The Bridge

by Iain Banks

  His father was injured at work and laid up for a year and half; his mother went to work in the cigarette factory (his sisters and brothers were old enough to look after the others). His father recovered, more or less the man he had been - maybe a little more quick to anger - and his mother went part-time until she was made redundant years later

  He liked his dad, until he became a little ashamed of him, as he became a little ashamed of all his family. His father lived for football and pay day; he had old records by Harry Lauder and of several pipe bands, and he could recite about fifty of the best-known Burns poems by heart. He was a Labour man, of course, forever faithful but wary, always excepting the betrayal, the fudging, the lies. He maintained that he had never knowlingly drunk so much as a quarter-gill in the company of a Tory, with the possible exception of some publicans, who for the sake of the socialist cause's good name he rather hoped were Conservatives (or Liberals, whom he regarded as honourable, misguided, but relatively harmless). A man's man; a man who never walked away from a fight or a workmate who needed another pair of hands, a man who never left a goal uncheered or a foul unjeered or a pint unfinished.

  His mum always seemed like a shadow compared to his dad. She was there when he needed her, to wash his clothes and comb his hair and buy him things and give him a cuddle when he'd skinned his knee, but he never really knew her as a person.

  His sisters and brothers he got on with, but they were all older than he was (it was years before he discovered he was 'the mistake'), and they already seemed grown-up by the time he was of an age to become really interested in them. He was tolerated, spoiled and victimised by turns, according to how they felt; he considered himself hard done by, and envied those from smaller families, but slowly came to understand that in general he'd been more spoiled and indulged than tormented and made scapegoat. He was their child, too; special to them as well. They always looked delighted when he answered television quiz-show questions before the contestants, and were proud - and a little amazed - that he read two or three library books every week. They - like his mum and dad - would give a little smile and then a long frown when they saw his school report card, ignoring the Es and the VGs and tapping at the F (for RI - Religious Instruction; God the confusion he suffered for years because his father approved of atheism but not of doing badly at any school subject), and the PE (PE - he hated the gym teacher and it was mutual).

  They went their various ways; the girls marrying, Sammy going into the army, Jimmy emigrating ... Morag did best, he supposed, marrying an office equipment sales manager from Bearsden. He gradually lost touch with them all, over the years, but he never forgot the sense of quiet, almost respectful pride which permeated their congratulations - mailed or phoned or delivered in person - when he was accepted for university, even if they were all surprised he wanted to do Geology rather than English or History.

  But the great city, that year, was everything to him. The western hub, Glasgow and its heartlands, he would always be too close to, always have too many memories of, all jumbled up from childhood days out and visits to aunties and grannies; it was part of him, part of his past. The old capital, old Edwin's town, Edinburgh; that was another country to him, a new and wonderful place; Eden ascendant, Eden before the fall, Eden before his own long-desired escape from the technicalities of innocence.

  The air was different, though he was only fifty miles from home; the days seemed to shine, on that first autumn at least, and even the winds and the fogs were like something he had always waited for, alternate scourings and coatings he underwent with a kind of happily pampered vanity, as though it was all for him: a priming and preparation, a grooming.

  He explored the city whenever he could; walking, taking buses, climbing hills and descending steps, always watching and looking, surveying the stones and layout and architecture of the place with all the possessive glee of a new laird inspecting his lands. He stood on that stark volcanic remnant, eyes slitted against a North-Sea wind, and looked out over the swept spaces of the city; he forced his way through the thrown sheets of stinging rain walking the old docks and the coastal esplanade, he meandered through the jumbled erratics of the Old, he strode the clean geometry of the New, he wandered through the quiet fog under the Dean Bridge and discovered the village within the city in its not-yet-quaint decrepitude, and he strolled along the famous bustling street on sunlit shopping Saturdays, just grinning at the rock-rooted castle and its royal train of colleges and offices, an encrusted battlement of buildings along the basalt spine of the hill.

  He took to writing poems and song lyrics, and in the university he would walk along the corridors whistling.

  He got to know Stewart Mackie, a small, quiet-spoken, sallow-faced Aberdonian and fellow Geology student; they and their friends decided they were the Alternative Geologists, and called themselves the Rockers. They drank beer in the Union and the pubs in Rose Street and the Royal Mile, they smoked dope and some took acid. White Rabbit and Astronomy Dominé blared from stereos, and one night in Trinity he at last lost that technical ghost of innocence, to a young nurse from the Western General, whose name he forgot next day.

  He met Andrea Cramond in the Union one night, while he was with Stewart Mackie and some of the Rockers. They went off without telling him to Danube Street, to a well-known brothel. Later, they claimed they only did so because they'd noticed this chick with granite-red hair giving him the eye.

  She had a flat in Comely Bank, not far from the Queensferry Road. Andrea Cramond was an Edinburgh girl; her parents lived only half a mile away, in one of the tall, grand houses circling Moray Place. She wore psychedelic clothes; she had green eyes, remarkable cheekbones, a Lotus Elan, a four-roomed flat, two hundred record, and seemingly inexhaustible supplies of money, charm, Red Leb and sexual energy. He fell in love with her almost immediately.

  When they first met at the Union they talked about Reality, mental illness (she had read her Laing), the importance of Geology (that was him), recent French cinema (her), the poetry of T.S. Eliot (her), literature in general (her, mostly), and Vietnam (both). She had to go back to her parents' house that night; it was her father's birthday the following day and it was family tradition to start the celebrations with a champagne breakfast.

  A week later they literally bumped into each other at the top of the Waverley Steps; he was heading for the station to go home for the weekend, she was off to see friends after doing some Christmas shopping. They went for a drink, had several, and then she invited him back to her flat for a smoke. He rang a neighbour who would go round and tell his parents he was going to be late.

  She had some whisky at the flat. They listed to Stones and Dylan LPs, they sat on the floor together in front of the hissing gas fire as it grew darker outside, and after a while he found himself stroking her long red hair, and then kissing her, and then after that he called the neighbours again and said he had an essay to finish and couldn't come home that weekend, and she rang some people who were expecting her at a party to say she couldn't make it, and then they spent the rest of the weekend in bed, or in front of the hissing gas fire.

  Two years went past before he told her he had seen her amongst the crowds of people on North Bridge that day, loaded with her shopping, and had already walked past her twice before deliberately bumping into her by the Steps. She had been thinking, not looking at the people around her, and he had been too shy just to stop her without some pretext. She laughed, when she heard this.

  They drank, smoked and screwed together, and tripped together a couple of times; she took him round museums and galleries and to her parents' house. Her father was an advocate, a tall, grey impressive man with a powerful, resonant voice and half-moon glasses. Andrea Cramond's mother was younger than her husband; greying but elegant, and tall as her daughter. There was one older brother, very straight, also in the law, and whole circle of her old school friends. It was with them that he gradually came to be ashamed of his family, his background, his west-coast accent, even some of
the words he used. They made made him feel inferior, not in intellect but in training, in the way he'd been brought up, and slowly he started to change, trying to find a middle-ground between all the different things he wanted to be; true to his upbringing, his class and beliefs, but also true to the new spirit of love, alternatives, and real possibility of peace and a better, less greedy, less fucked-up world ... and true to his own fundamental certainty in the understandability and malleability of the earth, the environment; ultimately everything.

  It was that belief which would not allow him to accept anything else completely. His father's view - he thought at the time - was too limited, by geography, class and history; Andrea's friends were too pretentious, her parents too self-satisfied, and the Love Generation, he already felt - though he'd have been uncomfortable admitting it - too naive.

  He believed in science, in maths and physics, in reason and understanding, in cause and effect. He loved elegance, and the sheer objective logic of scientific thought, which began by saying 'Suppose ...' but could then build certainty, hard facts from that unprejudiced, unrestricted starting point. All faiths, it seemed, began imperatively by saying 'Believe:' and from this ultimately fearful insistency could conjure up only images of fear and domination, something to submit to but built of nonsenses, ghosts, ancient vapours.

  There were some difficult times in that first year; he was appalled to find himself jealous when Andrea slept with somebody else, and cursed the upbringing that had told and retold him that a man should be jealous, and a woman had no right to screw around but a man did. He wondered if he ought to suggest they move in together (they talked about it).

  He had to spend that summer back in the west, working for the Corporation Cleansing Department sweeping leafy, dog-shit-spattered west-end streets. Andrea was abroad, first with her family in a Cretan villa and then visiting a friend's family in Paris, but at the start of the next year they were - to his surprise - back together again, relatively unchanged.

  He decided to drop Geology; while everybody else was doing Eng Lit or Sociology (or so it seemed to him), he would do something useful. He started a degree course in Engineering Design. Some of Andrea's friends tried to persuade him to do English because he seemed to know something about literature (he had learned how to talk about it, not just enjoy it), and because he wrote poetry. It was Andrea's fault anybody knew; he hadn't wanted the stuff published but she'd seen some of it lying around in his room and sent it to a friend of hers who published a magazine called Radical Road. He had been embarrassed and proud in almost equal measure when she surprised him with the issue of the magazine, flourishing it triumphantly in front of him, a present. No, he was determined to do something which would be of real use to die world. Andrea's friends could call him a plumber if diey wanted; he was determined. He remained friends with Stewart Mackie, but lost touch with the other Rockers.

  Some weekends he and Andrea would go out to her parents' second house at Gullane, along the firth's duned shore east. The house was large and bright and airy and stood the golf course, looking out across the grey-blue waters to the distant coast of Fife. They would stay there for a weekend, and take walks along the beach and through the dunes; occasionally in the quietness of the dunes they would make love.

  Sometimes, on good, really clear days, they would walk to the end of the beach and climb the highest dune, because he was convinced they would be able to see the three, long red summits of the Forth Bridge, which had terribly impressed him when he was just a wee boy, and which - he always told her - were the same colour as her hair.

  But they never did see it from there.

  She sat cross-legged on the floor after her bath, pulling a brush through her long, thick red hair. Her blue kimono reflected firelight, and her face, legs and arms shone, newly scrubbed, in the same yellow-orange glow. He was at the window, looking out into the fog-filled night, his hands cupped on either side of his face like blinkers as he pressed his nose against the glass. She said, 'What do you think?' He was silent for a moment, then pulled away from the window, closing the brown velvet curtains again. He turned back to her, shrugging.

  'Pretty thick. We could make it, but it wouldn't be much fun driving. Should we stay?'

  She brushed her hair slowly, holding it out to one side of her tilted head and pulling the brush through it carefully, patiently. He could almost hear her thinking. It was Sunday night; they ought to be leaving the coast house and heading back to the city. It had been foggy when they woke that morning and they waited all day for it to lift, but it had just kept thickening. She'd called her parents; it was in the city too and all over the east coast according to the weather centre, so they would not run of it once they left Gullane. It was only twenty miles or so that was a long way in the fog. She hated driving in fog, and thought he drove too quickly whatever the conditions (he'd only passed his test - in her car - six months earlier, and he loved driving fast). Two of her friends had had car crashes year. Not bad ones, but still... He knew she was superstitious, and believed that bad luck ran in threes. She wouldn't want to go back, though she had a tutorial the next morning.

  The flames flickered over the logs in the wide grate.

  She nodded slowly, 'OK, I don't know if we've got much food in though.'

  'Fuck the food, do we have any dope?' he said, coming to sit beside her, twisting some of her hair in his fingers and grinning at her. She clonked him on the head with the brush.

  'Addict.'

  He made a mewling noise and rolled around the floor, rubbing his head. Then, seeing this had no effect - she was still calmly brushing her hair - he sat up again, back against an armchair. He looked over at the old radiogram. 'Want me to put Wheels of Fire on again?'

  She shook her head. 'No ...'

  'Electric Ladyland?' He suggested.

  'Put on something... old,' she said, frowning in the firelight, looking at the brown folds of the velvet curtains.

  'Old?' he said, feigning disgust.

  'Yeah. Is Bringing It All Back Home there?'

  'Oh, Dylan,' he said stretching and pulling his fingers through his long hair. 'I don't think we've got it. I'll have a look.' They'd brought a case full of records with them. 'Hmm. No ... not here. Suggest something else.'

  'You choose. Something old. I'm feeling nostalgic. Something from the good old days.' She laughed as she said it.

  'These are the good old days,' he told her.

  'That's not what you said when Prague burned and Paris didn't,' she told him. He sighed, looking at all the old LPs.

  'Yeah, I know.'

  'In fact,' she added, 'it's not what you were saying when that nice Mr Nixon got elected, either, or when May Daly -'

  'OK, OK. So what do you want to hear?'

  'Oh, put on Ladyland again,' she said, sighing. He took the record to the radiogram. 'Do you want to eat out?' she asked him.

  He wasn't sure. He didn't want to leave the cosy intimacy of the house; it was good to be alone with her. Also, he couldn't afford to eat out all the time; she paid for most of the meals. 'Could do, could do,' he said, blowing some dust off the needle under the heavy Bakelite arm. He had stopped making jokes about the radiogram's antiquity.

  'I'll see what's in the fridge,' she said, unfolding from the floor, standing and straightening the kimono. 'I think the stash is in my bag.'

  'Oh goody,' he said, 'I'll roll a funny cigarette.'

  They played cards later, after she'd called her parents to say they'd be back tomorrow. Afterwards, she took out tarot cards and started to tell his fortune. She was interested in the tarot, in astrology and sun signs and the prophecies of Nostradamus; she didn't believe deeply in them, they just interested her. He thought that was worse than believing in them completely.

  She got annoyed with him during the reading; he was being sarcastic. She packed the cards away, upset.

  'I just want to know how it works,' he tried to explain.

  'Why?' She sprawled over the couch behind him,
reached down and lifted the record cover they were using as a crash-board.

  'Why?' he laughed, shaking his head. 'Because that's the only way to understand anything. First, does it work? Then, how?'

  'Perhaps, dearest,' she said, licking a cigarette paper, 'not everything has to be understood; perhaps not everything can be, not like equations and formulae.'

  They kept returning to this. Emotional sense versus logic. He believed in a sort of Unified Field Theory of the consciousness; it was there to be understood, emotions and feelings and logical thought together; a whole, an entity however disparate in its hypotheses and results which nevertheless worked throughout on the same fundamental principles. It would all eventually be comprehended; it was just a matter of time, and research. It seemed so obvious to him that he had great and genuine difficulty understanding anybody else's point of view.

  'You know,' he said, 'if I had my way I wouldn't let anybody who believed in star signs or the Bible or faith healing or anything like that use electric power, or ride in cars and buses and trains and aircraft, or use anything made of plastic. They want to believe the universe works according to their crazy little rules? OK, let them live that way, but why should they be allowed to use the fruits of sheer fucking human genius and hard work, things produced only because people better than them once had the sense and the hope to - will you stop laughing at me?' He glared at her. She was shaking with silent laughter, her pinkly quivering tongue poised to lick another paper. She turned to him, eyes glistening, and held out a hand.

  'You're just so funny, sometimes,' she said. He took her hand, kissed it formally.

  'So glad I amuse you, my dear.'

  He didn't think he'd said anything funny. Why was she laughing at him? In the end, he had to admit, he didn't really understand her. He didn't understand women. He didn't understand men. He didn't even understand children very well. All he really understood, he thought, was himself and the rest of the universe. Neither anything like completely, of course, but both well enough to know that what remained to be discovered would make sense; it would fit in, it could all be gradually and patiently fitted together a bit at a time, like an infinite jigsaw puzzle, with no straight edges to look for and no end in sight, but one in which there was always going to be somewhere for absolutely any piece to fit.