The Steep Approach to Garbadale

by Iain Banks

  A seagull - wings stretched across the breeze - banks around her, some distance off. Its white head and black bead-eyes swivel once in her direction, then the bird pulls up and flaps slowly away, heading for the shore.

  The rain has started again, dampening her hair. She wades further on, each step deeper and draggier than the last, forcing her way out towards the dark centre of the loch as though through a nightmare. The waters reach her groin, then her belly and waist, chilling her utterly, sucking the warmth from her body. Bubbles rise from her clothes. Each step she takes is a little easier now; she feels more sure-footed on the hidden surface of the bed under the brown waters as her body tries to float. She’s holding her gloved hands and the two last stones out of the water, hugging them up near her shoulders. Water trickles over her wrists and down her forearms.

  Tears fill her eyes and start to roll down her cheeks as she takes each sucking, gasping breath. The cold of the water, gradually transferring itself to her body, seems to be draining the ability to breathe from her chest muscles, putting them into spasm, forcing her to fight for every breath. She wonders if this terrible, wrenching, invasive cold will stop her heart even before she drowns.

  She is terrified. She starts to sob, the sobs made sharp and ragged by the penetrating cold of the water and her spasming chest. She had hoped that right now, in these final moments, there might be some sort of peacefulness, that she might find a state of uncaring resignation imposing itself upon her, like a foretaste of the freedom from pain she is looking to oblivion to provide. Instead she is going to her death in a state of dread and cold-flayed agony, blundering across the rocks hidden by the dark brown water beneath her, horror stricken at the thought of what she is doing to those who will survive her, filled with fear at the idea that there might after all be a stupid, vengeful, punitive God, a God ultimately no better than Man, a God who punishes further those so lost to hope they take their own lives in the first place. What if all that nonsense is true? What if the ghastly Christian mumbo-jumbo is based on truth?

  Well, let it be. She deserves any punishment, will accept it, embrace it. If this too-humanly formed God really existed, then the afterlife was as vindictive and spiteful as the world, indeed was just a continuation of it, and what she was here she would be there, and so no more deserving of any mercy or relief in that world than she was in this. She knows what she is doing is wrong. The knowing that what she is doing - what she has realised for some time she was committed to doing - will hurt others (one or two deserving, the rest not deserving at all) is itself one of the reasons that she hates herself and her life and what she has become, and so seeks this extinction.

  Anyway, it still doesn’t matter. Just the chance of not being, not thinking, not suffering, is worth it all. Deep inside, she knows it really is all nonsense, and there is no continuation whatsoever.

  Another few steps. She feels lighter still, gasping as the water surrounds her torso like an icily enveloping lover. Her heart is beating very quickly. The coat and the collection of stones keep her down, stopping her from floating. The water comes to her breasts - the obscene, cold lover squeezing like something hungry - and a wave splashes her stone-clutching hands, dribbling water down her wrists towards her elbows. The next wave splashes her face. One more step, then another, sinking deeper. The water is at her chin now. She takes a deep breath, instinctively, then thinks how stupid this is, and lets the air away again, forcing the last of it out as the water ascends to her mouth.

  A note. She should have left a note. She thought of this weeks ago, days ago, even last night, but in the end she didn’t do it. Perhaps she ought to have left one. It was traditional. Traditional. This thought makes her smile, briefly, tremulously, as the sense-destroying coldness of the water splashes up to her nose. No, there was no point leaving a note. What would she have said?

  The tears roll down her cheeks and into the slapping waves, taking their own tiny cargo of saltiness with them.

  She feels sorry for the child, for Alban.

  The gently sloping shelf of the loch bed ends here; she walks off the hidden underwater cliff with a tiny surprised cry, bitten-off, and vanishes immediately under the brown waves, her auburn hair sucked down at last like fine tendrils of seaweed, leaving only a few bubbles which float briefly and then burst and vanish.

  Her last breath, taken reflexively the instant before she cried out, held instinctively despite her desire for death, finally surrendered to the crushing pressure of the black water fathoms down, surfaces in a small silvery cluster of larger bubbles about half a minute later.

  The gull comes back through the soft veils of grey rain, wing-tipping down, feathers almost touching the surface of the waves over the place where she disappeared, then it curves away once more.

  Back on track. He should think so, too.

  Alban turns up at the London offices less than a week after Fielding had to leave him in Glasgow. They meet in Reception, Al standing dressed like a tramp in that same grubby-looking hiking jacket and toting his little stained backpack, his dirty jeans and scuffed hiking boots making him look like he’s just stepped out of the forests or a workman’s van. His beard is looking well trimmed, Fielding thinks, but still. They’re surrounded by the prizes, plaques, awards and certificates hanging on the walls, and by the framed newspaper cuttings and photographs of the famous, featuring either a game - usually Empire! - or Wopuld family members.

  When Fielding walks up to his cousin - nodding and smiling at Suze, the very fit blonde receptionist and switchboard operator - Al’s beneath a portrait of their great-grandfather Henry, standing in front of a glass case with one of Henry’s original prototype game boards displayed inside, complete with hand-carved pieces.

  ‘Cuz, good to see you,’ Fielding tells him, giving him the sincere handshake with added left-hand forearm grip. Fielding steers Al over to Suze. Fielding introduces them - you can see her re-categorising in real time, taking Al out of Shabby Hobo, Possible Thief or Nutter and putting him into Yet Another Eccentric Wopuld Family Member - then Fielding takes Al up to his office. Another portrait of old Henry looks down on them in the elevator as they exchange small talk about Al’s journey south.

  Dear old great-grandfather.

  Henry Wopuld was a clerk with a farming supplies company based in Bristol when he dreamt up Empire! in 1880-81. It was the heyday of the British Empire; the map of the world had turned or was turning pink or red or whatever hue map-makers chose to illustrate the holdings of the first Empire in history on which the sun never set, because it encompassed the globe itself. Civilisation, Christianity and trade were being taken to those inhabiting the furthest corners of the world whether they thought they wanted it or not, and in a sense all Empire! did was epitomise this, allowing the Victorian middle class - along with the more aspirational denizens of the lower orders - to fight and trade and preach and bluff their way to world domination from the comfort of their own homes. A claimed educational aspect to the game - in the fields of both geography and morality - helped it appeal to all ages and classes, and earn the praise of school boards and parish councils alike.

  The game was taken up by a small printing and toys company in London and marketed aggressively, mostly thanks to Henry. He had a partner who owned the original company, but there was some sort of unrelated investment scandal, the partner was bankrupted and Henry bought up the company for a song and never looked back. The family moved to Lydcombe on the proceeds of the fortune Henry made from the original game, but he was already working on new ideas.

  The USA, perhaps not surprisingly, proved reluctant to accept Empire!; sales were miserable. Henry tried a version of the game based on a map consisting only of the contiguous states of the US, but that did little better. Finally he bought up a small printing firm in Pittsburgh so that the box and board could each bear the legend Made in the USA, altered the map of the world on which Empire! was based so that the USA was centred - the boundaries of the board cutting through the heart
of Asia - renamed the game Liberty!, changed nothing else and watched the dollars roll in. He bought the estate of Garbadale in the far north-west of Scotland with the intention of hunting, shooting and fishing there and had the most expensive architects of the day design a grand new lodge in the finest Scotch Baronial style, to be named Garbadale Castle (later House, when tastes in such matters changed).

  There were various different editions and versions of the game, and a lot of litigation - or at least the threat of it - as other games suspiciously similar to Empire! appeared. Often the easiest way to deal with certain companies threatening the Wopuld firm’s position was simply to buy them up and close them down, incorporating whatever of worth there might be in the purchased firm into Wopuld Games Ltd, whether it was company personnel, some minor innovation in the playing of the game, or the manufacture of the product.

  Henry died in 1917, leaving a family he hoped was large enough to provide the firm with all the executive officers it might need to carry the Wopuld name onwards, though this was not sufficient to prevent a dip in sales after the Great War.

  Mornington Crescent, a game based on the map of the London underground with a complicated double-level board sold well in Britain and modestly abroad. A more purely trade-based game called High Seas! did reasonable business. Another based on stocks and shares called Speculate! was a brief, faddish hit on both sides of the Atlantic, though in the States it was marketed purely as a children’s game on the basis that all the adults were feverishly engaged in the real thing, making a game of it superfluous.

  The Depression necessitated the sale of the factory in Pittsburgh.

  The Thirties saw a partial revival of the family’s fortunes. An austerity version of the original game did well for a time during the Second World War, though there was some difficulty over the news that the Germanised version, produced in Leipzig by a now wholly German-owned company, was doing even better. Also, only for a while.

  After the war, the rejigged, relaunched, version of Empire! - Commonwealth (no exclamation mark) - remapped to reflect the changed political realities of the planet, did surprisingly poorly. Monopoly (once seen as an upstart, now regarded as the old enemy) outsold the old game for the first time. The company drifted, holding talks with other firms about merging or being taken over, though without serious effect.

  The original game staggered on through the Sixties, nearly went under in the Seventies - a very brief-lived game called Karma! based on a grotesque mishmash of misunderstood hippy gibberish and cereal-box Buddhism was an unmitigated disaster - and only started to revive in the Eighties. An electronic version of Empire! proved popular, then very popular. Then wildly popular. More PC and games-console versions followed, gradually creating a uniquely smooth spectrum of gaming potential to suit virtually all tastes, from those who aspired to the most calm, cerebral, turn-based experience - more akin to chess than anything else - to users who just wanted to wade straight into the most gore-spattered slice- or shoot-them-up, jerking round floors and couches, teeth grinding, eyes wide, face contorted, sweat beading.

  The board version became fashionable again on the back of the electronic successes and in 1999 the Spraint Corporation of America, Inc., making profound noises regarding stuff like vertical integration and OS/platform synergies, bought up a quarter of Wopuld Games Ltd for a significant amount of money and an even more significant quantity of its own forever soaring shares.

  Every share-wielding member of the extended Wopuld family suddenly became quite a bit richer.

  ‘Haydn,’ Fielding says, calling in at his brother’s office on the way to his own. ‘Look who’s here.’

  Good things happen. Sometimes they happen for no particular reason, the way the bad things so often seem to happen.

  Once, about seven years ago, less than a year before he left the family firm, and certainly when he was already thinking about doing so, Alban had what may still count as the most exquisite sexual encounter of his life. This all happened about a year after the insanity of the Singapore episode with Fielding and his drugs, about eight or nine months before he met Verushka Graef in a hotel in Shanghai, and about a year before he encountered his sepulchral Uncle Blake for the second time, living his life of abject luxury on top of his hulking neon skyscraper in the hazy steam-bath hive that is Hong Kong.

  Looking back, his world seemed very Asian, and he supposed they were out there a lot because that was where the factories were these days. It was also where the latest, greatest economic growth happened to be spurting.

  The company had come up with a luxury edition of the board game version of Empire! The board itself was constructed from semi-precious stones pivoting on titanium hinges, the cards were embossed silver, the dice stacks were formed from mahogany inlaid with mother of pearl and the pieces were carved from jade, ebony, jasper, agate, onyx and porphyry. This cost a cool ten thousand dollars US and they had expected to sell a few dozen to some sheikhs.

  Instead - well, as well as - they sold hundreds to what seemed like a whole new breed of the South-East Asian rich. For China and similar cultures, they had what they called the chipped version. It had been Alban’s idea to introduce a gambling element to the old game and they first brought that out as an even more extraspecial edition of the luxury version. They also increased the number of potential players to eight, because that was a number with especially good associations in parts of Chinese culture. That too had sold in relatively small but highly profitable and usefully influential numbers. The gambling version of the standard eight-player game subsequently shifted in gratifyingly prodigious quantities, too.

  At the time it didn’t just seem like Asia. At the time Alban remembers thinking that his life seemed to revolve around initials: HK, KL, LA, NYC . . . The whole world was becoming shorthand, becoming text, becoming txt.

  His encounter - his perfect, soul-saving, life-redeeming experience - took place in the deeply civilised, imperially stately and casually cool - if rather less far-flungly exotic - setting of Paris.

  He was there to see cousin Haydn, Fielding’s elder brother, who worked for the firm as a production wizard, ensuring the snuggest possible fit between supply and demand, and who had had, apparently, some sort of breakdown. Haydn had skipped town a week earlier, leaving the London office in Mayfair and the family home in Knightsbridge to abscond all the way to Paris - specifically, the Ritz - via Eurostar and a grand total of two taxis. Oddly, as well as displaying a singular lack of momentum in his moonlighting, he still seemed to be doing his job, running figures and production quotas off his laptop while staying in the Ritz, tying in - with a hardly reduced degree of exquisite precision - the specific extent to which profoundly need-motivated dextrous-fingered Malaysian, Indonesian and Chinese children should be worked to produce a monetarily measurable quantity of pleasure in buyers from Alaska to Kamchatka. (The long way round, obviously.)

  ‘Oh, Christ. Gran sent you, didn’t she?’

  Was the first thing Haydn said to Alban when he appeared at Haydn’s usual table in the hotel’s main restaurant, lifting over a gilt chair and sitting on it.

  ‘Yes, she did,’ Alban said. Somewhere in the near future there could well lie times when he’d have to deceive Haydn, but this was not one of them.

  He had, anyway, already decided this was an interesting but probably forlorn excursion. For some reason Winifred - Gran - was treating him as the company’s troubleshooter, sending him to do the more off-piste pieces of nonsense that she judged needed to be done for the good of the family and the firm. Oh fuck, he was her secret agent, her man on special assignment, Alban thought all of a sudden as he looked across the napkins, flowers and silverware at Haydn’s round, shining, fragile face.

  Haydn was a fat little guy who insisted on dressing in grey suits about one size too small. It was a perversion, in the sense that it did exactly the opposite of what it was supposed to do; he looked fatter than he really was, not thinner. Haydn had started going bald at about sixteen,
which was just a plain cruel thing for an adolescent to have to go through as well as all the usual stuff. He had elected ever since for the comb-over option, which was also never going to do him any favours, although - on the plus side - he had yet, at the age of twenty-seven, to suffer from spots.

  Since he had ensconced himself here, Haydn had not been answering his suite’s telephone, his mobile or his email. He also had most of his meals delivered to his suite, though he did sometimes appear for dinner alone in the main dining room. That was why Alban had had to drag over the shiny chair and plonk himself down across the table from the chap.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Haydn asked.

  ‘Well, there’s a good question,’ Alban said. ‘Why are any of us here?’ He sat back. ‘Are you always this profound over dinner?’

  ‘Stop dicking about, Alban. I just want to know what the hell you think you’re doing here.’

  Alban couldn’t remember hearing Haydn swear before. Paris really was persuading him to let what remained of his hair down. And in a dining room.

  ‘I came to see how you are,’ Alban told him.

  ‘Well, you’ve seen me. How do you think I am?’

  ‘I have no idea yet. I’ve only just found you.’

  ‘Is everything all right here, sir?’ the maître d’ asked, suddenly table-side.

  ‘Yes, no problem; thanks.’ Haydn waved the man away.

  ‘How do you think you are?’ Alban said.

  ‘Do you mean, how do I feel?’ Haydn asked, with what was probably meant to be sarcasm.

  ‘I suppose I do.’

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘So why have you decamped,’ Alban looked round the high, ornate dining room, ‘to here?’