Sputnik Caledonia Read online

  Andrew Crumey was born in Glasgow in 1961. He read theoretical physics and mathematics at St Andrews University and Imperial College in London, before doing post-doctoral research at Leeds University on nonlinear dynamics. After a spell of being the literary editor at Scotland on Sunday he now combines teaching creative writing at Northumbria University with his writing.

  He is the author of seven novels: Music, in a Foreign Language (1994), Pfitz (1995), D’Alembert’s Principle (1996), Mr Mee (2000, Dedalus edition 2014), Mobius Dick (2004, Dedalus edition 2014) Sputnik Caledonia (2008, Dedalus edition 2015)) and The Secret Knowledge (2013). His novels have been translated into 14 languages.

  Sputnik Caledonia was a critical and commercial success.

  Here are a few comments:

  ‘During his offbeat and eccentric childhood in 1970s Scotland, Robbie Coyle longed to be an astronaut. Heavily influenced by his ardently socialist father and with an increasingly unchecked imagination, Robbie is drawn towards Soviet space exploration, immersing himself in Einstein’s theories and episodes of ‘Young Scientist Of The Year’. But then, as Robbie’s fantasies become ever more fanciful, we are flung forward to a bleak dystopia that crushes the very idea of impossible desires. Andrew Crumey continues to blend his appetite for science with a gift for conjuring wholly convincing worlds. Yet again he has produced a novel that should bring with it a surge of support for his winning a major literary prize.’

  Joe Melia in Books Quarterly

  ‘The chirpily surreal title of this novel sums up Andrew Crumey’s work, which sites itself at a risky double intersection between physics and comedy, sci-fi and serious contemporary fiction.’ M. John Harrison in

  The Times Literary Supplement

  ‘But the sweep and scope of Sputnik Caledonia should leave you breathless with admiration: not only do we learn, as we often have from Crumey’s novels before, but we also laugh, a lot. The final revelation on which the novel ends is both emotionally powerful and intensely satisfying. Sputnik Caledonia is a quantum leap forward for the Scottish novel..’

  David Stenhouse in Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Sputnik Caledonia is a stimulating read, full of political, philosophical and scientific thought experiments.’

  Jonathan Gibbs in The Independent

  ‘The nature both of writing and reading fiction is that we explore other ways of being ourselves - in this, fiction is like dreaming, or like inhabiting the many alternate worlds of sf and quantum physics. Andrew Crumey’s novels have always been as much about the possibilities of metafiction as about the three-dimensional characters he creates; Sputnik Caledonia is at once sensitive about loss and hard-earned maturity, and intelligent about fools’ paradises and the people who fabulate and live in them.’

  Roz Kaveney in Time Out’s Book of the Week

  ‘An ingenious blend of philosophy, physics and fantasy…immensely stimulating and entertaining.’

  The Sunday Telegraph

  ‘You are invited to use your own brain to grasp the links between Goethe and science, the circular thinking of Kant and the inward gravity of black holes, come out with your own answers, your own universe. There are echoes, here, of Alasdair Gray’s Lanark: echoes, oddly enough, of Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! In a way, none of it should work but it does, gloriously. There is some beautiful writing, and quiet fun. Along the way one gets to learn a surprising amount about the historical, near-poetic links between hard science and philosophy. At the end, however, two aspects linger; the deftly drawn parallel world, a real haunting triumph, and the very real, very human, quietly tragic tale, only properly there at the very end, of a good if misguided man, father Joe, given up on competing global philosophies but struggling with something far harder, harder than Einstein or Goethe: to cope, simply, with the loss of his wee boy.’

  Euan Ferguson in The Observer

  ‘This master of making our heads spin has found out how to hit the heart.’

  John Self in Asylum

  ‘I can’t remember the last time I was so reluctant to put a book down.’

  The Scotsman

  ‘Crumey evokes brilliantly a hermetically sealed, paranoid micro-society.’

  Steve Poole in The Guardian

  ‘Crumey writes brilliantly about being a boy… A brio of a book.’

  Diana Hendry in The Spectator

  ‘A warm and moving portrait of Scottish small-town life.’

  Doug Johnstone in The Times

  ‘The balance between these contrasting worlds is handled deftly.’

  Edmund Gordon in The New Statesman

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Quote

  Part One

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Part Three

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Copyright

  PART ONE

  1

  For a long time Robbie Coyle used to wet the bed. On school days he’d be summoned from sleep almost without noticing what he’d done, but at weekends he’d slowly wake to find himself wrapped in soothing clammy moistness. At last his exasperated mother decided they should see the doctor.

  In the waiting room you had to take a wee wooden token whose number told you when it was your turn, and whose colour indicated which doctor to go to. Robbie was due to be seen by someone named Dr Muir, who he didn’t like the sound of. He read the magazine his mum had given him until at last his name was called.

  Dr Muir was old and bald, and listened patiently while Robbie’s mother explained the problem. ‘Very good, Mrs Coyle,’ he said, as if pleased by her son’s condition, then spoke to Robbie. ‘Do you have bad dreams?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ Robbie admitted.

  ‘Do you play sport?’

  Robbie said he liked running around playing at spaceships. He wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up.

  ‘What sort of things do you read? Stories, comics? You don’t buy those awful American ones, do you?’

  Robbie didn’t know quite what the doctor had in mind, so he showed him his Look and Learn and this was declared healthy enough. The doctor addressed Mrs Coyle again.

  ‘Young Robert here strikes me as a nervous lad, though not excessively so. But he’s bright for a nine-year-old, and that’s the real problem. He’s got a vivid imagination, and frets too much. What he needs is fresh air, an interest, good reading. Have you ever heard of Walter Scott?’ he said, turning to Robbie, who shook his head solemnly. ‘Try Ivanhoe, that’s a fine story. I read
it when I was your age.’

  They left the surgery and went straight to the public library, where Robbie was registered with the same silent formality that had marked his induction into the care of the local health authority. Mrs Coyle then hunted among shelves as crammed as a chemist’s drug counter while Robbie wandered off and pulled down something called Rocket to the Stars.

  Mrs Coyle couldn’t find Ivanhoe. Robbie, sitting on the floor with musty books towering over him, peered round the end of the bookcase and saw her go to the desk.

  ‘I can put it on order for you,’ said the assistant.

  ‘Actually,’ said Mrs Coyle, ‘I just want something that’ll stop him wetting the bed.’

  ‘Oh,’ said the assistant. ‘Well, you could try Kidnapped, I suppose.’

  As soon as they got home Robbie started reading Kidnapped and found it the most boring thing in the universe. There weren’t even any pictures. In Rocket to the Stars there’d been a V2 painted like a chequerboard, a monkey in a spacesuit and loads of other things. But his mother and the assistant had both agreed that if anything was going to make him wee the bed it was stuff like that, so instead he’d been allowed The Boy’s Book of Facts. Next morning his bed was wet again.

  2

  On Sunday, while the Coyles took their customary walk, the sky exploded. ‘What was that?’ Robbie asked fearfully, looking upwards.

  ‘They’re testing a new aeroplane called Concorde,’ his father said.

  ‘Why are they testing it over Scotland?’

  ‘In case it crashes.’

  A boat moving swiftly through water, Mr Coyle began to explain, kicks up a wave that forms the vessel’s wake; supersonic aircraft do likewise, and the resulting shockwave was what they’d heard as an impressively reverberating thunderclap. Robbie’s father left school at fourteen, worked in a factory in Clydebank and was never to be seen reading anything except a newspaper or a magazine, but he knew how to talk like an expert.

  Mrs Coyle and Robbie’s sister Janet were several paces ahead. Mrs Coyle turned and said, ‘I wish they’d do all their sonic booming over the sea instead of over us. Did you not hear about Mrs Farrell’s window cracking?’ Mr Coyle agreed the choice of test area was another example of England’s contempt for the Scots, but felt sure that supersonic air travel was the thing of the future. None of the Coyles had ever been in an aeroplane, but the thought that one could fly so fast was comforting all the same.

  Robbie had stopped shaking and was hoping they’d hear another bang since he’d be ready for it this time. He said, ‘If Concorde goes faster than sound, does that mean when the pilot talks his voice gets left behind and nobody in the plane can hear him?’

  ‘No,’ Mr Coyle reassured him, ‘it doesn’t work like that.’ Then Mr Coyle asked Robbie to imagine a plane that could fly at the speed of a bullet. On board, a hijacker sits patiently waiting in seat 13C, gazing out at white clouds rolling like cauliflower beneath him. At a carefully chosen moment he will stand up, bring out the pistol he carries concealed within his clothing, and point it at an air hostess called Barbara Perkins who happens to be travelling on her very first flight and will subsequently describe the tragic events which follow to the world’s press and television reporters.

  Mrs Coyle turned round again. ‘And Elsie Lang says her daughter’s cat died of fright after one o’ they sonic booms.’

  The hijacker sees the second hand of his watch reach twelve; he stands, brings out a sleek, black and wholly persuasive firearm and declares, ‘Nobody move. Nobody panic.’

  Everyone panics. There are screams, tears, and doubtless a prayer or two. An old lady in seat 10B faints, her neighbour thinks she’s had a heart attack, and the recently trained Barbara Perkins instinctively responds to the pressing of the overhead button whose bleeping summons her assistance.

  ‘I said nobody move!’ The hijacker’s gun is pointed at the crisp firm breast of Barbara Perkins, who is paralysed by fear yet still heroically motivated by the sense of duty she will subsequently explain as being just part of her job, as she goes to receive an award for exceptional bravery wearing a smart pink outfit bought specially for the occasion.

  ‘This lady needs help,’ Barbara Perkins calmly explains. ‘I think she may have had a heart attack.’

  ‘And there are cracks in our close too,’ said Mrs Coyle. ‘I’m sure they weren’t there before all this booming started.’

  Far below, the hijacker’s three revolutionary accomplices enter the private office of the French Ambassador, who sits at his desk while his secretary, her tanned legs crossed beneath his ruminating gaze, carefully takes notes. Three guns are aimed at them; one at him, one at her, and a third that swings persuasively between the ambassador’s broad chest and the slimmer frame of the secretary. There’s a noise at the door, someone has followed them; an armed guard enters and shots are about to be fired.

  In the plane, Barbara Perkins is moving in a parabolic arc towards the unconscious lady while a male passenger in seat 16D – married with two children, the director of a pet-food company – gets out of his seat some distance behind the hijacker, who hears what’s coming, turns and faces his assailant with gun raised.

  The French Ambassador is about to receive a shot to the head issuing accidentally from the weapon belonging to the guard, who is himself collinear with the barrel of another gun in the room, and whose arm has been grabbed as two men struggle to subdue him. The secretary will take a shot in the stomach from which she will die two days later; her funeral in the small village from which she comes will be a scene of national grief. One hostage-taker, stumbling backwards, has his gaze directed towards the ceiling of the ambassador’s office, whose elaborate plaster mouldings now take the form of a cloud-flecked sky and a newly developed airliner on its maiden flight, in which the director of a pet-food company is about to be united in death with a twenty-six-year-old woman below.

  ‘What the devil are you two on about back there?’ asked Mrs Coyle.

  ‘I was just going to explain something,’ said her husband. ‘Suppose an aeroplane could fly as fast as a bullet,’ he told Robbie. ‘If you fired a gun backwards from it, what would the path of the bullet look like from the ground?’

  Slowly, a round is entering the perspiring head of the French Ambassador; the secretary is taking within herself a projectile of equal calibre; and high above, a third identical bullet is completely stationary. The hostage-taker, gazing skywards through the ceiling, sees the bullet wait, hovering, while the barrel of a gun slides past to leave it apparently suspended in mid-air; yet the hostage-taker, in the last sweet moment of his life, knows this to be an impossibility. The bullet must surely be falling towards him, though in his final mortal instant it will descend no further than all the other bullets within this very room, even the one now parting the flesh of the French Ambassador’s forehead. In the aeroplane, the bullet must descend with an acceleration that is universal and incontrovertible, while the body of a married father of two is carried towards it like a sacred offering. This is the last thing the hostage-taker sees; all subsequent acts of heroism, in which two more armed guards reach the ambassador’s office and Barbara Perkins immobilizes the hijacker with the assistance of most of the passengers between seat rows 12 and 17, belong to a world which none of the terrorists survive to contemplate.

  ‘So you see, Robbie, it’s all quite simple. If you stand in a flat place and fire one bullet from a gun while dropping another from your hand, both hit the ground at the same time.’

  That was all very well, but Robbie still hoped they’d hear another boom. As they walked behind Mrs Coyle and Janet, Robbie asked, ‘Dad, if you were on an aeroplane and there was a hijack, what would you do?’

  Mr Coyle looked bewildered. ‘What do you mean? What made you think about hijackings?’

  Robbie had been remembering something he saw on TV. A man waving a gun around. A shot.

  ‘If anyone threatened me with a gun I’d let them do whatever they wanted,�
�� said Mr Coyle. ‘What’s the point being a hero if you’re dead?’

  ‘Even if it was to save me or Janet?’

  ‘That’s different,’ said Mr Coyle. ‘I’d gladly give my life for you or your sister. That’s the duty of any parent.’

  ‘Why?’ Robbie asked, and Mr Coyle explained that the biological purpose of every creature is to reproduce; though this didn’t answer the question.

  Janet and Mrs Coyle had reached the old memorial beside the river, a granite obelisk against whose mute support they were having a rest. ‘I’m fair jiggered,’ she declared. This was one of Mrs Coyle’s customary sayings; she had many, and Robbie assumed such habits to be a general maternal phenomenon. Every night, for instance, she would send Robbie off to bed with a formula inspired by whatever he happened to be doing at the time: ‘You can just Spirograph off to bed now, Robbie’; or ‘Time to Action Man upstairs.’ Once, after the end of a film, he was told he’d better Gregory Peck into his pyjamas, and for the rest of his life would associate the great actor with his tank- and soldier-embellished night attire at the time. On another occasion, following a gruesome documentary which Mr Coyle had insisted the whole family should watch as a solemn warning, Robbie was cheerfully instructed by his mother to ‘Belsen up to bed’, so that the word acquired a warm domestic glow which was not at all what Mr Coyle or the film-makers had intended.

  Mrs Coyle and Janet were leaning against the memorial as Robbie and his father joined them. ‘Have you ever read what it says on this thing?’ Mr Coyle asked his wife, who stood away in order that the whole family could follow the inscription:

  ON 31ST DECEMBER 1860, DURING SEVERE FLOODING,

  JAMES DEUCHAR, 20, A DIVINITY STUDENT AT GLASGOW

  UNIVERSITY, LEAPT INTO THE RIVER NEAR THIS SPOT

  IN AN ATTEMPT TO RESCUE GEORGE LAIDLAW, 5, AND

  MARY LAIDLAW, 7, WHO HAD FALLEN IN. HAVING SAVED THE

  YOUNGER CHILD, MR. DEUCHAR RETURNED TO SEARCH

  FOR THE GIRL, WHO WAS WASHED UP ALIVE FURTHER

  DOWNSTREAM. MR. DEUCHAR, HOWEVER, PERISHED IN