Espedair Street

by Iain Banks

He checked out, paid his bill, and set off for the airport in the GTS. I walked back through a sudden, thin sunlit shower of sleet to St Jute's. The policemen came half an hour later.

  Tommy was in custody; they'd gone to his parents' address to question him about the theft of a quantity of whipped-cream containers; he'd assaulted a police officer and resisted arrest.

  Detective Constable Jordan took my statement. I said I hadn't known the cans were stolen, but that I had let Tommy snort the gas; how this fitted in with Tommy's own story, I had no idea. DC Jordan cautioned me and told me that charges might be brought against me at some point in the future. They'd be in touch.

  I think they might have searched an ordinary house for drugs, but St Jute's must have looked a little daunting.

  'Is this place used as a warehouse, Mr Weir?' Jordan asked, eyeing the chaos of crates and boxes and assorted plant and vehicles.

  'Not really,' I said. 'This is my home.' The policemen looked at me sceptically. 'I used to be in the music business,' I explained. 'The record company sold a lot of records in the Communist Bloc, but they don't like to part with hard currency over there; we came to an agreement we'd take goods in lieu of royalties. This stuff is what we couldn't sell.' The two detectives exchanged glances. 'My lawyers have the appropriate bills of lading and import documentation; Macrae, Fietch and Warren. Contact them if you want to check.'

  They took a desultory look round the place, perhaps wishing that the assembled merchandise really had been stolen, but they left with only the shopping trolley full of whipped-cream cans.

  I watched them go, put my coat on again, turned off the space heater, the gas and the electricity, stood in the centre of the choir for a while, looking round (I listened for the pigeon, but couldn't hear anything), then I left by the Elmbank Street door, certain I would never see the place again.

  Because I'd killed Christine, too. Me and my clever, stupid, blasphemous, believer-baiting ideas.

  It went way back, the way these things usually did, rooted ineradicably deep in the past, tangled in with all the times you thought you'd done the right thing, made the correct decision. So you thought anyway, but always, in there, hidden away, was the thing that made you pay, the one wayward idea, the garbled but effective message, like a cancer, single-cell but growing, spreading, filling; killing.

  After the first US tour, when I'd made my ill-advised remarks, and we'd had a little trouble with the fundamentalists, I'd been stunned that people like that still existed today — my sheltered upbringing, I suppose — and then angry that such idiocy could have that effect and be given the credence it was in schools and textbooks and people's lives. That anger surfaced once when I was with Christine, producing a bad germ of an idea.

  Lying together in bed, in the Year of our Lord 1978, I believe, in one of the cavernously cold rooms of Morasbeg. I'd bought the place the year before, in a misguided fit of acquisitive enthusiasm, taken with the idea of being a Highland landowner (1 hadn't bought the island yet; that came later).

  We'd been talking about the fortnight's touring holiday we'd just taken, on Mull and Skye and the Hebrides. Christine had driven. We hadn't been able to come back from Lewis on the day we wanted because it was a Sunday, and so we'd been stuck in Stornaway for a day, twiddling our thumbs and watching all the good folk going to the kirk. Remembering that had got me onto religion generally, and the Christian fundamentalists I'd offended in the States in particular .

  'You know what we should do?' I said, sitting up and taking the binoculars from the bedside table.

  'What?' Christine rolled over in bed, propping her head up with one honey-coloured arm (it had been a sunny second week on the Isles.

  The bed in the main bedroom was situated within a huge, magnificent but heat-leaking bay window on the second floor, looking out across acres and acres of hummocky heather and marshy grass, with a glimpse of the sparkling sea to one side. I fiddled with the focus on the binoculars, searching for deer.

  'We should make those Neanderthals really sick; I mean, they keep accusing us of trying to corrupt youth and all that shit, and taking the name of Christ in vain; well, we ought to think up something deliberately, that would upset them.'

  Christine was silent for a moment or two. 'How about calling the next album "Puck God"?' she suggested.

  'Too subtle,' I said. 'Needs to be more obvious. We're dealing with genuine rednecks here.'

  'Uh-huh,' Christine said. I scanned the wind-blown waste of Ardnamurchan while Christine stroked my hairy back.

  'Re-enact the crucifixion,' I said thoughtfully, my eyes screwing up as I pointed the binoculars towards the glittering sliver of sea to the south-west. 'But use a black man!'

  'Too tasteful. Besides, they might like seeing a black guy getting nailed to a cross.'

  'Hmm. You're right.' I looked into the burning golden glare of the distant sea, fuming light over silhouetted dunes and waving grass. For a second I thought a shadow against the brassy reflections off the sea looked like a deer, but as I juggled with the focus it disappeared.

  I remembered the previous week, when we'd been together and alone on a beach on Iona, looking west to the sunset; the Atlantic rollers came crashing in long lines of surf and spray, and for a few moments the two of us, watching the head of what we thought must be a seal, suddenly saw its whole sleek-fat, suspended body within the green cliff face of the next up-rearing wave; outlined, upright, as though standing inside the wave, silhouetted by the sunlight falling from behind.

  'Got it,' I said, putting the binoculars down.

  'What?'

  'Your name.'

  'Christine? Brice? All of it?'

  'Part of it; part of Christine.'

  Christine looked quizzical. 'Forget the I, N, E,' I said. 'What's left? "Christ"!'

  Christine gazed at me levelly, blue eyes, honey skin, long blonde hair all tangled. 'Wow,' she said.

  'We play on that; we have you crucified on stage!' 'Oh, thanks.' She nodded.

  'I know!' I laughed. 'We have you on a giant guitar; you lie on the neck, and it has a sort of cross-brace ... no, there are two ordinary sized guitars forming the cross-piece of the cross. That's it! You start out on that, lying down on it, in the dark, and then you're levered up to vertical, as the lights come up, and you're hanging there on the cross, crucified, then you jump down, taking one of the cross-piece guitars with you, and you launch into the first song!'

  Christine snorted, threw herself down on her back, hands behind her head, staring up at the brightly grey plaster of the long, high-ceilinged room. 'Yeah, that would offend a few people,' she agreed. 'Still a bit subtle, all the same.'

  I shrugged. 'Images stick. It would work. I'd suggest we actually try it, but they'd lynch us.' I came down beside her, put my arms round her, cradled her.

  'Well, they might lynch me,' Christine said. She arched her back; my fingers fell into the muscular hollow her spine left as she flexed herself towards me.

  'Aye, well; we cannae be havin that noo, can we, lassie?' I laughed. Still cradling her, I shook her, carefully, always fearful of hurting her.

  'No, indeed.' She brought her arms up to my neck. Her entangled blonde hair slid across the white pillow like gold chains over snow (and for a fleeting instant, I thought Suzanne takes you down...), before we kissed.

  She got in touch, four years later, to ask me whether I'd mind her using the idea in her stage act; she was in the process of forming her own band, La Rif, and was getting ideas for the stage show together too. I told her she was welcome to use it. I wish I could say I also told her to be careful, to think twice, that it was a silly idea, not serious... but I didn't. I was chuffed; I thought how wonderful it was to have such extensive influence, to have old throwaway ideas fall on fertile ground and bring forth fruit. And I was gleeful, thinking how it would outrage those I despised.

  At the time Christine got in touch, Davey had been dead for a couple of years; I had only just started work again, on my own album, after
nearly eighteen months of doing not very much of anything at all; it never crossed my mind that Christine would be in any real danger from the stage act. I don't know why, because it should have; maybe Davey's death was still too fresh and I just didn't want to think about anything like that. So I encouraged her.

  The reaction was pretty much what you'd expect. Incredible publicity, of course, but mouth-foaming vilification from the moral majority and the megabuck TV evangelists; some southern states wouldn't let Christine appear at all, others would only let her play if she didn't do the guitar-Christ act. Death threats, too, of course.

  So who's a guilty boy, then?

  Ah, bugger it aw; Ah'm awa tae dae awa wi masel.

  Jesus, what else was there for me? I'd been saddled with my great, hulking, graceless body and a face fit for pantomime, I'd been born poor and clumsy and too nice or too weak to be a businessman or a successful crook, so that I could have been forgiven for giving in then, and accepting the type-cast role life seemed to have waiting for me; local freak, somebody people threatened their children with; I could have done my best in a proper job and spent the rest of my days getting nowhere but being a great help to my mates and being called the Big Yin and never scowling when people asked me, What was the weather like up there? or, What cathedral had I fallen off? and maybe I'd have found somebody who loved me and I could love or maybe not, and fathered lots of little ugly kids, but I didn't.

  I'd tried to do something more impressive, more memorable, and for a good few years there I thought I'd been doing all right. I'd clawed my way out of being an ugly nonentity and established myself as an unhandsome star; I'd made money, I'd been places and done things and amazed people and pleased them, and I'd scandalised a few too. I could do good things, I could be something else than what seemed to be inevitable. I could create grace, I could compose grace, even if I couldn't be graceful myself.

  But every time I thought I'd proved that, something happened to wipe it all out, and I was left in the wreckage, surrounded by the dead and broken dreams, and staring, appalled and confounded, at the proof of my own infectious, terminal, clumsiness. I was the ghost at the feast, the angel of destruction, the kiss of extinction. Marked out for bad luck, like some poisonous insect which advertises its lethal chemistry to potential predators with bright, outrageous colours. I'd cheated; I'd made my own good luck, overpowered that natural signal, ignored that uniform... and unknowingly had shifted the bad luck on to others, so that they suffered in my place.

  I walked through the city to Great Western Road, and took a bus there for Old Kilpatrick. It seemed important to walk, or catch buses, or try to hitch a lift; I didn't want to take a train or hire a tax-i; I wanted to start then and there, walking, and just keep going, my journey unplanned but determined, only my destination set and definite.

  Maybe it was just a sort of hopeless nostalgia, remembering the time, in my early teens, when a gang of us from Ferguslie had bussed and hitched this way, heading for... Crianlarich, Oban, Mull; however far we could get before our money ran out. We ended up camped on the banks of Loch Lomond, shivering in the rain with our good shoes caked with mud, wondering if there was a hotel bar nearby which wouldn't throw us out.

  Whatever. The wet pavements, the north wind, the palely gleaming buildings and the bright, busy sky took me to the great broad road which led over the hills and down the banks of the river and far away. I sat on the bus, not really thinking, but feeling frozen, stuck, rusted up inside.

  I watched the faces of the people in the bus, and I listened to their talk. They seemed like real, proper, normal folk and I was the weird one all right, I was the freak. Their lives, with all their diversity and complexities, for all their sudden changes and surprising additions and omissions, must have been of the ordinary stuff, the standard fare.

  Mine seemed then to have been even more grotesque and deformed than I'd feared in my darkest moments. The world belonged to these people. I had had colossal effrontery contaminating it with my presence for this long; now was time to pay, now it was time to admit life had been right and I'd been wrong all the time, and dispose of this mutant frame, put to rest this twisted, alien monstrosity.

  I felt tired, as the bus moved through the suburbs and the people got on and got off and the day moved from fair to showery and back again. At Old Kilpatrick I must have been dozing; the bus stopped, jerking me awake, and I found myself there, almost in the thin shadow of the Erskine Bridge, by the side of the river. There were low hills and trees on the south bank, and higher steps of grass and stone scarps beyond the houses of the town and the road I was heading for, on the north side.

  Hitch-hiking has a lot in common with fishing. I'd forgotten just how brain-numbing hitching could be; any other time I might have been exasperated. Right then, the very zombifying tediousness of it came as a relief. I stood, I watched the cars and vans and trucks join the boulevard heading west; I kept my arm out and thumb up, and tried to look as sane, unmenacing and non-homicidal as I could. So I must have amused a fair few drivers even if, over the course of a couple of hours, none of them stopped.

  I left the roadside for the leaky cover of a tree when a shower came on, shivering a little in my great dark coat and thinking in a vague, distant sort of way how ironic it was, to be sheltering from a little drizzle, when I was intending to drown myself in the sea just as soon as I got there. The shower passed, the traffic went on, the cloud-tangled sun fell gradually across the sky towards the firth and the mountains of Argyll.

  I thought of Christine, then tried not to. I thought of Davey and could hardly remember him as he had been; I kept seeing his photograph, recalling his guitar and his voice from individual songs, remembering what he looked like in videos. I thought of McCann and Wee Tommy and Betty and Rick Tumber and God help the brutes — I even thought of TB and that stupid bloody pigeon, and like the past twelve years the past one week seemed all jumbled and fragmented and confused, as though I was incapable of holding even that brief amount of time in my head and keeping it coherent.

  The rain came on again but I stayed out in it, though people rarely ever stop when you're dripping wet. Grim, unmoving, slowly soaking, I watched the cars and trucks hiss and rumble past, wipers waving, lights shining.

  The rain ceased.

  It was three o'clock before anybody stopped; a garage mechanic in a Land-Rover pick-up. He could only take me as far as Dumbarton, a few miles down the road. I stood by a roundabout he recommended, in what I reckoned was probably the same shower of rain that had soaked me earlier and moved on.

  I got the next hitch within five minutes, just as it was starting to get dark.

  'Where ye headin, big fella?'

  'Iona,' I said.

  'Aw aye. The island?'

  'Aye, off Mull.'

  'Aw aye. Ye smoke?'

  The man who'd stopped for me was seventyish, crouched over the wheel of his Hillman Avenger. Bald; wisps of grey hair. An old, greasy-looking deerstalker lay on the back seat of the car with some parcels and a Frasers bag. Baggy suit and thick glasses. He was going to Arrochar, so he could drop me at Tarbet, about two thirds of the way up the west side of the loch. He held out a packet of Carlton. I was about to refuse, automatically, but then said, 'Yes, thanks.'

  I took a cigarette. The old guy leaned over the dash and pushed in a cigar lighter. 'The name's John McCandless, whit's yours, big fella?'

  'Dan. Daniel Weir.'

  'Bit dreich for hitch-hiking the day, Dan,' Mr McCandless said, giving a sort of laughing cough as we headed up the dual carriageway towards the southern end of the loch. The lighter clicked out and we lit our cigarettes.

  'Aye, it is that,' I agreed.

  'And whit takes ye away tae Iona, Dan?'

  'I've got some friends there. Spending Christmas with them.'

  'Very nice.' He looked round at me for a moment. 'Ye no got a bag or somethin with ye, son?'

  'No,' I said, pulling on the cigarette. The tobacco-hit was making me feel
dizzy. 'I've got some gear out there, left it with them the last time I was there.'

  'Aw, aye.'

  The cigarette tasted bitter and harsh and reeked of the past. I drank it in, listening to the wipers hum back and forth and the engine roar monotonously; water trickled down the back of my neck, coldly inquiring, sinuously intimate, raising goosebumps.

  For a dizzying moment of déjà vu I shivered, and remembered standing in the grey rain of Ferguslie Park, thirteen years ago, setting out with my songs crumpled in my pocket and my hopes none too high, to see a band called Frozen Gold playing at Paisley Tech.

  I smoked, watched the rain drops fall and spatter, then smear away under the tired flaying of the wipers. I ought to have asked Mr McCandless what he'd been buying, what he'd done before he retired, if he'd always lived in Arrochar, what his kids were doing, what age the grandchildren were... any number of polite, decent, small-talking things, just to be human and show some interest and a little gratitude at having been picked up on a rainy evening. But I couldn't.

  Partly it was selfishness; the same what-the-hell attitude that made me take the fag, even though I'd finally given up smoking five or six years earlier; this was my last evening on earth (not my last day; I'd never get to Iona, or probably even anywhere near the sea, in one go now) so I thought I deserved a little indulgence. But also I didn't feel capable of pretending to be interested; I wasn't, and I couldn't act it. I wasn't really part of other people's world any more.

  'Ye in work, Dan?'

  'No,' I said. 'Had some once, but... not any more.'

  'Aye, bad times.' Mr McCandless shook his head, still staring ahead.

  I thought: Here come the thirties; here comes the depression, but Mr McCandless surprised me, and didn't make the usual connection. He just shook his head again and repeated, 'Aye, bad times.'

  I smoked my cigarette and watched the rain come down.

  When he left me at Tarbet it was almost fully dark and still raining. I stood on the road heading north, thumb out for a while, but nobody stopped. I ignored the big old hotel at the road junction and walked on down the road until the pavement disappeared. As I stood looking into the darkness down the winding loch-side road, the rain came down heavier. There was a small hotel a hundred yards back, its sign lit. I turned back to it.