He shook his head. ‘No.’
But she didn’t want to hear it and was back on her feet in an instant. ‘You have no claim on my son. I don’t want you anywhere near him. He doesn’t even know he has a maternal grandfather.’
The hurt must have shown on his face, for there was a fleeting moment of regret in hers. To cover it, she swung her pack off her back and delved inside for a flask and two tin cups. She pushed the cups into the snow to stop them from blowing away and poured hot, milky coffee into each. Without a word, she held one out towards him.
He took it gratefully and felt the hot liquid warming his insides. He stood up to stop his legs from cramping and nodded towards another installation perhaps fifty metres further along the ridge. ‘Another one of yours?’
She turned to look. It was smaller than her weather station. Anchored in a similar way, with some kind of sensor on top of a tall pole to which there were two large solar panels attached above a battery box and reader. ‘No. That’s a GDN field installation.’
He shrugged, none the wiser. ‘Which is what?’
‘GDN. Gamma Detection Network. There’s a ring of about sixteen of these things set up in a ten- to fifteen-mile radius of the power plant at Ballachulish A. They monitor radiation levels. Nothing to do with me. Someone’s probably already been up from the plant to check on it after the storm.’ She drained her coffee and stuffed the cup back in her pack, and held out her hand for his. He finished the last of his coffee and passed it to her. She said, ‘It’s time we went down into the corrie.’
They stood on the lip of the drop into the Corrie of the Two Lochans and felt how the wind had picked up. Brodie planted his legs well apart to keep his balance.
Addie braced herself too, but shook her head as she gazed down into the deep hollowed cavity on the north side of the mountain. ‘There’s been so much snow in the last few days,’ she said. ‘I can’t even see the ice tunnel now. I don’t know if I’ll be able to find it again.’
There were two ridges flanking the corrie, and they took the one on the west side. It was steep, very nearly sheer in places, and their descent was slow and careful, leaning towards the perpendicular using their crampons for grip and their ice axes for balance.
As they descended into the shadow on the north side of the mountain, they felt the temperature drop, and Brodie paused, bracing himself against the angle, to remove his iCom glasses and slip them back into their protective case. When he looked up again, he saw Addie watching him.
She turned away quickly and they slithered down the side of the ridge and into the corrie itself, to traverse the snow that had gathered thickly in the hollow. Breathlessly, Addie said, ‘It was somewhere over here. Right in the deepest part.’ She stopped to scan the contour of the slope. ‘You know, thirty years ago, snow hunters used to scour the mountains for snow patches that survived throughout the year.’
‘Why would they do that?’
She shrugged. ‘Who knows? To note and monitor them for posterity, I guess. The thing is, there were precious few of them around back then. And as global temperatures rose, they vanished altogether. Gone by the late spring. Now there’s hundreds of them all over the mountains, lying in deep corries just like this one all year round.’
Brodie squatted in the snow, using his ice axe to keep his balance. Her change towards him was small, and subtle, but hadn’t gone unnoticed. At least she was talking to him. ‘That’s something I’ve never really understood,’ he said. ‘How it got cold here and hotter nearly everywhere else.’
Her look was scathing. ‘Probably because, like everyone else, you just weren’t paying attention.’ He felt the sting of her rebuke. But she wasn’t finished. ‘Bet you didn’t even care to know. Certainly didn’t care enough to do anything about it.’
‘Maybe you’d like to explain it to me, then. Since you’re the one with the degree.’
She detected and reacted to his sarcasm. ‘It’s perfectly simple. Simple enough even for you to understand. You’ve heard of the Gulf Stream, I suppose.’
‘Of course.’
‘Yeah, well, it pretty much doesn’t exist any more. It brought warm water from the Gulf of Mexico north-east across the Atlantic. The whole of western Europe was warmer as a result. Particularly Scotland. I mean, if you look at other countries on the same latitude as Scotland, you’d see that snow and ice are the norm. Basically we line up with the whole of the Alaskan panhandle.’
She exhaled through pursed lips, and Brodie saw that there was an anger simmering deep inside her.
‘When the Greenland ice sheet started melting, all that freezing meltwater plunged south and basically stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks.’ She paused. ‘It got colder. And then there’s the jet stream. I suppose you know what that is, too?’
‘I’ve heard of it.’
‘A stream of air circling the northern hemisphere. Caused by warm air rising from the equator, meeting cold air dropping from the Arctic. It used to be that if the jet stream sat higher than usual, we would have a good summer. Lower, and it would be crap. But when global temperatures started rising, the air from the equator got hotter and disrupted the flow of it. Deforming it into peaks and troughs. The peaks drew up even hotter air, and the troughs pulled cold air down from the Arctic, from a circulation up there called the Arctic vortex. Put everything together, and suddenly Scotland’s got the climate of northern Norway, and the equator’s so fucking hot, no one can live there any more.’
She took a deep breath as if to try and calm the passion that was the cause of her agitation. And she turned further recrimination towards her father.
‘That’s what happens when you don’t fucking listen. That’s the legacy your generation left mine.’
Brodie stood up as he felt anger spike through him. The temper that he had passed on to his daughter. ‘Oh, I was listening. Like everyone else. It was practically all you ever fucking heard about. Climate change. Global warming. How we all had to do our bit. And a lot of us did. But the big boys didn’t, did they? China, India, Russia, America. The economic imperative or something, they called it. The need to keep on sucking fossil fuels from the ground and burning the fucking stuff, because too many people were making too much money doing just that.’ He waved his ice axe towards the heavens. ‘And what could ordinary folk like me or you do about it? Fuck all. It’s like when they tell us we’re going to war. Or they’re going to spent billions on nuclear weapons. Or refuse entry to starving immigrants. Whether we agree with any of it or not.’
‘You could have taken to the streets.’
He breathed his scorn into the wind. ‘Oh, yeah, that works. Disrupt the flow of daily life and people get pissed off with you. Protest in sufficient numbers and the authorities send in the riot police. You get one chance to change things, Addie. Once every four years. You put the other lot in, and it turns out they’re just the same.’ He rammed the point of his ice axe into the snow. ‘In the end, that’s why I stopped listening. Stopped caring. And it doesn’t matter what generation you belong to, nothing changes. It’s the same people abusing the same power, and making the same money.’
He found that he was breathing hard now, shocked by a passion he didn’t know he possessed. She was staring at him. But it wasn’t hate he saw there. She was startled. He grew suddenly self-conscious and tried a smile that didn’t quite work.
‘Don’t know where that came from.’
She stood staring at him for a moment longer, then turned away suddenly. ‘I’ll see if I can find that ice tunnel.’
It was a depression at the bottom end of it that gave away its location. Buried under fresh snowfall, it still presented a slightly raised profile at the upper end, which fell away sharply where the entrance to the tunnel had caused the wind to eddy and scoop out a hollow in the snow.