Transition

by Iain M. Banks

We lived in the country in a line of prison-officer homes, within sight of the prison. I’d grown up listening to mum and dad arguing over the years because the walls were thin in the house. Though you couldn’t hear mum, just dad. She always kept her voice right down, whispering even, while he either shouted or just talked in his loud voice. I don’t think he ever whispered in his whole life. When you listened to them it was like he was arguing with himself, or with somebody who wasn’t there. I used to wrap my pillow round my head, covering both ears, or if it got really loud I’d stick my fingers in my ears and hum to myself to shut out the sound.

  One time I must have been humming really loudly because the light went on and I opened my eyes and dad was there over me wearing just his underpants standing at the side of the bed and demanding what I thought I was doing making all this noise? He scowled at me as I lay there blinking in the bright overhead light, wiping my eyes and cheeks. I was sure he was going to hit me but he just made a grumbling sort of noise and left, slamming the door. He left the light on so I had to put it out myself.

  I had already, over the course of the preceding few years, heard things I would not have chosen to hear, things about sex and so on, but the night mum came back from the hospital a week or thereabouts after giving birth to my sister was the thing that really made the difference, for me. Mum had had a bad time giving birth to me and she wasn’t really meant to have any more children, but then she got pregnant and that was that. Dad would just have soon have got rid of what turned into my sister but mum wasn’t having that because of her religion so she went through with it. But it was an unpleasant procedure and she needed a lot of stitches down there. I suppose dad must have been drunk – especially drunk, as he always liked a drink.

  I tried humming but I knew they were talking about sex that evening when she came back from the hospital and because of the age I was a part of me was getting interested in sexual matters and so I partly wanted to listen, so I did. Thus I got to hear my mother begging my father to let her take him in her mouth, or even sodomise her, rather than have normal sex, due to the stitches and the fact that she was still very sore. I had heard dad in the past demanding these favours, or thought I had, but from the little I knew neither had actually occurred. That night, though, he wasn’t to be fobbed off with such distractions, especially not after months of being denied.

  So, not to put too fine a point on it, he had his way with her, and I had to listen to the gasps and gulps and then the screams. A lot of screams, even though despite it all you could somehow tell that she was trying to be quiet about it. I shoved my fingers into my ears so hard that I thought I was going to puncture my eardrums, and I hummed as hard as I could, but I could still hear her.

  It took much longer than you might imagine. Perhaps it was the drink, or the screams. But eventually the screams stopped, to be replaced by sobs and, shortly, snores.

  I had, of course, imagined myself bursting in on them and hauling him off her and beating him up and so on, but I was only eleven, and slight, like her, not big and burly like him. Therefore there was nothing I could have done.

  Meanwhile my sister had been set off by all the screaming and she was crying the way that very small babies do, and had probably been crying like that all the time but I hadn’t heard her over the screams from my mother and my own humming. I heard mum getting up from her and dad’s bed and going over to the cot and trying to comfort her, though you could hear her own voice breaking and her sobbing as she did this. Dad snored very loudly, and mum was sobbing and breaking down and my sister was screaming in a high, unpleasant whine. It was only at this point that our next-door neighbours started hammering on the wall, shouting, their voices like a sort of tired, distant commentary on events.

  I am not ashamed to say that I cried quite a lot throughout the rest of that night, though I still dropped off to sleep eventually and got up for school the next day, because it is amazing what you can put up with and get over. Almost anything, in fact.

  Nevertheless, I think it was then that I decided I would never get married or have children.

  3

  Patient 8262

  There is a certain purity to my existence. A simplicity. In a sense nothing much happens; I lie here, gazing into space or at the view presented by the window, blinking, swallowing, turning over now and again, getting up occasionally – always while they make the bed each morning – and staring open-mouthed at the nurses and orderlies. Now and again they’ll try to engage me in conversation. I make a point of smiling at them when they do this. It helps that we do not speak the same language. I can understand most of the one that they speak – sufficient to have an idea what my perceived medical status is and what treatments the doctors might have in store for me – but I have to make an effort to do so and I would not be able to speak much sense in it at all.

  Sometimes I nod, or laugh, or make a sound that is halfway between a sort of throat-clearing noise and the moans that deaf people make sometimes, and often I frown as though I’m trying to understand what they’re saying, or as though I feel frustrated at not being able to make myself intelligible to them.

  Doctors come and give me tests sometimes. There were quite a lot of doctors and quite a lot of tests, early on. There are fewer now. They give me books to look at with photographs or drawings in them of everyday objects, or large letters, one to a page. One doctor brought me a tray holding letters on wooden cubes, from some child’s game. I smiled at them and her and mixed them up, sliding them around on the tray, making pretty patterns out of them and building little towers with them, trying to make it look as though I was attempting to understand these letters and do whatever it was she wanted me to do, whatever might make her happy. She was a pleasant-looking young woman with short brown hair and large brown eyes and she had a habit of tapping the end of a pencil on her teeth. She was very patient with me and not brusque the way doctors can be sometimes. I liked her a lot and would have liked to have done something to have made her happy. But I could – would – not.

  Instead I made that motion babies and toddlers make sometimes, clapping with fingers fanned, knocking down the little towers of letters I’d made. She smiled regretfully, tapped the pencil on her teeth, sighed and then made some notes on her clipboard.

  I was relieved. I thought I might have overdone the kiddy-clappy thing.

  I am allowed to go to the bathroom by myself, though I pretend to fall asleep in there sometimes. I always make mumbly apologetic noises and come out when they knock on the door and call my name. They call me “Kel,” not knowing my real name. There was a reason, something between a conceit and a joke, why I was christened so, but the doctor who named me thus left earlier this year and the thinking behind this name is not mentioned in my notes and nobody can remember the reason. I am not allowed to bathe alone, but being bathed is not so terrible; once you get over any residual shame it is very relaxing. One even feels luxurious. I take care to masturbate in the toilet on the morning of a bath day, so as not to embarrass myself in front of the nurses or orderlies.

  One of the nurses is a big kindly woman with drawn-on eyebrows, another is quite small and pretty with bleached blonde hair, and there are two orderlies or care workers, one a bearded man with a ponytail and the other a frail-looking but surprisingly strong lady who looks older than me. I suppose if one of them – well, just the pretty blonde, if I am being frank with myself – ever showed any sign of sexual interest in me I might reconsider my pre-emptive pre-bath self-pleasuring. So far this looks unlikely and I am bathed with a sort of professional detachment by all of them.

  There is a day room at the end of the corridor where other patients gather and watch television. I go there rarely and affect not really to understand the programmes even when I do. Most of the other patients just sit there slack-jawed, and I emulate them. Now and again one of them will try to engage me in conversation, but I just stare at them and smile and mumble and they usually go away. One large fat bald chap with bad skin doesn�
�t go away, and regularly sits beside me, watching the television while talking to me in a low, hypnotic voice, probably telling me about his ungrateful and dismissive family and his sexual exploits as a younger and more attractive man, but for all I know regaling me with lurid local folk tales, or his detailed design for a perpetual-motion machine, or professing his undying love for me and setting out the various things he would like to do to me in private. Or perhaps his undying hatred for me and setting out the various things he would like to do to me in private – I don’t know. I can hardly understand a word he says; I think he talks in the same language as the doctors and nurses – most of whom I can understand well enough – but in a different dialect.

  Anyway, I rarely bother with the television room or the other patients. I lie here or sit here and I think about all that I’ve done and all that I intend to do once the immediate danger has passed and it is safe for me to re-emerge. I smile and even chuckle to myself sometimes, thinking of these poor fools mouldering away until they die here while I’m back out in the many worlds, living and loving; an operator, getting up to whatever mischief takes my fancy. How shocked they would be, patients and staff both, if they only knew!

  Adrian

  Funny thing is, I always loved cocaine. I mean, obviously I loved it in the sense that I loved how rich it made me, how it helped me to drag myself up from the pretty much nothing I started with, but what I mean is I loved it when I took it.

  It’s a proper brilliant drug, coke. I loved everything about it, I loved the way it all seemed of a piece. The cleanness of it, for a start. I mean, look at it: this beautiful snow-white powder. Little yellow sometimes, but only the way really brightly lit clouds are yellow though they start out looking white, from the sun. Bit of a joke it looks like cleaning powder, but even that seems right somehow. It feels like it’s cleaning out your skull, know what I mean? Even how you take it goes along with all this, doesn’t it? Clean, sharp, definite things like razor blades and mirrors and tightly rolled banknotes, preferably new, as big denomination as you like. I love the smell of new notes, with or without powderage.

  And it energises you, gives you what feels like ambition and ability in one easily snorted package. Suddenly nothing’s impossible. You can talk and think your way round any problem, batter down anybody’s resistance, see the clear, clever way to make any challenge work for you. It’s a doing drug, an enabling drug.

  Back where I came from they were all into dope, or H, or speed, which is the poor man’s coke, and they were starting to get into E. Speed’s like laminate instead of real wood, or faux fur not pukka, or a hand job instead of proper sex. It’ll do if you can’t afford the real thing. Ecstasy’s pretty good, but it’s not immediate. You have to commit to it. Not as much as kosher old-fashioned acid, though, cos I’ve heard people old enough to be my dad talk of these trips that lasted eighteen hours or more and just turned your whole world inside out, not always in a good way, and you needed to organise everything, too, like where you were going to spend the time you were tripping, and even who with. Support staff, practically. Like, carers! How the fuck did hippies ever get that fucking organised, eh?

  Anyway, compared to that time-consuming nonsense E isn’t that bad, like drinking spritzers instead of whisky sodas or something, but you still need to organise everything to come up at the right time and it really is mostly about dancing, being loved-up in amongst lots of fellow travellers and boppers. Fine for that long drawn-out moment of collective euphoria, but it’s more like part of a sort of rite, a ritual. What was that song that went, “This is my church”? Something like that. Like a service. Bit too collective, too chummy for my taste.

  Cannabis was sort of similar in some ways in that it made you mellow, didn’t it? Though how that squares with the fucking Hashisheen I’ve never quite understood. But it’s all that lying around like old hippies, wreathed in smoke and talking bollocks, that I could never take. All that claggy brown tar gumming up the cigarette papers and your brains and making you choke and splutter and wrecking you to the point where it seemed like a great idea to drink the old bong water for the final hit that’ll really take you over the edge into some other realm of understanding. What a load of bollocks. I can see it was a great Sixties drug when everybody wanted to smash the system by having love-ins and painting flowers on their bum, but it’s all too hazy and vague and sort of aimless, know what I mean?

  H is proper hard-core, got to respect that. It’s a serious lifestyle commitment for most people, and it’s like discovering the mother-lode of pure pleasure that all the other drugs including the legal ones like drink have all come from, like finding something utterly pure beyond which there can’t possibly be anything better, but it’s a selfish drug. It takes you over, it becomes the boss, everything else becomes about the next hit and it takes you away from the real world, seems to say that the one where the H is is the real world and the one you’ve lived in all this time and where everybody else still lives, the poor fools, and where the money is, sadly, annoyingly, is just a sort of game, a kind of grey, grainy shadow-place where you have to go back to far too often to make these sort of robotic responses that’ll let you get back to the tits-out Technicolor of the wonderful and enchanting world of the H. Proper commitment, H is, and the way it’s served up is potentially lethal too. Bit like joining the army or something.

  Plus, all that melting the mucky-looking stuff in ancient-looking spoons and searching for a vein and pulling ligatures tight with your teeth and having to draw your own blood out to mix it up in the syringe. Messy. You don’t need that. Not clean like coke. Exact opposite. And you need a bucket by you cos the first thing that happens when it hits is you chuck your guts up! Call me old-fashioned but I thought drugs were supposed to be about fun! What sort of fucking fun is that?

  Like I say, respect to people prepared to suffer that sort of degradation for the sake of the river of warm bliss you end up submerged in, but fuck me, it’s not a drug you take to make your life better, which is what I’m looking for, it’s a drug that empties you out of one life and pours you wholesale into another one completely where it’s all very fucking wonderful but the drug is the only way into it and the only way of staying there. It’s like becoming a deep-sea diver in one of those old brass-helmet jobs with the porthole grilles and the air hose leading back to the surface. The H is the air hose, the H is the air. Total dependency.

  No, give me coke every time. Not crack, though. Not cos it’s instantly addictive, that’s another load of bollocks. It’s just overrated, that’s all, and because you smoke it it’s got that messiness factor again, know what I mean? Something a bit sordid about crack, frankly. It’s like coke for junkies.

  Proper, pukka coke is clean, sharp, accelerating, and like a smart drug, a precision munition you take exactly when you want it and need it and delivering for as long as you keep taking it. Of fucking course it’s the drug of choice of your masters of the universe, your financial wizards, your high-financiers. It’s like just-in-time exhilaration, isn’t it? A toot in both barrels and suddenly you’re a fucking genius and totally invincible. Just what you need when you’re juggling telephone numbers of money about and making bets with everybody else’s dosh. Not without its downsides, obviously, though for most people these days loss of appetite is brilliant. I mean, who wants to be fat? Collateral benefit, kind of. But the runny nose and paranoia and risking losing your septum and, so they say, having a heart attack, that’s all a bit toss. Still, no gain without pain and all that.

  So it’s funny that I hardly ever took the stuff myself, given that I loved it, and still do, and I had access to the purest supplies at the best prices. Still do, too, through my contacts, of course. Just being cautious, basically. Also proving to myself who’s the boss, know what I mean? It’s called keeping things in proportion, keeping things balanced. I treat drink the same. I could guzzle vintage champagne and ancient cognac every day but that’d be giving in to that particular monkey, so that has to be ra
tioned too. Same with the girlies.

  I do love the ladies, but I wouldn’t want to be totally beholden to one of them, would I? True love and wanting kids and settling down and all that, it’s fine for most people and it makes the world go round and all like my old man said, but apart from the fact no it doesn’t, it’s gravity that does that, well, all right maybe it does make the world go round in the sense of creating the next generation, but it works just fine and dandy thanks as long as most people do it. Not all. Doesn’t need to be compulsory, doesn’t require every single person to take part, just most, just enough. What was that song, “Love Is The Drug”? Never a truer word, know what I mean? Just another temptation, another way of losing yourself. Making yourself vulnerable, that’s what it’s doing, giving in to all that romantic guff. Just putting your head on the chopping block, isn’t it?

  Don’t get me wrong. I’m not stupid and I know it can happen to anybody and maybe one day it’ll happen to me and I’ll be giving it all that It Just Feels Right and She’s The One and This Time It’s Different, and if it does then I just hope I don’t make a complete cunt of myself, excuse my language but you know what I mean. Even the mighty fall, they say. Nobody’s invulnerable, but you can at least show yourself the respect of holding out as long as possible, know what I mean?

  The Transitionary

  Temudjin Oh, Mr Marquand Ys, Snr Marquan Dise, Dr Marquand Emesere, M. Marquan Demesere, Mark Cavan; Aiman Q’ands. I have been called many things and I have had many names and though they sometimes sound very various they tend to gyrate round a certain set of sounds, clustering about a limited repertoire of phonemes. My name changes each time I flit, never predictably. I don’t always know who I am myself. Not until I check.

  I tap a tiny white pill into my espresso, rearrange the table condiments a little, drink my coffee in two gulps and sit back, waiting (another part of my mind isn’t waiting at all, it’s concentrating furiously, darting down a single filament of purpose within an infinitude of possibilities, a lightning strike zigzagging its way through a cloud, searching). I’m outside another pavement café, in the 4th, looking out across a branch of the Seine to the Ile St Louis, just entering the trance that will guide me to exactly the right place and person. Meanwhile, space to think, to review and evaluate.