The Steep Approach to Garbadale

by Iain Banks

  He’d wondered if they’d talk much about the old days, about what they’d meant to each other, but they hadn’t. They’d mentioned Lydcombe a couple of times, San Francisco just once:

  ‘I’m not sure I ever apologised to you properly for getting you into trouble with your boyfriend,’ he’d said.

  ‘Dan? Yeah, that was a tad embarrassing.’ Her eyes had gone wide. She’d shrugged. ‘My own fault. I got us both drunk, I’d been thinking about our grass-flattening escapades at Lydcombe. I just felt horny and you were there.’ She’d smiled. ‘Also, I was kind of doing it for closure, though I somehow neglected to inform you of this at the time. I always worried you were doing it because you wanted us to be together for ever or something.’ She made a snorting noise.

  I did tell you you were the love of my life, he’d thought. He hadn’t said it.

  ‘Scarred me for life,’ he’d said instead, in a manner to make light of it. ‘Well, up until you told me to get out of your sight that time in Singapore.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she’d said, turning to him, eyes big again. ‘You were so drunk then!’

  Yeah, he thought. Just drunk. Not sincere or ruined for other women or still burning for you or anything. Just drunk.

  Oh well. The stiffened breeze blew some of his hair into his eyes. He brushed it away again.

  Alban checked his watch. ‘Want to do the last hour or so trawling? We can keep the engine on idle and start to head back up the loch.’

  Sophie nodded. ‘Yeah, okay. Want me to cast off?’

  ‘Thanks. If you would.’

  He put his rod down in the boat, turned and squatted to face the engine, pumped the bulb on the fuel line, adjusted the choke and then grasped the plastic handle of the starting lanyard and began a strong, smooth pull. ‘This old thing usually takes a couple of—’ he was saying when the starting lanyard broke and he went flying backwards, staggering, falling across the midships seat and whacking his head on the bottom boards.

  He looked up. Sophie was looking down at him, a concerned look on her face; her arms were outstretched as she balanced in the rocking boat. ‘You okay?’

  The back of his head hurt a bit. He was lying in the bottom of the boat with his legs up over the central seat, as though preparing to give birth. He looked at his right hand, which was still holding the lanyard’s handle. He listened; waves slapping hull. No engine sound. Shit.

  ‘I’m okay,’ he said, and accepted Sophie’s hand, lifting himself back up and turning to sit down on the seat.

  ‘Garbadale we have a problem?’ Sophie said, squatting in front of him.

  He stared at the lanyard. Looked like it had broken near the engine end. Frayed, worn-looking fibres waved in the breeze when he held them up. He felt like throwing the damn thing overboard, but didn’t.

  ‘Will we have to row?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Christ, no,’ Alban said. ‘I’ll just take the top of the engine off and reattach the lanyard.’ He turned, hoisted his feet over the seat and knelt on the boards in front of the transom seat. ‘There’ll be a . . .’ His voice trailed off as he looked and felt under the seat. ‘A fucking tool-box, which is not here,’ he finished. There was a small plastic crate under the seat. He brought it out. It contained the fuel funnel, a little hand-bailer, a small first-aid kit, a reel of floating line and an empty cardboard spark plug carton. Alban sat down on the bottom boards, looking round the boat to see where else the tool kit might be. Not anywhere else, really. He put the lanyard in the crate with the other stuff.

  ‘So now are we going to have to row?’ Sophie asked.

  Alban looked at his watch. ‘It’ll take us till fucking midnight to get back.’

  Sophie had her phone out. She started pressing buttons, then stopped. ‘Ah,’ she said.

  ‘You’ll be lucky,’ Alban said. ‘Barely works at the house. Nothing down here at all.’ Alban sat up on the seat and turned to the engine. He took the plastic top cover off. There were eight twelve-mill bolts that had to be removed before you could get at the drum that housed the starting lanyard. He tested them, on the highly unlikely off-chance they were only finger tight, but they were solid. He looked at his Swiss Army knife. That wasn’t going to be adequate.

  They checked beneath the bottom boards, in case the tool kit had got down there somehow; all they found was dirty water. Sophie’s fishing paraphernalia had nothing any more hardcore than Alban’s knife.

  He caught a glimpse of the pale orange buoy, some distance off. They were cast off. He looked up to check their position. They were drifting slowly down the loch, further away from the house all the time, heading for the south-east edge of the wide bay. He checked his watch again. It was quarter past three. The EGM was scheduled for six, with the closed session part a half-hour earlier.

  They’d be rowing into a moderately stiff breeze for over twenty kilometres. He hadn’t rowed any distance for years and Sophie looked gym fit but was probably less powerful than he was. The only alternative was to go ashore and start hiking. Either way they’d never make it in time; it could easily be dark by the time they got back to the house. Realistically, they’d be relying on somebody raising the alarm and coming to look for them in another boat.

  Alban felt a growing, gnawing sensation in his guts, a terrible feeling of powerless anxiety, of failure and inadequacy and helplessness.

  ‘Well,’ he said, doing his best to display a confidence-inspiring smile to Sophie. ‘I guess rowing is what it has to be.’ He gestured for her to sit on the rear seat. ‘I’ll start off,’ he told her. ‘You can spell me for a bit if you like.’

  ‘Sure,’ she said. He placed the rowlocks in their holes, put the oars in place and started push-pulling to bring them round almost one-eighty degrees.

  ‘You done much rowing?’ he asked.

  ‘Kayaks,’ she said, an apologetic expression on her face.

  ‘Better than nothing,’ he said. ‘Piece of piss, really.’ There wasn’t even room in the slim boat for them to take an oar each.

  When the stern of the boat was starting to point in the direction they’d been drifting, he began rowing. The oars weren’t quite matched with the rowlocks and kept jumping out. ‘Bit rusty,’ he said. ‘Soon get into the rhythm.’

  Sophie smiled thinly. She checked her life-jacket.

  He looked behind him. The wind was already an appreciable force against the boat and once they rounded the headland formed by the base of Assynt they’d be straight into the teeth of it.

  This was going to be a long pull.

  Sophie was looking at her watch. ‘We going to make the EGM?’ she asked.

  ‘Umm, probably not as currently scheduled,’ he admitted. Alban reckoned they’d require a complete about-turn in the wind and the services of an Olympic oarsman to get back before coffee and petits fours.

  ‘Shit,’ she said. ‘Anything I can do?’

  He thought. ‘Come to think of it, you can pull the engine up out of the water. No sense dragging that through the loch.’ He felt like an idiot. He’d only been rowing for a minute, but it was something he should have thought of immediately. He wondered what else he might have missed.

  Idiot, he told himself. Idiot, idiot, idiot.

  ‘Let me know when you want me to take over,’ Sophie said.

  ‘Will do,’ he said. ‘Shout out if we look like we’re about to go aground. Ideally we want to just miss that headland.’

  She looked round him at the view ahead, nodded.

  He settled into a sort of rhythm, though the feeling that the oars were always about to jump out of the rowlocks was constantly unsettling. There was no purpose-built footboard to brace your feet against when rowing, so you had to use the ribs of the boat, which was okay as it was quite narrow, but he seemed to be just the wrong height, slightly too long in the leg for one set of ribs and too short for the next set sternwards. Plus his hands were already starting to chafe. Fuck it; his fingers and palms used to be calloused and hard. He’d been out of work for
barely two months and already it felt like he had the hands of Marcel Proust. He’d put the gloves on soon.

  He tried to empty his mind and settle to the task, into the simple push and pull of rowing. He did his best to feather the oars with each return stroke, rolling the blades of the oars flat to cut through the oncoming breeze. This was the proper way to row and would make a significant difference heading into the wind over the sort of distance they were looking at, but he’d never managed to incorporate the motions required into what passed for his natural rowing technique and he doubted he’d keep it up.

  Oh, fuck, this was going to be hellish.

  He smiled at Sophie and she smiled back, but she looked concerned and he felt the same way.

  What was to be done? What else was there to do?

  The phone? No chance. On the other hand, you never knew. Mobile phone masts could leak signals through unlikely little corridors in the hills. If nothing else, this would give Sophie something to do. ‘Keep trying the phone for signal, every few minutes,’ he told her. He shrugged. ‘Just in case.’ An oar jumped out and he rolled his eyes and said, ‘Shit.’

  He looked round at the headland they were aiming for. It didn’t look much closer. It looked darker than it had, though; high clouds were closing in from the north-west, putting the surrounding landscape into shade. It was going to get dark even earlier if the cloud cover kept building up.

  He stopped, shipping the oars.

  ‘My turn?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘No, just putting these on,’ he said, pulling out his gloves. He settled back into the rowing. The gloves made it all feel kind of mushy and distant, but at least they should save his skin.

  What are we trying to do? he asked himself. Concentrate; what am I trying to do?

  Get back to the house. So. Rowing looked like the only way. It was, wasn’t it? Hiking would take at least as long.

  Think out of the box. Think the way VG would think if she’d got herself into this pickle. (Would she have? Would she have been paranoid enough to have checked the tool kit was there? Never mind. Work with what you have, just watch out for assumptions.)

  What assumptions was he making about hiking? Well, direction, for one.

  Maybe there was another way out. Could they head in the other direction and tramp out via the head of the loch? He knew there was a track that, eventually, led down to Benmore Lodge and Glen Oykel, but he couldn’t remember how far that was. He could visualise the relevant map only vaguely, and seemed to recall it looked like a pretty long walk. Plus, both while they were rowing to the head of the loch and while they were hiking this unknown path, they’d be heading away from any help that might come from Garbadale.

  So, rowing.

  Was there any other way to start the engine?

  It was a pull-start. No electric starter. You used the lanyard or nothing; that was it.

  He thought on. If your car wouldn’t start you could jump-start it. Well, that was a non-starter in every sense. The only electrical stuff they had were their watches and Sophie’s phone. Not enough power there to turn an engine over, even if you could somehow connect the phone’s battery to the spark plug (and you’d probably need to start dismantling the engine to do that, too).

  You could push-start a car. Could you tow-start a boat? In theory, he supposed, if you could row at ninety knots or something you could restart the engine by just putting the fucker into gear and dropping it into the wash. In practice that was completely useless as an idea, too.

  Think think think.

  Oh, VG, he thought, I need you here now.

  What they really needed was to get the engine going, the piston going up and down, driving through the simple gearbox to the prop shaft and then the prop itself.

  Any other way to get the engine turning? Any other way to get the prop turning?

  Both oars popped out of their rowlocks. He nearly lost hold of one.

  ‘You okay?’ Sophie asked, looking alarmed.

  ‘I’ve just had a fucking brilliant idea!’ he told her. He frowned. ‘I think.’

  He rowed them into the nearest stretch of shore, finding a patch of beach composed of pebbles and sand and rowing the boat up on to it.

  ‘What’s the idea?’ Sophie asked. ‘Is there a path? Are we hiking?’

  ‘Wait, wait,’ he said, digging in the plastic crate for the broken starting lanyard. ‘Might not work.’ He held up the lanyard. ‘But it might. No idea but it’s worth a try.’

  ‘What?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘Show you,’ he said.

  He jumped out into the startlingly cold water, up to his thighs in a deeper bit than he’d been anticipating.

  He swung the stern of the boat round so it was at about thirty degrees to the little beach and he could get at the prop. He stopped and thought for a moment, then wound the lanyard clockwise round the propeller.

  ‘Okay, drop the engine,’ he told Sophie.

  When she’d done that he asked her to check the bulb on the fuel line was full and to set the choke and throttle. Sophie had worked out what he was doing. ‘This is safe, isn’t it?’ she asked. ‘You aren’t going to get chewed up or anything, are you?’

  ‘Just put it into ahead; I’ll be okay.’ He watched her pull the gear lever towards herself. ‘Okay,’ he said, bracing his free hand on to the transom of the boat and trying to find a firm footing on the sand and pebbles beneath his feet while the waves lapped round his thighs and soaked the crotch of his jeans. He looked at Sophie. ‘You ready to put it into neutral if it catches?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘It’s going to jerk you towards me if it does because it’s in gear.’

  ‘I know. I’m ready. Just do it.’

  ‘Here goes.’

  He pulled hard on the lanyard, making the prop rotate as the rope unwound from it and forcing it, in turn, to spin the drive shaft and - through the gearbox - set the engine in motion.

  The engine seemed to catch, then died again.

  ‘You fucking beauty!’ Alban yelled. ‘This is going to work! Lift it out again!’

  He wound the lanyard round the prop again, Sophie dropped the engine into the water, put it into forward gear and kept hold of the gear lever.

  This time the engine caught and held, revving noisily and sending the wash back at his legs in a froth of smoky, bubbly water until Sophie knocked it into neutral and adjusted the throttle. He threw the lanyard into the boat and waded out of the water, pushing the boat out by the stem, stern first into the waves. He leapt in.

  Sophie held out one hand to let him sit at the stern, then, as he sat, grinning, taking hold of the throttle tiller, she bowed and applauded. ‘Well done,’ she said. She stepped up to him and planted a modest kiss on his right cheek.

  ‘Home, Jemima, I rather think,’ he said grandly, dropping the engine into gear and gunning it to send them curving out into the bay, heading for the foot of the loch and Garbadale.

  They were within sight of the jetty and the grey roofs of the house were appearing over the still green treetops when Sophie looked round at him, then down at the lanyard, lying on the bottom boards where he’d thrown it after the engine had started. She picked it up and inspected the frayed end. Then she placed it back on the boards. The expression on her face had stayed thoughtful and serious while she was doing this. She looked into his eyes. Her eyebrows rose in a question.

  He shrugged, keeping his expression neutral.

  She gave a wry smile, checked her phone once more, then shook her head and turned away again.

  He took the starting lanyard with him when they left the boat tied up at the jetty, stuffing the handle and length of grey rope into a jacket pocket.

  They loaded up with the gear they needed to take back to the house.

  ‘Wouldn’t be impossible, would it?’ Sophie said quietly as they walked up the path through the trees.

  ‘Does seem slightly extreme,’ he said.

  ‘Wasn’t cut.’

  ‘No, t
hat would be a bit obvious. All the fraying looks very fresh though.’

  She glanced at him. ‘Should we say anything?’

  ‘Leave it with me.’

  ‘Gladly, cuz.’

  They walked on back to the house. Halfway there, they found the wreckage of the umbrella that had blown inside out and then away the day before, hanging from a tree a little way off the track. He climbed up and retrieved it and stuffed it into one of the bins at the back of the kitchens.

  Sophie went for a bath before changing for the meeting and then dinner. Alban left his jacket in the cloakroom. He thought about taking the starting lanyard with him, but left it in the jacket pocket. He checked the television lounge, saying hi to the various guys and some of the older children. There was an argument going on about having to stop playing computer games and switching to a TV channel with the football results. Fielding told him the deer-hunting party had phoned to say they’d be back at the house in half an hour. Staff from the Sloy Hotel were helping to prepare the ballroom for the EGM. Alban found Aunt Lauren in the kitchen with cousin Steve and his wife Tessa, who was dandling their granddaughter Hannah on her lap.

  ‘This is something called Ba’Aka honey,’ Lauren was telling them as one of the waitresses from the Sloy Hotel enfolded some warm toast in a napkin and added it to a large tray set for tea and holding various little jugs and pots, one of which Lauren was pointing at. ‘It’s from Northern Congo. Awfully hard to get hold of. Very stimulating. So I’m told.’

  ‘What, you haven’t tried it?’ Tessa asked.

  ‘Well—’ Lauren began.

  ‘Hi, Alban,’ Steve said. ‘How was the fishing?’

  ‘Didn’t catch much,’ Alban admitted, smiling at Tessa and making a big-eyed face at the baby so that she gurgled and held out one chubby hand towards him.

  ‘Oh, Alban,’ Lauren said, ‘we were hoping for enough to make a first course.’

  ‘Sorry,’ he said. He nodded at the tray. ‘That for Win?’

  ‘Yes,’ Lauren said. ‘I was just about to take it up to her.’

  ‘Allow me.’