Complicity

by Iain Banks

  "Bastard," I say, gliding the ship down to a fuel-dump and a gentle landing. I shake my head. "Riding the fucking mushroom cloud; never even occurred to me."

  "You're not gung-ho enough," Andy tells me, refilling my whisky glass.

  "Aye; you've got to be a real man to play this game," Howie says, winking and taking up his glass. He's a brawny Highland lad from one of the nearby villages, one of Andy's drinking partners. A bit rough and ready and with a highly incorrect attitude to women, but amusing, in a raw kind of way; a man's man.

  "You have to be slightly crazy to play Xerium," Andy says, sitting back in his seat. "You have to be… just… crazy… enough."

  "Aye," Howie says, draining his whisky glass. "No, no, thanks, Drew," he says as Andy goes to refill his dram too. "I'd better be away," he says, standing. "Can't be late for my last day with the Forestry. Nice to meet you," he says to me. "Maybe see you later." He shakes my hand; serious grip.

  "Right," Andy says, standing too. "I'll see you out, Howie. Thanks for coming round."

  "Not at all, not at all. Good to see you again."

  "… wee going-away party tomorrow night?"

  "Aye, why not?"

  They wend off across the dully shining floor of the ballroom, heading approximately for the stairs.

  I shake my head at the Amiga screen. "Riding the fucking mushroom cloud," I say to myself. Then I get up out of the creaking seat and stretch my legs, taking my glass over to the floor-to-ceiling windows which form one wall of the ballroom and look out over the gardens to the railway line and the shore of the loch. The clouds have shrunk to wisps and the moon stands somewhere overhead, filling the view with silver. A few lights burn further down the loch to the right, but the mass of mountains on the far side rises dark into the starry sky, grey becoming white at their snow-dusted summits.

  The ballroom smells damp. It is illuminated only by the light shining from the stairwell and the desk lamp on the old trestle table which holds the computer. Torn, bleached-looking curtains hang at the sides of the six tall window bays. My breath smokes in front of me and mists on the cold glass. All the panes are dirty and some are cracked. A couple have been replaced with hardboard. In two of the window bays there are buckets to catch drips but one of them has overflowed and caused a puddle to form around it, discolouring and springing the parquet flooring, which looks burned in other places. Striped, faded wallpaper has unrolled down the walls in places to hang like giant shavings off a piece of planed wood.

  The ballroom is scattered with cheap wooden chairs, tables, rolls of ancient, mouldy-smelling carpets, a couple of old motorbikes and lots of bits of motorbikes standing or lying on oil-stained sheets, and what looks and smells like an industrial-standard deep-fat frier with the associated hoods, filters, fan housing and ducting.

  The hotel lies at the foot of a steep road which leads down through the trees from the main road. With the hill and the dark masses of the trees behind it to the south, the place doesn't get any sunlight in winter and not that much even in summer. The main road used to come here and the ferry took you over to the north side of the loch, but then they up-graded the way round the loch from a track to a road and the ferry stopped. The Inverness-Kyle railway still runs past and the train still halts if anyone requests it, but with the ferry gone and the road traffic diverted the place has gone to seed; there are a few houses, a craft shop, the railway platform, a wharf and an abandoned compound owned by Marconi, and the hotel.

  That's it. There's a sign at the top of the road that's been there for years, ever since they opened the new road, and it says "Strome Ferry — no ferry', and that just says it all.

  A door closes in the distance, somewhere overhead. I drink my whisky and look out at the inky loch. I don't think Andy ever meant to do anything with this place. Like the rest of his friends, I assumed he was going to run it, put money into it; develop it. We all imagined he had some secret new money-spinning idea and soon we'd all be amazed at what he'd done to the place, and coming here to marvel at the crowds he'd managed to attract… but I don't think he was ever looking for a site for some viable business venture; I think he was just looking for somewhere suited to his burned-out, fed-up, pissed-off mood.

  "Right," Andy says in the background. He comes in from the stairwell and closes the double doors. "Fancy some narcotics?"

  "Oh! You have some?"

  "Yeah, well," Andy says, coming to stand near me and look out over the water. He's about my height but he's filled out a bit since he came here and he has a kind of stoop now which makes him look smaller and older than he is. He's wearing thick old cords worn smooth at the bum and knee but good-quality once, and what looks like a load of shirts and holey jumpers and cardigans. He's got a week's growth of beard which seems to be permanent, judging from the times I've seen him in the past. "Howie's like a lot of them up here," he says. "They like a drink but they have a weird attitude to anything else." He shrugs and takes a silver cigarette case from a pocket in one of his cardigans. "There are a few travellers live in the area; they're cool."

  "Hey," I say, remembering. "Did the police call you?"

  "Yeah," he says, opening the cigarette case to reveal a dozen or so neatly rolled spliffs. "Somebody called Flavell; asked about when I called you back the other night. I told him."

  "Right. I think I'm supposed to go and report to the local polizei tomorrow."

  "Yeah, yeah, it's a fucking police state," he says tiredly, offering the spliff case to me. "Anyway; fancy a blow, yeah?"

  I shrug. "Well, I don't normally, you understand." I take one of the Js. "Thanks." I shiver. I'm wearing my jacket and my Drizabone but I still feel freezing. "But can we go somewhere warm?

  Andy, the ice-boy, smiles.

  We sit in the lounge off his bedroom, on the top floor of the hotel, smoking Js and drinking whisky. I know I'm going to suffer for this tomorrow — later today — but I don't care. I tell him about the whisky story and the chill-filtering and the colouring but he already seems to know it all. The lounge is moderately spacious and somewhere between shabby and cosy: scuffed velvet curtains, heavy old wooden furniture, lots of plump embroidered cushions, and — on a massive table in one corner — an ancient IBM PC; it has an external disk drive and a modem connected and the casing is sitting slightly askew. An Epson printer sits alongside.

  We're sitting round a real fire burning logs, and a fan heater's whining away in the centre of the room's dark, threadbare carpet. I'm warm at last. Andy sits in an ancient bulging armchair, its fake brown leather rubbed through to the fabric net underneath in places and burnished to a deep black shine on the arms; he nurses his whisky and looks into the fire most of the time. His concession to the warmth of the room has been to take off his topmost cardigan.

  "Yeah," he's saying, "we were the blank-cheque generation. I remember thinking in "79 that it was time to really go for something, to finally try something different; to be radical. It seemed like ever since the "sixties there had been just one brand of government in two slightly different packages and nothing much ever changed; there was this feeling that after the burst of energy in the early-mid-'sixties everything had been going downhill; the whole country was constipated, bound up with rules and regulations and restrictive practices and just general, endemic, infectious ennui. I never could decide who was right, socialists — even revolutionaries — or the arch-capitalists, and it seemed we'd never find out in Britain because whatever way the popular vote went it never really brought any real change of direction. Heath wasn't particularly good for business and Callaghan wasn't particularly good for the working class."

  "I didn't think you ever thought much of revolution," I tell him, sipping my whisky. "I thought you were always a devout capitalist."

  Andy shrugs. "I just wanted change. It seemed like what was needed. It didn't really matter which direction it came from. I never said much because I wanted to keep my options open. I'd already decided I wanted to go into the Army and it wouldn't hav
e been a good idea to have anything on my record about supporting some left-wing group. But it had occurred to me that if there was ever any… well, I don't know; armed revolt, popular uprising…" He laughs lightly. "I can remember when that didn't seem so unlikely, and I thought, well, if anything like that does ever happen, and they're right and the establishment is wrong, then it wouldn't do any harm for there to be people like me in the Army who were basically in sympathy with the… movement, whatever." He shakes his head, still staring at the fire. "Though I guess that sounds pretty dumb now, doesn't it?"

  I shrug. "Don't ask me; you're talking to somebody who thought the way to make the world a better place was to become a journalist. Marks me down as a prime strategic thinker, and no mistake."

  "Nothing wrong with the idea," Andy says. "But if you're disillusioned now it's partly because of what I'm talking about; the radicalism of Thatcher that seemed so fresh. That promise, that lean, trimmed-down fitness we could all look forward to; here was the chance to follow one dynamic plan, pushed by somebody who wasn't going to chicken out halfway through. Stripping away all the inefficiencies, the cosy deals, the feather-bedding, the smothering worst of the nanny-state; it was a breath of clean new air, it was a crusade; something we could all take part in, all be a part of."

  "If you were rich to start with, or determined to be a bigger bastard than your mates."

  Andy shakes his head. "You've always hated the Tories too much to see any of that clearly. But the point is it doesn't matter who was right, and even less who would have been right; all that matters is what people felt, because that's what produced the new ethos of the age; consensus had led to impasse, care to sterility, so: deliver a shock to the system, take the sort of radical risk with the country that you have to take with a business at least once in its history if it's to succeed; go for growth, take the monetarist shilling." He sighs, takes out the cigarette case again and holds it out to me. I take a spliff.

  "And I was one of those who did," he says, lighting the J with his Zippo. "I was a loyal trooper in the children's crusade to recover the lost citadel of British economic power."

  He watches the fire while I smoke the spliff.

  "Though of course before that I'd already done my bit: I was one of Our Lads, I was an Expeditionary, part of the Task Force that recaptured Maggie's surrendered popularity."

  I don't know what to say, and, in a recently introduced policy initiative that has come with my advancing years, I don't say anything.

  "Well, here we are," Andy says, sitting forward and slapping his hands on his knees, then taking the J when I tap him on the elbow. "Thanks." He tokes on the spliff. "Here we are and we've had our experiment; there's been one party, one dominant idea, one fully followed plan, one strong leader — and her grey shadow — and it's all turned to shit and ashes. Industrial base cut so close to the bone the marrow's leaking out, the old vaguely socialist inefficiencies replaced with more rabid capitalist ones, power centralised, corruption institutionalised, and a generation created which'll never have any skills beyond opening a car with a coat hanger and knowing which solvents give you the best buzz with a plastic bag over your head before you throw up or pass out." He sucks hard on the number before holding it out to me.

  "Yeah," I say, taking it. "But it's not like it was all your fault. You did your bit but… Islagiatt."

  "Yeah, it seemed like a good idea at the time…"

  "Christ, man, I didn't think any of you guys should have been out there, but I don't think I could have done what you did, in the Falklands. I mean, even if there had been some war I did believe worth fighting, if I'd been called up or something, I'm a coward, I'm just not physically capable. You were. You did it; fuck the rights and wrongs of the war, once you're in there, under fire, and your mates are getting blown away around you, you have to be able to function. At least you did; I'm not sure I could."

  "So what?" he says, looking at me. "So I'm more of a fucking man because I learned how to kill people, and did?"

  "No, I just mean —»

  "Anyway," he says, looking away again. "A lot of good any of that did when we had a captain who couldn't fucking hack it, didn't have the guts to admit it, and had to send good men into a fucking killing ground to prove how fucking brave he really was." Andy lifts a log from the hearth and puts it on the fire, hitting the other logs with it and making them spark and blaze.

  "Yeah," I say. "Well, I can't —»

  "And you're wrong," he says, getting out of his seat and going to the corner of the room. There's a half-open hatch there leading into what looks like a deep, oddly cube-shaped cupboard; it's a dumb waiter. He pulls the top part of the metal cover further up, and the lower half sinks at the same time; he reaches in and gathers an armful of logs, bringing them over to the hearth. "We all have responsibility, Cameron. You can't escape it."

  "Chayzuz, Gould, you take a hard line, man, so ye dae," I say, trying to lighten things up but sounding pretty pathetic even to myself.

  Andy sits, takes the offered spliff and arranges the logs neatly round the edge of the hearth, to dry. He glances at me. "Yeah, and a long memory; I still haven't forgiven you for not trying to rescue me on the ice that time." He takes a long draw on the J, while I sit there thinking, Oh shit, then he hands the number back to me again with a big grin on his face. "Only kidding," he says. "I've been out-machoing men and bedding women with that story for twenty years."

  Andy shows me to my room, a floor down, at about four in the morning. It has a fan heater and an electric blanket on the single bed. Before I go to sleep I wonder about whether I should have said anything to him about Mr Archer and his phone calls and Ares. I came up here thinking I would; I assumed I'd need to offload on somebody, but somehow it never seemed to be the right time to introduce the subject.

  Never mind. It feels good just to have had a talk.

  As I drift off I have the start of the running-through-the-woods dream again but I get away from it and don't remember thing else.

  The next day while Andy's still asleep I take (a) some painkillers and (b) the car into Kyle of Lochalsh to tell the local police I'm here.

  Driving into the town I spot an Escort with a blue light or roof and pull up behind it. A sergeant appears from what a plate beside the door indicates is the dentist's and I go up to him and tell him my name and that I've been told to report my movement Detective Inspector McDunn. The gaunt, grey-haired sergeant fixes me with a studiously suspicious look and takes a note of my name and the time. I get the impression he thinks I'm a harmless crank. Anyway, he doesn't say much; maybe his mouth is still sore from his visit to the dentist's. I can't wait around to try and engage him in further conversation because my bowels suddenly decide they want to wake up too, and I have to make a dash for the nearest bar and the toilets.

  God, I hate it when my shit smells of whisky.

  Andy has a party that night, partly for me and partly because his pal Howie is leaving for a job on the rigs the following day. We go for a walk up into the hills in the afternoon; me puffing and panting and coughing after Andy as he strides quickly, easily up the rutted forest tracks. Back at the hotel, I help him clear up the lounge bar, which still bears the debris from Andy's last party a few months earlier. The bar is still stocked, though there is no draught beer, only cans. Andy seems to be assuming he'll be providing all the booze for the party, so I gather he's not quite as skint as I've heard.

  Maybe a couple of dozen people show up for the party; about half locals — mostly men, though there's one married couple and a pair of single girls — and half travellers, New Age hippies from various scattered buses and vans parked in lay-bys and the highway equivalent of oxbows, where corners or short, twisty lengths of old roads have been replaced with more direct stretches.

  In terms of people mixing, it's a party that at best emulsifies rather than combines; there's a hostility between some of the Highland lads (clean-shaven, short-haired) and the travellers (the opposite) that gets wors
e as everybody gets more drunk. I get the impression the indigenous locals know the travelling people keep disappearing to have some blow, and resent it. Andy seems not to notice, talking to everybody, regardless.

  I do my best to mix as well. At first I get on best with the Highland laddies, matching them dram for dram and can for can, taking their cigarettes and suffering their remarks on the lines of "No I still smoke" when I offer them my Silk Cuts but gradually as we get drunker I start to feel uncomfortable with their attitude to the travellers and even more so to women, and Howie, the guy I met last night, talks about how he used to slap the wife around and now the bitch is in one of these fucking women's refuges and if he ever finds her he'll fucking kick seven kinds of shit out of her. The others suggest this isn't such a good idea but I get the impression they think this mainly because he'd only end up in prison.

  I find myself gravitating towards the travellers.

  At one point I see Andy standing staring out the windows of the lounge, towards the dark loch, his eyes wide.

  "You all right?" I ask him.