Authors: Iain Banks
‘Positive you can,’ Hol says, drinking from her pint glass of water, ‘but later, not right now.’
‘Pacing yourself, are you, Hol?’ Alison asks. Like the rest, she’s sitting where she sat last night.
‘Yup.’
‘
Pacing
yourself?’ Guy says. ‘Fuck me, Hol. When did this radical new regime surface?’
‘No idea,’ Hol admits. ‘Must have crept up on me.’
‘Think I’ll pass on that.’ Guy takes a last drag on the roll-up he started outside the pub, then folds it with deliberation into an old John Smith’s Bitter can by the side of his seat.
‘Yes,’ Hol says, looking at him. ‘Late-onset maturity remains a distant dream for you, doesn’t it, Guy?’
‘Yeah, Hol,’ Guy says. ‘Looks like I’m going to get to miss out on it altogether. Even the chance of it, ta.’
Hol looks at him for a while longer. Her eyelids droop and she shakes her head. ‘Yeah, that might have been insensitive,’ she says. ‘My apologies.’
‘Another first,’ Rob mutters. He holds a glass out to Paul. ‘I will, Paul, if you don’t mind.’
‘My pleasure,’ Paul says, reaching.
‘Fill it full as you like,’ Rob says as Paul pours. ‘I’ve got some catching up to do.’
‘Certainly have.’
‘Me too,’ Alison says, also holding out her glass. Then, to Rob, as he looks at her, she says, ‘Intending to maintain my lead, darling.’
‘Wasn’t aware it was actually a competition,’ Rob tells her.
Alison looks at him for a moment. ‘You’re right,’ she says, withdrawing the glass a second or so before Paul starts to pour. ‘No need for both of us to get drunk and objectionable. I’ll make myself a nice cup of tea like a good little girl, shall I?’ She gets up and leaves, twirling the glass in her hands.
Rob looks at Paul and rolls his eyes.
‘It’s all right, love,’ Guy is saying to Hol. ‘We all know I’m dying, but we’re all pretending otherwise. It’s just that I’m the only one who has to live with it.’
He starts coughing, though you can see he’s trying to stop, not putting it on to prove his point.
Hol is looking at me. ‘Think you’re forgetting your boy wonder here,’ she tells Guy.
‘Nah,’ Guy says, glancing at me and clearing his throat. ‘He’s the batman, I’m the officer. Eh, kid?’
‘Yeah,’ Pris says, settling into the other sofa and curling her legs underneath herself. She’s been up to her room to change after getting wet in the rain and now wears a fresh pair of jeans and a loose, too-big silvery jumper that keeps falling off one shoulder or the other. It looks like she’s not wearing a bra. ‘How you doing, Kit?’
‘I’m fine, thanks,’ I tell her. I’m sat on the pouffe again, near Hol. I raise my teacup. ‘Got my tea.’ I’m quite full; I ordered only a couple of starters in the pub, anticipating Guy wouldn’t manage his main, which I got to finish. ‘Might have some wine, later.’
‘You found that fucking tape yet?’ Guy asks me.
There’s sudden silence in the room. Guy looks round at them all and says, ‘What, I’m not supposed to know? I’m not fucking deaf.’
‘Well,’ Paul says, sitting back in his seat. ‘This is a bit more like it.’
He doesn’t look at me, which is good. I hope he doesn’t want his fifty back.
‘Where is it, Guy?’ Rob asks.
‘No fucking idea,’ Guy says. ‘Might have recorded over it anyway, years ago. Not fucking kidding, either. Think I did. Record over it, I mean. My first living will.’ I fetched Guy another can of bitter before I sat down earlier; he opens it and drinks. ‘Little bit of ferrous-oxide irony for you there.’
‘Wouldn’t be with your lawyers, would it?’ Paul asks.
‘Don’t fucking trust lawyers, Paul,’ Guy says to him.
Paul smiles slowly. ‘Me neither.’
‘Who does?’ Haze says. He’s building a joint.
‘So it’s
not
with your lawyers?’ Paul asks.
‘Like I said,’ Guy says, ‘I don’t know where the fuck it is or what state it’s in but I think I might have recorded over it and then it became redundant anyway.’ He looks at me. ‘You’re very quiet, even for you, lad. Guilty conscience, or are we to take your silence in the negative? You haven’t found it then?’
‘I haven’t found it,’ I confirm. ‘I’ve not looked much. This morning I looked in the two old servants’ bedrooms above my room but it’s not likely to be there.’
‘So …’ Rob says, ‘…
why
did you look there?’
‘Because they’re above my room and I knew I wouldn’t be disturbing anybody when I started moving boxes about,’ I explain. I’m feeling a little hot after Guy’s remark about a guilty conscience. Annoyingly, he can usually tell when I’m trying to hide something. I think of the five tenners, folded into a neat compression of papery linen in their new hole-in-the-wall. ‘The other rooms up there are above somebody else’s room. I thought I might disturb people below if I searched in them.’
‘Ah,’ Pris says.
I used to disturb people. I bet I still could if I wanted to. At one time, way back when I was thirteen or fourteen, I had this thing about height. I’d just put on a growth spurt and I was – suddenly, it felt – nearly as tall then as I am now (one point nine-one metres then; one point nine-three now). For some reason I felt a real and pressing need to know how tall other people were. It’s amazing how few people are sure how tall they are, and how many add a few centimetres to their real height because they feel they need to, and how many, even now, measure themselves in imperial units, using hopelessly outdated feet and inches rather than the far more rational metric system. Even my own father wouldn’t tell me how tall he was, though I could see he was about eight or nine centimetres shorter than I was (eventually I measured him when he was lying drunk on the hall floor; one point eight-three).
I decided I needed a technique to discover how tall people were, objectively. Triangulation was never going to work; people are loath to stay still long enough while you measure the angle. You might as well ask them to take their shoes off and stand in a doorway with their back straight, and I knew from past experience how unsuccessful that was.
I tried attaching threads of different lengths weighted with little plastic beads to the tops of doorways, both here at home and in school, so they’d just brush against the heads of individuals passing underneath, but I discovered that people tend to flinch, instinctively, as soon as they feel their head or even their hair touch something hanging above them, which made the observational side of things a bit hit-or-miss, plus it was usually hard to see exactly which of a bunch – or a little curtain – of threads they’d just made contact with or just missed. In theory you would need to hang up just one thread of a certain length at a time for each individual, gradually increasing the length of the thread/reducing the height being measured, until they just brushed the plastic bead and no more. With various people entering a room almost at random (as happens especially in school), this was almost impossible.
I gave up on that approach.
I decided to measure people while they slept, creeping into their rooms late at night to take a tape-measure to them in bed. This worked fine with Dad, who passed out fully clothed, on his back, on top of the covers, with the light on, at least once a week, and this may have given me a false sense of confidence in the technique. I knew I was reducing the sample size – it would mostly be restricted to Dad’s drinking buddies from the pub; the occasional ex-colleague from the local radio station (he was a presenter and producer on
North 99
until his health got too bad); a sparse scattering of his few and mostly surly relatives; and his old uni pals: Hol, Paul, Rob, Alison, Haze and Pris, with or without other partners and subsidiary friends in tow.
As it turns out, though, most people lock their rooms at night, where possible, and/or sleep under the covers, making it hard to know which part of the bulge in the bedclothes is where their feet are to measure from, and/or they are amazingly light sleepers and tend to wake up and freak out when they see you padding stealthily up to them holding a tape-measure (or standing exasperated over them, trying gently to coax their legs straight). Plus, frankly, few people sleep lying flat out anyway; they tend to curl up a bit, making the measuring process highly problematic even without the whole waking-up-and-screaming thing.
I gave up on that method too, and just determined to get better at judging people’s heights, especially as they passed through doorways. Most modern domestic doorways are close to two metres in height, for example, and although Willoughtree House, being Victorian with minor-gentry pretensions, has taller doorways, not all of a uniform height, it was a trivial matter to memorise all of them and recalibrate for each.
No sooner had I done this than I started to lose interest in the whole subject.
On the other hand, it was around this time I started to take an interest in how much people weighed. Though this quickly narrowed down to deciding to anchor my own weight as close as possible to one hundred kilos, a goal and limit I have stuck to ever since, even if it does sometimes mean that I have to eat a little more than I really want (a problem that seems to be easing, it has to be said).
‘So you think you’ve recorded over it?’ Paul asks.
‘Might have,’ Guy says.
‘That’s not exactly the impression you gave on the phone, when we were talking about arranging this weekend, earlier in the year.’
‘Things change, mate,’ Guy tells him. ‘Circumstances, recollections, situations; all sorts of things. They all fucking change.’
Paul makes a sort of clucking noise. ‘Oh well, you got us here, I suppose.’ He shrugs. ‘Really, Guy? Did you think we wouldn’t have come otherwise?’
Guy looks at him. ‘Seems to be a very embarrassing thing, even quite distressing and upsetting for people, being around somebody dying, coming to visit them. Specially when they can practically see an old mucker shrivelling away in front of them, like he’s letting the side down by doing something none of us is supposed to do for another forty years or whatever, and they hear what sounds like little individual tumours rattling around in their chest every time they cough, like nutty fucking slack.’
‘Christ,’ Pris says, looking up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly. ‘Guy; please.’
‘Sorry, Priscilla, love,’ Guy says. ‘Didn’t mean to offend you, petal. Just trying to make the point that most of us don’t like being around very sick or very dying people. We don’t know how to react to them, how to treat them, how to maintain the usual isn’t-everything-marvellous and aren’t-we-all-on-the-up-up-up bullshit like we usually do. So people find excuses not to visit, or put a visit off until some time after you’re safely dead – I’ve noticed the funeral seems to be a popular point when people can suddenly find the time they couldn’t spare when you were actually alive and might have benefited from the attention—’
He breaks off to cough, once. It’s just a single cough but it has a hard edge to it like the sound of splintering wood. I see Hol wince.
‘Or people decide for you that you’d rather not see old pals,’ Guy continues, ‘because it might remind you too much of the old days and you might break down in tears and then they
really
won’t know what to do or where to put their face.’ He takes as deep a breath as he can, wheezing. ‘Or they’re worried the contrast between their so-fucking-wonderful lives and your own sad, pathetic, wasting-away terminal state will be too much to bear and only make it worse for you. So, anyway, yeah,’ Guy says, breathing hard now and looking round at them, ‘thank you all for coming.’
Pris gets up and goes over to Guy and kneels at the front of his chair and hugs him carefully, gently. ‘Oh, Guy,’ she says, and it sounds like she’s crying. ‘Oh, God, oh, Guy.’
Guy seems to shrink under her embrace. He looks awkward, angular, unsure what to do. Then he reaches round and puts one arm around her, patting her back.
‘All contributions welcome,’ he says, wheezing. He pats her back some more, then strokes the silvery fabric. ‘Oh; no bra, that’s thoughtful, love. You’ve made a prematurely old man very happy. Give us a jiggle.’
‘You!’ Pris says, pushing away from him then getting up and going back to sit on the couch, hitching her top back up to her shoulder from where it’s slipped down her arm. She dries her eyes with the sides of her hands. Guy wheezes with laughter, or at least amusement.
‘So, are we going to look for this tape or not?’ Alison says.
‘I think I need to sober up some more,’ Paul tells her. ‘Feeling a bit sleepy, to be honest.’
‘Yeah, calm down,’ Rob tells Alison, who glares at him. ‘There’s time. Wait till we’re all a bit closer to the top of our game, not post big-boozy-lunch.’
Alison stares at Rob for a little longer, then takes out her iPad and snaps the screen open, stabbing at the touchscreen.
A little later, after more wine and much more tea – ‘We are definitely getting older; we never used to be this sensible,’ Rob says – it’s decided we can’t stick around the house all afternoon drinking or playing games (a game of Trivial Pursuit or even Risk has been suggested, for old times’ sake, or maybe poker or some other card game, only they can’t agree on what they want to play).
The day has, remarkably, brightened a little and the rain eased almost to nothing, with suggestions of gauzy blue sky off to the west, where the weather’s coming from, so an expedition to Yarlsthwaite Tower is suggested and agreed upon.
‘We sure?’ Paul asks. ‘It’s nearly five. There’s only an hour of daylight left.’
‘Half an hour there, same back,’ Hol says. ‘You’d struggle to spend thirty minutes at the place itself – it’s just a bloody tower.’
‘Might even be a nice sunset,’ Pris says.
‘I can take another two in the Prius,’ Alison says. She has declared herself sober. ‘Who’s risking their lives in the Volvo with Kit?’
Volvos are very safe cars
, I want to say, but don’t.
‘Kit could drive Paul’s Audi,’ Haze suggests. ‘There’s more room, eh, don’t you fink?’ I’m sure Haze says ‘fink’, not ‘think’. It’s like he’s taken on something of Rick’s accent, though, come to think of it, I’m not sure I heard Rick say ‘fink’ or anything like it at any point.