The Steep Approach to Garbadale

by Iain Banks

  ‘It’s not illegal,’ he points out.

  ‘Yeah, but still.’

  ‘Anyway, we haven’t done anything yet.’

  ‘What do you mean “yet”? What, you think we’re going to? Do you? Huh?’

  He hugs her closer, buries his nose in her fabulous hair again. It smells of the outside, of the open air and every beautiful plant and flower and grass in the whole world. ‘Well,’ he says, ‘it’s crossed my mind even if it hasn’t crossed yours.’

  She doesn’t say anything to that, but keeps on stroking the small of his back with one hand and the nape of his neck with the other. This goes on for some time. He thinks, I would never grow bored with this.

  ‘I’m not really a proper virgin, you know,’ she tells him.

  He pulls back, looks at her.

  ‘Blame Scrabbles,’ she says with a small smile he can just about make out in the darkness. She shrugs. ‘Some saddle, anyway.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says. It takes him a while to get this. He hadn’t known it could work that way. He’s always (well, for the last couple of years or so since girls and sex started to become of interest) found this idea that females come sort of factory sealed kind of weird - like nature playing into the hands of religious nutters or something. Oh well. Even when you thought you knew everything about sex, there was always some detail left to learn. ‘Well, umm, you know,’ he says, feeling a little out of his depth here and suddenly entirely pathetic.

  ‘What about you? Have you done it?’ she asks. It sounds to him like she’s trying to sound casual. ‘Tell the truth.’

  He thinks about lying, all the same, but then says, ‘Ahm, well, ahm, no. No. ’Fraid not. A virgin too. Totally.’

  She goes quiet and still for a while, then says, ‘Well, this is just, you know.’

  He doesn’t know. ‘What?’ he asks.

  ‘Well,’ she says. ‘Just fun.’

  ‘Yeah. Yeah, it’s fun. That’s true.’

  ‘I don’t think we’re going to do anything. I don’t think that would be - that would make sense.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  In a way he’s devastated, because this has all felt like it might be leading up - eventually, even if not tonight - to doing it properly, but on the other hand he fully expected never even to get this far with her, in fact never really thought to get anywhere with her - never to get to kiss her, certainly; not proper kissing, not with semi-serious groping too, so it’s all been a bonus in a way . . .

  At the same time . . . Oh, hell, she was his cousin. Part of the family. He’d be better off doing it the first time with a civilian. This would have to do for now. This would do for now. This was, in the end, great. He wants to throw his head back and laugh out loud, wild and mad and uncaring, howling unhinged into the darkness, but he’s worried this would seem a bit weird and alarming, so he doesn’t.

  She says, ‘Let’s kiss again.’

  They end up crashing out in the barn with about a dozen other sleeping couples, snuggling together under an old tarpaulin, taking cups of water from the stuff in the barrels where the cans and bottles had been stored. A little after dawn, long before anybody stirs, she cuddles up to him, spooning against his back, nestling in, holding him, making tiny, faint, fast asleep noises.

  He whispers, ‘Cuz, cuz, sweet cuz’ to her, to himself, very, very quietly, then drifts off to sleep again, smiling.

  Great-Aunts Beryl and Doris live in the upper three-quarters of a fine tall sandstone townhouse cinched within a grand sweep of similar properties forming a terrace in deepest Hillhead. The streets are lined with cars. Amazingly, Fielding finds a parking space almost right outside.

  He and Alban arrive to a house in turmoil. There are shrieks coming from inside. The front double doors are hanging wide. All the windows are open, curtains billowing from several. What appears to be orange smoke is issuing from one of the windows on the top floor.

  A middle-aged man in a boiler suit is standing at the top of the relatively narrow steps rising from the garden flat beneath, holding on to one of the whorls of metal which form the end of the two elegant railings bracketing the broad front steps leading to the main dwelling. He is looking up at the open front door. Halfway between him and the doorway, a large lump of raw red meat is lying in the middle of one step. The meat looks rather squashed and blood is spattered alarmingly around it. The man looks round as Alban and Fielding walk up the steps from the street. ‘You the police?’ he asks, with what sounds like relief.

  ‘No,’ Fielding says firmly, ‘we’re family.’

  3

  Men, Doris! There are men here! We have men!’ ‘

  What’s that? Have you found it? Say again?’

  ‘Men, you cloth-eared old tortoise!’ Great-Aunt Beryl bellowed up the stairs to the first floor.

  Great-Aunt Beryl was small, thin and ninety but possessed of a surprisingly powerful voice. She was dressed in faded blue overalls with a scarf tied round her head and knotted over her forehead. A few wisps of white hair protruded. She held an old-fashioned broom with a vicious-looking Bowie knife gaffer-taped to the handle. On closer inspection, the turn-ups of her overalls had been gaffer-taped to the rubber of her black Wellington boots.

  ‘Beryl, what’s going on?’ Alban asked.

  ‘So nice to see you, Alban, and you, Fielding!’ the old lady said, the Bowie knife flashing dangerously near to the two men and making them flinch as she reached out to shake their hands. ‘Come in, come in! You’ve arrived at just the right time. We have various escapees. Arm yourselves and come help. Oh, you’re men; you won’t need to arm yourselves.’

  A voice floated down from the floor above. ‘Beryl, who is that? To whom are you talking?’

  ‘Beryl—’ Alban began.

  ‘Men, Doris, men! Nephews!’ Great-Aunt Beryl shouted up the stairs. She turned back to Alban. ‘What, dear?’

  ‘Who’s escaped?’

  ‘Not who, dear; what. About half a dozen mice and, now, Boris.’

  ‘Boris?’

  ‘He’s a python. Actually, he’s a she, but it was a long time before we found out and Boris rather stuck, d’you know?’

  ‘You have an escaped snake in here?’ Fielding said, looking worried, his gaze darting about the hallway. ‘How big is it?’

  ‘About eight feet in length.’

  ‘Jesus,’ Fielding said, drawing his feet together.

  ‘Fielding, language!’ Great-Aunt Beryl barked.

  Fielding swivelled to look around the hallway again, holding on to his cousin’s sleeve as he leaned over and tried to see behind various potted plants and tall vases standing on small tables. The stretch of corridor to the side of the stairs looked suspiciously dark and extensive.

  ‘Beryl, are you talking to tradesmen?’

  ‘No, it’s - oh, do listen, dear!’

  ‘There’s, ah, a lump of meat lying outside,’ Fielding said, gaze flicking this way and that.

  ‘Yes,’ Great-Aunt Beryl said. ‘We were trying to set a trap but it fell out of the window. Then we remembered we had some indoor fireworks from the Jubilee and thought we might utilise smoke to flush the wildlife into the open, thus far without success. Largely, though, our strategy has consisted of stamping and screaming.’

  ‘Beryl, I demand to know who you’re talking to! I can’t hold the fort up here myself for ever, you know!’

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Great-Aunt Beryl said. She thrust the broom with the taped-on Bowie knife at Alban, who started backwards, but took hold. The old lady turned and stamped up the wide wooden stairs. ‘First thing tomorrow,’ she shouted upwards, ‘we call Doctor McLaughlin and make an appointment for another ear-syringing! ’ She turned halfway up and looked back at the two men. ‘If you see any mice,’ she told them, ‘don’t hesitate to skewer the little blighters. Boris prefers them alive, but I reckon if he’s hungry enough he’ll eat them cold.’

  ‘What about the snake?’ Alban asked.

  ‘Oh, for pity’s
sake, don’t skewer Boris. Grab him behind the head. Don’t worry if he winds himself around your arm. Though of course if he goes for your neck, dissuade him gently.’

  Alban smiled and raised the home-made pike as Great-Aunt Beryl disappeared round the turn in the stairs. ‘Righty-ho,’ he said. He glanced at Fielding, who was looking at him. He shrugged.

  ‘“Well, you may regard him as you wish,” Doris said to me.

  ‘“I shall, too,” I said.

  ‘“I still think he’s a jolly good egg.”

  ‘“Perhaps so,” I said, “but his brains are scrambled!”’

  Great-Aunt Beryl threw back her head and laughed loudly. Her black wig, topped by a small hat made largely from purple feathers, tipped back alarmingly and threatened to come off, but she snapped her head forward again and it resumed its rightful place. Then she reached over and squeezed Alban’s forearm with surprising force. ‘More cherry brandy?’

  ‘I’m kind of full up, thanks, Beryl.’

  ‘That’s not quite what I meant, dear.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ Alban reached to the drinks trolley sitting between him and Beryl. ‘Allow me.’

  ‘Oh, thank you. Not too - oh never mind, eh?’

  Great-Aunt Doris took a moment or two longer to get, or possibly remember, the joke, but then laughed quite loudly, too. Her head didn’t go quite so far back. A few little flecks of spittle danced like fireflies under the lights, all of which, like most of the lights and lamps in the house, were covered by thin scarves and gauzy pieces of material. The dining room was tall, bay-windowed and panelled in what Alban was fairly sure was mahogany. Long lilac curtains festooned themselves over the windows and pooled on the teak floor. Only the white cube of a new-looking and fully-plumbed-in Bosch dishwasher, sitting to one side of the attractively tiled fireplace, rather jarred.

  Both Alban and Fielding had stared at it when they’d first walked in.

  ‘Saves all that traipsing,’ Great-Aunt Beryl had explained.

  The two old ladies had dressed in ancient formal evening wear - long, high-necked silky dresses - and opened up their dusty dining room for the occasion, even though the two men had no clothing quite so formal. Fielding had a dark grey business suit, which he duly wore, but the best Alban could do was put on a clean, if unironed, white shirt with his most recently washed jeans.

  Dinner itself was a Chinese takeaway, delivered by an amiable young man named Shing who was on first-name terms with Beryl and Doris. The dining table rather outshone the takeaway containers and the ladies confessed that the crockery was only their second best (certain takeaway foods were liable to contain ingredients which might stain the finer plates); however the champagne and wine, selected by Fielding from an old scullery which now served as a wine cellar, had been - save for one lamentably corked bottle of La Mission Haut-Brion 1950 - very good indeed.

  ‘So, Fielding,’ said Great-Aunt Doris, addressing Alban.

  ‘It’s Alban, dear,’ Beryl informed her. She glanced at Alban and shook her head. Fielding wasn’t even in the room at that point.

  ‘Of course,’ Doris said, waving one hand imperiously. She was a little more robustly made than Beryl - a sparrow to her wren - but still gave an impression of delicacy and even frailty compared to Beryl’s aura of air-dried toughness. Doris wore a similar hat to Beryl, though her feathers were crimson and her wig was platinum blonde. She wore alarming horn-rimmed glasses she called her Dame Ednas. ‘So, Alban,’ she said, ‘are you well?’

  ‘Every bit as well as he was fifteen minutes ago, when you last asked, one imagines, dear,’ Beryl told her crisply.

  ‘Really?’ Doris said, blinking behind her glasses. ‘And what did you say then, my love?’

  ‘I said I was well, thanks,’ Alban told her, smiling.

  ‘Jolly good,’ Doris said. ‘Well, perhaps now I’ve asked you a sufficient number of times, it’ll stick, d’you know what I mean? And I shall remember. Ha!’

  ‘Yes, perhaps,’ Beryl said.

  ‘I say,’ Doris said, looking serious, ‘is there any more of that peach schnapps?’

  ‘Here we are,’ Alban said, refreshing her glass.

  Great-Aunt Doris made little cooing noises as he filled the thin glass, which was somewhere in size between a liqueur shot and a schooner.

  ‘And so,’ she said, when the glass was nearly full, ‘did you have to get a pink chit from, umm . . . from, umm . . . ?’

  ‘A pink chit?’ Alban asked.

  ‘You know - permission to . . .’ she waved one thin, vein-ribbed hand around, ‘from your other . . . I’ve forgotten her—’

  ‘Oh. No, I’m not currently with anybody, Doris.’ He raised his glass and smiled. ‘Not properly.’

  ‘What about that young mathematician girl?’ Beryl asked. ‘Verushka. She seems jolly nice.’

  ‘She is. But we’re not a couple.’

  ‘You aren’t?’ Beryl said, seemingly surprised.

  ‘No,’ he told her. ‘That’s not really what either of us is looking for.’

  Doris tutted. ‘A handsome young man like you? You must have the girls falling at your feet, I should say. Wouldn’t you say, Beryl?’

  ‘I should say,’ Beryl affirmed.

  Doris leaned a little closer over the table and lowered her voice. ‘Are we still sowing our wild oats?’ she asked, and winked.

  ‘While playing the field,’ Alban told her.

  ‘Ploughing the field?’ Doris looked a little nonplussed. She looked at Beryl. ‘Is that rude?’

  Beryl ignored her and leaned to Alban. ‘And always trying to ensure there’s a crop failure, what?’ she snorted.

  ‘You’re not a gay, are you, dear boy?’ Doris asked.

  ‘Oh, Doris, really!’ said Beryl.

  ‘Fielding and you aren’t—?’ Doris went on, now looking thoroughly confused.

  ‘No, Doris. I’m pretty sure neither of us is remotely gay.’

  ‘Oh,’ Doris said, frowning. ‘Only I’m sure we could have given you a room together.’

  Alban laughed. ‘I imagine if I find Fielding in my bed tonight, Doris, it’ll be because Boris has escaped again.’

  ‘What?’ Doris looked alarmed. ‘Boris has—?’

  ‘Boris is in his tank, dear,’ Beryl said loudly. ‘And Alban is not a gay!’

  ‘Oh,’ Doris said, looking hardly less bewildered. ‘Jolly good. Well, cheers!’ She drank from her schnapps glass, then dabbed lightly at her thin lips with her napkin.

  Finally everything’s ready. He’d thought this was all going to go horribly wrong when he’d found the nearest socket and it was round pin - round pin! - but either the house had two separate circuits or the old sockets had been left in place when the building had been rewired, because there’s a normal double socket along the wall a bit.

  ‘Ladies and gentleman,’ Fielding says, clapping his hands as he opens the dining-room door, ‘presentation is served!’

  ‘Presentation?’ Alban asks as they escort the two old bats through to the drawing room. This all takes a while, as Beryl and Doris flutter and fuss and dither one way then the other, collecting shawls and handbags and pillboxes, glasses cases and whatever the hell else and wittering on about God knows what all the time, but finally - holding on to the arms of the men like children - they are led through to the drawing room, where Fielding has chairs set up and the laptop plus projector sitting on the table facing a white sheet slung across the window alcove.

  Al looks at Fielding as they get the girls seated. ‘You’re doing a presentation?’ he asks, like it’s funny or something.

  ‘Well, duh,’ Fielding tells him.

  ‘Power Point.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Like, with bullet points?’ Al says, a big dumb grin on his face.

  ‘Of course!’

  ‘Fielding,’ Al says, shaking his head.

  ‘What?’ Fielding says, but now Al’s fussing about getting a table over so the old girls have somewhere to
rest their drinks. Fielding turns off the main light so that the only illumination is coming from a standard lamp in one corner and the empty white light the projector is throwing at the sheet.

  ‘I say, Fielding,’ Beryl says, ‘what is this thing?’ She’s pointing at the projector.

  ‘That’s a projector, Great-Aunt Beryl. Now.’ Fielding claps his hands, standing before them, the projector acting like a soft spotlight on him. He’s taken off his jacket, rolled up his shirtsleeves and loosened his tie, so he’s looking pretty casual. Friendly, even. ‘First of all, I’d like to say thank you to Beryl and Doris for a wonderful meal and enchanting hospitality.’ This is a bit shameless, Fielding thinks, considering the embarrassment of having to eat a takeaway Chinese, even though the drink was almost tragically good. Never mind. Flatter to be received. They’re wined and dined and their bums are on the seats. ‘I don’t think it’s any secret that the family firm, Wopuld Limited - indeed, the whole Wopuld Group - has been approached—’

  ‘Are we going to see some slides?’ Doris asks nobody in particular.

  ‘Yes,’ Beryl says. ‘I think so, dear.’

  ‘Well, it’s a computer presentation, technically,’ Fielding tells them, taking his silver laser pointer from his shirt pocket and flourishing it. ‘Anyway, as I was saying. The Wopuld Company, Limited. The Wopuld Group. And Spraint. The Spraint Corporation. The Spraint Corporation of America.’ Fielding tightens his mouth, looks down and turns sideways to them, then starts to pace slowly, hands behind his back. Fielding thinks of this as his Ladies and Gentlemen of the Jury dynamic. ‘I remember when I was—’

  ‘So, is there a computer?’ Beryl asks, looking under the table.

  ‘Yes, that’s the computer there, Great-Aunt.’

  ‘What, this?’

  ‘Yes, that.’

  ‘Ah. So this is a portable type of computer?’

  ‘Notebook laptop, Great-Aunt. Now—’

  ‘So, shouldn’t we be facing it, then? I mean, I can’t see the tube, the screen thing. Can you, Doris?’

  ‘What’s that, dear?’

  ‘See the screen. On this thing.’