by Iain Banks
Alban’s escorted to a table, taking one near the group of mathematicians rather than by the window.
He chooses something called a Shanghai Surprise because it sounds vaguely familiar and for all he knows may even be a classic cocktail, then recalls as he’s waiting for it to arrive that it’s the name of yet another crap Madonna movie. It looks and tastes very orange. He’s chosen his table and seat well; he can look straight at Ms Graef without it being too obvious. He looks over at her. Very interesting face. Wide, high cheekbones, thin, strong-looking nose widening to broad nostrils. Hmm, nice nostrils.
Then he thinks, Suddenly I’m a nostril man? Where did that come from? She wears - inhabits - an expression of seemingly continual ironic surprise. He can just about make out her voice. It sounds pleasantly mellifluous; not especially Scottish.
She will look at me, he thinks. Pretty much everybody has this ability to spot via peripheral vision that a face with big, front-facing eyes is looking steadily at them, even from some distance away. The message may take a while to thunder through, but people usually catch on in due course and look back.
Finally she does look his way. He hoists his cocktail glass and smiles broadly, as though they know each other. She frowns.
A few minutes later she puts her hands on the ends of the arms of her seat and nods round the various people in the group, like she’s getting ready to get up.
She is getting up. Probably going to leave and go to her room, he thinks. Too much to hope she’ll come over to talk to him.
She walks over to him, face to one side, frown there again. Well, he thinks, whadaya know?
‘You’re the guy who fell asleep at the Game Theory paper this morning, aren’t you?’
He nods. ‘Guilty.’
‘So, should I know you?’
‘Yes,’ he says emphatically. ‘You should.’
She lowers her head and looks at him over the top of her glasses, still with half a frown on that mildly, amusedly surprised face.
He stands, holds out his hand. ‘Pleased to meet you. Alban McGill.’
They have a couple of drinks. He tries to tempt her out to a club or something but she’s tired from the night before; this drink and then she really must to bed. They get on really well, though. She’s heard of Empire! and the family firm. He’s - well, he’s done maths at school. He makes an executive decision regarding which he’ll inform Fielding in the morning and asks her out for dinner tomorrow. He only finds out much later that as he’s asking this she’s making a similar decision - actually even more inconvenient for her than his is for him - that allows her to say yes.
They eat in a floating seafood place looking upriver from near the Yanpu Bridge. Drink is taken. Things from the depths which look as though they ought not to exist on any world, let alone this one, and which most certainly do not look as though they should be allowed anywhere near a kitchen, let alone the human digestive tract, are duly served for their delectation, and consumed. More drink is taken.
They’ve talked about SETI, the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and about SETI@home, a program that will let computers - computers that are switched on but not otherwise being used - look for evidence of alien intelligence within the mass of radio signal data SETI has accumulated and which its own computers are going to take for ever to sift through unassisted. From there they get to talking about consoles and online gaming. She wonders if games machines could be used in the same way, to tackle tasks like extending the value of Pi or looking for big primes.
They’re sitting back in their little red-lacquer-and-gold-leaf alcove, him drinking brandy, her drinking whisky, watching the lights of the ships pass up and down the river to one side, and the waiters and diners on the other side.
‘What you should do,’ she tells him, ‘is try to create an AI by hooking up all the games consoles in the world. Use the connectivity. ’
‘AI@home?’
‘Good a name as any.’
‘Through 56k modems?’ he says scornfully.
‘Not now; once most people are connected by fibre optic or wireless. ’
‘Anyway, these things are maxing out their hot little chips filling the screen with gore and flying bullets; they’ve no time left for creating HAL.’
‘Get people to leave them switched on.’
‘Yeah. Best of luck.’
‘Or while they’re being used. You’d need to have them all doing something else for a while.’
‘What?’
‘I don’t know.’
He thinks. ‘You could have them downloading updates off the net or showing some screen stuff off their hard disks or a CD. Though there’s the small matter of time synching everything throughout the world.’
‘Do-able, surely.’ Her little round glasses keep sliding down her nose and she keeps popping them back up with her right index finger. He’s wondering how she’d take it if he leaned over just before she did this herself and did it for her. ‘Anyway,’ she says, ‘you wouldn’t need every single one.’
‘And you really think you could keep something like that secret?’
‘Good grief, no, you wouldn’t want to keep it secret!’ She looks horrified. ‘Why would you want to do that? No no! Tell people they’re part of a really cool experiment to create an AI. Give them an incentive; make them cooperate.’
He screws up his eyes. ‘Why are we doing this again?’
‘What?’ she says brightly, almost jumping in her seat, ‘having dinner?’
He laughs. ‘Creating this AI.’
She shrugs. ‘Hell of it.’
He laughs again.
More drink is taken.
‘Gee, dude, you sound, like, conflicted.’
‘And that is a terrible American accent.’
She sucks air through one side of her mouth. ‘I know. I keep trying but it never gets any better.’
‘May be time to give up.’
‘Nevertheless, I intend to persevere.’
‘Please reconsider.’
‘Umm,’ she stares upwards. ‘No.’
He shakes his head.
‘Sorry,’ she says. ‘We’re just stubborn.’
‘What, mathematicians?’
‘No, Graef family. So we return to the issue of family and feelings towards.’
‘Anyway, I’m not conflicted.’
‘I think you are. You love your family and you hate them at the same time.’
‘No, I just hate them. See? No conflict.’
‘You’re conflicted about not being able to admit you love them.’
He squints at her. ‘You sure you’re a mathematician?’
More drink has been taken. They’re in the taxi going back to the hotel.
‘Anyway, I’m probably not going to sleep with you.’
‘Probably? Probably?’ He’s appalled. ‘You can’t say probably! That’s not right! That’s not in the rules! You’re not allowed to say that!’ He’s on the point of appealing to the taxi driver on the matter.
‘All right, definitely. Not tonight.’
‘What? Why not? I thought we were getting on great!’
‘So did I,’ she says. ‘Therefore we must have.’
‘So, what is it? You never do on a first date?’
‘Oh, God, no. Done that . . . Poh! Many a time and oft.’
‘Oh, thanks.’
‘But these were casual encounters,’ she tells him. ‘Basically physical. Like sport, really.’ She looks pleased with this comparison. ‘Whereas we’re getting on so well, this is maybe too important to risk just jumping into bed at the first opportunity.’
‘We’ve got on too well so you’re saying no?’ He’s genuinely aghast. ‘That’s girl logic! You’re a mathematician; you should be immune to that!’
‘Ha,’ she laughs. ‘Proof against it. Hee hee.’
‘Look,’ he says, deciding to change tack, ‘just supposing we do.’
‘Supposing?’
‘Will you still re
spect me in the morning?’
- Not what he meant to say at the start of this but he’s always wanted to say that line.
She frowns theatrically. ‘“Still”?’
Back at the hotel, they have the lift to themselves. He leans against one mirrored wall, hands in trouser pockets, back slightly bent. She leans against the opposite wall of mirror, one leg up behind her, arms crossed. She’s smiling at him. He’s shaking his head at her.
It’s her floor first. There’s a delicate ching and the doors separate. She steps up to him, pecks him on the cheek, then swivels to the doors, looks back. ‘So, Mr McGill, coming?’
‘What?’ he says, leaning further forward. Thoroughly confused now.
The doors start to close but she blocks them with one sensibly shod foot and a straight-armed hand.
‘Well?’ she says, nodding her head to the side to indicate the corridor.
He pushes away from the mirrored wall. ‘Did I pass a test or something?’
She’s out the door, walking down the corridor, hips swinging. ‘No, just changed my mind.’
He has to jump out through the closing doors.
‘You don’t say.’
‘A girl can change her mind, can’t she?’
He doesn’t know what to say. He shakes his head and starts loosening his tie. She’s started whistling.
He began to write poems, and long letters to Sophie which he kept, dated and sealed, just ready to have an address added to the envelopes, so that he could post them to her when he discovered where she lived. He sent one short letter to her at Lydcombe, marked Private and Personal and Please Forward and printed out rather than handwritten so that it wouldn’t obviously be from him, asking her very formally to get in touch with him and wishing her well, even though he knew the letter was almost certain to be intercepted by James and Clara.
The poems were packed with dark images of loss and betrayal and long lyrical passages full of references to plants and growth and beauty. The letters were a kind of diary, telling her how he spent his days and weeks (partly to assure her that he wasn’t trying to get off with any other girls), and partly memories of their time together at Lydcombe, as well as intense avowals of love and declarations of his determination to see her again and give their love another chance.
There hadn’t been much more fallout. He’d overheard talk about sending him to the school counsellor but that died a death. Andy had no more man-to-man talks with him. Leah was, if anything, even more loving and sympathetic towards him than before. That could be embarrassing when they went out. He usually tried to walk a few steps behind her if they had to go into Richmond together.
He tried talking to his cousin Haydn when Andy and Leah had Kennard and Renée round for a dinner party. They sat playing computer games in Alban’s bedroom. Haydn was hopeless. He wasn’t allowed to play computer games at home and had promised not to play them if he went to friends’ houses. Alban wasn’t sure which was more mad; making this promise or actually sticking to it. Also, Haydn’s younger brother Fielding was there too and was a complete nuisance. He and Haydn were obviously expected to keep the brat amused even though he was so much younger than they were. Ten; just a kid. Really.
Happily, Alban was able to dig out an old Rubik’s cube from the back of a toy drawer and get the boy fascinated by that - Fielding had never seen one before - so Alban and Haydn were able to play in peace. Haydn had no idea what he was doing, but he loved playing. There was a desperate enthusiasm to his game-play, as though he was trying to pack in a year’s worth of competition into one evening.
‘How come you’re playing here when you won’t play with your friends?’ Alban asked Haydn as the younger boy handed him the warm handset.
‘I promised I wouldn’t play with friends, not relations,’ Haydn explained, blinking behind his glasses.
‘Hmm,’ Alban said, seeing an opening. ‘Talking about relations, do you ever see Uncle James and Aunt Clara at all these days?’
‘Not since last year. They’re down in Somerset, aren’t they?’ Haydn was watching Alban’s hands as they fiddled absently with the controls, his turn waiting.
‘Yeah. What about cousin Sophie?’
‘What about her?’ Haydn frowned, still looking at the controls, unused in Alban’s hands.
‘Where is she these days?’
‘I don’t know. Are you going to take your turn? I could take yours if you like.’
‘Done it!’ Fielding shouted, and came bouncing off the bed to shove between them, flourishing a cube with one completed side, all red.
Alban sighed.
He tried phoning and writing to other cousins, but nobody seemed to know anything. He kept on writing his poems and his letters to Sophie. He copied out some of the better and more romantic and tragic poems and included them with some of the letters.
He wondered aloud over a Sunday brunch about whether they might go back to Lydcombe for Christmas, but was reminded that they were all going skiing in Austria. Maybe next Easter? They were staying at home, or going to Garbadale. The summer, then? he suggested.
‘Bor-ing!’ Cory sang, turning over her empty eggshell to do the trick where you pretended it was an uneaten one and you didn’t want it - would you like it, Mummy?
Andy closed his Observer and looked at Alban over the newspaper. ‘Alban, I’m afraid we can forget about going back to Lydcombe for the foreseeable future. Certainly for as long as James and Clara are there.’ He looked like he was going to say more, but then just exchanged a look with Leah and opened his newspaper up again.
‘I think Austria’s going to be wonderful!’ Leah said.
Austria. That was nowhere near where Sophie had gone skiing before - and so might go skiing again - in the French Alps.
Alban started thinking again about making his own way back to north Somerset and trying to find some of Sophie’s friends.
The next big family bash was the marriage of cousin Steve - the son of Aunt Linda and Uncle Percy - to his girlfriend Tessa, in York, the following February. He knew they’d been invited and had RSVP’d. He made sure to ask about where they were staying, just to check that everything was still proceeding smoothly. They were staying at a hotel; now he was sixteen, Alban was even getting his own single room.
She would have to be there, wouldn’t she? It was a wedding. They were important, symbolic. There hadn’t been a big family celebration and get-together for a couple of years; everybody had to be there. She’d be there. She’d probably insist.
He didn’t ask beforehand whether Sophie would be at the wedding - that would look suspicious, desperate. He kept thinking of her, though; remembering her smile, her laugh, her voice, the smell of her hair and the feel of his hands on her body, hers on his, the memory of being inside her.
Her words, the sayings - all now incorporated into poems - were with him still. ‘They’ve all bleedin’ gone!’ ‘Fell off me ’oss, didn’ I, guv?’ ‘Blimey, Andy, I didn’t enjoy it that much.’ He has made a private ritual of whispering, ‘Cuz, cuz, sweet cuz,’ to himself each night before he goes to sleep, like a little prayer.
‘You must think me terribly rude.’
‘Must I? Very well.’
‘No, really, Win; I’m sorry about—’
‘Think nothing of it, dear. I’m sure I don’t.’
Oh, shit, he must be standing beside Grandma Win. The voices are coming from behind him, and sound close.
‘Well, so long as we—’
‘Of course, of course. Now . . .’
‘Fine, then. I’ll see you in a bit.’
‘Not if I see you first,’ he hears Grandma Win say quietly. He hadn’t recognised the other voice.
They’re in the big hotel near York, for the buffet reception, to be followed by a wedding dinner in the evening. He’d got fed up being collared by old lady relations telling him how much he’d grown (he had to wipe his cheek after Great-Aunt Beryl kissed him) and so he’d wandered over to the windows, carrying
a glass of lemonade because Andy says he’s still not allowed even a glass of wine until the evening. There were some chairs and he’d thought he might sit down, but then he’d have looked lost and lonely and like a wallflower, so instead he went to look at the view over the grounds which is why he’s looking out over the damp grass and the leafless trees towards the distant grey river, standing within the high alcove of the floor-length windows, some very tall green velvet curtains at his back. He wasn’t trying to hide, he was just leaning against the inset’s white-painted wood panels, but the curtains must be sort of hiding him and now he’s trapped.
He turns as carefully as he can, realising that, shit, yes, he’s almost completely hidden by the curtains. A chair scrapes on the parquet flooring and the curtains nudge out towards him at chair-back height. Oh, fuck, she’s sat down.
He could be trapped here for hours.
On the other hand, he might hear some useful stuff. Maybe he’ll even hear Grandma Win tell somebody where Sophie is - you never know.
It had been a disappointing wedding so far. Sophie isn’t here. James and Clara are. He’s seen them both; Uncle James spotted him while they were filing into the church but ignored him, just looked right through him. Aunt Clara saw him as he came into the ballroom for the reception a little ahead of Andy and Leah and Cory. She scowled at him before quickly turning away. He’s been wondering whether there is any point in going up to either of them, just to say hello, maybe even to apologise for any misunderstanding, but he doesn’t really want to have to and is almost relieved that they seem so forbidding. Probably no point.
Now he was trapped here, and if he moved or sneezed or this fucking chair was pushed much further back, he’d be discovered, and of course Grandma Win would assume he was deliberately spying on her. Oh, bugger. This is his dad’s fault; Andy stopped him from taking his new Walkman to church or to this reception. If he’d had the damn thing he could have pretended that he’d been standing here listening to it and so been completely, innocently unaware of what was going on behind him.