Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

grin and a wink, released an evidently
satisfying fart and went instantly to sleep.
    Some passengers busied themselves with newspapers or
conversation, but most dozed like Jondo or stared bleary-eyed
like me. The discrepancy between the time-honoured four-day week
and the project’s more demanding schedules reduced Friday
work to a matter of clearing up problems left over from the past
week and preparing for the next. Not even the inducement of
double time could make more than a handful of the labour-force
encroach on the sanctity of Saturday and Sunday, although it
could make most of us work overtime through the week. No amount
of patient lecturing from managers with clipboards and redundant
hard hats could persuade us to adopt what they considered a more
rational work pacing.
    The bus lurched into motion. I lit a cigarette to dispel
Jondo’s intestinal methane and laid my temple against the
welcome throbbing coolness of the window. As we crossed the
Carron and passed New Kelso I gazed beyond the suburb’s
neat bungalows to where morning smoke rose from the tinker camp.
A vivid image of Menial asleep – the tumble of black hair,
the white-sleeved arm across the pillow – lit up my mind. I
wondered what my chances were of seeing her through the day. I
didn’t even know which office she worked in, and a
desultory fantasy took shape of finding some fantastic excuse to
visit themall: of working my way through the administration
blocks and drawing-offices, spurning the flirtations of giggling
girls and pensive older women with hunky pin-ups above their
desks, until I finally walked into an engineering lab to find
Menial alone and in a day-dream of her own, about me, into which
my real arrival would be a passionately welcomed
incursion…
    Probably not.
    My head swung away from the window as the bus turned left on
to the main road along the northern shore. I jolted upright,
making sure my head didn’t swing back and crack against the
pane. Even at this hour in the morning the road was busy with
commuter traffic and heavy trucks. The bus chugged slowly along,
picking up yet more passengers in Jeantown, another village that
the project had expanded, its packed buildings teetering
perilously up the hillside. Out on the loch a pod of dolphins
sported, their leaps drawing gasps and sighs from the less jaded
or dozy of my fellow-passengers.
    Then, with a great clashing of gears and screeching of
flywheel as the auxiliary electric motors kicked in, the bus
turned right, on to the road up into the hills between the two
mountains, An Sgurr and Glas Bhein, that dominated the northern
skyline of the lochside towns. To me, this afforded an
inexhaustibly fascinating view of further ranges of hills and
reaches of water. Everybody else on the bus ignored it
completely. Someone opened a window to let out the smoke and let
in some fresh air; a bee blundered in, causing a ripple of
excitement and much brandishing of rolled newspapers before it
bumbled out.
    Above the last houses, above the meadows, the trees began:
twenty-metre-tall beeches, then pineand rowan and birch, all the
way up to the crags and the scree. Centuries ago these hills had
been bare of all but rough pasture and heather, cropped by the
infamous black-faced sheep. But these same bare hills had somehow
sustained the sparse guerilla forces of Jacobite and Land Leaguer
and Republican. Far below I could see the rocky peninsula known
as the Island, a sheltering arm around the harbour, still with a
small bunker on its top. During the First World Revolution a
thirteen-year-old had written herself into local legend by
bringing down a stealth fighter with a nuclear-tipped
rocket-propelled grenade. In Jeantown’s poky museum you can
see an ancient photograph of her: the grubby, grinning cadre of a
Celtic Vietcong, posed with the rocket tube slung on her
shoulder, beside unrecognisable wreckage on a scarred hillside
where to this day nothing will grow.
    Over the top of the saddleback and down into the long, dark
glen where the Pretender had evaded Cumberland’s troops,
where the Free Kirk had preached to the dispossessed, and where,
later, the Army of the New Republic had cached their computers,
the hardware of their software war against the last empire. The
grim glen opened to another fertile plain of woods and fields and
recently grown town, Courthill. Beyond it, at the edge of the
sea-loch, lay the