by Iain Banks
Sophie wore brown hiking boots, black leggings and the Michelangelo David T-shirt Uncle James had objected to a week or so earlier. She’d sewn a little leaf made from some green material over the statue’s genitals, which was just the perfect thing to do, because it at once removed the excuse her father had for telling her to take the T-shirt off, while at the same time acting as a constant reminder to him how ridiculous he was being. It had become her favourite piece of clothing, prioritised to the extent that she would take it out of the just-washed pile and iron it herself - a rare distinction. Alban had noticed that Uncle James’s face reliably turned one to two shades of red darker every time he was confronted with the article of clothing, which was, of course, often.
‘What’s wrong with “sipid”?’ she asked.
‘You sure that’s a word?’
‘You sure it’s not?’
‘I’m not claiming it isn’t.’
‘Then why are you mentioning it?’
‘I’m just curious.’
Her eyes narrowed. ‘You’re just weird.’
He laughed. ‘You don’t mean that.’
Her eyes went wide. ‘So now you’re telling me what to think! Thanks a lot.’ She looked resentful and sat down on a tumbled piece of dressed stone half buried in the mossy grass that covered the inside of the ruined abbey like a green carpet. She’d wandered in while he’d been de-mossing the grass with a rake. She had a stalk of straw in her mouth, as though impersonating a yokel. She’d been fiddling with this while they’d talked and now she replaced it between her lips.
He shrugged and went back to scraping the moss out of the grass and depositing it in the wheelbarrow. She watched him work for a while. He tried to look strong and graceful and purposeful.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
He’d kind of assumed this was obvious. Was she serious? Her expression was quite solemn, almost resentful, as though she was still smarting about people ordering her around and telling her what she thought or what she ought to feel.
‘Taking the moss out of the grass,’ he said, trying to pitch his voice just right in case she was being sarcastic, but not making it so obvious that she’d be further insulted if it had been an honest, innocent enquiry.
‘Why?’
‘Because otherwise the moss takes over.’ He glanced up at the grey remains of the building’s high walls. ‘It’s cos it’s quite shaded in here.’
‘Can’t you just let the moss take over?’
He shrugged again. ‘Suppose. It’d always look patchy, though.’
She was silent for a while, seemingly lost in watching him work. ‘Dad’s talking about getting a swimming pool,’ she said.
‘Oh.’ He supposed the house could do with one.
‘Yeah. They went to see some Round Table friends over in Barnstaple the other night - ’member the really hot one?’
‘Yeah.’
‘They had a pool. Very nice time was had by all, apparently. Well, Mum had to drive back after Dad said he would, but I think she’s used to that. Better than him drinking and driving.’
Alban straightened, looked at her. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘Where are they thinking of putting the pool? Which bit of the garden?’ The more he thought about it, the more he wondered how you could fit one in.
She shrugged, studied the end of the stalk she was chewing. ‘I dunno. Somewhere next to the house.’
He tried to think of other places he’d been that had pools. ‘Inside? Covered? Or outside? How big?’
She looked at him, tipped her head way to one side so that her long red ponytail hung, swaying heavily in the afternoon sunlight streaming through one of the tall, broken stone arches. ‘Underground, twenty-two-point-five metres long. Three wide. Green and purple tiles. Four diving boards and a slide.’ She shook her head, eyes widening as she looked away again, chewing on her straw. ‘How should I know? Just a pool.’
He stared at the part of the house he could see; a corner of slate roof and one dormer window, side on. They’d have to put this stupid pool on the first terrace, the parterre on the south-west side. Bastards! There were some beautiful flowers and shrubs there. Bastards!
‘Huh,’ he said. He attacked the moss and the rake dug in, catching soil. He shook it free, altered the angle and pulled at the same patch again, more gently. He tapped the moss into the wheelbarrow, then tugged the reluctant remainders off and threw them in, too.
‘How’s your knee?’ he asked her.
‘S’okay.’ She was concentrating on smoothing the end of the chewed stalk down, pressing it hard between a thumb and index finger.
‘You got a moment?’ he asked her. She looked up at him. He shrugged. ‘You up for doing a bit of work?’
She raised her dark eyebrows. ‘What sort of work?’
‘Shifting stuff. Two-man job.’
She gave a taut little smile, as though she wanted to smile more, but was controlling it.
‘I’m not a man,’ she said quietly to the stalk.
He left a tiny pause. ‘Yeah, I’d noticed.’ His mouth had gone quite dry all of a sudden.
‘Cheers, cousin,’ she said archly, rising smoothly from the stone, throwing the straw away and putting her hands on her hips. She looked, he thought, great. ‘Okay, what?’
He grinned, mouth not so dry any more. ‘Don’t worry. Nothing too strenuous.’
‘I’m not worried. Come on then.’
He gave her the rake to carry and lifted the wheelbarrow. She followed him.
‘What are these?’
‘Not entirely sure,’ he admitted.
They were standing on a large lawn on the north-east side of the gardens, near the Wilderness and the bog garden, surrounded by azaleas and American Black Walnut trees. The lawn was bisected by a long straight ditch which emerged from beneath the trees on a low bank to the south and disappeared under the azaleas to the north. About three-quarters of the ditch had been partially filled with long wooden posts, covered in places by moss and grass.
‘They look a bit like strainer posts or gateposts or something.’
‘What’s a strainer post?’
‘Sort of, umm, heavy-duty post you sink in really deep where a fence changes direction.’
‘How interesting. What are they doing here?’
‘No idea. Looks like somebody once thought of filling in the rill, but using wood is just mad, it’ll—’
‘A what? A rill?’
‘This is a rill,’ he said, indicating the length of the ditch. He squatted and pulled at the grass on the edge of the ditch, lifting up the sod to reveal a flat stone surface. ‘A water channel. Artificial; ornamental.’
‘Couldn’t just call it a water channel.’
‘Na, it’s a rill.’
‘So,’ she asked, ‘what’s the idea? Try not to use any more technical terms.’
‘We lift the logs out of the rill and . . .’ he looked over at the east edge of the lawn. It was further away than he remembered when he’d first thought of this. ‘Roll them over there. That direction.’
She leaned over, looking down. ‘They look a bit damp for the fire.’
‘It’s not for the fire. The idea is to clear the rill, see if we can get it working again.’ She didn’t look convinced. ‘It’d be nice!’ he told her. She nodded, looking as though she was humouring him. He spread his arms and smiled encouragingly. ‘Anyway. Just getting them out will be a big help. But they’re not small. If this looks like too much for you, you know; just, umm, well, you know. It doesn’t, I mean, it won’t really -’
She was looking down again. ‘They’re going to be full of insects and worms and stuff, aren’t they?’
‘Umm, well, yeah, probably,’ he had to agree.
She made a show of looking round his rear. ‘That a pair of gloves in your back pocket?’
‘No, I’m just pleased to, umm, wave you goodbye.’
She looked at him, brows raised, mouth pursed.
He cleare
d his throat. ‘Yeah, that was rubbish. Here; have the gloves.’
The system they worked out was to pull the grass and moss away from each of the semi-decayed logs and dig out the sand and earth surrounding them. Then she stood inside the rill, feet braced against the stone walls of the channel while he leaned over from the side; they slid out one log at a time to make it protrude into the part of the rill that hadn’t been filled in so that he could get a good grip underneath it, then they lifted each one together, grunting and staggering, and rolled the log up on to the grass. They’d leave the rolling away bit till later, or another day.
He thought he heard her bite back a squeal the first time they disturbed a big colony of silverbacks, but after that she just seemed to ignore the various insects they uncovered.
‘Woh!’ she yelled, when they lifted one log and a whole brown swarming family of tiny fieldmice scattered in various directions. She stepped quickly back, then grinned sheepishly at him and took hold of the log again.
The posts were partially waterlogged, heavier than he’d expected. He had the harder job, working from the side and above, but he was still impressed that she worked so hard and uncomplainingly. The day was hot and they both sweated a lot. She rolled her T-shirt sleeves up as high as they would go, not that this made much difference.
When she got a dark brown-green stain on her T-shirt from the end of a log, she said, ‘Shit!’
She looked at him, breathing hard. She wiped under her nose with one forearm. She pointed one gloved finger at her T-shirt. ‘You won’t get any wrong ideas if I take this off, will you?’
Oh, Jesus, he thought. ‘Scout’s honour,’ he said, saluting. He’d been thinking of taking his own shirt off - it was an old one of Uncle James’s, frayed at collar and cuffs - but now that might look like, well, like he was getting the wrong idea or something. Maybe he’d just undo one more button and roll his sleeves up a bit further instead.
She took off the gloves then crossed her arms beneath her breasts and pulled her T-shirt up over her head, revealing a lacy white bra.
Oh, fucking hell. This was brilliant; her T-shirt stuck on her head/ ponytail and he got a totally free chance to ogle her amazing, completely globular, lightly tanned breasts while she was cursing and struggling before finally pulling the T-shirt off, her face looking red and hot and flustered when it eventually emerged.
‘Get a good look?’ she asked him, rolling up the T-shirt and lobbing it on to the grass.
Oh, fuck! ‘What at?’ he asked, missing both convincingly faked sincerity and complicit sarcasm completely and sounding, he was painfully aware, like a total dork; he might as well have leered and gone, phwoar, yeah!
She shook her head and looked away, fiddling two-handed behind her head with the band holding her ponytail. This both raised her breasts and made them jiggle. He felt himself getting an erection. Oh, great.
The rest of the summer, he could just tell, was going to be about never getting anywhere near this fabulous creature.
‘Well, back to work,’ she said. ‘Tote that log, lift that big lump of wood . . .’
They worked long into the late afternoon, almost wordlessly from the simple effort of it. A light breeze cooled them a little, but it was still hot work. His hair stuck to his scalp and the shirt to his back. They swatted away flies. He caught glimpses of little rivulets of sweat running down between her breasts and within the runnel on her back formed by the muscles on either side of her spine - her body’s own miniature rill. He’d kind of hoped to see her panties, maybe, but the leggings rode too high on her hips. The slanting afternoon sun was golden, coating her body in a glowing, honey light.
They finished, and lay on the lawn, one on either side of the revealed rill, each spread-eagled on the cool grass in the shadow of the trees, panting, exhausted. He wondered what would happen if Uncle James, say, discovered them like this. What would he think?
Sophie put her T-shirt back on. They traipsed back to the house, muscles burning.
‘We’ll be sore tomorrow,’ she said.
‘Or the day after,’ he said as they climbed to the highest terrace just down from the house. The breeze had gone, and the garden seemed stuck in some breathless, timeless moment, only the buzzing of insects indicating any moving life beyond the two of them.
‘God,’ she said. ‘Still hot, isn’t it?’
‘Yeah,’ he agreed, and laughed. ‘Be good to have a pool.’
She looked over at him and smiled as they went up the steps and in through the French windows to the smell of a garlicky salad dressing and the sound of a radio.
Suddenly he’s kissing her! They’re at a party in a big open-sided barn on a farm near Bampton on the edge of the National Park that belongs to the parents of one of Sophie’s girlfriends and they’ve all been drinking cider - gradually lapsing into stupid, growling, absurdly broad West Country accents and probably deeply pissing off any locals present, going ‘Oh-arr, Oh-arr!’ and ‘Oi shall drink moi soyder,’ and ‘Garr she be lurverly’, and all sorts of other rubbish - and dancing madly to a load of bands neither of them has ever heard of - not that they’re admitting this, obviously, until he does at one point and she admits the same - and taking little puffs of joints though the smoke barely gets past either of their tonsils, frankly, and they spend a lot of time coughing and having to drink more of the cider to soothe their burning throats.
But he’s kissing her! She’s letting him! She’s kissing him back! They’re kissing! He almost can’t believe it.
They all watched the sun going down and they turned the music down so that they could go to the farmhouse to phone parents in turn and tell them they were fine. This is meant to be a sort of sleep-over and a lot of the parents think it’s the farmer guy and his wife who are in charge of things and making sure everybody behaves themselves, but it’s the nephew and his girlfriend who are there instead, giving the older couple a holiday, and the thing is they’re into a smoke and a drink and whatever and certainly happy to host an all-night party and they’re like totally relaxed about pretty much anything, though the nephew guy does carry a fire extinguisher around with him, even when there’s a spliff hanging out of his mouth, because it is a barn after all even though it’s mostly empty and there is a fair bit of straw lying around and people are smoking. There’s a fairly serious sound system rigged up in the back of the barn and barrels and troughs full of ice or at least cold water to put cans and bottles in. They haven’t even needed to bring booze because the nephew guy has bought loads and is selling it almost at cost price and also has this really strong, filthily cloudy cider in a couple of big demijohns which his girlfriend is selling in little white plastic cups - each one strong as a normal pint, she says, and after a couple nobody’s disagreeing.
At first Sophie dances with a few other guys and the older nephew who’s called Jamie, and Alban just sits and watches people and asks a couple of girls to dance when they look at him, but only one does and she’s a bit small and a lot drunk and staggers and soon goes off to throw up and so he doesn’t pursue that, while the other girl, it turns out, is with a big fair-haired drunk Young Farmer type who takes considerable exception to this suggested dance and offers to fight Alban, who apologises and holds up both hands and walks away and goes back and sits on one of the straw bales and concentrates on drinking, until Sophie plonks herself down beside him, breathless from dancing, and moans about how fucking knackered she is because it’s only two days after their heroic afternoon’s work in the rill.
She’s wearing really tight jeans and a sheer black top you can see this black bra through, and she’s taken off her boots and is dancing in her bare feet and she really is blaming Alban for making her feel so totally frazzled; it’s all his fault, so he offers to dance for her, and so she gets up on his back, head over his shoulder, his arms round her thighs, and he dances like that with a couple of her girlfriends while she waves her arms about and bounces up and down, nearly sending them flying to the ground a couple o
f times but not quite, and a few other guys do the same thing with their girlfriends. He gets totally exhausted after a couple of songs and has to let her down and stagger dramatically to a wall of bales at the back of the barn; they sit on the ground with their backs to the bales and her leaning alongside him, laughing, until she goes and gets them both cups of the strong, cloudy cider and comes back and sort of slumps against him, still breathless and giggling, then, next thing, while the last of the sunset disappears from the western sky and the barn’s lights shine down on them, suddenly - amazingly, unaccountably, without either of them really seeming to start it - they’re kissing; just a little sort of dipping/rising mouth-peck at first, then serious, no-exclusion-zone open-mouth tongue-involving action, cider cups set aside/dropped shamelessly on to the ground, turned crushed into each other, arms pulling tighter.
After a few moments she pulls away suddenly, a massive frown on her flushed face. ‘How did this happen?’ she asks, sounding horrified.
He shakes his head. ‘I don’t know!’ he says loudly, waving his arms about. ‘Good, though, isn’t it?’
The horrified expression dissolves and she laughs and starts to say something but it’s smothered as she falls to him again, mouth against mouth against tongue against tongue.
Later, behind the barn, out of sight, while the music thuds on the far side of the corrugated metal wall, they keep kissing and cuddling and fondling and just holding each other. Her hair is the most wonderful thing he has ever smelled. He’s been allowed to undo her bra and feel her beautiful, magnificent breasts and rub her between the legs through the jeans but she won’t let him undo the jeans at all, though she strokes his cock through his jeans, up and down so that he thinks he’s probably about to come a dozen times but never quite does, and his balls ache, like a memory.
‘We really shouldn’t be doing this,’ she says at one point when they’re lying there pressed together, panting, giving their mouths a rest.
