Espedair Street

by Iain Banks

  It's only recently I've started to worry about exactly why I'm doing this. Betty might be a mother figure to me. She doesn't look very similar, but there is a vague similarity. Worse, there's her man and my da.

  Because he too was in the Bar-L. For most of my childhood, in fact.

  You want to hear a sad wee story? I was five years old, having my birthday party in the flat in Ferguslie Park; my ma and four or five of my brothers and sisters. My ma had made a special effort for me, buying a cake and putting candles on it. I had a present, we all had paper hats, there were lots of bottles of skoosh to drink and that cake to eat, once I'd blown the candles out.

  Only I never got a chance to, because my da came home after being down the pub, and he'd heard a rumour — I don't know; probably just somebody making a joke or some thoughtless remark— that my ma had been seeing some other man. He practically kicked the door in, stormed through to the kitchen, and picked my ma out of the seat. Us kids just sat and watched, amazed, frightened.

  He held her by the chin, swiped her across the face with his other hand. I can still see her hair flying out, still hear the noise her head made as it cracked against the kitchen cabinet, smashing glass, sending cups and saucers flying. She fell, he picked her up and hit her again, shouting and swearing. She tried to beat him off, but he was too strong. He threw her down and started kicking her.

  We were all just young. We sat on our seats and screamed, tears streaming down our faces, howling. Steven, a year older than me, jumped off his seat and went to help ma; he was battered across the face and fell back against the formica table, spilling our lemonade. My da stood over ma, kicking her and shouting and throwing mugs and cups and plates down at her; she was crumpled against the cupboard under the sink, sobbing, arms over her head, all curled up like a baby, blood flowing from her head. My da kicked her a few more times, then heaved the kettle out through the window. He turned the table over, skelped me and the others he could reach round the ear, then walked out.

  We clustered round ma eventually, going down to where she lay on the lino, in that same position, and all of us were crying, close to hysterical.

  Happy fifth birthday.

  And I never did get to blowout my candles.

  My da reappeared three nights later, with some flowers he'd stolen from a garden, brimming with contrition and tears. He hugged my ma and swore he'd never raise his hand to her again ... but then he always did that.

  I must have taken it bad. I went to school that autumn, and did all right except that I wouldn't say or write or use the number five. For me, the numbers went; one, two, three, four, (blank), six, and so on. I wouldn't say the word, I wouldn't use the figure.

  It was a blank space, something I didn't want to think about.

  Took a school psychiatrist two years and a lot of patience (and tea and biscuits) to worm that out of me. I wouldn't think about it. I couldn't remember anything anywhere near my fifth birthday. I had terrible nightmares, about being chased by a lion or a bear or a tiger, and being beaten and mauled before I died/woke up, but I wouldn't remember anything about that birthday.

  By the time I was persuaded to dig up that memory, my da was safely in Barlinnie prison. Killed a man. Nobody in particular; just a guy who annoyed him one night in a bar, and who happened to have a thin skull. Hard luck really. He'd been a regular visitor to the local nicks since before I was born; for stealing, assault; always when he was drunk. Not really a violent man, just a stupid one, a weak one. He knew he became belligerent when he drank, but he always thought that next time it would be different and he'd stay in control. So he kept on getting drunk and he kept on getting violent and he kept on getting into fights and he kept on getting sent to jail.

  Here's my joke about my da. It so happens that he really did despise education; thought all students were wasters and poofs. He used to boast that he'd been to the University of Life (no, honestly; he really used to say that). Well my joke is; my da went to the University of Life... but he kept getting sent down.

  Funny,eh?

  He was eventually transferred to Peterhead prison, before Betty's husband went to Barlinnie, so they could never have met, which I think is a pity. He got out ten years ago. My ma took him back; by that time he was a wee, grey, broken man, and now he sits in their new house in Kilbarchan and stares at the telly all day. He won't touch drink or go out, and he goes to bed when my ma tells him. I don't know what they did to him to make him like that, but in my less charitable moments I can't help feeling it was no more than he deserved.

  But maybe I'm just a callous bastard.

  'Yer a bit pale yerself.'

  'Hmm, what?' Betty rescued me from my memories. 'Pale?'

  'Aye; ye look like ye've been in the jile yersel, so ye dae. An what's this?' Betty picked up one of my knuckle-skinned hands, inspecting it briefly then letting it fall back to the sheets. 'Didnae think you were a fighter. Whit ye been daein?'

  'Nothing.' I looked at the grazes on my fingers, and flexed them.

  'Aye ye have. Ah know whit fighter's hauns look like. Ye've been fightin, haven't ye? Whit wiz it aboot?'

  'I haven't been fighting. I was climbing something and I grazed my knuckles.' (But I'm starting to wonder; did McCann tell the truth? Did I hit somebody? What about after McCann left me; I went to get a take-away curry somewhere after we split up. What happened after that? Was I in a fight? I suppose I could have been ... But no; I don't know how to fight. A street-wise twelve year old could probably take me, even when I was sober. I'd remember something as traumatic as... as a fight... wouldn't I?)

  'Aye, ye fell doon the stairs. Pull the other wan; it's got bells on it.'

  I laughed. 'I didn't fall; I was climbing.'

  'Were ye trying tae break in somewhere?'

  'No; it was just... I was drunk. Just climbing. I wasn't trying to nick anything.' I put my hands under the sheets and lay on my back.

  I lay, she sat, silent for a while. I stared up at the high ceiling of the tower bedroom for a while. I was thinking. 'You know,' I said eventually, 'I've never stolen anything in my life.' I looked at her. 'Isn't that extraordinary?'

  'Bloody amazin,' Betty said, dark eyebrows lifting briefly. She leant down, subtracted another fag from the packet. 'Ye sure?'

  'I think so.' I nodded. How on earth did I get through my childhood and youth without nicking anything? All my friends did. Almost everybody I knew did. I didn't; I was frightened. I always imagined what it would be like getting caught; the guilt, the awful feeling of knowing you'd been told not to do something, having done it and then being caught and punished. The appalling sequentiality of it, as though it was all pre-ordained, already set up. I couldn't bear that. Fear stopped me. Fear of guilt. Fear of the sheer embarrassment. Fear of what my mother would say.

  So instead I ended up feeling guilty about not joining in with my friends.

  Betty lit another cigarette. I lay there thinking.

  I didn't think I'd even stolen any hearts. Not with my looks. I had my fans when I was Weird, and sure some of them were female, but that was different. It's a very dubious proposition indeed that fans actually love their idols; they worship them but they don't, can't, love them. It might feel like love, but have kids, adolescents, suddenly learned how to tell what is and isn't love? Jesus, I didn't know when I was that age. I don't even know very much more about it all now, and I've been trying to work it out for half my life.

  But even if you can call the glorification of the average star 'love', I wasn't even a normal idol. I think I was chosen by some kids as a sort of anti-hero figure, proof that you didn't have to be pretty to be in rock, but there was also a sort of adult-baiting perversity about making me an object of adulation. Kids stuck posters of me up on their walls to shock their parents. Weird leered down, mirror-shaded, wild-haired, scowl-mouthed, from thousands of bedroom walls, something menacing but contained; a safe cheap thrill and a kind of token totem of glossy threat. I displaced the prettier stars so that kid
s could make a point; as though, in its own small, modest way, my elevation to honorary stardom prefigured the half-sincere, half-pretended disgustrionics of punk.

  Or maybe I was a different sort of threat, and kids encountering parental resistance to their latest choice of clothes or decoration used me for comparison; you think this is bad; think yourself lucky I don't look like him. Could be even simpler of course; maybe they just found my big stupid face funny.

  No, I don't think I broke or stole any hearts. I didn't steal Inez'; that was safely under lock and key, somewhere deep inside her. It had been stolen once before, and she'd had to pay a lot — in exactly what currency of the heart, I never did find out — to get it back, battered and torn. It would never escape or be stolen again. She was in control from the start. We lived on her terms.

  Christine... no, she loved me for a while, or said she did, but it was as a friend, I think... Maybe even as a pet. That was the way I felt with her; like a big stupid clumsy dog; likeable and loveable, but too keen to please, too liable to jump up and slobber all over your face, and slap ornaments off tables with a wagging tail.

  There were others: Anthea, Rebecca, Sian, Sally, Sally-Ann, Cindy, Jas, Naomi ... but I don't think they really lost their hearts to me either, and I don't think I wanted them to, really. Too much responsibility. I wanted to be liked, not loved. Love was dangerous. Love could cripple, love could kill.

  But I never wrote songs like that. My songs, when they were about love, were fairly conventional, if a little more enlightened than the standard of the time (and one hell of a lot more enlightened and unobjectionable than what you'll find in the con�temporary rump of rock, heavy metal). The most I ever did was write sarcastically about love songs ('Love in Transit'; 'Well when the seas freeze, and the air leaves, will you really still be loving? Will you behave, past the grave? And are the ghosts of dead lovers still coming?'), which is better than nothing, but not vastly so.

  I was too conventional altogether. I ought to have spread my wings, flexed my muscles; all that shit. I could have written different songs, I could have been more radical, more adven�turous, more daring. Instead I just kept on churning out the same old stuff. Oh it changed a little as we went on, but not that much. Why did I keep doing that? It wasn't the money; after the first couple of albums, and finding the number of cover versions being done, I knew I could live quite comfortably for the rest of my life without writing another note, and that was really all that con�cerned me. So what was it? Why did I produce all those nice hummable songs?

  Because it was easy. Because it was expected of me. Because it was what people seemed to want. Because they always seemed to see more in what I was doing than I did, and the tunes I thought all very standard and conventional were praised as stretching the limits of the popular song, and creating a fusion of rock and classical styles. (What? My knowledge of classical music began and ended with the fact I didn't like it. I thought you fused rock and classical music by putting strings on a backing track... and we only ever used strings twice in about sixty songs... But if that's what people say, who am I to argue?)

  But I should have made the effort. I ought to have experimented more. I was writing the sort of songs I wanted to write, but I should have wanted to write different sorts of songs. I know me; it wouldn't have been difficult to interest myself in something a bit more challenging and original. If I'd done that, if I'd listened to different types of music, I'd have thought, 'Hey, I quite like this. This is okay... but I could do it better,' and at least have made the attempt. But I never got round to it.

  Betty's exhaled smoke made a grey-brown cloud across the tall window on the far side of the bright, warm room. Smoke rolled slowly against grey cloud. A few seagulls crossed the sky.

  There was a little more noise than usual from St Vincent Street; they were ceremonially opening the wonderful new Britoil building across the road, and the area was thick with police and security men.

  I had, reluctantly, allowed a policeman into the folly that morning, to check the roof of the tower for snipers. I don't think he liked the look of me any more than I liked the look of him, but at least I hadn't had a police marksman stationed on my roof.

  Betty sighed and stubbed her fag out in the saucer, exhaling smoke and lying back. Her breasts were slipping out again. The very tops of her aureoles were exposed above the sheet. She licked her lips, gazing vacantly at the far wall. She stretched, still not looking at me, put one of her arms back behind her, between her head and the white plaster wall; blonde hair spilled over her smooth forearm, gold on white. I lay there, thinking about what her mouth was going to taste like; faint disgust and extreme nostalgia combining.

  Maybe I could ask her not to smoke when she's with me; I'm the client after all. But I couldn't. That would put a barrier between us, make everything less natural. I'd no sooner ask her to do that than ask her to do some of the 'special' things some of her other clients requested.

  But I guessed I was a fool to pretend that my relationship with Betty was anything other than a commercial transaction. Can't buy me friendship. Well, I'd settle for sex and a chat. Even if the sex was rubberised (Betty is — very responsibly — worried about AIDS) and the chat only reminds me of things I'd rather forget.

  'Ah suppose you're gettin randy again?' Betty looked at me disapprovingly. I was surprised.

  'How did you guess?'

  'Two fags.' Betty put the saucer/ashtray down on the bare wooden floor and lay down, turning to me. 'You alwiz want it again aftir two fags.'

  I laughed, but uncertainly. Am I really so predictable? Betty put out one hand to me, rolled on her back.

  'Men,' she said, through a sigh. I kissed her.

  Her mouth tasted of smoke, her hair smelled of cheap perfume. A curiously comforting combination.

  'There's still a funny smell in here,' she said, unrolling a Durex down my dick.

  'You get to like it eventually,' I told her.

  She wrinkled her nose up, lay back again. 'You're weird,' she said. Then: 'Whit's so funny?'

  EIGHT

  There is no such thing as too much money. Anybody who has more money than they know what to do with has no imagination. You can always find new things to spend money on; houses, estates, cars, aircraft, boats, clothes, expensive paintings...

  Most really rich people usually find thoroughly appropriate ways of getting rid of some of their funds; they take up ocean-going yacht racing, they collect a string of racehorses, they buy newspapers and television stations or car companies, they fund prizes and scholarships or give their money and their names to hospital wings or new bits of art galleries. Purchasing a chain of hotels is a popular option; gives you places to stay all over the world, and you don't lose any time buying the hotel when you want to sack the manager.

  God almighty, offer me any sum of money from one pound to total control of the entire world economy and I could tell you just what I'd do with it, without even having to think very much.

  But only in an advisory capacity. Only theoretically. Don't expect me actually to do the things I'd say I'd do. I know now that, regardless of how much money I have, I'll stay much as I am. I had my fill of trying to be somebody else, of fulfilling my own fantasies and making them up for other people; tried that, been there.

  Mine turned bad on me, mine turned lethal, eventually.

  But I did my bit. I played my part in the great commercial dance; I accepted all that money and I spent it on all sorts of daft, stupid, useless, wasteful things, and quite a lot of drugs too. I had my flash car (even if I couldn't drive it) and I had my big house and my estate in the Highlands.

  The house was made up of equal parts of draughts and damp, and the estate was ten thousand acres of bog and scrappy heather. The only things I left planted there were wellington boots, sucked off by the clinging peat. There were deer on those there hills and fish in them there burns, but I didn't want to kill any of them, which made the whole enterprise a bit of a waste of time. I sold it
eventually, to people who drained the ground and planted trees. I made on the deal, of course. I bought my ma a house in Kilbarchan, and I put up half the money for the Community Rehearsal and Recording Suite we donated to Paisley Council.

  I even owned an island for a while; an inner Hebridean island I picked up ridiculously cheap at an auction in London. I had all sorts of wonderful plans for it, but the crofters resented me even though I meant well, and when I thought about it I guessed I'd have felt the same way if I'd been one of them; who did this lowlander, this Glesga Keelie, this youth of a 'pop' star think he was? Why, I didn't even have the Gaelic (I was going to learn the goddamn language, but I never got... oh never mind).

  They'd seen too many grand schemes come to nothing, too many promises disappear into the mists, and too many owners spend all their time somewhere else more comfortable and sunny. They were a surly and unfriendly bunch, but they had a point; I sold the island to them as soon as my accountants had worked out a way of writing it off against tax. Lost a bit on that one, but you can't win them all.

  So I've done all that, and I got fed up with it. My dreams came true, and I discovered that once they did, they were no longer dreams, just new ways of living, with their own problems and difficulties. Maybe if I'd been working on new dreams while the old ones were coming true I could have kept going, heading for even greener hillsides, even newer pastures, but I guess I just ran out of material, or I used it all up in the songs.

  That might be it. Maybe I used up all my dreams in my songs so that I had none left for myself. That would be ironic, almost tragic, because at the time I thought I had perfect control; I thought I was being clever, using my songs, using my dreams, to find out more about myself... a shame, really, that what I found out just wasn't worth the finding.