by Iain Banks
"Cameron," Clare continues, "is content to lurk here on the sidelines radiating self-righteous socialist disapproval and imagining how after the revolution we'll all have to pull ploughs, eat raw turnips and take part in interminable self-criticism sessions long into the candle-lit night on the collective farm, aren't you, Cameron?"
"You don't pull ploughs," I reply. "You push them."
"I know, dear — there is a farm next door to us back on the dear old homestead and Daddy does usually describe himself as a farmer — but I meant that we capitalist parasites would be taking the place of the oxen, not the horny-handed salt-of-the-earth types cracking the whip over them."
"Well, I'm sorry to disappoint you," I tell her, "but I'm afraid you're assuming a rather more lenient revolution than the one I had in mind. I had you down as bone-meal actually, come the day. Sorry." I shrug, watching Andy start to pour what everybody nearby seems to agree will be the last magnum required before the glass pyramid is finally full of champagne.
Clare looks at Yvonne. "Cameron always did take a hard line on these things," she tells her. "Oh well, might as well enjoy ourselves while we can before the commissars take their gloating revenge. I'm off to powder my nose; would you like to come?"
Yvonne shakes her head. "No, thanks."
"I'll leave you with young Hot-to-Trotsky here, then," Clare says, patting Yvonne on the shoulder and winking at me as she sidles off through the cheering crowd. The pyramid is still not quite full.
"One more bottle! One more bottle!" everybody is shouting.
I turn to Yvonne. "So, how's the venture-capital businesss these days?"
"Venturesome," Yvonne says, flicking back her shoulder-Ilength black hair. "How's the newspaper business?"
"Folding."
"Oh; ha ha."
I shrug. "No, I'm enjoying it. Money's not brilliant but someetimes I see my name on the front page and I feel almost successful for a while, until I come to something like this." I nod at Andy, taking yet another opened magnum and leaning out over the glass-stacked table. His task is almost finished; the pyramid is nearly full.
Yvonne glances at the pyramid with what might be contempt. "Oh, don't let your head get turned by all this shit," she says.
The tone of her voice surprises me. "I thought you'd love all this," I tell her.
She looks slowly around, at the people and the place. "Hmm," she says, and packs a disconcerting amount of cold equivocation into that single sound. She fixes her gaze on me. "But don't you just long for a neutron bomb sometimes?"
"Constantly," I tell her, after a pause.
She nods, eyes narrowed, for a moment, then she shrugs, tiurning to me and grinning. ""Hot-to-Trotsky"?" she asks, looking; after Clare, still heading, thinly majestic in the thick of the crowrd, for the ladies.
"I made the mistake of trying to get Clare into bed onoce," I confess.
"Cameron! Really?" Yvonne looks delighted. "What happenned?"
"She just laughed."
Yvonne tuts. She glances round. "I'd have given you a refearence, Cameron," she says quietly.
I smile and drink my champagne, remembering when Andy came to Stirling for Yvonne and William's party, five years ago. It seems like a lot longer.
"Did you ever tell William about that?" I ask her.
Yvonne shakes her head. "No," she says. She shrugs. "Maybe when we're older."
I think about telling her that Andy was there, in his sleeping bag, listening the whole time, but while I'm thinking about it something goes wrong; there must have been a flaw in one of the glasses, or the weight is just too much, because there's a cracking sound and one side of the pyramid starts to collapse, sending an avalanche of falling glass and frothing champagne spilling crashing down off the table and smashing, bouncing and splashing onto the mats and the floor below.
Andy goes, "Aww…" and holds his arms straight out.
People cheer.
Still thinking.
Four years later Clare and her latest fiance were spending a weekend at Strathspeld when she died of a heart attack. I heard the news from a guy I knew who still lived in the village. I couldn't believe it. A heart attack. Overweight male execs squeezing themselves behind the wheel of their Mercs; they died of heart attacks. Arthritic working-class guys raised on a diet of fish and chips and fags; they died of heart attacks. Not young women in their mid-twenties. Christ, Clare was even fit at the time; she'd given up doing coke and taken up healthy shit like running and swimming. It couldn't be a heart attack.
And that was exactly what the doctor thought; that was precisely what helped kill her. The local doc — the guy who'd helped save Andy after he almost died under the ice all those years earlier — was on holiday at the time and there was a locum, a deputising doctor in charge of the practice, except from what the locals muttered later it seemed he'd treated his stay in Strathspeld as a holiday, too, and spent more time on river banks with a rod in his hands than at bedsides toting a stethoscope. The family called him when Clare started to complain of chest pains in the late afternoon but he didn't come out; told them she'd just strained something; rest and painkillers. They called him twice again, and eventually he appeared that evening once it was explained the family wasn't used to this sort of treatment (and once he realised the best salmon stream in the area ran through the estate). He still couldn't find anything wrong, and left again.
They called an ambulance when Clare became unconscious and her lips turned blue, but by then it was too late.
Andy and his partner had sold The Gadget Shop chain the previous year; Andy was still thinking about what he wanted to do next — now he was rich — and was deep in the desert on a trans-Saharan expedition when Clare died. The funeral was private, family only; Andy got back just in time. I rang the house a week later and talked to Mrs Gould, who said Andy was still there. She thought he would like to see me.
A grey day in a cold April, one of those winter's-end days when the land looks exhausted and worn and it seems like all the colour is gone from the world. The cloud was thick and low and moving slowly on a damp, chilling wind, a lidding expanse hiding the sky and the snow on the distant hills. The trees, bushes and fields were all the same dun shade, as though a thin layer of dirt had been sprayed everywhere, and wherever you looked there seemed to be mud or rotting leaves or bare, dead-looking branches. I thought that, if I'd just come from the Sahara to here, I'd head back as soon as possible, family duties or not.
I stopped at the house to give my condolences to Mr and Mrs Gould. Mrs Gould was covered in flour and smelled faintly of gin. She was a tall, nervous woman who'd gone grey early; she always wore large bifocals and usually dressed in tweeds. I'd never seen her without a single string of pearls, which she fingered constantly. She apologised for the mess, wiping her hands on her apron and then shaking my hand while I said how sorry I'd been to hear. She looked around the hall distractedly, as if wondering what to do next, then the door to the library opened and Mr Gould peeked out.
He was about the same height as his wife but he looked stooped now, and he was wearing a dressing-gown; normally he was the epitome of tweedy country-squiredom, an archetypal laird in three-piece suit, clumpy shoes, checked shirt and cap; he resorted to a beaten-up, much reproofed Barbour when the weather turned particularly foul. I'd never seen him in anything as soft-looking, as human as the pair of scruffy trousers, open-necked shirt and dressing-gown he wore then. His strong, square face looked drawn and his thinning brown hair hadn't been combed. He came out of the library when he saw it was me, shook my hand and said "Terrible thing, terrible thing" a few times, while Beethoven sounded loudly from the opened library door and his wife tutted and tried to smooth his errant hair. His eyes kept looking away over one of my shoulders or the other, never meeting my gaze, and I got the impression that like his wife he was constantly waiting for something important to happen, expecting someone to arrive at any moment, as though they both couldn't believe what had happened and it was all a drea
m or a ghastly joke and they were just waiting for Clare to come gangling through the front door, kicking off muddy green wellies and loudly demanding tea.
Andy was out shooting. I could hear the shotgun barking as I walked through the dim, dripping woods from the house, staying off the muddy path as much as possible and walking on the flattened, exhausted-looking grass at its side to keep my shoes from clogging up.
The field was surrounded by trees and looked out towards the river upstream from the loch. The river wasn't visible, but there had been a lot of rain over that week and one corner of the field had flooded, leaving a shallow temporary loch reflecting the tarnished dark silver of the clouds; its waters were still and flat.
There was a stretch of curved gravel, edged with planks, near this end of the field; six posts stood along the front edge of the gravel stand, and on top of each post there was a little flat piece of wood like a tray. Twenty yards in front of the gravel pathway was a low mound where the launcher mechanism for the clays sat. There were two other mounds about the same distance away to either side. I could hear the little generator puttering away inside the central mound as I got closer, clearing the trees and looking across and down at where Andy stood. I watched for a moment.
Andy wore cords, shirt and jumper and body-warmer; a cap hung from the top of one of the nearby posts. He was very tanned. A big box of shells sat opened on top of the post in front of him; a foot switch at the end of a long, snaking flex operated the catapult in the pit. He slotted six cartridges into the long-barrelled pump-action gun and turned to aim.
His foot tapped once, and the clay shot out of the hide, spinning away into the greyness in a day-glo orange blur. The gun roared and the clay disintegrated somewhere out over the field. When I looked carefully I could see lots of orange fragments scattered over the sodden grass and glistening brown earth of the field.
The generator revved up and down, providing power to the automatic launcher; it had some sort of randomly set variation built into where it was aiming because the clays came out at a different angle and heading each time. Andy got them all with his first shot except for the last one. He even tried to reload fast enough to have another crack at it, but it thumped into the wet heather near the river before he could get the shell into the gun. He shrugged, put the cartridge back into the box, checked the gun and turned to look at me. "Hi, Cameron," he said, and I knew then he'd been aware of me all the time. He put the pump-action down carefully on an oiled gun bag lying on the gravel.
"Hi," I said, walking up to him. He looked tired. We shook hands a little awkwardly, then hugged. He smelled of smoke.
"Fucking squaddie culture, yeah; adoration of the fucking Maggie and pit bulls and getting some scoff down your neck and let's get pissed on lager and all moon together from the bus and camouflage jackets in the high street and yeah-well-I'm-inarestid-in-martial-arts-in't-I? I'm not a fucking Nazi I just collect militaria I'm not a fucking racist I just hate blacks and gun magazines instead of magazines for guns wanking over the glossy photos of chromed Lugers I'll bet; half of them think Elvis is still alive, buncha fucking stupid little cunts! The dip-shit little bastards deserve the fucking Micks turning them into mince; saw the inside of an armoured car once; been blown to buggery; thrown a hundred feet into the air and then rolled all the way down a hill; we took turns looking inside just to prove we were real men; looked like the inside of a fucking slaughter-house…"
I sat with Andy while he ranted on. We were drinking whisky. He had a big room on the second floor of the house at Strathspeld; we'd played here as kids, making models, fighting wars with toy soldiers and the train set and Airfix tanks and forts made from Lego; we'd conducted experiments with our chemistry sets, raced our Scalextric cars, flown gliders out the window down to the lawn and shot at targets in the gardens with our air rifles and killed a couple of birds and smoked a few packets of illicit fags from the same window. We'd smoked untold spliffs here, too, listening to records with pals from the village, and with Clare.
"Why are people so fucking incompetent?" Andy screamed suddenly, and threw his whisky glass across the room. It hit the wall near the window and smashed. I remembered the disintegrating pile of champagne glasses in the Science Museum, only four years earlier. The whisky left in the glass he'd thrown made a pale brown stain on the wall. I focused on the liquid as it slowly dribbled down.
"Sorry," Andy muttered, not sounding sorry at all, getting unsteadily out of his seat and going to where the bits of glass lay broken on the carpet. He squatted and started to pick them up, then let them drop back to the floor and just crouched there and put his hands over his face and started to cry.
I let him cry for a bit and then went over to him and squatted down beside him and put my hand over his shoulders.
"Why are people so fucking useless?" he sobbed. "Fucking let you down, fucking can't do their fucking job! Fucking Halziel; Captain fucking Michael fucking Lingary DSO — cunts!"
He pushed away from me and stood up and stumbled over to a wooden chest, tearing one of its drawers right out so that it crashed to the carpeted floor and a load of jumpers fell out. He got down on his knees behind the drawer and I heard tape rip.
He stood up holding an automatic pistol and started trying to slot a magazine into the grip. "Fucking brain-ectomy coming up, Doctor fucking Halziel," he said, still crying and still trying to get the magazine to fit into the gun.
Halziel, I thought. Halziel. I recognised Lingary's name from the times Andy had talked about the Falklands; he'd been Andy's CO, the one Andy blamed for the deaths of some of his men. But Halziel… Oh yeah, of course: the name of the locum who'd let Clare die. The guy the locals thought was more interested in fishing than doctoring.
"Fucking load, cunt!" Andy screamed at the gun.
I got up, suddenly feeling cold. I hadn't felt like this when I'd seen him firing the shotgun. It hadn't occurred to me to feel frightened of him then. Now it did. I wasn't at all sure I was doing the right thing but I got up and started towards him as he finally got the clip to slide into the gun and snick home.
"Hey, Andy," I said. "Man, come on…"
He glared up at me as though seeing me for the first time. His face was red and blotchy and streaked with tears. "Don't you fucking start, Colley, you little cunt; you let me down too, remember?"
"Hey, hey," I said, putting my hands out, and retreating.
Andy crashed into the door, opened it and almost fell out into the landing. I followed him down the stairs, listening to him curse and shout; in the front hall he tried to get a jacket on over his clothes but couldn't get it to fit over his hand holding the gun. He hauled the front door open so hard that when it hit the stop the stained-glass panel shattered. I looked woozily around for Mr and Mrs Gould but there was no sign of them. Andy slammed the heel of his hand off the half of the storm door that was still closed, then fell out into the night.
I went after him; he was trying to get into the Land Rover. I stood beside him while he cursed at the keys and thumped the side window. He put the gun sideways in his mouth to give him two free hands and I thought about trying to grab it off him but I thought I'd probably kill one of us and even if I didn't I was no match for him and he'd just take it off me again.
"Andy, man," I said, trying to sound calm, "come on; this is crazy. Come on. Don't be insane, man. Killing this dickhead Halziel isn't going to bring Clare back —»
"Shut up!" Andy yelled, throwing the keys down and grabbing me by the collar and slamming me back against the side of the Landie. "Shut the fuck up, you stupid little shit! I fucking know nothing'll bring her back! I know that!" He banged my head against the Land Rover's side window. "I just want to be sure that there'll be one stupid incompetent fuck less in the world!"
"But — " I said.
"Ah, fuck off!"
He hit me in the face with the gun; an inefficient, glancing blow with more chaotic anger than directed malice behind it; I fell down, correspondingly, more because I f
elt I ought to than because I was actually knocked out. Still hurt, though. I lay on the gravel, face up. It was only then I realised it was raining.
I worried distantly about being shot and killed. Then Andy slammed the gun side-on against the Land Rover and kicked the door.
"Christ!" he bellowed. He kicked the door again. "Christ!"
I was getting wet. I could feel water seeping through my jumper and making my back damp.
Andy bent down and looked at me. His eyes screwed up.
"You all right?"
"Yeah," I said wearily.
He flicked something on the gun and stuffed it down the back of his cords, then held a hand out to me. I put my hand up to his. I remembered William and Andy, balanced on the chair under the old hovercraft.
He pulled me up. "Sorry I hit you," he said.
"Sorry I was a prat."
"Oh, man, Christ…" He put his head on my shoulder, breathing hard but not crying. I patted his head.
Still thinking.
Yvonne and I at South Queensferry a couple of summers ago, across the road from the Hawes Inn at the slipway underneath the tall stone piers of the rail-bridge, the mile-wide river bright before us, people promenading along pavements and down the pier, an occasional smell of frying onions from the snack bar beside the Inshore Lifeboat shed. We were there to witness William getting to grips with his brand-new Jet Ski; this process seemed to consist largely of getting on, powering away, trying to turn too fast and falling off in an extravagant splash. His big blond head kept coming up, shaking once and then bobbing through the water as he struck out for the machine. There were another three Jet Skis buzzing around on that part of the river and a few water-skiers with their big-engined speedboats, all creating a fair old racket, but we could still hear William laughing; the guy thought buying a frighteningly expensive piece of machinery and spending most of your time falling off it into the water was just the most enormous wheeze.