by Iain Banks
‘I . . . well, it’s there.’
‘Yes, but can you see it?’
‘Well, sort of.’
‘But not properly?’
What the hell are they talking about? ‘I’m sorry, I don’t . . .’ Fielding starts to say, then realises. ‘Oh, I see what you mean! No, that’s the idea, you see. The computer tells the projector what to put on the big screen, here. The sheet, see? You don’t have to look at the screen on the computer. And I control it with this little remote. All very clever, but that’s just the tech.’
‘A remote control?’ Beryl says, squinting at the device Fielding has just produced from his back pocket.
‘Are we going to watch television?’ Doris asks.
‘Look, ladies, these are just the tools, you know? Not really the point of the whole exercise.’ Fielding glances at Alban but he’s not being any help at all, just sitting with legs and arms folded, grinning at his cousin.
‘I do hope that’s not off my bed!’ Doris says, staring at the sheet. ‘Ha ha ha!’
This, Fielding thinks, is ridiculous. ‘Look, I’ll show you.’ He steps to the side and clicks up the company logo opening shot, showing a kind of stylised Empire! board with lots of pieces and cards scattered about, the camera swooping down on to the playing surface, banking and swerving around the pieces and over the various territories.
‘Oh, my!’
‘Good heavens!’
Fielding smiles. That’s got their attention. This is just a glorified screen saver really, but it shows how the system works.
‘I say, that is clever!’ Beryl says.
‘Is this a film?’ Doris looks confused again. ‘Are we going to watch a film?’ She leans over to Beryl. ‘I shall need to go, you know, if we’re going to watch a whole film.’
Fielding clicks on to an ancient sepia photo of Great-Grandfather, company founder Henry Wopuld, looking very grand and Victorian in his whiskers.
‘I remember when I was—’ Fielding begins again.
‘Look, Doris!’ Beryl exclaims. ‘It’s old Henry.’
‘Oh, it is slides,’ Doris says. ‘So what was that other thing?’
‘Is this all inside the projector what-do-you-call-it?’ Beryl asks.
‘No, it’s all in the computer,’ Fielding tells her, keeping calm. ‘The projector just puts what’s in the computer on to the screen. Do you understand? And I control it with my remote. It’s just the usual . . . It’s just the means to the end.’ Fielding clicks back to the company screen-saver sequence. ‘See?’
‘There it is again!’ Doris exclaims. She leans over to Al. ‘Alban - whatever is going on?’
‘Technical wizardry, Doris,’ he tells her.
‘And are you doing this?’ she asks.
‘No, Fielding is. I’m just the sidekick.’
‘You’re psychic?’
‘Sidekick, Doris,’ he says more loudly, laughing. ‘I’m just the assistant. ’
Not - in Fielding’s considered opinion - that Al’s assisting with anything whatso-fucking-ever, the smug asshole. He’s just sitting grinning. Meanwhile, Fielding is getting hot under the collar. ‘Look, everyone,’ he says, ‘I realise all this technology might seem quite—’
‘So, what else do you have in here?’ Beryl is asking, leaning over to look at the computer. She reaches out to touch the machine.
‘Beryl! Please don’t—!’ Fielding starts to say. She doesn’t touch it, but he must have clicked the remote because the movie of the game board clicks back to old Henry, then on to some shots of famous people playing Empire! as a board game - here’s Bing Crosby and Bob Hope looking slightly startled, playing the US version, here’s the famous still from that old TV film about the Royal Family with the game in the background at Balmoral, here’s another still from when they were playing it in EastEnders (they couldn’t name it but, again, you could just about make out the board, and one of the characters kept talking about ‘this game of world domination’). Then there’s a few seconds of action from the latest version of the electronic version, followed by an animated graph of past sales, with projected future sales zooming away into the top right. Basically this is ruining Fielding’s presentation. ‘Sorry, sorry.’ Fielding lets go a sigh and clicks back through the images to old Henry.
‘Henry again!’ Doris says. ‘I think I’ve seen this bit.’
‘I think this is where we came in, dear,’ Beryl tells her. She smiles at Fielding, just as he makes the mistake of checking that the laser pointer’s working by shining it at the palm of his hand. ‘Oo! And what is that thing for? What does that do?’ she asks.
‘It’s a laser pointer,’ Fielding tells her, resigned. He points it at the corner of the sheet/screen.
‘What’s that?’ Doris asks.
From this point on Fielding kind of loses them. They’re far more interested in the pointer, the remote, and the idea that the laptop is pushing images through the connecting cable to the projector than they are about Spraint Corp’s takeover bid and Fielding’s carefully worked-up history of, and tribute to, the family’s long and successful struggle to bring high-quality board and electronic gaming to a waiting world.
Somehow they end up playing a game of the medieval action version of Empire!, hacking and slashing through vast battles and towering sieges and dodging cannonballs the size of basket balls, though without the proper controllers, just using the laptop’s configured buttons, it’s pretty messy. Being drunk probably doesn’t help, either. Doris and Beryl take turns using the laser pointer as either a pretend weapon or to highlight the crotches and codpieces of the various characters. Beryl in particular seems to love the gore, and shrieks regularly and loudly. Doris goes off to make coffee, refuses any help and reappears with tea. Irish tea, if there is such a thing - she’s put whisky in it. It tastes hideous.
Beryl advances to the rank of Margrave. Alban laughs a lot. Doris falls asleep. A mouse skitters across the floor from under the screen, heading for the door. They all chase it.
Alban lay in bed for a little while, drinking water and thinking back to the phone call he’d made earlier. He’d asked to use the phone shortly after they’d rounded up most of the mice and discovered Boris wrapped around the hot-water tank in the upstairs airing cupboard. He drank his water, and smiled into the darkness of the room. It was good to be in a proper bed again, a bed with sheets and pillows. This one was an ancient brass double bed, creaky and somewhat sagging, but comfortable enough. He had every hope of not being in this bed tomorrow night. He drank more water, grinning into the darkness, remembering.
‘Graef.’
‘Hello there.’
‘Ah, Mr McGill.’
‘How are you?’
‘Very well. And you?’
‘Well.’
‘Where are you?’
‘Glasgow.’
‘That’s good. Shall we meet?’
‘Tomorrow?’
‘Would be perfect. Though I could become free tonight.’
‘Won’t pretend I’m not tempted.’
‘As you should be.’ He could hear her smile. ‘And flattered. I’d never risk appearing this eager for anybody else.’
‘Wish I could. But there’s family stuff to be done.’
‘Your aunts? Beryl and Doris?’
‘Yes, them. And a cousin.’
‘Tomorrow, then. Say hello to the girls from me.’
‘Will do. Where do we meet?’
‘Come to the office. Any time after seven. I’ve been away conferencing so there’s piles of backlog.’
He’s not really there. He knows this but it makes no difference. He knows this but it is no help.
He is not there, firstly, because he knows this is not happening. He’s not there, secondly, because there was nobody there - that’s known, that’s a fact. And he’s not there, thirdly, because when it happened he was barely two, and in the dream he is a few years older, maybe five or so, able to understand something of what is going on an
d to talk and plead with her (even though she never listens, even though she cannot hear, even though she doesn’t see him). In the dream he is able to walk fast enough to keep up with her as she walks through the house and into the cloakroom where she chooses the long dark coat with the poacher’s pockets, the coat that had been her father’s and - sometimes, as now, like this time - he’s able to follow her out of the gloom of the house into the light of the day and trail after her as she walks down the dark, dank path under the alders and rowan to the burn-side walk leading towards the gatehouse and the main road and the sea.
The dream was interrupted when the door of his bedroom opened, light spilled in briefly and somebody stepped into the room, closing the door.
‘Alban?’ a voice said in the darkness. At first, he wasn’t sure whether he was really awake or not, and just for an instant he thought it might be his mother, finally replying. He struggled to wake up properly. It didn’t feel like he’d been asleep long. ‘Beryl?’ he said.
‘Put the light on,’ Great-Aunt Beryl told him. ‘Don’t want to bark a shin. One takes for ever to heal at this age.’
He felt for the bedside lamp, found it and switched it on. Great-Aunt Beryl was dressed in a long white nightgown and a warm-looking tartan dressing gown. Her hair - her real hair - was very white and wispy and sparse.
‘Is there something wrong?’ he asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘Well, yes, but there’s no emergency.’
‘Boris still in his tank?’
‘As far as I know.’ She walked up to his bed and started unmaking the corner of the bed at its foot. ‘Shift over, nephew, and pass me a pillow.’ Beryl got the sheets at the bottom of the bed undone, accepted the passed pillow and climbed in, putting the pillow behind her so that she could sit up facing him. She fixed him with a disarmingly bright gaze. He pulled the sheets up a little to cover his nipples, bemused at himself for feeling so self-conscious. His great-aunt took a deep breath. ‘Now, Alban.’
‘Yes, Beryl.’
‘Did you get my letter?’
‘Yes, I did. Though only today. Fielding brought it from Wales.’
‘And you’ve read it.’
‘Yes.’ He reached for his water glass. ‘Would you like some water?’
‘Yes, please. Thank you.’
‘You’re welcome.’
‘So,’ she said, clasping her hands. ‘Unfortunately, since I wrote that letter, matters have rather come to a head, medically.’
‘Oh, Beryl, I’m so sorry,’ he said. The letter had just said that she was unwell and undergoing tests. As he’d never known Beryl complain about - or even mention anything regarding - her health, he’d guessed this was something out of the ordinary, something she considered important.
‘Oh, I’m ninety - a good innings and blah blah.’ Beryl waved away any sympathy. ‘However, it would seem that I am highly likely to die within the next year or so. Ha! As though, at this age, that was ever other than true. Annoyingly, though, they have found one of those unpleasant things that end in -oma inside me and apparently that makes the outcome pretty much inevitable, rather than giving one a sporting chance. I ought to have six months though, and possibly a year. The only good thing about getting cancer at this age is it spreads very slowly; the cancer cells are as decrepit and sluggish as every other part of one’s body, and take their time multiplying. ’
‘Oh, Beryl—’
‘Do stop it, please,’ she said, blinking furiously. ‘I take some comfort in people’s sympathy, but only so much. We all have to go; in a way I’m lucky to have the notice.’
‘If there’s anything I can do—?’ he began.
‘There is,’ she said brightly.
‘What?’
‘Be quiet and listen.’
‘Okay.’
‘Now, I may, in due course, as my illness progresses and my condition deteriorates, have to take matters into my own hands, because I have no intention of dying in any great pain, if there is no hope of recovery. That is something I feel I have to tell you, Alban, you understand, but you must be assured it is simply a practical means of escaping an unpleasant experience, that is all. Normally, obviously, one doesn’t really approve of that sort of thing - bit of an easy way out, always best to just soldier on, you never know what might be around the next corner, that sort of thing - however it is something that has to be faced, and I particularly want you to be prepared. It has also struck me that for some people, the unpleasant experience they are trying to escape through suicide is the rest of their lives. If they see that life as being filled with nothing but emotional pain until they die of old age, well, one can understand that would in itself be unbearable, and the younger you are, the worse. That’s the kind of thing one thinks about when one finds oneself in this sort of pickle. So, for what it might be worth, I pass that on.’ She paused. ‘Yes?’ She could see he wanted to say something.
He drew in a breath but eventually just nodded and said, ‘Okay. Thank you.’
‘Now, the other matter I alluded to in my letter. Which we spoke about once, some years ago.’
There was a pause, then Alban said, ‘Ah ha,’ for want of anything better.
‘I don’t know how much you know about the circumstances surrounding your birth.’
Alban looked away, seeming to search the dark corners of the room, lost in the shade.
He shrugged. ‘I was born in Garbadale House on September the third, nineteen-sixty-nine. My parents had been married two days earlier, also at the house. They’d been living in London before that. They were students at the LSE; that’s where they met. They stayed on at Garbadale and Dad became, well, it was never a formal post, but sort of trainee estate manager. Think that’s where he started painting. Winifred and Bert were there, too, most of the time. Mum - Irene - looked after me, though apparently she wasn’t very well herself. Some of it might have been postnatal depression. We stayed at Garbadale until . . . Until I was two. Until Irene died.’ He shrugged again.
Beryl looked thoughtful, her already small eyes reduced to puckered slits. ‘Hmm. I see. All well and good. What I wanted to tell you was from just before you were born, from the end of August that year.’
He nodded, folded his arms high over his chest.
‘Did you know your mother had been knocked down in the street, by a bus, in London, a couple of weeks before you were born?’
‘Yes, I did. That was one reason for her to go to Garbadale, for them both to go; she was recuperating.’
‘Hmm. Though undertaking a five-hundred-mile journey, even on the sleeper train and in a big comfy car, does seem a little strange when one’s been that knocked about. She had a lot of bruising, and head injuries.’
‘So I heard.’
‘If it had been a car that knocked her down,’ Beryl said, ‘she’d probably have had two broken legs.’
‘If you say so,’ he said. ‘But she can’t have been that badly injured; they let her out a day or two later.’
‘Yes,’ Beryl said, sounding thoughtful.
The truth was he didn’t like talking about any of this. He didn’t like to think about any of this. For most of his life he’d avoided going back to the great gloomy house and the damp, dark garden with the huge, desolate estate of rain-slicked rock and gale-hammered heather surrounding it. There had been those few long weekend visits to Garbadale House in his childhood to see Grandma Winifred and Grandad Bert, and once - shortly after his sister Cory had been born - they had stayed for a week, but he hadn’t liked the place and, looking back, was pretty sure his dad had hated it, too. You could hardly blame him. The first time Alban had chosen to go back of his own volition had been to dispose of something that had profoundly needed disposing of. Since then he’d been back a few times, determined not to let the place and the legacy it held intimidate him, but it was always, in effect, with gritted teeth.
‘You see, the thing is,’ Great-Aunt Beryl said, ‘I was in London when your mother had her accident.’
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‘Oh,’ Alban said. Beryl had been a nurse, first in the Wrens, then in the NHS, in Manchester, then in Saudi and Dubai, then - for the last few years before her retirement - in Glasgow.
‘She was knocked down in Loake Street, close to a clinic,’ Beryl said. ‘Private place; surgical. What they’d call elective surgery nowadays. It was one of their doctors who was first on the scene. I visited her in Bart’s, the day after the accident. She was quite heavily sedated; couldn’t get much sense out of her. Tried talking to her for a bit, but then I was sent packing. Very furious Sister. Explained I was a relative and a senior nurse but she wasn’t having any of it. Rather bad form, I remember thinking at the time.’ Beryl frowned, as though this thirty-five-year-old incident still annoyed her. ‘Thing is, I was only down in the big smoke to visit an old girlfriend from the war. Pure chance I happened to be round for tea with Win and Bert in their flat in South Ken when the rozzers came to say Irene had been knocked down. I’d only just arrived, in fact; barely had time to dunk a biscuit before the door went. It was Win and Bert who dashed off as soon as they heard and left me to man the fort and stand by the telephone and so on. They didn’t get back till very late that night and then said Irene was unconscious and not allowed any visitors, though, as I say, I went next day anyway, just to make sure they were looking after her properly. Had to head off for the Gulf the following day, so it was my last chance, really.’ She went silent for a bit. ‘Never did see her again.’
‘Well, you went to see her; that was good of you.’
‘Something she said,’ Beryl said suddenly. ‘While she was lying there. I mean to say, she was semi-lucid at best, poor girl, but she sounded coherent when she said it.’
‘What?’
‘That he hadn’t wanted her to have it, and that was why.’
Alban thought about this for a moment. ‘Ah, I’m sorry?’
Beryl said, very clearly: ‘He hadn’t wanted her to have it, and that was why.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ he said, eyes widening, ‘the “it” here is me, isn’t it?’
‘Typical man,’ Beryl sighed. ‘Yes, obviously, the “it” was you. The point is, though, who was this “he”? And did this mean she’d walked out in front of that bus on purpose?’