by Iain Banks
‘Hoo-hoo!’ he laughs, looking up at the blue sky above the thick, feathery tops of the breeze-swayed grass.
She says, ‘Yeah, well, sorry, but; yuk.’
‘We could use a tissue next time,’ he suggests. He’s aware he’s sounding hopelessly eager. He really hopes this hasn’t put her off the whole idea.
‘Hmm.’ She wipes her hand on the beaten-down grass and looks dubiously at his penis, which is still stiff.
Or you could suck it, he wants to say, but doesn’t. He cleans up with a paper hanky from his jeans pocket and she lies down beside him on the flattened grass, stroking him.
There is also, at the same time, the larger moral question regarding, What the hell does anything matter when we are forever on the brink of killing ourselves - killing everybody?
This is not a trivial matter. This is 1985, and their parents, the previous generation, they both agree, have managed very successfully to almost completely fuck up the world, and left the solutions - the tidying-up, if any such healing is possible - to the following generation, and their children’s children, and their - well, you get the idea. The world still stands on the brink of all-out nuclear war, the superpowers constantly find new excuses to confront each other, half of Africa seems to be starving, hundreds of millions go to bed hungry while the West stuffs its bulging collective face with greasy fries and fat-pumped hamburgers made from diseased meat, and on top of all that this Aids thing looks like making their generation’s sex-lives more fraught, limited and dangerous than they ever deserved. It’s so unfair. Really unfair; not the sort of unfair kids and teenagers are always complaining about to their parents or teachers or anybody else in authority, but genuinely, manifestly, no-question-about-it unfair.
You always hope and you try to believe that there must be a way forward, because we - humans, the species - are where we are, so we’ve always found a way forward before, but sometimes hope is a difficult thing to hold on to. Jeez, you just had to watch the news . . .
They talk about this a lot. It matters to them. At the same time, he is aware, being honest with himself, that he’s kind of pushing this apocalyptic vision and getting her to talk about the sheer snow-balling awfulness of the world because he does want them to go the whole way, he does - of course he does - want to have proper sex with her, and emphasising the dangers that lie ahead in their future lives, and the possibility that those lives might be horribly, unfairly short thanks to their parents’ idiot generation is maybe one way of getting a girl - maybe especially an intelligent, thoughtful kind of girl - to throw inhibition to the winds and - as their American cousins would express it - put out.
It’s not something to be proud of, maybe, but it’s not like he’s telling any lies here.
‘I’m thinking about it,’ she tells him, the first time he asks her to suck him off, in the old shed on the western limit of the estate, almost in Devon.
She’s stroking his cock, kneeling between his legs, his jeans down around his knees, a tissue in her other hand. He’d kind of assumed she’d put the paper hanky over his prick like a sort of soft condom, the way he does when he wanks, but she has discovered that she likes to watch his penis spasm and see the warm white liquid spurt, so she keeps the hanky ready until the last second, then catches his ejaculate on the wadded tissue, smiling as he tenses and gasps and comes.
‘Think I’m going to—’ he says.
He does, arching his back. ‘Maybe next time,’ she murmurs.
The question, they agree, is simply, How do we cope sensibly with the present quota of shit left to us by the parental generation without surrendering our souls and just accepting any amount of shit for ever, thus turning sensible acceptance into outright exploitative stupidity and becoming part of the problem, so that we go on to be just as stupid and selfish and thoughtless as the generation before?
Answers on a postcard.
They take turns; he prefers to kiss her while she wanks him; she prefers kneeling over him, watching.
‘Do you think our mums and dads did all this sort of thing?’ she asks one time, inside a little arbour formed by the tapestry hedge at the side of the south lawn and a curved coppice of sweet chestnut.
She is lying with her head on his chest. ‘I suppose so,’ he says. ‘Dad says every generation thinks it invented sex.’
She is silent for a moment. ‘I can imagine your parents doing it.’ She shivers. ‘Euw! Not mine!’
He’s thinking of Uncle James and Aunt Clara. ‘No,’ he agrees. ‘I’d rather not imagine it, either.’
‘Maybe they never have,’ she says. ‘Like, obviously James must have done it with June, cos there’s me. And June is quite sexy, I suppose. But maybe they . . .’ Her voice trails off. ‘No, wait; I think I heard them through a wall once. That was horrible.’
They start kissing again. She’s wearing jeans and he presses and strokes her between the legs through the jeans for a long time, long enough so that he can feel the heat and the dampness of her through the thick denim and she doesn’t stop him, just hugs him very hard and breathes faster and faster, her head buried in his neck until eventually she shudders, her arms grip him even more tightly, she bites his shoulder through his shirt and a strange, cat-like noise is forced from her lips. She gives one final shiver, then goes limp, body heaving against him as she breathes, her breath hot on his neck and cheek.
He says, ‘That was you coming, wasn’t it?’
She just lies there panting for a moment or two, then, on shaking arms, struggles to raise herself up and look at him. Her face is flushed; a beautiful scent like pine seems to fill the heavy, hanging curtain of her hair. She looks like she’s about to say something. Possibly something sarcastic, he suspects, now he thinks about it, but instead she just rolls her eyes, shakes her head and collapses back on top of him.
He grins a huge grin.
Fielding stares at his mobile. He doesn’t believe he’s hearing this. He knew he should have stayed in Jockland, but there was urgent stuff needing attending to back here in London, and so he had to blast south, leaving Al happily shacked up with Mathgirl. Fielding’s been ringing her at her office making a nuisance of himself, asking her to tell Alban to give him a call. Finally this harassment has paid off but now Al’s gone all uncooperative.
‘Al, I need you here. I can’t do this myself. I can try, but I may not succeed. With you, I’ve got a much better chance. We make a good team. Come on now. I’m serious. I’m kind of relying on you here, man.’ Fielding can feel himself making a face as he walks along Wardour Street, on his way for an after-work drink with some Chinese factory owners, in town to pitch units, runs and costs.
‘Look, Fielding,’ Al says, sounding far too damn calm and casual. ‘I’ve said I’ll be at the bash in Garbadale. So I’ll be there. But I’m not coming to London to try and browbeat my dad and yours into opposing the sell-off.’
‘Don’t you want to see your own parents?’
‘I’ll see them in a couple of weeks anyway.’
‘Al, I can’t believe you just don’t seem to care about this family any more. We’re in danger of losing everything and all you can do . . . You’re just happy to . . . I mean, I’m happy you’re having such a peachy time in Glasgow with Verushka, but this is our family at stake here, man. This is our chance to do something, to make a difference.’
‘I’m heading back to Perth in a couple of days, anyway,’ he says, like he hasn’t heard a word.
Perth. Jesus weeping H. Christ. Fielding bites back a whole clip of sarcastic comments about the comparative merits of a rainy sink estate in Perth and the glitzily moneyed buzz that is London, and just says, ‘Throwing you out, is she?’
‘Yeah,’ Al says, obviously not meaning it. ‘No, I just feel like I’m taking up too much of her time when I stay with her for longer than a few days. She’s a life she needs to lead. I start to feel I’m monopolising her after a while. Makes me uncomfortable.’
‘Right.’
Right m
y fragrant arse, Fielding thinks. He’s seen them together. The woman is totally fucking gorgeous and blatantly worships him. Alban’s a fucking idiot. But Fielding’s not going to tell him. Some people just seem to spend their misbegotten lives stepping smartly out the way of anything remotely good for them and ignoring any and all good advice well-meaning friends and family might offer. It’s a gift. An anti-gift. A curse. Yeah, that’s the word, Fielding decides. A curse.
Stupid fuck.
4
I’m in the Volley in the Valley - that’s the Volunteer Arms, Valley Street, for those not fortunate enough to be acquainted with the more select drinking emporiums of Bonnie Perth - sitting there quite the thing with Deedee (i.e. D.D., which stands for Designated Drinker) and Veepil (i.e. V.P.L. which is short for Visible Panty Liners or something). I’ve also seen Veepil’s name spelt V-PILL; there is a piece of highly fucken derogatory graffiti on a gable end in Islay Avenue which favours the latter spelling - when in walks your man Alban.
‘All Bran!’ Deedee shouts, seeing the prodigal as he comes through the door and stands looking round. Deedee is waving a suddenly empty glass. It is well known that the big man is not normally short of a sheikel or two and some of my more embarrassing friends (just let me pause while I consider who amongst said bunch would not qualify for this label, big Al himself excepted . . . well, maybe we’ll come back to that one!!) anyway they sort of exploit him a bit sometimes, though he never seems to mind. Like I say; embarrassing.
Al waves and comes over. He looks just like he did when he left, a week ago. Maybe the beard’s a bit trimmer. He nods at Deedee and takes his glass. ‘What the fuck happened to the flat, Tango?’ he asks me.
‘Fucken D.S. is what happened to the fucken flat, that’s what,’ I tell him.
He rolls his eyes. ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’
‘My feelings exactly, big man.’
‘Jesus,’ he says. ‘Right. First things first. Who wants what?’
In a round is got. Al says his formal hellos and sits beside me, putting his wee backpack on the floor.
‘And before you ask,’ I tell him, ‘yes, they did take your big pack. Heard one of the boys in blue saying what a smart-looking bit of kit it was, too, so I wouldn’t hold out great hopes of ever seeing that again.’
‘Did they nick anybody?’
‘Aye, me!’ I poke myself in the chest. ‘I had about ten ounces of blow in the place cos Special Kay and Deep Phil were back from Umshter-fucken-dum.’
‘Shit. You been charged yet?’
‘Aye, fucken possession with intent to supply. No date yet.’
‘Ah thought they wur meant tae be no botherin wi blow these days, but,’ Veepil says, waving her cig around. This is about the seventh time she’s said this over the last couple of hours. Drink has been taken.
‘Sorry to hear that, Tango,’ Al says. ‘You got a legal?’
‘Aye, getting aid, and that.’
‘Did they leave anything of mine?’
‘That’ll be right. Maybe some dirty washing.’
‘So, are you locked out?’
‘Aye. The council took serious fucken exception for some bizarre fucken reason and put me in a fucken B&B on Flowers Street. Fucken shite it is. Sorry, Al; canny put you up now. I had a word, and Sunny D says you can stay at his and Di’s if you don’t mind sharing a room with the twins.’ I hold my hands up, feeling mortified and dead inhospitable, even though this is definitely not my fault. ‘Best I can do, big man. I’m really sorry.’
Al pats my shoulder. ‘That’s okay. Don’t worry.’
‘Ye’ll no be wantin tae go tae Sunny an Di’s though, will ye?’ Deedee says, giving it serious face.
‘No,’ Al says. ‘I’ll pass. Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.’
‘Where are you going to go, but?’ I ask him.
‘Where fate seems to be pushing me,’ he says, sighing and staring up at the ceiling. ‘Back into the welcoming fucking tentacles of my family.’
Deedee is poking a finger through a handful of small change, mostly copper’s. ‘Anybody got any dosh fur the fag machine? Ma duty-frees must be back hame.’
Al digs in his pocket.
It begins with a choice. She picks a large coat with the deep, inside pockets that people call poacher’s pockets from the variety of coats and jackets and capes in the cloakroom of the house. The coat she selects is an old, shabby one that has been in the family for decades; it has been worn by her father, some of her uncles, perhaps a few of her larger-made female relations over the years, and by most of the males in the present generation of the Wopuld family. She leaves the house by the side door and takes the indirect route towards the main road, heading not down the drive that loops up to the front of the house and through the avenue of tall cedars, but instead walking down to the shadowy path that follows the River Garbh on its way from the inland loch towards the sea.
She picks up the first stone while she’s walking through the garden, stooping to pull it from the side of the path. She looks at it, thinking of cleaning some of the damp brown soil from it, but then puts it straight into one of the external pockets of the coat. There’s a glove in the pocket. She looks at it as she walks and feels in the other outside pocket, finding the second glove. She puts them on. They’re too big, like the coat, but it doesn’t really matter.
She walks down the path by the river, listening to the waters roar and shush. Some of the people on the estate call the river a burn. She has always wondered why something full of cold water is associated with a verb denoting fire and heat. There seems to be no adequate explanation for this.
The trees down by the river are what-do-you-call-it; deciduous. They have broad leaves they shed in the autumn. Autumn comes early here, this far north; a month or so early compared to Somerset, compared to Lydcombe. In perhaps as little as a couple of weeks the broadleaf trees here will be starting to turn brown and red and gold and begin to lose their leaves.
The rain has almost ceased now and the sky is going from a dull to a brighter grey. She squats by a stone in the centre of the rough path and tries to prise it out, but it will not come. She takes the gloves off, thinking this may help, but it doesn’t. She puts the gloves back on again. She walks down a narrower path to the side of the stream and pulls a rock from the bank, putting that rock into the external pocket on the other side of the coat from the first stone.
She continues down the riverside track, stopping now and again to add stones and rocks to her pockets, beginning to use the deep, inside poacher’s pockets. The coat is starting to become heavy, pulling her shoulders down.
Where the road into the estate crosses the river, via an old curved bridge of grey stone, she stays with the path, passing under the road. A car hisses overhead on the still damp tarmac. She hears that, and listens to the tumbling waters echo off the curved surface of arching stone, then she’s out from beneath the bridge and walking down the path towards the rocky shore and the dull grey gleaming that is Loch Glencoul, the sea loch. The line of rocks arranged like giant pearls around the shore of the loch are different shades of grey; a rainbow of monochrome. Their colour changes to brown near the water, covered in seaweed. The mountains tower around the loch, their high tops hidden by the uniform blanket of grey cloud.
The coat feels very heavy on her now, weighing her down with the mass of stones she’s accumulated, making her shoulders ache. The rocks in the poacher’s pockets click and clack as she walks and force her to move with a swaying, halting, slightly unnatural step. The river shallows and broadens out between banks of rain-bright grass that give way to the rocks and seaweed at ragged, undercut margins of dark, peaty ground where the grey remains of barkless tree trunks and giant branches - element-stripped, time-polished - lie trapped and caught, twisted limbs spread and out-flung in frozen poses of what look to her like agony and despair; a Pompeiian tableau representing the fossilisation of a meaningless end.
There is no discernible path any more.
She stumbles down the side of the stream, nearly falling, then stoops to pick up another couple of rocks, adding them to the collections in the poacher’s pockets. She thinks she feels something give as she adds the stones to the right pocket, and worries that the material will rip, letting the stones fall out. She recalls a fable about something like that. Aesop, probably. The fable of the woman who tried to carry too many rocks; that would be her. Not that it would ever be written, not that anybody would ever read it. Not that it mattered in the least. Not that anything did.
The rocks on this part of the shore are round and hard to walk over, especially with all the extra weight she is carrying. She had carried less when she had been pregnant with the child, though sometimes it had felt like all the weight in the world. She splashes into the stream as it spreads out still further, leaving behind the grassy banks and forming a rough delta across the rocks, straggled with seaweed and the flayed flotsam branches. Her boots fill with cold water. She stops, takes off the gloves and carefully does up the buttons on the coat, right up to her chin. Then she stoops, plunging her hands through the water rushing around her boots, and picks up a last couple of stones from the bed of the stream. Cradling them in the crook of one arm, she pulls the gloves back on over her wet hands, then holds the stones, one in each hand, rather than risk putting them into the already overloaded pockets of the coat.
She keeps on walking down the stream until the stream becomes the sea, becomes the waters of the loch. By sticking to the stream bed she’s walked past the seaweed, avoiding slipping and falling on it. She wonders where the water stops tasting fresh and starts being salty.
The waters of the loch rise around her ankles, calves, knees. The coat’s tails float up on the surface of the loch, moving with the small waves, then start to disappear under the surface, weighed down by the stones she has gathered in her pockets. The water is stunningly, sharply, cruelly cold. Already, as the waves chop and surge around her knees, she can hardly feel her feet, and what sensation remains is painful; a bone-chilling ache she remembers from childhood. The coat sinks around her. The water rises to her thighs.