The Business

by Iain Banks

  'All right! All right! So long as you're sure he never abused you.'

  'Oh, not that again. I'm hanging up.'

  'No! You've got hang-ups! Hello?'

  In my dream, in the depths of that cold night, the east wind blew. Mihu, the Chinese servant who looked just like Colin Walker, Hazleton's security chief, cracked open a window in the eastern wall of windows, and the Queen Mother complained of a draught, so the canopy on that side of the bed was dropped. In the night, while the Queen slept, he went out on to the terrace. for a while, then slipped back into the chamber and opened the western windows, which led out on to the terrace — the Queen stirred and muttered in her sleep, but did not wake — then, while Josh Levitsen and the little lady-in-waiting looked on, Mihu/Walker opened the eastern windows to let the wind in.

  The lowered side of the bed's canopy acted as a giant sail, bulging like a dark purple spinnaker and making the whole framework of the bed creak and flex. The Queen Mother woke up groggily just as the bed started to move. The giant statues with the frayed shining armour stared down, their tattered gold leaf whispering wildly in the gale blowing through the long room; a gibbous moon flared in the cloudless night sky, pouring through the space and scintillating on the tiny strips of tinkling leaf as they tore and lengthened and ripped away and went flying through the moon-dark room like shrapnel confetti.

  The bed began to move along its rails. Mihu/Walker decided it wasn't moving fast enough, and put his huge hands on the east side of its frame, and pushed. Contained within a blue-glittering cloud of golden flakes, the bed rumbled along its tracks and out into the night. The Queen Mother screamed, the bed's wheels hit the end of the tracks, but there was nothing there to stop them. The wheels clattered down on to the stones, striking sparks; the bed's canopy, loops and folds and curtains all flapped and snapped and fluttered in the golden-seeded breeze. Still picking up speed, wheels and the Queen Mother still screaming, the bed hit the terrace wall and crashed on through, tipping momentously into the black gulf beyond.

  Somehow Mihu/Walker's hand stuck on to the bed and he could not let go, and so he went with it, and Uncle Freddy — trapped in the bed by straps and tubes and wires — screamed as he fell into the night.

  I woke from that one with the sweats. I checked my watch. Twenty minutes since the last time I'd looked at it. After that it was a relief to lie and worry about everything.

  Uncle Freddy. Suvinder. Stephen. Stephen's wife.

  In a bizarre, horrendously guilt-making way it was a relief to have something to have to do. I remembered the feeling I'd had when I'd flown back alone from my Italian school trip, knowing that my mother was dead. The tears did not come and I just felt numb, surrounded by layers of insulation that even seemed to muffle the words of people. I recalled the noise the jet made as we flew over the Alps, all feathers of white spread over the land far below.

  I was having problems with my ears and gone slightly deaf. The stewardesses were kind and solicitous, but I assumed they must have thought they were dealing with a half-wit from the way I had to keep asking them to repeat things. I really couldn't quite make out what they were saying. There was a roaring in my ears, a compound of the jet's engines and the air tearing past the fuselage and the effects of the pressure on my inner ears. That more than anything else was my insulation, the thing that kept everything at bay.

  Then, more than now, you were isolated in a plane. Nowadays you can make calls from your seat phone; then, once you were up in the air, that was it. Aside from the very unlikely possibility of a caller persuading Air Traffic Control or somebody to patch them through to the flight deck, once you took your seat you weren't going to be disturbed. You had that time, that interval between the responsibilities that the ground beneath your feet implied, to detach yourself from things, to take an overview of your life or just whatever problems ailed you at the time.

  It struck me only then that maybe that was why I always felt good on planes, why I liked them, why I slept well on them. Shit, did it really go back to that flight from Rome to Glasgow and that roaring in my ears, that strange, numb knowing that I was cut adrift from my mother for ever, and wondering what would become of me? I knew I hadn't really worried — or at least I hadn't worried that my biological father would come and reclaim me for himself and the life I thought we'd left behind — but I did get that detached, Now what? feeling, that impression that everything was going to change and I would too.

  And so I kept myself awake all the way through the night thinking this sort of thing, wondering if Uncle Freddy was going to live, and if he didn't whether I'd get there in time before he died, and what it might be — if there was any specific thing — that was so important he was calling for me and not anybody else, and should I let Hazleton let Stephen know about his wife and her lover, and would the Prince, despite all he'd said, hate me for turning him down, and had it all been set up by the Business as the ideal way of tying Thulahn tightly to us, and how else were we going to do it, and should we do it, did the people in the place deserve or need or want to have all that might happen to them happen?

  And was this whole thing about planes born in that other flight back after catastrophe, and did it go deeper than that, to layers of insulation I'd been wrapping around myself all my life, to all the hierarchies of contacts and business associates and good reports and executive levels and salary increments and pay-off guesses and colours of credit cards and classes of aircraft cabin and higher-level interest rates and even friends and lovers I'd collected around myself over all the years, not to keep the world away from me, because people were the world, but to keep me away from me?

  My last thoughts, as dawn was coming up and I fell briefly asleep again, were that all this stuff about flying beds and aircraft and sleeping on them was making certain that I'd be so tired and sleep-deprived that I was bound to sleep on the plane; the Gulfstream if not the Twin Otter. Then, before it seemed I had really got back to sleep at all, the alarm went off and it was time to get up, feeling groggy and terrible and dizzy with the effects of interrupted sleep, and stumble sticky-eyed to the bathroom.

  I stood beneath a tepid shower, listening to the wind moan in the vent to the outside air and making my own moaning noise as I heard it pick up and start to gust.

  I dressed ethnic, in the long red jacket and matching trousers. It was only after I'd put everything on that I remembered I'd meant to dress Western. Oh, well.

  My bags were already on their way down to the airfield when i did my usual last look round the room for anything I might have forgotten. Just a formality, really: I'm a conscientious packer and I hardly ever forget anything.

  The little netsuke monkey. It was still sitting there on the bedside table.

  How could I have missed you? I thought. I stuffed it in a pocket of my long red padded jacket.

  The Twin Otter landed, I thought, spectacularly. Not an adverb I enjoyed settling on as the mot juste, in the circumstances. The Prince, bundled up against the cold, stiff wind, took my gloved hand in his. The wind was making my eyes water, so I guessed it was doing the same to his. He asked, 'Will you come back, Kathryn?'

  'Yes,' I said. Dark clouds were moving fast across the sky, torn to great rolling ribbons by the high peaks. Swathes of snow dragged down the slopes. The pilots were hurrying the few pallid passengers off the craft and helping with the unloading, loading and refuelling. The crowd was small. Gravelly dust was picked off the football/landing field and thrown into the air.

  Everything was late; the plane had been delayed at Siliguri with a burst tyre for an hour. I'd used the time to do a bit of present shopping while the weather worsened. When we heard the plane had taken off and was on its way I wasn't sure whether to feel relieved or terrified. My insides settled on both, which just seemed to leave my lower brain confused.

  'You promise?'

  'I promise, Suvinder.'

  'Kathryn. May I kiss your cheek?'

  'Oh, for goodness sake.'

  He
kissed my cheek. I hugged him, briefly. He nodded and looked bashful. Langtuhn Hemblu and B. K. Bousande looked in different directions, smiling. I saw a way out of our mutual embarrassment and went over to where my little pointy-hatted friends had appeared. I squatted down to say hi. Dulsung wasn't there, but Graumo, Pokuhm and their pals shook both my hands and patted my cheeks with sticky fingers. I tried to ask why Dulsung wasn't there, and they tried to tell me, miming something that seemed to involve lots of twirling and fiddly work.

  I distributed the gifts I'd bought earlier. I gave Graumo two presents and tried to make it clear that one of them was for Dulsung, but he looked suspiciously surprised and delighted and promptly disappeared. I hailed Langtuhn, who came over with a big bag of boring but useful stuff like pencils, erasers, notebooks, dynamo flashlights and so on. We presented this to the children, getting them to promise to share it all out.

  We'd just finished doing this, and I'd given away the last of the presents, when Dulsung appeared, breathless and smiling broadly. She offered me a little home-made wire-and-silk flower.

  I squatted down so our faces were level, accepted it from her and attached the new flower securely to my jacket.

  I looked round for Graumo but there was no sign of him. I had nothing to present to Dulsung: I'd given everything away. I checked my pockets for a gift I might have missed. Only one lump remained in any of the jacket's pockets. The little monkey. That was all I had left: my tiny dour-faced netsuke piece.

  I pulled it out of my pocket, held it in my fingers for a moment, then offered it to her. Dulsung nodded, then accepted it with both hands. Her face split into a huge smile and she reached up with both arms. Still squatting, I hugged her. The little monkey was in her right fist; I could feel its chunky hardness against the back of my head.

  Then it was time to go, and so I went.

  I left as I'd arrived, just me and the guys up front in the plane. Once the ground had dropped away — along with my stomach — I looked back to see the people I'd left, but by the time we turned after take-off all there was to see was the inside of a big black cloud full of jack-hammer turbulence and glimpses of swirling snow.

  The flight was horrific. We got there; we got to Siliguri, but it was pretty damn frightful. One of those flights where you contemplate death and terror so closely that no matter what happens, even if — when — you arrive safely, the you that got on the plane really hasn't survived after all; the you that gets off is different.

  I'd given away my little netsuke monkey. What had I been thinking of? Ah, well, never mind. It had seemed like the right thing to do. It still did. Anyway, it was my own fault for almost leaving it in the bedroom; otherwise it would never have been in my pocket in the first place. A superstitious person would have thought that somehow the little carving had wanted to stay in Thulahn. A Freudian…well, never mind what a Freudian would have thought. Luce had asked me once was I a Freudian? I'd told her no, I was a Schadenfreudian.

  During one of the wilder bits of the flight, I found myself touching and stroking the little flower in my lapel. My hand was on the brink of jerking away again as my brain thought, Hello, is this some sort of rosary scene going on here? I looked down at my hand as though it belonged to somebody else. Then I thought, No, this is just a childish thing. Comfort, not superstition.

  Same difference, I thought.

  Of course, a really superstitious person would have thought that the monkey supernaturally knew that the plane was going to crash in the mountains and had made sure it was safely on terra firma at the time in the hands of a new owner.

  The plane dropped sickeningly and hit another seemingly solid wall of air. I grabbed the flimsy seat arms with both hands. Yeah, very fucking comforting, I thought.

  Gulfstream all the way. Siliguri to Leeds-Bradford just like that, in a tad over eight hours; would have been less but for head winds. I'd assumed we'd have to touch down somewhere to refuel, but no. The plane's seats were big and broad and leather in a cabin gleaming with mahogany; there was a rest room with gold and marble fittings, up front there was a no-nonsense flight crew and back with me a welcoming but unfussy stewardess who served hot and cold food and drinks that would have earned a Michelin star back on the ground, plus there were today's papers, this month's magazines — some of them women's magazines, hot diggety — and every TV channel under the sun and over the horizon. I got myself a serious news fix. Oh, and the flight was blissfully smooth.

  I changed from Thuhn haute couture to a smartly corporate blouse, pinstripe skirt and jacket, and shoes more suitable for hospital visits in Europe in winter. Dulsung's little artificial flower went in an inside pocket. Contemplating myself in the generously sized and perfectly lit mirror above the deep marble basin, my avaricious side — stunned into shocked silence, like most of the rest of me, by the traumatic transition from Thuhn to Siliguri — woke up briefly to look round the plane and say, I want one! While a side I didn't even know I had reared its curious head and with a shake of it said, How sickeningly ostentatious and wasteful. But then both these disputing demispheres fell promptly asleep as soon as I settled my occasionally fondled but assuredly never abused butt into my seat.

  I awoke over the North Sea looking down at the flares of oil and gas rigs, the seat fully reclined and a cashmere stole wrapped over my legs. The aircraft and the air roared and shushed around me.

  I yawned and made my way past the smiling stewardess — I nodded and said, 'Thanks' — to the rest room to tidy my hair and apply some make-up.

  A frustrating delay waiting for a customs official to turn up at Leeds-Bradford, then a smooth journey in a chauffeused Merc — rear seat unforgivingly hard — to the hospital. The air smelled strange and felt thick. Somehow I hadn't noticed this back at Siliguri but I noticed it now.

  It was pretty late by then. I'd let Marion Craston know I was on my way as soon as we'd hit cruising altitude out of Siliguri and she'd told the medics, but whether I got to see Uncle Freddy or not depended on how he was. When I got to the ICU they asked me to turn my mobile phone off. I was allowed to set eyes on Uncle F — tiny, skin yellow-white, head bandaged, almost invisible from some angles because of all the machinery and wires and tubes and stuff — then had to tiptoe away, because he was asleep at last, for the first time, for any length of time, since he'd arrived here. He'd been told I was on my way; maybe he felt able to sleep now. I felt touched and flattered and worried all at once.

  Marion Craston and the mysterious geriatric floozy from Scarborough were nowhere to be seen, having retreated back to their respective hotels. I asked if there was any point my staying through the night. I felt well enough rested from my extended snooze on the Gulfstream to handle one of these all-night bedside vigil things, but the medical staff said no; better to come back in the morning. They seemed marginally more sanguine about Freddy's chances than they'd sounded before. I stayed half an hour, just to make sure he really was safely asleep, then left. I still worried, and let myself out of the hospital with a feeling of hopelessness and dread, half certain that, after all, he'd die in his sleep during the night and I never would get to talk to him.

  Mercedes to Blysecrag. A red-eyed Miss Heggies, very obviously keeping control of herself. The house felt terribly empty. It should have felt cold, too, and probably would have if I'd come from anywhere other than Thulahn. Instead it felt warm, but still empty and desolate.

  I woke up in the middle of the night with a dream of drowning in warm water. Where was I? Warm. Warm air. Not in Thuhn. I felt for my torch, watch and the little monkey, then recalled where I was and flopped back. York room, Blysecrag. Uncle Freddy. I lay looking up at the darkness, wondering if my drowning dream counted as a premonition and whether I should ring up the ICU to see if there was some sort of crisis. But they had the number here: they'd phone me or Miss H if there was anything serious to report. Better not bother them. He'd be okay. Sleeping soundly. Bound to pull through. I reached out for the netsuke monkey.

  Noth
ing there between the watch and the torch. Of course: Dulsung had it, half a world away. I hoped she looked after it. Actually there was something there, between the torch and my watch: a little home-made artificial flower. I patted it, turned over and went back to sleep.

  'Kate, my girl.'

  'Uncle Freddy. How are you feeling?'

  'Bloody awful. Wrecked the car, you know.'

  'I know.'

  Breakfast had been interrupted by a call from the hospital to say that Uncle Freddy was awake and asking to see me. There was still half an hour before the car was due to arrive, so I suggested that Miss Heggies and I go together in her ancient Volvo estate. She just shook her head: she'd go when she was asked for.

  We opened up the stables-cum-garage and I drove the Lancia Aurelia into town. Miss H would phone the car company to tell them they wouldn't be needed.

  Marion Craston was there in the ICU's small lounge, and the mystery woman. Marion Craston was tall, athletic, a little plain, a little vague and mousy brown. Mrs Watkins, the object of affection in Scarborough, was there too: younger than I'd expected, petite, plump, nicely turned out, lots of brassy dyed blonde hair; soft Yorkshire accent. I thought we might all troop in together, but Uncle Freddy asked to see me alone.

  Seeing the set-up closer to, I realised we couldn't all have trooped in anyway: there was just about room for one person to squeeze in between all the machines and sit by Freddy's side. The nurse, who made sure I got settled in without tearing out any vital tubes or wires, bustled off immediately afterwards, called to some other emergency.

  He looked shrivelled, reduced, lying there. His eyes looked bright in the subdued light, but seemed shrunken back inside their bony orbs, the skin waxy and stretched thin around them. His face and hair were the same yellow-white colour. I patted a few stray wisps of hair back into place.