Pandaemonium (21 page)

The group have been taking turns to execute a gentle abseil down a rock face, two at a time. They’re almost done, but Kane predicts the pace is about to slow as the more reluctant candidates are running out of other people to hide behind and will probably require some persuasion. Kane would bet the house on Julie Meiklejohn being last. It uncharitably occurs to him that she might provide invaluable impetus to speed the other fearties up if someone points out the greater risk of the line breaking after it has been subjected to the stresses of supporting her. Not nice, he knows, but it’s the release provided by such thoughts that helps him stay professional. They don’t care to admit it, but being human, teachers are inevitably going to like some kids more than others, and Julie is one plump chick who is never going to be described, by way of compensation, as having ‘a nice personality’. He can vividly imagine the processes that got her that way: the teasing and bullying that toughened her up and taught her how to locate other people’s vulnerable spots. Maxwell’s equations said that the amount of energy in the universe could never increase or reduce, but it seemed pain and cruelty multiplied like bacteria.

Guthrie helps Marianne into the harness while Kane assists Cameron, then Sendak attaches them to the lines.

‘You’ve seen it twenty times now,’ Sendak reassures them. ‘Just kick off, and the line will only play out when you want it to, okay? So you go as slow or as fast as you need.’

Marianne bounces off gently, taking it a little at a time. Cameron, not wanting to be shamed by a girl, kicks away more ambitiously and panics at the sensation, going by how tentative his second kick appears.

Sendak has a look down, satisfies himself that the latest pair will manage, though they won’t be breaking any speed records.

‘So, how did this thing go down?’ Sendak asks quietly.

It takes Kane a moment to realise what Sendak is referring to. Kane gives him a look, seeking confirmation that this is so.

‘Hey, if you don’t want to talk about it, that’s cool,’ Sendak responds, misreading. ‘I understand.’

‘No, no. Talking about it is supposed to be why we’re here.’ Even as Kane says this, he realises how hard that is going to be. All they’ve discussed so far has been people’s feelings, and only in the most abstract way. It’s like they’ll have to approach it by degrees, peeling away the protective layers one by one.

‘Andrew Dunn - the kids called him Dunnsy - got in a fight with Matt over there.’ Kane nods to his right, where Matt is now the only remaining male. ‘When I say a fight, more like . . .’

‘Matt started a lot of fights by the provocative act of being shy and awkward, right?’ Sendak suggests.

‘You got it. The other kids don’t know what to make of him. He is very, shall we say, emotionally self-sufficient, and they can’t deal with that. He can seem very aloof . . .’

‘Which doesn’t always go down with attention-seeking teens.’

‘Exactly, that being a very apt description of wee Dunnsy.

‘I don’t know precisely what precipitated it and I don’t suppose it matters, but Dunn set about Matt in the corridor where some of the pupils have their lockers. It’s a busy spot at break time, as you can imagine. A lot of kids milling around, and one of them happened to be Robert Barker.’ Kane sighs, a dozen tabloid headlines screaming in the face of his thinking. ‘Barker was . . .’

‘Troubled,’ Guthrie says, relieving him. ‘He was in the year below this lot: younger in years but very much older in terms of experience. His father was put inside for murder when Barker was ten. Mother an IV drug abuser, dead loss. String of equally useless and varyingly abusive junkie boyfriends. Barker was a deeply disturbed kid. Randomly violent and self-destructive. There was a ferocity about him that was as frightening as it was tragic. He was a poor wee boy, really. Just a poor wee boy.’

Guthrie looks away over the tops of the trees. Kane can tell he’s holding back tears. This is the other side of the deputy: he can be the most indignantly censorious and morally exacting figure much of the time, but somewhere beneath it is one of the most compassionate men Kane has ever known.

There was a simplistic mentality, as embodied by the tabloids, which saw a kind of closure, if not justice, in Barker’s subsequent suicide. Guthrie was one of those who most keenly felt it instead as the compounding second blow of a greater tragedy. Both Guthrie’s strength and his vulnerability - Kane couldn’t call it weakness - lay in that he thought Barker could be saved, and it was his job to do it.

Kane has a look over the edge to see how Marianne and Cameron are progressing. Both taking it very cautious, just about halfway. It’s no surprise: Goths and sporting activity generally don’t mix; though Kane anticipates their descents will look rapid in comparison to some of the last half-dozen, including, as it does, Yvonne, Gillian, Theresa and Julie.

‘So how did Barker come to be involved in this fight?’

‘Matt had the closest thing anybody could describe as a rapport with Barker,’ Kane explains. ‘Essentially two loners who each recognised another person who generally liked to be left alone. I think Matt may have stuck up for him on occasion - verbally, of course, not physically - but I don’t know whether Barker would have even been aware of that. I wouldn’t read much into it: they weren’t buddies or anything. Matt just provided an excuse, and that’s only working on the assumption that Barker even noticed who Dunn was attacking.’

‘He brought a knife to school and he intended to use it,’ Guthrie says. ‘Matt just helped identify a target. Or maybe Dunn identified himself as the target by getting into a fight on that particular day. See, it was a disastrous combination of events. The latest junkie boyfriend stabbed Barker’s mother. He went to stay with his uncle, the dad’s brother, until she got out of the hospital. Then when the junkie boyfriend made bail, she let him move back in. That was the day before it all happened, but we knew nothing about it.’

‘He was a bomb waiting to go off,’ Kane adds. ‘He brought a knife to school and he was stabbing somebody with it one way or the other.’

Marianne and Cameron have reached the bottom. Sendak waves over to hail the next pair. Julie, Yvonne, Gillian and Theresa start jostling, trying to force each other to the front, but their efforts are rendered moot as Matt and Roisin amble dutifully forward.

‘We should have seen it coming, though,’ Guthrie says, once the two new descendants have kicked away. ‘Between the school, social services, police, whoever. We should have seen it coming, just like I should have been on the spot that day. I was just round the bloody corner, ticking off some fourth years I’d caught trading cigarettes. If I’d been in the locker corridor or the social area, like I’d normally be at interval, I could have intervened before . . .’ He sighs, still tearing himself apart.

‘You’re not fucking omniscient, Dan,’ Kane tells him, but he’s not listening.

‘Every night since, every night, I think about how it could have been different. I was on my way to the locker area, as usual, but I was too late. If I had left my office a few seconds sooner or a few seconds later, I’d have missed those fourth years and I’d have been there and Dunn wouldn’t have attacked Matt Wilson. Or if Dunn had decided to come the bully boy with Matt the day before, on a day when Barker wasn’t stalking the halls with a knife. There’s so many other ways it could have unfolded, so many different paths that would have led somewhere else, somewhere better.’

‘No,’ Sendak says. ‘Right now, there’s only the path that took you here. You start trying to see what was down the paths not taken, that way madness lies.’

Guthrie nods acknowledgment to Sendak for the sentiment, but Kane can tell it’s not going to stop him punishing himself. What he hasn’t mentioned, and what it does nobody any good to know, is that Barker came close to expulsion on a number of occasions, and Guthrie always argued against his exclusion. He believed education - and mainstream education, at that - was Barker’s best chance, perhaps his only chance. He believed he could be saved. Maybe he could have been, before his junkie mum got stabbed by her junkie boyfriend, then took him back in and triggered Barker’s meltdown.

Pain multiplies. It multiplies in little ways, like Julie Meiklejohn going from bullied to bully, and in enormous ways, like Robert Barker’s rage, the aftershocks of which they are all still suffering.

Kane looks at the tears forming in Guthrie’s eyes, and at the sorrowful understanding in Sendak’s, and wonders whether compassion can multiply too.

‘Mothballing the operation?’ muses one of the grunts. ‘I’d fill the entire fuckin’ place in with cement. Gonna have nightmares the rest of my days after this shit.’

‘I hear ya, buddy,’ his comrade agrees. ‘I’m thinkin’ of puttin’ in for a transfer back to Basra for some peace of mind.’

He makes his way to the control and monitoring HQ on the floor of the Cathedral. It’s deserted: rows of unmanned consoles and dormant monitors, identical screen-saver images dancing on all but one. The exception is displaying the countdown to the end of the cycle. There are thirteen hours, twelve minutes and nineteen seconds remaining until the shutdown process can be initiated.

He glances across at the thing between the cubes, shielding his eyes so as not to look directly into the red-shifted glare of the anomaly, the storm of light that so many people feared was a gateway to Hell. He knows otherwise, though. That’s why he has to act.

One of the soldiers glances back, but his presence on the control floor doesn’t merit any further interest. He’s just someone taking a final, not-so-sentimental look at a spectacle they would be obliged to disavow for the rest of their lives.

And it is quite a spectacle. Despite the squabbling over certain sensitivities, there could be no question that Cathedral is the correct word, for science can surely have its cathedrals too. But like in any cathedral, there could be blasphemy. There could be sacrilege: sins against what was holy, betrayals of what was sacred. And there could be iconoclasm.

He strides along one of the rows, waking up all of the screens, and begins keying in new values to various fields. Confirmation is automatically sought from the computers for every action, but certain of his alterations trigger more than an electronic enquiry as to whether he is sure. Override codes are requested and supplied, escalating to a flashing advisory that ‘PARALLEL GRAVITATIONAL REFLEX COMPENSATION MUST BE DISABLED BEFORE POLARITY RESET MAY BE APPLIED’.

He toggles the corresponding setting from AUTOMATIC to MANUAL to DISABLED, prompting a code-clearance warning that ‘THIS OPERATION IS IN BREACH OF RECOMMENDED SAFETY PROTOCOLS’.

He supplies the code and executes the command, beginning a new countdown of his own, synchronising with his personal timepiece. ‘POLARITY INVERSION WARNING: POLARITY RESET IN 09:59.’ Then he calls up the inversion-abort authorisation and alters it to something keyed in at random with his eyes closed, copying and pasting it into the confirmation field so that even he doesn’t know the code.

No way back now.

As he makes his way towards the main exit, there is a grumbling, surging sound, somehow filling and trembling the rock cavern. The two soldiers he overheard earlier turn in response towards the giant black cubes either side of the anomaly.

‘What the hell?’ asks the first.

‘No,’ assures the second. ‘No more Hell. Shuttin’ it down. That’s just the death rattle.’

They pay him no heed as he hastens past, heading back towards the labs, where he can take cover against the coming storm. He checks his watch: less than nine minutes, then the machine will undergo a modification that is going to make mothballing it a little more difficult than General McCormack hoped.