Authors: Iain Banks
‘Well,’ Pris says, frowning. ‘It’s just—’
‘No, love,’ Guy says. ‘Whatever you’re going to say, it’s not.’
Pris frowns and looks round at the rest, finds no support, and with a little shake of her head says, ‘Well, it’s you … It’s your body, Guy. I guess none of us can live your life for you.’
‘You can die my death for me, petal,’ Guy offers, sounding almost jovial now.
Pris appears, I think, hurt at first but then looks up at him and gives a small explosive laugh when she sees him smiling, winking at her.
‘Anyway, remissions happen,’ Ali says. ‘You can never give up hope. You mustn’t. You can’t.’
‘I
live
in bloody hope, Alison,’ Guy tells her. ‘Permanent bloody resident. Every morning I wake up thinking,
Hey-hey; maybe it’s gone and I’m fine!
Never has been so far, but I don’t let that discourage me.’
‘I think you’re finding your own way to be positive about it all,’ Pris says.
‘Mr fucking Positivity, that’s me.’ Guy raises his teacup. ‘To fucking Positivity!’
We all toast fucking Positivity. Even me, and I don’t normally swear.
Paul gazes up at the top of the still unlit bonfire in the centre of our lawn, then down at Guy. ‘This isn’t a … pyre, is it? You’re not going to throw yourself on top of it, are you?’ he asks.
‘Will you fuck off?’ Guy says. ‘I have to listen to this bollocks every fifth of November.’
Paul reappeared from his room after about forty minutes, and went to work with Rob, going through the various cupboards. When I raised my eyebrows at him – Rob was too near for us to talk properly – Paul just blanked me.
The fire is finished, or as finished as it’s ever going to be before it’s lit. It’s about four metres high and the same across, largely composed of bits of ancient soft furniture too old to have fire-resistance labels attached, various worn, moth-eaten carpets, lots of old drawers and their associated chests, assorted bits of vintage plastic and many boxes and bin liners full of papers and old clothes Guy doesn’t want to go for recycling.
There’s still more stuff that might get added to the bonfire, and the temptation is to leave lighting it until dark, in an hour or two, but the latest forecast is for heavy rain around the same time and the sky to the west is already thickening with dark clouds, so we need to get it going now.
I’ve packed the heart of the fire with the most combustible stuff, like sawdust, small dry bits of wood, oily rags and the old paint, and left a hole in the side of the fire to give access to the centre. Guy leans awkwardly on one stick and holds a last oily rag from the garage. I use a lighter on the knotted rag and it catches, flames pale in the last watery light filtering through the outskirt tatters of the clouds massing to the west. Little coils of black smoke lick up round the sides as Guy gives it time to catch properly, then he sort of half throws, half pendulums the fiery rag into the heart of the bonfire.
Five minutes later it’s already a decent blaze; we stand watching it, transfixed both by the ever-changing flames themselves and the slowly seeping, waving smoke, and by the progress of the burning as it spreads through the fabric of the bonfire, catching quickly on the oily rags and paint-soaked sawdust, producing quick bursts of fire and thick, dark smoke, and crawling more slowly along pieces of wood and crumpled cardboard before starting to lick and lap at the bulging sides of the bin bags, which are beginning to melt and slowly split, exposing and oozing out their contents like bursting sausages in a frying pan. Things are starting to crackle.
Within ten minutes we have to start retreating from the heat, stepping back across the grass. Flames are shooting from the top and beginning to spread laterally everywhere. It feels like the fire has awoken and begun reaching out, as if before it was something small and lazy that was just happening to the pile of stuff that is the bonfire; a function or property of the massed debris, like its height or its mass. Now it’s like it’s become its own thing, like it’s something alive and separate inside the pyre, something with its own independent life and needs and a determination to feed and grow.
There’s an urgency to the rise and flick of the flames now as they feed on their own heat and more and more air is sucked into the blaze, to be heated and used and transformed, the resulting gases thrown upwards through the writhing basket of fire. Before, the smoke was rising the way steam rises from a plate of hot food, gently curling through the air, all relaxed and lazy; now it looks propelled, excited, turbo-charged, throwing itself at the sky like something furious, impatient, angry.
It must be the melancholic in me that can already look forward, past the time when the fire is at its peak, fully ablaze – when even where we’re standing now would be impossibly, damagingly, skin-crispingly close – to when it’s starting to die back again, and then to when it’s half collapsed and then fully fallen in, to – hours and hours from now, even if the rain somehow holds off – when it’s just black cinders, grey ash and a few half-hidden, low-glowing embers producing a little heated air and not even any smoke any more.
It’s like a river, I think suddenly. It starts small and hesitant, becomes bigger, quicker, more assured as it grows, bursts with power and fury in its prime, then returns to slow, meandering quietness towards the end, eventually giving itself to nothing, recycled into its constituent parts.
It’s hardly uncommon: something going from near-helpless small beginnings, through childhood and youth to vigorous adulthood, then decrepitude, and an end. So a process, like many others, but short enough and vivid enough for those of us with the time and interest to observe it and draw our own comparisons, if we’re that way inclined.
I’m not stupid. I
am
weird and I don’t think the way other people do, I realise that, plus, like a computer, I struggle with some stuff that normal people find easy to the point of not even thinking about, but I’m not stupid. I know that part of the reason I’m finding it so affecting standing here looking at the fire – especially with these people, especially with my dad at my side, leaning on his stick, his skeletal fingers clutched like talons round the knurled top – is because this is like looking at an image of our own lives, our own abandoned histories, our own past, baggage and legacies; all that hoarded meaning going up in smoke and flame, reduced to no more than bulk fuel for a mindless chemical reaction.
It’s been nearly quarter of an hour now, I reckon, and I don’t think anybody’s said a thing. If they have, it’s been very quietly, and just one person to another, right beside them. I’ve never heard this lot so quiet when they’re all together.
Then there’s a sound over the roar of the flames. Guy sounds like he’s choking at first, and I start to turn to him. He isn’t choking. He puts his head back then jerks it forward and spits into the fire.
Against the riot of flames, it’s hard to tell whether the gobbet of spit gets there, falls short, or is even vaporised by the heat before it can land. Anyway, it vanishes.
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Before we all get totally fucking mesmerised and turn into … fucking … Zoroastrians, d’you not think it’s time for another cup of fucking tea?’
‘Well, we have a result,’ Paul tells me, after tea and biscuits, on the first-floor landing, while the rain is just starting and we’re clearing the last walk-in cupboard.
‘And?’ I ask, when he doesn’t add anything immediately.
‘Tell you in the big reveal,’ he smiles. ‘Shall we just stick to the truth? About the sequence of events?’
I have a think. ‘Maybe not mention the money?’
‘Agreed. Let’s say you just asked me for help after we’d done the recycling, that was the first I knew.’
‘Okay.’
There’s the noise of the loo flushing, and when Rob reappears, I’m already heading downstairs with another box. My back is quite sore now.
‘Yeah, but it’s true, isn’t it?’ Haze says, nodding slowly, eyes partially closed, staring into the middle distance, or at least whatever portion of it is available within the confines of the sitting room. ‘When you stare into the void, it, like, stares back at you.’
‘Does it, fuck,’ Guy snorts.
Haze looks at him, blinking rapidly.
We’re just finishing a curry we had delivered. Paul paid for it. Everybody thought Haze was going to cook tonight but it turns out he accidentally brought a bag full of football gear instead of his collection of specially mixed hand-ground spices and secret sauce bases. He was full of apologies.
We ordered too much, which is great; there’s another four full meals here – more if I boil some rice to go with it. In my head, I’m already reorganising the contents of the freezer to make room for everything. And this is even allowing for further grazing on the most snackable stuff. I may tidy up fairly soon to get the surviving main-meal portions safely out of the way and remove them from being tempting. This is sneaky, but frankly we’ve all gorged ourselves and it’ll probably be better for their waistlines.
More beer and wine has been opened, though everybody agrees they can’t get too drunk as they’re all heading home tomorrow. I’m drinking some medium-sweet white from a wine box Pris brought.
‘Whoa, dude. I’m just saying what I felt,’ Haze says, through a small cloud of exhaled smoke. Ali, sitting nearby, waves it away with quick, sharp flaps of her hand.
‘No you’re fucking not,’ Guy tells him. ‘You’re just repeating a load of ego … drenched, self-regard-saturated, pseudo-mystical bollocks.’
Hol mutters something about ‘calling my homie Freddy N on one of his greater insights’, though she says it so quietly I think maybe only I hear it as Rob sighs and says,
‘Just give up now, Haze.’
‘Is that from
Touching the Void
, that climbing—’ Ali says, as Guy jabs one bony finger at Haze.
‘How does the fucking void stare back at you?’
‘I was just saying, I was looking into the quarry this morning—’ Haze begins.
‘How the
fuck
does the fucking void stare back at you?’ Guy demands, louder. He’s already complained about having a headache this evening and he’s taken more painkillers than he really should. Sometimes when he’s in a lot of pain he gets more angry and combative and, well, vicious. ‘Where are its eyes, where is its fucking nervous system, where is the brain that is receiving the results of this so-fucking-directed staring? Staring implies looking, looking implies – requires, fucking demands – something to stare with, something to interpret and consider and fucking philosophise about the results of this “staring”. How does any fucking absence of rock or other material cobble together the intellectual wherewithal to do anything as organised as fucking
stare
?’
‘I think,’ Paul says, ‘it’s generally regarded as being just a metaphor for the connection you feel when you gaze upon something … profound.’
‘Really?’ Guy sneers. ‘I think it’s an excuse for the intellectually challenged and … pretentious to make themselves feel important. Wow, man,’ Guy says, suddenly switching to a deeper, stoned-sounding, slightly posher voice and slowing down a fraction, ‘like, I’m so fucking the centre of the world I can’t stare into this crack in the ground without it showing me the respect of, like, staring back at me, like, you know? Cos I’m, like, as vacuous as it is, yah?’ He shakes his head, switches back to his normal voice as he says, ‘Jesus,’ and drinks from his can of Newcastle Brown.
For a moment I can hear the rain spattering against the windows. It was heavier earlier. I checked on the fire ten minutes ago and it’s almost out, a lot of stuff only half burned.
‘Whatever you say, dude, but I felt something,’ Haze says, shrugging. He hands the joint to Guy, who takes it and says,
‘Whatever you felt, it wasn’t being fucking stared at.’
‘Have it your way,’ Haze says, sitting back and exhaling some more smoke.
I think Guy’s being a little unfair on Haze. I know what it’s like to stare at something and feel fascinated. Even trivial things can do this. I remember getting that feeling for the first time with a kitchen tap, and water. I was just a kid and standing on an upturned bucket or something so I could reach the big main sink and I was experimenting with the cold tap, turning it on and off and trying to regulate it as accurately as possible.
The phenomenon that really entranced me was when I got the flow just right, almost but not quite closed off. You had to start with the tap running, not from it being off – it works only one way, on our taps at least. You reduce the flow to just before it cuts into individual droplets, and, if you get it right, it suddenly turns into a single thin column of water, looking somehow so still that it might as well be made out of glass; you can’t see any sign of it flowing at all. The very first time I did this I was young enough to imagine that it literally had turned into glass, and had to stick my finger into the stream to see.
I loved the fact that you couldn’t see the water flow; you had to look into the sink, where it was hitting the white ceramic surface, to see that the water was actually still falling from the tap and heading down the plughole.
Of course, since doing Physics, now I know that what I was observing was an example of laminar flow, and that when you open the tap up a little further the stream’s behaviour modulates into standard non-laminar flow – with turbulence, which is the norm – but at the time I remember being mesmerised by the effect, and thinking that I was somehow connecting with something deep and mysterious.
(I also loved letting thin, clear honey or syrup dribble off a spoon and onto a slice of bread – from high-enough up – so that the hair-thin stream of it at the bottom wriggled and darted about the place as it hit, like a mad thing. Though that didn’t feel quite so profound and Zen as the static stream-of-water thing, maybe because it was about frantic, erratic movement rather than stillness.)
‘Anyway,’ Haze says, sounding almost upset. ‘The sodding void
did
stare back at me; only it was Kit. He was in it, in the quarry, or at least, like, just climbing out; he stared back at me. Didn’t you, Kit?’