‘Well, if you’re sure…’
‘Oh yes,’ said Maya, smiling. She stood up and banged her arms around her chest. ‘About time we got moving, no?’
‘Yes,’ said Geena. She crushed up their litter and bagged it, stood up and hugged Maya.
‘See you again soon,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Maya. ‘I’ll get the lunch next time.’
‘No, no.’ Geena knew she wouldn’t, anyway.
‘OK, thanks. Bye!’
‘Bye. And remember,’ Geena added, mock-stern. ‘No campaigning.’
‘No campaigning,’ Maya said. ‘Promise.’
Smile, wave, turn.
As she walked back along the canal bank, Geena thought: what have I done? What the fuck have I done?
She felt quite sorry for Hope Morrison.
Saturday morning began at seven, as most Saturday mornings did, with Nick bouncing up and down on the end of the bed. Hope yelped as a badly directed bounce ended on her foot, jolting her fully awake.
‘Nick,’ she pleaded, ‘just go and play with Max.’
Nick walked on all fours up the bed and clambered in between Hope and Hugh. Hugh, his back to Hope, grunted and pulled the duvet over his head. Hope wrapped an arm around Nick, feeling the heat of his body through his pyjamas.
‘Well, snuggle in and let’s go back to sleep,’ she said, nosing his hair.
Nick squirmed. ‘Want breakfast.’
‘Get it yourself,’ Hugh said, from under the duvet and under his breath.
Nick heard. ‘Can I, can I, can I?’
‘No you cannot,’ said Hope. ‘Let’s just snooze for a bit, OK?’
‘I’m not sleepy,’ Nick said. ‘I’m hungry.’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ said Hugh.
‘Hugh!’ Hope chided.
‘Yeah, yeah, sorry.’
‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck,’ said Nick, enjoying himself.
‘And you stop saying that.’
‘Daddy said it.’
‘Yes, but he shouldn’t have. Now go to sleep.’
Nick sat straight up, pulling the top of the duvet with him.
‘Going to get breakfast,’ he announced.
Hope sighed. This was how it always ended. Nick wasn’t badly behaved most of the time, but Saturday mornings were far too exciting to spend in bed. Hope could understand that. Nick seemed to enjoy nursery (once he’d been prised off her leg each morning) but for him every new weekend was a fresh wonderland of freedom. Hope had a memory flash of how Saturday mornings had been before Nick was born. Oh well. Everything had an up side and a down side, and on balance she didn’t regret it. She got up, winced at the cold, and pulled on her dressing gown and slippers in a hurry.
‘Let’s get breakfast,’ she said.
‘Yes!’ said Nick. ‘I’ll get Max. He’s hungry too.’
‘Hugh, do you want a coffee and toast?’
But Hugh was already snoring again. Hope went through to the kitchen and made eggy soldiers for Nick and toast and honey for herself. As they ate, the garden brightened outside. The sky, visible by ducking down and looking up, was blue.
‘Railway walk?’ Hope asked.
‘Yes!’ said Nick. ‘Railway walk, railway walk!’
So that was that. Saturday, sorted.
The railway walk was Parkland Walk. The nearest entrance was a kilometre or so along East West Road to the east of Victoria Road. Hope, Hugh, and Nick with Max on his shoulder set off about eleven. Hugh had the buggy folded up and concealed in a small rucksack, just in case. Parkland Walk followed the path of an old railway line, through a long cutting for most of its route. It was the first time they’d been there since the late autumn, and Hope felt a little down on seeing it still looked like winter. Mud, dead leaves, bare branches, a few buds, shopping trolleys, litter, frost in the shadows. But Nick ran ahead, breaking thin ice and splashing through puddles in his wellies and sending Max shinning up trees.
After a while she said to Hugh: ‘We could just go on walking.’
‘What?’
Hope waved a vague encompassing hand ahead.
‘There are walks everywhere, they all connect up. Canal banks, cycle paths, that sort of thing. We could walk from here to anywhere in Britain and hardly go on the main roads.’
‘We could,’ said Hugh. ‘If we didn’t have to sleep or eat.’
‘We could camp out,’ said Hope, ‘and live off the land.’
‘The berries don’t come out for months,’ said Hugh. ‘And the squirrels are skinny even when you can dig them out. Mind you, the roadkill keeps well at this time of year. Like a deep freeze, practically. And we could recharge the monkey at fuel stations, if we took the adaptor. Yeah, that sounds like a plan.’
‘You’re not taking me seriously.’
‘That I’m not. And why would we want to walk to anywhere, anyway?’
‘If we had to get away.’
‘Jeez.’ Hugh didn’t sound amused. ‘That’s not how you do it. There’s no away.’
‘People talk about going off grid.’
‘Yeah, they do. They talk about it. On the net. Nowhere’s off grid any more.’
‘There must be,’ said Hope. ‘There must be a place.’
Nick had stopped by the side of the path up ahead, and squatted down to gaze into the dark space underneath a huge holly bush. Max, programmed to occasionally ape its owner’s actions, squatted beside him. As Hugh and Hope approached, they heard Nick talking, as if to someone under the bush. His elbows were propped on his knees, and he gestured with his hands and forearms, each motion mimicked by Max.
Hope turned to Hugh, smiling, and raised a finger to her lips.
‘Cute,’ she murmured.
Hugh nodded. But he waited only a few seconds, and then coughed, and scuffed the ground as he strode forward.
‘Yes,’ he said to Hope as he reached for Nick’s hand and scooped Max to his shoulders. ‘There is a place.’
He sounded happy.
6. The Bright Land
There was a place. Hugh was fairly sure it existed and wasn’t one of his visions. The other lads, Malcolm and Donald, had seen it too. The reason he couldn’t be entirely sure was that the lads were Leosich themselves, and they could have had the second sight too, for all he knew, and spoken of it no more than he did. But he was almost sure there was more to it than that, even to this day: that the glimpse his pals had shared, and denied, was of some far reality. Hugh’s guesses as to the nature of its reality varied on a sliding scale of scepticism and self-mockery: an objective phenomenon, a space-time anomaly, a land under the hill, a fairy land, Tir Nan Og…
They’d all been about twelve years old at the time: old enough for big school, the Nicolson Institute in Stornoway. Old enough to look with a sort of affectionate pity at wee school, Valtos Primary, when they came back to Uig for the summer holidays. Seeing the parish again after a couple of terms in the town was unsettling. The black houses and the white, the sheep-fanks and bothans, the corrugated-iron sheds, the dry-stone walls another inch deeper in the grass, the ruins and the new build, the rusting cars and tractors in the middle of fields, all seemed primitive and petty, almost shameful to be associated with, something you’d outgrown like childhood toys. Only the windmills and the wooden houses looked modern.
The boys and girls whose parents were natives or settlers had work to do on the crofts or in the shops. The girl children of the wind-farmers had help to give their mothers around the house. The boys didn’t (unlike the girls, who had home management in their curriculum). They mooched. They hung around the turbines and got in the way of the workers. Goggled and gloved, gaming, they squandered sunny days indoors until their mothers yearned to chase them out of the house with sticks.