by Iain Banks
Life went on; she visited, or was visited by, her mother; she took the occasional lover, in or out of the orchestra watched her savings mount up, and wondered what she was really doing with her life, and why. Her hands hardly ever ached, and even if she did wake up sometimes, in the early morning, with her hands crumpled and cramped and compressed into tearfully painful fists, nails digging into her palms, or caught between her arms and her chest, stuffed into her armpits, while she dreamed of fingers crushed in car doors (great too-thick car doors, with lots of handles and levers and patches of obscurely important writing on them) and even if she did wake panting and sweating now and again, it was still nothing; normal and fair and better than she deserved.
Came a day when she could afford the down payment on the fabulous Strad. She travelled to Sapporo to meet it and Mr Kawamitsu, and Mr Kubota, the owner. There; it was in her hands.
It was like meeting a husband picked out by your parents, yet who you'd already — secretly — known and loved.
She took the cello away to a ryokan just outside Wajima for two weeks. She had a double room in an outhouse across the courtyard from the main inn. She played there. It was a sort of honeymoon.
The cello was ancient, made sometime between 1729 and 1734. It had belonged to a San Marinan composer at the Hapsburg court, had narrowly escaped being used as firewood by Napoleon's army as it swept through Piedmont in 1796, travelled to America with an Italian virtuoso to celebrate fifty years of American independence, had its spike shot off in the Boxer Rebellion in Beijing, survived an entire string quartet during the Second World War because it was put on the wrong DC3, flying to Algiers, not Cairo (the Dakota flying to Cairo with the string quartet crashed below sea level, in the Qattara Depression, while the puzzled pilot tried to work out what had gone wrong with his altimeter), and spent thirty years in a bank vault in Venice before being sold at auction by Sotheby's of London, to Mr Kubota.
Mr Kubota brought the cello back from England on a JAL 747, strapped into the seat between him and his wife; he was watching from his first-class window as the plane came into land at Narita, and saw what looked like a medieval battle going on underneath; two armies; banners, smoke and fumes and lumbering cannon. He remembered pointing it out to his wife.
It was that day, that demonstration, she'd discovered, when — stuttering, incredulous, hardly daring to believe fate could dispense such undeserved balm — she'd asked him. But it was true.
She'd hugged Mr Kubota, startling him and Mr Kawamitsu.
Hisako Onoda saw the cello obliterated by AK47 and Uzi fire, ripped to splinters against the stem of the Nadia in the hazy sunlight of late afternoon.
Strings tugged, snapped, flailed. Wood burst and sprang, turned to dust and splinters under the hail of fire. Bullets sang and sparked against the metal of the bows behind the instrument as it disintegrated and collapsed in a cloud of dark and pale-brown fragments, strings waving like anemone limbs, like a drowning man's fingers. Blood was in her mouth and bruises puffed round her eyes and cigarette burns burned on her breasts and the seed of a boatful of men ran down her thighs and she kept seeing Philippe crumple under the first bullet that hit, but it was the cello; the needless, pointless (apart from to hurt) destruction of the cello that finally killed her. Old wood. New metal. Guess which won? No surprise there. Killed, she was free.
She heard the scream of the engines in the rasp of the guns. The sky was filled with thunder and fire, and she felt something die.
Now she couldn't be who or what she had been. She hadn't asked for this, hadn't wanted it, but it was here. Not her fault. There was no forbearance, no vengeance, just chance. But it had happened, all the same, and she did not feel she had simply to succumb; acceptance was not nearly enough and far too much. This took the scab off. Truth always hurts, she told herself; hurt sometimes truths. They made her watch, as the afternoon wore out and the clouds sailed and the wind moved as it always had and the water sparkled just so and the Kalashnikovs and Uzis barked and rapped and the cello dissolved under their fire.
She suspected she'd disappointed them; they'd ripped the masking tape off her mouth so they could hear her scream when they shot the instrument, but she'd kept quiet.
They took her away. But it wasn't the same person they led off, and something that was her lay there in the string-tangled debris of the wrecked instrument, turned to less than sawdust by the impact.
She was a toy, a mascot; they fucked her and made themselves whole, together. But toys could corrupt, she thought (as they took her away from the sunlight, back to her cage and captivity and torture), and mascots might bite back.
They showed her their other toys, too, on the bridge; the SAM launcher (they played at readying it to fire and pointing it at her, once poked it between her legs, joking about whether she was hot enough down there to attract the missile); the plastique charges they'd sink at least one of the ships with, once they'd downed the plane; the vencerista literature and equipment they'd leave behind with a couple of their uniforms, so that when the National Guard did come to investigate, there'd be no doubt who'd shot down the Americans and massacred the people on the ships.
The radio operators were dead too. She'd seen the bodies in the Nadia's radio cabin as they'd dragged her along to the bridge, past the scars and gouge marks of the fire fight Orrick had started. The ship's radio was officially out of action; the Americans were jamming every frequency in sight to combat vencerista radio signals, fearing a large-scale attack, they said. The soldiers let her listen to one of the infrequent news broadcasts. Radio Panama was playing martial music, apart from the news programmes, which were meant to be hourly but weren't. The jamming came right up against the station's frequency on both sides, producing a background of whistles and rumbles and a sound somewhere between a heavy machine-gun and a helicopter.
When they'd got to the bridge, they'd tied her to the Nadia's small wheel, forcing her to stand awkwardly, unable to rest her legs, her arms strapped to the wood and brass of the wheel. Her head was down, and sheltered behind her greasy, unwashed hair. She looked down at the bruised, burned body revealed by the ripped yukata, and listened to the sounds of a world losing its head.
Panama City was under martial law. The President of Columbia had been shot dead and five groups had claimed. responsibility. More US carrier groups were arriving off the Pacific Coast of Central America and in the Caribbean. Cuba said it was preparing to be invaded. The Kremlin was threatening a new blockade of Berlin. America and Russia had both called for an emergency session of the UN. The US peace mission was on again; the plane would leave Dulles the following morning. A thousand rioters were dead in Hong Kong, and the Azanian Army had found a giant glass crater in the sands three hundred kilometres east of Otjiwarongo, which they claimed was the site of Johannesburg's unsubtle cruise-missile warning shot. The news ended with American baseball scores, then the martial music resumed.
Hisako laughed until they hit her so hard she blacked out for a moment. She still giggled, even as the plastic restrainers bit into her wrists and the weight of her body tore at her arm sockets; she watched the blood fall like little bombs from her mouth to the cushioned deck of the bridge, and felt herself snigger. The music they were playing now was a Sousa march; it reminded her of a group of lecturers she'd known in the Todai English department who held a small party each week for staff and students. They'd invite visiting English speakers along; businessmen, scientists, politicians, and sometimes somebody from the American or British Embassy. A Brit diplomat appeared with a video tape one time, and some of them watched it. Not everybody found the programme funny or even comprehensible, but she loved it, wanted more. A sub-group formed to watch the latest tape, flown in from London in the diplomatic bag each week. She became addicted to the programme. The music — this music — had meant that and that only to her for almost a quarter of a century.
So Radio Panama played the Sousa march which had become the theme to Monty Python's Flying Circus, and
she could only laugh, no matter how hard they hit her. The world was absurd, she decided, and the pain and cruelty and stupidity were all just side effects of that basic grotesqueness, not the intended results after all. The realisation came as a relief.
When Dandridge called through on their unjammed walkie-talkies, they put another piece of masking tape over her mouth. She had to swallow her blood. Dandridge said something about coming over to the Nadia, and they untied her from the wheel and after some discussion in Spanish took her down into the bowels of the ship through the engine room and locked her in the engineering workshop with the light off.
She slept.
Somebody had stabbed her. She had just woken up and she'd been stabbed; the knife hung from her belly, dripping blood. She tried to pull it out but couldn't. The room was dark, echoingly big. There was a line of red light at floor level, all around her. It flickered slightly.
She got up out of the dirty bed, tangled in the grease and grimy sweat of the sheets. She kicked them away and stumbled on the metal floor, holding the knife carefully so that it wouldn't move around too much and hurt her even more. There wasn't as much blood as she'd expected, and she wondered if there would only be a gush when she got somebody to pull it out. She wanted to cry, but found that she couldn't.
She came to the wall of the room and felt under the rim of the metal, between floor and wall, looking for a place to lift. She moved round, feeling under the wall with one hand, holding the knife in the other. Eventually she came to a set of steps leading up out of the room to a very dim red outside. where long, booming noises shook the air and the ground. The steps, made of compacted sand, were edged with wooden slats held in by little tuft-headed posts.
She came up out of the bunker into the gory glow of late evening; strips of close-packed cloud lay overhead, alternating with streaks of red, like blood staining black sheets. The thunder of the guns sounded in the distance, and the earth trembled. Down in the trench she found the men, lying exhausted against the sides of crumbling earth and rotten wood. The mud was up to their knees and their eyes were closed. Red light hung like oil on their rifles. They were bandaged; everyone wore a filthy grey bandage; on head or arm, or over one eye or both, or over their chest, over their uniform, or round one leg. She wondered why they didn't see her, and stopped and looked into the face of one whose eyes were open. Red light reflected in the darkness of his pupils. He sniffed and wiped his nose. She tried to talk to the soldier, but no noise came from her mouth, and the man ignored her. She started to worry that she wouldn't find anybody to take the knife out.
At the end of the trench were men who looked like their boots. Their eyes were threaded, up and down their leathery faces. Their mouths were stuck open, like the top of a shoe, tongues flapping spastically as they tried to talk to her. Their arms were like thick laces, and couldn't pull the knife out of her. One raised his foot out of the mud and she saw that the top of his boot melded naturally and easily into a naked human foot, without a break. She puzzled over this, sure she'd seen it before, but then the boot soldier put the foot under the mud again and a whistle sounded. The boot soldiers picked up their guns with all the rest and put rickety wooden ladders against the sides of the trenches. She walked up out of the trench, back to where a line of blasted tree stumps lay on the brow of a small hill, like teeth.
The village on the far side of the hill was wrecked; every building damaged. Roofs had collapsed, walls fallen, doors and windows been blown out, and huge holes filled the road and streets. She saw people in the town square, facing in towards the centre, where a red light shone.
She walked down the broad, crater-pitted streets, passing people who stood looking to the central square. She used sign language to ask for help, but they all ignored her.
It took a long time to walk through the suburbs; the crowd of silent, raggedly dressed people became gradually thicker until she had to push her way through them, which was difficult while she still held the knife. She could hear a roaring noise in the distance. The people looked exhausted and hollow-eyed, and some of them collapsed as she pushed past. The roaring noise sounded thick and heavy, like a great waterfall slowed down. The people fell around her, crumpling to the ground as soon as she touched them, no matter how careful she tried to be. She wanted to say sorry. She could see the silhouette of the giant fountain ahead against the crimson sky now. The people were thick about her; she pushed between them and they fell, knocking into their neighbours so that they fell, too, and hit the people near them, who also fell and took others down with them. The wave of collapsing people spread out like ripples in a pond, knocking everybody to the ground until only she was left standing and the fountain was there, huge, in front of her, with the lake beyond.
The fountain was tiered, shaped like a wedding cake. It gushed blood; blood roaring and falling and steaming through the cold evening air. She fell to her knees when she saw it, half-suffocated by the smell of it, mouth blocked. A cataract of blood flowed away from it to the inland sea beyond the city. She got up, stepped over the fallen people, stumbled down the steps by the side of the violet rapids until she stood on the shore of the lake, red waves lapping at her feet.
She pulled the knife out and threw it into the lake. No blood rushed out of the wound, but the knife splashed when it hit, and some of the blood splattered her face and feet, and some hit the place where the knife had been embedded, and a single strand dribbled down to the lake at her feet, and the strand thickened, and pulsed, and the blood flowed into her not out of her, falling up out of the lake, as if a tap had been turned on.
She tried to stop it, beating it down with her fists, but the blood burned her, breaking her fingers; she fell back, but the blood rushed out of the lake into her, the stream thick as an arm, filling her, bloating her, choking her, sealing her mouth. She lifted her ruined hands to the dark clouds and tried to scream, and the sky flashed once, above her; the lake shivered. The sky went dark once more. At last her lips tore open, and she screamed, with all her strength, and the sky lit up all over, as though the clouds were catching fire. The lake spasmed, whipping the strand that joined it to her, almost breaking its thin grip. She drew air in through her ruined lips, to scream with all the power of the lake itself, while the sky trembled above her, glittering and sparking on the brink of release, poised and ready to catch and blast.
She woke up on the floor. The place was dark, the deck hard and cold. Breathing sounded loud and ragged in the harsh steel container of the room, but it was only her own, coursing through her nostrils. The tape over her mouth still clamped her lips. Her breath quieted slowly while she sat, trying to ease the ache in her shoulders.
It was late. She didn't know how long she'd slept, but she knew it had been some hours; early morning by now, if not later.
She'd been secured against a metal bench, her hands attached to its leg by the plastic strap of the restrainer. As soon as she awoke she hurt; her backside had been spread in the same position for so long she felt welded to the deck, her shoulders ached, her wrists and hands felt numb, and the places on her breasts where they'd touched her with their cigarettes burned as though the glowing red coals were still there, sizzling through her flesh. Between her legs wasn't as bad as she'd expected. Sucre had been small and the rest had added their own lubrication with each violation. The pain didn't matter so much; it was the feeling of being used, of mattering so little as another human being, and so much as a warm, slippery container, to be taken and crowed over; look what I've done; I did this even though she didn't want to.
The ship hummed around her. She couldn't see a thing. The light in the corridor outside, between the engine room itself and the Nadia's steering-gear compartment, must be turned off as well. She tried to remember how the room had looked when they brought her in, but couldn't. Too complicated, for one thing; full of machinery, lathes and drills and benches with vices and tools. It ought to be an ideal place to escape from, but she didn't know how to begin.
She
felt what she could, starting with her fingers.
And stopped.
The rear flange of the L-shaped leg supporting the bench, which the restrainer was looped around, was ragged. It rasped against her fingers, hurting. Blood welled on her fingers, making them slick then sticky. She explored the jagged edge. She pulled forward and moved her wrists quickly up and down, then stopped and felt the inner surface of the restrainer where it had been rubbing against the metal. The material felt roughened. She put it back where it had been and sawed up and down as hard and fast as she could.
She could hear it, and after a while she could smell it too, and that seemed like a good sign.
She was almost free when she heard steps, and the light outside in the corridor went on. She stopped for a second, then resumed her sawing, frantic with the effort. Footsteps clanged against metal, stopped at the door. She threw her hands up and down, drawing her spine back to the metal edge of the bench with the effort of forcing the restrainer against the leg.
The door swung open just as the restrainer snapped.
10: Average Adjuster
Light swamped in. She scuttled to the left, behind another bench. But too late; she knew it was too late. There was too much light and she must have been seen.
She expected the soldier to shout out, but he didn't. There was a noise like a chuckle, and the sound of a hand moving over metal. Something clinked on the far wall. The soldier spoke to her in Spanish but she couldn't make out the words. She peeped over the top of the bench. The opened white loop of the plastic restrainer lay by the leg of the bench she'd been attached to; it ought to be obvious, but the man hadn't reacted yet. He slapped the metal bulkhead at the side of the door, cursing. Looking for the light, but still it didn't come on.