by Iain Banks
She looked into his eyes, and he felt he was being assessed in some way; she took a deep breath, nodded at the table between them. "Shall we sit?" she said. It sounded like an odd thing to say. Sara drew out one of the small plastic chairs, her back to the window, and sat down. She watched as Graham sat down too. She had her hands on the table; he put his there, spread out like fans, thumbs just touching, as hers were.
"When do the rest of the people for the seance turn up?" he asked, then wished he hadn't. Sara smiled at him in a strange, distant sort of way. Graham wondered if perhaps she was on something; she had something of the disengaged look people often have when they've been smoking dope.
"I didn't have time to get the salad together," Sara said. "Do you mind if we have a talk first?"
"No; on you go," Graham said. There was something wrong; he felt bad. Sara wasn't the way she usually was. She kept looking at him with that odd, vacant, assessing gaze which made him uncomfortable, made him want to curl up and protect, not be himself and open out.
"I've wondered, Graham," she said slowly, not looking at him but looking at her own hands where they lay on the black surface of the table, "about how you... see the sort of relationship we've had." She looked up at him briefly. He swallowed. What did she mean? What was she talking about? Why?
"Well, I..." he thought as hard as he could about it, but he had had no time to prepare, to think about the subject. With some warning he could have talked about it perfectly easily and naturally, but just to be asked outright like this... it made things very difficult. "I've enjoyed it, to some extent," he said. He watched her face, ready to alter the way he was expressing himself, even alter what he was saying, according to the reception of his words on the white surface of her face. Sara gave him no clues, however. She was still gazing at her pale, thin hands, the lidded eyes almost hidden from Graham's view. A small white section of the scar tissue round her neck showed from the square neck of the T-shirt, by the pale column of her neck.
"I mean, it's been great," he said awkwardly, after a pause. "I realise you've had... well, that you've been involved with... somebody else, but I..." He dried. He couldn't think what to say. Why was she doing this to him? Why did they have to talk about this sort of thing? What was the point? He felt cheated, abused; sensible people didn't talk about this sort of thing any more, did they? There had been so much rubbish talked and written and filmed over the years; all that romantic crap, then the idealistic, unrealistic naivety of the sixties and the wide-eyed evangelism of the new morality of the seventies... all that had gone; people were less inclined to talk, more liable just to get on with it. He'd talked to Slater about this and they'd agreed. It wasn't so much a backlash, more a slack pausing for breath, so Graham believed. Slater thought it meant The End, but then to Slater little didn't.
"Do you think you love me, Graham?" Sara asked, still not looking at him. He frowned. At least the question was more direct.
"Yes, I do," he said quietly. It felt wrong. This wasn't the way he had envisaged telling her. This afternoon setting, the lightness of the room, the distance of black-painted table between them; nothing suited what he had to say, what he wanted to tell her he felt.
"I thought you might say that," she said, still staring at her long white fingers on the table top. Her voice chilled him.
"Why are you asking all this?" he said. He tried to sound a little more jocular than he felt.
"I wanted to know..." Sara began,'... how you feel."
"Feel free," Graham said, laughing. Sara looked at him, calm and white, and he stopped the laughter in his throat, killed the smile on his face. He cleared his throat. What was going on here? Sara sat for a moment, silent, while her fingers lay on the table, inspected and observed
Perhaps he should show her the drawings he'd done of her, he thought. Perhaps she was upset about something, or just depressed in some general way. Maybe he ought to try and take her mind off whatever it was. Sara said, "You see, Graham, I've deceived you. We have. Stock and I."
Graham felt his stomach go cold inside him. At the mention of Stock's name something happened deep inside him, a gut reaction of ancient, evolved fear and distress.
"What do you mean?" he said.
Sara shrugged jerkily, the tendons on her neck standing out like taut ropes. "You know what deception is, don't you, Graham?" Her voice sounded odd; not like hers at all. He formed the impression that she had thought this out, that like him she had thought in advance about the things she would say (but she, choosing the ground in advance, had the advantage), so that her spoken words were more like lines, something to be acted out on the tense stage of her body.
"Yes, I think so," he said, because she was silent, and it seemed they would go no further until her question was answered.
"Good," she said, and sighed. "I'm sorry you've been deceived, but there were reasons. Do you want me to explain them to you?" She looked up again, once more just for a second or so.
"I don't understand," Graham said, shaking his head, trying, by the expression on his face, the tone of his voice, to make it clear that he wasn't taking all this as seriously as Sara was. "How do you mean 'deceived'? How have you been deceiving me? I've always known about Stock, I've known about your relationship, but I haven't... well, I might not have been ecstatically happy about it, but I didn't -"
"Do you remember that time when it was raining and you rang up from... a callbox, I think you said?" Sara interrupted.
Graham smiled. "Of course, you were under the bedclothes with your Walkman turned up full blast to drown out the thunder."
Sara shook her head quickly, briefly, so that the movement looked more like some nervous spasm than a sign. She kept looking down at her hands. "No. No, I wasn't. What I was doing underneath the bedclothes was screwing Bob Stock. When you rang, and rang and rang, he took his... stroke from the pulses of the bell." She looked up into his eyes, her face quite serious, even unpitying (while his aching guts turned inside him). A cold, uneven smile crossed her face. "As a third party, you were quite a good screw. Rhythm and staying power."
He felt he could not speak. It was not the fact of the tawdry revelation itself so much as the tone of its delivery which hurt; this clinical, deadpan expression, the flat voice, even if this outer calmness was belied by that tensioned neck, the jerkiness of her movements and gestures. She went on:
"That time I talked to you from the window, when you were down in the street, the day we went to Camden Lock... Stock was behind me; he put the window down on my back. All I had on was that shirt. He took me from behind, you know?" The corner of her lips jigged nervously twice, then twisted with a tiny dry hint of a smile. "He'd always said he might do it, one of the times he was there when you called. I'd dared him to do it. It was very... exciting. You know?"
He shook his head. He felt he was going to be sick. This was absurd, insane. It was like all Slater had ever joked about, like all the most sexist caricatures of female deception. Why? Why was she telling him all this? What did she expect from him?
She sat on the far side of the circular black table, her hair severely gathered back, that thin, nearly translucent face brought to its own point, decks cleared for action. She was watching him now, he thought, the way scientists must watch a rat; some animal with its brain exposed, wires into it, hooked up to a machine with its tiny, electric, animal thoughts bleeped and phosphoresced, recorded by glowing green lines and the smoothly unrolled lengths of paper and the thin metallic scribbling of scratching pens. Why, though? Why? (And thought, does the rat ever know, could it ever comprehend, the reasons for the cruel uses it was put to?)
"You do remember," she said, voice purring, "don't you?"
"I... remember," he said, feeling broken, unable to look at her, and stared at the table's surface and one or two small crumbs lying on it. "But why?" he said, looking up at her. He could not keep his eyes on hers for very long. He looked down again.
"... even that first time," Sara said, ignoring h
is question, "when we met at the party. In the loo. Would you believe that Stock was in there? We had arranged it all in advance. He climbed up the drainpipe. I left that room we were in and went down there to meet him. That's what I was doing in the bathroom; fucking on the floor with Bob Stock." She pronounced the words carefully.
"Really?" he said. He had forgotten it all, forgotten all he had ever felt for her. He would feel it again, he knew, and it would hurt, but for now he was putting it out of his mind. It didn't matter any more. She had changed all the rules, put the whole relationship that had existed between them into quite a different category. He stored the old self, the hurt young man for the moment, concentrated as best he could, while still reeling inside from the sheer force and extent of the change, on what was being said now, on this new set of rules, this role he was being forced into, for reasons he didn't yet understand. "But why?" he said, trying not to sound hurt, trying to play it the way she was.
"Decoy," she said, shrugging. She gazed at her fingers again, spreading them out on the black paint surface. "That divorce of mine... my husband was having me followed. Stock couldn't afford to be involved, but we didn't want... couldn't stop seeing each other. So we decided to use somebody else to seem to have an affair with me. You were seen to go upstairs with me at that party; we figured that whoever my husband had tailing me would be at the party, gate-crashing; following me. We thought that he would assume we'd been screwing. I really had, of course, but that was just a little extra. We've been stringing you along ever since. Sorry, Graham. Anyway, our man doesn't seem to be following you. Perhaps he's been called off the case or something. Maybe my other half just didn't want to spend any more money on me; don't ask me."
"So," Graham said, feeling faint, sitting back in the chair as though nothing was wrong, trying to stop his lips quivering, one hand on the top of the seat-back (where, he remembered for no good reason, the fly had been), his other hand still on the table, like some strange animal in a black and circular arena, on the far side of it from her pale fingers. His hand, trembling very slightly, scratched at a fleck of white paint on the black surface as he said, "I'm not... of any use any more, is that it?"
"Sounds rather mean, doesn't it?" Sara said. She was still trying to sound calm, but her words sounded clipped. Graham laughed, shaking his head.
"Oh no; no, not a bit!" He felt tears starting to come to his eyes, and stopped them, determined not to show her what he was feeling. He shook his head, went on laughing, still watching his finger scratching at the white-paint fleck. "Not at all, no." He shrugged.
He was aware of a sort of tingling itch all over his body, as though the heightened awareness of his earlier anticipation was with him, in a single sense only, once again, and every nerve in his skin was receiving a maximum intensity, pouring into his brain a mass of static, average signals, a bodily white noise giving an impression of unattenuated, unsifted, exaggerated usualness; a paradigm of the pain of clearly felt normality.
"So it was all just an act, was it?" he said, after a while, when she had said nothing more. He still couldn't show what he felt. He kept thinking, wildly, that it might all be a cruel sort of joke, or even a test, a final examination before he was allowed closer knowledge of this woman. He couldn't, mustn't over-react.
"Sort of," Sara conceded, voice deliberately lazy (he had the impression of her turning very slightly to the window, as though listening for something), "but I haven't hated it. I quite like you. Graham, really I do. But having set out to use you, there wasn't a lot else I or... Stock could do but go on with it. Maybe I shouldn't even be telling you any of this now. Maybe I should just have told you not to come here, and then not have seen you again. But I wanted to tell you the truth." She swallowed a couple of times, gazed at her hands on the table, clasped them.
Still there was that false coldness in her voice, he thought, as he scratched at the white fleck of paint; still she was not really telling the whole truth at all. She wanted to see what his reaction would be, how the words would affect him. He sat there and wondered what he could do. What was there to do? Break down and cry? Become violent? Just get up and leave?
He glanced quickly at her, then away. She sat looking at him, still but somehow tensed. Looking again, he saw what might have been a tic, near the edge of her jaw, under her right ear. A pulse on her neck, over the white scar on her upper chest, beat rapidly. He looked away, eyes blinking.
He could not, he would not break down. She would not see him cry. A furious, vicious, angry part of him, some deep, buried kernel of animal hatred, wanted to attack her; slap and punch that cold white face; rape her, leave her wrecked and battered; reciprocate and outbid her in this awful, hurtful game she had suddenly chosen to play. The only part he trusted (but the part that had got him here, now in this situation, even if through no fault he could see) was equally revolted by the idea of either type of assault; to embrace either of the sexually conventional reactions, adopt either of those segregated responses was... insufficient. Pointless. Nor was there a way to stay in the game with (he searched for a word, inside himself)... honour (that was the only word he could think of, though it was too old and tainted, too historically misused to be quite what he wanted or meant. But in more sense than one, it was all he had).
"So this is the truth, is it?" he said, still with a sort of half-laugh in his voice as his finger picked at the table.
"Don't you believe me?" she said, clearing her throat awkwardly on the first word.
"I believe you. I suppose. Why shouldn't I? Why should you tell me any of this if it wasn't true?"
She didn't answer. He smiled emptily as he watched the finger, still trying to lift the stuck-down wisp of dried white paint from the black surface of the table.
Back at the bike, the black figure twisted the throttle, trying to gun the motor, but it stuttered, rasped then coughed, almost died. It ran more smoothly, but still not perfectly for a few seconds, then hesitated once more, missing beats. The man kicked the bike, then straddled it, revving the motor. He looked behind him for an opening in the traffic. He let the clutch in on first gear and the bike jerked forward, then the engine failed, dying again. The bike trickled forward as horns sounded from the cars and trucks behind; the bike revved, moved forward, but each time the engine tried to take the load it stuttered and the bike slowed.
"Fuck it!" the man shouted into his helmet. "Oh, God." He used his feet to trundle the bike back in to the kerb again. He got off quickly. Should he walk, or run, up to Half Moon Crescent?
"Well then, be there," she had said. He'd laughed. They had been planning just how they would remove Graham from their private equation. "I'll be there," he'd assured her, "no problem." She'd said, kissing him: "If you are not on time I might resort to Plan B." He had asked her what that was. "I give him what he wants," she'd said, "then tell him to disappear..." Whereon he had laughed - he now thought - a little too heartily.
He got down quickly to his knees, took off his gloves and threw them to the pavement, opened one of the panniers at the back of the bike and snatched the toolkit out. "Come on. Stock," he said to himself, "you can do it, son...' He took the small screwdriver out. Damn bike. Of all the times to let him down!
He had been concerned, mostly for her sake, that she wasn't too hard on Graham before he got there; she was only supposed to tell him she had decided to stay with Stock, not hurt the kid too much - dangerously much - with the truth about the way they'd used him. "Let him down gently, won't you?" he'd said. She'd looked at him calmly for some time, then said evenly, "I'll let him down."
He looked over the top of the bike at a young man with fair hair walking up the far pavement. For one heart-thumping second he thought it was Graham Park, then saw it wasn't. As his gaze dropped to the bike again, he caught sight of something odd on the top of the black-polished petrol tank. He looked back again, more closely. There were fresh scratches on the paint round the chrome petrol filler cap, and clusters of small white grains. When he t
ried the cap it lifted easily, and would not lock. The small white grains felt sticky. "Oh shit," he breathed.
"Poor Graham," Sara ffitch said, smiling jerkily at him, letting her head tip slightly to one side, as though she was trying to get him to look at her.
"Why me?" Graham said (and wanted to laugh in spite of it all, at the sheer absurdity of what he was saying, the falsity of the entire situation, the way that, because it was like a game and the sort of scene they had doubtless both seen portrayed in this popular culture a thousand times, there were only certain things he could say, certain viable responses he could make).
"Why not?" Sara said. "I heard about you through... Slater. You sounded like the sort of guy I might be able to charm, you know?"
He nodded. "I know," he said. A small piece of white paint came away from the surface of the black table, lodging under his fingernail.
"I didn't think you would actually fall in love with me, but it did make things easier in a way, I suppose. I'm sorry for you, though. I mean, I don't think we can go on after this, do you?"
"No. No, I think you're right. Of course." He nodded again, still not looking at her.
"You don't seem... very concerned."
"No," he shrugged, then shook his head. The last piece of paint stuck on the table's surface would not come off. He took his hand away, glanced at her, then sat forward in the seat, folding his arms, crossing his feet at the ankles, as though suddenly cold. "You just acted it all, then?" he asked.
"Not really, Graham," she said. He thought he could just make out, from the tops of his eyes, as he stared at the table, her shaking her head. "I didn't act very much at all. I told a few lies, but I didn't promise very much, I didn't have to pretend very much. I did like you. I certainly didn't love you, but you're quite nice, quite... sweet."
He laughed, briefly, quietly, at that last word, such faint praise indeed. And that "certainly'; did she have to put that in, as though trying through every single word and nuance to find a way to hurt him? How much damage would she be content with? What sort of reaction was she trying to get from him?
