Espedair Street

by Iain Banks

  'I'm sure I shall,' I agreed, feeling pompous. 'But it has to be done.'

  Mr Douglas just sighed. He'd refused to do it at all (referring to my 'excited and agitated state') at first; we compromised by dating it for the following day, to give me time to change my mind. I signed it and caught a taxi to the Griff.

  'Whit?' McCann said.

  I jangled the keys under his nose. 'It's yours. Take them. I've kept the Holland Street key because I'm going to stay there the night. As of tomorrow; all yours.' (Technically a lie, but what the hell.)

  'You fuckin crazy ?' McCann had never looked so puzzled, or so worried (not even in Monty's).

  'McCann, I've been crazy for years; you know that. Will you take the goddamn keys?' McCann drank from his beer glass, looking sideways at the keys in my hand. He shook his head. 'Naw; Ah want tae know whit's goan on.'

  'McCann,' I said, despairing, 'it's perfectly simple; I've had some very bad and... maybe, some very good news, over the last couple of days. I came close to killing myself... or I think I came close... But even then I was,' I waved my hands in the air, jangling the keys, 'I was of sound mind. I still am, and I'm going to go over the hills and far away, to see an old friend who mayor may well not be pleased to see me but I've got to see her... and, anyway, I need to make a break, I need to get away from myself. I've seen my lawyer and what's going to happen is it's going to be as if I had died; I've signed a document which more or less has the same effect as my will; all the money goes.

  'You get the folly and everything in it. Do whatever you want with it. At the moment everything in the folly includes a pigeon, and you've got to make sure it gets out somehow, also there may be some tapes and stuff like that, and a few personal things, but otherwise it's all yours. Also, I want you to see a woman called Betty gets in touch with my lawyers too. She'll turn up at the folly; you'll know her.

  'I'm getting the early train tomorrow and for all I know I might be on the next one back, in which case I'll see you in here tomorrow and we'll both go to court on Thursday; or I might be away longer. It depends. All I'm asking you to do is keep in touch with my lawyers to check out what happens with Wee Tommy, and take the keys of the folly.'

  I held the keys out again. McCann glared suspiciously at me. 'Please, McCann,' I said. 'Don't do this to me. I know I don't deserve it; I lied to you and I'm sorry... but please, please take the keys. It's important to me.'

  McCann put his glass down. He looked at the keys in my hand, then into my eyes. He took the keys from me, eyes narrowing.

  'If this is a joke, Ah'll break your fuckin neck, pal.'

  I sat back laughing, but with a niggling worry in the pit of my belly, thinking about Glen Webb, and wondering at what might be my own absurd gullibility. 'If this is a joke,' I told McCann, thinking of the wild coasts beyond Arisaig, 'you probably won't need to.'

  And so I sat in the Griffin bar with my friend McCann, and after a few drinks it was almost as it always had been, and we talked and laughed and I told him a little about my previous life, and I don't think he believed me when I told him how much money there was, or where it was going (but he approved, in theory), and I reassured him I wasn't going to be broke, even though the future royalties from all the old stuff would be distributed as well. A gentleman called Mr Richard Tumber was going to get a phonecall in a day or two which would delight and amaze him. I'd make a new record, but I was starting from nothing again; I needed an advance.

  We left, and McCann went home and I went back to St Jute's and tried to sleep but couldn't, so sat up, in my high tower, on a vigil in which I looked out over part of the city and part of my life, remembering and regretting and re-living and sometimes smiling to myself, and realised that there were an awful lot of things in my life I hadn't got round to, and killing myself was just another one of them, and knew that I was doing a foolish thing, but that sometimes only foolish things worked.

  In fact I was doing two foolish things, which is exactly one more than you're ever allowed to get away with at the same time ... but that couldn't be helped, because both giving it all away, and going off on an absurd, naive, immaturely romantic and probably doomed quest for an old love were required; they were the only possible things I could think of which might get me out of the rut, the inwardly spiralling groove I seemed to have been in for the past few years. So I had burned my bridges and I was leaping before I'd looked and I was already anticipating repenting at leisure. What am I doing? I asked myself.

  Espedair Street. I worked on the song through the night, verse and chorus, not using a guitar or the keyboards but just singing it to myself in my head and gradually working it out. I wrote the words down on the back of Glen Webb's card, in tiny, tiny writing.

  It wasn't really Espedair Street or Ferguslie Park or anywhere you could point to on a map; it was somewhere of a different sort, an amalgam of places and feelings and times, and a place only I knew about. The song was finished before it was time for me to go.

  I left a saucer of milk and some crumbled bread and biscuits out for the pigeon, then went down to the crypt and gathered up the back-up master tape of all the songs and music I'd been working on over the past year or so. I should really have told McCann I might want to come back and use the studio for a wee while, but I'd forgotten. Maybe I could rent the place from him for a few weeks. Whatever. Not to worry.

  I trimmed my beard and cut my hair. I stopped and thought for a minute, then found an old canvas bag and stuffed a few spare clothes into it. Taking the shooting stick/umbrella seemed like a good idea, too; I'd carry that. A bottle of blue Stolichnaya nestled into the clothes in the canvas bag, looking quite at home. Emergency rations.

  I took a last look round the old place, feeling happy and sad and full of hope and dread all at once, then left by the Holland Street door and put the key back through the letterbox. It was a fresh, cold, dark morning and I walked quickly to Queen Street to catch the train.

  The train left on time, its diesel loco chugging into the tunnel heading north out of Queen Street. We moved through the dark city, past housing schemes and old factories and stagnant canals to the suburbs, curving west towards the north bank of the river, which we neared after the city dropped behind. I saw the lights of the Erskine Bridge, near where I'd stood hitching in the rain, two days earlier. The lights of cars moved on the motorway on the Clyde's far bank.

  The carriages were old; the train used steam heating, and the smell of it, damply warm and enveloping, filled me with an odd mixture of longing and contentment.

  Between Dumbarton and Helensburgh, with the lights of Greenock glittering on the far side of the river, I looked back and saw the first hint of dawn in the clear skies over Glasgow.

  The train climbed into the hills; Loch Long was dark, its mountains tree-lined. Navigation lights winked as the young day went from grey to steely-blue. We crossed over to the shores of Loch Lomond between Arrocher and Tarbet. The train laboured out of Arrochar and Tarbet station, percussive voice echoing in the hills, and we rumbled past the hotel I'd stayed in the night before. It was this train, twenty-four hours earlier, that had woken me.

  The loch was blue, smooth, quiet under the line of mountains.

  I passed a while singing 'Girl On A Train', and humming 'Chattanooga Choo-Choo' and 'Sentimental Journey', trying to remember the words.

  Rannoch Moor was a desert of snow. The train startled a herd of forty or more deer, brown-black shapes leaping and running across the white. I went to the buffet, where the smell of steam was even stronger, and ate a bacon sandwich and drank a can of beer. Back at my seat I nibbled at a chocolate biscuit and watched as frozen Loch Trieg appeared way below us; the train slowly descended the mountainside to meet it. The sky was clouding over.

  Ben Nevis stood lumplike, still mostly visible, over Fort William. I got out while the train waited in the town's station, ate a pie in the station buffet and bought a newspaper.

  The train set out again, heading out the way it had come in, b
efore swinging left for Mallaig. It crossed the Caledonian canal, then swept and wound its way along lochsides and through the hills and the tunnels and over viaducts and bridges, until — suddenly — there was a sea loch, shores matted with weed, waters diced and parcelled with the floating structures of a fish farm.

  The line wiggled and twisted through a neck of land, then, in the midst of tumbled rock and tall, crowding trees set in dark flowerless masses of rhododendron bushes, the sea appeared, its horizon bordered by far masses of cliffs and mountains. I felt ashamed that I couldn't tell whether I was looking at islands in the distance, or parts of the mainland.

  Then Arisaig at last, under high grey clouds and a fresh north wind. I'd been humming the new song to myself for parts of the journey, but now it suddenly changed and I found myself humming 'Cry About You':

  Must have been the cold north wind

  Blew some rain into my eyes,

  Must have been an old smoke ring,

  Won't you ever realise?

  — You ought to know

  — I'd never go

  And cry about you

  Superstition. Rabbits' feet, blue blankets; a rosary. Something to hold onto and make you feel you weren't completely alone after all. So my song was my comfort and my heart was knocking at the door of my ribs like it wanted to get out, and I found a phonebox in the village and rang Glen Webb's office in Glasgow to get his sister's address, only to find he wasn't in that day and they didn't know where to get in touch with him.

  I went to the nearest hotel and sat in the public bar, wondering what to do next. I asked the barman if he knew Jean Webb, but he didn't. This was a small village and I found it ominous. What if Glen Webb had got the name wrong? Why hadn't I waited, done some checking, for God's sake?

  According to the timetable I'd picked up in Glasgow, there was a train — the same one, turned round, I guessed — leaving Mallaig at twenty-past twelve. It'd be here eighteen minutes later... but it would only take me as far as Fort William. Shit.

  I ought to get on it anyway. This wasn't working out. I was a crazy man. I shouldn't be here; I'd done an insane thing and given everything I ever owned away, and I should get the hell down to London now and tell Tumber I was going to make another album and could I have lots of money immediately?

  But maybe it was just fear. I knew I wanted to see her. Even if it was only for an hour, just a few minutes, I had to see her, just to say... oh God, what? I nearly asked you to come away with me a dozen years ago? I'm a lunatic who at the moment is totally penniless apart from what I've got in my pockets and some plastic money I can't afford to use and don't qualify for any more, so please let me stay with you, I'm very good with children, honest?

  Insane, insane, insane. And how likely was it she was... unattached? Just her and an eight year old who'd probably take one look at me and run screaming. It didn't seem likely. She must have come here for a reason; some huge, quiet, kind Highland man with a soft voice and hard hands... Jesus, I could almost see him now...

  But I still wanted to see her. I'd come here; I couldn't just turn back. Besides, she might hear I was here, after all; they can't get many six-six monsters stopping off in Arisaig in the middle of winter. And how would she feel if she knew I'd been here and not come to see her, if Glen was right about her being pleased to see me? But I knew it wasn't going to work; you just can't do things like this and get away with it. So why not leave now, with the dream at least still intact, so that you'll never know whether it might just have worked? Wouldn't that be salvaging something? Isn't that where the smart money would go? God, impossible to know what to do. I reached into the coat pocket where my change was. My fingers closed round a coin.

  I thought, If it's heads, I'll stay here and look for her. If it's tails, I'll get up now and go to the station. Train to Fort William then train tomorrow — or even taxi if they'll take me that far — to Glasgow; London and Rick before teatime.

  Heads I stay, tails I go.

  I brought the coin out; it was a fifty pence piece. And it was tails.

  I put it back in my pocket, in with the rest of the change. I finished my drink and took up my bag and took the glass back to the bar.

  One thing about not knowing what to do, and tossing a coin to decide, having made up your mind you'll definitely do whatever the coin says: it sure as hell lets you know what you really want to do, if it says the wrong thing.

  I left the bag with the barman, booked a room for the night and I went to the local post office, to ask where Jean Webb lived.

  'Och aye; Mrs Keiller, aye, she said her maiden name was Webb.' The old lady in the post office seemed to be quite used to having hulking, brutish strangers ask after local women. 'She has the one wee lassie, that's right.'

  'Yes, Dawn,' I said, still desperate to prove I knew them and I wasn't some homicidal sex maniac come to rape and murder them both. The old lady didn't seem bothered in the least.

  'Aye, that's her name. They've a house at Back of Keppoch.'

  'Is that far?'

  'Och, no; just over the headland. A mile, perhaps.' The old lady looked at the clock above the counter. 'Of course, she'll be at work right now.'

  'Oh.' What had I been thinking of? It hadn't occurred to me she'd be working. Idiot.

  'Aye, Mrs Keiller works in the office at the fish farm, at Lochailort. Do you know where that is? You'll have passed it on your way.'

  'Um, yes...

  'Here, I'll show you on the map.'

  I bought the map in the end. Mrs Gray— Elsie — said if I wanted I could phone the fish farm from there, if it was urgent. I declined the offer. I'd go to Jean's when she got back from work.

  I sat in the bar, gazing out to the rocky confines of the sea loch beyond the roofs of Arisaig, sipping export shandies, because the last thing I wanted to be, when I saw Jean, was drunk.

  I am a sentimental man, a weak man, a pliable man, and nobody is better at twisting me round their little finger than I am.

  I am totally selfish, even when I'm being selfless. I give everything away, I come up here on a hopeful, hopeless mission of the heart, seeming to give all for love, but I'm not really. I've come here for, at the very least, absolution. I want Jean to confess me, to say that it's all all right, that I'm not really a bad man, that the last twelve, thirteen years haven't been wasted; oh God, she's not going to say, Stay with me and be my love, but she might put her hands on my poor fevered brow, she might let me kiss the ring. Absolution; forgiveness, hail Jean, full of grace...

  We are all selfish. Sell up and go to the slums of Calcutta, work with lepers in the jungle... at my most cynical I ask whether even such things are not selfish, because it is easier for you to live with yourself having done that, knowing you have done all you could, rather than suffer the cramps of conscience. Throw yourself on the grenade; you do so knowing you are the hero, and there will be no more times when the terror of death might make you turn and flee.

  But maybe I'm just a bad, cynical man.

  So, Weird goes looking for his old love. Surrender. It looks like adventure but really it's hiding. Ah, Jayzuz, the ways we invent to get away from our responsibilities.

  The only thinking animal on the goddamn planet, and what do we spend most of our time trying not to do?

  Correct.

  We join armies, we enter monasteries or nunneries, we adopt the party line, we believe what we read in ancient books or shit newspapers or what we're told by plastic politicians, and all we're ever trying to do is give somebody else the responsibility for thinking. Let us enter this order, obey that one; never mind we end up being told to massacre or torture or simply believe the most absurd thing we've ever heard; at least it's not all our fault.

  Nothing to do with us, John; we just did what we was told...

  And Love; isn't that just another route to the same thing?

  I did it for the wife and kids. That's what it's all about isn't it, I mean? Sacrifice; work hard...

  Ah, God, it's b
etter than outright selfishness, spending all the money, beating the wife and terrorising the weans, but amn't I just using something similar to get away from my own responsibilities? Simulating my own financial death through a legal trick, going off on this ridiculous adventure... playing, just playing. Looking for a way out, a way back to the cradle and the milk-wet breast.

  Who am I trying to kid?

  (Answers on a postcard, please, to...)

  The winter afternoon darkened.

  I ate in the hotel, studying my newly bought map, humming my new tune and playing around with it. The map showed there was a walk round the coast from Arisaig to Back of Keppoch. I thought about taking that route to the address Mrs Gray had given me, but it was getting dark and I'd probably break my neck falling over some cliff. That would be ironic; putting my Will into effect while still alive and then dying the next day.

  I'd take the main road and risk getting run over by a car instead.

  I got to Jean's house just after four. It was new, a bungalow, one of about half a dozen under a group of pines, looking out over a curved beach and a rocky bay to the Sound of Sleat and the distant mountains of Skye.

  The house was dark. I sat down on a wall, to wait. I hoped there was nobody else in any of the other houses, a couple of which had lights on, who'd look out and see me sitting there... then felt annoyed with myself, for being so easily embarrassed, so prone to guilt. I put my chin in my hand and tried to ponder the links between guilt and embarrassment.

  I decided I wasn't smart enough to figure it out, not right now, anyway. But is there a song in it? That was the question. Never mind was there any truth in it; was there a song?

  No idea. I sat on the wall and I sang silent songs to myself.

  A car came along the road, lights bright in the gloaming. It stopped outside the house. Faces looked towards me. Somebody got out on the far side. I heard people talking, in the car. The person on the far side was talking to the driver and somebody else inside. I heard a young, female voice say, 'Wait a minute, then.'