by Iain Banks
‘Promise,’ he says.
She pulls back, studies his eyes in turn. ‘You don’t remember last night, do you?’
He raises his brows, tips his head to one side.
She smiles. ‘After that. You were talking about your mother. In your sleep.’
He looks shocked. ‘I was? I never do that.’
‘Unless there’s somebody else called Irene, or Mummy.’
‘Jesus,’ he breathes, looking away down the drive towards the unseen sea loch. He looks at her. ‘Wait a moment. I remember you waking me up.’
‘Yeah.’ She nods.
He looks away again. ‘Oh well.’
‘Anyway,’ she says, with one last kiss. ‘See you on Monday morning. You go in and get some breakfast.’
‘Hey. Listen,’ he says, still holding one hand. ‘If you get rained off or just think the better of it, come back. Okay? At any point. We’ll decamp to a room at the Inchnadamph if we can’t stay here together, or Neil McBride and his wife would put us up.’
She stops, puts her head back, eyebrows raised. ‘Not rather be here with your family?’
‘Hey, we could just break into the north wing with a few logs and get a fire going,’ he tells her. ‘But no. You come back if you need to. If you want to. Don’t hold off.’
‘Deal,’ she says, and, grinning, holds her hand up for him to kiss.
She slides into the Forester, fires it up and takes off down the gravel drive, one hand waving from the window. He waves back, watching until the car disappears behind the screen of trees.
He turns and walks back into the great house.
8
‘I used to have a hearty dick,’ Blake told him. ‘Now I’ve got a dicky heart.’
Alban smiled and tried to look sympathetic at the same time. ‘Is it really that bad?’
‘Bad enough. Docs say I should lay off the booze.’ Blake held up his glass of whisky and soda and stared at it with a look of accusatory sorrow, as though it was a trusted friend who had let him down. ‘May need a triple bypass.’
‘Well, they’re pretty routine these days.’
‘Hmm. Maybe so, but I still don’t like the sound of it. They cut through your breastbone and prise your ribs apart, did you know that? Big steel clamp things. Grisly.’ He shook his head. ‘And there’s a risk with any operation. Things go wrong. Mistakes get made. Infection.’
‘I’m sure you’ll be fine, Blake.’
‘Huh.’ Blake drank some more of his whisky and soda.
Alban hadn’t seen Blake since his visit during his gap year. This time, he’d been in Hong Kong to meet with some product development people and factory owners from Shenzen, preparing the ground for a redesign of the Empire! board and pieces. Hong Kong was both highly altered and just the same. The new airport had taken the fun/terror out of flying into the place, buildings Alban was sure had been a block from the sea were now six or seven blocks away as more land was reclaimed and immediately built upon and the last of the junks and sampans had long since disappeared from the harbour.
On the other hand, it was still stiflingly hot and humid and berserkly crowded at ground level, the Chinese still spat everywhere and were not in the least shy about coughing and sneezing right in your face, everybody constantly pushed and shoved and jostled everybody else as they walked around - and kicked and elbowed you out of the way if you stopped in the street for any reason - the tall, teetering, anorexically narrow wooden trams were still liable to burst into flames at the drop of a match and the racket of rattling that issued from mah-jong parlours if you happened to be passing when the doors opened was exceeded only by the choking super-dense cloud of cigarette smoke that pulsed out at the same time.
‘Anyway,’ Blake said, ‘it was kind of you to look me up. No one else in the family ever does.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that,’ Alban told him.
Blake made a desultory flapping gesture with one hand. He was as tall and thin as ever. When he’d first greeted Alban he’d been wearing a large floppy hat that made him look like an Anglepoise lamp.
They were sitting in the rooftop garden of Blake’s skyscraper. This was still near the harbour; the land immediately offshore hadn’t been reclaimed. Not yet, anyway. They were a hundred and something metres up, shaded by a broad canopy and with a moderately strong breeze blowing, but it was still uncomfortably hot. Drinking, reclined, was fine, but just the thought of doing anything more energetic, like getting up and moving around, was enough to bathe you in sweat all by itself.
Alban wondered whether to try and get Blake to talk more about the family and the reasons he’d left it. He was, after all, on the brink of doing something similar himself. It was a month or so after the breakfast telling-off he’d received from Win, and in his heart he was moving closer all the time to just chucking it in. He carried a copy of his letter of resignation around with him in an envelope all the time now, like a suicide pill. Maybe he needed one last push, a final prod to make him take the leap. Would comparing notes with Blake do that? Not that their circumstances were that similar; Blake had been thrown out for embezzlement, whereas he was just thinking about resigning after doing a good, conscientious job for the last few years. It wasn’t like he’d be punished or sent into exile by the family. He was looking at the equivalent of an honourable discharge, not a dishonourable one like Blake’s.
‘Do you ever try to contact other people in the family?’ he asked Blake. He sipped on his iced water. He was in shirtsleeves, tie loose, shoes and socks off. Blake was even less formal; barefoot too, baggy shorts and a loose silk shirt. The warm breeze brought the scent of jasmine to them; the roof garden held dozens of the plants.
‘Not really,’ Blake admitted. ‘I’m something they’d rather forget. Your grandmother especially.’ He looked briefly at Alban. ‘She’s top dog now, isn’t she?’
‘Has been for a while,’ Alban agreed. ‘Family and firm.’
‘No love lost there,’ Blake said. He sounded sad. ‘Anyway. I have my own life here; always have had. Been a good life, I’ve done well. No complaints. I—’
Blake’s mobile, sitting on the low teak table between them, vibrated. ‘Excuse me,’ he said to Alban. ‘Yes?’ He listened for a while, then said, ‘No. That’s not remotely good enough. Tell him that’s positively insulting. We’ll go elsewhere.’ He listened some more. ‘Yes, well so have I, and mine tells his what to do, so inform our friend he’s welcome to try.’ Blake shifted almost without a pause into what sounded to Alban like convincingly rapid Cantonese and spoke that for a minute or so, sounding fairly animated, then said, ‘Do that. Yes, later. Goodbye.’ He put the mobile back on the table. ‘Sorry - deal about to happen, or not. Can’t turn the damn thing off. Do you like mobiles? I have to have one like everybody else and they’re very handy sometimes, obviously, but I sometimes feel I absolutely hate them at the same time. Do you know what I mean?’
‘Yeah, I do,’ Alban said. ‘It’s being at everybody’s beck and call.’
‘Quite.’ Blake nodded, then sipped his drink.
‘You can always turn them off,’ Alban pointed out.
‘Yes,’ Blake said. ‘But then you worry you’re missing something important.’ He looked at the phone. ‘Still. Could see the damn things far enough.’ He looked out over the hazy city. Slim shapes that were distant jets slid minutely across the sky, descending towards the now far distant airport. ‘You’re, what, thirty now, aren’t you?’
‘Near enough,’ Alban said.
Blake was silent for a while, then said, ‘Do you ever get a sort of feeling of wondering what it’s all about?’ He looked over at Alban, who looked back, not sure at first whether Blake was being entirely serious, and realising that he was. ‘About why we bother?’ Blake’s expression was positively mournful. He looked away again. ‘Maybe it’s just an age thing. I don’t remember feeling like this when I was younger. Seems to have crept up on me without me noticing, like this heart thing. Do you ever get that?
’
‘What, suspecting everything’s pointless?’
‘I suppose that’s what it is.’
‘Not particularly. Kind of had that more when I was younger. Sort of thing you discuss when you’re a student.’
‘Maybe just me then,’ Blake said glumly, and drank.
‘Not just you, Blake. Lots of people feel like that, at least now and again. I suppose it’s one of the main reasons so many people turn to religion.’
Blake nodded. ‘I’ve started praying again, but I just feel foolish. I realise I’m just talking to myself.’ He shook his head. ‘Silly, really.’ He glanced at Alban. I thought I’d have all this stuff figured out by now. I feel rather cheated that I don’t, that I’m having to start thinking again about things that - as you say - one might have expected to leave behind in one’s teens.’ He held his glass up to the light. ‘I think I am like a lot of people, you know: I’ve spent my life waiting for my life to start. It’s as though one needs permission from somebody - parents, God, a committee of one’s peers; I don’t bloody know - to finally take responsibility for one’s own actions, one’s own life. Only the permission never comes, and gradually - well, gradually for me, I can’t speak for others; maybe their realisation comes in some sort of sudden revelation and a blinding light or whatever - gradually you realise that it never will come, that the way you’ve lived your life, stumbling through it, winging it half the time, is all there really is, all there ever was. I feel cheated, because of that. I feel, sometimes, like I’ve cheated myself though I can’t see how I could have done much different. And I have a horrible feeling that even if I had a time machine and could go back to visit my younger self to warn him, or at least advise him about all this, he’d - I’d - have no idea what my future self was talking about. I’d think he was an idiot. I’d ignore him. I’d ignore myself.’
‘Blake,’ Alban said, trying not to sound too amused, ‘you sound like somebody who hasn’t achieved anything. I kind of had the impression you’d done pretty well for yourself.’
‘Oh,’ Blake waved one hand, then ran it through his white hair - it looked longer than the time Alban had been here before - ‘I’ve done very well for myself. I’m not complaining about that for a moment. Though, ha, mind you, the commies could take it all away in a moment, on a whim, if they really wanted to. Well, not everything, obviously, but almost all my property is here, in Honkers. Can’t stuff a building or a plot of land in an offshore account. But . . . Oh, look, you don’t mind me talking about all this, do you?’
‘Course I don’t mind,’ Alban said.
This wasn’t strictly true; he was finding Blake’s late-onset existential angst a little wearing. The guy was a multi-squillionaire and still he was finding stuff to get all morose about. Alban felt almost puritanical about this sort of thing; of course being rich didn’t mean you suddenly no longer had anything to worry about, but you ought at least to have the decency to keep quiet about it. Oh well. He’d chosen to look Blake up. It had seemed the right thing to do then and would seem like the right thing to have done later, when he’d be sitting on the plane back to the UK. Visiting the exile, keeping this one distant offshoot of the Wopuld clan from detaching from the family tree completely. Sometimes, Alban felt like he was the family social worker.
‘It’s just,’ Blake said, waving one hand again, ‘even having, you know, made a bit of money and so on, even that doesn’t seem like so much. You meet other people who’ve made even more and you think, Well, this person’s clearly an idiot. I mean, I’m not saying one should base one’s estimation of oneself or anybody else purely on how much money you’ve made or they’ve made, but it’s hard not to compare these things sometimes, and you think, Well, what does having made a bit really mean, or say about one, if this pillock can make even more than I’ve made? D’you see what I mean? It’s quite depressing, really. Do you understand?’
Alban sighed. He understood there was nothing worse than the very rich feeling sorry for themselves. ‘There’s always somebody with more, I guess,’ he said, trying to sound more sympathetic than he felt.
‘But if it’s not about money,’ Blake persisted, ‘or prestige or your immortal soul or whatever, then what?’
‘Some people put a lot of value on children,’ Alban said. ‘Or just on another person.’
Blake looked at him and snorted. ‘Yes, well.’ He drank from his glass. ‘I never did quite meet the right girl.’ He studied his empty glass. ‘Actually, that’s not true. Arguably I met too many of them.’
‘You never married, Blake?’ Alban knew Blake wasn’t married now, but he didn’t know if he ever had been.
‘Thought about it a few times,’ Blake said. ‘Never did.’ He nodded at Alban’s glass. ‘Fancy another?’
Alban too looked at his glass of water, now nearly empty. ‘Why not? Might even have a proper drink this time.’
‘Good man,’ Blake said. He put his fingers to his mouth and produced a disconcertingly piercing whistle. He shrugged at Alban and said, ‘Quickest way,’ as a barman in a white jacket appeared around the side of some jasmine plants to take their order.
‘You could still have children, Blake,’ Alban told him. ‘Get yourself a young wife, start a family.’
‘At my age?’ Blake looked pained.
‘Blake, you’re not short of the money for a nanny. You won’t have to be the one getting up in the middle of the night to warm the milk.’
Blake shook his head. ‘I’m too old,’ he said. ‘And then what if it didn’t work? What if I didn’t like the child, or its mother for that matter? What if I realised she only wanted me for my money? What if the whole experience was just another cause for realising the essential futility of everything?’
‘Jesus, Blake, in the end, you’re sitting in the sunshine with people running after you, on top of forty storeys of hi-tech building occupying some of the most prime real estate in the world. And, yes, there’ll be women desperate to throw themselves at you for your money. Well, that’s not the worst thing that ever happened, either.’
‘I know,’ Blake said. ‘I have this talk with myself all the time, telling myself exactly that. I should be grateful. I should feel lucky, I should feel blessed. I should feel . . . I should feel good about my life.’ He looked across the rooftop garden. ‘I stand over there, some nights,’ he said, looking at the glass wall topped with teak which ran around the edge of the roof. ‘I look down on all these tiny brown and white dots; little guys in loincloths running around like blue-arsed flies in the middle of the night, busy collating copies of the South China Post and pushing and pulling handcarts full of chickens. And I actually envy them. It must be such a simple - Ah.’ This last word was directed at the servant bringing them their drinks.
Blake exchanged a few words in Cantonese and an insincere smile with the guy in the white jacket as their drinks were served.
‘Well, there’s always this stuff,’ Alban said. He held up his G&T. Better this than explain to Blake what a dingbat he had to be to envy guys with no economic choice but to run around in loincloths in the wee small hours collating outsize papers or transporting fucking chickens.
Blake looked into his whisky and soda. ‘I probably drink too much already. So the docs say, anyway.’
‘Drugs?’ Alban said, feeling his patience starting to wear thin.
Blake drank, looked at him. ‘Do you mean prescription?’
Alban raised his eyebrows. ‘Or the other sort.’
Blake looked away. ‘I don’t think you’re being entirely serious, Alban.’
‘I guess not,’ Alban agreed. They both drank. ‘Do you ever think of trying to mend fences with the rest of the family? I mean, making a real effort, trying to woo them back?’
‘Yes, I do,’ Blake said. ‘But it never takes much thought for me to realise that there’d be very little point in doing so.’
‘You seem very sure.’
‘I am. We parted ways a long time ago.’ Blake looked a
t the sky again. ‘Grown too far apart, basically. I have my life here. You lot, well, you have your own lives. I won’t pretend I’m not interested in hearing about people, but it all seems slightly unreal. Anyway, even if I did wish to . . . resume relations, I don’t think I’d be welcome. Takes two to tango, and all that.’
Alban just nodded. He hadn’t even mentioned Blake’s name to Win since that time at Bert’s funeral, nine years ago now. He hadn’t needed to to form the strong impression it wouldn’t be a good idea. Blake was still very much the black sheep. ‘PNG, dear boy,’ Uncle Kennard had said when he’d mentioned this to him. Kennard didn’t seem as viscerally opposed to any contact with his brother as Win had, but he still hadn’t actually been in touch with him for all these years, either. ‘Definitely PNG.’
‘What?’ Alban had asked, confused. (Papua New Guinea? What the hell did that have to do with anything?)
‘PNG - Persona Non Grata,’ Kennard had explained. ‘Not welcome, in other words. Old Foreign Office phrase,’ he’d explained wisely, then somewhat spoiled the effect by adding, ‘or something.’
Alban looked at Blake, sitting in the hazy, saturated sunshine of Hong Kong, a couple of years after the handover, not long before the millennium celebrations, and, for the first time, did genuinely feel sorry for the man. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘people might still mellow, over the years.’
Blake looked at him. ‘Would you say Winifred has mellowed at all?’ he asked.
Alban had to look away for a bit. ‘Well, no,’ he admitted.
‘Keep in touch,’ Blake said coolly, looking away at the distant planes again. ‘If she ever does, let me know.’
She’ll die first, Alban thought, and knew it was true.
He resigned from the firm a week later.
The weather was awful; a strong west wind dragged a lumpen blanket of thick grey cloud over the whole west coast, bringing sheets and squalls of cold, buffeting rain. Alban thought of Verushka, sheltering in her tent, rain drumming on the bright, paper-thin nylon, or - worse - actually out in it, trudging up a hill through the rain and mist, pack heavy on her back. The weather was so bad he told himself it was a good thing; even VG wouldn’t stay out in a heaving wet gale like this. The worse it got the more likely she was to come back, so in a way the worse it got the better it was. Unless she was so stubborn or determined or so set on keeping out of his family’s way that she had resolved not to come back no matter how bad the weather got, in which case the worse it got, well, the worse it was. Maybe, he told himself, looking out from the drawing room at the cliff and the mist-shrouded waterfall (blown sideways, not back up), she’d give in and go somewhere else rather than come back here. Maybe she’d just bail out to the nearest hotel.