Espedair Street

by Iain Banks

  'Yeah; now.' Balfour said.

  I shook my head. 'No way.' I handed him back the pipe. We finished that, then he brought out a small leather case from his jacket, hanging over the back of the chair. Inside, there was a mirror, a razor blade, and a little snuff box. I regarded this lot dubiously.

  Ten minutes later: ' Ah, what the hell; okay. Let's race!'

  'Bastard!'

  'Ten-eight. My race, I believe.'

  'Bastard! You weren't even trying the first time!'

  'Not really. Ha ha.'

  'I'm still not going up in that plane with you. I'm too tall to die.'

  'Na; I've gone off that idea myself. Let's get drunk instead.'

  'Now that,' I said, crossing my arms, 'is more like it.'

  It was late at night and we'd almost finished the bottle of Glenmorangie. I think it was still the first bottle but I wasn't sure. We were in a room that had been converted into a small private cinema, where Davey had been watching some stunningly tasteless Swedish porno movies and I'd been listening to the Pretenders on the headphones and building joints for something to keep my hands busy. After a while I realised I was dropping more dope into the darkness than I was managing to get into the numbers, so I stopped rolling and started smoking, blowing greyblue clouds into the path of the projector beam until Davey told me to stop and handed me a can of strong lager .

  I remember drinking that, and then the room went dark; Davey dragged me, still smoking I think, and definitely giggling, from the seat. The mansion seemed very bright after the cinema; I grabbed a pith helmet from a bust in an alcove at the top of the stairs and pulled the hat down over my eyes as we marched arm in arm down the stairs. I stumbled about at the bottom, bumping into things I couldn't see and laughing, then Davey pulled me out into the fragrant air of a summer's night.

  'Now what?' I said, craning my head back and trying to see out of the bottom of the pith helmet.

  'Drive around the estate,' Davey said, shoving me into the back of the Roller. 'The three chimneys tour. I've only done it twice and I want to see if I can improve my time.'

  'Three chi... oh hell, whatever,' I breathed, collapsing back in the seat and staring out the rear window at the darkness. 'Wake me up when we get back.'

  The Roller purred, and we set off. I lay looking at the ceiling for a while, and must have been dozing at least when we stopped. I looked over the back of the front seat to see we were parked on grass in front of a large dark building, and Balfour was preparing a couple of very hefty lines of coke on a mirror balanced on the tray of the Roller's opened glove box. I pushed the helmet back, ogled the lines of white crystals and said, 'That it? We done it yet?'

  'Not yet,' Davey said, snorting one line through a section of plastic straw and then handing me the straw and mirror as he sat sniffing and snorting and breathing hard, staring at the tall building in front of us. 'And don't spill it, he said.

  Unnecessarily; I'd already disposed of the stuff, though I'd done the lot up one nostril and was feeling oddly imbalanced as a result. I lay back down again to wait for the effect, but Balfour dragged me out of the car and we stumbled across the grass to open a large door and then crash around a bit inside the unlit building, our only illumination coming from a torch Balfour held. I cracked my head on something and was very glad of the pith helmet.

  'Careful!' Balfour said, and opened a door; I clambered up into what felt like a car interior, still too stupefied to work out what was going on. I lay back across a couple of seats and closed my eyes.

  The realisation hit at exactly the same time as the coke, and at the same time as a powerful engine — much louder than the Roller's whispering motor — burst into life. I clawed and fought my way upright as we bumped across the grass; I slipped on something and fell to a thrumming floor, my helmet coming off and rolling away in the darkness. I felt for it, retrieved it, jammed it back on and headed forward to where I could dimly see Davey strapping himself in, lit by the lights from the dials and controls on the dash in front of him.

  'We are!' I howled, hardly able to believe it was really happening, that even Balfour would be so insane. 'You — We — This really is...' I spluttered, then was thrown back as we accelerated. Balfour clicked lights on, and I saw the airstrip in front of us. 'No!' I shouted.

  'Shut up and sit down,' Davey said calmly, peering at some dials. We leapt forward again, heading down the field. I looked for a door handle.

  'You're mad,' I told him. 'Stop this! You bastard! Let me out!'

  'Will you stop shouting?' Davey said, and pressed a stop-watch into my shaking hands. 'How can I concentrate when you're shouting like that?' The plane powered down the grass, bucking and heaving on the uneven ground.

  I gave up looking for a handle in the darkness — I could never find the door handles in cars, so I knew I'd no chance in a plane and threw myself over the seat at Balfour. I managed to get one hand to his throat. 'Let me out, you mad son of a bitch! I'll kill you! I'm not kidding; I'll kill you now; I'm not letting you take me up in this thing!'

  'Look, stop being melodramatic, will you?' Davey said reasonably, and detached my hand from his neck without looking at me. 'I'm about to take off; you're distracting me, know what I mean?'

  'Take off?' I screamed, and threw myself back into what I imagined was the comparative safety of the rear seats. I lay there quivering, backside stuck in the air, hands over the pith helmet, but the plane didn't tip back and soar; it slowed, and made a sudden turn which pressed me (still whimpering) hard against one side. Then the engine roared, I was thrown against the backs of the seats, and the bucking and heaving increased dramatically in both frequency and amplification. 'What... what happened?' I shrieked over the racket.

  'Oh, I wasn't really taking off before; I was just taxiing to the end of the field,' Davey explained in a reasonable voice.

  'Bastard!' I scrambled to my feet and threw myself forward again, grabbing at the back of Balfour's head and just missing.

  I saw him flinch and duck and heard him say, 'Now I'm taking off.'

  'Aargh!' I shouted. The aircraft's nose reared up; a line of lights beneath us fell away, the blurred ground disappeared, some trees flicked into and out of sight just like that, and I was thrown back again as we climbed.

  I froze. I went into some sort of temporary catatonic state, my hands clawed round the back of the seat beside the pilot, my eyes fixed staring straight ahead, my body — even my heart, it seemed stopped, fixed, stalled.

  'Hey, you dropped the watch; here.' Balfour reached over to me and pressed the watch into my stiffened fingers. I was staring into the starless dark beyond the steeply tipped windscreen, my teeth vibrating in time to the labouring engine. Davey adjusted some controls. 'Sit down, Danny. You'll be more comfortable.'

  I found my way into the co-pilot's seat. I got the harness on somehow. I could see lines of light beneath us; the sodium yellow of streets in towns and villages, and the tiny white spears and dim rubies of a motorway. I stared, transfixed. Then I looked over at Balfour. He was smiling, looking quite relaxed and happy. If I could have made it out over the engine, I bet I'd have heard him humming to himself.

  He'd had less than I had, I told myself. He wasn't drinking as much as me and he had less dope and it doesn't affect your reaction time so much anyway and besides the coke should counteract it a bit... shouldn't it? I stared at the stop-watch in my hand as we swept out across a stretch of darkness I suspected was water, heading for an isolated bunch of bright lights in the distance.

  'You all right?' Davey asked me.

  'Ha ha! Fine!' I said. I looked at the stop-watch again. Then I dropped it and put both hands round Balfour's throat. He looked mildly surprised but didn't take his hands off the controls in front of him. 'Take us down. I may still kill you, but take us down right now; hear?'

  Davey tutted. 'Look, you've dropped the watch again. I'll need you to work it in a few minutes. Will you behave yourself? You're getting excited; I knew I shouldn't have g
iven you so much cocaine.' He shook his head; I could feel his neck move in my hands.

  I realised I was dealing with a complete madman impervious to any reasoning or threats, and let go of his neck. I resigned myself to my death and picked up the stop-watch again. 'Fair enough. Just say when.'

  'That's more like it.'

  'But if we ever do get down intact, I'm still going to kill you.'

  'There you go again,' he told me, settling himself in his seat and staring forward. 'Just calm down. Get that watch ready.' I stared forward as well.

  We were approaching what looked like a huge factory of some sort; a gigantic building lit from inside, its many outbuildings blazing yellow under sodium lights; from the centre of the building a huge chimney rose, hundreds of feet high and lined with levels of red lights like vast necklaces of LEDs. We were flying just under the level of its summit. Smoke twisted lazily from it, and ghostly white steam drifted from bits of the brightly lit buildings beneath. We were flying straight at the chimney stack.

  'What the hell,' I breathed, 'is that?'

  'Kingsnorth power station,' Davey said, still aiming us straight for the vast concrete tower. 'Ready with the watch?'

  I watched the chimney get closer and closer. We weren't climbing over it; we were at least fifty feet beneath the summit, and on a collision course. I pressed back in my seat, eyes goggling. 'I said, ready with the watch?' Davey said, annoyed.

  'Yes,' I croaked weakly. I closed my eyes as the chimney, almost filling the screen in front of me now, came up to splash us like a midgie against a flyswat.

  'Now!' Davey yelled. I felt my thumb press down on the watch; the plane flipped on one side, I was forced hard down into my seat and the engine roared. When my eyes opened again we were back on an even keel and the power station was behind us. We were heading across darkness for another distant set of lights and another red-speckled tower. The light-bright field and flickering flares of a big oil refinery glittered away to one side. I couldn't swallow and my eyes were stuck. Everything had dried up.

  'One down,' Davey said happily, and nudged me, grinning. 'Watch going all right?' I nodded dumbly and stared with appalled fascination at the next power station, as it drifted slowly closer.

  We rounded that chimney too, then another. I found my eyes kept closing of their own accord whenever those massive concrete barrels filled my sight. Each time we banked, I was pressed into my seat, and we passed the smoke stack. I had no idea just how close we were coming each time, but I swear I heard our engine echoing off the concrete on the third pass.

  We headed back for Kingsnorth and finally swung round it again; I clicked the watch off as we dropped suddenly, sickeningly towards the dark waters of the Medway.

  'Got to do a bit of low-level stuff now,' Davey explained. 'Just in case we've been spotted on anybody's radar; don't want them to know where we land, do we?'

  I closed my eyes. We rose, fell, my stomach going light then becoming very heavy in turns. I felt sick. We banked left, right, left again, then kept on doing that, and rising and falling as well.

  I waited to die; I waited for a gasp or a shout from Balfour, for a shudder as we clipped trees and then nose-dived; for the bright flash of pain and flame, for oblivion, and as I waited I tried to tell myself it wasn't really happening and I was just having the most awful nightmare of my life, in bed, in our hotel in London, beside Inez, or Christine, or better yet between the two of them... any second now I'd wake and I'd be all right. I told myself even Balfour wasn't this crazy, not to really do this, not really...

  Unless he'd taken my brief liaison with Christine harder than I'd thought; shit, I hadn't thought of that! Was that it? Was he going to nose-dive now and kill us both, or throw me out over a sewage farm, or did he just not care whether we crashed or not? Jesus; I'd thought it was all settled; Davey and Christine were back together, Davey had stopped the smack, Inez and I were going out again, even if things weren't totally back to normal yet ... He couldn't have been lying about not being angry, could he?

  Meanwhile I was pulled this way and that; left and right and down and up, as if I was being tipped forward, thrown back, and stood on one side and then the other...

  I opened my eyes, looked out. What could I see?

  Just lights.

  What could I feel? Like I was being tipped one way and the other, like I was being thrown forward and angled back.

  Suddenly I remembered what Balfour had bought along with the plane to help him learn how to fly. I leaned over to him with my fists clenched and screamed, 'You son of a bitch!' at him. I unclipped the harness and got shakily to my feet as we flew along a light-lined valley. I moved to the door, trying to keep my feet as the cabin rolled and dipped. 'You total bastard!' I shouted. 'You can stop that now; turn it off! I've worked it out, asshole!' Balfour was twisting in his seat to look at me every few seconds or so, his face puzzled and worried. He shouted something to me but I couldn't hear for the noise of the 'engine'.

  I found the door handle eventually. I waited for Davey to turn round again and then gave him the finger. 'Bastard!' I yelled again. 'You can stop it now; I know. Very convincing, and I was suitably scared, but I know it's a goddamn ...' I pulled on the handle and yanked the door open.

  I didn't get to say 'simulator' because next thing I knew I was hanging half out of the plane holding precariously on to the door handle with one hand and staring down through a hard bellowing wash of air at dark fields tearing by a hundred feet below. Something white fell out of the door and went fluttering and tumbling away, falling behind us and then disappearing in a stand of trees. I didn't even have the breath to shout or scream. The plane tipped on one side and I fell back into the cabin again, hauling the door closed behind me. I lay across the seats once more, quivering with aftershocks of utter, mortal terror.

  'Danny,' Balfour said in an exasperated voice. 'That was silly, and you just lost my log book, for Christ's sake. I'll have to start a new one now. I mean, what if somebody finds it and connects it with the Three Chimneys tour? I could be in serious trouble, Daniel... Jesus, man, you're more trouble than I thought. Just sit there and don't move until we land, okay?' He sounded quite upset. He belched, and I heard him muttering to himself.

  I lay across the seats, paralysed and dumb and quietly pissing my pants.

  Balfour must have seen the funny side of it all as he came in to land, because he was laughing so much as we taxied in he missed the hangar and crashed the aircraft into the Roller, breaking the prop, decapitating the silver lady and severely denting the motor's bonnet.

  'Oh, shitbags,' he said, as the engine died and splinters of the propellor fell back and thumped on the roof of the plane's cabin.

  I might have laughed then, but I was hanging out the door again by that time, and laughing as you throw up is as technically difficult as it is respiratorially unwise.

  I'd dropped the stop-watch out the door when I opened it in midair, too, so Davey never did find out if he'd beaten his own record for the power station circuit.

  It was the last time he made that journey.

  Five weeks later, involuntarily true to my word, in Miami, I really did kill him.

  ELEVEN

  'Dani-elle, ma man! How the devil are you?' Richard Tumber bounded up the steps from the hired Ferrari parked at the kerb; he stood on tiptoe and put one arm round me. 'Heyyyyyy ... good to see ya again...' He punched me on the shoulder. 'Weird!'

  I looked up and down the street, hoping not too many people were witnessing this. They weren't; it was a cold and showery Sunday and respectable folk were at their dinner. 'Rick,' I said. 'Hi. Come in; how are you?'

  'Magic, me boy; magic.' He stepped in through the main doors and looked round the folly. 'Still living in the mausoleum, eh?' He clapped his kid-gloved hands together and rubbed them, nodding and clicking his tongue as he inspected the interior of St Jute's. The pigeon chose that moment to flutter briefly from one high rafter to another, cooing in the slightly panic-stricken
manner of a bird that hasn't seen a proper meal in three days. 'Hey.' Tumber grinned, seeing the animal. 'You got a pet!'

  'Sort of,' I agreed, and helped him off with his fur coat. Underneath, there was a very baggy suit that looked sloppily made but which I didn't doubt had cost him a laughable amount of money. Silk shirt, natch. Bow tie. He carried a very slim leather briefcase (when I first knew him, his briefcase was aluminium) and he wore graded Porsche glasses. I'd have staked money on the briefcase containing a Filofax, up until a few months ago at least, when I heard they were starting to be regarded as... well, Out, dear (Jeez-uz).

  'You okay?' he asked, frowning at me.

  'Fine,' I lied.

  'You look... peaky. What was it you used to call it? "Peely-wally", yeah?'

  'Yeah.' I shrugged, put a hanger inside the fur coat and hung it on a clothes' rack of cellophane-wrapped Bulgarian suits. 'Just a hangover.'

  'You been getting... "steaming", eh?' He grinned, punching me on the other shoulder.

  I nodded. Rick has the approach to professional and personal acquaintances of one of those magazinettes that come with credit card statements and colour supplements; he likes to personalise things, as standard. Three Gold— Tooled Initials... Your Name Here... so whenever he meets me I'm treated to a barrage of West-Coast Scottishisms in spoken inverted commas, for at least as long as it takes for him to think he's put me at my ease.

  We sat in my best chairs, near the sound system and the electronic gear at the back of the pulpit, far enough downwind from the space heater to be able to talk without raising our voices, but still within its draught of warm, paraffin-scented air. Tumber took off his jacket and put his feet up on a loudspeaker. He'd accepted a small glass of Stolichnaya. He lit up a black and gold Sobranie and looked serious. I waited for him to say something. He nodded once, gave a sort of half-smile with one side of his mouth, pursed his lips.

  I fiddled with my glass, wondering what was going on.