She set the dog to find and sent it after the farmers.
She had an itch in the back of her head that she knew meant something bad would happen. Maybe had happened. So when, after the baby was born, it did: she wasn’t all that surprised.
She turned the buggy back home and put in a call to Malik.
The dog set off and she felt her world telescope into only the part of her that was watching him run. The smooth flow of tension and release, his body so low to the ground. She slowed her perception and still couldn’t pinpoint the exact moment his paws hit the ground. She couldn’t keep her foreconsciousness at that speed for long; she was too tied to her body’s slowness. She backburnered the dog’s perceptions. She already loved the dog as much as anything she had ever loved. She had to look away, search the sun-scorched bracken, the deep hot greens of the rhody bushes to settle herself, get back to her body’s time and continue the conversation she’d already begun with Malik’s cool, remote voice and the decades-old icon (a misty hill wearing a woolen hat) the house had popped-up onto the buggy’s screen.
“I see you paid the tax. No more revolution?” Malik said, foregoing pleasantries.
“The revolution is stabilized on the principles on which it began.”
She wondered then if it were actually him talking behind the icon, if he were even still alive. Would he still be handsome?
“Damn Red Clydesiders,” he said, “with their smooth-talking activists and the Tory backbench in their pocket. What do they know about us islanders? Might as well put the Tories upfront. Perhaps the polis would reconsider.”
“Red always suited you, though,” she said, unable to resist flirting.
There was silence on his side. His icon didn’t move and the Granny thought, He’s dead and I’ve insulted some youngster.
The house popped two messages into her heads-up and told her that both the children and the missing farmers had signaled they were coming home. But the link to the dog had gone dead.
“That’s a nice dog,” Malik said. “Thank you.”
She caught up with the children as they trailed back to the house. They’d gotten tired. They hadn’t seen her dog. Perce had forgotten Ariadne’s attack and now as the three of them trudged along he held onto Ariadne’s hand, made her drag him along. As usual everyone ignored the middle girl. Granny managed to be as polite to them as they were to her. The baby was talking to them but she neither offered them a lift nor asked them any questions. Everyone was equally unsatisfied.
The children ran to the cellar door and she let the car follow them in. The house led her into the sitting room where the wives were laid out as a collection of Royal Wedding (Victoria and Albert to Arthur and Uther) China in a display cabinet. They weren’t behind glass. Temptation surged through her. But she was thinking of her beautiful dog.
She pulled up an ottoman, sat down and sighed as she put her feet up. She girded herself and acknowledged the expected note from ChloeSimone.
“House,” she said. “Tea for two.”
The house opened the door again and the husband came in.
She explained about his mother-in-law and he was sanguine. She talked about the farmers and he buttered scones. He flinched when she mentioned Malik. By the time she’d gotten to the children’s latest escapade he was palpably upset. He began buffing his fingerprints from the teapot. She didn’t tell him about her missing dog.
“Perhaps,” he said, “you should wake your mother?”
The wives clattered, sussurated. She shushed them and kept her peace.
“You know I’ve always admired her efficiency with local officialdom.”
She knew he meant this as a reflection of her uselessness here as well as her job performance. He was so good at being banally evil, she thought. She queried the Hague and clocked in. She could handle the Court and the husband.
The husband was balding, had dark rings around his eyes. He slurped his tea. Why couldn’t he wait one minute until it was cool? She’d picked the wide-mouthed tea cups just so that the tea would cool quickly. Hers was already cold. She concentrated but she couldn’t heat it up. She’d never been telekinetic, but you never knew unless you tried.
The wives had slipped out while she wasn’t looking. Maybe they were afraid that she’d throw something. If she broke one of the plates, would that be the end of them? It was a metaphysical question of some interest.
When she first came to Rothesay she’d been sixteen. Her hair was long, straight, hung past her shoulders. She changed the color daily. Yet changing her hair didn’t change anything else: she could never be anything but what she was. She had had admirers from the moment she stepped off the ferry. She’d always had them, but that year, apart from the occasional tourist, she found herself in a closed social system. She came to know many more of her admirers than she’d ever wanted to.
Holding her cold tea, she felt the ghost of that year, memories insistent, rise within her chest, a heaving that, as she recognized it, became firmer, stronger, became something that would break down all her recent decisions. Delusions? Where did that thought come from?
She wanted so much, she had so much she could be doing. Yet she sat here. She could see a minute crumb among the few tiny bristles the husband had missed shaving at the spot above his lip he always missed when he first woke. Her chest wanted to explode. She wanted to scream. But she wasn’t sixteen. She was supposed to be able to compromise, rationalize, work out the way forward.
The cat wandered in. As usual it ignored her and headed for the husband who leant toward it, put his hand down. But the cat stopped, arched its back. It turned, stared at the Granny, ran out the room.
Malik. Her mother. The children. Her job at the Hague. The dog. She studied her embroidery. Asked the house to warm her tea and to add something for her back. She smiled over at the husband, making an effort. He was eating his buttered scones, ignoring her Dundee marmalade. If he could, he only ate white foods—rice, bread, coconut. The buttermilk pale yellow scones were a compromise and she imagined that in his internal tables he was scoring points by eating them.
“Since we’re here, why don’t I show you the island tomorrow?” she offered. “And later we can work out what to do about my mother.”
The Granny knew more than she’d ever wanted to about the husband’s soft old bones and so she acquiesced to the house’s suggestion to take a hovercar.
She was stuck in an if/then loop: If she could deal with Malik and have him take her mother’s body, then she wouldn’t have to deal with her mother; if she couldn’t deal with Malik, then she had to deal with her mother’s body and her mother. She siphoned today’s nest egg dividend straight off the top to Lawyers Without Frontiers and hoped they’d remember if there came a time that she needed them.
She drove the husband on the road toward the remains of Rothesay. The baby was asleep: huffy that the Granny had gone out with the husband. The water, the Kyles of Bute, was slate blue, choppy. Seals barked at the car and she sent a query to the house to see if the farmers could use them.
They were nearing the village of Port Bannatyne when they met the Somalis.
She was happy to be driving. Before they left, the Granny had patted the husband down, removed a couple of weapons and a pocket wife. He was a fool and would have been a dead one if she’d let him keep the weapons. He had no conception of military history, no view of strategy or knowledge of Support by Fire. It was foreground or nothing with him.
She signed a greeting, popped the doors, stepped with exaggerated slowness out of the car and round to the front. The husband followed. The Somali leader, a blank-faced girl of twelve, or more likely a post-famine twenty-five, motioned and they were searched. Another motion and another girl brought over a haggis on a leash. The chimera mewed at the Granny and the husband, desperate to find a reason to attack. A tiny girl trotted over, took the husband’s reading glasses, put them on. They clashed with her shorts. The glasses were an affectation at the best of times and an embarrassment now. The husband enjoyed the level of psychological removal they gave him. The other women signed amusement with tiny shifts in their stance. They didn’t really care, though, and the leader motioned and they all disappeared into the high ferns. The girl in glasses led the Granny and the husband to an ancient wheeled, scrap-worthy biodiesel Ford Transit van. The Granny stepped in, pulled out her corner of embroidery, and sent the car back to the house. They headed into the hills.