‘Yes, you told me that, thank you,’ Hope said, with some asperity. She hadn’t felt exactly flattered by his account of how he’d fallen for her. It was as if she had fitted a previous fantasy image. As quickly as the thought recurred, a more reassuring interpretation occurred to her, and it cheered her up immensely. All of a sudden things made sense again.
‘But I think I understand,’ she went on. ‘Let’s leave aside your second-sight theory, OK? I don’t know anything about that, and it doesn’t seem likely to me. Look at what we get if we assume it’s all psychological, it’s all in your head.’ Hugh looked poised to interrupt. She raised a hand. ‘No, wait, hear me out. Lots of people, far more people than ever admit it, see people who aren’t there. It’s quite common in kids. Take your case. You start off with an imaginary friend, OK? And then you become embarrassed by her, and she disappears. As you get older, you see others, but just when you’re at or near puberty and feeling all sorts of stresses you don’t understand and can’t process, you have a really quite disturbing and scary vision, hallucination, whatever. You start having nightmares. So you ask your dad for something that reassures you, that you feel keeps the bad thing at bay. And it does. After that… right up to now, right up to your most recent encounter, sort of thing, the visions become much more benign. The one you saw when you met me, it was a kind of blessing on us, wasn’t it? It was saying I was the ideal girl for you, an ideal you’d begun to form when you were quite small – just becoming aware of the difference between boys and girls, and how that had something to do with how your parents loved each other, and at the same time you were just a little bit ashamed of the warm and tender feelings you had towards these, yuck, girls – and that grew with you. You see?’
‘I’m not sure I do,’ said Hugh.
‘These visions you have aren’t something bad. They aren’t something to be ashamed of. They’re one part of your brain telling you things about yourself. Mostly good things, apart from that one scary episode. You’re all right, Hugh. You’re all right. That’s what I’m trying to tell you.’
‘Thanks,’ said Hugh, with a wry smile.
‘And you don’t need that thing in the box any more.’
Hugh looked dubious, almost stubborn.
‘Maybe not, but I don’t want to risk it. I don’t mean risk what I thought might happen when I was thirteen. I mean risk doing something to what’s keeping me stable, right? Even if what you say is how it is, and I hope so, maybe the thing in the box is important to me psychologically. Like a symbol, you know? If it’s all in my subconscious – well, the subconscious has a thing about symbols. I don’t want to disturb that.’
‘You’re a grown man now,’ Hope said. ‘You don’t need a security blanket.’
For a moment Hugh’s expression didn’t look very grown-up at all.
‘I might find I needed more of the drink, instead.’ He poured himself another generous slug. ‘It’s funny. My private name for the box was “the suicide box”.’
‘You weren’t feeling suicidal?’ she asked, shocked.
‘No, no,’ said Hugh. ‘Not for one second. It was just a wee private joke to myself. You know, about the old ruling-class tradition of what to give someone when they’ve really fucked up and need to make a graceful retirement from the scene? Doesn’t mean anything more than that.’
‘OK, OK,’ said Hope.
There was an uncomfortable silence. On the screen, strange organisms were extrapolated from faint exoplanetary atmospheric traces of organic molecules that hinted at a different genetic code.
‘Are you sure you were just joking,’ said Hugh, awkwardly, ‘about having a dram yourself?’
‘Not entirely.’
His cheek twitched. He rubbed his chin just under the mouth. ‘Were you really considering taking the fix?’
‘Damn right I was,’ said Hope. ‘I’d decided. The only reason I didn’t was that I’d hidden this box’ – she flicked it with a fingernail – ‘beside yours.’
‘Why?’
‘Fiona – the health visitor – gave me it, and I didn’t want to think about it, so I put it somewhere—’
‘I meant, why did you change your mind about the fix?’ She told him. By the time she had finished, she was crying in his arms.
‘Oh, Hope,’ he said, stroking the back of her head.
And nothing more. After a while her shoulder and her neck hurt. She sniffed, blinked, pulled away and sat back at the other side of the sofa, legs curled up. A slug-trail of snot glistened on Hugh’s shoulder. Hope tugged out a tissue and dabbed it off, then settled back again.
‘Nothing to say?’ she said.
Hugh sipped his whisky and looked at her. ‘I don’t know what to say,’ he said.
‘Oh, damn it!’ Hope felt all the more irritated with him and with herself for having picked up Hugh’s Leosach genteel swearing. She reached for the bottle and poured a small dram into the empty glass, and a larger volume of water. Even so, the first sip felt like fire in her mouth. She waited for the sensation to subside to a spreading glow. Along with it came the realisation that she’d crossed a line, trivial though the transgression was. Hugh watched without comment, then raised his glass.
‘Slainte,’ he said, in an ironic tone.
‘Skol. Now, talk, for crying out loud.’
Hugh took a deep breath. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘You know I’d prefer you to take it. I’ve said so often and often. I’ve never understood your objection. In fact I think it’s irrational, to be honest. But I’d rather you didn’t take it at all than take it because you feel defeated. That isn’t you, Hope.’
‘Well, I do feel defeated,’ Hope said. ‘Because I am. Or I will be. Like I said, it makes no difference in the long run what I do. It all ends up in the same place, with me swallowing that thing. Hah! Might as well wash it down with whisky right now, and get it over with.’
She actually reached for the tablet. Hugh’s hand shot forward and grabbed her wrist.
‘Not like that,’ he said.
She relented, not that she’d really intended to do it. She’d got the reaction she’d wanted. Well, maybe. She sipped the whisky, regarding him. After more than three months without alcohol, even this small amount was making her feel a little light-headed, a little loquacious and pugnacious.
‘So, like what?’ she demanded.
‘Like, somewhere where you’re not pressured all the time, where you’re not being got at. Where you can make your own mind up. We could just go.’
‘Go where?’ Hope demanded. ‘I’m not going to the other side, and everywhere on this side is just like here, and everywhere outside them both is a shit-hole and either a failed state or a tyranny where the fix is bloody compulsory.’
‘Just because Jack Crow told you to go to Russia,’ said Hugh, teasing, ‘there’s no reason to rule out the other side. I mean, there’s work in Russia.’
‘There’s work, all right,’ Hope said. ‘Work or starve. And there’s always a lower depth for that, all the way down to scavenging the rubbish dumps. No thanks.’
‘Anyway,’ said Hugh, ‘I wasn’t thinking of Russia. I was thinking of Lewis.’
‘Lewis?’ Hope wasn’t sure whether to take him seriously. ‘From what you’ve told me, Lewis is even more infested with social workers than London.’
‘Yes, it is,’ said Hugh. He took a long swallow of whisky. ‘Thing about social workers in Lewis, though. You can see them coming from a long way off.’
Hope laughed. He had that dry, disillusioned, defiant note in his voice that was the up side of the Leosach gloom, and a wry gleam in his eye. This was the Hugh she knew. Not the strange man who stashed a powerful air pistol and a bottle of single malt and who saw people from the past walking through walls. But they were the same man, that was what she would have to get used to.