Next day I found Mikey sitting on a pile of bean bags in the middle of camp, watching performances by the congregation. Some of them played instruments, others sang. A small acting troupe had formed overnight. They performed a series of short vignettes, including Elisha and the bears, and the drunkenness of Noah. Baldy made a decent job of playing Noah, stumbling and falling, revealing skin-coloured tights beneath his robes.
After the play, a woman came forward on her knees, hands gripped together. Her hair was grey, wet with grease. She pleaded with Mikey to take her into a yurt and lie with her so that she may carry his light onwards. Mikey looked at me and I put my hand over my mouth.
One of her brothers led her away. They kept their eyes to the floor, they talked in hushed whispers. I caught them watching Mikey when his back was turned, as if he was the first thing they’d ever laid their eyes on, the world’s first object, moving before them.
I could see Isaac and Brother Terry were having a conversation, over by the yurts. They were deep into it, heads close together, using their hands and fingers to make their points. I decided that I’d had enough of their secrecy, so I strolled over to Isaac once he was alone and walked him over to a quieter area of the camp. I asked him what was going on and he explained a plan was afoot to cause some damage to the base’s perimeter. His skin looked waxy and he was dark beneath the eyes.
‘Is everything all right?’ I asked.
He nodded. ‘Fine.’
‘I don’t need to be worried about you?’
‘No,’ he told me, his eyes closing for a moment.
It was to happen that very night. They would sneak along to the darkened base and they would cut away a section of the fencing that encircled it. This would cause the alarm to be triggered inside the base, wasting a whole day’s work and other associated hassle for the employees.
I let him go about his business and that evening I watched them leave. There was something wrong with Isaac, I could tell. His head was hanging as he left the camp with the others and the last I saw of him was his rounded shoulders slinking into the woods, a pair of bolt cutters hanging by his side. The fire smouldered and the faintest tinkles came from the breeze moving bells hidden high up in the trees. I went into our tent and undressed. Mikey’s snores were gentle – very far off trucks – and the smell was nothing like our old tent, it was clean canvas and air-dried laundry.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said to the dark.
Mikey mumbled in his sleep.
I had done the right thing in taking him, there was no question about that. If we’d stayed then the press would’ve got even worse, the social workers would have driven him crazy. There was no need for him to see that psychologist, just to go over old ground. Let sleeping dogs lie.
I mean, aye, maybe I had exaggerated the press’s interest.
Perhaps.
They had been there though, a wee gang of three or four of them that I saw from the bathroom window. And they took that photo of Mikey and put it in the paper, didn’t they?
I growled to myself, frustrated by the hardness of thinking about it.
Next day the rain came. We’d been lucky to go so long without it. They spread a massive tarp across the camp, tying it to the trees all around, but the water still got in. It leaked through tears in the fabric and ran in silly brown trickles from higher land. Everyone stuck to their tents, the odd person wandering through the clearing to check the fire or have a word with someone else. I suppose they were waiting for a sign that the efforts down at the base had paid off.
We killed the afternoon in the yurt, waiting for the rain to finish. It was quite peaceful. You could hear the irregular drumbeat of raindrops falling on the trees’ canopy, other louder plops from the camp’s tarpaulin.
I was lying back on my bed when I decided to tell Mikey my idea. ‘I was thinking,’ I said. ‘We should think about heading back.’
He sat up. ‘Oh aye?’
‘Aye. Once we’re finished here, head back down the road. I think we’ve given it long enough.’
‘Hm,’ he said, trying to contain his excitement.
‘What d’you reckon?’
‘I think that sounds all right.’
‘Grand.’
After that we were in fine spirits for the evening meal. One of the hippies had made this huge volume of bean chilli and the clearing was heady with spice and tomato. Everyone sat together under the tarpaulin, blowing on chilli and chattering away.
I looked across the fire at everyone as they ate. I had some of my food. I looked across the camp and began to feel anxious.
I thought, where the fuck was Isaac?
I put my bowl down in the dirt and pushed myself up by the knees and paced around the camp. There was no sign of him in any of the tents or tepees or wagons or yurts that I peered into. He wasn’t down at the latrines or the field or even out by the building site for the Church’s first official building. As I wandered back to the camp proper I speculated that perhaps he’d done a runner, sick of the oddness of the camp or the Church.
Brother Terry was lying on his back, ankle of his right leg resting on the knee of his left, the robe falling back to reveal an udderish swinging calf. Some of his hair had fallen onto his forehead and his eyes were giddy. I stepped inside and the rain noises closed us off.
‘You again,’ he said, with no contempt.
‘Me again.’
‘You know,’ he said, working a pin into his teeth, dislodging some trapped morsel, ‘if it wasn’t for your brother, I’d have done something about you already.’
He laughed, making sure I knew I was not allowed to take this seriously.
‘I bet you would’ve,’ I said.
‘Be a safe bet.’
‘I just wanted to let you know. Isaac never came back from the fence thing last night.’
He threw his little pin onto the floor of the yurt. ‘You seem like a very angry person, Mr Buchanan,’ he said.
‘What does that have to do with Isaac?’
‘Something, maybe nothing. Just an observation. Why is that?’
‘I just seem to find myself in frustrating circumstances.’
‘You know, maybe you remember, you yourself were featured heavily at the time. The murder, I mean.’
‘Is that right?’
‘Yes it is. Well, maybe heavily is the wrong word to use. But you were certainly a person of interest to those of us following the case closely.’
‘Huh,’ I said.
‘Very interesting. But as we all know, your brother was the guilty party, wasn’t he?’
‘It was a long time ago. He was young.’
‘No one’s blaming either of you, not here. This is a safe place, Mr Buchanan.’ He was rubbing the odd, smooth skin of his calf as he spoke. From the angle I was at, his face was all melting chins and nostrils. ‘I’ve shown my hand. I consider the actions that were taken, when you were young, to be immensely useful.’
‘Some folk would call that sick.’
‘A genius is a person who refuses to see things in the prescribed fashion. The world changes for the unreasonable man, and all that.’
‘Hm,’ I said.
‘Why are you here?’
‘I came to tell you about Isaac.’
Terry ran a small hand over his potbelly. ‘Ah. Isaac. He’s gone I’m afraid. Concern yourself no longer with Brother Isaac.’
‘Gone? Gone where?’
‘He has moved on, in service of the Lord.’
I crouched down beside Brother Terry. He smiled. ‘You’ll have to be more specific,’ I said.
‘Oh, you lot. You lot and your dreary obsession with the black and whiteness, with the ins and outs, with the technicalities. Isaac has gone on a mission.’
‘All right,’ I said, letting the silence hang. Brother Terry sniffed, so I sniffed too. It was the fruity dampness of wet nature.
I spoke to him, in my head. I said to him, I could do anything I want to you, now, and there is nothing you can do. I told him he didn’t realise, didn’t understand, the power that I had swelling and vibrating in every joint of my body.
Eventually he broke. He spluttered out a giggle. ‘Aw, I’m no good with secrets,’ he sighed. ‘But what does it matter, I suppose? I may as well say. I’ve sent him off into the base.’
Brother Terry waited for my reaction but it didn’t come. I just crouched and noticed my power.
‘He’s going to blow the fucker up.’
‘Wow,’ I said.
‘I know,’ he smiled.
I could do it now. Lunge for him and take him out of this world with just my fingertips.
Instead I said, ‘Right,’ and I crouched there under the dim canvas, the only light coming from the lamp that hung over Terry. ‘What if I wanted to stop you?’ I asked.
‘Well, you know you can’t?’
‘What if I called them up? Those plainclothes police that jumped us before.’
Brother Terry winked at me. ‘Oh, those men are not police. Not by a long shot.’
‘So,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll just go,’ I said.
‘Probably for the best.’
I paused by the door. I could hear everyone outside moving around, the fleshiness of their bodies flapping and smacking and wobbling.
‘What’s it for?’ I asked, looking out into camp.
‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘What a lack of imagination. It’s the revelation of your brother. I realised I needed something big to force the Lord’s hand, something monumental to really clear out the cobwebs.’
He said the whole thing matter-of-factly. There was no fervour in his voice, no zeal in his eyes. It was as if he was describing his plan to repaint the front room in time for Christmas. Then he produced a flannel from somewhere and laid it out over his eyes.
I stood outside of his yurt. I could see everyone’s skin, soft and fragile, and their eyes and hair. Nothing to protect them. I thought about Isaac and how scared he’d been the day before, dark-eyed and distracted. I imagined him lurking in the base, huddled in silos and lying panting behind walls. Surely they would fill him full of bullets before he could cause any mischief. Surely they would. Surely he would die leaping a fence or barricade, metal flying around him, his hair nimbusing torchlight.
I had been born too late to ever be really frightened of the bomb. Our mother told stories about being at school and getting a lesson specifically about how to drop their skinny wee arses under their old fashioned school desks if they heard the bomb alarm going off, as if a few layers of mucky wood was enough to protect them against a cloud of pure energy ripping through the school house. That was never a worry for me, certainly not for Mikey. We’d grown up as scared of nuclear blasts as we were of pirates or Jack the Ripper. I tried to think back to anything I knew about atomic explosions. I remembered a documentary I’d seen about Japan in the war, about the shadows of Nagasaki’s population blasted onto walls.
I went back to Mikey and tapped him on the shoulder. ‘Come with me,’ I said.
‘What’s up?’ he asked as we stood together in the dripping woods away from camp.
‘I was just having a word with Terry.’
‘Oh aye?’
‘Aye. He was saying he’s asked Isaac to blow up the base.’
‘Right,’ Mikey said. ‘Wow. That’s not good.’
I shook my head. ‘Nope.’
‘What’ll we do then? Would we die if he did?’
I gave the question a few laps around my mind. ‘I think the whole country would. Maybe the whole world.’
‘Fuck.’
‘I know.’
‘What if we did the old… you-know-what, on that Terry chap.’
He mimed strangling.
‘Wouldn’t stop Isaac from doing whatever he’s going to do,’ I said.
‘That’s true,’ said Mikey, squatting down and stretching his arms. ‘One of those classic catch 22s.’
‘I mean, I wouldn’t call it a catch 22 exactly.’
Mikey nodded, sagely. ‘Good call,’ he said. ‘So…’
‘So,’ I sighed, letting my lungs empty of breath until they pinched. ‘We play it by ear, I suppose.’
‘I suppose so.’
‘Give it another day or two.’
‘It might all blow over by itself.’
As night bloomed and ink seeped into the sky, the rain continued to fall. It was a constant thrumming battering on the tarp, in the trees, in the dirt. Some of the hippies laid out sandbags at the east end of the camp to stop runoff spilling from the hills. There was a growing tension coming from the Church, particularly in relation to my brother, a mounting intensity to the way they considered him. A young man had thrown himself across Mikey’s path as we’d returned from our discussion, begging Mikey to trample him. Another started crying over their tea that evening. When someone else asked what the matter was, the upset party sobbed and told us he couldn’t cope with how absolutely beautiful Mikey was.
Brother Terry commandeered the central area of the clearing after the plates were tidied away. He kicked a few camp chairs away and stood with his arms out at ninety degrees.
‘Brothers,’ he said, cocking his head. ‘Sisters.’
A polite ripple of applause spun around the clearing from the religious constituency.
‘How glad it makes me to be here before you as the Lord blesses us with his gift of rain. Let the flowers and bumblebees be happy, and drink.’
Baldy punched the air in delight.
‘What a significant day this has been. Perhaps the most important of the Church’s history, not including my return from the world outside.’ He shuddered theatrically, then extended his hand towards Mikey. ‘Can we all just take a moment to consider that every single thing I told you turned out to be true? That our Lord would return to us, dumb and unaware of his significance. That for his true nature to be revealed a great sacrifice would have to be made?’
‘It’s true,’ said a voice from behind me, ‘he did say that.’
‘Thank you Brother Slank. Most kind. The sacrifice I spoke of –’ He bent over slightly at the hips, his hands at his sides now. ‘– is in the post. It is imminent. The hour of our reckoning is upon us.’
A murmuring swooped around the camp like a low flying bird, a soft gust of sound passed through heads like wings.
‘Some things are going to happen soon that might seem quite confusing or a little bit unfair. To those of you startled by those soon to be happening occurrences, I say only this – change is often uncomfortable, but it is always necessary.’
And then he clapped.
And then the lights came on.
All around the circumference of the clearing torches shone inwards, together. Confusion and hysteria broke out instantly, Brother Terry moving through the darkness and the light beams, hands behind his back like a friar. I held Mikey by the arm and we did our best to stay out of the way.
‘Keep your head down,’ I said, without looking at him. I was concentrating on the figures moving inwards like a tightening knot, casting their torches around, slicing the night.
‘Remain at ease brothers and sisters,’ roared Brother Terry. ‘These men are not here for you.’
It was those strange plainclothes police. A band of them moved into the clearing from all sides, the rain on their suits and raincoats glittering in torch and firelight. They began to round up the protestors, grabbing them by their arms, knees in the smalls of backs. The noise was ghastly. All I could smell was wet clothes. The Church’s members watched on as the police moved among them, passing them over to visit violence on their neighbours.
Over the top of the yells and roars, Brother Terry’s voice, rising. ‘Stay calm. This is not really happening. Any negative emotions you are feeling are simply discomfort at rapid and unusual change.’
I spied a gap, over by the back of the yurts. Perhaps we could sneak through, make our way to the van, and fuck off out of it forever. I pulled Mikey and we fell into the dark trees, heads full of the richness of sodden leaves and decaying earth.
‘Stay down,’ I whispered. ‘We’ll go around.’
‘No,’ said one of the men, hidden in the darkness, ‘you won’t.’
He brought us back by our scruffs and heaved us onto the ground before the fire.
‘What’ll we do with this pair?’ asked the man of Brother Terry.
The two of them loomed over us, Godlike in the fire’s nightmare glow, sparkling and cracking behind us along with the moans of beaten humans.
‘Contain them,’ said brother Terry.
Our hands were tied behind our backs by the man and we faced the ramshackle row of tents that had once housed the camp’s protestors. One of the police emerged from the largest tent, carrying Terry and Beth’s father in his arms, an ancient infant. He tossed the old man onto the earth like a bag of sugar.
A woman in crowd screamed. The old man lay on the ground, very still, as all around him the people he had gathered in that place were rounded up and marched away.