Espedair Street

by Iain Banks

  'Yes?' The man looked me up and down. He looked like the owner.

  What did he see? A tall, gangling, brutish man with straggly black hair and a shadow of stubble; hook nose, staring eyes, shoddy long coat, dripping wet.

  'I'd like a room, please. Just for one night. I won't be...'

  'Sorry, we're full. Christmas, you see.'

  'Just a room,' I said. I took out a handful of notes from one pocket. 'I won't be needing breakfast or anything.' I counted out five tenners. 'I can pay in advance; I'll be leaving early.'

  The man — a plump English guy, wavy brown hair that looked dyed, and nervous eyes — made a papping noise with his lips, looking down at the money in my hands. 'Ahm ... we might have had a cancellation. I'll have to ask my wife.' He disappeared through to the public bar, sending a wave of warmth and noise out behind him.

  His wife was plump too; she looked into my eyes and smiled in a friendly way. 'I'm sorry, Mr ...?'

  'Daniel Weir .'

  'I'm very sorry, Mr Weir; we are fully booked up at the moment.'

  'Your husband thought you might have had a cancellation,' I said, slowly folding up the tenners.

  'Well, no; we've a couple who haven't confirmed or arrived yet, but' — she glanced at a wall clock — 'we couldn't really give you their room yet. Another four hours or so, and if they haven't arrived... perhaps then.'

  'I see. Thanks anyway. Good night.' I turned back for the doors.

  'Good night. I'm sure you can find somewhere else. Which way ...?' But by then I was back out in the rain.

  Trucks swept past. The dark, lapping waters of the loch were only a few yards from the road, once it ran beyond the village. The multi-axled trailers on the big trucks went spraying by, massive tyres rumbling. I stood on the damp pavement, wondering why I was bothering to go to Iona. Why not do it here?

  I couldn't. Even in my death, in that one thing we all share, I wanted to be different; throwing myself into this picturesque but rather tame old freshwater loch, or mangling myself under some truckload of tin cans or treetrunks, seemed too normal, too close to society. I wanted the wilderness and the waters of the world-ocean. It wasn't ego, even now I don't think it was that; it was ... taste. Appropriateness.

  No room at the inn; I sighed and walked back to the big hotel at the road junction, ready for another rejection. They let me in without a murmur, a wee lassie getting me to fill out the Access voucher there and then; it was a double room and she talked me into having not only breakfast ('Oh, you might as well, Mr Weir; it's inclusive'), but dinner too.

  I agreed to dinner because I'd stopped feeling tired and started feeling hungry, and it was still not half-past four. Long winter nights. I hadn't allowed for any of this. I was shown to my room. I observed its anonymity for a while, wondering how many hotel rooms I'd been in in my life. I had a shower and dried my clothes over radiators. I dried my hair and watched some kids' television for a little, then turned it off. I dressed, went to the bar, had a few drinks, bought a packet of cigarettes and smoked half of them, had dinner, then went back to the room.

  All that time, I was waiting.

  Waiting to feel something, waiting to suddenly burst out crying, or to suddenly feel all right again, better once more, or go hysterical and take a running jump out of the nearest high window... but none of that happened.

  It was as though some autopilot had taken over, as if a temporary government was running things, some skeleton crew of the mind; the king is dead, long live the regent ...

  On Iona it might be possible to know again; that was where I was heading and everything had stopped while I got myself there.

  Once I'd arrived, when I was facing those blue-green waves; then I'd start thinking again; then, when I was finally faced with it, the reality of killing myself and just not being any more; opting out of this insane, tasteless, murderous circus where the freaks are too often wiser— but also more despised — than the thronging marks. I was still convinced I'd do it. I was almost looking forward to it. I'd heard that old people could accept death and there was some sort of meta-tiredness which had nothing to do with the quick sleep of night; a lulling, draining, glacial sapping of life's own life over the years, winding up, powering down... I'd thought it was just some sort of excuse, a lie the old told to convince themselves they wouldn't mind dying and so draw the sting of fear. But now... now I wasn't so sure. I thought I understood that tiredness.

  I lay down fully clothed on the bed with the lights on, staring at the ceiling, waiting for something to happen.

  I must have fallen asleep.

  When I woke up I didn't know what time it was. It was still dark and there was music playing in the room next to mine. There was no clock in the room. I turned on the television but there was only white noise on all the channels. I rubbed my face and yawned, then took off my clothes (and thought: For the last time. I'll go in fully clothed tomorrow; quicker, less ridiculous, somehow). I climbed into the wide, cold bed, put the lights out.

  The music was too loud. It was going to keep me awake, I knew it, too, which would make it even harder to ignore. It was...

  ... us.

  I hadn't recognised it at first; music always sounds different through walls, but it was Frozen Gold all right; MIRV. It was side one; 'The Good Soldier' faded, and was replaced by '2000 AM'. So I'd slept through 'Oh Cimmaron'. Next 'Single Track' and then 'Slider', and then, very likely as this was probably a tape played on a ghetto-blaster, side two as well.

  Too loud. Loud enough for me to be able to make out Christine's voice, Davey's guitar. I lay there, listening, unable to stop it, paralysed and transfixed and frozen.

  And at first I laughed, because there is another song, on Personal Effects, which contains the lyrics,

  Just an old rock star in a cheap hotel,

  He's sung too many songs about love.

  Kept awake all night in his en-suite hell,

  By his old hit played too loud above.

  And it was a low, despairing sort of laugh, the laugh of bitter appreciation that life could always kick you when you were down, just to make sure you were still watching the show, and with that laughter came an odd, half-appalled revelation: there was no real division between tragedy and comedy, they were just tags we'd stuck on our hooligan consequences as we stumbled and stampeded through the world's definitive grotesqueries, just a set of different ways of looking at things, from person to person and time to time, and a set of different moods to see them in ...

  And Davey sang 'Single Track':

  Ash blonde criminals abound in my mind

  And you snow-princess were the worst I could find

  And Christine sang 'Whisper':

  But this is only what you say,

  One single way in all the ways.

  I hear the flood within the drought,

  I hear the whisper in the shout.

  And Davey sang 'Apocalypso':

  'The dam has just gone,' said the cripple we passed

  'But we shall live on,' he said, breathing his last.

  'Oh please allow me,' said the young cardinal

  But the wafer, we've heard, tastes a little too real

  And Christine sang 'The Way It goes':

  Well I suppose this is the feeling,

  That pretends to true love's wonder,

  Finds you standing, finds you kneeling,

  Never fails to push you under...

  And together they sang 'Across From The Moon And Down':

  You put your shell-like ear to a shell,

  Just to know what the bone will tell.

  You hear no roaring ocean's flood,

  Just the sweet, salt sea of your blood.

  And I listened, and my laughs died away, and I just sat there, my heart thumping, and my breath coming quick and shallow, and gradually — only lightly at first — the tears came.

  And that was when I grieved for Christine, and finally fell asleep on my damp, salty pillow, to wake the next morning at the so
und of a passing train, at once relieved and disappointed, and reluctantly resigned to my life.

  FOURTEEN

  There's this sloth in the jungle walking from one tree to another, and it's mugged by a gang of snails, and when the police ask the sloth if it could identify any of its attackers, it says, 'I don't know; it all happened so quickly...'

  And that's the way I feel. Everything seems to take about the right amount of time at the time, but later... Jeez, where did it all go? You look back, and sometimes you think, Did I really do all that?, and other times you think, Is that all there is? Is that all I managed to get done?

  We are never satisfied. Don't even know the meaning of the word.

  My ma finally decided to give up the flat in Ferguslie, and I went back there in... summer of '81, it must have been, to help her look for a house and arrange the money. I don't think my arguments had convinced her; I think she hadn't been getting on with her neighbours so well, though whose fault that was I never knew.

  We found the house at Kilbarchan. Ma, ignoring my hints and suggestions, had it redecorated in red flock and moved the stock of Woolies' repros in. She set out a room that was to be my room. I'm only half-ashamed to admit I've never spent a night there.

  Almost without my noticing it all my brothers and sisters had grown up. A couple married, one at Uni (wee Malcolm, though God knew how, I remember thinking at the time, unless they did degrees in Kung Fu), two — amazingly enough — in work, and one in the RAF.

  My da came out of prison that year and went to stay with my ma. I told her she was a fool to take him back, but she did. I wouldn't even meet him for a couple of years. When I did, after Ma persuaded me, it was like meeting a stranger. A quiet, insignificant stranger with eyes that never seemed to look directly at anybody.

  I'd spent the year after Davey died doing not very much of anything (once we'd got the horrendous legal problems caused by abandoning the tour out the way). I'd travelled a bit, aimlessly. I'd sold Morasbeg, and started looking for somewhere else to live, to settle down in the UK now that the Tories had made it so cheap for us rich people to live there. This nest-quest for a wee hoose ended when I found St Jute's, so whether you count it a success or a failure rather depends.

  I'd spent quite a few months, on and off, half-heartedly learning to play an analyser/synthesiser/sequencer (the sequencer part let me correct the bum notes my thick, clumsy fingers made), with vague intentions of doing a solo album, and maybe some film work. I'd sold the Panther long ago. I started having driving lessons once, but I gave them up.

  One day, with nothing to do in Paisley, I thought I'd look up a few of my old pals, see if anybody was still where I remembered them, or could be traced. This made a change, as I'd spent a large part of the previous year avoiding those who knew me — or had known me — well. I had withdrawn, I had turned my friends away, though I'd known they'd only wanted to offer sympathy and comfort.

  So perhaps the pain was dying, the memory healing a little, at the end of that year, though I confess that perhaps I was just getting restless. I was, after all, starting to have a few ideas for songs again, after so many fallow months I had begun to think not without some relief — that the ideas had dried up.

  Whatever; I went looking for people.

  I called on Jean Webb's parents, only to discover that cancer had killed Mr Webb the year before and Mrs Webb was in a wheelchair, looked after by her retired older sister, who'd never married; another of Jean's aunts. We had tea. Mrs Webb's twisted fingers could barely hold the cup.

  I asked her how she managed with the stairs up to her flat. She said she could struggle up and down with a stick and her sister's help; anyway, she was near the top of the council list to be moved to disabled accommodation. She explained all this as though it wasn't important, and as though having to explain it was slightly annoying.

  We talked mostly about her children. The son who'd gone to business school was a trainee accountant in London; the one who'd worked at Inverkip was in the army. Jean and Gerald were living in Aberdeen; Gerald had a job in the oil industry. Jean had lost her second child, born prematurely. They'd been advised not to try for any more. The daughter, Dawn, was three years old; very forward, and bright for her age. Jean came home quite often; I'd only missed her by a day.

  The rest was inconsequential. All of it was depressing. I only remember one thing she said, apart from the news of her family. Somehow we'd got on to the subject of advice; what you told your children, how you tried to help them grow up.

  Mrs Webb sat in her wheelchair, the cup and saucer on an adjustable table her sister had wheeled in front of her. She looked out the window to the flats on the other side of the street, looking away from me as the light failed.

  'Ach, son,' she said, slowly shaking her head. 'Ye try to bring your kids up right, and give them advice an that, but they dinnae listen. Ah God, it hurts ye at the time, but who's tae say they're wrong? Ah listened, Dan,' she looked at me, then glanced at her sister, sitting crocheting on the couch across the room. 'Ah listened tae ma mum, did Ah no, Marie?'

  Marie nodded slowly, without raising her eyes from her work. 'Aye, you listened, hen.'

  'Ah listened tae ma mum,' Mrs Webb continued, gazing out the window again, 'because she'd had a hard life an Ah thought she knew what she was talkin about. Well, maybe she did. Ye know what she told me?' Mrs Webb glanced briefly at me. I raised my eyebrows. 'She told me tae keep the heid,' Mrs Webb smiled at the quiet street outside. '"Keep the heid, Jessie," she'd tell me; "Just take it easy"; that's whit she'd say. Whit she meant was, Ah wiznae tae dive straight intae things; Ah wiznae tae breenge about the way Ah always did cos Ah was a right wee tearaway when Ah wiz a wean' — another quick glance at me — 'or Ah'd regret it later.

  'Well, me and Bob always took things easy; we were careful wi our money an we didnae get any thin on credit.'

  Mrs Webb's sister shook her head at her crocheting and said, 'No,' in an approving, confirmatory way.

  'We saved when we were able, an we never took any risks. We tried tae give the weans a decent start in life, an we tried tae set things up for our old age.'

  She was quiet for a few moments. Her sister's needles clicked in the background. I wondered whether I ought to say something. She went on, 'But Ah don't know if ma mum was right. She might have been right for her, cos Ah know now she'd done things in haste an been sorry for them all her life, but... Ah don't know, son; if Ah had ma time tae live again Ah think Ah'd be a wee bit less cautious. Ah'd live a bit more for today an no tomorrow, an Ah'd tell the weans the same, though God knows Ah'd probably end up regrettin that too.'

  She turned away from the window to look at me again and the sad, solemn expression on her face changed, became a smile. 'Aye,' she said, 'it's a sair fecht, is it no?' But with the smile, and what may have been a shrug, and with the slow, delicate picking up of a teacup, made the statement seem merely ironic.

  A sair fecht.

  A sore fight, indeed, Mrs Webb.

  I left the flat depressed but, as I walked down Espedair Street, back into town under a glorious sunset of red and gold, slowly a feeling of contentment, intensifying almost to elation, filled me. I couldn't say why; it felt like more than having gone through a period of mourning and come out the other side, and more than just having reassessed my own woes and decided they were slight compared to what some people had to bear; it felt like faith, like revelation: that things went on, that life ground on regardless, and mindless, and produced pain and pleasure and hope and fear and joy and despair, and you dodged some of it and you sought some of it and sometimes you were lucky and sometimes you weren't, and sometimes you could plan your way ahead and that would be the right thing to have done, but other times all you could do was forget about plans and just be ready to react, and sometimes the obvious was true and sometimes it wasn't, and sometimes experience helped but not always, and it was all luck, fate, in the end; you lived, and you waited to see what happened, and you would rarel
y ever be sure that what you had done was really the right thing or the wrong thing, because things can always be better, and things can always be worse.

  Then, being me, I felt guilty about starting to feel better, and thought, So, you've heard a little bit of home-crocheted philosophy, and seen somebody worse off than yourself; is this all it takes? Your revelations come cheap, Daniel Weir; and your soul is shallow ... but even that was part of the experience, and so explained, and expiated, by it, and under that startlingly gaudy sky — like something from one of my ma's Woolworths' paintings — I walked, and felt I could be happy again.

  FIFTEEN

  In the hall now, at Arisaig, watching the little kid on the trike, trailing coloured streamers, round and round.

  A train woke me, just as the dawn was seeping from the sky above the dark hotel. I dozed, rang reception to order a taxi to Glasgow, had my breakfast, then went back to the city, taking a newspaper with me and sitting in the back of the cab, partly to avoid smalltalk with the driver. A young Arrochar lad, he was content to listen to the radio while I tried to find out what else had been happening in the world recently.

  I went straight to Wee Tommy's ma's, but there was nobody in. Next came St Jute's and then the Griffin, to see if McCann had replied to my note. There was nothing fresh on the pile of junkmail inside the folly's door, and no sign of or message from McCann at the Griff.

  I went back to Tommy's folks' house and put a note througn the door telling them to get in touch with my lawyers. Then I went to see them.