by Iain Banks
Anyway, the following spring, the main lawn of Hill House – the one visible from the lounge and the conservatory, the one that visitors to the house could see as soon as they came down the drive – suddenly erupted into flower, from bulbs somebody had dug into the grass the year before. The flowers made up a picture of a severed horse’s head, maybe five or six metres from the tip of its nose to the ragged bloody neck; red tulips stood in for the blood.
It wasn’t a particularly good portrait of a severed horse’s head, and it never really got a chance to bloom fully, but it was shocking enough. Mrs M nearly had a fit. The whole lawn was razed, ploughed and re-sown within a couple of days.
Don took Grier aside. At first she denied everything and suggested it might be some sort of underworld message from a business associate of Donald’s. Ellie heard that the resulting explosion of rage from her dad made Grier wet her pants; Donald didn’t hit her – he’d always skelped the children’s bums but stopped hitting the girls after they passed the age of about nine or ten – but Grier seemingly thought he was about to. She admitted it had been her.
Donald took the money for the re-laying of the lawn out of her allowance and told her she was getting away lightly. If she ever did anything that upset her mother like that again, she’d find her inheritance so reduced she’d struggle to buy a rocking horse.
‘Aye, she’s some kid,’ I said when Ellie first told me all this.
‘She’s frightening,’ Ellie said. ‘Fourteen-year-olds just don’t usually think that far ahead.’
‘Or use a combination of a Godfather reference and guerrilla horticulture in an elaborate and basically pointless form of revenge,’ I said. ‘I bet she’d make a great conceptual artist.’
‘We should be so lucky,’ Ellie told me. ‘Just pray she doesn’t go into politics.’
‘Grier said something weird the other day,’ I tell Ellie. ‘In the café, after we met on the beach?’
‘What?’
I tell her about Grier hinting Callum might have been pushed, rather than have jumped.
Ellie is silent for a disturbingly long time. I can’t read her expression at all. Eventually, in a flat voice, she says, ‘Well…there have been…Stuff’s been talked about. About Callum.’
‘Uh-huh?’
She shakes her head. ‘Let’s talk about something else.’
‘Okay.’
Only neither of us seems to be able to think of anything else to talk about, so we drive on in silence for some minutes.
Ellie turns the Mini onto a little single track road that leads up through some trees to – according to a sign – Tunleet Reservoir. I vaguely remember this, from when I was exploring on my moped. The Mini works its way up the twisting, deteriorating road, crosses a cattle grid, then crunches its way over the gravel of an otherwise deserted car park in front of a boarded-up stone waterworks building at the foot of a grassy reservoir wall, just sliding into shadow.
Ellie makes a little noise of approval. ‘Looks like we’ve got the place to ourselves.’
We have indeed. It feels almost disloyal to Ellie, but I experience a tiny frisson of relief. I was – despite everything – part expecting to find a collection of Rangies and oversize pick-ups parked here, and the Murston boys standing looking mean and tap-tapping the thick end of baseball bats into their meaty palms.
Ellie and I walk up the grassy slope back into the sunlight and along the stone summit of the dam wall to a metal bridge over the overflow at the eastern edge. Beyond, the reservoir stretches out to the south-west. The whole place can’t help reminding me of the smaller dam and reservoir on the Ancraime estate where Wee Malky died, though this loch’s much bigger and in higher, more open country, like something exposed, peeled back and offered to an evening sky of ragged clouds and glimpses of a watery-looking sun.
We walk along a path to a small promontory about the size of two tennis courts laid end to end, jutting out into the sun-bright, chopping water. At the end, on a slight rise, there’s a wooden bird hide: seven-eighths of an octagon with slits roughly at eye height cut into the undressed wooden logs. Low platforms underneath are probably for kids to stand on so they can see out too.
There are a couple of sturdy backless benches in the middle of the space. We spend a little while looking through the slits at a few ducks and coots and a family of six swans cruising by, white feathers ruffled like the water, then we sit on the benches, under a sky still clearing of cloud.
A skein of geese flies overhead. The birds start swapping position as they fly above us and the faint sound of honking – half comic, half plaintive – sinks down through the breeze to us. Ellie sits back, feet up on the chunky beams of the bench. She hugs her knees.
‘Do you ever feel like you’re just waiting to die?’ she asks, not looking at me.
‘Umm…not really, no,’ I tell her. But I’m thinking, Fuck me, this is a bit heavy.
‘No? Sometimes I feel like that,’ she says, ‘Sometimes I feel like I’ve seen it all before, been everywhere, done everything, experienced everything, and you start to think, What else is there except more of the same, only maybe worse?’ She looks at me. ‘Yes? No? Anything like that? Or just me?’
‘Well, something like that, so not just you. Not so sure about the wanting to die bit. Though I suppose some people—’
‘Not wanting to die,’ she says. ‘Just…waiting for it to happen, when it does. Like you’re already anticipating the end.’ Her face scrunches up. ‘Do you know how long we’re expected to live? I mean, our generation? We could live to a hundred, easy. A hundred!’ She shakes her head, hair flung about her, then settling deftly. ‘I feel I’ve lived a whole life already, Stewart, at twenty-five. I look at kids half my age, or even just ten years younger and I just feel so…so distant from them. Was I that annoying, that precocious, that stupidly sure of myself, that shallow when I was their age?’ She shakes her head. ‘But that life expectancy means another three lives on top of this one. More, in a way, because you don’t have to go through half of each one being a kid.’ A shrug. ‘Except more decrepit in the last one or two, towards the end. Incontinence, dementia, deafness, arthritis. Back to being as helpless as a child.’
I nod. ‘Always good to have something to look forward to. Though we might have really good replacement stuff by then. And robots, to look after us, if our – if people won’t.’
‘Yeah, but something’ll get us in the end.’
‘Probably cancer. Unless the robots turn on us, obviously. Personally I’m hoping to die in my eighties, relatively young and still vigorous, when the father of the sixteen-year-old twins I’m in bed with bursts in and puts a laser bolt through my head.’
‘But do you see what I mean? Sometimes I feel like I just want to keep my head down, never get beaten up or raped, never become a refugee or a war widow, never starve or have to bury my own children…If I ever…But, just get out of this life without being hurt any more…And that’ll feel like victory, like getting away with it? Do you understand? I mean, not that I’ve been badly hurt, not really—’
‘Yeah, well. Not for the want of me—’
‘No. I mean not compared to women who have been raped or tortured or watched their loved ones shot in front of them. Not compared to somebody who’s been beaten up every night or been burned with acid or had their ears and nose cut off for leaving a violent husband. Compared to that, what you did to me was nothing.’ She looks at me. It’s a challenging look more than a forgiving one, so I choose not to say anything. ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ she says. ‘It was still stupid, selfish, petty, unbearably insulting at the time, but …’
‘But you still took me to the station.’
She snorts. ‘Ha! You could say that was just me being selfish, as ever. I didn’t want to see them kill you or maim you, or even know that they had. Didn’t want that on my conscience. I wanted to prove I was bigger than you.’
‘Well, I’m still grateful,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll never know h
ow—’
‘Oh, it didn’t end there,’ she tells me. ‘I had to fight – I mean, shout and scream and threaten all sorts of grisly stuff, things I never thought I’d hear myself say…All to stop them sending somebody to London to do something horrible to you, or getting one of their underworld pals down there to take the job on, for a price or just as a favour.’
‘Jesus. I had no idea.’
And I really didn’t. Sure, when I moved down to London I kept my door locked and used the security camera when the bell went, and I didn’t walk down any dark alleys if I could avoid it, just in case a Murston brother came calling to administer a well-deserved beating, but apparently almost everybody in London does this risk-limitation stuff as a matter of course anyway.
‘Good,’ she says. ‘I’m glad you had no idea.’
I leave it a few moments, then ask, ‘Why did you do it?’
‘What, spirit you away? Protect you?’
‘Yeah. There must have been part of you wanted the boys to give me a good kicking, right then.’
She shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘No, there wasn’t. Not right then. I was in shock for all of about five seconds, then I just had this sudden, very…very cold, in a way, very adult feeling that, Well, that was that all over, there’d be no wedding, you and I were finished, I was on my own again, but, like, what could I do to keep the damage to a minimum? What was the best course of action? For me and everybody else? And getting you away as fast as possible seemed really obvious, just what needed to be done, for everybody’s good, not just yours. Even arranging a false trail, getting somebody – Ferg as it turned out – to order a taxi to the airport in your name just popped right into my head, right there. So that’s what I did.’
She looks at me with a strange expression, one I’m not sure I can read at all.
‘You want to know the truth?’ she says, her voice very languid, cool and poised. ‘I’ve rarely – maybe never – felt so alive, so in control, so good about myself, as I did that night.’
She looks away, sighs.
‘Didn’t last, of course. Cried myself to sleep for a week, raged and screamed at you, wished I had been more…vengeful. Used to fantasise, used to obsess about us meeting again and me walking up to you and slapping you so hard your teeth rattled. Put my reaction on the night down to shock, some misguided sense of loyalty to you or a residual need to protect you because I still loved you, or…Found an old shirt of yours, in my wardrobe,’ she says. ‘Still smelled of you.’ Another shake of the head. ‘Tore it, ripped it until it was practically confetti, until it looked like it had been through a shredder – and been out in the rain, because I was crying, howling so much – and while I was doing that, I really did wish you’d still been inside it, really did want you to have been the thing, the one that got torn to scraps and ribbons.’
She doesn’t look at me, just shakes her head, staring at the timber of the hide’s walls.
‘But I got through it. Things sorted themselves out. Things always do. We de-organised the wedding, I got on with my life, started going out again, meeting people. In the Toun and Aberdeen, and just chose not to hear the whispers and the murmurs, sympathetic or otherwise.’ She looks down, runs her hand along the worn smoothness of the bench. ‘Met Ryan. Well; started to see him as a man, not a boy? And so began another exciting adventure.’ She smiles at me. Ellie wears a watch. She checks it now. ‘Thought my stomach was trying to tell me something.’ She looks at me. ‘You hungry?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Want to come to mine for something to eat? It’ll just be pasta or stir-fry or something. You picked up any special dietary requirements while you’ve been in London?’
‘Thanks, I’d love to. And no; still omnivorous.’
At the same moment, though, I lose any appetite I had, as my belly contorts itself with another little tremor of fear. Or anticipation. I honestly don’t know myself.
We stand up. ‘This isn’t, you know, “coffee”,’ she tells me with a small smile. ‘You know that old thing?’
I manage a smile too. ‘From more innocent days.’
‘Just a meal, then I’ll take you back to your folks’.’
‘I know. Appreciated.’
‘Come on then.’
Going down the dark, grass slope, under skies turning orange and pink with the start of sunset, she slides her arm through mine. ‘Want to drive?’
‘Okay.’
‘No heroics? Nothing lairy?’
‘Promise.’
‘Deal.’ She hands me the Mini’s key.
So I drive us back to the converted mansion called Karndine Castle. I take it slow. It’s still not the smoothest of drives but that’s not my fault; the roads really are much more worn, rutted and potholed than I remember and there’s a lot of little jinks and sudden steering adjustments required. Respect to the girl; I hadn’t realised, earlier, how good a job Ellie was doing avoiding all this shit. I’m glad I’m not sixteen right now; this stuff’s bad enough in a car but potentially lethal if you’re riding a motorbike.
At the castle we climb a couple of grand, creaking old staircases – largely ruined by the fire doors and walls required for multiple occupation – and go on up a further curving flight to her apartment in a big, square, airy tower with three-sixty views over parkland, fields, forests and hills. No lurking Murston brothers leap from the shadows and pull me screaming down to some torture cellar. My insides relax a little and suddenly I’m hungry again.
She goes to the loo. I’m told to put some music on, make myself at home. What to choose? Be too trite to select something we both loved.
She was always a bit more into old Motown and R&B in general than I was. I go for R&B just as a genre and set it to play from the top, then quickly have to skip as the first track up is Amy Winehouse and ‘Rehab’. Given El’s day job that might sound contrived. Not to mention morbid. Next album. Angie Stone; nope, don’t know. Next: 75 Soul Classics; that’ll do. Archie Bell and the Drells with ‘Tighten Up’. Never heard of it. Also, I have absolutely no idea what the fuck a drell is meant to be.
Skip, skip. Aretha Franklin and ‘Think’. Finally.
I take a look about as the music starts to play. The furnishings are tasteful but sparse and there’s a careless, almost slapdash feel about the place, like she still hasn’t settled in yet or even entirely unpacked, though she’s been here over a year.
El reappears, minus fleece, with an open shirt, light blue, worn loose over her tee. ‘You can help if you like,’ she says.
‘Love to.’
The kitchen’s big; double-aspect to the south and the east. I sit at the breakfast bar as she sets a pan boiling for noodles and heats a wok for a stir-fry. I help her chop the veg, to be topped up by pre-prepared stuff from the freezer. We drink chilled green tea.
We eat in the kitchen, just nattering about old times and old friends, laughing now and again, as the monstrous shadow of the building is thrown longer and longer across the sheep-dotted parkland to the south-east. We clear up together and I am able to display my newly, London-acquired ability to stack a dishwasher. Mum would be so proud.
She puts the lights on later, and the kitchen glitters.
‘I better take you back,’ she says, after some very good espresso from a neat little machine. I have a much more impressive device back at the flat in Stepney – all gleamy red and chrome, with confusing dials, and more handles and levers than a person can operate at one time – which does no better.
‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘Thanks for all this.’
‘That’s okay,’ she tells me. She shrugs. ‘Sorry there’s no invitation to stay.’
‘Don’t be sorry. And don’t be daft. Are you crazy? Just all this has been more than I deserve. You’ve been very…forgiving.’
‘Yeah, well. If only that was the worst of my faults.’
‘Oh, just stop it.’
She looks at me through narrowed eyes. ‘You would if I did, though, wouldn’t you?’
‘What, invite me to stay the night?’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘Course I would,’ I tell her. I don’t think she’s actually going to, so I don’t bother telling her my nuts are quite possibly out of action – if I’ve any sense – for a day or two. ‘If that’s what you really wanted.’
‘I’m still not,’ she says, eyes flashing. ‘But, well …’
We’re both standing, maybe a metre apart, by the work surface. She looks down, picks with a thumbnail at something non-existent there, shakes her head. ‘I don’t know whether to feel flattered or just think, Men …’ She looks up at me. ‘I mean, I’m still not, but …’ She balls her hand into a fist on the work surface, and looks me in the eye. ‘That time Grier came to stay at your place, in London.’
‘Uh-huh?’
Ellie’s eyes narrow. ‘Anything happen?’
‘It was like the first night you and I slept together.’
She turns her head a fraction. ‘On the beach?’
‘Just sleep.’
‘She told me your hands were all over her.’
‘Is that what she told you?’
‘True, or not?’
‘Like you said, I’m not a blabber.’
‘Oh, yes, your famous policy: no kissing and telling.’
‘Yeah. Though I’m starting to think it’s just contrarianism on my part, not morality, because it’s what all the other guys do.’
‘And girls, as a rule.’
‘And girls. So, I just want to be different. And retain an air of mystery, obviously.’
She smiles slowly. ‘I’d still like to know. And you do sort of owe me, Stewart.’
‘Yeah,’ I breathe. ‘Guess I do.’ I spread my hands. ‘Anyway, I’ve already told Ferg. The loophole being, there wasn’t any kissing to tell about.’ El’s eyebrows go up at this point like she wants to protest at my double standards or something, but I talk on quickly. ‘It was the other way round: Grier was all over me. I mean not, nastily…Just, like, Oh, come on, and then, Okay, suit yourself…But …Well, there you go. We parted…a little awkwardly. I mean, still friends, or whatever we’d been to start with…but awkwardly. Didn’t see her again until this weekend.’