by Iain Banks
‘I don’t see what’s wrong with rounders,’ Uncle James said suddenly. ‘Or rugby. Children watch too much telly as it is.’
‘Oh, James, please,’ Sophie said, over her coffee cup. She shared a brief look with Alban as her father did his intensely funny turning round in his seat thing, pretending to look for this person called ‘James’ who must just have entered the room.
Sophie and Alban had met up twice more and yesterday they had used up their last two condoms in the tumbledown remains of an old cottage at the southern boundary of the estate. He’d found an old tarpaulin and cleaned it up and brought it to spread over the grass and nettles in the centre of the ruined building, and they’d lain together there. They’d laughed and giggled afterwards, tickling each other and trying to keep quiet, just in case. These dinners, afterwards, have almost become fun. They exchange sly looks, catch each other’s eye and have to suppress smiles, and - once, last night, the way they were seated - he felt her stroke his leg with her foot. Meanwhile their parents chatter and natter and clatter their cutlery and talk about all sorts of rubbish, perfectly oblivious.
This was the third little shared moment they’ve had, this meal.
Alban let the sweet, conspiratorial smile linger just a moment. Then Sophie looked away. He asked for a coffee and, as he accepted it, glanced at Grandma Win, to see a hard, narrow-eyed look disappear, like something swallowed in by her whole face, to be replaced instantly by a thin, glasses-glittering smile.
The next morning, the day before they’re to leave, he goes to Barnstaple with Andy and Leah and he just walks into a chemist’s and - using money that usually he’d have spent on sweets or a single - buys a packet of condoms. His face is scarlet and he can’t look at the assistant, who is young and pretty, but it doesn’t matter; it’s done. He’s done it. He feels intensely proud. When he gets out of the chemist’s he wants to jump in the air and shake his arms and scream! Instead he just makes sure the packet is firmly lodged in a secure jeans pocket and walks with a grin and a swagger back to where they’ve all arranged to meet.
‘Really? Alban, you’re marvellous!’ she yells, taking hold of his shoulders then throwing herself against him, hugging him and kissing him.
They’re down in the long grass on the far side of the old orchard wall, in the early part of dusk. He’s supposed to be doing some final tidying-up before the so-called ‘proper’ gardeners start again next week. She’s meant to be taking a walk down to the river in the last of the light.
She’d thought it would be a sorrowful, frustrating goodbye, but now they have condoms, and, thankfully, her period still hasn’t started. (He’d completely forgotten about this, he realises as they start undressing each other - if he’d remembered he probably wouldn’t have thought it worth the embarrassment of buying the condoms in the first place.)
‘This is getting better every time,’ he whispers into her ear, a little after entering her. They’re bucking and jerking away at each other, not always in sync, but the actual feeling of being joined like this is becoming something he’s learning to enjoy properly. The first time or two it was all so quick and complicated. There seemed to be so much going on there was no time to appreciate it.
‘I love you inside me,’ she whispers back.
Then he feels her stiffen. ‘Ssh!’
‘What?’ he says. Maybe too loudly.
She slaps a hand over his mouth, forces him to lie still on top of her. He wonders if this is some new sex thing she’d read about - he’s read about a lot of stuff in Plink’s older brother’s porn mags, and even in Leah’s Cosmopolitan - but then he realises she’s heard something. He starts to bring his head further up to look her in the eye, but she pulls it down again.
He turns his head a little, smells crushed grass, honeysuckle, hints of magnolia and pine.
Now he can hear something. Steps on brick, then the noise of one or two people walking through long grass. Oh fuck, he thinks. Oh fuck. He hears a murmur, then somebody whispering, ‘Over there.’
Sophie hugs him very tight, keeping him as low as possible, as still as possible. She squeezes him from the inside and he feels fear start to belittle him, his erection - so fierce and hard a couple of minutes ago it was painful - beginning to go.
The noise of grass being pushed aside shifts, seems to get louder, then starts to fade, then comes back. It stops. He can’t see. He has no idea if this person, these people, are just a metre away or ten.
A woman’s voice whispers, ‘There.’ There’s a pause. The same voice - it’s Grandma Win, he can tell now - whispers impatiently, ‘Now!’
Blinding light.
‘You fucking little—!’
‘Daddy, no! Daddy, it’s—!’
Alban rolls over, out of and off Sophie, covering his eyes with one hand as a powerful torch beam flicks from his face to Sophie’s, exposing her long white body as she tries to cover herself. He’s feeling for his cock and the condom and at the same time he’s trying to curl up to cover himself and struggling to kneel.
‘Oh, Christ!’ Uncle James shouts. Alban’s punched hard on the shoulder and falls back in the grass, still trying to get the condom off and get back up again. ‘You filthy little fucker!’ His jeans are around his knees and this is making everything impossible.
‘Get up! Get up! Come on, get up!’
‘Daddy—!’
He’s glimpsed Uncle James and Grandma Win. James is carrying the torch. He doesn’t know if there’s anybody else there. ‘Get up!’ he hears Uncle James say. He’s turned away, pulling his jeans up, condom still on.
‘James, let me,’ he hears Grandma Win say. ‘Here.’
Alban zips up and turns round into the glare of the torch. Something whacks into his head and the next thing he knows it’s half dark again and he’s lying in the grass.
‘No, Daddy! No!’
‘James!’ (Grandma Win, loudly.) ‘Never strike a child on the head.’
‘The head? I’ll cut his fucking balls off!’
‘Daddy, please! Oh please!’
Wow, that had hurt. Sore cheek. Distinct ringing in head. He really ought to get up. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck. Up; get up.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, Alban! Get up! Help him up, James.’
Sophie, crying.
Oh, now he knew what the worst and saddest sound in all the world was.
‘Certainly bloody not. You’re coming with me, young lady. Thank you, Win. Thank you. Right.’
The torch light wobbled off. The sound of Sophie’s sobbing slowly faded.
The sky was the colour of a dark, ripe peach.
He struggled to his feet. Grandma Win stood in front of him in the long grass. Her face looked set and hard. ‘You young idiot,’ she said.
‘It’s not illegal!’ he said. It was just the first thing that came out. He sounded like a child, even to himself.
‘Yes it is. You’re both under-age. Get dressed.’
He completed getting dressed. He felt tears welling up in his eyes and tried to force them back.
Grandma Win saw him back to the house.
He wasn’t allowed to enter. Uncle James wouldn’t have him in the house.
He sat on the front steps, then in Andy’s car. The hour or so that followed was a nightmare he couldn’t wake from. Andy was quietly furious. Leah - pale, shocked - kept wanting to put an arm round him, but he shrank from her. Aunt Clara was in bed, howling, audible from all over the house in the pauses when James stopped shouting.
Sophie: gone, locked away. Assailed, ears battered, by this awful, unending, screaming shouting.
Eventually, Andy drove them to the Lamb in Lynton, taking the one family room which was all that was left. Alban was awake most of the night, listening to his dad quietly snoring and his mum quietly crying.
He felt himself oscillating wildly from anger, from the absolutely certain feeling that it still wasn’t illegal and what they’d been doing had been beautiful and right and they were all over-reactin
g absurdly . . . to feeling the utmost, utter shame. It was at these points that he wept, burying his face in his pillow to stifle the noise, feeling he’d destroyed his own life and Sophie’s and everybody else’s, too.
They left for Richmond in the morning.
5
Decking. They’ve covered half the fucking garden in decking. Alban has developed a certain low-level hatred of decking. It’s become all the rage, it’s the flavour of the last few years, it’s what you do to bring the outside in or the inside out or create a roofless room or however the hell you want to express it, but he just finds it annoying. He shouldn’t hate it the way he does because it has its place; it effectively extends the house or flat it’s attached to, it’s a lot easier to build decking up to the same level as an internal floor than it is having to cart in tons of earth and hardcore to support a stone or brick patio, plus it fits in with people’s modern, money-rich, time-poor lifestyle blah blah blah, reducing the amount of actual garden that you have to deal with - all that messy soil and ground and such - and letting you get away with a few artfully placed plant pots . . . but he still hates the fucking stuff. He hates it because everybody’s doing it, thoughtlessly. He hates it because it’s become the default solution, and he distrusts default solutions. He takes a certain guilty malicious glee in looking forward to when, across the country, it gradually all starts to rot. Shrieks and spilled G&Ts as legs plunge through sudden holes.
‘What do you think?’ Leah asks, holding him by one arm, hugging him side-on as they look out over the grey, split-level expanse of wood. ‘We had to take out a few bushes and flowers and a couple of small trees, but it’s made a huge difference. Do you like it? Cory liked it,’ she said. ‘I think.’ His sister was an industrial designer in LA, married with two children. ‘What do you think?’
‘Looks great,’ he says. He smiles and turns to Leah. She is mid-fifties now, hair still curly and blonde though much shorter and less full than it used to be. She’s filled out a little, though she still looks good for her age. She wears a pleated skirt and a pale blouse under a light jersey. She plays a lot of tennis and has taken up golf. Alban wonders if she’s had a little work done about her eyes; they’d looked droopier, older, the last time he’d seen her, over a year ago.
‘You’re happy with it?’ he asks her.
‘Oh, yes! We’re out here all the time now. I mean, not in the winter, obviously. Though the patio heaters make a big difference, too.’
They have three big gas-bottle patio heaters; together with the two teak loungers, table and six chairs and double swing-seat with canopy and the barbecue, there isn’t much room left for plant pots. In pride of place, though, at the head of the steps down to the next level, they have two of those carefully sculpted, perfectly round lollipop trees in a couple of giant, expensive-looking terracotta pots.
‘We’re thinking of getting one of those free-standing canvas canopy things,’ Leah adds. ‘For when the sun’s too strong.’
‘Wasn’t there a water feature here a couple of years ago?’ Alban asks. ‘One of those marine-ply-and-mirrors things?’
‘Oh, that!’ Leah squeezes his arm. ‘Nothing but trouble.’ She squeezes his arm again. ‘Oh, Alban, it’s so good to see you again!’
‘Yeah,’ he says, putting an arm round her waist.
‘Mind your backs! Here we go.’ Andy arrives at the patio doors behind them with a tray of drinks.
Andy is much as ever, though he’s thickened around the middle and about the lower face. He’s wearing dark chinos and a worn denim shirt. His hair is still only three-quarters white. He’s grown a sort of moustache plus goatee thing - same mixture of colours as his hair - which Alban isn’t sure about. He’s taken to wearing glasses with thick legs and fashionably angular black frames. He grins at Alban, who grins back - it is good to see Andy and Leah. He supposes he has to accept he has spent too much time away from them.
They walk out on to the decking.
It was like the old days. Andy and he went into town to see a film at the NFT. They took an early train, walked across the river, ate Italian near Covent Garden, walked back across the river and caught Ran, the latest in a Kurosawa retrospective and which, coincidentally, neither had seen. Leah said she thought she probably had seen it, but they both suspected it was more likely she was just giving them time together.
‘Fielding bring you out of hiding, did he?’ Andy asked as they walked along the South Bank, curving back towards Waterloo past the concert halls, the river dark to their right, lights glittering beyond, Big Ben and the London Eye rising ahead.
‘Oh, he tracked me down.’
‘Did you need much tracking down?’
‘Well, it wasn’t deliberate, but I’d covered my tracks fairly well.’ He glanced at Andy. ‘You got my cards all right, yeah?’ He’d always sent them Christmas cards and birthday cards.
‘We got them.’
‘Well, sorry to have been so . . . out of touch.’ He puts his arm briefly round Andy’s shoulder, just a little awkwardly. ‘It’s good to see you again.’
Andy smiled at him, nodded. ‘Good. You too.’
Alban wasn’t sure what to say. He and Andy had always had a fairly calm, measured kind of relationship - Andy was a fairly calm, measured kind of guy, so there wasn’t much choice. The worst that had ever passed between them had probably been due to that awful last evening at Lydcombe, and even then it had been more the tight-lipped, silently disappointed you’ve-let-us-all-down kind of very British reaction. The evening they got back to Richmond after more or less being thrown out of Lydcombe, Andy had delivered a short sermon about responsibility, mutual respect, sexual health, the obligations one had as a guest to one’s hosts, and legality, even if the law might sometimes seem like an ass. As a punishment, Alban would work every Saturday for the rest of the year at the charity shop Leah helped out in, and donate the money to Oxfam. Dismissed.
Alban remembered thinking at the time, even as he felt grateful for being treated like an adult rather than a child, that he’d almost have preferred a shrieking spit-flecked bollocking.
That wasn’t the worst of what happened because of James and Win finding Sophie and him like that, not by a long, long way, but it was the worst that happened between Andy and him.
‘You going to the—?’ Alban began, then smacked himself on the forehead. ‘You’re Company Secretary. I guess you kind of have to be at Garbadale for the EGM. Sorry.’
‘Yes,’ Andy said with a small smile. ‘Don’t think Leah’s looking forward to it, but she feels she has to be there for Gran’s eightieth.’
‘How about you?’
‘Looking forward to it? Not especially.’
‘No, me neither.’
‘But you’re going.’
‘Yes, I’m going.’
Andy looked at him. ‘Why?’
Andy had always had the disconcerting ability to ask the most obvious questions that turned out - unless you resorted to an insultingly trivial answer like ‘Why not?’ - to have answers that required an unanticipated degree of complexity if you were to reply truthfully. Sometimes you even had to think.
Alban frowned and rubbed his beard. ‘Chance to see everybody.’
‘That’s a sudden change of heart. You seem to have spent so long avoiding us all. Even Leah and me.’
Alban glanced at Andy, but he wore his usual kindly, slightly quizzical look. His tone of voice had not sounded bitter.
‘Well, I’m sorry about that,’ Alban said. ‘Feeling sorry for myself for a long time there. Not the best frame of mind for, well, socialising. ’
Andy thought about this. ‘Well, you know Leah and I are always here. We both understand you can’t always be running back to us whenever there’s a problem, but . . . As long as you know we’re here when you need us.’
‘Thanks, Dad.’
‘Hey, you’re welcome,’ Andy said, nudging him and grinning. ‘Garbadale,’ he said. They walked a few more steps. ‘I suppo
se Sophie’ll be there.’
‘Yeah, but I’m not—’ Alban began, then stopped himself. ‘I’m not investing any hope in that.’ They looked at each other. ‘Honestly.’
Andy waited a few moments before saying, ‘Okay.’
‘But I suppose I should be there for the EGM and the old girl’s party.’
‘I’m sure we’ll all have lots of fun,’ Andy said, deadpan. He glanced at Alban. ‘You still have the minimum shares. Which way will you vote?’
Alban shrugged. ‘Against. Just on principle. Probably futile, but, hey. And—’
‘What principle?’
Alban thought. ‘Resisting American cultural imperialism?’ They both grinned at that. ‘And you?’
‘I was thinking of selling,’ Andy told him. ‘And that would be my advice to anybody who asked for my opinion.’
‘The keeping-the-family-together argument doesn’t impress?’
‘Alban, if it takes a set of shareholdings to keep a family together . . .’ Andy shrugged. ‘Anyway, who would we be keeping it together for? Your generation?’
‘Well, there’s Fielding . . .’
‘He does seem surprisingly concerned,’ Andy said. ‘I always got the impression he was on the brink of jumping ship, finding a sexier line of business or starting up on his own. But I know he and Nina have been talking about children, so maybe he wants stability, something to pass on.’
‘Oh?’ Alban felt bad he’d hardly asked anything about Fielding’s partner. Oh well. ‘Aunt Kathleen?’ he suggested.
