by Iain Banks
I put my hand to my brow, looking down and shaking my head, then sigh theatrically and look at him, letting my shoulders slump. "Well, I don't know who it is, McDunn; if I did I'd tell you."
"No, you can't tell me yet," McDunn says quietly and reasonably. "You know who it is, but… you don't know that you know." I stare at him. McDunn's going metaphysical on me. Oh, shit. "You're saying it's somebody I know."
McDunn splays one hand, smiling smally. He chooses to tap his fag packet round and round on the tabletop again rather than speak to me, so I say, "Well, I'm not sure about that, but it's certainly somebody who knows me; I mean, I think that card with my writing on it proves that. Or, it's something to do with those guys in the —»
"— Lake District," McDunn sighs. "Yes…" The DI thinks my theory it's the security forces trying to fit me up is pure paranoia. "No." He shakes his head. "I think it is somebody you know, Cameron; I think it's somebody you know well. You see, I think you know them as well… well, nearly as well… as they know you. I think you can tell me who it is, I really do. You only have to think about it." He smiles. "That's all you have to do for me. Just think."
"Just think," I repeat. I nod at the DI. He nods back. "Just think," I say again. McDunn nods.
Summer in Strathspeld: the first really hot day that year, air warm and thick with the coconut smell of gorse — swathed richly yellow on the hills — and the sweet sharpness of pine resin, lying dropleted on the rough trunks in thick translucent bubbles. Insects buzzed and butterflies filled the glades with silent flashes of colour; in the fields the corncrake stooped and zoomed, its strange, percussive call stuttering through the scent-laden air.
Andy and I went down by the river and the loch, clambering up the rocks upstream then back down, watching fish jump lazily out on the calm loch, or strike at the insects speckling those flat waters, jaws snapping underneath; dispatching, swallowing, leaving ripples. We climbed some trees looking for nests but didn't find any.
We took off our shoes and socks and waded among the rushes surrounding the hidden, scalloped bay where the stream draining the ornamental pond near the house splashed down to the loch, a hundred metres up the shore from the old boat-house. We were allowed to take the boat out ourselves by then as long as we wore life-jackets and we thought we might do that, later; get in some fishing or just some pottering around.
We climbed the low hills northwest of the loch and lay in the long grass under the pines and the birch, looking out over the small glen to the forested hill on the far side where the old railway tunnel was. Beyond that, over another wooded ridge, unseen and heard only on occasion when the breeze veered from that direction, was the main road north. Further beyond that, the Grampians" southernmost summits rose green and golden-brown into the blue sky.
Later that evening we were all going into Pitlochry, to the theatre. I wasn't too impressed with this — I'd rather have seen a film — but Andy thought it was all right, so I did too.
Andy was fourteen, I'd just turned thirteen and was proud of my new status as a teenager (and, as usual, of the fact that for the next couple of months I was only a year younger than Andy). We lay in the grass looking up at the sky and the fluttering leaves on the silver birch trees, sucking on our reed stalks and talking about girls.
We were at different schools; Andy was a boarder at an all-boys school in Edinburgh and came back only at weekends. I was at the local high school. I'd asked my mum and dad if I could go to a boarding school — the one in Edinburgh Andy was at, for example — but they'd said I wouldn't like it and besides it would cost a lot of money. Plus, there wouldn't be any girls there, didn't that worry me? I was a bit embarrassed about that.
The comment about the cost confused me; I was used to thinking of us as being well-off. Dad ran a garage and petrol station on the main road through Strathspeld village and Mum had a wee gift and coffee shop; Dad had been worried after the Six-Day War when they'd introduced the fifty-miles-an-hour speed limit and even issued fuel-rationing books, but that hadn't lasted very long and, even though petrol cost more nowadays, people were still travelling and using cars. I knew our modern bungalow on the village outskirts overlooking the Carse wasn't as grand as Andy's mum and dad's house, which was practically a castle and stood in its own estate: ponds, streams, statues, lochs, rivers, hills, forests, even the old railway line passing through one corner of it; one big garden in effect and vast compared to our single acre laid to lawn and shrub. But I'd never thought of us as really having to worry about money that much; certainly I was used to getting more or less what I wanted and had come to think of this virtually as a right, the way only children are apt to if their parents are anything other than actively hostile to them.
It never occurred to me that other children weren't spoiled as a matter of course, the way I was, and it would be years — and my father would be dead — before I understood that the expense of sending me to a boarding school was just an excuse, and the simple, sentimental truth was that they knew they would have missed me.
"You have not."
"Bet you I have."
"You're kidding."
"I'm not."
"Who was it?"
"None of your business."
"Ah, you're making it up, you little tramp; you never did."
"It was Jean McDuhrie."
"What? You're kidding."
"We were in the old station. She'd seen her brother's and she wanted to see if they all looked like that and she asked me so I showed her mine, but it was only if she'd show me hers and she did as well."
"Dirty wee rascal. Did she let you touch it?"
"Touch it?" I said, surprised. "No!"
"Ah! Well, then!"
"What?"
"You're supposed to touch it."
"No, you're not, not if you just want to look."
"Of course you are."
"Rubbish!"
"Anyway, what did it look like; was there any hair on it?"
"Hair? Ugh. No."
"No? When was this?"
"Not long ago. Last summer maybe. Maybe before. Not that long. I'm not making it up, honest."
"Huh."
I was pleased we were talking about girls because I felt this was a subject where Andy's two extra years didn't really count; I was effectively the same age as him, and maybe I even knew more than he did because I mixed with girls every day and he only really knew his sister Clare. She was away shopping in Perth with her mother that day.
"Have you ever seen Clare's?"
"Don't be disgusting."
"What's disgusting? She's your sister!"
"Exactly."
"What do you mean?"
"You don't know anything, do you?"
"Bet I know more than you do."
"Crap."
I sucked on my hollow reed for a while, staring up at the sky.
"Have you got hairs on yours, then?" I said.
"Yeah."
"You haven't!"
"Want to see?"
"Eh?"
"I'll show you it. It's pretty big too because we've been talking about women. That's what's supposed to happen."
"Oh, yeah; look at your trousers! I can see it! What a bulge!"
"Look…"
"Ah! Ugh! Wow!"
"That's called an Erection."
"Wow! God, mine never gets that big."
"Well, it's not supposed to. You're still young."
"Charming! I'm a teenager, do you mind?"
I watched Andy's cock, huge and golden and purple and sticking out of his fly like a gently curved plant, some sweet exotic fruit growing into the sunlight. I looked around, hoping there wasn't anybody nearby, watching. We were only visible from the top of the hill where the railway tunnel was, and usually nobody went there.
"You can touch it if you like."
"I don't know…"
"Some of the guys in the school touch each other's. It's not the same as being with a girl, of course, but people do it. Better th
an nothing."
Andy licked his fingers and started to stroke them up and down over the purple bulge of his cock. "This feels good. Do you do this yet?"
I shook my head, watching the saliva on that full, taut hood glisten in the sunlight. There was a thickness in my throat and a tight feeling in my stomach; I could feel my own cock throbbing.
"Come on; don't just lie there," Andy said matter-of-factly, leaving his cock alone and lying back in the grass, putting his arm behind his head and staring up at the sky. "Do something."
"Oh, God, all right," I said, tutting and sighing, but really my hand was shaking. I pulled up and down on his cock.
"Gently!"
"All right!"
"Use some spit."
"Good grief, I don't know…" I spat into my fingers and used them, then found his foreskin was loose enough to be rolled back and forth over the head, and did that for a while. Andy breathed hard and his free hand went to my head, stroking my hair.
"You could use your mouth," he said, voice shaky. "I mean, if you want."
"Hmm. Well, I don't know. What's wrong with — ah!"
"Oh, oh, oh…"
"Yuk. What a mess."
Andy took a deep breath and patted my head, chuckling. "Not bad," he told me. "For a beginner."
I wiped my hand on his trousers.
"Hey!"
I put my face up to his. "I've seen Clare's," I told him.
"What! You —!"
I jumped up and ran laughing down through the grass and the bushes, down into the glen. He jumped up too, then cursed and hopped about, struggling to get his fly shut before he could chase me.
CHAPTER 9 — GROWTH
I remember that, remember the feeling of his warm, cooling, sunlit juice on my hand, slippy becoming sticky, but I can't think about it any more without thinking of gorilla man and the little guy tied to the chair. I think they were surprised when I threw up; I hope they were, I hope they were surprised and very interested and thought, "Ullo "ullo "ullo it wasn't "im then after all; he ain't the villain, he's been fitted up so help me… Oh God, I hope my belly spoke for me better than my fucking brain, in other words.
Not guilty, didn't do it that's why what gorilla man did sickened me; no blood well hardly any blood literally a drop, a drip, a fucking pixel on the screen and the only thing slicing into flesh was a needle, tiny and delicate not a chainsaw or an axe or a knife or anything, but it's that image that idea that old devil meme, I keep dreaming about it, keep having nightmares about it, and I'm the trapped one, I'm the man in the leather-and-chrome chair and he's there with his gorilla face and his squeaky baby voice, explaining to the camera that what he has in this bottle and in this syringe is sperm; the crazy fucker's loaded it up with jism man looks like half a fucking milk bottle of the stuff and he's going to inject it into the little guy's veins and he ties something round the naked upper arm of the little guy strapped to the chair and pulls it tight and waits for the vein to show while the little guy howls and screams like a child and tries to shake the chair to bits or rip it apart but he's too well strapped in there no purchase no leverage and then the man in the gorilla mask just does it; sinks the needle into the little guy's skin with a bit of blood and empties the whole syringe into him. I throw up onto the floor and they pause the video for me and somebody goes to get a mop.
After I've stopped chucking and coughing they restart the video and we cut to the other scene and the tall hospital chair and the little guy again with empty eyes and McDunn says his bit about Persistent Vegetative State.
Well, indeed. They did a DNA-fingerprint test and found he had a bus-load of people in him, linked it to some guy who was in the toilets under Centre Point the day before hiring rent boys but he didn't want the full business just wanted them to wank into this bottle thank you for your contribution young man every little bit helps going to a good home thank you mind how you go…
I'm thinking.
"This is the trickle-down effect in action, is it?"
"No, this is the show-off effect in action," Clare tells me, having to shout over the din. Everybody else seems to be cheering. Andy and William are standing on a seat; Andy leans out over a table laden with glasses, a champagne bottle in one hand and his other arm held by William, who leans out the opposite way to balance him.
The table Andy is perched over is stacked with several hundred champagne glasses, forming a glittering pyramid rising a couple of metres from the table's surface. Andy is filling the single champagne glass at the apex of the pyramid with champagne; it is overflowing, filling the three glasses beneath it; they in turn are overflowing, filling the glasses on the level beneath them, which are also full and so spilling over to the level underneath, and so on and so on down almost to the bottom; Andy is on his eighth magnum. He glances down at the final layer of glasses.
"How we doing?" he roars.
"More! More!" everybody shouts.
"William!" somebody yells from the crowd. "Fifty quid if you just let him go!"
"Don't you fucking dare, Sorrell!" Andy shouts, laughing, upending the magnum over the topmost glass as the bottle empties.
"Not for a measly fifty," William laughs, as he and Andy pull together and draw together, tottering on the seat while Andy throws the emptied bottle to someone in the crowd and is handed another full magnum by his partner in The Gadget Shop, a fellow ex-ad-man who's a few years older than Andy. It strikes me the symbolism of this whole venture would be better were it he and Andy balancing together on the seat, but I get the impression Andy's partner isn't fully into such flamboyance.
"Winch me out there, Will!" Andy bellows.
"God, though, it's tempting," William says, leaning back and letting Andy crane out over the pyramid of glasses again.
"This is infantile," Clare says, shaking her head.
"What's what?" Yvonne asks, making her way through the crowd. She clutches a bottle of champagne.
"This is infantile," Clare says, nodding at the pyramid of glasses. She sees the bottle in Yvonne's hand. "Oh, I say, well done that woman." She holds out her flute. Yvonne fills the glass.
"Cameron?"
"Ta."
She fills her own glass and stands beside Clare and me, watching Andy pouring the champagne onto the top of the pyramid. Yvonne's wearing a little black number that to my untutored eye looks like it could have cost ten quid or a thousand; Clare is rather more ostentatious in a short, sparkling, crimson creation that looks like it wants to be a ball-gown when it grows up. Andy and William are in monochrome, DJs removed for the bubbly-waterfall operation.
Yvonne grins. "Boys," she says, sounding long-sufferingly affectionate.
I look around. When Andy invited me to the launch of the The Gadget Shop I naively assumed it would be in the shop itself, in Covent Garden. But that didn't measure up to Andy's sense of showmanship; it wasn't glitzy enough, dramatic enough, or even big enough. Instead, he hired the Science Museum. Part of it, anyway. That got people interested. A shop is just a shop, and even a shop selling expensive executive toys is still just a shop, but a museum is, well, glamorous. People reckon the Natural History Museum is the most glamorous — partying in the shadow of all those dinosaurs in that huge space is just the business — but for The Gadget Shop the Science Museum along the road was the obvious venue, as well as being cheaper. Besides, everyone who matters has already been to some sort of bash at the Natural History Museum; this is new.
There's a full-size hovercraft held tipped on wires directly above us; a virtually circular thing with a tiny cabin and a huge fluted central air-intake. I vaguely recall making an Airfix kit of that thing when I was a kid. It floats above us, gleaming in the darkness as if supported on a cloud of talk and booze while the people below swarm and chat and roar Andy on; the champagne — already dripping down off the edges of the table onto the temporary matting beneath from spillages — is almost overflowing the second-last level of glasses.
"More! More!" people yell.
"Oh, less, less," Clare mutters, sniffing.
"Nearly there yet?" Andy shouts.
"More! More!" everybody roars.
I look at them all. These are people like me. Christ. Media people, people from the advertising company Andy has just left, a few politicians — mostly Tory or Social Democrats though there are a couple of Labour guys — bankers, lawyers, business advisers, investment experts, actors, TV people — at least one film crew, though their lights are switched off for now — various other city types, a scattering of people who are, well, just professionally famous, and the remainder seemingly either part of some enormous floating meta-party or hired from some agency to impersonate people having a whale of a time: Rent-a-Hoot or something similar. I'm mildly surprised we haven't had a kiss-o-gram, but maybe that's a little lo-rent for Andy. Clare told me he'd taken rather a lot of convincing — once he'd determined to do the slightly naff champagne-pyramid stunt in the first place — not to try doing it with proper champagne flutes but to use the perry glasses like everybody else did; too tall, too unstable otherwise.
"You're very quiet, Cameron," Yvonne says, smiling at me.
"Yeah," I say helpfully.
"I think Cameron," Clare says, sniffing, "disapproves." She draws out the «oo» sound in the word.
Clare is a tall, auburn girl with striking angular looks she shares with her brother, but whereas Andy is — at the moment — bulkily fit-looking and tanned, Clare is just thin, and luminously pale. I reckon she's overly keen on coke and spends too much time in clubs, but maybe I'm just jealous; my cub-reporter status on the Caley and the triumph-of-miniaturisation salary that goes with it make habits that expensive out of the question. Clare has always had rather more in the way of aristocratic pretensions than Andy, who has that aura of classless broth-of-a-boyhood that usually only the congenitally rich can carry off convincingly.
Clare works for an estate agent so far up-market it's mostly estates they deal in, not humble houses, no matter how extensive; if it doesn't boast a couple of salmon rivers, a few square miles of trees and a brace of hills, lochs or lakes, then they just aren't interested.