by Iain Banks
Alban sat watching the A9 unroll towards the silver snout of the car, the three-pointed star like some indiscriminate gun sight. They were heading away from Perth on the long downward slope towards the plain of the River Earn, a Sitka forest on one side of the car, the view across the flood plain to the northern slopes of the Ochil Hills on the other. A black and red iPod linked into the car’s entertainment system was playing old dance music, from Fielding’s wild years. Alban could feel the slim bulk of the folded letter in the back pocket of his jeans. He was remembering a conversation from years ago.
‘There’s a lot you don’t know, young man,’ Great-Aunt Beryl had told him. ‘A lot I can’t tell you, at least not now.’
‘Then when?’ he’d asked.
‘I don’t know. Perhaps never. Certainly not now.’
‘But why not?’
‘Sometimes, whether it’s a family or . . . any other institution, one has to wait for people to die, or until one knows that things won’t matter any more for some reason or other. Though, it has to be said, some things seem never to cease mattering. Or, one has to wait until one knows one is about to die oneself, and so won’t care, frankly, when the balloon goes up. You know; when the whatsit hits the fan.’
He’d been silent for a while. ‘Then why are you telling me at all?’
Beryl had looked at him with a strange expression. ‘Perhaps I’m not entirely sure myself, Alban. Or perhaps it’s a way of salving my conscience, even if only partially. Perhaps it’s like avoiding telling lies without in any way telling the truth, and so misleading somebody by omission, as it were. Do you understand?’
The music in the car changed from something Alban barely recognised or remembered to the Chemical Brothers’ Block Rockin’ Beats. Fielding whooped and turned up the volume. ‘Oh yes!’ he said, smiling broadly at Alban. ‘Remember this? Remember Singapore? Oh, fuck! That was fucking crazy, man.’
‘Yeah,’ Alban said. ‘I remember.’
‘Let’s get drunk.’
‘Woh! Not like you, cuz. What’s the problem? Don’t answer that. Good idea. Let me just say that right now. However, I have a counter-proposal. A not mutually exclusive counter-proposal re the above.’
‘Fielding, what the hell are you talking about?’
‘Let’s get wasted as well.’
‘Wasted? You have drugs?’
‘Most certainly do. Never travel unprepared.’
‘You brought drugs to Singapore? Are you fucking insane? Haven’t you been paying any attention at all? Do you know what they do to people who import drugs to this place?’
‘Alban, get real. I’m not a fucking dealer, just a user. And if I did get caught, so what? I’m rich, I’m white, I’m male, I’m an executive with an internationally respected games company with lawyers to command and, as of the other night, I’m on first-name terms with the British High Ambassador of Commissions or whatever he is.’ He laughed, waved his arms. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ He laughed louder.
It was 1997. They were in Singapore attending a toys and games trade fair, promoting Empire! (unashamedly, in an ex-imperial outpost, Alban had pointed out) and the other products of the Wopuld company to wholesalers. The day’s work was done, the trade fair over, their display was being packed away in the exhibition centre and they had a free evening plus a day off to follow so they were in a quiet corner of the main bar of Raffles, drinking Singapore Slings because Fielding had this thing about Geographically Appropriate Alcoholic Beverage Consumption - Manhattans in Manhattan, etc.
‘You fucking lunatic. What have you got?’
‘E, coke, dope. Some K, but it’s rubbish.’
‘Jesus H. Christ. We’d better take it fast just to get rid of it and remove the evidence.’
‘That’s more like it.’ Fielding raised his own glass and nodded at Alban’s. ‘Drink up. We’ll have a rickshaw race back to the hotel. Loser buys the drinks all night.’
‘I am not having another fucking rickshaw race. My last guy was four foot tall and a hundred and three. I wanted to get out and take over and tell him to sit in the back and relax while I wheeled him back to whatever old folks’ home he’d wandered out of.’
‘Well, I’m racing. And I’m deeming you to be racing, too, like it or not. If you lose I’m just going to walk out of wherever we end up drinking and you’ll either have to pay up or do a runner. Don’t think I won’t.’
‘I might just do the runner. If they catch us, you’ll be the one in possession.’
Fielding gasped stagily and picked up his jacket. ‘That’s not very cousinly of you.’
‘Yeah, well, family bonds don’t mean what they used to.’
‘Ooo!’ Fielding camped. ‘What’s all that about?’
‘Nothing. Never mind.’
It’s the next day and Alban is seriously fucked up. He seems to have lost a day or a night, and he appears to be living the current waking period in some sort of shuffled order, slabs and tranches of experience and awareness traincrashing into one another in no discernible order whatsoever, just a blurred riffle of sensations and events thrumming past, some of which might be flashbacks - he’s not sure.
‘History is finished. It’s all over! Even Deng said it’s glorious to be rich. Capitalist democracy has won and the rest is mopping up. That Jap guy was right.’
‘Bullshit. You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads SF comes out with this crap about the end of history.’
‘Science fucking fiction? Do I look like some sort of fucking anorak?’
‘Oh, fuck off.’
‘Why have we stopped?’
‘Oh my God. We’re going to die.’
They were in a cable car that went from this enormous grey building with giant circular windows to a low island just offshore which seemed to be called Semosa or Samosa or Sentosa or Samoa. They couldn’t exactly tell because even when they looked right at the signs for the place, the letters seemed to change in front of their eyes. (‘Samosa, he was some sort of fascist general or something, wasn’t he?’ ‘Or one of those fried triangles. Don’t ask me.’) The last time Alban looked at the sign it appeared to say Lampedusa, and that’s just totally wrong. He didn’t even risk mentioning that one to Fielding.
There doesn’t seem to be any good earthly reason for there to be a cable car going from this tall building to this low-lying, just-offshore island, so that’s exactly why it seems absolutely necessary to make the trip but now the cable car’s come swinging to a stop over the slack brown waters of the strait beneath and they’re just hanging there in the baking sunlight, looking out through the hazecrammed sky towards the distant towers of the city centre. They’re sharing the car with about a dozen Malays and Chinese and having to mutter, which must look suspicious in itself, only Alban has no reliable idea how loud they’re really talking and that’s paranoia-inducing all by itself.
‘Have we taken all the drugs?’
‘Most of them. Will you keep your voice down?’
‘What if they’ve stopped the cable car because they know we’re on board and we’re carrying?’
‘Don’t be stupid. Why would they stop the car? What are they going to do? Rappel down from a helicopter?’
‘It’s suspicious.’
‘It’s not suspicious, it’s just one of those things.’
‘Don’t trot out bourgeois clichés at me, you—’
‘Just try to keep calm.’
‘I am calm. This is calm. This is me being calm. See; I am calmness personified.’
‘Let go of my shirt.’
But it was the middle of a warm, intensely humid night and they were walking the streets, through the stink of shit and rotting fruit and perfumes and within the echoes of low-rise buildings, stepping over scuttling cockroaches the size of mice that looked the size of rats under the lens of chemical enhancement and passing by sudden courtyards where a tiny, ancient, leathery man is skinning what looks like a monkey on a bloodstained table, smoking a
s he pulls the furred skin away from the white and pink beneath, and open doorways to temples reveal guys in loincloths and surrounded by fumes and incense and wild bunches of flowers standing chanting, facing barely seen altars; snapped shots of imagery while they pace with jackets over shoulders and their shirts sticking to their bodies and their hair sticking to their scalps because they’ve just been to a club and they’re still hot from dancing and talking to two girls who might not have been real girls and then there was nearly a fight and Alban had to pull Fielding out of it and the only tune they can remember from the club is Block Rockin’ Beats and it’s impossible to cool down because the humidity is like walking around in a wetsuit constantly being topped up from a kettle until they hail a taxi just for the air conditioning and sit listening to the merry chime, chime, chime noise from the device that makes that noise when you go over the Singapore speed limit and Fielding insists on being taken to the zoo because he’s heard they have polar bears there in a huge chamber that’s kept at the sort of constant, chilly temperature that is acceptable to your average top land predator of the Arctic wastes.
‘It’s the middle of the fucking night! The zoo’ll be closed, you idiot! Look. Look!’ Alban holds up his watch. ‘It’s half past four in the fucking morning!’
‘That’s not right. Your watch must still be on UK time or something. ’
‘Then why does the cab’s clock say the same?’
‘That’s not the clock - that’s the fare.’
‘Believe me, that is not the fare. I’m asking the driver.’
He asks the driver, whose command of English seems mysteriously to have disappeared since he accepted the fare.
‘What was that?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘What were you asking him?’
‘Whether the zoo would be open at five in the morning.’
‘What did he say?’
‘He just smiled and talked a lot of . . . I don’t know.’
When they get there, the zoo is extremely closed and they nearly lose the cab for the return trip because Fielding wants to negotiate a reduced tariff on account of the fact that the driver should have known the zoo would be closed and was blatantly exploiting their innocent touristic ignorance and he threatens to summon the Tourist Police if there indeed is such an entity and Alban has to calm both him and the taxi driver down and only persuades the latter to take them back to the centre of town again by handing over the whole two-way fare and an arguably extortionate tip in advance, something that even then he only gets away with because Fielding has gone off to shout loudly at - and kick - some nearby chain-link fencing.
Before, or possibly after, with brains totally fried, they’re in the World Famous Tiger Balm Gardens, going on all the rides and staring goggle-eyed at the various bizarre and totally twisted tableaux and paintings and dioramas that depict in vibrant, pulsating colour, with little left to the imagination, the suite of utterly grisly tortures that await those who smuggle drugs into Singapore or take drugs while they are there or are in some other way bad. There seems to be some sort of ghoulishly barbaric competition going on between the local belief system’s grisly squad of supernatural demons and the jolly japesters of the various Singaporean law enforcement agencies concerning who can be most inventively horrible, and it is profoundly not what you want to see when you’re up to your eyelids in a whole unholy cocktail of supremely illegal and remarkably powerful drugs, not all of which are yet safely - ha! - actually inside your body or that of your partner in crime.
They wander around, assaulted by appalling images on all sides, bludgeoned by the screams - happy screams, definitely happy screams - of small children and impressionable adults, damp and getting damper as they stroll and stagger through clouds of water vapour being sprayed from path-side sprinklers studded amongst the flowers and shrubs.
Riotous profusions of insanely vivid blooms flourish everywhere; greenery of a thousand shades and wild outburstings of flowers fill every speck of un-concreted, ill-asphalted ground in the gardens. Alban keeps wanting to stop and look at all this fabulously fascinating flora and maybe take notes or something or take photographs with the disposable camera he’s bought for the purpose - in fact, with one of the two disposable cameras he now has, because he forgot he’d bought the first one - but Fielding continually hustles him onward, demanding they exhaust the possibilities of the various exciting rides before they start looking at fucking flowers. Throughout the city Alban has sensed this vast, extravagant energy of growth and greenness forever trying to burst out through all the cement and tarmac, clawing at every missed nook and cranny in this fanatically self-controlled city, punching from every vacant patch of ground larger than a postage stamp like a violent reproof.
They get kind of locked into the water slide, which provides a fine view of the harbour and the docks and the ships at the quay-sides and anchored offshore and steaming slowly along the nearer shipping lanes, not to mention Sentosa island, they think, which is where they’re going next or possibly have already been to. The extra soaking at the bottom of the ride each time makes no difference whatsoever to their clothes and helps keep them cool. Then at the end of one turn, Fielding doesn’t get out and Alban realises his cousin is asleep and snoring. In a way this is fine because it means they can go back to their hotel, but in a way it isn’t really fine at all because Alban’s forgotten which hotel it is they’re staying in and has been trying to think of its name for the last two hours or so. He’s checked his pockets but can’t find a key card and he’s looked in Fielding’s wallet and pockets too and for the last half-hour or so he’s had to contemplate desperate measures like just approaching people at random and asking if they recognise him or Fielding and might remember, say, which hotel bar, reception or restaurant they might have happened to see them in, though he suspects this plan may be a little on the optimistic side.
He’s hauling a stumbling, incoherent Fielding along the path to the exit, thinking that maybe by some miracle he’ll find a taxi driver in the rank who remembers taking them back to their hotel some time over the last week or so, when a tall tanned white guy in a baseball hat and shorts and a bum bag comes up to them, all smiles, and greets them both by name. Fuck, we’re rumbled; it’s the pigs, Alban has time to think, but he’s wrong; it’s just friendly cousin Steve - Linda and Percy’s eldest - the guy who’s never at home because he’s always somewhere in the world installing or maintaining or replacing container terminal cranes but whom Alban and Fielding have both met at a couple of family weddings over the last few years. Which is great, though of course cousin Steve has absolutely no idea which is their hotel either.
While Alban is desperately trying to make small talk and remember how people behave when they’re straight, Fielding wakes up with a start and stands staring at Steve with a stunned, terrified expression on his face and is unquestionably just about to start gibbering or screaming or throwing punches or running away or possibly all of the above when Alban throws himself on Steve’s mercy by claiming they’re both suffering mightily from some dodgy prawns consumed a couple of hours ago - the near-hallucinatory effects of which may admittedly have been accentuated by a beer or two - and could do with some help.
Steve’s hotel is nearby. He takes them there and they straighten out sufficiently in his room while he’s away summoning a doctor to be able to bribe the medic when he arrives so that he accepts and even confirms their story. Fielding wants to score some more drugs off the doc, but that’s just going too far.
Somehow they’re able to have a couple of beers in the hotel bar with Steve and push down a few morsels of a Vietnamese meal before making their excuses and heading back for the thankfully now remembered hotel and crashing for the next fourteen hours.
The reason he’d wanted to get drunk in the first place - being brutally honest - was because he was feeling sorry for himself. The reason he was feeling sorry for himself was he’d been rejected, again, by Sophie. She worked for the family fi
rm, too, in the US sister company. When he’d started working for Wopuld Games Ltd he’d imagined they’d bump into each other all the time, but they almost never did. She’d been there in Singapore at the trade fair, though.
‘You’re the love of my life.’ (Despairing; a last, pathetic roll of the dice.)
‘Well, gee. I’ll pass on that privilege.’
She seemed serious. He just stared at her. ‘What have you become?’ he whispered.
‘Wiser.’
‘Shit, that was close,’ Fielding muttered. There was a beeping noise from somewhere and the big car’s nose dipped as it braked sharply. A speed camera zipped past. Fielding was watching the rear-view mirror intently. He flashed Alban a grin. ‘Made it!’
Alban had to turn his face away. The exit for Auchterarder and Gleneagles disappeared behind them as the car accelerated again, heading for Glasgow.
He’s too young to be there, of course, but he is, all the same. He’s with her as she comes down from her room, down the wide, gleaming staircase under the tall, south-facing window and walks across the creaking parquet of the main hall towards the kitchen, and he’s there as she turns into the short corridor that leads past the gunroom and the inside log store and the drying room to the cloakroom, and he watches as she stops and chooses what to wear to go outside.
She’s dressed in brown Clark’s shoes, a pair of white socks, jeans - her own, but too big, needing to be secured with a thin black belt - a brown blouse and an old white roll-neck jumper. White M&S underwear. No watch or rings or other jewellery; no cash, chequebook, credit cards or any form of identification or written material.
He watches her choose the long dark coat with the poacher’s pockets. It’s huge and almost black, its original dark green-brown staining weathered and worn and grimed over decades on the estate to something close to the darkness of the brown-black water in a deep loch. Sometimes he watches her go immediately right up to the coat and hoik it off the wooden peg between all the other coats and jackets, and sometimes he sees her stand there for quite a long time, in the gloom and the pervading smell of wax while rain patters off the glass in the shallow, high-set windows (because it was raining lightly, at the time).