlair. Walk and climb, climb and walk, pressure easing in his head, rain pattering on his hood. He was walking away from all the crap that had to do with how other people felt and what they expected from him. He could walk as far as the bars of his cage, measure them on the deltameter, and look out at the dead world that had once been alive, or at least not quite so dead. Maybe he couldn't call it living, but at least it had a point and a purpose, however basic: to stay alive.

They'd be watching him now, he reckoned, not with RF trackers or GPS or Sentinel in Glasgow, but from back windows that faced onto the hills of Inverlair. They'd see his yellow oilskins, watch him rebuild the wall of the broch, stone by stone, the nutter.

Carl took a detour, cutting south towards the road instead of north behind the village. His change of routine would be noticed, he surmised.

Down below was the road, winding into the drift-net of low cloud that smothered the southern summits. At least Howard and the German couple had been given a decent burial. They were lying next to others: people threw in their handfuls of dirt; said a
few words. SCOPE had done away with all that ritual, preferring instead an open-air smörgåsbord approach. Is that not what the Indian Parsees did? Left their dead exposed on the hillside for the wind and the eagles to devour? Meat going around on the big wheel. A parade of predators to scoff the bodies: foxes, dogs, birds, rats, cats, trillions of maggots pupating in the ripening flesh. Mass human death would have caused a sudden flowering of insect life.

Good eating, all round.

•

The rain eased. Each hole that had held a broch stone was full of water; there were twenty-five holes altogether, twenty-five pieces of a Neolithic puzzle.

It was a sick fucking joke, that's what it was; a new life on the way and he'd put it there. That wasn't right. To say it was a sick joke wasn't doing it justice. What would its future be? Stuck in Inverlair, hungry and clueless about the world. Another mouth gaping for food, a burden that was his doing and his responsibility.

There had been no agenda with Simone when she'd knocked on his door, no ulterior motive. He never meant for anything to happen; he had felt something that wasn't to do with sex or lust. Maybe fear was the basic driver for so much of what people did, even when they were shagging. Even that could be a cry against extinction and terror, the obliteration of self and conscious awareness. Or was it the unmasking of the true self, the revelation of insatiable appetite in its twisted, personalised glory?

All he'd wanted to do was hold her.

The rest of it just happened. That is what he believed to be the truth.

Carl hacked round another broch stone, clearing its outline in the sticky earth. He was keeping watch, but he wasn't really sure on what.

The sea would have been scanned, when the broch was a
broch, for uninvited guests; it would have been Mission Control in the fight against invaders. Where was the threat now?

It wasn't the redzone or the sea that Carl watched. It was Inverlair. With Howard's binoculars he scanned for movement; old women finally able to hang out clothes to dry; fish unloaded at the pier; Isaac playing in his sandpit. All this was perfectly normal for a world he could not penetrate, that held him at bay; so he had to watch it. Stay vigilant.

Carl dug out another stone, heaving it up and onto the grass, purpose being regained and reconfigured. One curving section of wall – almost a half circle – was rising to join the remains of the other. Higher than knee-height would cause him problems, but he'd figure that out when the time came.

Graft? He'd show the fuckers all about that. He would rebuild this thing, stone by buried stone. Fuck it – he would live in it. He would defend the broch against all comers. He would fight.

Fight.

So there was no time to waste.

He worked faster, hacking round a stone, levering it out, muttering to himself.

What's the point in trying to make a difference? Why risk what you have when protesting – the stance you take – means nothing? You're just one man. You're being buried, bit by bit, and you're just about to go under. If only you'd stop struggling, all that weight would lift from your shoulders and you could breathe again, take it all in your stride. So why bother trying to shine a light? The darkness is all around. Let it claim you. Get used to the dark that everyone else is groping around in. He should have let CivCon take him by the hand and show him the right way to behave now that there is no light in the world. Thrashing around in the dark is dangerous. You might hurt yourself, sonny, and those around you. The dark is all around you. Accept it. Let the shit wash over you and don't try to see into it or through it because that's just a
headfuck and why bother bringing that on? Just keep your head clear and down and accept what's around you, now and forever. Amen. Accept the darkness. Stop struggling. Stop resisting. Stop trying to make other people see the foul things that are whispering how blessed is the darkness. Let it alone, and keep your mouth shut.

No.

And another stone, his sixth that day, was reclaimed from the earth. Another piece of the puzzle. Another step towards wholeness. It was important. It meant something. The broch was older than SCOPE and white rust and CivCon. Only hunger and death were older.

Sweating and gasping as he spaded up chunks of turf, Carl imagined himself a savage, repelling hordes of invaders from his perch. He would club them aside. Hack them to pieces. Machine-gun the lot of them. A caveman with an M60.

He'd make a difference. He'd make them pay.

‘Hello there,' a voice said.

Carl let out a cry, jumped up from his digging, sweat, mud and hair plastered across his face. Wide-eyed, he gawped at the figure standing nearby. The stalker; Carl couldn't remember his name. The man smiled, adjusting his cap.

‘The view is nice, but you won't have much in the way of mod cons.'

Carl cocked his head, still brandishing the spade. ‘Eh? What the fuck are you on about?'

‘The broch,' said the stalker, calm and even. ‘A view but no loo. Not what you'd call a des res.'

Carl looked at the guy, sixty if he was a day. He felt the blister sting on his right palm from the digging. The pain wouldn't stop him doing what he had to do. No fucking way.

‘Definitely not cosy,' the stalker said quietly.

Carl clutched the spade, and took a deep breath. The wall of the broch was forming; the long dead was rising.

The stalker leant forward on his stick. He wore a dark Gore-Tex jacket and thick brown socks above his heavy boots. Wisps of greying hair stuck out from under a tweed cap.

‘You're busy,' he said.

Carl sat down on the mud-plastered stone he had just spent twenty minutes exhuming. The rain had stopped. He wiped his face clear of sweat and hair, nodded, said nothing.

The stalker squinted at the sky, the fog-shrouded bastion of Ben Bronach. The day was clearing, wind swinging to the north, getting colder. A seagull soared, silent over the ridge.

‘Do you mind if I ask you what you're doing up here?'

Here we go. Never mind the matey chinwag.

‘Why? Are you going to tell me to get off your land?'

‘No,' said the stalker, his voice steady. ‘This isn't my land. I'm wondering why you're digging these stones out of the ground.' He lowered his eyes from the sky and hills to inspect the foundations of the broch wall.

Of course there was a reason why a man would climb up into the hills to dig large stones out of the ground in the pissing rain. Alec John could remember, as a boy, when stones just as big had been used to build, and rebuild, walls. But this was different. This man was not digging for a practical reason. He was digging because he was compelled to.

For a second, Carl felt like telling the stalker the truth about the stones. He was rebuilding the broch, he felt like saying, because he was sick of living in that goldfish bowl down there, and because he needed something to do with his time. He was sick of the people down there muttering about what he had or hadn't done. They were sly bullies, the lot of them. So much for Highland hospitality.

‘I wanted to be an archaeologist, once,' Carl found himself saying. ‘I just wanted to see the broch as it was. Not just a pile of stones, but . . .' He faltered. ‘Just to preserve it, you know? Before it's too late.' He looked at the ground, eyes roving over the stones.

‘That's a fair enough explanation, I suppose,' said the stalker. He cleared his throat. ‘But maybe it is too late, for the stones anyway.'

Shouldering his shotgun, he gestured up at the ridge. ‘I've got traps where the grouse are,' he said. ‘Stoats – they're fucking pests.' He jerked his thumb towards the village. ‘They're even worse than that lot down there. And that's saying something, believe you me.'

Carl stopped inspecting his blister and looked up at the stalker, his mouth open.

‘I'm Alec John Stoddart,' said the stalker. ‘You'll be Carl Shewan. I remember you. I found you, lying half dead with your friend.'

Carl nodded, still staring. ‘I know,' he said softly. ‘I meant to say thanks for that and . . .'

Before Carl could finish, Alec John set off up the slope towards Ben Bronach, his dark form soon vanishing against the dark flank of the hill.

‘Don't worry about it,' he said over his shoulder. ‘Sorry about your friend.'