The Business

by Iain Banks

  He nodded and looked thoughtful. 'Are you perhaps a Catholic, Kate?'

  'What?'

  'You looked so sad. The plot in which Guy Fawkes was taking part was an attempt to restore the Catholic succession to England, was it not? I thought perhaps you were lamenting to yourself his lack of success in blowing up the Houses of Parliament.'

  I smiled. 'No, Prince. I was never a Catholic.'

  'Ah.' He sighed and looked out of the window at the distant lights. He smelled a little of smoke and some old-fashioned scent. His eyes looked sunken and dark. He seemed lost in his own thoughts. 'Ah, well.'

  I hesitated, then said, 'You look a little low yourself, Prince. Has it been a long day?'

  'Most,' he said. 'Most long.' He stared out of the window. He cleared his throat. 'Ah, dear Kate.'

  'Yes, Suvinder?'

  'About our telephone conversation this morning.'

  I held up my hands as though to catch a basketball at chest height. 'Suvinder,' I said. 'It's all right.' I hoped I might settle the issue with just that gesture and those words, plus a look of friendly sympathy and understanding, but the Prince had obviously already decided he was going to have his say. I hate it when people are so damn programmed.

  'I hope you were not offended.'

  'I was not, Prince. As I said at the time, I was annoyed at being woken up, but the sentiments were most flattering.'

  'They were,' he swallowed, 'sincere, but ill put.'

  'The sincerity was by far the more obvious quality, Suvinder,' I said, and even surprised myself at the way the words came out. The Prince looked pleased. He gazed out the window again. We both watched the few rising sparks.

  I was thinking about how high up we were, about the crags and cliffs and the undulating hills between us and the town when he said, 'It is all so flat here, isn't it?'

  I looked at him. 'Are you homesick, Suvinder?'

  'Perhaps, a little.' He glanced at me. 'You have only been to Thulahn once, haven't you, Kate?'

  'Just the once, and very briefly.'

  'It was the rainy season then. You did not see it at its best. You should return. It is very beautiful at this time of year.'

  'I'm sure it is. Maybe one day.'

  He gave a small smile and said, 'It would please me greatly.'

  'That's very kind, Suvinder.'

  He bit his lip. 'Well, then, will you tell me why you were looking so despondent, dear Kate?'

  I don't know whether I'm just naturally reticent or it's some business-inspired wariness to do with giving people a handle on my possible weaknesses, but normally I'm loath to share any back-story (as Hollywood would call it) stuff. Anyway, I said, 'I suppose I always find fireworks kind of sad. I mean, fun, too, but sad all the same.'

  Suvinder looked surprised. 'Why is that?'

  'I think it goes back to when I was a little girl. We could never afford fireworks, and my mother didn't like them anyway; she was the kind of person who hid under the kitchen table when there was thunder. The only fireworks I ever had of my own were a few sparklers one year. And I managed to burn myself with one of those. Still have the scar, see?' I showed him my left wrist.

  'Oh dear,' he said. 'Sorry, where?'

  'There. I mean, I know, it's tiny, looks like a freckle or something, but, well.'

  'To have no fireworks as a child, that is sad.'

  I shook my head. 'It's not that, though. What we used to do was, on November the sixth each year my pals and I would go round the town where I lived, collecting spent fireworks. We' d dig the Roman candles up out of the ground and search for rockets in the woods and people's gardens. We tramped all over the bits of waste ground looking for these bright tubes of cardboard. They were always wet and soggy and the paper was just starting to unravel, and they smelled of dampness and ashes. We used to stick them in a big pile in our gardens, as though they were fresh and unused. The thing was to have more fireworks and bigger ones than your friends. I found it helped to go further afield, to where the better-off people had their displays.'

  'Oh. So you were not just tidying them up?'

  'I suppose we were doing that too, inadvertently, but really it was a kind of competition.'

  'But why is that sad?'

  I looked at his big, dark, melancholy face. 'Because there are few things more forlorn and useless than a damp, used firework, and when I look back it just seems so pathetic that we used to treasure the damn things.' I shrugged. 'That's all.'

  The Prince was quiet for a while. A few more rockets lit up the skies above Harrogate. 'I used to be frightened of fireworks,' he said. 'When I was smaller.'

  'The noise?'

  'Yes. We have fireworks on many of our holy days and on the monarch's birthday. My father would always insist that I let off the biggest and loudest of them. It used to terrify me. I would never sleep the night before. My nurse would stop my ears with wax, but still when I set off the larger mortars the blast would all but knock me head over heels, and I would start to weep. This displeased my father.'

  I didn't say anything for a while. We watched the tiny, silent sparks climbing, spreading, falling in the distance.

  'Well, you're in charge now, Suvinder,' I told him. 'You can ban fireworks if you want.'

  'Oh, no,' he said, and looked mildly shocked. 'I could never do such a thing. No, no, they are traditional and, besides, I came to tolerate them.' He smiled hesitantly. 'I would even say that now I love them.'

  I put my hand out and touched his arm. 'Good for you, Prince.'

  He looked down at my hand, and seemed to be about to say something. Then his secretary B. K. Bousande appeared at the door, clearing his throat.

  Suvinder Dzung looked round, nodded, then smiled regretfully. 'I must go. Good night, Kate.'

  'Good night, Suvinder.'

  I watched him pad quickly, silently away, then turned back to look out of the dark window, waiting for more of the tiny lights climbing above the town, but there were none.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  'You bitch.'

  'You asked for it.'

  'I was just trying to help.'

  'So was I.'

  'What do you mean?'

  'Well, you spoke so highly of this Dr Pegging I thought I'd give him something more to work on. You can afford it. Think of the poor man's fees. And I think you've got a crush on him anyway. Gee, I imagine calling up a complete stranger thinking they're your best friend is probably worth a whole year's extra treatment.'

  'Ex-best friend.'

  'Whatever.'

  'Oh, Kate, don't be so horrible!'

  'I'm sorry, Luce. Bygones?'

  'I suppose.

  Word came through from Jebbet E. Dessous' people that the middle of the week was far too late to meet up; they wanted me there a.s.a.p.

  So: Uncle F's Lancia Aurelia to Leeds-Bradford, where some sort of fuck-up by British Regional Aeroflot — a fairly regular occurrence judging by the bitter comments of some of my fellow non-passengers — meant I had to hire a helicopter from a company in the airport; I phoned our corporate lawyers to let them know we'd be charging BA for the relevant amount on my company credit card. I'm with the Prince on this one: I don't like helicopters either, or light aircraft for that matter, though in my case it's just because of the statistics.

  Anyway, to Heathrow in a Bell Jetranger with a business-like pilot, who thankfully didn't indulge in any small-talk, then the tiny-windowed luxuriously upholstered cigar tube that is Concorde. No free seats and I was sat next to a smug advertising account director who was himself invasively well upholstered and determined to make the most of both the free champagne and four hours of enforced intimacy. I slipped my earphones on and turned up the Walkman. Sheryl Crow at volume shut him up.

  I fell asleep after the album finished, and woke up as we were decelerating through bumpy clouds. I was in that drowsy, disconnected state where the bits of the brain that dream dreams and come up with crazy ideas haven't been brought back on message by the ration
al part, so that everything goes a bit haywire, and I remember watching the US coast, far, far below, and thinking, Well, here I am, and Stephen's in Washington DC; at least if there's some comprehensive world-wide catastrophe we'll be on the same continent. In the event of some deep-impact type disaster — if I survived — I could start walking and attempt to find him. Yes, and Mrs B might have died tragically and we could start a new life together…

  I shook myself out of it and looked out my US passport, to speed the formalities when we landed.

  JFK, an American 737 to Chicago (iffy lunch but the coffee had improved), a slim commuter Fokker to Omaha and a very noisy military-looking Huey to Jebbet E. Dessous' vast property on the Nebraska/South Dakota border; eighty thousand acres of plains, cattle, scrub, trees, roads like a map grid and all the dust you could eat. The co-pilot who helped strap me in insisted I wear a pair of heavy olive-green headphones for the journey. My hair, which had survived intact for four flights, one ocean and half a continent but which has always reacted badly to hats and serious headphones, was going to need fixing later on.

  Half an hour in we hit some low-level turbulence over a series of pine-covered ridges. My lunch began to let me know it hadn't really settled down properly and was thinking of relocating. I considered the potentially onomatopoeic name of the helicopter I was travelling in, and tried to take my mind off my nausea by thinking of other modes of transport with dubious names, but only got as far as Sikorsky and the Cess in Cessna before we reached calm air again and my lunch decided that — on balance — it was happy where it was.

  We landed in late afternoon in a dusty airport on the outskirts of what looked like a small deserted town, kicking up a great rolling ochre cloud.

  'Welcome to Big Bend, ma'am,' the pilot said.

  'Thanks.'

  I took my time unclipping my harness and disconnecting the headphones while the dust settled. An ancient Willis Jeep in US army colours roared up and sat just outside the limit of the slowing rotor blades.

  The breeze was cold and sharp and dry beneath a lapis sky stroked with feathers of high pink cloud. I could hear the steady crack-crack-crack of heavy machine-gun fire from some way off. The co-pilot dumped my bags in the back of the open Jeep and jogged back to the Huey, which was powering up again.

  'Ms Telman.' The driver was a grizzled but healthy-looking guy a decade or so older than me, dressed in army fatigues. He stuck out one hand. 'Eastil. John Eastil. That all your luggage?'

  'How do you do. Yes, it is.'

  'I'll take you to your cabin. Hang on.' He spun the Jeep's wheel and gunned the engine; we roared away from the Huey. 'Sorry it's not a limo.'

  'That's all right. Good to get some fresh air.' Actually I was pleasantly surprised by the way Mr Eastil drove: it was a lot more relaxing than Uncle Freddy's floor-the-pedal-and-damn-the-speed-bumps banzai style.

  'Take you long to freshen up, Ms Telman?' Eastil asked. 'Mr Dessous would like to meet with you directly.'

  'Five minutes.'

  My cabin was a ten-minute drive away; a sprawling wooden thing set in amongst the pines overlooking a slow-flowing river winding through a shallow valley carpeted with long, pale grass. While Eastil waited in the Jeep outside I hung up my suit carrier, washed my face, squirted perfume behind my ears, dragged a brush through my hair, a toothbrush across my teeth and plonked the sad-faced monkey on a bedside table. The walk-in provided a skiing jacket, which I pulled on as I strode out to the Jeep.

  We drove back into town, through its deserted streets and out the far side. We arrived at an old drive-in movie theatre; a huge field shaped like a baseball ground with the gantry for a vast screen at the wide end, though there was no screen, just the slim web of girders of its support structure. There were a lot of trucks and heavy rigs scattered around, and two big mobile cranes, one of them with its jib extended and its body raised up off the ground by its extended jacks.

  Short rusty posts, which must once have carried the speakers for the parked cars, were arranged in serried rows across the weed-strewn lot. We parked alongside a handful of four-wheel drives and sport utilities by the projection building, which looked a lot like a concrete bunker, with no proper windows but a scattering of small rectangular apertures all facing in the direction of the absent screen. A long tube poked out of one hole.

  'Miss Telman! Good to meet you. Jebbet E. Dessous. Call me Jeb, I don't answer to much else. I'll call you Miss Telman till I get to know you better, if that's all right with you. How was your flight? Cabin okay?'

  Bustling out of a door in the projection building came a large, red-faced man dressed in the sort of speckled beige army fatigues the world has come to associate with the Desert Storm campaign. He wore a similarly camouflaged cap — incongruously, it was the wrong way round, as though he was trying to look New York Hip of about five years ago — from under which stuck tufts of hair that might have been sandy or just yellowing white. He thrust out one massive hand.

  His grip was delicate, even sensitive.

  'How do you do, Jeb. Everything's been good.'

  He let go and stepped back to look at me. 'You're a fine-looking woman, Miss Telman, hope you don't mind me telling you that. My opinion of my dumb-ass nephew has gone up, and that takes a lot of doing, I'll tell you.'

  'How is Dwight?'

  'Oh, still stupid.' He nodded at the Jeep. 'Come on, I'll take you to him.' He looked up at the sky with a frown, then pulled his cap the right way round.

  Jebbet E. Dessous' driving style was more muscular than that of Mr Eastil, who sat in the back, holding on tight and chewing on a cold cigar.

  'Sing us a song, John,' Dessous shouted, as we swung round the outskirts of the deserted town.

  'What do you want to hear?' Eastil asked. I got the impression this was not an unusual request.

  'Anything.' Dessous looked over at me and tapped the centre of the Jeep's bare metal dashboard. 'Can't get any sort of sound system in these things,' he said. I just nodded.

  John Eastil launched into an enthusiastic — no, make that just loud — rendition of an old song I vaguely recognised but couldn't place until he got to the chorus, when I realised it was 'Dixie Chicken' by Little Feat. Dessous tried singing along too, but was patently tone deaf.

  We headed along the bottom of a small dry creek towards the jumbled shape of a sprawling stone-and-log-built cabin, which looked like it owed something to Frank Lloyd Wright. Probably an apology.

  'Boy comes here to write,' Dessous shouted at me.

  'I see. How's he doing?'

  'Oh, got some play opening in New York, so he says. Dumbass fool probably financed it himself. Still wants to make it in Hollywood, get his name above the titles. That's what — well, you'll hear.'

  'Uncle Freddy seemed to think Dwight had some mad scheme you wanted me to talk him out of.'

  'I don't want to prejudge anything here, Miss Telman. I don't know you, don't know which way you'll jump. I just want you to be honest with the boy. He talks about you a lot. Might listen to you. Sure as hell doesn't listen to me.'

  'I'll do my best.'

  'Yeah, well, just give it your best shot.'

  We stopped outside. Eastil stayed with the Jeep again while Dessous jumped out, strode to the door, hammered on it once and marched in. 'Dwight!' he hollered, as I followed him. 'You decent, boy? I got a lady here to see you!' He pulled his cap off and ruffled his hair.

  The cabin's shady interior was all long, low couches, split levels and rugs over naked concrete both underfoot and on the walls. From a distant room came a whoop, and Dessous turned in that direction.

  'Hold on, hold on, just backing up!'

  We found nephew Dwight in a bedroom with a view over the creek. The broad bed was covered in sheets of paper; on the desk by the window stood an elderly Apple Mac. Dwight was standing in front of the machine, clicking with the mouse. He glanced round. 'Yo, Uncle. Hi, Kate! How the hell are you?' Dwight was a sharp-featured, awkwardly tall guy, only a little more t
han half my age; he was barefoot and wearing jeans and a dressing gown; his mid-length brown hair was half held in an unravelling pony-tail. He had a goatee beard and patchy stubble. He tapped the keyboard, turned the screen off and then came over to me, took both my hands in his and kissed me wetly on both cheeks. 'Mwah! Mwah! Great to see you! Welcome!'

  'Hello, Dwight.'

  'Your idea is what?'

  We were sitting on a terrace overlooking the dry creek, Eastil, Dessous, Dwight and I, drinking beers. The stars were starting to come out. Thick jackets and a warm draught from the opened terrace doors kept us on the warm side of hypothermic.

  'It's brilliant!' Dwight exclaimed, waving his arms about. 'Don't you think?'

  I resisted the urge to suggest it was he who wasn't thinking, and just said, 'Run it past me again?'

  'There's this, like, thing that looks like a ship's funnel or something, right? In Mecca, right in the centre. Where the Muslims go on pilgrimage to, okay? It's like the thing they're going there to see; this rock, inside this big sort of black shrouded building thing, in the centre of this humongous square in Mecca.'

  'The Kaaba.'

  'Cool!' Dwight looked delighted. 'You know the name! Yeah, the Kaaba, man. That's it!' He swigged from his bottle of Coors. 'Well, the idea for the movie is that…oh, yeah, like, hold on, this rock that's in the Kaaba, right? It's supposed to have fallen from the sky, be a gift from God, from Allah, right? I mean, obviously nowadays everybody knows it's a meteorite, but it's still holy, like, still venerated, okay? Or they think they know it's a meteorite,' Dwight said, leaning across the table and nearly putting one elbow in a bowl of dip. 'The idea for the movie is that it isn't a meteorite at all, it's a fuckin' spaceship!'

  'Dwight!' Dessous said sharply.

  'Aw, Uncle,' Dwight said, with a sort of exasperated laugh. 'It's okay. Kate's cool about it. Sometimes even women cuss these days, you know?' He looked at me and rolled his eyes.