by Iain Banks
He sleeps through Hawaii.
He spends a month in Lima with Aunt Else, Andy’s long-absconded sister and the only non-Wopuld relation he visits during his whole gap-year world trip. She runs a pool bar of deranged seediness on the least fashionable edge of the city.
It is an education.
He takes the train to Machu Picchu, hitches down then back up the coast, in trucks mostly, watching waves spin in hypnotically along the hundreds of miles of unrolled golden beach, then heads north - suddenly realising he’s starting to run out of time, that there’s only a month to go before he’s due home - finally ending up in Los Angeles where, almost by chance, while looking in on cousin Fabiole, who harbours pretensions of becoming a film director, he bumps into Sophie.
Alban has forgotten about his cousin fairly successfully, especially over the last nine months that he’s been travelling. Sophie fills fewer and fewer of his thoughts since he discovered she’d been back from Spain for most of the summer after the one they spent together, but had not even tried to get in touch with him.
They meet in the middle of the desert. Cousin Fabiole is doing some location scouting and has heard about all these hundreds of aircraft sitting in the sunshine on a playa out on the Mojave, left to - well, not rot, because out there it’s very dry and that’s kind of the whole point; they won’t deteriorate even though they’re outside - and he thinks it sounds like a great location and so wants to go have a look and maybe get some inspiration. They pile into his car and head for the desert.
Cousin Fabiole is small, wiry, red-haired and voluble. He’s at film school, lives in a small condo in Topanga and spends a lot of time looking at things through a rectangle he makes with both sets of index fingers and thumbs. He wants to make inspirational movies like Rocky and has already acquired a convincing southern Californian accent.
‘Rocky? But it’s a classic.’ Uncharacteristically, he does not on this occasion use the word dude.
‘I thought it was awful,’ Alban admits, then licks some gummed paper carefully. He has been given the job of building joints on the journey. This is one of the many new skills he has developed over the last year or so, adapting his technique to the grass that Americans favour or the tobacco-and-resin approach he’s encountered elsewhere, as required. The main challenge here is making sure the grass doesn’t blow away. Fab’s car is an old Ford sedan with fading red paint and broken air conditioning so they have to travel with the windows down. Fab likes to drive pretty much as fast as the car will go when he’s confident there are no cops around, so this is not a trivial matter.
‘Orr-fool,’ Fabiole mimics, shaking his head. ‘Well, whatever floats your muesli, I guess.’
They arrive at the aircraft park, a flat, dusty, windy place in the middle of bright nowhere. There’s some difficulty with the security guys at the gate until a phone call is made to the people on the coast that Fab knows who have set this all up, then they’re through, though rather than head straight for the rows of parked aircraft they go to the pale, seemingly never-ending expanse of the only runway and an untidy scatter of small hangars near one end.
‘Meeting a photographer I know,’ Fab explains. ‘He’s flying in from San Francisco.’ He hands the joint back to Alban, who takes a shallow breath of the smoke. ‘Friend of,’ Fabiole says, then gulps back the smoke, ‘cousin Sophe’s.’
Just the mention of her name is enough to make Alban’s heart leap. He coughs smoke like he’s been punched in the gut. The last he heard of Sophie she was in New York at some art college, staying with some relative of her mother’s. New York City was going to be his last port of call on his world tour and he had been hoping to try and see her. ‘Oh,’ is all he can find to say.
He immediately fantasises that she is on the light plane they’re waiting for, but can’t think why she should be.
A little Cessna appears out of the blue, comes in one wing down on a partial crosswind and lands on about ten per cent of the vast runway, trundling up to the hangars where Alban and Fab are standing leaning against the hood of the car. There are two people in the plane, and - after a long-seeming delay once the prop has stopped turning - the two people get out and one of them is female, but Alban’s heart - having leapt again - sinks when he sees the girl is a willowy blonde, nothing like Sophie after all.
‘Yo, Fab!’ the man says. He’s a tall guy, maybe mid-twenties, with untidy dark hair, a bulky camera bag and Ray-Bans.
‘Dan-ee-yell!’ Fab hollers. They run up to each other and high-five.
The blonde - trainers, cut-off jeans and a Cure T-shirt - stops a few steps short when she sees Alban. She’s wearing dark glasses too, and pushes them up into her hair to look at him. ‘Alban?’ she says.
Jesus, it is Sophie.
Dan and Sophie are seeing each other - he’s partly based in NYC - and this is how Fab knows him in the first place.
They drive around in the beaten-up Ford, looking at the hulks and husks of the planes, some intact, most with their engines removed. Dan photographs assiduously. Then they take to the skies in the Cessna, Fab using Dan’s camera to take more photos. Both in the car and the plane, Alban and Sophie are in the back seats. Dan turns out to be a great guy; full of stories and wisecracks. Sophie laughs a lot at what he says. She and Alban are awkward with each other, not entirely knowing what to say. In the plane they’re kind of pressed up against each other. He can smell her perfume, and thinks he can smell the her beyond the artificial odour, the unique scent that is the girl, her skin; a memory of Lydcombe, three summers ago.
The plane banks, one wing pointed almost straight down at the ground, engine revving up as they circle like a wheeling tin vulture over the carcasses of the abandoned aircraft.
Back on the ground, Dan shouts, ‘You ever been to San Fran, Al?’ as Fab packs up the camera gear while Dan, up a short stepladder, refuels the plane.
‘No,’ Alban admits, ‘I was thinking I might take a look but I don’t know if I’ve the time now.’
‘Well, Alban, shit, you don’t have to trust your Brit ass to this maniac on the road back to La-la land; come see a real city.’
‘Fuck you, dude!’ Fabiole shouts good-naturedly.
‘What, now?’ Alban asks. He glances at Sophie but her expression is unreadable behind the dark glasses. Staring at her in the hammering sunlight, he still can’t believe how blonde and slim she’s become. She’s grown at least three centimetres, too.
‘Sure, now,’ Dan says, dribbling a last few drops into the plane’s starboard tank then securing the fuel cap. ‘Come spend a couple of days at mine. You’re about my size; you can borrow stuff of mine or just buy shit. We’ll throw you on a bus back to LA on Sunday or Monday. I might even fly you back myself if I’m not busy.’
‘Fab?’ Alban asks. ‘You mind?’
‘No,’ Fabiole says, grinning. ‘You go, dude.’
He goes, sitting in the back of the little aircraft and watching the dry duns and khakis and fawns and browns and strips and stripes and circles and squares and rectangles of serene Californian greenery pass by beneath.
They land at Hayward before dusk, pick up Dan’s convertible Saab, take the bridge across the Bay then swing north to the city.
They stop at Dan’s apartment looking over Lafayette Park and eat at a Vietnamese restaurant just off Columbus Avenue. Back at Dan’s - modest but tasteful apart from rather a lot of chrome - he’s just opening a bottle of Napa Merlot when the phone rings and he asks Sophie to turn the TV on. Dan keeps the receiver under his chin, wandering through from the kitchen on one of those long phone leads that only seem to exist in the States, holding the bottle and three glasses. He sets these down on the coffee table in the lounge and clicks through to a news channel and a helicopter shot of a yellow school bus being driven fast along a brightly lit freeway, police cars pursuing. ‘Got it,’ he says. ‘What? The thirty-five? Daly, okay. On my way. Yeah ’bye.’ He retreats to the kitchen, hangs the phone up and comes back with arms sprea
d. ‘Duty calls. You kids’ll just have to amuse yourselves. Sorry.’
He’s gone a minute later, dashing from the flat pulling a jacket on and clutching two cameras.
Alban and Sophie look at the bottle of wine.
‘Or we could just go to the pub,’ Alban says. ‘I mean a bar.’
Sophie shakes her head. ‘We’re three years too young, cuz.’
Alban has a good laugh about this and sits down. ‘Oh, yeah.’ He digs in one shirt pocket, producing a joint. ‘Also, I have some of Fab’s finest home-grown.’ He looks at the number, then into his shirt pocket, then shrugs. ‘Oh well, I’m sure he’s got more.’
Sophie sits down across from him. She smiles and pours the wine. ‘Well, party time.’
They keep the TV on the same news channel with the sound off - the school bus chase continues, now bannered as School Bus Chase - and listen to albums, drinking wine and smoking. The bus chase ends with the vehicle - Alban has been in the States just long enough to start thinking of it as a vee-hickle - crashed but upright and poised on a fulcrum of concrete barriers in the middle of a highway somewhere, surrounded by police cars and flashing lights. Shots from the bus look like sparks, and police are seen diving for cover behind cars.
‘This is great,’ Alban says, nodding at the TV and passing Sophie the current joint.
‘Welcome to America.’
‘How long you been here?’ he asks.
So far they haven’t said anything about what happened at Lydcombe three years ago.
‘In the States? Just since last fall, last autumn.’
‘Before that?’
‘Madrid. Lydcombe now and again; flying visits mostly. How about you?’
She looks so different and so the same. Her mouth is still the mouth he used to kiss, but her teeth look whiter as well as more regular, and her face is framed in different hair, and carried on a far thinner body. He guesses the way she looked before was due to puppy fat, but he’d liked her like that. He feels like he’s found her again but she’s still lost to him; another person, another life, another lover. Her accent has changed, become mid-Atlantic, but the tone, the timbre are the same. ‘Me? Oh, just, you know, at home,’ he says, taking the joint back. ‘Richmond, then I’ve been travelling the last, well, nearly year.’
‘You look good,’ she tells him. ‘You’ve filled out. Tan suits you.’
He grins. ‘I bet you say that to all the boys.’
‘Yeah,’ she tells him, reaching for the joint again. ‘I do. Cheers.’
He laughs some smoke out, lifts his own glass. He’s sitting on the floor with his legs under the glass-and-chrome coffee table. She’s sitting on the couch behind him so it’s easier to pass the numbers to and fro while watching the TV.
This is so different from what he imagined. He’d thought that they would either see one another and instantly rush into each other’s arms, maybe never to part again, or, alternatively, have the most horrendous, hurtful fight that would leave them both emotionally scarred for life.
Either way, something momentous. Not this strange, edgy, slightly nervous situation where they both act like they were never lovers, like Lydcombe had never happened.
‘I tried to get in touch with you for so long after they split us up,’ he tells her.
‘Really?’ She sounds sceptical.
‘Really. Did you ever get any of my letters?’
‘Not one,’ she says, passing the joint back.
He doesn’t know what to say to this. Wasted, wasted, all of it wasted. Ah well. He takes a deep breath, clears his throat.
‘Tried calling. Even thought about coming down on the train and bus and looking for you at Lydcombe, until I heard you were in Spain.’
‘In-a-Shpine. In-a-Shpine,’ she says, staring at her glass and sounding thoughtful in a stoned kind of way. It sounds like she’s quoting somebody else, from some other time, not making fun of him. ‘In-a-Shpine . . .’ Then she looks at him. ‘Did you really?’ she asks. ‘Really write all these letters. Seriously?’
‘Yep, and lots of poems, too. Hundreds of sheets in the end. Aunt Lauren said she’d send them on to you.’ He looks up at her. ‘You definitely didn’t get anything?’
‘Not a flippin’ fing.’ She gets up to change the record. ‘Thought you’d forgotten about me,’ she says quietly, back to him.
‘Well, I didn’t.’ He looks round at her but she’s taking in Dan’s wall of records and books. She had changed into a light, short green dress for the restaurant. She reaches up to a top shelf and he sees the tanned back of her thighs.
‘Do you have any CDs?’ she asks. ‘Dan’s got some here, though he says he likes the sound of vinyl better. And he has these things.’ Reaching down, she pulls out what looks like an album of music from Chinatown. ‘Laser discs? Like, for films?’
‘Heard of them,’ he says.
‘Hmm.’ She slides the laser disc back into its place on the shelves.
‘Did you try to get in touch with me?’ he asks, looking away and taking the last of the joints out of his shirt pocket.
‘Fuck me, how many of those have you got?’ she asks.
‘Last one. Won’t light it if you don’t want me to.’ He already feels pretty wasted though he’s trying hard to keep it together. He looks round but she’s studying the record collection again, arms folded.
‘Na, na, don’t let me stop you.’ There’s a pause. ‘Might open a window though.’ She turns and glances back at the TV, then away again.
‘Sophie?’
‘What?’
‘Did you?’
‘Do you like Joni Mitchell? Dan’s a big fan but I’m not so sure. Must bring some Cure over. Did I what?’
‘Try to get in touch with me.’
There’s a long pause. ‘No, hon, I didn’t.’ The needle clunks down into the vinyl’s lead-in spiral with a near subsonic rumble; a hollow, empty sound pregnant with impendence.
His heart feels like it flows out of him and down the three floors to the street. Hon. Short for honey. That’s a new word. Probably Dan calls her that. Probably calls her that in bed. Or maybe she calls him that. Maybe she calls that out when she’s coming. When he’s making her come. Oh, fuck, what is he doing here?
She sits down on the floor opposite him, at the foot of the other couch, her legs slid under the coffee table, parallel with his.
‘Things were made pretty bad for me after you guys left Lydcombe,’ she tells him. She looks sad and serious and beautiful, but still disorientatingly different. ‘They made me feel pretty bad about myself. About everything that happened. About all that we did.’
He still hasn’t lit the last joint. He looks into her eyes, trying to imagine how it must have been for her. In all this time, in all this thinking about her, he never really thought about how she must have felt about it; he just pictured her as the same girl she had always been, but stopped, frozen, paused, something caught in amber or carbonite or something but still staying the same person, ready to resume her life, their life, the instant whatever spell had been cast over them could be broken.
He had never imagined that she might change as a result of all that happened. Even after hearing from Haydn that she’d been back to Lydcombe, that she had a boyfriend, he had somehow written that off, dismissed it. That had been somebody else, or that had been just her turning out to have been a bad person all along but only now being exposed as such. And somehow the image that he held of her had not changed; that strange, frozen icon of her that he possessed had stayed with him and somewhere deep inside he’d felt - even after all the travelling and changing he’d done - that he could still wake them both from their dream if he could only find her and somehow nothing essential would have changed. It was only now he realised he never could do that, that everything had changed; most of all the two of them.
‘James and Clara made me feel I’d hurt everybody,’ Sophie says quietly. ‘Themselves mostly, naturally, but Grandma Win, your parents, the whole fami
ly. Even you. We had to . . . I had to draw a line under it all and start again. That was the only way forward, the only way out. Put it down to youthful stupidity and move on. If I could do that, if I could not look back, then we’d all be okay. They’d be happy. I’d be saved. You’d get over me quicker.’
He feels tears prick behind his eyes but fights them back, clenching his jaw to try and bite them down. ‘So,’ he says, and has to clear his throat again. ‘Do you think it was just youthful stupidity?’
She looks at him for a long while. Joni Mitchell sings about Cold Blue Steel and Sweet Fire. Eventually Sophie says, ‘You going to light that joint or just fondle it all fucking night?’
They smoke the last joint, passing it back and forth over the table. On the TV, the School Bus Chase is now being labelled as the School Bus Siege. Dan rings to say he’ll be there all night and intends to crash at a pal’s nearby in Daly City - apologies. Usually he’d feel threatened leaving her in the apartment with such a handsome guy, but - hey - they’re cousins and it’s not like they’re from the Ozarks or something.
They finish the wine.
She gets up, has to hold on to the end of the couch for a moment, goes ‘Woo!’ then puts on This is the Sea by the Waterboys. ‘Do you know this?’
It’s a record he remembers from just after they were split up.
‘Yes,’ he tells her. ‘I remember this.’
She stands in front of the hi-fi, between the speakers, swaying, head down, eyes closed, hands clasped above her head.
He twists round, watches her for a while.
She turns and says, ‘Do you want to dance?’
‘You’ll have to go,’ she tells him.
‘What, now?’