Transition

by Iain M. Banks

  “Ho ho!” The girl just widened her eyes and shook her head and took a drink. “You are so fucked up.” She flashed a shit-eating smile and added, “Dude.”

  We were in the Met bar, when it was still cool. I’d already seen one Gallagher brother. I was meeting some mates there; we were off to watch the F1 race the next day at Brands Hatch or Silverstone or wherever. The girl was there with a couple of old school friends, though the other two had gone off to the Ladies, one looking unhealthily pale and the other to hold her hair, I was guessing. Leaving this one. Called Chloë. Chloë with the diaresis, which is the two-little-dots thing, apparently.

  The girl who was probably doing the hair-holding by now had volunteered their names earlier. In all the noise I didn’t think Chloë had caught my name and she hadn’t asked either. She was cute. Young enough to be a student, maybe: curly black hair, cheeky little face with big eyes. Nice top, great tits, designer jeans, red heels. Tasty, in other words. And a challenge. Patently.

  “Greed gets a bad press,” I told her.

  “Yeah. What, like fascism?”

  I winked. “You’re an idealist, aren’t you?”

  “I have ideals,” she agreed. Her voice was western Home Counties. Girls’ school. She was trying a bit too hard to sound bored. “Plus I’m human, so I’m a humanist.”

  “And feminine,” I said. I’d got better at seeing how this sort of stuff worked.

  “You’re catching on.”

  I drank my lager, smiled. “Doing all right, am I?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I wouldn’t get too optimistic. I don’t fuck guys like you.”

  “What sort of guys do you fuck?” I asked her, resting one elbow on the bar and leaning just a little closer to her, taking up more of her field of vision. I’d already got a semi. Just a girl using the f-word like that was usually enough. To be talking about fucking with a girl even when she was basically saying no, or at least was telling you she was saying no, was enough. Promising, know what I mean?

  “Nice guys.”

  “Nice,” I said, looking sceptical.

  She winked at me. It looked like a what-do-you-call-it, a parody of the way I’d just winked at her. “They finish last.” She drank from her cocktail glass, looking pleased with herself.

  I laughed. I put my glass down and held out my hand, looking tentative about it. “I’m Ade?” I said, quite quietly, head lowered slightly in that Let’s-start-again? kind of way. She looked at my hand like it might be contaminated. “Adrian?” I said, and gave her the first-level cheeky smile, which has been known to melt many a girl’s heart and other parts and which I am not ashamed to admit I have practised in the mirror, to get the effect just right. Hey – it’s for them in the end. But then she took my hand, gripped it for about a nanosecond.

  “Chloë,” she told me.

  “Yeah, your mate said.”

  “So, what, you’re in the music biz, Ade? Or films?” It was like she was trying to sound sarcastic when there was nothing to be sarcastic about.

  “Nah, money.”

  “Money?”

  “Hedge fund.”

  “What’s a hedge fund?” she asked, frowning. To be fair, not many people outside the industry had heard of them then – this was pre-LTCM folding, sort of in between the Asian crisis and the Russian crisis.

  “Way of making money,” I told her.

  “Hedging your financial bets?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Sounds… totally parasitic.” Another insincere smile.

  “Nah, honest, we make a lot of money for a lot of people. We make money work. We make it work harder than anybody else. That’s not parasitic at all. Your banks are parasitic. They just sit there, absorbing stuff from the people actually making the money. We’re out there, we’re predators. We’re operators. We make the profits happen. We make money perform. We make money work.” I’d already said that, I knew, but I was getting enthusiastic. Plus I’d taken a toot in the Gents five minutes earlier and it was still hitting me.

  She snorted. “You sound like a salesman.”

  “What’s wrong with being a salesman?” I asked. She was starting to annoy me. “I mean, I’m not, but so what if I was? What do you do, Chloë? What’s your business?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Graphic design,” she sighed.

  “That any better than being a salesman?”

  “Bit more creative, maybe?” she said in a bored voice. “Slightly more meaningful?”

  I put both forearms on the bar. “Let me guess, Chloë. Your dad’s loaded. You—”

  “Fuck off,” she said angrily. “What’s he got to do with me?”

  “Chloë,” I said in mock horror. “That’s your dad you’re talking about there.” I snapped my fingers. “Trust fund,” I said. “You’re a Trusty.”

  “No, I’m fucking not! You don’t know anything about me!”

  “I know I don’t!” I protested, pretending to match her in general upsettedness or whatever. “And you’re not making it easy for me, quite frankly!” You never want to overdo that kind of thing, though. I made a sort of deflating motion, dropping my shoulders and my voice. “What have you got against me, Chloë?” I asked, trying to sound just a little hurt but also being careful not to overdo the plaintiveness.

  “The thing about money, maybe?” she suggested, like it ought to be obvious. “The whole greed thing, yeah?”

  “Look,” I said, sighing. I was already thinking this wasn’t a chat-up situation any longer. I just wanted to say stuff that I’d been thinking about, stuff that I’d sort of wanted to say to people like her before but never got round to. Plus, of course, there are some women that when you stop trying to chat them up and start treating them like a bloke you’re arguing with, they really like that and that can get them into bed where trying to chat them up normally never would. So, definitely worth trying.

  “The greed thing,” I say to her. “Everybody’s greedy, Chloë. You’re greedy. You might not think so but I bet you are. We’re all out for number one. It’s just that some of us don’t kid ourselves about it, know what I mean? We all want everybody to think the same as we do and we think they’re stupid if they think any different. And when it comes to love and relationships, we’re all looking for the right person to worship us, because that’ll make us happy, aren’t we? Wanting to be happy – that’s selfish, isn’t it? Even wanting there to be no more poverty or violence – I mean, it’s all bollocks cos there always will be: both. But that’s us being selfish cos we want the world to be the way we personally think it ought to be, know what I mean? You can dress it up as wanting other people to be happy, but in the end it comes down to you and your own selfishness, your own greed.”

  Chloë held a hand up, almost touching my mouth. “Greed and selfishness aren’t the same thing,” she said. “Close, but not the same. And they’re both different from self-preservation and general self-interest.”

  “Still, close, like you say.”

  She sighed, drank. “Yeah, close.” She looked like she was studying something behind the bar.

  “There’s nothing wrong with a bit of greed, Chloë. It’s what makes the world go round. Wanting to get on, wanting to better yourself, being ambitious, know what I mean? Wanting the best for yourself – what’s wrong with that? Wanting the best for your family – what’s wrong with that, either? Eh? It’s great having the luxury of thinking about other people, the poor and the starving and all that, but you only have that luxury cos somebody’s been thinking for themselves and their family.”

  She turned to me, big eyes wide and bright. “You know what? You remind me of somebody, Ade,” she said.

  “Somebody nice?” I asked. Sarcastically, if I’m honest about it.

  She shook her head. I liked the way her hair moved, though I was resigning myself to never running my fingers through it or breathing in its perfume or using it to pull her head back towards me while I fucked her from behind. “No,” she said.
“He’s one of those men who was packed off to public school when he was just a little kid—”

  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t.”

  “Ssh.” She looked stern. “I heard you out. The point is, because of that or not, he decided that everybody’s out for themselves and nobody really cares for anybody else, though some people pretend to. He’s looked after ‘Number One’” – she did that finger-waggly inverted-commas thing – “exclusively ever since and he can’t see there might be something wrong with that. In fact, he can’t even see that what he’s got there is just a single point of view, and a pretty perverse one at that; as far as he’s concerned it’s some great truth about people and life that only he and a few other realists have worked out. Thing is, he’s got a problem. Maybe he’s still infected with some tiny remnant of human decency or something, but he can only really be content with himself and his despicable egotism if he’s satisfied that his self-centred attitude doesn’t make him a freak. For his own peace of mind he needs to believe that it’s not just him, that anybody who claims to care for others is lying; maybe because they’re frightened to admit they only think of themselves too, or maybe because they actively want to make people like him feel bad about themselves.”

  I was starting to think that Chloë had been on the marching powder too, though somehow it didn’t look like she had, know what I mean? She wasn’t speaking the way you do when you’re coked up. But, fuck me, she was still speaking:

  “Socialists, charity workers, carers, people who volunteer to help others; they’re all – and he’s quite convinced about this – they’re all in reality mean-spirited bastards, either self-deceiving bastards or – for their own filthy left-wing reasons – deliberately trying to destroy the self-esteem of normal, healthily ambitious people like him. Because if only everybody looked after their own interests everything would be fine, see? Level playing field, with everybody nakedly ambitious and selfish; everybody knows where they are. If some people aren’t totally selfish, or, even worse, pretend not to be selfish, then it messes up the whole system. It makes it more unfair, not fairer, the way they’d claim. He calls people like that do-gooders, and they make him angry. I think he would actually prefer do-badders, which is a pretty fucked-up attitude when you think about it. He feels quite strongly that these charlatans needed to be unmasked. Always on about them. Never misses an opportunity to complain that they’re liars and frauds. Frankly, Ade, altogether, it makes him sound like – and I firmly believe he actually is – a complete cunt.”

  Funny, isn’t it? The c-word has no discernible effect on me. Wood-wise, I mean. You’d think when a woman uses the term it’d be quite sexy, but it isn’t. Weird.

  I nodded. “Ah-ha,” I said. “Old boyfriend?”

  “No, Ade. My dad. You remind me of my dad.” Chloë drained her drink and patted me on the arm. “Sorry, dear.” She nodded. “Now, here are my friends, coming back from the loo, looking a bit more sorted, thankfully.” She slid daintily off her bar stool. “I think we’ll be moving on. Interesting to talk to you, Ade. You look after yourself, yeah?”

  And off all three of them fucked.

  Her fucking dad? I fucking wanted to slap the bint.

  The Philosopher

  I have always had nightmares. Long before I became a soldier or a policeman, long before I killed GF’s father or became a torturer, I would have unpleasant, threatening, frightening and distressing dreams. Perhaps they became worse for a while, on a few occasions maybe, especially just after Mr F. However, I believe that my decision not to pursue any further personal vendettas, and to act only when I felt I had the backing of some greater authority and that there existed a viable legal and moral framework supporting my professional actions, helped, as it were, to clear my conscience. At any rate, my nightmares decreased in severity afterwards.

  They did not disappear. They would still haunt me. People did, faces did, sounds did, screams did especially. Some were very recent in origin: the latest subject, their roar of initial defiance, the following howls of agony and the eventual, inevitable pathetic whimperings and pleadings for mercy, sometimes accompanied by the information required in the first place, more often with nothing of use because the subject knew nothing useful to begin with.

  I became a little disillusioned, I suppose, though that had nothing to do with the nightmares. It was just that our job never seemed to end, never seemed to achieve very much. There were always more subjects, and gradually a greater overall number of subjects at any given time, from a greater spread of ages and from more and more backgrounds and professions. Society seemed to be collapsing around us. The Christian Terrorist threat seemed only to increase despite the best efforts of the government, the security services and ourselves, and the real terrorists or terrorist suspects appeared to be joined by those who had fallen foul of the increased security measures and laws which the initial increases in terrorist activity had made necessary in the first place.

  My colleagues and I comforted ourselves with the thought that however bad things might be or even might get, just think how much worse everything would be without our dedication and professionalism.

  I finally received some long-deserved promotion and began to take on more administrative duties, taking me away from the front line, as it were, though not entirely. In busy periods I would help out and when colleagues were unexpectedly absent I would fill in for them. Both situations seemed to occur rather more often than the department expected or I’d have liked. I began to see a department-approved counsellor, and my doctor put me on some medication that worked relatively well, at first at any rate.

  I established a mutually pleasing relationship with a lady police officer and found some solace in that, as I believe she did as well. We had decided to go on holiday, looking for some winter sun.

  This was required, certainly in my case. I had lately started to have increasingly distressing nightmares that centred around being killed in my home, waking up to find ex-subjects, especially deceased ex-subjects, standing at the foot of my bed, still in the state we had left them when my department had finished with them. They would stand and stare at me in the darkness, silent but filled with accusation. I could always smell the bodily fluids and sometimes semi-fluid solids that subjects were prone to evacuating either right at the start of the interrogatory episode or when they were under especially pronounced pressure. I would wake up in a sweaty knot of sheets, terrified that I had myself wet or soiled the bed.

  Just the prospect of such unpleasantly interrupted sleep was bad enough. My doctor put me on some more pills, to help me sleep. I found that a nightcap of whisky helped as well.

  I might claim that I had a premonition regarding what happened at the airport. Though I think, in retrospect, that it was simply a memory of the CTs who had attacked the airport some years before, taking the weapons off the police guards and running amok with them. In any event, I was surprisingly nervous as my fiancée and I arrived at the airport. Nobody had attacked this airport for several years, nor had anyone succeeded in bringing down an aircraft either, despite a few near things, so I kept telling myself that there was nothing to worry about, but my hands were shaking as I locked the car door and picked up our luggage trolley.

  Part of my nerves was due to the fact that I had, over the last year or so, begun to worry that I might bump into an ex-subject in a social situation or in a large crowd, and that they would attack me or even just shout and scream at me, or just quietly point me out to their friends and family as their erstwhile interrogator. I must have interrogated thousands of people over the preceding decade-and-a-bit and they were not all dead or in prison. There must be hundreds still at large, those whose crimes had been relatively minor or who had bought their release by turning informer, or who had been the victim of malicious denunciation. What if I encountered one of them? What if they fell upon me or embarrassed me in front of other people? This had preyed on my mind more and more recently. Statistically, it had to happen eventually.

>   Nowadays, all too often, I thought I did indeed see such people. I tried never to memorise or even casually remember the faces of any of my subjects – as my dreams showed, they proved all too memorable without any effort being made on my part – but nevertheless I had started to see faces in the street or in parks or shops – or anywhere else where there were other people, really – which I felt certain I had last seen tear-streaked, contorted in agony, mouth open in a scream or sealed with tape, their eyes popping, faces turning red.

  I had stopped going out quite so much as I had used to. I entertained more at home, had groceries delivered.

  We entered the terminal building. I found the beady-eyed gaze of the expressionless border police, paramilitaries and soldiers intensely reassuring. Nobody would be surprising these fellows and stealing their weapons. They took a family just in front of us to one side for a luggage spot check.

  We went to the bar after the rather long-winded and laborious check-in process. I claimed I needed a stiff drink after that, and also that I was a slightly nervous flyer. We spent half an hour there before we thought we ought to go through the main security barrier. I drank three or four glasses to my fiancée’s one, which she did not finish.

  There was a long queue for the security barrier. I had guessed as much from the latest internal security services threat-level alert and had allowed for such in our schedule for the day so far, despite some complaints.

  We shuffled forward. I was trying to read a newspaper. Police and soldiers walked up and down by the side of the line, looking at people. I started to worry that I might look suspicious just because I was trying so hard to look as though I was reading the paper, and was so obviously sweating. I could think of a few psychological/physiological parameters that I was fitting into all too neatly.

  I put the newspaper down and looked around, trying to appear normal, unthreatening. At least, if I was taken out of the line my identity cards and especially my security forces special police pass would secure a speedy end to any suspicion and doubtless an apology. The line still stretched twenty metres ahead of us. Two desks out of three working, scanning passports and checking tickets before admitting people to the main security area where the hand luggage would be sniffed and scanned.