by Iain Banks
"I'll drop you a line with my new address, once I'm settled."
"Right; good, okay." I nod. There's a splashing, swirling sound behind me, and a soft, hollow bumping noise. "Well," I say, "any time you're in Edinburgh…"
She shakes her head and looks away, then smiles gallantly for me and tips her head, indicating. "That's your boat, Cameron."
I just stand there, nodding like an idiot, wanting to say the one right thing that must exist for me to change all of this, make it good, make it all better, make it eventually happen happily for us, but knowing that that thing just doesn't exist and there's no point looking for it, and so just stand there nodding dumbly with my lips trapped compressed between my teeth, looking down, not able to look her in the eyes and knowing that's it, the end, goodbye… until after those moments she puts me out of my misery and puts out her hand and gently says, "Goodbye, Cameron."
And I nod and shake her hand and after a while I get my mouth to work and it says, "Goodbye."
I hold her hand one last time, just for a moment.
The hotel at that end of the loch is full of dead stuffed fish in glass cages and mangy-looking taxidermised otters, wild cats and eagles. I don't know many people and I think Yvonne's avoiding me, so I have a single whisky and a few sandwiches, then I leave.
The rain is still torrential; I have my wipers on quick-time but even so they're hardly coping. The moisture coming off my brolly and coat lying puddling on the back seat is fighting a pretty equal battle with the heater and blower to mist up the glass on the inside.
I get about fifteen miles on the single-track road round the mountains when the engine starts to misfire. I glance at the instruments; half a tank of fuel, no warning lights.
"Oh, no," I groan. "Come on, baby, come on, don't let me down; come on, come on." I tap the car's dashboard gently, encouragingly. "Come on now, come on…"
I'm heading up a slight hill into a stretch of road through a Forestry Commission plantation when the engine does a passable impression of me in the morning, coughing and spluttering and not quite firing on all cylinders. Then it dies completely.
I coast quickly to a stop in a passing place. "Oh, Christ… Shit!" I yell, slamming the dashboard, then feeling stupid.
The rain makes machine-gun noises on the roof.
I try starting the engine but there's just another bout of coughing from under the bonnet.
I release the bonnet-catch, put my coat back on, take up the sopping umbrella and get out.
The engine makes little metallic, creaking, tinking noises. Steam wisps up as raindrops hit the exhaust manifold. I test the plug leads and look for something obvious like a loose wire. It doesn't appear to be anything obvious. (I don't think I've heard of anybody in a situation like this ever finding it was something obvious.) I hear an engine and look round the side of the raised bonnet to see a car heading in the same direction as me. I don't know whether to try and wave them down or not. I settle for just looking pleadingly at the approaching car; it's one guy in a beaten-up Micra.
He flashes his lights and pulls in ahead of me.
"Hi," I say as he opens the door and gets out, pulling on an anorak and shoving a deerstalker hat on. He's red-haired, bearded. "It just stopped." I tell him. "I've got fuel but it just cut out. Could be the rain, I suppose…" My voice trails off as I suddenly think, Christ, it might be him. It might be Andy; this could be him, disguised, come for me.
What am I doing? Why didn't I get round to the boot and get out the fucking tyre-iron the instant the car stopped? Why aren't I carrying a baseball bat, a can of mace, anything? I stare at the guy, thinking, Is it him, is it? He's the right height, the right build. I stare at his cheek and his red beard, trying to see a join, trying to see glue.
"Aye," he says, stuffing his hands in his anorak pockets and glancing down the road. "Ye goat any WD40, pal?" He nods at the engine. "Looks like yon bit there could do with some."
I'm staring at him, my heart pounding. There's a weird roaring noise in my head and I can hardly hear him over it. His voice sounds different but he was always good at accents. My belly feels like a solid chunk of ice and my legs like they're about to buckle and give way. I'm still staring at the guy. Oh Christ, oh Christ, oh Christ. I'd run but my legs won't work and he was always faster than me anyway.
He frowns at me and I feel like I've got tunnel vision; all I can see is his face, his eyes, his eyes, just the right colour, just the right look… Then he changes somehow, seems to straighten and relax, and in a voice I recognise says, "Ah. Very perceptive, Cameron."
I don't see what he hits me with; just his arm swinging round at me, quick and blurring as a striking snake. The blow lands above my right ear and fells me, sends me folding down in a galaxy of flickering stars and a huge growling swell of noise as if I'm falling through the air towards a great waterfall. I twist as I fall and hit the engine, but it doesn't hurt, and I slide off it and down and fall towards the puddles and the road and I hit the road but I don't feel that either.
Oh God help me here on the island of the dead with the cries of the tormented, here with the angel of death and the acrid stench of excrement and carrion taking me back in the darkness and the pale fawn light to the place I never wanted to go back to, the man-made earthly black hell and the human scrapyard kilometres long. Here down amongst the dead men, midst-ways with the torn-souled and their wild, inhuman screams; here with the ferryman, the boatman, my eyes covered and my brains scrambled, here with this prince of death, this prophet of reprisal, this jealous, vengeful, unforgiving son of our bastard commonwealth of greed; help me help me help me…
My head hurts like buggery; my hearing feels… blurred. That's not the right word but it is. Eyes shut. They were shut with something earlier, shut by something, but not any more, at least I don't think so; I sense light beyond my eyelids. I'm lying on my side on something hard and cold and gritty. I'm cold, and my hands and feet are tied, or taped. I shiver uncontrollably, scraping my cheek across the chill, granular floor. Bad taste in mouth. The air smells sharp and I can hear…
I can hear the dead men, hear their flayed souls, wailing on the wind to no ear save mine and no understanding at all. The view behind my eyelids goes from pink to red then purple into black, and is suffused with a rumbling shift into a terrible, tearing roaring noise, shaking the ground, filling the air, pounding my bones, dark going dark, black stinking hell o mum o dad o no no please don't take me back there
And I'm there, in the one place I've hidden from myself; not that cold day by the hole in the ice or the other day in the sunlit woods near the hole in the hill — days deniable because I was then not yet the me I have become — but just eighteen months ago; the time of my failure and my simple, shaming incapacity to reap and work the obvious power of what I was observing; the place that exposed my incompetence, my hopeless inability to witness.
Because I was there, I was part of it, just a year and a half ago, after months and months of badgering, cajoling and entreating Sir Andrew he finally let me go when the deadline was up and the trucks and tracks and tanks were about to roll I got my wish, I got to go, I was given the chance to do my stuff and show what I was made of, to be a genuine front-line journalist, a rootin-tootin-tokin-tipplin God-bijayzuz gonzo war correspondent, bringing the blessed Saint Hunter's manic subjectivity to the ultimate in scarifying human edge-work: modern warfare.
And forgetting the fact the drinks were few and far between and that the whole media-managed event was so unsportingly one-sided and mostly happened far away from any journos, tendance gonzoid or not, when it came to it — and it did come to it, I did have my chance, it was put right there in front of me practically screaming at me to fucking write something — I couldn't do it; couldn't hack it as a hack; I just stood there, awestruck, horrorstruck, absorbing the ghastly force of it with my inadequate and unprepared private humanity, not my public professional persona, not my skill, not the face I had laboured to prepare to face the sea of faces t
hat is the world.
And so I was humbled, scaled, down-sized.
I stood on the sunless desert, beneath a sky black from horizon to horizon, a rolling, heavy sulphurous sky made solid and soiled, packed with the thick, stinking effluence squeezed erupting from the earth's invaded bowels, and in that darkness at noon, that planned, deliberated disaster, with the bale-fire light of the burning wells flickering in the distance with a dirty, guttering flame, I was reduced to a numb, dumb realisation of our unboundedly resourceful talent for bloody hatred and mad waste, but stripped of the means to describe and present that knowledge.
I crouched on the tar-black grainy stickiness of the plundered sands, within scorching distance of one of the wrecked wells, watching the way the fractured black metal stub in the centre of the crater gouted a compressed froth of oil and gas in quick, shuddering, instantly dispersing bursts and bubbles of brown-black spray into the furious, screaming tower of flame above; a filthy hundred-metre Cypress of fire, shaking the ground like a never-ending earthquake and bellowing madly in a strident jet-engine shriek, shuddering my bones and jarring my teeth and making my eyes tremble in their sockets.
My body shook, my ears rang, my eyes burned, my throat was raw with the acid-bitter stench of the evaporating crude, but it was as though the very ferocity of the experience unmanned me, unmade me and rendered me incapable of telling it.
Later, on the Basra road, by that vast linearity of carnage, a single strip of junk-yard destruction stretching — again — from horizon to horizon on the flat dun face of that dusty land, I wandered the scorched, perforated wreckage of the cars and vans and trucks and buses left after the A10s and the Cobras and the TOWs and the miniguns and the thirty-mill cannons and the cluster munitions had had their unrestrained way with their unarmoured prey, and saw the brown-burned metal, the few bubbled patches of sooty paint, the torn chassis and ripped-open cabs of those Hondas and Nissans and Leylands and Macks, their tyres slack and flattened or quite gone, burned to the steel cording inside; I surveyed the spattered shrapnel of that communal ruin rayed out across the sands, and I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be caught here, beaten, retreating, running desperately away in those thin-skinned civilian vehicles while the missiles and shells rained in like supersonic sleet and the belching fire burst billowing everywhere around. I tried, too, to imagine how many people had died here, how many shredded, cindered bodies and bits of bodies had been bagged and removed and buried by the clean-up squads before we were allowed to see this icon of that long day's slaughter.
I sat on a low dune for a while, maybe fifty metres away from the devastation on the strip of ripped, bubbled road, and tried to take it all in. The lap-top sat on my knee, screen reflecting the grey overcast, the cursor winking slowly at the top-left edge of the blank display.
I gave it half an hour and still couldn't think of anything that would describe how it looked and how I felt. I shook my head and stood up, twisting back to dust my pants.
The black, charred boot was a couple of metres away, half-buried in the sand. When I picked it up it was surprisingly heavy because it still had the foot inside it.
I wrinkled my nose at the stink and let it drop, but it still didn't help, didn't break the log-jam, didn't (ha) kick-start the process.
Nothing did.
I filed a minimum of uninspired war-is-hell-and-frankly-so-is-peace-if-you're-female-out-here stories from the hotel and smoked some mind-bendingly powerful dope I got from an affable Palestinian helper who — as soon the journos left — was picked up by the Kuwaiti authorities, tortured and deported to Lebanon.
When I got back Sir Andrew told me he wasn't at all impressed with the stuff I'd filed; they could have run AP stories for a lot less money and just as much impact. I didn't have an argument against this, and so had to sit there and take the old man's verbal battering for half an hour. And, even though at the time I knew it was wrong, unjustifiable and a feeble, contemptible piece of self-important self-pity, for a while, under that withering deluge of professional contempt, I felt like something trapped and pulverised amongst the dust and greasy ashes on the Basra road.
I'm hearing the cries of the dead men above the roar of the screeching, broken well-heads, and I smell the thick, cloying brown-black oil and the sweet gagging odour of corruption; then the cries turn to the calls of seagulls, and the smell to that of the sea, with an acrid overtone of bird-shit.
I'm still tied up. I open my eyes.
Andy is sitting across from me, his back against a rough concrete wall. The floor underneath us is concrete, as is the roof. There is a doorway to Andy's left; no door, just a pitted aperture to the sunlight outside. I can see more concrete buildings, all derelict, and a skinny concrete tower spattered with seagull droppings. Beyond there are chopping waves rolling white at their tops, and a glimpse of distant land. The wind sighs through the doorway over little stones and shards of glass; I can hear waves hitting rocks. I blink, looking at Andy.
He smiles.
My hands are tied behind my back; my ankles are taped together. I work back to the wall behind me and lever myself up until I'm sitting, too. I can see more of the water outside now, and more land; a faraway scatter of houses, a couple of buoys bobbing in the wind-patterned water, and a small coastal freighter heading away.
I work my mouth; it tastes foul. I blink, start to shake my head to try and clear some of the fuzziness, but then think the better of it. My head aches and throbs.
"How are you feeling?" Andy asks me.
"Fucking awful, what do you expect?"
"Could be worse."
"Oh, I'm sure," I say, and feel very cold. I close my eyes and put my head carefully back against the chilly concrete of the wall. My heart feels like it's beating air; too fast and faint to be propelling anything as thick as blood. Air, I think; Christ, he's injected me with air I'm going to die, heart thrashing on foam on froth on air, brain dying, starved of oxygen, sweet Jesus no… But a minute or so passes and, while I still don't feel too good, I don't die either. I open my eyes again.
Andy is still sitting there; he's wearing brown cord trousers, a combat jacket and hiking boots. There's a big camouflaged rucksack against the wall a metre to his left and a half-full bottle of mineral water in front of him. By his right hand there's a cellphone; by his left, a gun. I don't know very much about handguns beyond the difference between a revolver and an automatic, but I think I recognise that grey pistol; I think it's the one he had that night a week or two after Clare died, when he was all set to take vengeance right then on Doctor Halziel. Maybe — I'm thinking now -1 should have let him.
I'm still wearing what I was when he kidnapped me: black suit, dirty and stained now, and a white shirt. He's removed my tie. My Drizabone is lying, neatly folded but looking scruffy, a metre to my right.
He stretches out one leg, and his hiking boot touches the water bottle. He taps it. "Water?" he says.
I nod. He gets up, takes the top off the bottle and holds it to my lips. I glug down a few mouthfuls, then nod, and he takes it away. He sits back where he was.
He takes a bullet out of his combat jacket and starts turning it over and over in his fingers. He takes a deep, sighing breath and says, "So, Cameron."
I try to get comfortable. My heart's still beating like hell and making my head pound, my bowels are threatening terrible things and I feel kitten-weak, but I'm fucked if I'm going to plead with him. Actually, I'm probably fucked no matter what I do, and — being realistic — when it comes to it I'll probably plead like a little kid, but for now I might as well tough it out.
"You tell me, Andy." I keep my voice neutral. "What happens now? What have you got in store for me?"
He grimaces and shakes his head, frowning down at the bullet in his hand. "Oh, I'm not going to kill you, Cameron."
I can't help it; I laugh. It's not much of a laugh; more of a gasp with pretensions, but it raises my spirits. "Oh yeah?" I say. "Like you were going to give back Halz
iel and Lingary unharmed."
He shrugs. "Cameron, that was just tactics," he says reasonably. "They were always going to die." He smiles, shaking his head at my naivety.
I inspect him. He's clean-shaven and fit-looking. He looks younger than he did; a lot younger; younger than he was when Clare died.
"So if you're not going to kill me, Andy, what?" I ask him. "Hmm? Give me AIDS? Chop off my fingers so I can't type?" I take a breath. "I hope you've taken into account the advances in computer voice-recognition which are making keyboard-free word processing a realistic possibility in the near future."
Andy grins, but there's something cold in it. "I'm not going to hurt you, Cameron," he says, "and I'm not going to kill you, but I need something from you."
I stare meaningfully at my taped-together ankles. "Uh-huh. What?"
He looks down at the bullet again. "I want you to listen to me," he says quietly. It's as though he's embarrassed. He shrugs and looks me in the eye. "That's all, really."
"Okay," I say. I flex my shoulders, grimacing. "Could I listen with my hands untied?"
Andy purses his lips, then nods. He takes a long knife out of his boot. It looks like a thin bowie knife; the blade is very shiny. He squats while I turn round and the knife slices slickly through the tape. I tear the rest off, taking some hairs with it. My hands tingle. I look at my watch.
"Jesus, how hard did you hit me?"
It's half nine in the morning, the day after the funeral.
"Not that hard," Andy tells me. "I kept you under with ether for a while, then you just seemed to sleep."
He sits back where he was, sliding the knife back into his boot. I put one hand out and lean to the side, looking out the doorway. I squint into the distance.
"Christ; that's the fucking Forth Bridge!" Somehow it's a relief that I can see the bridges and know home's only a few miles away.
"We're on Inchmickery," Andy says. "Off Cramond." He looks around. "Place was a gun battery during both wars; these are old Army buildings." He smiles again. "You get the occasional adventurous yachtsman trying to make a landing, but there are a couple of bolt-holes they can't find." He pats the wall behind him. "Makes a good base, now the hotel's gone. Mind you, it's under the flight path for the airport and I suspect the security boys'll want to give it the once-over before the Euro-summit, so I'm bailing out today, one way or the other."