Reheated Cabbage (6 page)

For Kenny, Craig and Woody

Another convoy of travellers hustled along through the busy traffic which clogged the city's arteries, rolling onto the slip road off the congested bypass and snaking painstakingly towards the mobbed field which rumbled with the buzz of small competing sound systems.

From the disused railway bridge overhead, a sweating PC Trevor Drysdale kept a watchful eye on the scene. Drawing a wheezy breath of the baked, mucky air, Drysdale wiped his brow and gazed heavenwards at ragged clouds which failed to block out the sun's leery heat.

Out of the range of Drysdale's vision and earshot, in a stinking enclave underneath the concrete bypass, the local young team were also filling their lungs with the chemicals the traffic spewed out, to complement the ones they voluntarily ingested.

Despite the heat, Jimmy Mulgrew felt himself shudder. It was the bevvy and the drugs, he reasoned. It always kept a part of you from being warm. That, and lack of sleep. He embarked on another flinching spasm, more severe than the last, as Clint Phillips, standing over a prostrate Semo, brought the heavy hammer crashing down on the side of the boy's strong, square jaw. The jaw was concealed by a pillow, wrapped around his head and secured with tape, leaving only his eyes, nose and mouth visible. Even with this protection, Semo's head still jolted to the side under the impact of Clint's blow.

Jimmy looked across at Dunky Milne, who raised his brows and shimmied his shoulders. He took a step forward and wondered whether or not he should intervene. Semo was his best mate. But no, Clint was staying cool and checking on him. — Awright, Semo? Is it away? Is that it broke, aye?

Semo looked up at Clint, registered his ugly smile. Even wasted on a temazepam capsule and some super lager, Semo could still feel the pain in his jaw. He moved it around. It was sore, but still intact. — It isnae broke yit, he drawled, his spittle dribbling into the pillow.

Clint bristled, taking on a prizefighter's gait. He turned and shrugged to Jimmy and Dunks, who looked back neutrally at him. There was something moving uneasily in Jimmy's chest, and he wanted to say 'that's enough' but nothing came out as Clint crashed the hammer with vicious force into the side of Semo's head.

On impact, Semo's head jerked again, but then the boy staggered to his feet. An old man walking a chunky black Labrador dog looked startled as he turned the corner and came upon them. The young team's stares burned him and he violently pulled the pissing, whining beast along the road as it tried to urinate on one of the concrete support pillars. The man disappeared around the other bend that led up from the slip road to the old village, before he had the chance to witness the youth with the pillow taped around his head tear the hammer from the other boy's grasp and smash him full in his unprotected face with it.

— FUCKEN RADGE! Semo roared, as Clint's cheekbone shattered and part of his top row of teeth were scattered in a sickening splintering sound which gave Jimmy a nauseous but uplifting feeling. Jimmy didn't really like Clint, basically because Clint worked in the garage and Shelley hung around there, but he also wasn't enthusiastic about this scam.

Clint was holding his face in his hands, looking up at Semo and screaming like a demented hyena, spitting blood and teeth. He turned to Jimmy and Dunks in tearful appeal. — It wisnae meant tae be me! he bleated. — It wis meant tae be that cunt! He hud the fuckin jelly! He hud the pillay!

Semo looked completely away with it. He wasn't letting go of the hammer, nor was he removing his rapacious gaze from Clint.

— It's done now but, eh? Jimmy shouted. — Moan, lit's goan see the polis! He winked at Semo, who let the hammer rest by his side.

— Fuck youse! Clint whined. — Ah'm gaun hame!

— Come back tae mines, Jimmy said.

Clint was in no position to refuse, allowing himself to be led back to Jimmy's house. They went upstairs to his bedroom, and listened to some tapes. Clint managed to swallow two jellies and passed out on Jimmy's floor. Jimmy went downstairs for a bin liner and put it under Clint's head, to stop the blood from getting everywhere.

Jimmy started to relax when he heard his father turning up the volume on the telly's handset downstairs, compelling him to increase the output from his Bass Generator tape. The telly volume nudged up an increment; Jimmy corresponded. It was a familiar ritual. He smiled at Dunky and gave the thumbs up, and they opened a tube of Airfix. Clint was out for the count, and Semo was also asleep. Jimmy tenderly cut the tape and let the pillow flap back, enabling his friend's head to rest naturally on it. Semo's jaw was badly swollen, but his injuries were minor in comparison to the mess Clint's coupon was in. Letting a couple of drops of the nippy, burning liquid drip onto his tongue, Jimmy felt himself satisfyingly struggle for breath as the vapour filled his lungs.

Shelley Thomson had six toes. When she was wee her father told her that she was an alien from outer space and that she was found abandoned by her parents when a UFO dumped her in a field outside Rosewell. The truth, however, was that it was her father who had abandoned Shelley. When she was six years old, he simply did not come home one day from work. Her mother, Lillian, refused to tell Shelley whether she knew anything at all about her dad's disappearance.

As a result, Shelley somewhat idealised the memory of her father, and this was particularly the case when her adolescent battles with Lillian hit a particularly discordant pitch. Growing up into a dreamy, speculative fifteen-year-old, Shelley had developed a fascination for UFOs.

When she realised that she was pregnant after missing two periods and then scoring positive twice on different Boots home-testing kits, Shelley claimed that the father was a seven-foot alien who came to her in the night and took her semi-conscious to a place which may or may not have been a spacecraft and lay on top of her. She told her friend Sarah that there was the 'feeling of doing it' without any genital interaction.

— Aw aye? Sarah scoffed. — What was eh like? Brad Pitt? Liam Gallagher?

Sarah tried not to show that she was impressed that her friend did not allow herself that kind of indulgence. Instead, Shelley described the alien in classical terms: a long, thin hairless body, large slanted eyes, etc. Impressed though she was, Sarah was far from convinced.

— Aye, right, Shelley, she disdained. — It's Alan Devlin's fae the garage, eh?

— Nuhp!

Alan Devlin was an attendant at the local garage at the bottom of the slip road which led onto the bypass. He had an easy, engaging manner with young girls from the local school, whose grounds backed onto the filling station. Clint Phillips, Alan's bashful seventeen-year-old YT, would wait nervously outside and keep watch while the senior attendant indulged himself in the back shop with the local youngsters, Shelley and Sarah being among those he numbered in his schoolie harem. Clint longed for a piece of the action but was too shy in himself, due mainly to his bad spots, and therefore too unexotic to the girls, and Devlin would tease him mercilessly about it. Many times Clint wished that Mr Marshall, the garage manager, who was never there, would come by and surprise them, but he never did. Marshall was an alcoholic and always on the piss in one of the local pubs come lunchtime. Clint nonetheless liked to infer that he'd fucked Shelley; this annoyed the fuck out of his mate Jimmy Mulgrew, who had the hots for her in a big way.

Alan Devlin came from the city and had been involved with a gang of football casuals known as the Capital City Service in his teens, but gave up when his older brother Mikey mysteriously vanished one evening, never to return. Mikey Devlin had been a top boy. In the five years since the disappearance of his idolised big brother, Alan Devlin had re-evaluated life. The gig was basically fucked, you were here one minute and gone the next. The point was to take what you can get. For Alan, this meant shagging as many birds as possible. His success with young girls was based on charm, persistence, and an ability to tap into their obsessions. Shelley had allowed him to fuck her after hearing this story. As her father had vanished, she felt a bond to Alan Devlin. Previously, this tall, thin schoolgirl had only let him touch her small, pubescent breasts, often as he and Sarah had full intercourse.

Shelley, and for that matter Sarah, always vowed never to visit Alan in the garage again. They were drawn out of boredom, however, and unfailingly mesmerised by the older lad's easy flattery. Before they knew it, Alan's hands would be all over one, or both, of them.

The shanty town of travellers had spilled from the old municipal travelling people's site onto the toxic wasteland alongside it. The settlement was growing daily. Millennium fever: these wee cunts were crazy for it, thought PC Trevor Drysdale. They weren't real travelling people, they were just cheeky bastards out for bother. As if he didn't have enough of that from the local youths. There had been a fight outside the chip shop last night. Again. Drysdale knew who the troublemakers were, with their drugs and smart-arse behaviour. Later this week he was up before the promotion board. There was still time to get the kind of result that could swing it. Had he not scored brownie points with his firm, but sensitive dealings with the travellers? Sergeant Drysdale. It sounded good. That new suit from Moss Bros. It fitted like a glove. Cowan, the chairman of the promotion board, was a stickler for appearances. Brother Cowan was also known to him from the Craft. The job was as good as his.

Drysdale walked down the path to the edge of the reservoir. Beer cans, wine bottles, crisp packets, glue tubes. That was the problem with working-class youth today; economically excluded, politically disenfranchised and full of strange drugs. It was a bad combination. All these wee cunts wanted to do was to party into the next century and see what this cultural watershed brought. If the answer was 'the same old shite', as it surely would be, Drysdale morosely reflected, then the wee fuckers would just shrug and party on into the next one.

Trevor Drysdale was realistic enough to know that there had never been a golden age of a 'clip round the earhole' in enforcing the law in these parts. Yet he did remember the realpolitik equivalent of social control, 'the kicking in the cells'. The old school of rough-and-ready Scottish youth respected that great institution of law enforcement, the slippery steps. Now, though, most of them were too full of drugs to feel the kicking or even remember they'd received it. After a few jellies, that kind of damage went with the territory. Yes, such an activity could still be therapeutic for the individual officer, but as a method of enforcing the law it was worse than useless.

What a place, Drysdale mused, letting his gaze sweep over the reservoir down across the city's topography and back up to the Pentland Hills. It had changed here alright. Even as conditioned to its incremental development as he was, sometimes the nastiness of the arbitrary, incongruent nature of the locale jarred with him. Old villages, shoebox modern housing developments, barren fields, scabby, moribund farms and industrial estates, leisure and shopping complexes, motorways, slip roads and that rancid piece of brown, derelict wasteland they bizarrely called the Green Belt. That terminology seemed like yet another calculated insult perpetuated on the locals by the authorities.

But if there was one thing that concerned him more than the gloom which had solidified the place like a gel, it was this new wave of optimism. Millennium fever. In other words, another excuse for young cunts to go shagging and drugging while the rest of us have to work away in a state of loathing and fear, he reflected with rancour, feeling his ulcer bite. It had to be stopped. There were thousands of them now, crowded onto that strip of land.

Drysdale looked down from the steep bank by the water. He could see that makeshift village of lost souls expanding, getting closer and closer to his own Barratt estate. Thank fuck for the slip road that divided them. It was surely now time for the government to declare a national emergency; take off the kid gloves. But no; the sly fuckers were holding off, crossing their fingers for a few drug-related deaths. Then they'd whip up hysteria among a supposed moral majority and bring in some more repressive measures. It had to be worth a few percentage points in the polls and party conference season, and an election itself, were coming up soon. There would be a round of 'get tough' speeches followed by a few witch-hunts. Drysdale had heard it all before, but to hear it more loudly would at least mean that they hadn't given up. Let's get some fucking blood spilled here, he ruefully willed, dispatching a rusty can into the dank water with a crisp volley.

The young team's plan had been an inadvertent success. The next morning Clint Phillips woke up on Jimmy Mulgrew's floor in agony, and they had been forced to take him to the hospital, where he was X-rayed, examined and admitted. Jimmy considered it a bonus that Clint, rather than Semo, had been hospitalised, although with Clint not at the garage shop, they would have to watch what they nicked with that big Alan Devlin cunt around.

Anyway, Clint would be out in a day or so, then they could go round to the small police substation, and register the crime with the polisman Drysdale, blaming a group of the travellers for the assault.

The Cyrastorian pushed his long fingers against his temples. He could feel himself steadily moving from the centre of the Will, out into the peripheral zones of its influence. Sometimes Gezra, the Elder, felt that he had been wrong to pursue this line of work beyond his allotted span. It was as if he could feel the very chill of deep space insinuating itself into his flesh and bone, through the translucent aura of the Will, which protected him and all his world's sons and daughters.

In the darkness of his craft, illuminated only by the images which panned up of the observed planet, the Appropriate Behaviour Compliance Elder for this sector pondered as to the likely destiny of the rogue youth's ship. Earth seemed almost too obvious. After all, their specimen had been from that world. Specimen. Gezra smiled across his thin lips; he would have to stop using such a pejorative, demeaning term. After all, the Earthman had been inducted, electing to stay a part of Cyrastorian culture, rather than return home with a memory wipe, and this in return for strangely modest rewards. There was little to be gained in attempting to understand the primitive psyche of the Earth creature.

The Appropriate Behaviour Compliance Elder reluctantly decided that he needed to use external technology to locate the renegade youths. This prospect filled the Elder with distaste. Cyrastorian philosophy was based around the dismantling and demobilising of external technology, and the ruthless promotion of the Will, those individual and collective psychic powers, by which his race had developed and advanced their civilisation from their own decrepit, post-industrial age, now several millennia past.

As with Earth humanoids, the early history of Cyrastor had been dominated by a procession of prophets, evangelists, messiahs, sages and seers who had contrived to convince both themselves and their followers that they were privy to the secrets of the universe. Some achieved little more than ridicule in their own lifetime, others would have an influence on generations.

The remorseless rise of science and technology conspired to undermine the great religions as the basis of truth, without ever reducing the humility, wonder and reverence experienced by all intelligent life forms as they contemplated this immense, amazing universe. Yet as Cyrastorian technology itself advanced and opened up what seemed like a vast expanse but would retrospectively only be regarded as a corner of their civilisation, it simultaneously threw up more mysteries than it had the capacity to resolve. This was always the way with knowledge, but of greater concern to the Cyrastorians was their culture's inbuilt tendency to gear all such technology towards the consumption of resources without being able to eliminate poverty, inequality, disease and the wasted potential of its citizens.

At the very height of their technological advancement, this pragmatic and idealistic people faced up to their spiritual crisis. A body known as the Foundation was established by the Principal Elders. Its brief was to promote spiritual enlightenment, and to liberate the Cyrastorian potentialities of the mind from its hitherto supposed physiological limitations. Centuries of meditation resulted in the creation of the Will, a collective pool of psychic energy that every Cyrastorian could draw upon, and, by the very act of living and thinking, contributed to in accordance with the levels of their personal training and their ability to learn. As the Will had all but eradicated cultural and social differences, this proved to be very similar in all Cyrastorian citizens.

It had previously been somewhat hilarious for Gezra to fritter away leisure moments watching primitive cultures like Earth continue down their blind alley of external technology development. Now however, many of the renegade Cyrastorian youth were moved by at least the idea of this visceral touch, feel and taste nonsense. Primitivists, they sought physical types of interaction for its own thrilling sensation, and often with races who were little more than savages. Gezra knew, however, that the renegade leader, the Younger called Tazak, had, for all his rhetoric about the cult of physicality, extremely developed psychic powers, and would sense any Elder attempts at the detection of his presence through the exercise of the Will.