Authors: Iain Banks
‘I’ll tell you now,’ he says. ‘If I’d known it was all going to end this early, I don’t know that I’d have accepted responsibility for you, lad. Took the best years of my life, looking after you.’
Hearing him say this gives me a bad feeling in my belly. ‘Sorry to have been such a burden,’ I tell him, trying to stop crying. Failing.
‘Too late for that now, isn’t it? And you were just a babe in arms anyway. Not your fault. It was that bitch of a mother of yours.’
‘Don’t talk about her like that. Please.’
‘I’ll—’ he starts angrily, then glances up at me and, after a moment, sighs, letting out as big and as deep a breath as he’s capable of these days. His chest rattles and he nearly coughs. ‘Ah well,’ he says. ‘Yeah. Not your fault, and I … appreciate what you’ve done for me, what you’ve been doing, recently. Suppose it’s unfair you get the brunt of everything. But you’re all I’ve got, aren’t you? Eh?’ He smiles uncertainly and reaches out to pat me on the arm, though he doesn’t look me in the eyes. ‘You’re a good kid. None of this is your fault any more than it’s mine.’
Less
, I want to say, but don’t.
‘Yeah, well,’ he says, and goes, I think, to try to put one hand behind his head, but then stops, grimacing with the pain, and lets his arm flop down by his side again. ‘Maybe I’ve been wrong,’ he says, and sighs. (And, just for a moment, I think he means that maybe he’s been wrong to keep the identity of my mother secret from me all this time, and he’s finally going to make amends now, and tell me. But no; we’re back to him.) ‘I most certainly do not believe in hell, purgatory or heaven or any of that dreamed-up, sado-fantasist bollockry. However,’ he says, holding up one skinny finger, ‘I am prepared to be pleasantly surprised, following my death, because I don’t think I’ve been
that
bad a person, and if you can’t expect a bit of magnanimity and compassion from God, who the fuck can you expect it from? If God is supposed to be less forgiving than your average council care worker, fuck ’im; what use is the twat?’ He tries a smile, grinning up at me.
I think, in his own awkward way, he’s trying to lighten the mood. The sheen of sweat seems to have gone now. He’ll just accuse me of fussing if I try to wipe his face.
I think I must have a blind spot where religion is concerned. I just don’t get it. Either it’s telling you stuff that’s just provably not true – like the Earth being six thousand years old, for example, when there are tree-ring records that go further back than that (I mean, tree rings!) – or it’s telling you stuff that it swears is true but that it has no proof of, like life after death. That’s such a big claim you’d think there’d be some pretty robust proof out there, but basically there’s nothing, apart from claims in old books about miracles happening; old books often written ages after the events they describe.
Frankly I’m fairly sceptical about what I read in newspapers printed yesterday, when everybody’s memories are still fresh, so this ancient stuff was never likely to appeal. And miracles seem in short supply, too, these days. Unless it’s the sort that people talk about when a school collapses and all the children are crushed to death except one, who’s pulled from the debris and people call that a miracle, though then it’s hard not to feel, well, if that’s a miracle, couldn’t God have tried a little harder and let two of them live? Or, better still, the whole class, or the whole school?
The kind of people who seem to believe they know how their God thinks just sort of smile – regretfully, but still smile – when you say something like this, as though you’re some kind of simpleton, but I don’t think it’s anything to smile about.
I am uncomfortably close to Guy’s point of view in this. The last time he threw anything at the television was when one of the thirty-three Chilean miners, who were trapped down the bottom of that mine for two months in 2010, said that their rescue had been a miracle. ‘No it wasn’t a fucking miracle!’ Guy screamed. ‘A miracle would have been the arch-fucking-angel Gabriel suddenly materialising amongst you and enfolding you all in his mighty wings to transport you instantly to the surface and your waiting loved ones in a display of dazzling radiance!
You
were rescued by tens of millions of dollars, mining experts from around the fucking world, the mobilised resources of the whole of the fucking state of Chile, months of hard, grinding work, calculation and expertise and
heavy engineering
, you superstitious Catholic FUCKWIT!’ Then he threw a book at the telly. A paperback, thankfully.
I don’t like Guy thinking he’s influenced me too much, so I didn’t tell him that I mostly agreed with all of this.
Anyway, from what I’ve been able to work out, if you’re going to claim that you know something, then it should be provable, otherwise how do you know you know it? Just being surrounded by lots of people who agree with you doesn’t prove anything. (Well, it might prove quite a lot of things, actually, but not what you might like to think it does, and quite likely not stuff you’re going to be comfortable with, either.)
And faith is just mad; it’s like you have to leap to the end of an argument or discussion about something and act as though you’ve been convinced, even though you haven’t been, and then, apparently – well, allegedly – it all makes sense. But what wouldn’t, if you’ve already committed to believing in it? You might stick with any sort of nonsense out of sheer embarrassment at admitting you’d been taken for such a fool. If you’re going to apply this faith thing to anything, then anybody can just believe whatever they please, and then who’s to say who’s right or wrong?
I reckon claims to knowing stuff need to be open to discussion and argument, and the person doing the claiming has to be open to the possibility of having to change their mind because they realise they didn’t have all the facts before, or because a new explanation just works better, otherwise how can you trust them?
From what I can gather, though, this idea doesn’t seem to fit too well with religion.
Lastly, I think it’s a very good sign if the various areas of the stuff you know about sort of all fit together. Like biochemistry and engineering fit together, even though they’re completely different fields, because they’re linked by clearly provable physical laws and mechanisms that make sense and that demonstrably work. I’ve met some very intelligent people whose thinking is all joined up until you get to religion, and then it’s like that’s an area that’s been fenced off as out-of-bounds, not subject to the rules about proof and likelihood – even plausibility – that they’d apply as a matter of course in every other area.
Which might not be so bad if it was some fairly trivial area, like which is the best football team or something, but it isn’t; it’s what they regard as the most important part of their morality – even their personality – and it’s worrying that this is the one bit they want to leave free from rational inquiry. I’d have thought that bit ought to get the most thoughtful attention, not the least.
Guy sighs. ‘But I think I know there’s nothing, son; just oblivion.’ He closes his eyes. ‘Oblivion; nothing else.’ He’s almost whispering now. ‘Though,’ he murmurs, ‘that said; if there is an afterlife, depend on it I shall come back and haunt you like a fucker.’ Then his eyelids flicker, and with that he’s asleep.
Not in this house, you won’t
, I think, as I turn out the bedside light.
5
‘O
h, Kit,’ Paul says as I go back into the sitting room. ‘Thought you’d gone to bed.’ Paul is kneeling at the table between the two couches. The mirror has been taken off the wall above the mantelpiece and laid on the table; Paul is chopping up lines of white powder from a small pile near the centre.
‘Should have gone to somebody’s room,’ Haze says. ‘Told you.’
‘Too bloody cold,’ Ali says. ‘Knew we should have brought our own heater.’
‘Blow the fuses,’ Paul says, brow furrowed as he taps at the mirror.
‘That’s all right,’ I’m saying, as Hol sits back in her couch, rolling her eyes, and Pris says,
‘Hope you don’t mind, Kit,’ and Rob is saying,
‘He’s a grown-up …’
‘You won’t tell Guy, will you?’ Ali says to me. ‘He’ll be upset.’
‘Yeah,’ Hol says. ‘Though upset as in jealous, not disapproving. That’d be the rankest hypocrisy.’
‘No, it’s okay,’ I tell them. ‘Doesn’t bother me.’
‘This is definitely the time to do this,’ Paul says, chopping away with a black credit card. ‘When we have all day tomorrow to recover.’
‘Never used to need time to recover,’ Rob says.
Paul pushes a line carefully to one side, making it parallel with half a dozen others. ‘Also, we’ve all been getting a bit drunk there; this’ll sharpen us back up again.’
‘Yeah, align our excuses,’ Hol says quietly, watching Paul.
‘I think,’ Haze says, ‘the least we can do is include Kit in. Don’t you think?’
‘What, rather than exclude him out?’ Hol says.
‘Yeah,’ Haze says, looking at me. ‘Only if he wants. Not trying to force anybody or anything. Just polite. You use somebody’s space, you offer them a share. Etiquette. Guy being indisposed, asleep, whatever; falls to our Kit, doesn’t it? That’s right, isn’t it, Paul?’
‘Sure is,’ Paul says. He glances up at me. ‘Cut you in here, chief?’
‘Play your own game, Kit,’ Hol says quietly.
‘Yeah, sure,’ I say, squatting on my pouffe. ‘I assume that’s coke?’
‘Yup,’ Paul says.
‘Oh, I’ve done that before,’ I tell them. They all look surprised. Hol most of all.
‘My last birthday,’ I tell them. ‘Guy got us some. We both did it. Said in the old days he’d have been expected to take me to a brothel but this would have to do.’
‘Wow,’ Pris says.
‘That’s our Guyster!’ Haze says, shaking his head and grinning.
‘I think in the old days the brothel visit would probably have happened earlier than your eighteenth,’ Hol says, looking at me oddly.
‘Modern parenting,’ Rob says.
‘Still a lot of lines there,’ Ali observes, as Paul chops another couple.
‘Guy took some of this just a couple of months ago?’ Hol is saying, frowning. ‘How did that go down?’
‘Not great,’ I tell her. ‘I think he nearly had a heart attack. I was going to phone for an ambulance but he wouldn’t let me. He said afterwards he thought he might have found a good way to off himself when the time came; a couple of Belushi-size lines and his heart would just thrash itself to a pulp.’
‘You’re not actually intending to take any, are you?’ Ali is saying to Rob.
‘Why the hell not?’
‘Because we agreed—’
‘No, honey,’ Rob says. ‘We talked about this but we didn’t agree anything.’ His voice sounds like he is talking at a business meeting, to an underling who is a bit slow. ‘You have to learn the distinction between us stopping talking about something after you’ve had the last word in the latest part of an ongoing discussion, and us actually coming to an agreement.’
‘Woh-oh,’ Haze says.
‘My mistake,’ Ali says, looking at Rob.
‘Jeez, guys,’ Paul says, running a licked finger along the edge of the credit card and then rubbing his gums. ‘None of this is compulsory. Just a toot or two. Lighten up.’ He looks up at Ali, Rob. ‘Yeah?’
‘It’s just, there are issues,’ Ali says.
‘Oh, God preserve us,’ Hol mutters.
‘Ali thinks I might be enjoying myself too much,’ Rob tells us, smiling.
‘I’m worried for both of us,’ Ali says, hugging herself. ‘We don’t sit back, either of us. That’s just not who we are. We tend to just go for things. We don’t wait for things to happen to us, we go out and happen to things. Which is fine in some areas – it’s what got us where we are, it’s what Grayzr values in us – but not so good in other areas.’
‘Like fun, apparently,’ Rob says.
Paul is rolling up a fifty-pound note, looking thoughtful.
‘Like potential addiction,’ Ali says.
‘Really?’ Pris says. ‘You’re worried about that? Genuinely?’
‘Are we going to do the coke or not?’ Haze is saying.
‘I think it’s something we need to be aware of,’ Ali says.
‘Ali has talked about AA,’ Rob tells us, shaking his head and breathing out hard.
‘NA,’ Ali corrects him. ‘Narcotics Anonymous.’
‘Same diff—’ Rob starts to say.
‘You fucking serious?’ Hol says. ‘Treating a psychological weakness like a so-called disease and submitting to a “Higher Power”?’ She does the finger-quotation-marks thing. ‘Fuck that. That’s evangelism disguised as self-help.’
‘It is a disease,’ Ali tells Hol. ‘You wouldn’t understand. People don’t when they haven’t experienced—’
‘Oh, wouldn’t I?’ Hol says. ‘I had an ex went down this greasy path. He liked a drink. He liked drinking so much he preferred it to doing more than the absolute minimum at work or in his relationships. I was stupid enough, in lust enough, to think I could change him, but I couldn’t. Eventually he decided he was an alcoholic; took refuge in this idea it’s a disease—’
‘It
is
a disease,’ Ali says again.
‘Nope,’ Hol says. ‘Bilharzia is a disease. Multiple sclerosis is a disease. Malaria is a disease. Weird sort of fucking disease you stop in its tracks by a simple act of will. All you have to do is reach for the glass’ – she does just that, lifting her glass halfway to her lips, then replacing it on the table by the edge of the coke-decorated mirror – ‘but then put it back down again. Same applies to smoking, or overeating. Just stop. Make the decision. Keep on making the same decision. Not saying it’s easy, not disagreeing it’s better to do it as part of a group if you are going to do it, but in the end it is just a decision; a neurological event inside your brain. Just decide.’ She snaps her fingers. ‘So-called “disease” over.’ She lifts the glass again. ‘Try that with bilharzia. Cheers.’
‘It might be a different sort of disease,’ Ali says. ‘It’s still a disease.’
‘No it’s
not
,’ Hol says. ‘It’s a condition. It’s a decision you keep on making to behave in a certain way rather than in another way. You can call it a psychological weakness or a lack of willpower if you like, but you can’t call it a disease without making the word basically meaningless. You’re insulting everybody who has a real disease by calling it one.’