SEALED
After being released for the third time that week I walked the two miles home through the rain minus the umbrella I had when the police took me in. I lit a cigarette, the last from my packet but the rain kept extinguishing it no matter how hard I drew.
I walked the long way home past the whisky bond, the geriatric hospital and the gypsum factory. I didn’t want to meet people, didn’t want to risk being seen from a window. You never knew. All it needed was an eager beaver with a strong sense of civic duty and a hazy idea of evil to decide to dispense with a judge, a jury and all the usual stuff. Dying or being killed didn’t bother me. The process however, did.
For the sake of my safety a policeman had warned me not to go back home.
‘Don’t go back home’, he said. ‘It won’t be safe’.
‘Where should I go?’ I said.
‘Have you friends or family?’
‘I have a sister’.
‘Go there if she’ll have you’, he said.
‘She lives in Salisbury’, I said.
‘England?’
‘Rhodesia’.
‘You can’t leave Britain’.
‘I have friends in London’, I said.
‘You can’t leave Scotland’, he said.
‘Edinburgh?’
‘You can’t leave Glasgow’.
‘That just leaves home’.
‘That’s up to you’, he said. ‘But if you do, we can’t guarantee your safety’.
As the rain fell on my face I wondered where it came from, the array of coincidence which led a particular drop to fall on me at a certain time rather than anyone else. Where had it been a few hours, days or weeks ago? Had it been vaporised or atomised weeks before and soared thousands of miles over oceans and continents before falling on me? Or were these the same rain drops which fell on me the previous day or the previous week? Were these my personal rain drops, set to fall on me thousands more times between then and my death? They might even fall on the soil of my grave.
When I passed the dark stone wall which bounded the hospital grounds I was almost home. I looked up and counted down from the thirtieth floor at the top to the twentieth of my own flat. I was relieved to see it wasn’t on fire before realising they would be certain I was asleep inside before striking a match. I started to laugh. God knows why, it wasn’t funny. I always laugh at inappropriate times. It was why I was walking home from a police station, soaking wet without an umbrella. Maybe not exclusively, but it had played its part.
I hovered at the edge of the hospital wall for a few minutes before finding some courage and striding towards the flat. Even though it was after three in the morning, whenever I had been leaving early or arriving late in the past I always met someone in the lift or foyer. A shift worker perhaps, or a lunatic on his way to howl at the moon.
My step quickened along with my heartbeat as I got closer to the deserted block. It was odd, how it seemed so peaceful at that time of night. It wasn’t always like that of course. During daylight and the evenings it was different. Very different.
I entered the foyer. Alone. So far, so good. One lift was broken, the other on the twenty-ninth floor. I pressed the button. A few seconds later the numbered board above the lift door read ’28′, then ’27′. Satisfied, I turned to check I was still alone. I wasn’t.
‘All right?’ he said. I didn’t answer as I checked for nearby heavy objects. There were none.
‘Some weather, eh?’ he said as he flicked rain water from his hands and shook his hair. He looked up in sudden recognition. I braced. ‘Know what this country’s got tons of?’ I shook my head.
‘Rain! Tons and tons of rain. Know what they should do with it?’ I shook my head again.
‘They should get all the rain, right, and put it in big tanks – big massive tanks, right? And then, when they’ve got all these big tanks, you know what they should do?’ he said, edging closer, his voice lowered. ‘Breed fish in them’. He stepped back to bask in the glare of his bright idea. ‘Think of all the fish shops, all the fish vans…Christ, all the fish and chip shops…They could make thousands. Millions, even’.
‘I…I think they already do that, don’t they?’ I said.
‘Where?’ he said, loud again.
‘In fish farms. You know, in lochs and in the sea around the highlands’.
‘Fish farms?’ he said. ‘Fish? Farms?’
‘Yes’.
‘Fish? In farms?’ he said. I nodded. ‘Farms with fish in them?’
‘I believe so’, I said, just as the lift door opened.
‘Ah well. There you go’, he said, suddenly deflated as we both got in the lift. ‘You’re on twenty, aren’t you?’ he said, pressing the ’20′ and ’17′ buttons. ‘Terrible business this with the poor wee lassie from twenty nine, isn’t it?’
‘It is’.
‘The thing about something like that happening is, it’s like fighting a fire. I mean, even after it’s out, the smoke still makes everything stink’, he said. The light read ’3′, ’4′ and ’5′.
‘It does’.
‘You’ll know about that better than me I suppose’.
‘I do’, I said.
‘Obviously not as much as her mammy and daddy. I mean, no offence to you my friend, but it doesn’t compare’, he said. ’6′.’7’. ’8′.
‘It doesn’t’.
‘You know what I think all this stuff is down to?’ he said. ‘I think it’s the food’.
‘The food?’
‘Look at all the steroids and drugs they put in animals, and we eat the animals’ he said. ‘All the fish are swimming in seas and rivers full of muck and pollution and we eat the fish’.
‘That’s true’, I said. ’9′. ’10′. ’11′.
‘And even if you avoid eating fish and animals’, he said. ‘You still get soaked by the rain, and the rain is full of the same acid and stuff that the fish eat’, he said.
‘That’s true’.
‘You notice how there’s no famines in India anymore? You know how?’ he said. ‘Because when the rains came the wheat would bend and break, so they changed the wheat, the actual stuff, the…what’s the word?’
‘Biology?’ I said.
‘No’.
‘Genetics?’
‘No that’s not right’.
‘Physiology?’ I said.
‘Biology! Biology. They went right into the biology of the wheat and made it tinier, so when the monsoon came, it wouldn’t bend or snap and there would be no famine any more’, he said. ‘I mean, that’s good, no famine…but how do we know it doesn’t change the way our body works? I mean, suppose – I’m not casting aspersions on you here, by the way – the guy who did it was eating that Indian wheat without even realising it? What if his body reacted to it? Or reacted to the acid in the rain? What if that’s the reason?’
‘It could be’.
‘That’s right, it could be’, he said. ‘You’ve got to hope there’s a reason. Because if there’s no reason for something like that, well…I think that’s why people get furious. It’s not the wee lassie. It’s the idea that it could happen for no reason, you know?’ he said as the lift door opened at the seventeenth floor. ‘Though some don’t care if somebody’s been found guilty or even charged. Some just want an excuse to rip somebody apart and for the police not to care, you know?’
‘I do’, I said.
‘I was in the Broomy Tavern earlier on’, he said as he stepped out onto his floor. ‘The local heroes were all puffed up and full of themselves. What they were going to do to this guy when they got him. None of them were thinking about the wee lassie, or if the guy was guilty or not’.
As the door began to close behind him he turned and held it open. ‘These farms full of fish?’
‘Yes?’
‘Do they have big tanks?’
‘I think they just leave them in lochs and put pens around them’, I said.
‘Ah, can you see the problem?’ he said. ‘They’ll still be getting the acid rain in their water then?’
‘They will’.
‘So the big tank is a good idea?’
‘It is’, I said.
He smiled.
‘When you get in, don’t flush the toilet or put your lights on. Don’t watch your telly’, he said. ‘The old fellow next door to you was in the Broomy, said he’d listen for you coming back if there was a good drink in it’.
The door began to close but again he kept it open at the last moment.
‘Sorry, I just need to ask you one last thing’, he said. ‘This guy… is he guilty?’
The door began to slide shut.
‘Everybody’s guilty of something’ I said.
Alex Cox is a writer from Glasgow.
