Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  “Do you want to fuck me?” she asked. She looked and sounded very serious. I felt extremely nervous. I had meant to say “Nothing would give either of us greater pleasure!,” which was a line I’d heard in a film, but in the end I just nodded and said yes, I did.

  “Where’s your room?” she asked, taking me by the hand. “We’ll have to close the curtains.”

  I had kissed a few girls, and one, since gone away to university, had put her hand into my pants and wanked me off, but I was otherwise still a virgin. I had hoped to see things, to get to look at a girl’s body properly, in close-up, in soft sunlight or full moonlight, but she wanted the curtains closed and no lights on. I had a packet of condoms I’d stolen from my mother’s bedside cabinet but she assured me there was no need for these. I came very quickly the first time. She wanted to be taken from behind, her holding onto the headboard of my narrow bed, me kneeling behind her. Later she took me in her mouth. I thought this was a bit dirty at first, but she just gave a single snorting laugh when I mentioned this. I had become very hard again and could feel, against the skin of my cock, the braces imprisoning her teeth. I began to pull out as I felt myself approaching orgasm, gasping and telling her this, but she kept me in her mouth and let me come there. Later again we made love face to face, though her eyes remained tightly closed throughout. Her nails drew blood on my back, though I only realised this later. At the time the pain was not so bad and I remember thinking this was interesting. She laughed at the fact that I always wanted to clean up immediately, with tissues.

  The room was dim but nowhere near fully dark and I had already noticed the various scars and burn marks distributed over a large proportion of her body. Even if the room had been pitch black or I had been blind, I would have felt the welts of raised scar tissue on her arms and thighs and torso. I had already half guessed, and one or two boys I knew – I would hardly call them friends, but we hung around together sometimes – had suggested that there was a reason she always wore long clothes and was excused gym classes and swimming lessons.

  We had sex whenever we could. My dad’s garden shed was probably where we did it most, usually at night. It was hidden from the house and it was easy to get the key from near the back door. Sometimes we would pretend to do things to each other with items like the saws and hammers and the heavy vice that sat clamped to the workbench. We were invited to a party at the flat of some of her friends and had sex in a bedroom that had been set aside for just this activity; there was a queue.

  GF had long been in a girls’ organisation called the Girl Foresters and had risen to the rank of junior officer. One time I got to fuck her while she wore the uniform of this organisation and that felt especially good. I fantasised that one day she would become a police officer and I would get to fuck her while she wore that uniform.

  One time, for nearly a week, we had the run of a house belonging to an old lady who she cleaned for sometimes, when the old lady was in hospital. We fucked until we were both sore. She had bruises on her arms and the backs of her legs that I had not caused.

  “Of course it’s my dad,” she said one evening, lying on the floor. If we did lie down to have sex, we always did so on a sheet spread over a quilt on the floor; she would not use the beds in the old lady’s house. I had asked her if the bruises came from her father. I had wanted to ask her this for some months now but had never felt the time was right. In all honesty I wasn’t sure the time was actually right then and perhaps if I’d thought about it more deeply I’d have realised the time would perhaps never be right, but I did want to know and I felt we were in a relationship of sufficient long-standing and even commitment that I deserved the prerogative of being able to enquire regarding such matters.

  I asked whether he had always hit her. “Long as I can remember,” she replied. “Ever since mum left.”

  I said I thought her mum was dead.

  “He says she is,” she told me. “Won’t say where she went or where she ended up before she died. If she is dead.” She rolled over onto her front. I stroked her buttocks, which were very firm and round and smooth and one of the few places on her body that she had never marked with the various implements she used to cut herself. I wanted to ask her if her father had abused her in other ways, if he had abused her sexually as well. I had already guessed that he had but I wanted to be sure. However, I was worried that this might prove a rather difficult subject. GF could be very nervous and highly strung and was liable, when faced with a conversational subject she felt uncomfortable with or a line of questioning she objected to, to burst into tears, fly into a rage or storm out of a room.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said as I gently caressed her behind and she pushed back the cuticle on each finger to inspect the pale moon of nail beneath before biting on the ragged edges of her fingernails. I hesitated, wondering if she really had guessed what I was thinking. I decided, with a disturbed feeling, that she probably had guessed correctly. However, I did not say anything. I kept on stroking the glossy skin of her backside. “It is what you’re thinking, about him, isn’t it? What else he might have done to me if he does this to me. That’s what you want to know, isn’t it?” she said. Still I said nothing. She continued to worry at her fingernails, biting them and tearing at them. She still didn’t turn round to look at me. “Well, what do you think?” she asked.

  I could tell from her voice exactly what I should think but I told her I didn’t know what to think. I said this partly to be completely sure and partly because I felt that doing so kept me in a better situation.

  “Well, he did,” she said. “From when I was nine.” There was a long pause during which she slapped my stroking hand away from her behind. “He still does.”

  She turned and stared back at me then, with a fierce and terrible look on her face. She rolled over onto her back, drew her legs up and let them fall apart so that her genitals were fully revealed, still moist and glistening from our last bout of lovemaking ten minutes earlier. “Still want to fuck me now?” she asked, her expression and tone of voice both defiant and desperate. I looked at that raw wound, then into her eyes.

  I told her to stay where she was, then got up and went through to the utility room where I found a clothes line. I went back to the room where she lay just as I’d left her. I asked her if she trusted me and she thought about it and then said that she did. I told her to roll back onto her front, which she did. I brought her hands together behind her back and tied them at the wrists. I could hear her crying but trying not to make too much noise about it. I moved an old heavy chair into position and tied each of her feet to its two front legs so that she could not move them, then brought the companion chair round in front of her and carefully raised her by the shoulders and laid her chest and head across the seat.

  I told her that of course I still wanted to fuck her, and I did so, though not aggressively or hard. Instead I fucked her very gently and slowly, until I came. Later I untied her and held her while she cried and I told her that she wasn’t to let her father fuck her ever again, but that was the wrong thing to say because she went into one of her rages and tried to slap and punch and bite me, screaming that she couldn’t stop him.

  We tied each other up occasionally after that. I did not enjoy being immobilised, though, and so we stopped. I like to think that she stood up to her father and he abused her less after this time but he did not stop altogether and I always knew when he had done so, either from the bruises or from the reopened cutting sites on her body.

  I shall be completely honest and record here that I think people make too big a fuss about incest these days. I’m sure it has always gone on. However I had grown to hate Mr F, GF’s father, and this was as much about the physical damage he did to her and the physical damage that he caused her to do to herself as about the fact that he had raped her from the age of nine, taken her virginity, made her distrust everybody and had treated her like a sex toy rather than a person or a daughter. It seemed to me that he had done something
quite literally unforgivable, even if GF had been inclined to forgive him.

  I rather lost the plot with Mr F. I went too far. I got carried away. It was not so much that I had let it become personal as that it started out as nothing but personal, because I knew nothing else back then.

  I broke into their house when GF was away at a camp with the Girl Foresters. She would be absent for a full week. I crept out of our house, took my bike down the lanes and dark back-roads to their house and used the key that I knew lay under a particular flowerpot to let myself in. I had never been to her house but I had a rough idea of the layout of the place. I knew that Mr F would be drunk and fast asleep that night after his weekly Chamber of Commerce dinner. He was in the bedroom, with the light still on. He was lying on top of the bed, face down, half undressed. He was a tall man, gone to fat about the upper chest and belly, but not as well developed as my old man.

  I’d grown up and become quite strong. I’d made myself a cosh from a pair of old socks and a load of piggy-bank change. I whacked him on the back of the head and did it again when he started to rear up, roaring. He went down, gurgling, breath spluttering from his mouth as though he was trying to snore.

  I gagged him with thick tape, right round his head twice, and tied him up, then dragged him down to the cellar feet first with his head thumping off each step and tied him to the central-heating unit. I made sure he was well secured and properly gagged, then went up to ransack the house so that it would look like it had been a burglary gone wrong. I was wearing charity-shop gloves and a woollen ski mask that looked like an ordinary hat until you pulled it down. On my feet I was wearing a pair of old sneakers I’d found hanging from a tree in the forest a couple of months earlier. I’d padded them with socks because they were far too big for me. In my rucksack I’d brought another pair of shoes, ones my dad thought he’d thrown out and which were even bigger. I changed into them and walked around in them for a bit, opening drawers and pulling stuff out and pulling back carpets and using a crowbar to prise up a few floorboards. I went into what was obviously GF’s room and treated that just the same; I couldn’t not. Even that felt oddly good. When I thought I heard a muffled noise below, I went back to the cellar and Mr F.

  I would have liked to have done something to him like he’d done to his daughter, but that would have been to leave a clue, so I just used kettles of boiling water, an old-fashioned blowtorch and a hammer. When I used the hammer I covered his feet or his hands – as appropriate – with a towel, so that no blood would splash on me, though there wasn’t actually that much. Probably the most blood came when I used a cheese grater on his knees. He screamed through the gag so much that I had to cover his whole head in a sack, and then with a bin bag, just to try to shut him up.

  I think that he suffocated because I tied the bin bag too tight.

  I hadn’t really intended to kill him, not at the start, not until I really got into it, I think, but as I worked on him I think he somehow became less human to me, more just this thing that reacted in a certain way to a certain stimulus, a set of workings that produced a set of noises and a set of muscular contractions and a set of blisterings and discolorations on the skin, according to what I subjected him to. I think also that I started to feel I had done so much damage to him that it would somehow be tidier to kill him off. I don’t mean that I wanted to be merciful, to put him out of his misery – his misery was what was interesting to me – but that he was so badly compromised as a human specimen he had stopped being entirely human. I’m not putting this very well. He was all too clearly human, but he was, he had become, less than human. I would even resist the obvious conclusion that it was I who had done this to him. I had the nagging, perhaps illogical, but quite inescapable feeling that he was doing this to himself, that, despite my total and absolute control over him, he was still somehow responsible for his own torment. I’m still not entirely sure why I felt this, but I definitely did. I think that I developed a sort of contempt for him, despite the fact that I knew I had surprised him and left him with no chance of escaping or resisting me. I’d clubbed him while he was asleep (drunkenly asleep, but still). What chance had he had? None. But that’s just the way things are sometimes.

  In any event, I did kill him, obviously. Partly it was because I got distracted when I found an old car battery at the back of the cellar when I was looking for new things to use on him and I believe he expired from lack of oxygen while I was still trying to get the acid out of it. I thought he might be pretending at first. He was completely limp, and there was no pulse in either wrist or under his jaw, but you could never be sure. I used pliers on his fingernails – the fingers were all loose and granular-feeling because I’d already smashed them with the hammer – but he did not react so I concluded he really was dead. I tied the bin bag back round his head – tied tightly, reckoning that if he was dead I ought to be sure of it.

  The thing is, I had thought my heart could not have beaten harder and faster than when I’d been breaking into the house in the first place but I’d been wrong. It thrashed in my chest like something wild as I tortured Mr F and although I won’t pretend that I was in any way professional, I felt powerful and in charge and as though I had finally found something that I just naturally knew how to do.

  What I had not done, of course, was actually put any questions to him. I hadn’t asked him whether he’d raped his daughter, or what he might have done with his wife. I’d thought of it, but in the end I was too frightened that my voice would betray my nervousness, or he’d scream loud enough to attract a neighbour. I suppose I could have got him to respond to questions through simply nodding or shaking his head but that didn’t really occur to me. I just wanted to inflict a lot of pain on him for what he had done to GF and, as the night went on, I suppose, yes, I thought I might as well kill him, even though he hadn’t seen my face, I hadn’t spoken to him and I was fairly sure he’d never be able to identify me. It just seemed like the right thing to do. The tidiest.

  I unlocked the front door and put the key back under the flowerpot where I had found it. The last thing I did was break the window in the spare room from the outside to make it look like I’d come in that way. I’d left enough of a clear area on the carpet beneath the window for it not to be obvious this had happened after the ransacking. I got home and back into bed, unseen. I didn’t sleep the rest of the night.

  The next day I went for a walk in the woods. I took the rucksack with all the clothes I’d worn that night, far into a dense plantation, and burned it. Then I dug a hole nearly a metre deep and buried the ashes.

  A business colleague of Mr F found him two days later, the day before GF was due back from the camp. Relatives came to look after her and took her away for nearly a month. The police said they were looking for one or two burglars and announced that it was probably a robbery gone wrong. Everybody in town apart from myself slept very badly for the next few weeks. I slept like a baby. All I had to do to cover my tracks was keep the swagger out of my walk and the sneer from my lips. I knew what I had done, and felt proud and manly and in control. I was even more proud that I had been able to see through to the end what I had done to Mr F than I was of getting away with murder.

  When I heard they were fingerprinting all the men in the town I went along to the police station without grumbling; not one of the first to go, but not reluctantly either. I was never even questioned. The police concluded the ghastly crime had been committed by an unknown person or unknown persons from out of town and gradually life returned to normal.

  Nevertheless, what I had done had been amateurish and out of control and I had acted like policeman, jailer, judge, jury and executioner. I admit that this did seem wrong to me. I had discovered something that I was good at and even – in a sort of righteous but I hope not perverse way – had enjoyed, but this was not altogether right. There have to be limits, there has to be some sort of apparatus of judgement and rightful jurisdiction, an oversight, if you will, that gives the torturer proper author
ity.

  I had got away with what I had done but if I hoped to do anything like it again then I felt I could not repeat my actions. I certainly was not about to start murdering people in their cellars like some seedy serial killer. Mr F had deserved what had happened to him and I had been the means of delivering justice to him, but that was that. I had to accept that through sound preparation, good judgement and good luck I had succeeded in my mission and been able to walk away.

  GF came back and stayed with one of her aunts in a town-centre hotel until the funeral. I left a message and we met in our usual café. She seemed distant and yet relaxed and I realised she was probably on some sort of medication. She no longer wore the braces on her teeth and said that she had missed me and had stopped cutting herself, for now at least.

  I didn’t go to the funeral; she didn’t ask me to.

  She started at the same college I attended and got a flat with another girl. I moved into a place nearby with a couple of guys. GF and I started going out again and soon became intimate once more, though neither of us ever again suggested any bondage games.

  She never talked about her father, but then she rarely had.

  One day we both had time off and had gone to bed in my flat.

  “Remember these?” she asked, producing a packet of Sugar Cherries from her bag. “Confiscated them from a Junior Forester.” She popped one into my mouth and another into her own. We chewed on them noisily for a while. I tried to remember the last time I had eaten one. “I used to love these,” I said.