Intrusion (9 page)

‘Light at the end of the tunnel,’ said Donald, in the tone of having made a smart remark.

As they walked on, the glimmer took shape as a rectangle like the entrance. It was difficult to be certain what colour the light was, but it seemed to be the blue of a bright sky. The boys reached the end of the tunnel in a couple of minutes. The draught became stronger and colder as they moved forward. Hugh looked out, with Malcolm and Donald peering over his shoulders again. He blinked hard and shaded his eyes – the light was dazzling. The tunnel exit was evidently on the side of the hill, a steeper slope than the one they’d climbed. He saw the village and the sea-loch below, and the hills around, under the broad sky. But the houses looked different: darker, smaller and less regular in shape than the grey cement-block houses and slate roofs of the village he knew. The tide was far, far out, the sea-loch a distant glimmer. And the ground was covered in snow, of that he was certain.

He leaned forward, peering down the slope. A hundred metres below them, a tall figure was striding up the hill. A black shape against the white, with a gleam of eyes under a hood. Hugh recoiled. The other boys took his fright, and all of
a sudden all three of them were scurrying back up the passage, the shadows of Donald and Malcolm weird and long in Hugh’s wildly swaying torch-beam. Hugh could hear, above their own hurrying steps and rapid breaths, something or someone in the tunnel behind them.

Almost tumbling over each other, they hurtled out of the tunnel into the little gully and the blaze of sunlight, and scrambled up the far side, hitting the bank at a run and hauling themselves up on the heather. Only then did they glance back. No one else came out of the tunnel. They could hear nothing but their own breath and hammering heartbeats and the cry of a curlew.

They looked at each other and ran – around the end of the gully, with fearful sidelong glances, and across the moor, past the loch, across the bare rock and down the hill. They charged through heather and waded through bog and skipped and leapt over gaps in the outcrop and, on the way down the slope, hurdled erratic boulders. If any of them fell, they were up in a second, racing on.

At length they ducked through the fence of the glebe above Hugh’s house and collapsed in the long grass, gasping, sides aching from the stitch, legs filthy to the knees, shirts ripped, heels of hands scratched, shins bruised.

None of them could have said why they felt safe on this side of the fence, but they did.

Hugh stood up, hands on knees, panting.

‘Did you see it?’ he asked.

‘See what?’ Malcolm asked. Donald, too out of breath to speak, scowled and shook his head.

‘The village,’ said Hugh. ‘Down here, with the snow on it.’

‘Snow?’ Malcolm said, in a disbelieving tone. ‘That wasn’t snow. It was just the brightness.’

‘Uh-huh,’ Donald added, catching his breath. ‘After the dark, it was so bright I could hardly make out anything.’

‘And then,’ Malcolm chipped in, ‘you jumped back and nearly knocked us over and we thought something was wrong, so we ran.’

‘You didn’t see him?’ Hugh asked.

‘See who?’

‘The man coming up the hill.’

‘Now you’re having us on,’ said Donald, sounding uneasy.

Malcolm laughed. ‘That’s like the stories about crashes and dead pilots.’

Donald glowered. ‘It is not!’ he said. ‘It’s like the stories we believed when we were wee.’ He raised his hands, fingers dangling and shoogling. ‘Woo-oo-ooh!’

Malcolm clouted him. Donald kicked. They exchanged a few more blows. Hugh grabbed shoulders.

‘Stop it!’ he yelled.

They both pummelled him for a change, and then everyone backed off. No recriminations. They had outgrown telling on each other, but not outgrown hurting each other.

‘Forget about the man,’ Hugh said. ‘But you saw it, you saw the land all bright at least.’

‘So? It was the sun in my eyes,’ said Donald.

Malcolm nodded along. ‘Yes, that was it, the sun.’

Hugh knew they were lying. They’d seen what he’d seen.

‘Och, that’s what it was,’ he said. ‘And maybe I just saw a shadow, or a sheep.’

‘We were fleeing from a sheep?’ Malcolm asked, his voice squeaking with disbelief.

They all laughed, Hugh too.

‘I’ve got a new game,’ said Donald.

They ran down the last green slope to the back of the house and jumped on their bikes and raced away.

That evening, by way of explaining how he’d got his clothes, shoes and skin in such a state, Hugh told his father about how he’d been exploring a tunnel or cave or passageway up in the hills. He didn’t say anything about what he’d seen.

‘Show me your phone,’ his father said.

Hugh handed it over and his father punched up the GPS tracker app. He slid the phone back across the table.

‘See the place where you turn around?’ he said.

Hugh looked down at the black squiggle of his route on the screen map.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Now flick to … wait a minute.’

His father tapped at his own phone. The route line remained but the underlying map had changed, from a satellite pic with tags to a gridded white sheet with contour lines and little symbols. Right at the point where the route line doubled back was a row of tiny red arrowheads.

‘Culvert,’ his father said.

‘What’s it doing up there?’ Hugh asked.

‘The company was going to site a windmill there, a few years ago,’ his father explained. ‘Changed their minds, that’s all, but not before they’d gone ahead and started building a culvert to draw off flash floods.’ He frowned. ‘Speaking of which. One rainstorm and that would have been you.’

‘There was no chance of a rainstorm,’ Hugh said, in a sulkier tone than he’d intended.

‘Don’t give me lip,’ said his father. ‘There’s always a chance, you know that.’

‘The water would just have washed out,’ Hugh persisted.

‘No, it wouldn’t,’ his father said. He stabbed a finger at Hugh’s phone, magnifying the map. ‘The culvert wasn’t finished, see? It doesn’t have a lower opening. It’s probably flooded at the bottom already. So you stay out of culverts in future, got it?’

‘OK, OK,’ said Hugh.

‘Promise.’

‘Yes, Dad, all right.’

‘Now help your mother with the washing and then go to your room.’

He didn’t sound angry, or anxious, and Hugh left with some relief that he wasn’t in as much trouble as he could have been.

He didn’t go up that hill again.

After Hugh had gone to work on Monday morning, Hope took her time over breakfast and found herself running late. She skipped the usual ten minutes of talking Nick into his clothes, and just picked him up and started inserting him in them. Underpants, warm vest, shirt, trousers … at that point he kicked – not deliberately at her, but walking his legs in midair and landing an occasional random heel on her shins.

‘Stop that!’ Hope said.

‘I’m not I’m not I’m not.’

He was drumming his heels on her now, squirming in the elbow she had around his waist.

‘That bloody hurts,’ she said. ‘Stop it!’

Instead of doing what she instantly expected and gleefully repeating the bad word that had slipped out, Nick acquiesced in sudden sullen silence, stepping into his trouser legs one by
one as she set him down and held them out in front of him. He even buttoned the waistband and buckled the belt, in a belated display of independence.

Then, as she held out his cagoule, he put his arms in one by one and said as he turned away to zip up the front: ‘This is such cack.’

He said it in such a weary, resigned voice that Hope was more shocked by the tone than the content. His accent on the last word was like Hugh’s, with a long vowel and a guttural:
caachck
. And he didn’t say it in the defiant way he usually repeated naughty words, or as if said to provoke her. It was an aside, a remark.

So she didn’t reprove him.

‘What is cack, Nick?’ she asked.

‘It’s what comes out of people’s bottoms,’ he said, without so much as a giggle, then added: ‘You know – poo.’

‘Yes, I know,’ she said, getting into her own cagoule. ‘But what is “such cack”?’

Nick pouted. ‘The weather,’ he said. ‘Everything.’

‘Surely not everything?’ Hope said, holding out her hand.

‘Not you and Max and Dad,’ Nick allowed.

‘Or nursery?’

‘Nursery’s all right,’ he said.

They went out the door and into the rain.

‘Well, I’m glad to hear that,’ Hope said, locking the door. ‘Off we go!’

Nick went up the steps. To him, they were high. His legs swung out to the sides as he clambered up.

They walked down Victoria Road, rain rattling on their hoods.

‘Who did you hear saying that word?’ Hope asked.

‘What word?’

‘You know,’ Hope said.

‘I don’t know.’

‘All right, “cack”.’

‘I meant I don’t know who said it.’

‘Was it your dad?’ Hope asked, in an amused tone.

‘Oh, no!’ Nick looked up at her from under his hood.

‘So who was it?’

‘Don’t know, don’t care,’ Nick sang.

That wasn’t like him, either.

His hand tightened on hers as he swung over a puddle.

Oh well, Hope thought. Probably one of the kids at nursery. She’d have to have a word with Miss Petrie about language.

Miss Petrie, as it turned out, was outside the nursery gates when Hope and Nick arrived. She was standing talking to – or being talked to by – three mothers. One of them – Carolyn Smith, an Adventist faith-kid mum whom Hope knew well enough to nod to – saw their approach and pointed. Four heads turned. Miss Petrie looked worried, Carolyn a little embarrassed, the other two tight-lipped.

Hope marched up.

‘Good morning, Miss Petrie,’ she said. ‘Hi, Carolyn.’

‘Good morning, Miss Petrie,’ Nick said.

Miss Petrie gave him a brief smile. ‘Be a big boy and go in by yourself today, Nick,’ she said.

She glanced at Hope, as if getting permission, then stooped and pushed the small of Nick’s back with one hand while waving her phone at the gate with the other. The gate began to slide open. Nick seemed taken with the idea.

‘Bye, Mummy,’ he said.

But one of the two angry-looking mums blocked his path. He looked up at her, and then back at Hope and Miss Petrie. Finding no guidance there, he dodged to one side, lunch box swinging, and nipped past the woman’s legs. She reached out and snatched at his shoulder.

‘Oi!’ Hope shouted.

The angry mum’s fingers slipped on the wet cagoule and Nick darted away, through the gate. He’d disappeared and the gate had begun to swing shut behind him before Hope managed another word.

She stepped forward, getting in the woman’s face. ‘Don’t you dare grab at my child like that!’

The other woman didn’t back down.

‘Your child’s endangering my child,’ she said.

‘No, he is not,’ Hope said. ‘And that’s not the point. Endangering is statistics. Grabbing is battery. I could report you to the police.’

‘Now, Hope,’ Miss Petrie interposed, ‘that’s not very helpful, is it?’

As Hope turned to reply, she saw that the other angry mum was holding up a phone, recording the confrontation. This made her more angry and more restrained at the same moment.

‘Maybe it would be helpful if you could tell me what’s going on.’

‘Well,’ Miss Petrie said, wiping rain from her eyebrows, ‘Chloe and Sophie here were just raising their concerns about your little boy bringing in infections … ’

‘Look,’ said Hope, gesturing in a vague way so it didn’t look like pointing, ‘there’s Philippa Kaur going in with her kids, and they sure haven’t had the fix. Why don’t you have a go at her?’

Sophie, the one who was recording, clicked her tongue at this.

‘What?’ Hope said.

‘Oh,’ said Chloe, the one she’d just had words with, ‘so you want us to single out the Kaurs, do you?’

‘No!’ Hope snapped, outraged at the unspoken imputation. ‘I just don’t see why you should single out me.’

‘Because you’re just doing it out of selfishness,’ said Chloe. ‘We’re doing it and Philippa’s doing it because of conscience.’

The penny dropped.

‘Oh, your kids are faith kids too!’

‘That’s right,’ said Chloe. ‘So they’re in danger of any infections your kid brings in.’

‘Oh, Christ!’ said Hope.

Sophie tutted again, and Carolyn, who’d been hanging back until now, assumed a pained look and said: ‘Please.’

‘OK, sorry,’ said Hope. She took a step back, feeling crowded, and tried a different tack.

‘Why can’t we stick together on this? I know we all have different reasons for not wanting the fix, but let’s be honest, our
kids give each other germs no matter what our reasons are, and they’re not giving or getting germs from the rest. So it’s only us and our kids this affects, right? Can’t we, you know, live and let live about it?’