Walking on Glass

by Iain Banks

  He started to panic at the thought, and wound his way through the books to the door of the room. He locked it, and took his Sunday-best safety helmet down from the overloaded peg behind the door. He put the hat on, and felt better. He took a different route back to the chair by the window and sat down again. What would he do now? Go for a drink. That was what you did when you left work, or when you had lots of money. He took the money out. It was mostly in ten pound notes; there were lots. He looked at the big brown rectangles of paper; the Queen looked nice, the way he liked to think his mother must have looked. Florence Nightingale, on the back, on the other hand, reminded him of some of the nurses at the home he'd gone to.

  He put the money away, stuffing it into his back pocket. He looked round his room, over the walls of books, the pile of clothes by the side of his bed, the hunchback of jackets and shirts and coat and ties on the back of the door, the large wardrobe where he'd kept all his books originally, and still had lots of them stored in shoeboxes, the small bedside cabinet with a plastic glass of water and his latest book lying on it. The room had an old, blocked-off fireplace, where his two-bar electric fire sat. On the mantelpiece was his collection of car mascots.

  There were five Jaguars, eight Rolls-Royce silver ladies, two old Austin signs, and a varied collection of leaping salmon, racing horses, pedigree dogs and one cricketer, wielding a bat. He still, to his disappointment, had no Bentley mascots. He kept the Mercedes signs in a big jar at one end of the mantelpiece. He wasn't really bothered about Mercedes signs, but somehow his original reason for hacksawing the mascots off cars - his own safety - had been complicated by the collector's urge to add depth and breadth to the collection.

  Originally he had taken offence at Jaguar mascots; the leaping cat, no longer on every car, but still in actual, solid form on quite enough, seemed designed to disembowel him. The silver lady was little better, and some of the custom-made special mascots were even worse. He thought they were illegal, but when he went to the Police Station in Upper Street to complain that people were riding around in these lethally armed cars, the bored-looking sergeant had just looked at him and eventually said well there wasn't a lot he could do about it and sir would just have to look both ways before crossing the street (Steven had been disappointed about that, but on the other hand he was most impressed that a policeman had called him "sir'). They weren't usually helpful, and of course it was obvious that at least some of them must be in on the whole secret of Grout's Torment, but even so, you couldn't help but admire them and look up to them, and to have one call him "sir" was rather good. He went back a few weeks later to report the theft of a bicycle he didn't even own, just so that he could be called "sir" again.

  Taking the car mascots was often dangerous. Several times he had almost been caught by enraged owners when they heard some noises in the street outside, in the darkness, or heard feet crunch in a twilit driveway.

  Steven had stuck to the immediate area at first; Islington, especially Canonbury, and the quiet streets around Highbury Fields. Then the pickings became leaner as people were careful not to leave their cars in shady spots and parked them only under lamp-posts, or were more conscientious about putting their cars in their drives or garages, and locking the gates.

  Steven, hacksaw in pocket, had accordingly widened his area of operations, and now was liable to strike anywhere from the City to Highgate, capturing jaguars, kidnapping silver ladies and pocketing stars. He certainly felt a lot safer walking about the streets, holding his breath between the parked cars and trucks, keeping an eye out for low walls and raised doorsteps he could also use to escape from the lasers in the passing vehicles, knowing that a good few of those growling death-traps had been made that little bit safer thanks to him.

  Then he had started to think about bikes; motorbikes could be pretty deadly, too. They were usually driven by suicidal exhibitionists, and just the sound of them had given Steven some terrible frights in the past, and made him hate the people who rode them.

  So he'd started putting sugar in their fuel tanks; that was what he'd been doing the previous evening, down in Clerkenwell. He'd been out until two in the morning, and had been chased by a security guard who'd seen him fiddling with a bike's fuel tank in a car park. Steven had been very nervous and excited when he got back, and even though he felt very tired he had taken a long time to get to sleep. Maybe that was why he'd been on a short fuse this morning.

  Well, he didn't care; that was their problem, back at the depot. They'd see, when those holes in Upper Street which he had repaired were still intact after all theirs had opened up again. Let them worry about all that. He didn't regret sugaring bikes" tanks and scalping car mascots in the least. He wasn't even just doing it for himself, after all. Although of course he was the most important person, he was doing everybody else- all these people walking in Packington Street, for example - a favour as well.

  Steven hung the small towel on the back of the chair by the window. He looked through the pile of clothes hung on the back of his door until he found a cleanish shirt, and put it on. There was a can of Right Guard under his bed which he used to spray under his arms when he remembered, but it had run out last week and he kept forgetting to get a new one. He tucked his shirt into his trousers.

  He took his Evidence Box out from the bedside cabinet and went to sit with it by the window. The Evidence Box was an old cardboard Black and White whisky case Steven had picked up somewhere. In it he kept a small radio-cassette recorder, a piece of estate agent's literature and a school atlas, along with dozens of fading yellow newspaper cuttings.

  The cuttings were of the Strange But True type; fillers and funnies, supposedly True Stories which Steven could tell were complete nonsense; made-up rubbish they taunted him with, trying to get him to stand up and challenge them, call their bluff. But he wasn't going to be so predictable or stupid; he would keep quiet, and he would collect the evidence. One day he might have a real use for it, but in the meantime it was reassuring.

  He took out the cassette recorder, switched the tape on. He had recorded the noise of the so-called "static" from the Short Wave band. But he knew what it really was; he listened to the grinding, deep, continuous roaring noise, and he recognised the sound of the War's eternal heavy bombers of the air. He was amazed that nobody else had noticed it. Those were engines, that wasn't static. He knew. This was a Leak, a tiny slip they had made which let part of reality slip through into this false prison of life.

  He breathed deeply, looking out down Packington Street, trying to remember or imagine what those droning, immense-sounding noises represented; through what limitless airs and atmospheres did those huge craft power, what was their seemingly endless mission, what was the appalling cargo they carried, what dreadful enemy would suffer beneath them when they arrived over their target. He switched the tape off, rewound it.

  The next piece of evidence was trickier. It was a sheet of paper with house-buying details on it; the evidence of the leak came from the name of the firm. Hotblack Desiato was the name of the estate agents, and Grout knew that was a Leak. He was sure he could recall something about that name which related back to his previous life, his real life in the War. What that name actually meant, whether it was a name at all, and if so that of a friend or enemy or place or thing, or whether it was a phrase, order, instruction or what, he could not remember, no matter how hard he thought about it, or how hard he didn't think about it and just waited for his subconscious to come up with the right answer. But it meant something, he was sure. Something had happened to him, sometime, which related to that name.

  Oh, and as usual, they were very clever, very subtle. If the name was not a Leak then it was a deliberate ploy by the Tormentors to taunt him, tease him. They had put that firm of estate agents in the area he lived in just so that he could keep seeing their signs and so be constantly distressed and frustrated by his inability to remember exactly when and where he'd heard the name before. Anyway, it was more evidence, even if it turned
out just to be a Leak and they hadn't meant it. He folded the paper up again and put it back in the box.

  He took out the atlas, opened it at a map of the World. He had drawn red-ink circles round places like Suez and Panama, Gibraltar and the Dardanelles.

  He snorted with contempt at their ridiculous attempt to design a reasonable-looking planet. Who did they think they were kidding? Ho-ho, so the continents just happen to link on to each other, do they? Very handy. Any idiot could see it was all too carefully arranged to be natural. It had been designed. Whether he really was on a planet with those shapes on it he didn't know; he suspected not, but it didn't matter. Even if, as he rather suspected, the "world" actually came to an end just outside Greater London, that wasn't the point. The point was that they were trying to get people - him - to believe this travesty of a map. The contempt they must feel for him, expecting him to accept this! It made him boil just to think of it. But they had made a serious mistake; they had underestimated him, and they would not break him, certainly not while he had evidence like this to back him up. He turned the atlas to the pages on South East Asia... yes, the island of Celebes still looked like a letter from some alien alphabet (and the more he thought about it, the more familiar it looked, too, so that sometimes he almost thought he knew what it represented, or the sound it made, if his human throat or brain was capable of forming such a foreign sound). He closed the atlas, smiling to himself and feeling better; justified and reassured. He put everything back in the Evidence Box and put it back in his bedside cabinet, where it fitted in neatly, then he made his way carefully back to the window, dosed it, and threaded his way back through the walls of books to the door, making sure that he had his door keys and his money in his pockets.

  He stopped at the door, faced with the choice of keeping his good hat on or putting on his usual safety helmet. He decided to keep the good one on. It was a lovely deep-blue colour, with almost no scratches or abrasions on it at all, and a nice real leather sweatband bit inside the front part of the inner webbing. Why not keep it on? Celebrate today. It was his birthday, after all. He wondered if it was worthwhile telling Mrs Short it was his birthday. It didn't seem right that nobody else knew. At least if he told Mrs Short there would be somebody to wish him "Happy birthday" or "Many happy returns'. That would be nice. Still undecided, he left the room, after first checking that he hadn't left the fire on or left a plug in a socket, or left the light on.

  He didn't encounter Mrs Short on the way down the stairs, and found this something of a relief. He was walking quietly through the gloom of the front hall towards the door to the street when Mrs Short's door opened suddenly and she was there in front of him in the hallway, huge arms folded, the light reflected on her taut-skinned forehead.

  "Aow, there you are, Mr Grout. Off to the dentist, then?"

  "What?" Steven said foolishly, then remembered. "Oh, yes, yes that's right. Umm..." He closed his mouth so that Mrs Short couldn't see into it, not that he expected her to be able to see anything in the darkness, but one never knew.

  Mrs Short said, "Don't suppose you'd like to give me my rent money now, would you, Mr Grout, in case I don't see you for a few days?"

  Steven thought about this. Not seeing Mrs Short for a few days. What a pleasant thought. But unlikely. He shook his head and said. "No, not just now, Mrs Short; I haven't got enough money just at the moment. I'll have it on... Friday," he lied, starting to feel hot again. They were using the microwaves on him even now, even here! He had one of his hands behind his back, the fingers crossed because he was telling lies.

  "Well, if you're sure, Mr Grout," Mrs Short said, then looked down at his trousers. "Only I thought I saw this bulge in your rear pocket, didn't I?" An" me bein" me I just naturally assumed that it was pay."

  Steven felt his eyes widen. He didn't know what to say; Mrs Short had guessed! She must know! In fact - of course! - they'd told her. She had probably been informed by the depot immediately after he'd left. That was probably one of the first things that Mr Smith's secretary had done. Idiot! Why hadn't he guessed this?

  Well, he would just have to brazen it out, he decided. There was no point in trying to come to some sort of compromise now. It was all or nothing. Mrs Short might know, but it seemed that it was not in the rules that she was allowed to tell him she knew, and she could only imply it.

  "Friday," Steven said, nodding briskly. "Money on Friday. Definitely." He edged towards the welcoming opening of the door, shaking his head as he passed her. She blinked rapidly at him. He had often wondered if this was some sort of code. He cleared his throat, said, "That's all right, thank you." He patted his back pocket; "Dental card," he explained. Mrs Short nodded sympathetically.

  He was out! He stood on the doorstep, almost in the street, and he'd escaped. "You mind how you go now, Mr Grout, won't you?"

  "Oh yes," he said, and turned, took a deep breath, and set off down the street.

  "Sure I can't dust your room while you're out, Mr Grout?" Mrs Short shouted from the still-open doorway when Steven was about ten yards away. He felt himself seize up; his legs stopped, his shoulders came up as though to tense for a falling blow. He turned round in the street, looked back at the stoutly smiling face of Mrs Short, and shook his head violently. There were no parked cars for about thirty metres; traffic was grumbling down the street in a ragged stream. He shook his head again.

  "What's that, Mr Grout?" Mrs Short shouted, and put one chubby hand, cupped, to her ear. He stared at her, widening his eyes, shook his head as violently as he dared. "Can't hear you, Mr G," Mrs Short called to him. He was starting to run out of oxygen?-

  He put his head down and walked back to the doorway, stood up out of the level of the laser-axles, and said straight into Mrs Short's face, "No, thank you, Mrs Short. Please don't dust my room. I prefer to do it myself."

  "Well, if you're sure," Mrs Short smiled.

  "Oh, completely," Grout assured her. He waited there, to see if she would close the door, but she didn't. He took a deep breath, said "Goodbye," and turned away. He walked quickly, towards Upper Street, and had done perhaps fifty metres before he heard Mrs Short, far in the distance, shout at him. He didn't turn round, but heard her distant scream of "Byeee!" with a sort of nauseous relief.

  SPOTLESS DOMINOES

  They sat on the balcony outside the games room of the Castle Doors. Inside was a blaze of light. The snow on the balcony had all melted and a warm, moist, salty breeze blew around them constantly, from the room over the balcony and out into the open air. Quiss and Ajayi sat with light tunics on, over the small wood-filigree table, shuffling plain white sticks of ivory over the cut surface.

  It was now too hot in the games room. The boilers of the Castle of Bequest had been repaired only about thirty of their days ago, and according to the seneschal there was still a bit of "fine tuning" to be done.

  From where she sat, Ajayi could see the quarries. Small black figures moved up the snow-covered paths and roads to the mines and quarries, and carts trundled to and fro; the ponderous, laden ones disappearing from her view behind an outcrop of - she peered, narrowing her eyes to try and see better - well, either rock or the castle; she couldn't tell.

  The rest of the landscape was as near-flat and uniform as ever. A gust of warm air from the baking heat of the games room swirled round her, then unwound itself again. She shivered briefly. No doubt all this heat, and the salt, was playing even greater havoc with the castle's plumbing than usual, and before too long, once they did get things back to normal, and an acceptable level of light and heat, the whole system would break down again, probably for even longer. In the meantime they were playing a game called Spotless Dominoes, in which plain pieces of ivory had to be arranged in certain linear patterns.

  Neither she nor Quiss had any idea when they were going to finish the game, or even how well they were doing at any stage, because although they knew that in the original version of the game there were spots on the ivory pieces, their pieces were blank. T
hey had to lay them out in lines each time they played, hoping that the small table with the red glowing jewel at its centre on which they played would recognise that the spot-values it had -randomly, of course - assigned to the pieces before each game were such that the pattern Quiss and Ajayi produced was a logical one; one in which, if all the spots suddenly appeared on the surfaces of the dominoes, the pattern would make sense; a one would be matched with a one or a double one, a two with a two or a double two, and so on. It was the most frustrating game they had played yet, and they had been playing it for one hundred and ten days.

  She deliberately did not think about how long they had been in the castle. It didn't matter. It was one instant of exile, that was all. She had no idea how much of it she would remember if... when she returned to her post in the Therapeutic Wars. It was a rare punishment and not one that people who had had to experience it were likely to talk very much about even if one did bump into them, so although she, like Quiss, had always known of the existence of the castle, what happened to those who successfully passed through it was not recorded.

  No, it did not matter how long they were here, as long as they did not despair or go mad. They just had to keep playing the games and trying the many different answers, and eventually they would get out.