Canal Dreams

by Iain Banks

  Then, dazed and bruised and terrified she would vomit and drown, she was pushed and pulled up the companionway to the deck. She caught a last glimpse of the cello case, lying in the bottom of the Gemini.

  Sucre and the other man met a third soldier at the door to the Nadia's saloon. Sucre opened it. She saw Philippe and the others. He looked relieved. She closed her eyes, shook her head.

  They took her into the room, then Sucre crossed to Mrs Bleveans, took her by the elbow, and with her in tow collected Marie Boulard. He made them stand at the bar, and put restrainers on them as well.

  Nobody talked in the room. Sucre had the two women kneel in front of the semi-circle of low stools, facing the bar like worshippers. Down at the far end of the room, the Koreans, the North Africans and the remaining crewmen had been collected into three giant circles; they too were kneeling, facing outwards, their wrists apparently strapped to those of the men on each side of them. One of the fake venceristas was completing tying up the Koreans, who formed the largest of the three groups. The men looked out into the room with frightened eyes. Sucre had a word with the man behind the bar with the heavy machine-gun, then went down the room to the third of the circles, patting the shoulder of the soldier who'd just finished tying the men up. She was watching now, eyes bright with pain and terror, her bowels feeling loose, her stomach churning behind the bruise. She saw Sucre pretend to inspect the bonds of the men making up the far circle. She saw him take the grenade even though nobody else seemed to. She saw him wander away from the group, towards the second one. The soldier behind her tightened his grip on the restrainer.

  One of the men in the first circle must have felt it. He shouted something in Korean, screamed, tried desperately to get up, almost dragging part of the circle with him while the others looked round bewildered. Sucre skipped to the second circle and dropped the grenade into the middle of it, repeated the action at the last circle of men, then ran for the door. The saloon filled with screams. Sucre ducked behind a couch with the soldier who'd tied up the men. The soldier holding Hisako stepped back so that he was shielded by the door; the man behind the bar disappeared behind it.

  The noise was more muffled than it had been earlier, when Orrick had attacked. She watched. Her eyes closed for the instant of the detonation, but she saw the circle of men rise up, saw the red cloud burst from one part, on the far side. The second circle of men had almost managed to stand; some had been hit by shrapnel from the first blast, but somehow they were almost on their feet. She saw Lekkas then, yelling at the others and trying to kick behind him, where the grenade had to be. The ringing blast of the first grenade was just giving way to the screams and moans of the injured in the first group when the second detonated, throwing men across the room, flaying legs, smacking blood and flesh off the ceiling. Something whined past her left ear. The men in the third group were almost on their feet; the grenade blasted their legs out from under them.

  The machine-gun opened up; Sucre and the soldier who'd tied the men up scrambled to the side of the room and started firing too. The man holding her shoved her forward and started firing with a small Uzi, making a cracking, drilling noise by her head.

  Philippe, Broekman, Endo and Bleveans were struggling to their feet. Marie Boulard and Mrs Bleveans knelt, shivering as though the noise itself shook them. Mrs Bleveans was trying to look back, to where her husband was. Hisako couldn't see Mandamus. The saloon was filling with smoke like a thick sea fog.

  Sucre saw the officers standing, and turned his fire on them. She saw Broekman whipped back as though pulled by a hawser fastened to his back, and Philippe hit in the belly, doubling up: she closed her eyes.

  She opened them again when she heard Mrs Bleveans scream, over the noise of the firing. The woman crashed through the barrier of stools towards her husband, who lay on his side on the floor, shirt covered with blood. His wife fell towards him, over him. Sucre kept on firing; Mrs Bleveans's blouse kicked out in four or five places. Marie Boulard had risen at the same time, and threw herself at Sucre; the soldier holding Hisako flicked the Uzi to one side, bringing the woman down in a cloud of smoke and noise.

  They finished all the men off. Mr Mandamus was, miraculously, uninjured, and protested to the last, before being silenced with a single shot from Sucre's pistol. The soldiers decided both the other women were indeed dead. They threw Hisako to the floor and tore the yukata off.

  They were going to rape her there, but instead dragged her by the feet, out, across the corridor and into the ship's television lounge, because the air in the saloon was so thick with choking, acrid smoke.

  FORCE MAJEURE

  force majeure (fors mahzher') n. Irresistible compulsion or coercion, unforeseeable course of events excusing from fulfilment of contract. [F, = superior strength]

  9: Aguaceros

  Her fingers ached whenever she touched the cello.

  After the demonstration they regrouped before dispersing, to see who had been arrested or injured. One of the students volunteered to go with the group of people who would follow the police buses back into the city and find out what had happened to those who were missing. The rest of them returned by cars and hired minibuses.

  She found it easy to be quiet; her shock passed unnoticed. Everybody else was high on the exhilaration of the demonstration and the fact they'd survived with nothing worse than red eyes and sniffy noses. They chattered, relived and retold their experiences. Nobody seemed to have heard about the dead policeman.

  They went back to the same bar she'd met them in earlier that week. She went to the toilets and threw up.

  The television showed the news; the clash outside the airport was the lead story, with the murdered riot policeman providing the headline. The students were divided; some had bruises from the batons, or knew people who'd had arms broken by the riot police, at the University, the airport or in the streets on Vietnam demos, and muttered that the man probably deserved it, or that another policeman might have done it, settling some old score in the heat of the battle… while the rest went as quiet as Hisako.

  She left as soon as she could, coughing and complaining of a headache. In the flat she sat in darkness, staring at the patterns of light the city cast on to the ceiling and walls through the window blinds. She was still staring at the white and orange barred wedges of light when they gradually faded under the pervasive grey of a new day.

  She didn't know what to do; to confess, to run away, to pretend nothing had happened…

  She didn't know what had made her do it. Anger and pain, perhaps, but so what? There must have been hundreds of people there who'd been more angry, and been hurt worse than she. They hadn't killed anybody.

  What was in her that could do such a thing? She wasn't normally violent; she'd been accused of attacking the music sometimes, of being too aggressive with the bow and her fingers, but (as she put her hands into her armpits, staring at the grey day dawning) that wasn't murder.

  She still could hardly believe she'd done it, but the memory was there, livid and raw, like the taste and sting of the gas. And the memory resided not just in her brain, behind her eyes, but in her bones; in her fingers. She could feel again the crumpling and cracking as they lanced into the man's neck; they hurt again as she thought of her bones and his, buckling, compressing.

  She hugged herself tighter and put her head down on to her knees, sobbing into the jeans and forcing her arms into her sides as though trying to crush her hands.

  It was impossible to sleep the next night too, so she walked through the city until dawn, through the Soapland sleaze and past the quiet parks and down the side streets where the pachinko parlours sounded like a million tiny nails being rattled in a drum and the karaoke bars echoed with drunk businessmen singing badly, down the streets where the plaster European models stood in bright windows, hung with million-yen dresses, and electronics companies displayed the latest crop of gadgets like glittering jewellery, and through suburbs, where the small houses sat crammed and dark and th
e only sound was the distant city grumble and faraway trains screeching through points.

  That day she slept, fitfully, always waking with the feeling of shock, convinced that some incredibly violent noise had just stopped echoing, that a titanic explosion had caused her to wake and the air had barely finished ringing with the aftershock. Once a small earthquake did wake her, but it was only enough to rattle the flat a little; nothing remarkable. She'd never been bothered by quakes before, but now she lay awake, worrying that it was just a prelude to a big one; a shock that would bring all Tokyo down, crushing her in her flat, squashing her under tons of rubble suffocating her on the bed like a pinned insect, grinding her bones, destroying her while she tried to scream.

  She got up, took to the streets again.

  And when she did try to play the cello, her fingers ached. The left hand, the one that had been stepped on, hurt a little, but the right, which had to hold the bow, filled her with agony. It was as though all the bones had been recently. broken, and the act of trying to move the bow across the strings fractured them once more. She kept dropping the bow. Eventually she gave up. She walked, she sat in the flat, she ate next to nothing, she tried to sleep but couldn't, then fell suddenly asleep and had to claw her way out of dreams of cruelty and pain, and she waited for the police to come. They never did.

  Later, she found it difficult to work out quite how she ended up in hospital. The orchestra came back, and the two girls she shared the flat with, but she hardly noticed. She had settled into a routine by that time, and the girls hardly impinged upon that. She knew without looking at a clock roughly when to try to sleep, when to go out walking, when to try and play the cello and have her fingers ache (sometimes she only thought about playing the cello, and her fingers ached anyway), when to eat a little from cold tin cans, when to sit and wait, drained, for sleep to take her, knowing that dreams and fear would wake her while sheer exhaustion tried to keep her under.

  The girls tried to talk to her (she remembered them showing her photographs of the tour; bright, very colourful, but she had the impression all the smiles were somehow pasted crudely on and she couldn't work out why they were showing her these sad, obviously faked and painful photographs), and later one of the orchestra managers came as well, but he left, and another man came, who was very calm and quiet and professional and she trusted him and tried to talk to him, and the next day two young men who really did have white coats came and took her away without any trouble at all. Her two flatmates were there, and seemed to think she should take the cello with her, but she refused, wouldn't let them do it, made a scene and left the immediate source of her pain behind.

  The hospital was in the hills near Uenohara. During the day, if it wasn't cloudy or foggy, you could see Fuji. In the evening, Tokyo blazed on the plain to the east. She spent the first week crying, unable to talk, her every expression a currency of tears, because she was sure this was costing so much money and she had spent all her savings running away and her mother would go into debt and bankruptcy paying for it all, until she managed to voice her anxiety to somebody from the orchestra who'd come to visit her, and they told her the orchestra 's medical insurance was paying, not her mother. She cried even more.

  Her mother came to visit on the second week. She tried to explain to her that there was something she'd done, some terrible thing she was sure, and she couldn't remember what it was, but it was terrible, terrible, and nobody would ever forgive her if they knew; her mother buried her face in her hands. Hisako went to her and hugged her, which was very wrong, far too open and obvious, but she did it with a sort of glee that hurt, as though to take her own mother in her arms in a public veranda overlooking the wooded hills near Uenohara with other people near by and quite possibly looking on was some sort of secretive attack, and she really hated her mother and this was a way of getting back at her, subjecting her.

  She tried to go for walks, tempted by the lights of the city on the plain and the mountain hovering like an immense black and white tent over the hills to the south. But they kept catching her, finding her, and she kept encountering locked doors and high fences too finely meshed to climb, and had to wait there, banging on the door or the fence with her palm or fist until her hands ached just enough or started to bleed, and they came to take her away.

  She slept sitting up, propped by gaijin pillows, afraid to lie down in case the roof collapsed. The ward ceiling was too broad and big and she didn't think there were enough pillars or walls to support it properly; one good tremor and the lot would come down, smashing into her bed, flattening her there and grinding up her bones and crushing her neck with ferro-concrete beams and suffocating her over the years while the orchestra went bankrupt and her mother turned to prostitution and she lay not alive and not dead with a necklace of reinforced concrete slowly choking her, a burden upon all of them, hated but indulged.

  Mr Kawamitsu came to see her. This confused her, because he was from another time, when she was young and still innocent and had no blood on her hands and no real dreams in her head and she couldn't understand how he'd got here from there; had they built the rail tunnel already? They ought to tell her about these things.

  She was disturbed that day, anyway. They'd been watching television the evening before and the nurse had been out of the room for a while, during a programme about Vietnam which showed terrible, terrible things; things of suffering and flame and blackened flesh and the orange flash and white pulse in the green green jungle; a bruise in the forest while the sticky orange (sticks tumbling lazily from the pretty plane) fire and the white (explosion cloud and tiny trailing threads, medusa) phosphorus gnawed their way through the olive skin to the white bone, while the Rome ploughs ripped and the Hercules sprayed Agent Orange (ha, gasp pant, and she saw the word-picture for tree mutate before her eyes, and thought in English it would go trees ree re e…) and only the screams of some of the patients brought the nurse back Adjusting His Clothing (ho, she noticed), and turned the set on to a game show instead and everybody seemed to forget what they had seen.

  Except her. She remembered, and dreamed that night, up-propped, muttering, plagued, asweat, and as she replayed and remembered and relived, she laughed with each flicked frame of pain and grief, because it had all already happened and demonstrating wasn't going to do any good now, and because it made her feel good, which made her feel bad, but still she felt good in the end.

  The dawn was bright and clear and blue that morning. Mr Kawamitsu brought a cello.

  He put her hands upon it, showed her how to hold the device. The sunlight leant shafts of gold against the walls of the room, and Fuji was invisible beyond the hills and inside the clouds. She stroked the instrument, remembering. It wasn't hers, but she remembered not just playing a cello, she somehow remembered this cello, even though she knew she'd never seen or held it before. It smelled good, felt good, sounded deep and rich and sensuous. It played her rather than the other way round, so her fingers didn't hurt. She was sure she'd talked to Mr Kawamitsu, but didn't remember what she'd said.

  He left, taking the beautiful cello with him. The pillows were uncomfortable that night, and the ceiling looked a bit more secure. She swept the pillows from the bed and slept with her head on her arm, soundly until the morning light. She dreamed that her four fingers were strings, and her thumb was a bow. In the dream, the strings stretched and snapped, bursting and unravelling and disappearing in a cloud of mist. The bow scraped against the neck of the instrument and snapped, flailing; tendon still attached, bone broken. It ought to have hurt but it didn't, and she felt as though she'd been untied, let loose. She studied her fingers the next morning. They looked fine; nothing wrong with them. She made a tent of them and tapped the tips against each other, checking out the rainy weather and wondering what was for breakfast.

  They put it down to her fear, and the idea that she'd been so ashamed at letting everybody else down she'd gone crazy; She felt demeaned by such a judgement, but accepted it as lenient compared to what
she deserved for what had really driven her.

  The cello belonged to a businessman in Sapporo who'd bought the instrument as an investment, and because he thought it looked a pretty colour. Mr Kawamitsu knew him. He'd persuaded the man that the Stradivari should be used rather than stored. Mr Kawamitsu always meant that Hisako should have the chance to play it, and perhaps own it one day. Bringing it to her now was all he could think of that might help. It did, but she told Mr Kawamitsu to take it back to Sapporo with him. When she could afford to, she'd buy it.

  He went. Her mother stayed; she left. Her mother slept in the same room with her for the first two weeks after she moved back to Tokyo, back into the same flat with the other two girls (she couldn't believe it, they wanted her to be there. She wondered if maybe they were crazy too). Then her mother went back to Hokkaido, and she went to see the orchestra manager.

  She could stay; as a guest soloist. She wouldn't be expected to tour abroad, she couldn't expect to be a fully paid-up member of the orchestra — no more subsidised stays in exclusive mental hospitals from now on — but she could play; play with the orchestra when it was in its Tokyo base, or anywhere else in Japan. It was more than she'd hoped for, much more than she deserved. She accepted, wondering as she did so what the down side would be; how life would get back at her for such apparent clemency.

  She stayed and played. She found herself in another quartet, even more in demand than the first, and she was asked to do recordings. She was introduced to a man called Mr Moriya, who was professionally appalled to discover how much she was being paid, especially for recordings, and helped her make more.