Walking on Glass

by Iain Banks

  "And I loved you, I thought you were so..." he could not finish. If he went on, he knew, he would break down and cry. He shook his head and angled his gaze so that she would not see his eyes glisten.

  "Yes, I know," Sara said, sighing artificially, "it was pretty dirty, I know. Terribly unfair. But then who gets what they deserve, hmm?"

  "You bitch," he said to her, looking up and into her eyes through a film of tears, "you fucking cow."

  Something changed in her face, as though the game had become more interesting at last; her eyebrows might have risen fraction- ally or her tiny smile, that twisted look at the side of her mouth, have reappeared, but whatever it was it struck him with almost physical force. He was not proud of the words, he knew what they sounded like, what the whole setting and implication of them was, but he could not help them; they were all he had to throw at her.

  "Well," she said slowly, "this is a bit more like it..."

  He stood up, his breath forced in and out of him in spasms, his eyes drying again but smarting, staring at her. She sat there and looked up at him, quizzically, some sudden quickness of interest, even fear illuminating the until then cool, quiet features. "What the hell did I ever do to you?" he said, staring at her. "What gave you the right to do this to me?" His heart pounded, he felt sick, he stood there quivering with rage, but still, still, remaining unaffected, a small part of him saw this unusual, unaccustomed anger within him, heard the words he spoke, with an amusement, a sort of critical appreciation, not unlike what he saw in her eyes and read on her face.

  She shrugged, swallowed, still looking up at him. "You did nothing to me," she said slowly, "or to... Stock. We had no right, of course. But what difference does that make? Does it really make you feel worse?" She looked at him as though she really was asking a serious question, something she could not find the answer to in herself, something she had to look to him or somebody like him to answer.

  "What do you care?" he said, shaking his head, leaning towards her across the table. His eyes were bright, he could look at her now. She gazed back, something like fear quickening her, widening the hooded eyes. He saw the small pulse by the side of her neck again, he became aware of the shallow rising and falling of her T-shirt inside the olive dungarees. He could smell the oil she had put on herself after her bath, the clean fresh smell of her. She shrugged again, shoulders jerking.

  "Just interested," she said. "You don't have to tell me. I just wondered how it felt."

  "What the hell are you doing?" He couldn't stop the words coming out in a gasp, couldn't stop the anger, the pain from being there. "What are you trying to... Why did you have to do it this way?"

  "Oh, Graham," she sighed, breath ragged, shaking her head. "I didn't set out to hurt you, but when I thought about what I had to tell you, how I had to tell you, I... saw it had to be done in a certain way. Can't you see?" She looked at him, intent, almost desperate; "You were just too perfect. It had to go along certain lines once we'd set out. I can't really explain it to you. You... you asked for it." She held up one hand, as though to catch something he had thrown at her, as he opened his mouth to speak. "Yes, yes," she said, "I know, it does sound terrible, it's what... it's what rapists say, isn't it? But that's the way it was with you, Graham. That was all that gave me the right to do any of this to you, that's all you did; just be the way you were. All you were guilty of was being innocent."

  He stared at her, his mouth open. He walked round the side of the table. She stayed sitting as he approached her; the beat of her pulse quickened, her hands clasped quickly together on the black circle of the table. She stared away, at where he had been sitting. He went round the back of the seat she sat in, to the window, and stared out of it.

  "So I just go now," he said quietly.

  "I want you to go, yes." Her voice was thin and sharp.

  "Do you, now?" he said, his voice still low.

  I could, he thought, throw myself out of the window, but it isn't very far to the street, and why should I give her another little display of grief and petulance anyway? Or I could draw these curtains and turn on her, hand over mouth, throw her across the table, tear the clothes off her, pin her there... and act out another part, that's all. I could plead temporary jealous madness; depending on the judge, I could have a very good chance of getting away with it. I could say no violence was used (just that blunt instrument between the legs, just that even blunter instrument between the ears, just the age-old violence, the ancient cruelty, the ultimate obscenity of pleasure, joy twisted into pain and hatred. Yes, yes, that was it; what perfect torture; an archetype for all the cunningly designed machines us boys have played with. Shatter and destroy inside, leave no outward trace or bruise).

  She led me on. Your Honour.

  Yes, she led me on, and fuck you. Your Honour. I'll not do that, to her or myself. Always did think Pilate had the right idea; wash hands, let the mob have its grubby desire. Slater, my brains are in the right place after all. He turned round, half-expecting her to be holding a breadknife.

  But she was still sitting there, in the seat, her back to him, hair gathered and bunched.

  "I'd better go, then," he said, and was hopelessly, emptily elated that his voice did not shake very much. He walked slowly past her, down to the carpeted section of the room, and took up his portfolio of drawings. He thought of leaving them for a moment, but he needed the plastic portfolio; it would be a pointless gesture to leave it, or even remove the drawings.

  He walked out into the hall; from the corner of his eye, he saw she was not moving. She sat in the chair, unmoving, watching him. He let himself out by the thin, light, inner door, went down the stairs and out the front door. He walked across to the corner of Maygood Street, and straight up it. He almost expected to hear her call him, from the window, and had already decided not to turn if she did, but no sound came, and he just kept on walking.

  When she heard the door close beneath, and the lock catch, and then the sound of his footsteps on the pavement outside, Sara slumped suddenly, puppet-slack, her head dropping as though in a faint to lie on the sweat-slicked surfaces of her forearms, near her still clasped hands. Her eyes stared over the smooth dark surface of the table. Her breathing slackened, and her pulse slowed.

  He gunned the bike again, sending it out into the traffic, drawing a chorus of horns from behind as the bike's engine hesitated once more. He gritted his teeth, swore, felt sweat dribble inside the black helmet, and twisted the throttle again. The bike's stuttering engine caught and he surged forward, beside a flat-decked beer lorry with a few barrels at the rear of its long load platform. He gunned the engine, swept round the Watneys" truck, the aluminium barrels at its rear glinting in the sunlight. Then when he was level with the cab the engine failed again; he just got round in front of the lorry, then had to slow down. The truck's engine sounded, loud, right behind him. The dying engine would not restart; he would have to steer back in for the side of the road. He waited for a break in the traffic on his left which would let him get to the kerb, ignoring the pulsing horn of the Watneys" truck, which he was now holding up. The engine spluttered, then suddenly caught and ran smoothly again. He hissed through his teeth, revved it. The bike shot forward. Some shouts came from behind, from the cab of the lorry at his back. They came to the lights at the junction of Pentonville Road and Upper Street; he would have to go over the junction and then cut down Liverpool Road, to get to Half Moon Crescent.

  He waited at the lights. The beer lorry drew up alongside, the driver shouting at him, loudly asking him what he was up to. He said nothing. The lights changed, the truck moved off, the bike's engine died completely. He restarted it, roared off after the truck, caught it and started to pull in front. The lorry driver was keeping his foot on the floor, the truck's engine screaming. The bike stuttered once again. The engine caught, failed, caught again; together the bike and lorry roared up the wide stretch of Upper Street, the beer lorry stopping the bike from pulling in towards Liverpool Road.


  He saw a hole in the tarmac in front of him (and was vaguely aware of people on the pavement, waiting for buses, as their faces flashed by on the far side of the truck's flat deck). The long hole in the road surface ahead of him wasn't too large; he could avoid it and the long dark plume of disintegrating tarmac strewn out on its far side; he swerved the bike neatly.

  At first it looked as though the lorry with the beer barrels would miss the hole, too, but it swerved suddenly towards the hole and bike - as though avoiding somebody stepping out into the road from the bus-stop - and its wheels went thumping, crashing into the ragged trench in the roadway with a huge hollow-sounding noise, and from the truck's lightly laden, suddenly bouncing rear, something flew into the air...

  Graham walked up the street, through the hard sunlight of the late afternoon, over Penton Street and into an area where most of the buildings had been demolished. Around him were some echoes of buildings; rows and corridors of corrugated iron, new and zinc-bright in the sunlight, standing on end around empty, dusty sites where weeds grew; in the distance were old buildings, tall crumbling places, leaning and twisted, worn old slates with many missing, roofs bowed under the ancient weight, old windows, glaucomaed with age, eaten timbers making up ramshackle additions to the top storeys. New kerbs, un-made-up pavements, dust and sand. He caught glimpses of the empty sites through spaces in the corrugated iron. Most were flat, filled with swirled patterns of rubbish and growing weeds. Some were being worked on; he saw the naked bricks and ragged lengths of concrete-bottomed trenches which would become foundations; lengths of string marked lines and levels for bricks.

  He walked through this summit of iron and dust, seeing it but numb to it, through the slightly humid air and the sounds of the traffic and sirens, through the smells of cement dust and rotting rubbish, down to Liverpool Road and over towards Upper Street.

  He could only think of what had just happened to him as something he had watched, not actually taken part in. He could not appreciate it directly, he could not cope with it in any personal way, on a level which related to what he regarded as his real self. It was something too important to be assimilated quickly; it was as though some vast besieging army had finally smashed the main gate into a great city, and swept in to overwhelm its ruined defences but could do so only through that one point, so that, while the forces spread throughout the streets and houses and the city's fall was assured, already underway, for a long time in many places within it there was nothing immediately wrong or affected, and life could go on almost as normal.

  When he got down to Upper Street there was a traffic jam, and the flashing blue light of an ambulance waiting somewhere at the bus-stops; people were looking in that direction, trying to see over the tops of the other people's heads, edging closer, trying to find out what happened. He could not go near, did not want to see other people.

  He crossed the lanes of stationary traffic, waited for a break in the still moving south-bound streams, crossed to the far side, walked past another huge building site where tall cranes stuck into the sky and dust moved in the wind, then went down through smaller streets, ignoring people, clutching the black portfolio to : him, heading towards some trees he could see.

  Richard Slater lay in bed with his elder sister, the woman Graham knew as Mrs Sara ffitch, but whose real name was Mrs Sarah Simpson-Wallace (nee Slater).

  The shared, mingled sweat dried on their naked bodies. Sarah took another Kleenex from the box under the bed, dabbed at herself, then put the soggy tissues in the small split-cane bin at the foot of the bed. She got up, stretching her arms and shaking her black, tangled hair.

  Slater watched her. He had bruised her again. Dark blue marks were forming on the tops of her arms, and under her buttocks, at the top and rear of her thighs. He had bitten her, too, on the white scar (where she didn't feel it so much). She had whimpered at the time; cried out, but - perhaps because she was relieved she had received no physical retaliation from Graham - she did not seem to be in a mood to complain today. Still, Slater felt guilty anyway. He was too rough, and despised himself - and maybe even her - for it. He had never been like that with anybody else, never even felt like being that way. With her, he couldn't help it. He wanted to be like that, he wanted to grip her, squeeze her, to impale and imprison her, to shake and pummel her; mark her. It was that or it was nothing; cold, without feeling, almost masturbatory.

  Why? he asked himself for the thousandth time. Why do I do that to her? Why do I need to? He knew he wasn't like that really. It went against everything he believed in. So why?

  Sarah took a plain, blue silk dressing gown from the bottom of the bed and tied it around her. She still wore the pink training shoes she had put on after her bath.

  Slater sighed. He said, "None of which alters the fact that you shouldn't have done it, not without me here."

  Sarah shrugged, without turning round. "I'm going to have some orange juice," she said. "Want some?"

  "Sarah."

  "What?" She turned to look at him. Slater looked at her accusingly. She grinned back at him. "I handled it," she said. "Nothing went wrong, did it?"

  "He's bigger than you are. He might have got violent. He is a man, after all, dear. We chaps are all the same, didn't you know?" He could not resist smiling as he said it.

  "Luckily, you aren't all the same at all," Sarah said, and went through the doorway, across the hall to the sitting-room and kitchen. "Not at all," she said from the other room as she walked. "Not even slightly."

  Slater lay on the bed, shivering once as his flesh dried. He got up and took a piece of paper from the small dressing table by the side of the bed. It was an old Labour election leaflet, blank on one side. He took a pen from the inside pocket of his biker leathers - strewn on the floor with her dungarees and T-shirt - then sat up in bed and started to write, quickly and in a small, scratchy, precise hand.

  He wrote:

  Dear Graham,

  I know what Sarah has told you. It was not the whole truth. I'm afraid. The fact is that I am Stock (and so, once, was Sarah, as I'll explain). There is no Bob Stock, there's only me.

  Sarah is my sister and we've had (horror of horrors!) an incestuous relationship for the past six years or so (blame single-sex public schools, I say). Sarah is married and her husband was having her followed. I couldn't risk being seen with her, so I invented Stock; I keep the bike in a car park at the back of the Air Gallery; I know somebody who works there and they keep the leathers and crash helmet. I dress there and visit Sarah using the bike, looking terribly butch and incognito.

  So far so good, you might think, but we needed more; it wasn't all that important that Sarah was known to be committing adultery, but it was important, at least until very recently, that it wasn't known who with. Quite apart from the fact that what we're doing is reasonably illegal, it would have done terrible things to our parents. Dear dad, you see, was Conservative MP for Salop West. Even you might have heard of him; very strong line on family life, morality and that son of thing; supported the Festival of Light, the National Viewers and Listeners Association (Mary White-house's mob), and SPUNK, or whatever they call it; the Society for the Prevention of Unborn Conservatives (sick!). Pro-hanging, of course.

  The old bugger having made his reputation peddling this sort of reactionary moralist nonsense, the revelation that his two children were humping each other would have finished him; that applied at the start of all this, but became even more important when Mag the Hag announced the election. Anyway, going back to where you came in, I think you'll appreciate that the situation was such that we needed another safeguard to stop me being identified. We needed somebody else, to draw the heat, to distract the chap we knew was trailing Sarah. We chose you. All right; I chose you.

  Why couldn't we just have stopped seeing each other? I hear you ask. Tried that. Just not poss. Sarah got married trying to get out of this whole thing, and I moved down here, but neither of us could stop thinking about the other; just couldn't forget. I supp
ose we must be doomed for each other.

  I think you fell for Sarah a bit (though being you you made it impossible to tell; you could have been cranium-over-Achilles for the girl and still have given nothing away; acting Joe Cool as usual) and if my fucking bike hadn't conked out on me (I think some bastard put sugar in the petrol tank) we were going to let you down easier; I was to appear in the street outside while Sarah was explaining to you in the flat that she liked you too much to start anything because she was basically a bad "un and she and Stock deserved each other... well, it seemed like a good idea at the time; you hustled out the back door as Sarah panicked; unrequited but smug, knowing You Were Too Good For Her, and her, worthless bitch, back with the bad guy. Oh well.

  Anyway, the election's over, as you might have noticed, and our father was one of the only two Tories to lose their seats in a Conservative landslide (to a Liberal; ha ha), and he's retiring from politics. Sarah isn't being followed any more, as far as I can tell, so the need for most, if not all, of the subterfuge is gone... sorry.

  Why protect the old fascist in the first place?

  What can I say? That blood is thicker than water maybe, but also that if anything had come out about Sarah and me it might not only have ruined our father but it would certainly have killed our mum, who really isn't a bad sort. (Fuck it; we both still love her. There.)

  Family loyalty, in other words. I don't know.

  Well, you must admit we were thorough; we even arranged for you to see "Stock" when I was there (you remember; in the pub?); that was Sarah, padded out with jeans and jumpers and walking on tip-toe with several dozen of my socks stuffed into the bottoms of my boots.

  I don't know how to -

  Sarah came back then, with two glasses of orange juice and a large plate with small pieces of bread topped with pate, various cheeses and honey. "Here," she said, putting the plate and one glass down by the side of the bed, on the small dressing table. "What are you writing?"