by Iain Banks
I pressed part-way into a handy bush but Ellie didn’t look right or left as she walked purposefully up the steps. I gave it a minute or so, feeling oddly complicit, even guilty. I smelled tobacco smoke and peeked out again; Dean was sitting smoking a fag and gazing – I was guessing ruefully – out to sea.
There. Nothing had really happened; just a blip. A trying, a testing, and Ellie had pretty much passed. At least as well as I’d have, in similar circumstances, I supposed. But it was over, and I’d been right not to react immediately. Hanging back, not being impetuous, had been the right thing to do. Maybe I really was starting to get mature after all. I could forget about this.
I went up the steps and found Ellie after a minute, talking to some mutual pals. ‘Here you are,’ I said, just as the fire brigade arrived.
There was some quite vocal female appreciation of the firemen, and some grumbling male resentment that the womenfolk were so easily distracted, but the boys in the yellow helmets were gone within ten minutes and we all filed back into the hotel, emergency over.
I thought I’d better check that Jel knew it was safe to come back in.
She was still in the plastic chair, talking to one of the hotel waitresses. Jel’s feet were still sore so I carried her back in.
‘This a fireman’s lift?’ she asked as I walked up the service corridor with her in my arms, one of her hands round my neck and her other carrying the stilettos.
‘No, more just your standard Hollywood guy-carrying-girl grip.’
‘Girl could get used to this,’ she told me, smiling conspiratorially. ‘Hope El realises what a lucky girl she is.’
‘Yup; so do I.’
I was about to kick open the door to the ballroom when I saw her looking at me. I hesitated. ‘What?’
She looked at me levelly for a moment or two. Her perfume filled the air.
Jel sighed. ‘Nothing,’ she told me. ‘You better put me down here. I can hobble the rest.’
‘Aye, next time we’re all here, probably be fur ma funeral. Ye’ll come fur that, eh?’
‘Joe, do you mind? Next time we’re all here is next week, for my wedding, mine and Ellie’s. You can’t kick the bucket until we’ve had two or three grandchildren for you. There’ll be dandling to be done. Sorry, but you’re just not allowed to keel over. Not for another ten or twenty years. Minimum. Nope; sorry, done deal. No negotiating.’
Joe, bless him, found this quite hilarious. He’d always been an easy audience. He sat chuckling silently and wiped at his rheumy old eyes with a white hanky. I’d sat down at the Murston family table, between dances. Mr Murston Senior had put on a bit of weight since we first bumped into each other in the hills, years earlier; he was positively rotund now, his face was puffy, he wobbled when he did the silent laughter thing, and tears seemed to leak from him at the slightest excuse, as though forced out by the sheer pressure of his bulk.
‘Aye, well, we’ll see,’ he told me, stuffing the hanky away. ‘But a buddy gets tired, ken?’
‘We all get tired, Joe.’
‘Aye, but there’s tired an there’s tired.’
‘Oh is there, now?’ I narrowed my eyes theatrically. ‘This had better be good wisdom here, Joe.’ I reached over and tapped him on the forearm. ‘You old geezers have a responsibility to provide us whippersnappers with choice stuff.’
‘Ach, get on wi ye!’ he wheezed, as his eyes started to fill and the hanky came out again.
The evening went on. Much drink was taken, much drunken dancing committed. The amount of camera flashing declined as power ran down both in camera batteries and small children, though not as much in either as one might have hoped. I spent a couple of intervals outside smoking with Ferg and his chums. Ellie and I danced in a Circassian Circle, then in a Flying Scotsman. Another Eightsome rounded off the ceilidh part of the evening but we sat that one out. More food was laid out, more drink taken. We danced to some pop, I danced with Lauren, the bride, with Grier – as instructed – and with a revived Jel. Grier insisted on consecutive dances, the second being a slow one during which she pressed herself hard against me.
‘I can feel your erection,’ she informed me, just before the song stopped.
I briefly considered denying what was, after all, the truth, and also not something I was particularly in control of. ‘I was thinking about Ellie,’ I told her.
‘Not Anjelica MacAvett?’ Grier said quietly, from beneath the black fringe.
‘No, not Anjelica MacAvett,’ I said, looking at the girl, disquieted.
‘I see a lot,’ Grier whispered into my ear.
‘I bet you do. But not Jel; El.’
‘El Jel, Jel El,’ Grier sing-songed.
‘Ellie,’ I said, firmly.
Grier nodded and pressed in against me again, as the last notes of the song faded. ‘And she’s thinking of Dean Watts.’ She stepped back, nodded. ‘Thanks, Stewart,’ she said, and skipped off.
My expression, I’m sure, must have been choice.
I was at the bar. Ellie was at a distant table going over old times with girlfriends from the Academy.
‘Real thing?’ Ferg asked quietly, suddenly at my side.
‘Que?’
‘Humpty Driscoll’s got a room and some very pure powder. More than the daft fuck knows what to do with, so a few of us are volunteering to help him out. Care to join?’
‘Fuck, yeah,’ I said, so we tramped off to the room Humpty had.
Humpty had always been the sort who needed to provide incentives for people to be his pals; once it had been sweeties and stolen fags. He was training to be a lawyer in London and his folks had moved to Australia so he’d got himself a room in the hotel. Jel was already there, hoovering a line as Ferg and I arrived. Her brother Josh was looking on with a knowing grin. Gina Hillis, Sandy McDade and Len Grady were there too, and Phelpie.
The coke was pretty good and I had a couple of very intense discussions about fuck knows what, one with Ferg and one with Jel.
We all went off to dance some energy away and, a few songs later, when Jel and I were still dancing, we saw Ferg and Josh heading for the main corridor from the ballroom to the foyer.
‘Think there’s more coke going?’ Jel asked, grabbing my arm.
‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘I don’t know …’ I could think of at least one other good reason Ferg and Josh were heading off somewhere together.
‘Let’s follow them!’ Jel said in a stage whisper, eyes big and bright.
This seemed like an extremely good idea, so we headed after them – I looked round for Ellie, but she’d disappeared again – however, we lost Ferg and Josh in the crowds of people in the corridor (a few lightweights were leaving. And it barely midnight).
We stood in front of the lifts, Jel pressing buttons seemingly at random. ‘Let’s go there anyway,’ she said. ‘It was 404, wasn’t it?’
I’d thought it was 505. Or possibly 555. ‘Umm,’ I said.
Jel nodded. ‘Let’s try it.’
‘You take the lift, I’ll take the stairs,’ I told her. This seemed like a splendid stratagem to ensure we didn’t miss anybody. And also to avoid it looking like Jel and I were proceeding in a bedroom-wards direction together.
‘Okay!’
I walked upstairs two at a time, dispensing a couple of jolly hellos to known faces en route and trying not to trip over small children.
I met Jel outside room 404, but it wasn’t right; no answer, and it and the corridor around it just didn’t look familiar either.
‘Fifth floor?’ I suggested. I was still feeling room 505.
Jel nodded. ‘Let’s try it.’
The fifth floor looked even less right. Parts weren’t even lit. ‘We’ve lost them,’ Jel said, dispirited. Then she perked up. ‘Emergency supplies!’ she said, and dug down her cleavage, feeling around inside her bra. I thought it would do no harm to observe this process closely. She produced a little paper wrap.
‘Brilliant, but I bet these are all locked,’ I sai
d, testing the nearest door, then going to the next.
‘Keep trying,’ she said, followed almost immediately by, ‘Aha!’
It was a little ladies’ toilet: three cubicles and a shelf with three sinks opposite, modesty-panelled with a faded green floral curtain, all of it overlit from above with fluorescents and filled with a faint hissing noise like static.
The mottled green formica surface around the sinks wasn’t perfect for coke-cutting – too pale, for a start – but we made do. We chopped it with my credit card, rolled a twenty. Jel’s charlie wasn’t quite as good as Humpty’s had been – a bit more cut, though I wasn’t sufficiently expert to tell with what exactly, and the irony that her dad would have access to much better stuff wasn’t lost on us – still, it did the job.
I started telling Jel, in some detail, about my final-year project, which involved imagining famous buildings relit quite differently from conventional floodlighting (all done on computer, no physical models). By this time I’d been thinking seriously about what the job I’d been offered might involve, and had talked at length to some of the guys I might be working with, so I thought I had a pretty good handle on what was required, hence I talked about angles or ‘splayings’, the kind of technique you needed for lighting something A-shaped, like the Forth Bridge, for example. Wide-eyed, leaning in towards me with a look of enormous concentration on her face, Jel seemed rapt, absorbing all this as though she was thinking of taking up a career in creative lighting design herself.
I was making the point that you need to take account of prevailing weather and atmospheric conditions and, ideally, have a dynamic system in place capable of changing according to whether it was dusk, full night, or dawn, what stage the moon was at, whether the weather was clear or misty and how much light spill or contamination there might be from nearby floodlit buildings or other sources, when I sort of took another look at her expression.
‘Like, some – actually most – buildings in China need to be lit taking into account the fact they have this near-continual brown haze …’ I said, then kind of heard my own voice fade away.
Jel was sitting on top of the sink surround, taking the weight off her feet, which brought her face up level with mine. She reached out with a gloved hand, put it to the nape of my neck, and said, ‘I really think you ought to kiss me.’
I took a deep breath, put my hands on her hips. ‘Well, ah,’ I said, decisively. Actually, I hadn’t really meant to put my hands on her hips, if I remember right; they just sort of appeared there. ‘I suppose,’ I said.
‘I know how you feel about me,’ she told me.
You do? I wanted to say. But I don’t know myself. I thought about this. So true on several levels.
Thing is, whatever part of my brain that deals with such matters has come up with a lot of excuses over the past five years for everything that happened over the next five or ten minutes: Hey, we were drunk, coked up at the same time, I’d seen Ellie snogging somebody else, and there is almost a tradition for people about to get married to have one last fling – but in the end it doesn’t matter, like it doesn’t matter who moved forward to whom, who opened their lips first, whose tongue first moved into the other’s mouth, or whether she shimmied her dress to let her legs wrap around me or I did, or whether she reached for my zip or I did.
She froze. ‘Did you hear a noise?’ She stared at the door to the corridor.
‘No,’ I said, then thought, Or had I? There were various sounds to be heard here, including that soft, continual wash of white noise coming from the nearby plumbing and the distant thudding base from the PA system in the ballroom, floors below.
Breathless, hearts pumping, we stared at each other from about a hand’s length away. ‘Into a cubicle!’ she said, nodding past me.
I picked her up, her legs round my waist, thudded into the middle cubicle as quietly as I could, stood there for a moment while she reached down, locking the door, then I sat down on the toilet seat. ‘We should have put the light out,’ I whispered.
‘Oh, fuck it,’ she breathed. We sat there for a moment, listening, but nothing more happened. We started kissing again.
‘Do we need to—’
She shook her head. ‘Pill. Risk it if you will.’
‘How about,’ I said, reaching up inside her dress with both hands. I felt stocking, warm flesh, a smooth thin garter belt.
She laughed roguishly, put her mouth against my neck and bit very gently. ‘Nope,’ she said, ‘went without. Pas de VPL.’
‘Fuck …’ I breathed.
We’d barely begun by the time she thought she heard a noise again; her mouth was hanging open and she was part supporting herself with one gloved hand splayed on each side wall of the cubicle. She stopped, stiffened, motioned silence.
I heard something too this time: what might have been the door to the corridor, opening, then closing.
We stayed as we were for what felt like a long time. I watched the angle of light that I could see beyond the bottom of the cubicle door, looking for any change. I could feel my heart beat, and hers, and sense the thud-thud-thud of the disco. The continual hiss of what sounded like a faulty cistern made it hard to be sure, but I didn’t think there were any suspicious sounds, either in the cubicles on either side or out in the main part of the loo.
She started doing that pelvic floor thing, squeezing me from inside, even while the rest of her body stayed perfectly still and poised. She was grinning down at me. Af ter maybe a minute there had been no further noise from outside and no change in the light.
‘Somebody looking in and leaving again,’ I whispered. ‘Another false alarm.’
Jel raised herself a little higher, then let go of the side walls, raising both gloved hands high over her head as she sank further down on to me, so tight and hot I nearly came there and then. ‘Fuck it,’ she said, ‘just fuck me.’
I stood, lifting her, producing a gasp, thudding her back against the door and the partition wall to the side, her right shoulder just avoiding the coat hook protruding from the door. I took her weight while she grasped my shoulders. A little later, with her legs wrapped tight around my waist, she raised her gloved arms straight and high above her head.
Half an hour later I was standing, trying hard not to grin my face off, talking to Ferg in the hotel foyer. He looked pretty happy too, though whether this was for similar reasons I hadn’t yet enquired. Part of me felt guilty, of course, but another part of me – a more influential part of my head-space, it has to be said – was already writing off the whole experience and doing its best to ignore both the strange, tight, balled feeling in my guts and the troublesome minority of my neurons, protesting loudly with stuff like, You just did what? How could you do that? How could you do that to Ellie?
It was – it had been, I was in the process of deciding – a line-drawing-under fling, a last and very much final hurrah that meant I had kissed goodbye to the delights of other women with a fine, decisive flourish: a bittersweet, never-again moment that would remain my secret and Jel’s for ever more. In the end, after all, I wasn’t yet married to Ellie, I hadn’t taken any vows in public, before any congregation or gathering of friends and family, and so technically no trust had been betrayed, no binding agreement breached.
And Ellie had had her little snog in the gardens, after all. There had probably been no more, either during this night or in the recent past, though of course there might have been the odd straying at university; there was a sort of tacit acknowledgement between us that a few things might have happened we’d rather the other one didn’t know about: nothing relationship-threatening – maybe in the end relationship-strengthening, getting stuff out of the system, tried, sampled, enjoyed but, having been enjoyed, found to be sufficient just in that one evaluation – but still things that were best confined to the memories in our own heads.
So that was all right then.
There was no warning, no hubbub or sort of raised general level of noise coming from the ballroom, ju
st Ellie striding up to me, taking me by the arm.
‘El,’ I said. There was just the faintest of trembles inside me, like I thought there might be something wrong, but probably not; just a guilty conscience.
‘El, how are—’ Ferg started.
‘You need to get out, now,’ she told me, her voice flat. She looked at Ferg.‘Ferg, get the desk clerk to order a taxi for Dyce, name of Gilmour. Urgent. Find a way to let my brothers know about the booking.’
Ferg’s mouth clacked shut. Ellie gripped my upper arm hard. She had her blue sequinned purse in her other hand. ‘Come on,’ she said.
She made to move, as if she was going to drag me with her. I tried to stay standing where I was, wondering what the hell all the panic was about and unwilling to be manhandled – womanhandled – like this in front of friends.
‘El, what the—’
She put her mouth to my ear. ‘Come on!’ she hissed, shaking my arm. ‘My fucking family’s going to fucking kill you, you stupid fucker,’ she said through clenched teeth. ‘They know you fucked Jel. Everybody knows you fucked Jel. Now move!’
‘—cking cunt!’ somebody screamed from the direction of the ballroom. It sounded a lot like Murdo Murston. I caught a glimpse of Mike Mac’s face, ten metres away, just appearing between the ballroom doors. He looked pale, shocked. He saw me and his expression didn’t change.
I’d never heard Ellie swear so much, never. I couldn’t remember hearing her voice with this strange, flat, determined tone before, either. My feet seemed to start moving by themselves. Ferg went to the hotel desk. Ellie forced me towards the main hotel doors, pulling the Mini’s key out of her purse with her teeth as we exited through the depleted crowd of smokers by the doors into the harshly floodlit car park and the warm summer evening beyond.
‘Are, are you fit to drive?’ I asked, some autopilot bit of my brain attempting to take over.
‘Be quiet, Stewart,’ she told me. She pushed me. ‘Faster!’