The Bridge

by Iain Banks

  Andrea was away in Paris almost half the time now. She had another life there, another set of friends; he'd met some of them when they'd come over to Edinburgh; a magazine editor, a woman who worked in UNESCO, a lecturer who taught at the Sorbonne; nice people. They were all friends of Gustave, too. I should have gone over, he told himself, I ought to have gone, made friends. Too late. Why am I so stupid? I can design you a structure to withstand hundred-foot waves for thirty years or more and make it as sturdy and safe as any other designer could for the weight and the budget, but I can't see my hand in front of my face when it comes to doing sensible things with my own life. If there is a design to my own existence it escapes me. What was that old Family song? The Weaver's Answer. Yeah, well; where's mine, Jimmy?

  He bought a Toyota MR2 as well as the latest model Quattro, he started flying lessons, he built up a sound system based on Scottish-made components, he bought the Minolta 7000 camera as soon as it came out, added a CD player to the hi-fi and thought about buying a power boat. He went sailing with some of Andrea's old pals, from the marina at Port Edgar, on the south bank of the Forth, upstream from the two great bridges.

  He grew restless with the Quattro and the MR2. There was always some better car; a Ferrari or an Aston or a Lambo or some limited edition Porsche or whatever ... he decided to stop competing and go for timeless elegance instead. He found a well-looked-after MK II Jaguar 3.8 through a local dealer; he sold the Audi and the Toyota.

  He had the Jag re-upholstered in red Connelly leather. A specialist tuner dismantled the engine, blueprinted it, changed the cams, pistons, valves and carbs and fitted electronic ignition; they completely revised the suspension, fitted beefier brakes, new wheels and asymmetric tyres, plus a new gearbox to handle all the extra torque. He had it fitted with four new seat belts, a laminated windscreen, more powerful lights, electric windows, tinted glass, a sunroof, and anti-theft devices he'd have trusted a Chieftain tank to (but which he kept forgetting about). The car spent three days at another specialist firm having a new sound system installed, complete with CD player. It can make your ears bleed, he told people; I haven't even found all the speakers yet. Half the boot seems to be amplifier; I don't know which is going to give way under the vibration first; my ear drums or the outside paint job (he'd had it rustproofed and repainted; twelve coats, hand-painted). 'Good heavens,' Stewart said when he told him how much the ICE equipment had cost to install, 'You can buy a new car for that.' 'I know,' he agreed. 'You could buy a new car for the cost of a year's insurance and a new set of tyres for the thing as well. More money than sense.'

  Nothing seemed to work quite perfectly. The car had annoying rattles, the house CD player had an intermittent fault, the camera had to be replaced and almost all of the records he bought seemed to have scratches on them; his dishwasher kept flooding the kitchen. He found himself becoming short tempered with people, and traffic jams infuriated him; a sort of pervasive impatience seemed to fill him, and a callousness he could not evade. He gave money to Live Aid all right, but his first thought when he heard of the Band Aid record had been about the revolutionary adage which compared giving to charity under capitalism to putting a Band-aid on a cancer.

  The 1985 Festival couldn't even revive his spirits. Andrea was there for part of it, but even when she was with him, in the next seat at a hall or cinema, or in the passenger's seat in the car, or beside him in bed, she wasn't really with him, not all of her. Part of the woman's thoughts were not free, not for him. She still didn't want to talk about it. He heard circuitously that there were complications to Gustave's MS; he tried to bring the subject up but she would not co-operate. It dismayed him there were things they could not talk about. It was his own fault; he never had wanted to talk about Gustave. You couldn't change the rules now.

  He had dreams about the dying man in the other city, and sometimes thought he could see him, lying in a hospital bed, surrounded by machines.

  Andrea went back to Paris half-way through the Festival. He couldn't face the cultural equivalent of a thousand-bomber raid alone, so he borrowed a friend's Bonneville and took off for Skye.

  It rained.

  The company went from strength to strength, but he was starting to lose interest. What, in the end, am I really doing? he asked himself. Just another fucking brick in the wall, just another cog in the machine, if a little better oiled than most. I make money for oil companies and their shareholders and for governments that spend it on weapons that can kill us all a thousand times over instead of just five hundred; I don't even operate at the level of an ordinary decent worker, like my dad did; I'm a fucking boss, I employ, I have real drive and initiative (or I used to); I actually make it all run just that little bit better than it might if I wasn't here.

  He cut the whisky out again, spent some time drinking only mineral water. He gave up dope almost completely once he realised he wasn't enjoying it any more. The only time he did smoke was when he went over to see Stewart. Then it was like old times.

  He started to take coke regularly; it got to be a Monday morning ritual and the natural start to an evening out until one night he was watching the television news and cutting up a couple of generous lines before he went out drinking. There was a follow-up report on the African famine being shown. He looked away from a child with dead eyes and skin like a bat's wing; he looked down to the mirror on the table he was hunkered over and saw his own face looking back at him through the shining granules of white powder. He'd stuffed three hundred pounds' worth of this stuff up his nose the previous week. He threw the razor down. Shit, he said to himself.

  A bad year, he told himself. Just another bad year. He started smoking cigarettes. He finally accepted he needed glasses. The bald patch on his head was the size of a bath plug-hole. He seemed to feel the restlessness of youth and the last-chance urgency of age at the same time. He was thirty-six years old, but he felt like eighteen going on seventy-two.

  In November Andrea told him she was thinking of going to stay in Paris, to look after Gustave. They might have to get married, if his family insisted. She hoped he understood. 'I'm sorry kid,' she said, dull voiced.

  'Yeah,' he said. 'Me too.'

  Ah shit, I suppose I canny really complain; I've had a good innings and all that stuff, but Jeez I don't feel like giving it all up right now; once a swordsman always a swordsman, I gess. Bloody few get to this age, let me tell ye; I'm ecxeptional; it's a fact. Suppose I might no have made it without the wee bam on the showlder, but I don't let him know that; he's uppity enough without me swelling his head even more so. Still, he didn't come up with a solution for our little problem though; namely, growing old. Wee bugger wasn't that clever.

  Anyway, here I am, sitting up in the bed, watching the closed-circuit TV screens and thinking dirty thoughts, trying to get a hard-on. I'm remembering Angharienne and what we used to do. The stuff we used to get up to! Ye'd hardly credit it, but when you're young you'll try anything. Ah well, you're only young once, like they say (the wee familiar disagrees with this, but he's yet to prove otherwise). I suppose three hunner odd years is no a bad score, but bugger it, I still don't feel ready to die, but it looks like I've got no choyce in the matter. The familiar tried a few things (no choyce for him either; he's stuck with me), but nothing's worked so far and I think the wee bastard's run out of ideas; trust him to bugger things up now, when I could really do with his help. He says he's still got some irons in the fire, whitever that's supposed to mean. Either giving up golf or thinking about torchering somebody. Wee barn's sitting on the table by my bed; all shrivelled up and grey looking, so he is. He hasn't sat on my showlder since we got the flying castle (he calls it a ship, but then he likes confusing things; calls the bedroom the ship's bridge, too). What happened was, we got back to the sorcerer who'd helped me get into the Underworld, and the two of them - the sorcerer and the wee familiar - had a battle; hammer and tongs stuff it was and I had to watch from on corner, frozen stiff from some spell the bloody familiar had cast
over us. Eventually the familiar won, but then, just when I might have got rid of the wee bugger, he found he couldn't do what he wanted to, which was take over the body of the sorcerer; seems that wasn't possible; against the rules, sort of thing; I could bring him out of the Underworld, but he couldn't take over a living body; had to stay in an inannimate object. That was him; totally scunnered and bombed-out. Trapped in the wee familiar-body, so he was, and no way out of it. He got all upset and started breaking up the sorcerer's magic celler, and I thought he might start on me for a while, but he didn't, he calmed down after a while like and came back to my showlder and released me from the spell. Explained that we really were stuck with each other for good or ill, and we'd both just have to make the best of it, this time.

  Maybe it was for the best, you never know. Doubt I'd have lived this long without him; some of his ideas were pretty smart. His first was to go back to see that young witch I'd been doing the business with no long before I rescued the familiar from Hades. Angharienne, that was her name; the familiar thought me and her might be able to come to some sort of arrangement, he said. She was pretty duebious at first, thought the familiar was trying to pull a fast one, going to try and take over her body or something like that, but they had this dead complicated talk, and they both did some magic, and went into one of them trances (dead bloody boring that was); they woke up all smiles and agreement. Familiar told me that we were going to have a trial troylistic arrangement. OK, I said, as long as there's nothing dirty involved. Anyway, I gess that was how I got be an old swordsman.

  'What are you doing? Trying to raise the dead already?'

  'Shut up you; none of your business.'

  'Of course it is my business; what if you have a heart attack or something?'

  'Well why no magic up one of them whouris for me then?'

  'Certainly not; you'd be sure to peg out then. Just stop that; it's so unseemly in a man of your age. Your brain may still be retarded but your years are advanced.'

  'It's my willy and it's my life.'

  'It's my life too and you can't play with one if it means playing with the other as well. Have a sense of proportion, man.'

  'Och, I'm no really wanting a wank, just to see if I can get it up still. Go on; show us a dirty video, eh?'

  'No. Keep watching the screens.'

  'What for?'

  'Just keep watching. You never know what might happen. All is not yet lost.'

  'We should have kept looking for that Fountain of Youth, so we should.'

  'Ah ... you'd probably just have pissed in it.'

  'Aw, fuck,' I says, and just lie there with the arms folded feeling sorry for myself.

  The flying castle is sitting on this hillside; we landed it here weeks ago after visiting this planit where they claim to be able to make people live for ever. Whatever they did, it didn't work on me and the wee familiar (they said they'd no ecxperience with something like us, a swordsman and a familiar). I wanted to go to one of these fancy cities here on Earth and take some of those magic drugs they've got nowdays; a few weeks of fun burning yourself up like a young man, then you pop your clogs, quick and painless and you've had a lot of fun in the innterim, but the familiar wasn't having it; pilated the castle here to the middle of nowhere, on this cold and windy hillside, and dismissed all the guards and servants and that and even shooed offa couple of the great-grandchildren and gave away half the magic gear that we had - crystal balls that fortel the future, enchanted sub-machine-guns, magic missiles and that sort of stuff. Seemed to want to give everybody the impression we were getting ready to die, but didn't give all the good stuff away; kept the flying castle itself and some bits and pieces like a jacket that flies, the Universal Translator and a few tonnes of invisible platinum in the hold. Even found some new batteries for the old dirk; the 'knife missile' as the familiar calls it. Its batteries ran out about a century ago and it was just a no very sharp knife after that what I kept for sentimental reasons. Wee familiar was dead snooty about it at the time 'Just a cheap copy, I told you so,' it said, but it found new batteries for it just reently and put it in charge of security, guarding the flying castle's door. Fuck knows why; maybe the familiar's getting ecsentric in its old age.

  Still canny stop thinking about the wife. Popped her clogs nearly half a century ago, but I can still see her bonny face like she'd just croaked yesterday. Turned out she wasn't as young as she looked; never did find out how old she was, but the familiar thinks she was a thousand or so at least. She wouldn't grow old slowly, like even witches are meant to; did the magic on herself so that she stayed looking just out of her teens until right to the end; burned herself out staying young; can't say I blamed her but it catches up on ye in the end. She became a statue; a wee dark wooden carving, all hard and dark and old-looking; left instructions she was to be planted in this forest near where she was born, where she's become a wee tree, no long since. The familiar says the tree will probably go from being wee and shrivelled to big and tall and younger, and then shrink like it's going back in time until it becomes a sede, and after that even it doesn't know what'll happen. It seems sad when it tells me all this, because it knows that when I die - when we both die, because it can't live without me - it'll just disinntigrate into dust and that'll be that; no even an existence in the Underworld for it after that. Tough titty; I'll probably no even be allowed in to hell after what happened the last time I was there; the wee familiar still chuckles when we talk about the old days and me rescuing him; seems they had to alter the whole rejeem down there after that bloke Charon turned into stone; couple of characters called Virgil and Danty took over temperarily and they're still there. Fuck knows what sort of receptcion I'll get when I turn up at the perilly gates or whatever it is they've got now. Probably let me in all right but have something really nasty arranged, I'll bet. Ye can see why I'm no so keen on kicking the bucket, anyway.

  'Ah-ha.'

  'Ah-ha whit?'

  'I thought you were supposed to be watching the screens.'

  'I am, I am, I just - aw wait a minute! Who the fuck's that?'

  'No one who wishes us well, that's for sure.'

  'Aw shite!' Coming down the hillside there's this muscley punter with blond hair and a fucking great sword. Bloody great broad shoulders and sort of metal straps all over his body, big boots and a wee sort of loin cloth thing. Some sort of helmet on his head with a wolve's head on it, snarling like. I sit up in bed, feeling scared already; I'm dead stiff these days (all ecsept the bit I'd like to be), and what with the roomatism and that, and the way my hand shakes nowdays, and needing glasses and so on, I really don't fancy squaring up to some young fit warrior with a dirty great sword. 'Whit happened to the fucking total exclusion zone then, eh? I thought people were meant to fall asleep if they tried to come up to the flying castle!'

  'Hmm,' the familiar says, 'must be that helmet he's wearing; probably contains some neuroscreening device. Let's see if the laser can deal with the fellow.'

  The big berr with the muscles marches on down the slope, staring up at the castle, big blond brows knitted together, muscles rippling, the big muckle sword swinging. Suddenly he looks surprised, and starts swinging the sword even faster, so it's a blur all around him; next thing I know there's a flash and the screen goes dead. 'Aw naw! Whit now?' I'm trying to get out of bed, but my old muscles seem to have turned to jeely or something, and I'm sweating like a pig. The screen comes alive again, showing the door of the castle from the inside.

  'Hmm,' the wee familiar says again, as though it's dead impressed or something. 'Not bad. Some sort of limited prescience involved there, I'll warrant; he knew the laser was about to fire on him. Probably only a few seconds into the future, but enough; he's going to be difficult to stop. Nice trick with the laser too; probably some sort of mirrorfield in the sword. Reflecting the light back into the cameras might have been coincidence, but if not then it was very cheeky. Quite an adversary, what?'

  'I canny move! Do something! Fuck being a wond
erful bloody adversary; get us away from that bastard! Get the castle moving!'

  'Not enough time, I'm afraid,' the wee familiar says, calm as ye like. 'Let's see if the knife missile can stop him.'

  'Fuckin marvellous! Is that all we've got between us and him?'

  'I'm afraid so. That and a couple of not very intelligent or strong airlocks.'

  'Is that it? You stupid bastard; why the fuck did you let all the guards go, and the-'

  'Error of judgement, I suppose, old son,' the wee familiar says, and yawns. He hops onto my shoulder and we both watch the inside of the castle door. The tip of a sword appears through the metal and cuts a circle out of it; it falls to the floor and the big blond bastard steps through. 'Fields,' the familiar says quietly, nodding by my ear. 'That airlock door had monofilament reinforcing; cutting it cold like that would need some pretty neat blade-fields. Quite some weapon the lad's equipped himself with ... though it could be the other round, of course.'

  'Where's that wee bastard of a dirk?' I'm shouting now; bloody petrified, ready to shite the bed so I am. The big blond bastard is tramping down the castle hallway, looking dead wary but all determined like, and swinging the sword like he means business. He looks to one side and glowers.

  The wee dirk comes at him, but far too slow; almost like it was hesitating. Blondy keeps glowering at it. The dirk stops in mid air, then just falls to the floor and rolls away into a corner. 'Aw naw!' I'm shouting.

  'Told you it was a cheap copy; they had to equip it with an IFF circuit. Probably our chum's sword - or that helmet - fed it a fake Friend signal. The real things are free agents, smart enough to make up their own minds ... which is why they're quite useless for the likes of you or me, of course.'

  'Stop talkin like a fuckin arms salesman and dae something!' I scream at the wee familiar, but it just shrugs its wee grey shoulders and sighs.