So Reader had obtained some money, twenty thousand pounds, as a loan from the theatre’s own bankers in Musselburgh, and was now trying to figure a way of accounting for the small hand-outs she was making to the families.
But there were good things too. The Edinburgh Evening News was published every day, without a break, though Ted suspected it was being run up on a desktop publishing package on somebody’s home pc. It carried some news, mostly stale rehashes of the TV and radio bulletins, but it also ran long lists of personalized messages from the displaced people of the city. To Mary McClair from Vicky Norman. If you need a place to stay, please call… The mobile phones prevalent in the Centre were being used less for personal messages, and more as part of an informal communications network, spreading low-level news about the fate of people and places, even pets. One of the volunteer groups brought in printed T-shirts. NO WATER. NO FOOD. NO POWER. NO PROBLEM. They became a fashion accessory among the volunteers.
They had a VIP visit. It was Dave Holland, a London politician, the environment secretary, a fat English bastard whose accent seemed to disappear down his throat. Trailed by two camera crews with glaring lights and gigantic boom mikes, he strode through the theatre, shaking hands with photogenic kids and care workers and volunteers. Ted couldn’t believe how much time and resource was taken up by catering for Holland, the security and route planning and all the rest of it.
But it was good for morale, he was told.
Holland made one substantive announcement. “There’s a wave of sympathy around the world for what you’re going through,” he said. “Everyone’s eyes are on you. There will be a rock concert in Wembley Stadium to raise relief funds. And we’re flying out the Hibs and Hearts squads—” A ragged cheer; they were Edinburgh’s two principal soccer teams. “—to play an exhibition game.”
Rock music and soccer, Ted thought sourly.
He actually got to meet Holland. The man came along a row of volunteers, introduced by Siobhan Reader, shaking hands and sweating heavily. When it was his turn, Ted asked, “When are you going to start evacuating Glasgow?”
Holland laughed nervously and moved on.
Later, Ted found himself in a huddle with Reader and Jack.
Jack said, “I’d have asked him if Willie MacLeish is playing.” MacLeish was Hibs” star striker.
“You’re right,” Ted said seriously. “I would have got more sense.”
“And I’d have asked him,” Reader said stiffly, “if there’s any word of my husband.” The first time she’d mentioned him. And with that she turned and walked to her office, to start another sleepless night of work.
Ted stared after her. She was, he’d first thought, just an ineffectual worker, and he’d treated her with contempt. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time.
But she was, of course, a woman with a life of her own. A family maybe. And he’d never thought even to ask.
The evenings were long.
Just a day or two from near death, and boredom was becoming their biggest enemy.
On Ted’s advice, Reader had banned alcohol, but allowed in TV, powered by a portable generator. The reception of the terrestrial stations was poor — local transmitters knocked out, lousy conditions because of the volcano weather lingering over Edinburgh — but satellite dishes seemed to work reasonably well. Reader had intended to show a steady diet of game shows, pop and movies — she even wanted to run videos — but Ted suggested that, except for kids” programming in the area set aside as a nursery, she simply run the news. People here wanted to know, after all.
The news, the images from Edinburgh, worked to keep people quiet. Ribald cheers whenever somebody in the Rest Centre was shown.
The Hibs-Hearts soccer match attracted the biggest crowds around the TVs. The game itself was played at Ibrox Stadium, the home of Glasgow Rangers, and the teams, depleted by the disaster, were reinforced by loan players from other clubs, in England and Scotland. There seemed a genuine warmth as the stranded people watched their teams battle it out, fans of the two clubs mingling without self-consciousness or conflict.
When the game was done, the mood was subdued, it seemed to Ted: subdued, but somehow deepened. As if the televising of a soccer match, two scratch teams chasing a ball around a park, had moved people on a level the destruction of a city never could.
Even the news of alcohol-fuelled rioting among Glasgow fans that followed the match didn’t seem to mar the mood.
At the end of the fourth day, as the light was fading, Ted realized he hadn’t taken any air. So he walked out through the foyer, still crowded with new arrivals, and stepped into the comparatively fresh air of the patio outside.
There was a pall of smoke to the west, over whatever was going on in Edinburgh. Helicopters flitted, their lights winking brightly. Some of them appeared to be dumping water or some kind of chemicals into the continuing inferno; others were dropping crates of supplies under blossoming parachute canopies to the pockets of survivors that remained. The small human activity, probing and challenging the work of the Moonseed, warmed Ted’s heart.
Somehow, watching that, he found it easier to believe that Michael might yet have lived through all of that.
He found a purpose, coalescing within him. He had to return. I’ll go in for Michael. And if I don’t find my son, maybe I’ll find the arsehole who lured him in there. Then we’ll see.
He told Jane what he planned.
“What? That’s ridiculous.”
“But if it was Jack—”
“I’d go. I’d go without hesitation.”
And above their heads, the ash and smoke and steam merged into one hell of a sunset, a curtain of flame that reached to the police-blue zenith.
The Rest Centre was actually quieter that night. Many people had found billets, or had been allowed to leave to find accommodation in hotels, or with relatives.
Sleep again came easily to Ted. But he was woken at 3.00 a.m., by yelling voices.
A middle-aged man — still dressed in the rumpled suit in which he’d arrived at the Rest Centre yesterday, straight from his job as lawyer or bank manager or accountant — had strangled that yapping Alsatian with his bare hands.
4
The journey into Tokyo was an ordeal for Declan Hague.
May was the season for the school children to be taken in parties to the nation’s show places. Venus and the volcano ash hadn’t put a stop to that, and they seemed to be everywhere: on the trains and the stations and the streets, with their mobile phones and their laughing faces and their fashionable rad-gear and their electronic toys. And everywhere he went, they seemed to home in on him.
Well, he could understand why. He was a combination of two rarities for these kids: a gaijin — a foreigner — and a monk. Here they came in little groups of three or four, boys and girls alike in their ankle socks and navy or black uniforms and ties, grinning and giggling and holding up their disposable cameras.
The kids pursued most of the few gaijin on Tokyo’s crowded streets. But he thought there was more to it than that. About him, they probably sensed weakness, on some subliminal level.
Weakness. Fear.
Or even a whiff of danger.
After all, it was because of children younger than these teenagers that he had been forced to leave Ireland, leave the Church, and come all the way around the world to this place, to immerse himself in the placidity of another religion.
But he got through the day somehow, smiling and nodding and waving away their requests for photographs. And besides, his determination to complete the mission he had set himself would carry him through.