by Iain Banks
'Where the hell's this? he said, rubbing his eyes and looking around. She got out of the car.
'North Queensferry. Come and see the bridge,' she told him, puliing on her jacket. He looked out sceptically; the night was cold and there was a hint of rain. 'Come on,' she called. 'It'll clear your head.'
'So would a fucking revolver,' he muttered as he got out of the car.
They walked past notices warning people about objects falling from the bridge, and others which claimed the land beyond as private, until they came to a gravel turning circle, some old buildings, a small slip, grass and whin-covered rocks, and the round granite piers of the railway bridge itself. The smir of rain inside the cold wind made him shiver. He looked up into the wind-moaning spaces of the structure above. The waters of the Firth of Forth shushed and slapped on nearby rocks, and the lights of buoys flashed slowly on and off, up and down the wide, dark river. She held his hand. Upstream, the road bridge was a tall web of light, and a distant grumble of background noise.
'I like this place,' she told him, and she hugged him, her body quivering with the cold. He held her, but looked up into the web of steel overhead, lost in its dark strength.
Three years, he thought. Three years in another city.
'The Tallahatchie Bridge fell down,' he said eventually, more to the cold wind than to her. She looked up at him, nuzzled her cold nose into the presentable remnant of the fine beard he'd grown over the last two years and said,
'What?'
'The Tallahatchie Bridge. Ode to Billy Joe, Bobbie Gentry, remember? The damn thing fell down.' He gave a small, despairing laugh.
'Anybody hurt?' she asked, then put her cold lips on his Adam's Apple.
'I don't know,' he said, suddenly very sad. 'I didn't even think to look. I just saw the headline.'
A train rumbled over the bridge, filling the night air with the bassy voice of other people going to other places. He wondered if any of the passengers would pay heed to the old tradition and throw coins out of their nice warm carriages, spinning futile wishes into the uncaring waters of the cold Firth below.
He didn't tell her, but he remembered being here, in this very spot, years ago, one summer. An uncle who had a car took him and his parents on a ride through the Trossachs and then over to Perth. They came back this way. It was before the road bridge opened in '64 - before they'd even started it, he supposed; it was a Bank Holiday, and there was a queue a mile long waiting for the ferries. The uncle drove them down here instead, to have a look at 'one of Scotland's proudest monuments'.
What age had he been then? He didn't know. Maybe only five or six. His father had held him on his shoulders; he'd touched the cool granite of the piers, and reached, stretching, straining, small hands open and grasping, for the red-painted metal of the bridge ...
The queue of cars had grown no shorter when they went back. They crossed by the Kincardine Bridge instead.
Andrea kissed him, waking him from his memories, and hugged him very tight, tighter than he'd ever have thought she could hug, so tight he almost had difficulty breathing, then she let go, and they went back to the car.
She drove over the road bridge. He looked out over the dark waters to the dim night-shape of the rail bridge they had stood beneath, and saw the long dotted row of lights of a passenger train as it crossed high over the river, heading south. Lights like a row of dots at the end of a sentence, he thought, or at the start of one; three years. Dots like meaningless Morse; a signal made up of only Es and Hs and Is and Ss. The lights flickered through the intervening girders of the bridge; the nearer cables of the road bridge flicked past too quickly to make any difference.
No romance, he thought, watching the train. I remember when there were steam trains. I'd go up to the local station and stand on the foot-bridge over the tracks until a train came along, chuffing steam and smoke. When it went under the wooden bridge its smoke exploded on the metal plates put there to protect the timbers; a sudden blast of smoke and steam which surrounded you for what seemed like very long seconds with a delicious uncertainty, another world of mystery and swirling, half-seen things.
But they closed the line, they dismantled the engines, they tore down the foot-bridge and turned the station into an attractive, very unique and spacious residence with a pleasant southerly aspect and extensive grounds. Very unique. That just about said it all. Even if they'd got it right they'd still have been wrong.
The train flowed across the long viaduct and disappeared into the land. Just like that. No romance. No fireworks as the ashes and cinders were dumped, no flying comet-tail of orange sparks from the chimney, not even any clouds of steam (he would try to write a poem about it the next day, but it wouldn't work and he would throw it away).
He turned from the bridge, yawning as Andrea slowed the car for the tolls. 'You know how long it takes them to paint it, don't you?' he said to her. She shook her head, wound the window down as they came up to the toll plaza.
'What, the railway bridge?' she said digging in a pocket for the money. 'I don't know. A year?'
'Wrong,' he told her, folding his arms, looking ahead towards the red light at the far end of the booth. 'Three. Three fucking years.'
She said nothing. She paid the toll and the light turned green.
He worked, he got on. His mum and dad were proud of him. He got a mortgage on a small flat, still in Canonnrills. The company he worked for let him put some money towards his company car, once he'd ascended to such heights of bourgeois decadence, so he had a bigger and better BMW, rather than a Cortina. Andrea wrote him letters; he would make the same old joke whenever he referred to them.
John Peel played reggae on night-time Radio One. He bought Past, Present and Future by Al Stewart. 'Post World War Two Blues' very nearly made him cry, 'Roads to Moscow' actually did once, and 'Nostradamus' annoyed him. He played The Confessions of Doctor Dream a lot, lying with the headphones on, spreadeagled on the floor in the darkness, smashed out of his skull and humming along with the music. The first track on the eponymous second side was called Irreversible Neural Damage.
Things had a certain pattern, he observed to Stewart Mackie. Stewart and Shona moved to Dunfermline, across the river in Fife. Shona, having been trained to be a PE teacher in the Dunfermline College of Physical Education {located confusingly but cannily not in Dunfermline but across the river near Edinburgh); it seemed then singularly appropriate that she should become a teacher in Dunfermline itself; from one dispossesed capital to another. Stewart was still at the university, finishing post-grad work and probably all set to become a lecturer. He and Shona called their first child after him. It meant more to him than he could tell them.
He travelled. Round Europe on a rail-pass before he got too old, across Canada and America by train, too, and by hitch-hiking and buses and trains down to Morocco and back. That trip he didn't enjoy; he was only twenty-five, but he felt old already. He had the beginnings of a bald patch. Still, there was a wonderful train journey towards the end of it, travelling for some twenty-four hours through Spain, from Algeciras to Irun with some American guys who had some of the finest dope he'd ever encountered. He'd watched the sun come up over the plains of Mancha, listening to the tram's steel wheels playing symphonies.
He always found excuses not to visit Paris. He didn't want to see her there. She came back every now and again; changed, different, somehow more steady and ironic and even more sure of herself. Her hair was short now; very chic, he supposed. They had holidays on the west coast and the islands - when he could get the extra time off - and once went to the Soviet Union; his first trip, her third. He remembered the trains and the journeys on them, of course, but also the people, the architecture and the war memorials. It wasn't the same, though. He was frustrated, unable to speak more than a few words of the language, and listening to her chattering away quite happily with people made him feel he'd lost her to a language (and to a foreign tongue, he thought bitterly; he knew there was someone else in Paris).
He started seeing a girl called Nicola, a nurse he'd known since he'd had his appendix out at the Royal Infirmary. People made jokes about their names, called them imperialists, asked them when they were going to claim Russia back. She was small and blonde and had a generous, allowing body; she disapproved of him smoking dope and told him - when he splashed out and bought some coke - that he was insane to waste that sort of money stuffing it up his nose. He felt very tender towards her, he told her once, when he suspected he was supposed to tell her he loved her. I feel tender every bloody morning, you animal, she said, laughing and snuggling up to him. He laughed too, but realised it was the only joke she had ever made. She knew about Andrea but didn't talk about it. They drifted apart after six months. After that, when asked, he said he was playing the field.
The phone rang at three o'clock one morning, while he was screwing an old school pal of Andrea's. The phone was by the bedside. Go on, she said, giggling, answer it. She held onto him while he inched across the bed to the ringing machine. It was his sister Morag ringing to tell him that his mother had died of a stroke an hour before in the Southern General, in Glasgow.
Mrs McLean had to get back home anyway. She left him sitting on the bed, holding his head and thinking. At least it wasn't Dad, and hating himself for thinking it.
He didn't know who to ring. He thought of Stewart, but he didn't want to wake their latest baby; they'd had problems with the kid sleeping anyway. He rang Andrea in Paris. A man answered, and when her sleepy voice came on the phone she hardly seemed to know who he was. He told her he'd had some bad news ... She hung up.
He couldn't believe it. He tried calling back but the phone was engaged; the international operator couldn't get through either. He left the phone on the bed, engaged tone beeping mindlessly while he dressed, then took the Porsche on a long, frosty, starlit drive north, almost to the Cairngorms. Most of the tapes he had in the car at the time were Pete Atkin albums, but Clive James's lyrics were too thoughtful, and often too melancholic, for a good, fast mindless drive, and the reggae tapes he had - mostly Bob Marley - were too laid back. He wished he had some Stones. He found an old tape, one he'd almost forgotten, and turned the Motorola up to maximum volume, playing Rock and Roll Animal over and over, all the way up to Braemar and back, a sort of knowing sneer on his face. 'Allo?' he whined nasally to the headlights of the occasional passing car, 'Allo? Ça va? Allo?'
He went to that place on the way back; he stood under the great red bridge which he had once thought looked the same colour as her hair, while his breath smoked and the Porsche idled clatteringly on the gravel turning circle and the first streaks of dawn outlined the bridge, a silhouette of arrogance, grace and power against the pale flames of a winter morning sky.
The funeral was two days later; he'd stayed with his father in the pebble-dashed council house after quickly packing a bag in his flat and slamming the whining phone down. He ignored his mail. Stewart Mackie came through for the funeral.
Looking down at his mother's coffin he waited for tears that did not come, and put his arm round his father's shoulders, only realising then that the man was thinner and smaller than he used to be, and quietly, steadily quivering, like ajust-struck iron rod.
As they were leaving, Andrea met them at the cemetery gates, getting out of an airport taxi, dressed in black and carrying a small case. He couldn't speak.
She hugged him, talked to his father, then came to him and explained that after they were cut off she'd tried to call him back. She'd been trying for two days; she'd sent telegrams, she'd had people go round to his flat to look for him. In the end, she'd decided to come herself; she'd phoned Morag in Dunfermline as soon as she got off the plane, found out what had happened, and where the funeral was.
All he could say was thank you. He turned to his father and hugged the man, and then cried, crying more tears into his father's coat-collar than he thought his eyes could ever have held; for his mother, for his father, for himself.
She could only stay for one night; she had to go back to study for some exams. The three years had become four. Why didn't he come to Paris? They slept in separate rooms in the pebble-dashed house. His father had been sleepwalking and having nightmares: he would sleep in the same room, to wake his father if he had nightmares, stop him hurting himself if he walked in his sleep.
He drove her through to Edinburgh; they had lunch at her parents', then he took her to the airport. Who was your friend, the one on the phone in Paris? he asked her, then wanted to bite his tongue. Gustave, she said, easily enough. You'd like him. Have a nice flight, he said.
He watched the plane take off into the aquamarine skies of a crisp winter afternoon; and he even followed it a little way by road as it turned south; he leant forward over the steering wheel of the Porsche, staring up through the windscreen to watch the aircraft as it climbed into the immaculate blue of the cloudless sky, driving after it as though he could catch the jet. It was just starting to make a vapour trail when he lost sight of it, glinting and disappearing over the Pentland Hills.
He felt tugged by age. For a while he took The Times, balancing it with the Morning Star. Now and again he would look at the logo heading The Times, and think he could almost catch the pages of Times Present as they flicked over, almost hear the rustle of the dry leaves turning; Future became Present, Present became Past. A truth so banal, so obvious and accepted that he had somehow managed to ignore it before. He combed his hair so that the bald patch - barely the size of a two-penny piece - would not be so noticeable. He changed to the Guardian.
He spent more time with his father now. He would drive through on some weekends to the small new council flat and regale the old man with tales of the wonderful world of engineering in the seventies: pipelines and crackers and carbon fibres, the use of lasers, radiography, the spin-offs from space research. He described the furious force, the incredible energy of a power station undergoing a steam purge, when the newly completed boilers are fired up, water is fed in, the pipework fills with superheated steam, and any bits of loose weld spatter, dropped gloves or tools or nuts and bolts or decaying apple cores or whatever are exploded through the great pipes and blasted into the atmosphere, cleaning the whole system of debris before the final pipework joins the boilers to the turbines themselves, with their thousands of delicate and expensive blades and fine tolerances. Once he'd seen the head of a sledgehammer thrown quarter of a mile by a steam purge; it went through the side of a parked van. The noise put Concorde to shame; a noise like the end of the world. His father smiled, nodding thoughtfully from his chair.
He still saw the Cramonds; he and the advocate would sit up late every so often, like two old men, and discuss the world. Mr. Cramond believed that law and religion and fear were necessary, and that a strong government, even if it was a bad one, was better than none at all. They argued, but always amicably; he was never able to explain quite why they got on, or how. Perhaps because in the end neither of them took anything they said themselves seriously; perhaps because neither of them took anything at all entirely seriously. The did agree it was all a game.
Elvis Presley died, but he cared more that Groucho Marx died in the same week. He bought albums by the Clash and the Sex Pistols and the Damned, glad that something different and anarchic was happening at last, even if he listened to the Jam, Elvis Costello and Bruce Springsteen more. He still knew people at the university besides Stewart, including some in a couple of small revolutionary parties. They'd stopped trying to get him to join after he'd explained he was utterly incapable of following a party line. When China invaded Vietnam and they had to try and prove that at least one of them wasn't socialist he found the resulting theological contortions wildly amusi
ng. He knew some younger people through a poetry writing group at the university which he attended sporadically; he knew a select few of Andrea's old crowd and there were a couple of men in the new company he worked for who he liked. He was young, he was well-off, and although he would rather have been taller and his hair was an undistinguished brown (and with a bald spot the size of a fifty-pence piece - inflation), he wasn't unattractive; he lost count of the number of women he'd slept with. He found himself buying a bottle of Laphroaig or Macallan every two or three days; he bought dope every couple of months and usually had a joint to put him to sleep. He gave the whisky up for a few weeks, just to make sure he wasn't becoming an alcoholic, then rationed himself to one bottle a week.
The two men he liked in the company tried to persuade him to come in with them, partners in their own business; he wasn't sure. He talked to Mr Cramond about it, and Stewart. The advocate said it was a good idea in principle, but it would mean hard work; people expected things too easily these days. Stewart laughed and said 'Well, why not?' Might as well make money for himself as anybody else; pay your taxes under Labour and hire a very smart accountant indeed if the Tories got in. Stewart had his own, more severe problems though; he hadn't been really well for years, and he'd been finally diagnosed as diabetic. He drank bottles of Pils when they met, and looked longingly at other people's pints of Heavy.
He still wasn't sure about joining a partnership. He wrote to Andrea, who told him, 'Do it.' She would be coming back soon, she said, studies complete, Russian mistressed to her satisfaction, he thought: I'll believe she's back when I see her.
He had taken up golf - Stewart had persuaded him. He balanced this by joining Amnesty International after years of dithering, and sending a large cheque to the ANC after his firm had worked on a South African contract. He sold the Porsche and brough a new Saab Turbo. He was driving out to Gullane one bright Saturday in June to meet the advocate for a game at Muirfield, playing a tape which consisted solely of Because the Night and Shot by Both Sides recorded back-to-back time after time, when he saw the advocate's crumpled blue Bristol 409 being dragged up onto a breakdown truck. He drove on a little way, slowing but still heading for Gullane, telling himself the car with the stoved-in front and smashed windscreen wasn't Mr Cramond's, then turned round in a side road and went back to where two very young-looking policemen were measuring the road, the scarred verge and a shattered stone wall.