The Steep Approach to Garbadale

by Iain Banks

  Haydn fiddled with his napkin. ‘I needed a break.’

  ‘Gran used the word “breakdown”. So did your dad.’

  ‘They would.’

  ‘Well, if it’s any comfort, it doesn’t look like a breakdown to me.’

  ‘Thanks a lot.’

  ‘Moving a couple of hundred kilometres to a luxury suite in a five-star hotel in Paris and keeping doing your day job at the same time doesn’t exactly smack of a tortured soul’s descent into bedlam.’ Alban paused. ‘Unless you think you’re Napoleon or something.’

  ‘Actually I’m not doing my day job properly,’ Haydn said, ignoring this and nodding to the waiter as his consommé was set before him. The slim young waiter turned and walked away. Haydn watched him for a couple of seconds. Haydn was widely assumed within the family to be gay but in denial about it. Haydn looked at Alban. ‘I’m only half doing it.’ He looked after the waiter again. ‘Actually, about a third doing it, or an even smaller fraction. Usually I spend three hours in the morning and three hours in the afternoon working. An hour or two extra on a busy day. Here, I’m doing two one-hour stints.’

  Alban thought about this. ‘Is that it?’

  Haydn frowned, dipped his spoon into his soup and let the watery brown liquid dribble away back into the bowl again. ‘I’m missing nuances. Going more broad brush,’ he said. ‘Also, I’m not looking very far ahead. Over time there’ll be cumulative errors. They’ll build up.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s ticking over. More of a game.’ He looked darkly at Alban. ‘But don’t be deceived; I am not still doing my job properly. I’ve run away and I’m just playing. You can call that a breakdown if you like.’

  He carefully rearranged his napkin, holding it up to alter it from a triangle to a perfect rectangle, lining the edges up to within a millimetre, then replacing it on his lap.

  ‘Well, okay,’ Alban said, watching this. ‘But it’s a very civilised form of breakdown.’

  Haydn busied himself with his soup. After half a dozen spoonfuls he paused to dab at his lips with the napkin. He returned the napkin to his lap, still spotless.

  Man, you seriously need to get laid, Alban thought.

  ‘So, what’s the problem?’ he asked.

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘Cuz, I’m here.’

  Haydn took a deep breath, studying the blank white tablecloth. He grimaced, looked up. ‘I’ll tell you later. I need to formulate exactly how to express it linguistically.’ He nodded at the table in front of Alban. ‘Have you eaten? Will you join me? I don’t care to drink alone, but we could have a bottle of something.’

  ‘What a good idea.’

  ‘You see, that’s the mistake people make. It’s not supply and demand; it’s demand and supply.’

  ‘Is that a big difference?’

  ‘It’s fundamental! It’s a whole new way of thinking, of working, of ordering, and of ordering.’

  They were sitting in the living room of the suite at the Ritz which Haydn was currently charging to the family firm. The suite was quite big. Alban wondered if the main cause for familial concern here was the room rate impacting on the firm’s liquidity.

  Alban nodded. ‘Right,’ he said. He felt he sort of half-got the distinction between ordering and ordering. He hoped he did. Either that or cousin Haydn genuinely was cracking up. In which case maybe he should hope he didn’t get the distinction.

  Maybe he shouldn’t have come to Paris.

  They were sharing a bottle of champagne. Alban was trying hard to convince Haydn to come out on the town. He hadn’t wanted to come to the suite but Haydn had insisted, finally admitting it was because he didn’t like using public toilets, even if they were the public toilets of five-star hotels. So they’d come up to the suite. But they needed to go out, dammit. They were in Paris, for Christ’s sake. It was even spring. In the week he’d been here, Haydn had confessed, he hadn’t actually been out at night yet. This was so wrong-headed that Alban actually felt slightly angry. It was like going to the Grand Canyon but keeping your eyes shut, or declaring yourself a fan of Jimi Hendrix, but only for his singing.

  Alban wondered if he’d basically been sent here to pimp. He certainly wasn’t the only person in the family who thought that what Haydn needed more than anything else was a healthy dose of rumpy-pumpy, whichever gender might be involved. Or maybe Gran thought Haydn fancied him; maybe she’d sent Alban to Haydn, one cousin to another (very fucking funny), as a present, as a prize to tempt him back to the bosom of his family and responsibilities. He certainly wouldn’t put something like that past the old she-goat.

  ‘This isn’t the reason you’re here, is it?’ Alban asked, genuinely confused. ‘This so-called breakdown doesn’t resolve into a question about fucking semantics or something, does it?’

  ‘No, no,’ Haydn said, staring into his champagne. He was sitting, legs up, on an ornate chaise longue. Alban had opted for a single-occupancy chair.

  ‘What, then?’

  Alban was painfully aware he was probably the wrong sort of person to send on a mission like this. He’d never thought of himself as having a great aptitude for getting people to talk, or indeed as having any sort of gift for amateur counselling. He was pretty sure nobody else had thought of him in that way, either. Agreed, he’d provided a shoulder to cry on for a few people of both sexes over the years, some close, some not but just - he guessed - desperate, and had had a few people treat him like some sort of cross between a priest and a psychiatrist, but his only skills in this field, he was sure, consisted of knowing when to shut up, make sympathetic noises, ask the very occasional question and resist the sometimes quite powerful urge to shake the person concerned and tell them loudly just to pull themselves together.

  Haydn looked uncomfortable, fidgeting on the chaise, mouth compressed into a tight line. ‘Excuse me,’ he said, getting up. ‘I need to visit the loo.’ He disappeared.

  Alban drained his champagne, studied the empty glass for a moment, then got up, went to the phone on the desk and ordered a taxi.

  He heard the sound of a toilet flushing. ‘You fucking shall go to the ball, Cinders,’ he muttered to himself as he returned to his seat.

  He’d had to negotiate. He’d wanted to go straight to a club but Haydn had shown every sign of plunging headlong into outright hysteria at the very idea, so they’d compromised with a coffee and a glass of brandy sitting outside one of the cafés at the west end of the Rue-St-André-des-Arts. This was where five streets converged and the full mad circus show of Parisian road skills is displayed day and night in all its heart-stopping glory.

  Alban had had the taxi drop them at the St-Michel end so they could walk the length of the street. This was one of Alban’s favourite places in Paris, in the whole world, and if Haydn didn’t at least start to fall in love with the city after this then the fucker had no soul and Alban would personally take him firmly by the collar and belt, march him up the Mazarine and drop the sorry witless wazzock off the Pont des Arts to let him swim home to the fucking Ritz.

  ‘Cheers.’

  ‘Santé.’

  ‘So, what then? What is the problem?’

  ‘You really want to know?’

  ‘Haydn, we’ve kind of been through this. Stop it.’

  ‘Well, okay. It’s . . . it’s the impossibility of ever getting an order just right.’ He grinned quickly at Alban and drank deeply from his brandy.

  ‘What?’

  Haydn coughed and then said, ‘I am perfectly serious. Every time I place an order, I feel I’m failing. You either order too much of - well, anything - and stock ends up sitting on shelves or pallets in warehouses - costing money, obviously - or you don’t order sufficient and have to reorder, which is inefficient, and also costs extra. Two production runs cost more than one run of the same combined total. Don’t you see?’ Haydn seemed like he really needed Alban to understand. And also slightly pitiful.

  Alban looked at his cousin. Haydn’s nervous, tense, slightly flus
hed face was illuminated by the lights of the café at their back and those of the surrounding restaurants, bars and shops, the nearby streetlights, the red glow of a recently ignited gas heater and the headlights of the closest eccentrically parked hatchback.

  ‘For this you run away from your family, you cause your poor mother no end of worry and run up a hotel bill that would feed a—’

  ‘You’re sounding like you’re pretending to be Jewish.’

  ‘That was deliberate, Haydn. My final word was going to be “Oy”. Thanks for spoiling it.’

  Haydn looked alarmed. ‘You’re not anti-Semitic, are you?’

  ‘No I’m not,’ Alban said indignantly. ‘I’m positively pro-Semitic. And anyway, the fucking Palestinians are a Semitic people. Now—’

  ‘You’re anti-Palestinian?’ Haydn yelped.

  ‘Oh, dear God,’ Alban moaned, putting his face in his hands. ‘No!’ he said loudly. ‘Do you want to see my subscription details for Medical Aid for Palestine, or what?’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Will you shut up and let us get back to the point?’

  ‘All right, all right. I’m sorry. Don’t shout at me.’

  Alban took a deep breath. ‘You skedaddled because you, because you . . . You never get orders for bits of games right, not precisely right, not to, to the individual unit? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘Broadly, yes,’ Haydn said, looking relieved to have negotiated the minefield of Middle Eastern sympathies and to be back on the relatively safer ground of his own neuroses.

  Alban placed one hand flat on the little metal table and looked away, shaking his head. ‘Oy,’ he said softly. He looked at Haydn. He shrugged resignedly. ‘It’s just the right word, dude.’

  Haydn continued to prove resistant to the idea of going to a proper club with people and music and dancing and such. Alban knew of at least two which were about fifty-fifty straight/gay - to allow Haydn the choice without seeming to impose it upon him - but the guy just wasn’t playing ball at all. Instead they walked a meandering path along the route of the St-Germain, sometimes on the boulevard itself, sometimes on smaller streets leading off it, parallel with it and leading back to it again. They walked slowly; Haydn’s bulk and short legs meant he was a natural waddler, and he seemed to get out of breath climbing a kerb.

  ‘I don’t care to go to these places,’ Haydn tried to explain. ‘They’re too loud, too crowded.’

  ‘That’d be all the people in them, causing that.’

  ‘Also, they’re too smoky.’

  ‘Some of them can be,’ Alban conceded. ‘Others have these things called air conditioning or just extractor fans.’

  ‘Everybody smokes,’ Haydn said, glancing at two young men as they passed on the pavement, both talking loudly and gesturing with glowing Gitanes.

  ‘Haydn, this is Paris. It’s practically compulsory.’

  ‘I just don’t like being in large groups of people I don’t know. It’s just not me.’

  ‘Oh, jeez, Haydn, you just need to meet people. Young attractive people who might want to meet you.’

  ‘I’m not attractive,’ Haydn said. ‘And please don’t try to pretend otherwise. I refuse to indulge in that sort of self-deceit.’

  ‘You’re young. That’s halfway there.’

  ‘Huh, yeah. Plus I look older than I am.’

  ‘Some people like a wise head on young shoulders,’ Alban said, then laughed. ‘Or better still, between their legs.’

  ‘Oh, please.’

  ‘Haydn; people far less interesting, who are actively ugly in a serious claw-your-own-eyes-out-now kind of way, rather than just not six-packed buff-gods, get laid every day, sometimes by very good-looking women indeed. And men, for that matter. I’m totally serious. It’s just a question of giving yourself the chance, of not being so terrified of rejection you don’t ask in the first place, and of having just the tiny, teeny-weeniest little bit of self-confidence.’ Alban held up one index finger and thumb, tips barely separated, to help his cousin visualise the exact degree of teeny-weenyness they were talking about here.

  ‘Alban,’ Haydn said. ‘I don’t like being with lots of other people, especially strangers. Don’t you understand?’

  Alban shook his head, then blew out a breath. ‘No. Well, yes. If you don’t, you don’t. I’m sure we could find, you know, a less crowded environment. Someplace quiet, where there might be—’

  ‘Alban,’ Haydn said, stopping on the pavement. Alban turned to face him. They were outside a garden in front of a small church, a little patch of darkness in the commercial glitz of St-Germain. Haydn crossed his arms. ‘Do you know what?’

  Alban nodded emphatically and said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘Eh?’ Haydn looked confused. ‘What?’

  Alban waved one hand regally. ‘Sorry. Just fuckin’ with you. What?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what,’ Haydn said. ‘I know what you’re saying, I know what you’re - what you’re angling at. What you - where you want to get me, or at least the sort of place you want to get me, and why. I know what you think and what the family thinks and what people say behind my back. I am not fucking stupid. And do you know the truth?’

  Alban said nothing. Cousin Haydn actually sounded angry. Alban was determined to treat this as a positive development unless and until it ended with him getting biffed on the nose.

  Haydn’s eyes opened wide. He leaned fractionally towards Alban. Alban leaned back a slightly smaller fraction, still alive to the nascent nose-biffing possibilities inherent in the current situation. Haydn said, ‘I don’t particularly like sex.’ Having said it, Haydn drew himself upright and raised his chins defiantly.

  Alban felt the need to cross his own arms. He kind of wanted to lean back - way back - as well, but thought that would look too much like he was taking the mick, so he contented himself with biting the corner of his mouth and leaning to one side, as though there was a young, thin tree directly in between them and he was trying to look round it.

  ‘Really?’ he asked, frowning mightily.

  ‘It’s like it’s a crime or something,’ Haydn said, and Alban had the impression his cousin was about to start crying. ‘People treat you as though you’re mad, or it’s a disease they might catch, or as if it’s some sort of criticism of them, of everybody else . . . Some even assume it’s just a line, some sort of ridiculous, pathetic tactic to get them to sleep with you. The truth is I’ve had sex. I’ve tried it. Tried it several times, in fact, and I just don’t see the attraction. It’s messy, it’s undignified, it’s hot and sweaty and, and - animalistic.’ Haydn was looking down at the pavement by now, as though he was telling the sidewalk what he thought of it. From the corner of either eye, Alban could see other pedestrians giving them a pretty wide clearance zone. Haydn was still speaking: ‘It hardly lasts any time, you make a complete fool of yourself in front of another person and then you have to make embarrassing small talk for ever afterwards and the whole fucking world is just completely bloody obsessed with it - it’s ridiculous, it’s preposterous, it’s demeaning, it’s just so . . . ridiculous !’ He looked up at Alban, appearing quite angry, breathing hard, arms still crossed over his heaving chest. He reached up quickly and smoothed some of his comb-over back into place and then crossed his arms defensively again.

  ‘Hmm,’ Alban said thoughtfully. This was worse than he’d thought. He cleared his throat. ‘You have been doing it with the right, ahm . . .’ he scratched behind one ear.

  ‘Sex?’ Haydn said, almost spitting. ‘Gender? Type of person?’

  ‘Well,’ Alban said, actually feeling slightly embarrassed. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Yes,’ Haydn said. ‘I find women quite attractive in a theoretical sort of way. They’re smaller, more efficient, better packaged. I just don’t have any overwhelming desire to penetrate them with any part of my own body.’

  Alban wasn’t sure this was at all the right thing to say, but he was drunk and he knew he was going to say it anyway, so he di
d. ‘You absolutely sure? Haydn, I’ve seen you looking at waiters and guys in the street. Especially good-looking guys—’

  ‘I look at men like that because I wish that I was them,’ Haydn said, suddenly bitter. ‘I look at them with longing because I long to be like them. Good-looking and assured and attractive to women.’ He shrugged. ‘Or men. Just to somebody.’ He shook his head, looking frustrated at his own inability to explain himself fully. ‘Though, and please believe me in this, most of the time - almost all the time, honestly - I just don’t care. I don’t miss it, I don’t feel deprived or sad about it. In fact, in myself I’m perfectly fine; it’s the reactions and the prejudices and the, the stupidities of other people that distress me.’ He blew out a breath after these words, like punctuation. Specifically, a very full full stop.

  Alban thought about all this. He looked up at the under-lit clouds above the city. Traffic roared behind him. He looked back at Haydn. ‘Fucking hell,’ he said.

  ‘If it’s any, oh, I don’t know; not consolation,’ Haydn said, glancing away for a moment. He started again. ‘If it makes you feel better, I have sort of tried with a man. It really is absolutely not any of your bloody business at all, and it had better not go any further, but I have tried it. I tried it as far as kissing, anyway, and - you know - touching; fondling, you might say.’ Haydn closed his eyes at the memory. ‘That was the single most embarrassing incident in my life,’ he said with a shudder. He looked at Alban. ‘And you?’ he asked.

  A bit aggressively, Alban thought.

  ‘Me what?’ he asked, confused.

  ‘Are you sure you’re doing it with the right gender?’

  Alban frowned.

  ‘You have something of a reputation as a ladies’ man in the family, don’t you, cuz?’ Haydn said. ‘But how do you know? How can you be sure unless you’ve tried? Have you tried?’

  ‘Well, bit like you,’ Alban admitted, scratching behind one ear again. ‘Youthful fumblings.’ He laughed. ‘Fucking hell, Haydn; I went further than you! I was actually wanked off and I’ve had another guy’s cock in my mouth.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Never came.’ He sounded wistful. ‘Always put that down to drink and lack of technique. Anyway.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Tried. Just not me. Like you say.’