by Iain Banks
Beryl holds Alban’s arm as they make their way to the door and the waiting cabs. They’re bringing up the rear of the party, walking slowly.
‘Did I rather put my foot in it there with all that talk about marriage?’ she asks.
‘It did feel a bit awkward, Beryl,’ Alban admits.
‘Sorry. One gets impatient at my age. Desire to see ends tied up before one pops one’s clogs, sort of thing. But why don’t you ask her?’
‘To marry me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Beryl, I don’t think I want to get married.’
‘Well, just live together. That’s what counts, not the piece of paper.’
‘I don’t know if I want that either. And even if I did, I’m pretty sure it’s not what she wants. You did hear what she said.’
‘I’ve never seen two such clever people be so stupid. But it’s your life.’ She squeezes his arm as they approach the doors. ‘However. Any luck with finding out what was going on with your mother saying what she did to me?’
Alban had got used to old people making these ninety-degree changes in conversational direction. ‘Not a lot of luck,’ he told her. ‘I talked to Andy. He says it wasn’t him.’
‘Never thought it was.’
‘Same here.’
‘He had no ideas who might have disapproved so much?’
‘None. None he was willing to share, anyway.’
‘Oh well.’
‘Well, we’re going to have the whole family in the one place for the weekend. That’ll be the time to ask questions.’
‘Jolly good,’ Beryl says, and pats his arm as they stop at the cloakroom.
Eudora is saying, ‘What a lovely evening!’
‘Well, carry on then,’ Beryl tells Alban. ‘Let me know if I can help.’
‘Sorry about that.’
‘Beryl?’
‘The whole marriage thing.’
‘Don’t apologise. You didn’t do anything.’
‘Yes, but they’re my family. I feel I have to.’
They’ve dropped Eudora at her flat in Buccleuch Street and are on their way to Verushka’s. She looks at him for a moment. He’s staring ahead.
She touches his arm. ‘Any more you want to add?’ she asks him.
‘What do you mean?’
She moves over, snuggles up to him, holding his arm with both her hands, her head on his shoulder. ‘You do know how I feel about all this, don’t you?’
‘I think so.’
‘I don’t want children. I don’t want to get married. I may never even want to settle down.’
‘That’s pretty much what I thought.’
The cab stops, jerks forward, the driver mutters a curse under his breath then they move on again.
‘I love being with you.’ She says this quite quietly. ‘I miss you. When you’re away, and the phone rings, always I hope it’s you. Every time. Just in a small way, but always.’
He leans his head over so that it touches hers. He says, ‘I suppose I’ve always treated it like there’s only so much fun you can have with somebody. If you’re with them for decades then it’s spread very thin; watery, diluted and tasteless. But if you only live for a few days every now and again, then it’s all intense and concentrated.’
She shakes her head, runs a hand through his curls. ‘Oh, my poor love,’ she says softly through a sad smile. ‘You do talk the most utter nonsense sometimes.’
He reaches up and puts his fingers round the wrist of the hand that is stroking his head. ‘Do I now?’
She nods thoughtfully. ‘Yes, you do.’ She’s thinking that the action of gripping her wrist like that - gently and lightly, certainly - and stopping her from stroking his head is as aggressive as he ever gets with her. She suddenly realises that she quite happily slaps his arm, punches his shoulder, and even kicks him - albeit softly, pulling the action - in the calf and thigh and backside, and can recall at least once balling her fists and beating him on the naked chest, play fighting . . . And he never even pretends that he is about to respond. He has never raised a hand towards her.
Probably their most violent actions have involved arm wrestling.
Well, and sex, she supposes. But, even there, it is just the conventional lunge and thrust of perfect normalcy; no slapping or clawing, no bites or even love-biting. She’s had her ears re-pierced, nipples bitten so hard she’s cried out - not in a good way - and been left with bruises, scratches and grazes from other lovers, and in every case made clear her objections . . . But with him, nothing. In bed or out, he has always been gentle, thoughtful, sweet and even - in some sense that she has to confess confuses her own notions of masculinity and femininity - accepting.
This will, she decides, need some thinking about. He lets go of her wrist. She puts her palm to his cheek, feeling the warmth of him through his neatly trimmed beard.
The cab bounces over some road repairs. ‘Anyway, I’m sorry, too,’ she tells him.
‘What about?’
‘What I said about you and Sophie. I didn’t need to. I was kind of replying in the same coin and I shouldn’t have. So, apologies.’
‘Oh.’ When he thinks about this, he remembers that, yes, he was hurt at the time, that he felt in some tiny way betrayed, even though he feels he shouldn’t have, even though it seems a rather petty thing to have felt, and even though everybody round the table, with the possible exception of Eudora, knew pretty much the whole story anyway. He pats her leg just above the knee. ‘That’s okay.’
She puts her mouth near his ear. ‘We’re okay,’ she whispers. ‘We’re still okay, aren’t we?’
He turns to look into her eyes in the half-darkness of the cab, the slow strobe of orange streetlights flickering over them like film. ‘Of co—’ he begins, then stops and smiles and kisses her lightly on the lips. ‘Yes, we’re okay,’ he says.
She whispers, ‘I just want to get you home and feel you inside me.’ She kisses his ear and he turns to her and puts his arms round her, hugging her. They kiss for a while. They break off, see the cab driver looking at them dubiously, and both draw close again, heads bowing to each other, laughing quietly.
When he’s eighteen he has a gap year. Later, he won’t remember anybody at the time actually calling it that, but that’s what it was. He knew a few people who’d taken a year off between school and university and thought it seemed like a good idea. He’s left school with very good A-levels. After a lot of thinking he’s decided that when he goes to university - St Andrews or Edinburgh, probably - he’ll do Media Studies.
When he tells Andy this, his dad lowers his paper, looks at him over the top of his reading glasses and says, ‘In my day if you didn’t know what to do at Uni you did Sociology.’
Alban is less hurt by this remark than he might have expected. Anyway, in the end he goes to Bristol and does Business Studies. Though, in his defence, as he points out to people for rather too long a time afterwards, he had the good grace to hate it.
He sees quite a lot of the world in his gap year, though - being, effectively, a Wopuld - he sees much of it filtered through the multifaceted eye of his family. It is much more difficult for a Wopuld family member, especially a young Wopuld family member, to see the world unassisted and unencumbered than it is for the average traveller. There are simply too many Wopulds, too many members of associated clanlets, too many accomplice families, too many ex-and current business partners and too many individuals still displaying - and in many cases also feeling - a soft spot for the family scattered across the face of the planet for one to be able to avoid them without causing severe offence, or conducting one’s travelling in conditions of inappropriate secrecy. When you know no one in a country, you are free, if you wish, to experience the place to the full, on its own terms. When somebody who knows the place and is well-disposed to you takes you under their wing, then you have the place discovered for you.
It could, Alban realises as his own little world tour unfolds, cut both ways. On the on
e hand, having somebody to show you around and do the talking and point out all the interesting places that the guidebooks didn’t always know about, is really handy. Such people will also usually buy you meals and drinks and put you up in their houses and apartments for quite long periods of time without showing any of the obvious signs of wishing you gone or expecting payment. On the other hand, you start to fall into the trap of seeing everywhere as essentially the same because everywhere you go there are these roughly similar, kindly-seeming, certainly helpful people, well-disposed to you for whatever reason, who will smooth your path and grease a few wheels and even palms to make your stay more pleasant on their patch.
Getting out, away from this sort of smotheringly helpful succour, might result in getting dysentery, being beaten up by local surlies, fending off the advances of large sweating men in charge of cement trucks, having your wallet skilfully razored from the bottom of whatever deeply cunning pocket you might have secreted it in while sleeping, missing trains and buses due to ruthlessly exploited Brit diffidence and you mysteriously being the only person present to have entirely assimilated the concept of queuing in an orderly - or indeed any - fashion, wishing - while on the trains and buses that are successfully boarded - that you had missed them because anything would be better than being stuck on this hellish conveyance in hundred-degree heat with iffy bowels, either no toilet at all or a blocked toilet - usually within all-too-easy sniffing distance - while the rear end of the bus or the corners of the train carriage go Right Out Over the Thousand-foot Drop and a local with severe body odour problems in the next seat tries so aggressively to sell you drugs that you’re convinced he must be an undercover cop with a grudge against young Westerners and a quota to fill and a hundred other vicissitudes the young and inexperienced traveller is liable to experience before gratefully returning home, but at least you know you’ve been abroad, at least you know what life is really like, if not for the other billions you share the planet with then at least for the hundreds of thousands of the young and relatively rich who take their lives into their hands by going out amongst them.
There are, also, the chance encounters with places and with people - ultimately, arguably, with yourself - that would never truly happen if you had somebody looking after you, and which might actually give some point to all the shit and suffering involved in travelling and make the whole process, the entire exercise, worthwhile: a gleaming temple glimpsed through mists at dawn; a perfect, deserted beach arrived at at the end of a ghastly journey; an evening round a fire with people you didn’t know yesterday and may well never see again after tonight but who, for now, you feel close enough to to want to spend the rest of your life with - a sudden, intense connection with others or with a place that you will never, ever forget.
On his travels, Alban tries to balance the amount of time he spends with Wopulds and allied traders and the intervals of what he has come to regard as proper travelling, when there is the opportunity for adventure and, frankly, uncalled-for unpleasantness that at the very least he will be glad has stopped - and to have lived through - and one day may even look back on with a degree of nostalgia and possibly something resembling gratitude.
When he reaches Hong Kong, he judges it is time for a bit of pampering again, and so takes up the invitation of his Uncle Blake - issued rather vaguely via a Christmas card the year before - to come visit.
He flies in from Darwin after a fun but hot and tiring couple of months sharing a microbus across Australia with a pair of recently qualified electrical engineers from Brisbane. Alex and Jace are great, generous, giggly, eternally optimistic guys - especially about sex, which they get exactly none of during the whole journey, though Alban comes close one evening with a waitress in Kalgoorlie - and the three of them get on really well as a hitch from Sydney to Melbourne turns into an epic journey all the way to Darwin via Alice Springs and Perth, but after nine weeks in the same tiny space and a total of about twenty showers between them, he feels they’ve undergone the male equivalent of that thing women are supposed to get when they’re cooped up together, when their periods - allegedly - synchronise. Alban would swear that Jace, Alex and he now have coordinated sweat and he subsequently shares a sort of genetically averaged smell with the two of them.
They part at Darwin Airport, all grins, with a long, grunty group hug and sincere pledges of eternal friendship. (He will never see either of them again.) He falls asleep shortly after take-off and only wakes up as the plane makes the sort of steep, even violent turn that big jets only make, as a rule, when they’re either about to crash or actually in the act of crashing. He looks out of the window at a tall building rushing past about a metre from the wingtip. It’s night and he sees a Chinese guy looking at him. The guy is wearing stripy shorts and a grey vest and leaning on the concrete balcony of this appallingly close apartment block; he flicks a lighter and ignites a cigarette. Alban will later swear he could identify the lighter as a Zippo and at the time honestly believes that a crash is exactly what is about to happen. In fact it’s just all part of the fun of landing at Kai Tak Airport, situated alarmingly close to the heart of downtown Kowloon.
His uncle has sent a driver to pick him up. Alban’s still buzzing from the interrupted deep sleep and the near-death experience and stumbles through the clamorous light of the airport and the gritty night-time haze and muggily enveloping warmth of the city into the icy AC of the leather-scented Bentley without really taking much in. He’s delivered to a hulking skyscraper by the harbour and directed - by a Chinese angel in a slit-skirted business suit - to an express lift which hurtles upwards, leaving his stomach somewhere around the mezzanine floor. He stumbles out of the gleaming cube with his backpack and is confronted with a vast, glittering room opening out on to a tree-studded rooftop garden the size of a couple of tennis courts, all of this swarming with sleek-looking people of too many racial types to keep track of, every one in suits or cocktail dresses or perfect white uniforms as appropriate and beyond which and whom lies what looks like every electrical light ever manufactured in the history of the world since Edison, shining madly in inchoate swirls, vast ropes of highways, glowing pools of intersections and stadia and mirroring off both the crystal-surfaced complexity of hundreds of tall buildings and the city-blanketing under-surface of a layer of thick, shining cloud which mirrors the colours of the enormous vertical signs on the towers, slabbed neon edges reflected on the vapour producing an overhanging stratus patched with green, blue, red, purple and gold.
A smiling Chinese gent in a starched white jacket which would grace the captain of the QE2 relieves him of his backpack and guides him via a tray of large champagne flutes to a tall, grey-haired man who is standing near the railed edge of the roof gesturing grandly out over the city before a small group of Chinese men. The grey-haired man turns round. Alban is introduced to Uncle Blake.
‘Alban. Good to see you. Do call me Blake.’ Uncle Blake is tall and formidable, with a lengthy nose that looks like it was once broken and a kind of determinedly jowly set to his long features. His skin looks tanned grey. He puts out one big, beefy hand and shakes Alban’s. Something of the humid closeness of the night seems to communicate itself through the man’s enveloping clasp. Alban says Hi. He’s introduced to the various important people Blake is with, all of whom seem to have titles or ranks and short but ineffably Chinese names, not an iota of which he remembers a heartbeat later, and has various features of the city, harbour and distant, twinkling islands pointed out to him until finally, perhaps sensing his befogment, Blake steers Alban away towards the elevators with one big dinner-plate-size palm on his back and suggests he might want to get freshened up before rejoining the party. Another gleaming Chinese servant in a jacket seemingly made of pure starch escorts him in the lift down two floors to an apartment on the swish side of lavish, a corner bedroom with glass walls on two sides and a bathroom the size of a squash court.
He has a shower and lies on the bed in a huge white towelling robe to collect his w
its and promptly falls asleep. When he wakes up the room’s lights are off and Blake is leaning round the edge of the door.
‘Sorry, Alban,’ he says, deep voice booming. ‘Just wanted to make sure you were all right.’ He gives what is probably meant to be a friendly smile that succeeds in appearing remarkably ghoulish. ‘Long flight, was it?’
‘No, just from Darwin,’ Alban says, feeling displaced once again. ‘What time is it?’
‘About midnight.’
‘Oh, God.’ He’s slept for over two hours. ‘I’m sorry. Have I missed the party?’
‘No, a lot of people are still here.’
‘Oh. Right. I’ll get dressed.’ He swings off the bed.
He only has a few days before a flight to Peru via Hawaii and a visit to his Aunt Else in Lima. The time in Hong Kong passes in a fast-forward blur of overripe high-rise fragrance, blasts of chill in offices and limousines followed by choking hazy interludes in the smothering blanket of fume-laced kettle steam that passes for the open air of Honkers, a buzzing, smog- and smoke-scented pressure suit that seems at once to percolate him and keep him at a distance from the place.
He mixes with the toffs at the races, is wheeled around the harbour and a couple of the nearby islands on Blake’s humungous, gleaming power boat - he’s given a chance to steer it when they’re clear of most of the other traffic and laughs like a loon when he gets to open the throttle and feel this whole ridiculous machine the size of a substantial house lift its sharky nose and accelerate - and spends a bewildering evening at a small party at the home of some of the hyper-rich up on the Peak, with a hazy view that includes the distant summit of Blake’s skyscraper near the harbour. The whole Peak seems to smell of jasmine and bananas. The ultra-opulent people are from Canada (him) and Japan (her) and where they live is more like a palace or a museum, walls lined with art plundered from every continent of the planet save Antarctica. Alban sips a cocktail with flecks of gold in it and feels like a child again.
When Blake drops him at the airport with a new Walkman, a shiny Swiss Army knife with a lockable blade, a fat envelope of used ten- and hundred-dollar bills for emergencies and the advice, ‘Remember, Alban; always look out for number one. Be selfish. Every other bugger is,’ he feels like he’s been spat out by the city, and boards the 747 and turns right for Tourist class with something like relief.