The Woman Who Walked Into the Sea (12 page)

‘In case you’re wondering . . .’ Now she was standing in the aisle between the two front rows, ‘how my accent ended up east of mid-Atlantic, it’s because I was born in Ireland, raised and educated in England, and found success in America.’ She scanned the audience. ‘Yes, I’m doing ok, but that’s not what this is about. It’s not about people like me getting rich by ruining your environment, as some of our opponents like to say. This is about you, whether you want jobs, opportunity, prospects for your families, whether you’ll let me and the other companies in the consortium give that to you, or whether you’ll make us go elsewhere.’ She frowned, looking towards the left of the hall where a single detonation of pent-up protest had greeted her last sentence.

‘Honestly? I’d rather it was here,’ she said trying to identify her opponent. ‘Why?’ She looked for him again. ‘Because you people need it the most. Yes there’ll be a cost. You’ll lose some scenery, but not much.’

Giving up the search, she addressed the hall again, ‘Hell, this is a great opportunity for you. Don’t turn this one down because nothing like it is going to come this way again soon.’ She paused to consider what she’d said. ‘Correction. Ever. Don’t let anyone take this from you.’ She waited before finishing: ‘And you know who I’m talking about.’

Her last remark drew another outburst, the same shout as before, the same expression of anger. Violet didn’t hear it clearly because Mrs Anderson was wondering aloud if the speaker had been referring to Duncan Boyd. A family behind was coming to the same conclusion since ‘Boyd was the big problem’. Violet strained to see who had bellowed in protest and noticed people shifting their chairs away from Cal. Others were staring at him. ‘It’s your friend,’ Mrs Anderson said, spotting it too. ‘Does he know Duncan?’ she asked doubtfully, ‘because people who know him generally don’t speak up for him.’

Violet did not answer and anyway the speaker had started again. ‘I imagine you expected me to come here this evening and talk about the project, how much it’ll cost, the timetable, how you’ll be saving the world, and so on. But you know all of that, and anyway it’s beside the point. What you’ve got to decide is whether you want a future, whether you’re going to save yourselves.’

She placed her hand on her heart. ‘D’ye know something, I think you will.’ She bowed before going back up the steps, her sandals flapping against the treads, pursued by warm applause. Violet half-expected another protest from Cal. She glanced around. He was sitting stony-faced with his arms folded while around him people were clapping.

Ted Russell,
in corduroys, was next. He rose to his feet with
a piqued expression as though he expected a respectful quiet
to descend on the hall. Instead there were cat-calls
and, around Violet and Mrs Anderson, a gathering undertone of
hostile comment about Duncan and the risk his opposition to
the windfarm posed to the village’s future. Mr Russell’
s face became as livid as his trousers as he
struggled to make himself heard. At one point he warned
about the threat of unrestrained development and the lasting damage
it would do to ‘our wonderful west coast way of
life not to mention the tourist industry that sustains us
all’. The remark brought more jeers; and a deeper shade
of red to the speaker’s cheeks and neck. The
hecklers didn’t seem to regard his ‘wonderful west coast
way of life’ to be the same as theirs. Russell’
s response was to start shouting back. ‘Might I remind
you,’ he boomed with patrician superiority, ‘that we’re custodians
of this ancient landscape and history won’t be kind
to us if we sacrifice it for a technology which
is both inefficient and unproven.’ Despite Gwen Dixon’s calls
for quiet, he gave up the unequal battle and sat
down, his face glowing like embers in a draught.

‘The only things that are inefficient and unproven around here,’ a man shouted, ‘are incomers like you.’

The jibe brought a counter from Russell’s supporters of second home owners and B&B proprietors. They clapped their man out of loyalty until Ross Turnbull got to his feet. The hall fell silent, apart from Russell’s bad-tempered complaint to Madam Chair about unfair treatment.

Turnbull spoke quietly. ‘My definition of unfair is different to Mr Russell’s.’ The hall strained to hear him. ‘Unfair is growing up in Poltown and having to leave because there’s no work and no prospect of any work. It’s families being broken up . . . it’s what our children will always have to put up with if we don’t back this development.’ He spoke, he said, for those without a job or a decent home. The
forgotten
he called them. ‘Those of you who have been held back for too long by people with a selfish interest in keeping the landscape as it is – this is your moment.’

Mrs Anderson tutted with impatience, rather too loudly for Violet’s liking. Heads swayed to identify the source of the complaint, and Violet turned too, trying to deflect them. She picked out Cal. He was muttering to himself and shaking his head in disagreement with what had just been said.

‘Well? What are you going to do?’ Ross Turnbull carried on. ‘Grab the opportunity for God’s sake.’ The applause was deafening as he left the stage to attend to his lolling father.

The final platform speaker, the suited environmentalist, talked fluently but drily about the impact of windfarms on bird-life in particular (the area around Poltown being important for Sea Eagles and Peregrine) and biodiversity in general. ‘You are lucky enough to have miles and miles of wild land and seascape but it’s disappearing globally. It’s important to protect what’s left. You are its guardians.’

It was an unfortunate echo of Ted Russell’s speech and elicited another chorus of boos.

No sooner had he sat down than Gwen Dixon
stood up. ‘Quiet, quiet,’ she boomed but even her voice
failed to silence an argument that had broken out in
the wings of the hall. Violet craned her neck to
see what was going on. Two young men in tee
shirts, Turnbull supporters Mrs Anderson said, were arguing with a
young farmer type with swept back blond hair and a
tweed jacket. A punch was thrown. Violet wasn’t sure
whose. The young farmer lunged forward. Suddenly men were running
to take sides. The two tribes shoved at each other,
the preliminaries to a skirmish. The rest of the audience
sat transfixed until the crack of a head butt on
the bridge of the farmer’s nose. A collective gasp
of shock sounded in the hall. It was followed by more fists flying and a scraping of chairs and people hurrying for the door
.

Violet grabbed at Mrs Anderson’s arm, ‘I think we’d better go, don’t you?’

Worse violence happened most Saturday nights in Sauchiehall Street, Cal thought. The punches and the head-butt gave way to insults and shouting but the audience still rushed for the exit. There was a yell for a missing child. A woman cried out. Cal caught a glimpse of an elderly man toppling. A shout of ‘Don’t push’ went up. Gwen Dixon strode down the aisle towards the crush at the doors, her shoulders and hips rolling together, her elbows bent; a practical woman prepared for action. The speakers were on their feet, wondering at what had happened, finding themselves the audience to a drama, all apart from Ross Turnbull who was wheeling his father towards the side exit. Cal noticed him look back at the melee and grimace, a combination of worry at the crush of bodies and disappointment at the turn of events. Not quite the show of overwhelming support he’d called for or that BRC had demanded.

‘Stop pushing.’ Gwen Dixon was working her way into the throng. She scolded and shouted, calling for common sense, telling everyone to take a step back, to take their time. Heads turned towards her: the pressure on the door relaxed. ‘One by one please, and no pushing. Everyone will get out safely if you take your time.’ Cal joined the back of the queue that was forming. He nodded towards Gwen Dixon as he passed her, acknowledging her efforts. She glowered back, communicating disapproval of his interventions.

Outside, the rain was still falling and the wind blowing. Groups of distressed and crying people huddled together to exchange stories. A woman Cal’s age went from cluster to cluster inquiring about cuts or other injuries. He watched for the statue and her white-haired companion. He’d come to the conclusion they were granddaughter and grandmother. Then he saw the old woman by a car. She’d dropped her keys. The wind was shoving at her, almost tipping her over, as she bent to pick them up. Cal ran over to her, steadied her, retrieved her keys and placed them in her hand. ‘Are you all right?’ he said.

She blinked at him. ‘Where’s Violet?’

‘Don’t worry. Everything’s fine.’ He looked around the car park. ‘Where did you last see her?’

‘At the door . . .’

After helping her into her car he said she should drive home in case trouble flared again and he would look for Violet. Then he headed off across the car park, calling out her name and asking if anyone had seen her, describing her appearance. Having drawn a blank, he tried the hall. As he passed the side of the building, he heard a scream. The light cast by a small window lit up two struggling figures. ‘Hey,’ he called out, running towards them. ‘Hey stop that.’

The light fell across Violet’s face as she was pushed to the ground. A small, burly man looked back at Cal. His face was hidden by shadow and a hood. Cal shouted again. The man held out his right hand as a warning to Cal to keep his distance before turning and disappearing into the blackness.

Cal knelt beside Violet and helped her sit up. ‘He’s gone. Are you all right?’

She held her hands to her face and nodded. ‘Yes,’ she said uncertainly.

‘God, what was all that about?’

He must eat. He must drink. He must ring his son Rahim. They were the reasons for leaving Shereen’s room; reasons for going downstairs, for picking himself up. He
must
. Why must he? Muhammad Anwar tried to remember. Slowly it dawned on him. It wasn’t so much that he must do these things. It was just that they were all he had left to do.

No case files to read.

No shirt to iron.

No trousers to press.

No sandwiches to make for his lunch break.

No need for wakefulness in the night, fretting over this or that boy or girl and whether the right decision has been made.

No alarm clock to set.

No flask of tea to prepare.

No emails or texts to read before work.

No diary to consult.

Not tomorrow, not the next day, not next week. For the time being he had no work. ‘Until further notice,’ Mr Hunter had said. ‘You are suspended and I must ask you to leave these premises immediately.’

Eat, drink, ring Rahim: except Mr Anwar was not hungry or thirsty (despite having had no food or water since he left the office at midday), and he couldn’t (wouldn’t) ring Rahim. So he remained where he was, watching the light fade to dark, the pink draining from Shereen’s duvet cover and the skin of a Bollywood starlet’s airbrushed face becoming translucent in the streetlight which illuminated the poster hanging beside the door. Did he have a reason for leaving his daughter’s bedroom? Not to eat. Not to drink. Not to ring Rahim.

Rahim, he sighed. Rahim was all he had left. Rahim, in his final year at Edinburgh University, would soon be a doctor. Dr Rahim Anwar. How could he admit to Rahim that he had a stupid old man for a father?

Instead he told Shereen, as he used to do when she was a baby, as he had done these past four years, an account of his day, the same theme usually recurring: how a man like him (a man of colour is what he meant), also an unassuming man, had to accustom himself to disappointments; how he had become wiser as a result and kinder; how kindness was under-rated; how some people confused it with weakness, in particular Mr Hunter.

You shouldn’t judge the man until you know the pressures bearing on him, he told Shereen, in case he sounded disparaging of Mr Hunter.

Always step into the other man’s shoes before criticising him, he advised Shereen, with a rueful tilt of his head. Even before she left home the only shoes she was prepared to step into were peep-toed, sparkly and high-heeled and well beyond her father’s pocket. He imagined that nothing had changed except that Shereen’s taste for glittering extravagance was being indulged by her wealthy husband.

Sighing again, he returned to the subject of Mr Hunter. As director of the department, his shoes were necessarily big ones, he told Shereen. Mr Anwar held his hands wide apart to show her just how big. There was the inquiry into the death of Charmaine Hislop, the fostered toddler who was killed by her baby-sitter. There was the claim for unfair dismissal by Gillian McKay, Mr Hunter’s demoted deputy. There was the work-load that was growing like Topsy: important work. Very important work, he emphasised in case Shereen hadn’t grasped the seriousness of the situation.

Mr Hunter didn’t have his troubles to seek.

If your father was sounding regretful, he told Shereen, it was because he was. Regretful at the inconvenience he had caused Mr Hunter, regretful at being disobedient, though not regretful at what he had done.

You see, he said with a degree of caution, Mr Hunter was unmarried. (The circumspection was because Mr Hunter was gay.) Mr Hunter didn’t have children. He had no experience of the heartbreak when parents and children lost touch with each other. Mr Anwar shook his head, his expression one of resigned endurance. He wouldn’t say more; he didn’t need to. Shereen had heard it before, often: how the ache never diminished. Mr Anwar’s silence was a long one, lasting many minutes. Jagged edges of pain stabbed his heart, rendering him speechless, as it always did. It was twenty-two years since his darling Meera died; Meera, his wife; Meera, the mother of his two children; and four years since he had last seen or spoken to Shereen. The spasm passed.