Christopher Brookmyre - Parlabane 04 (21 page)

Baxter produced a heavy coil of climbing cord from his backpack and dropped it to the ground. It was very fine stuff, identified by Parlabane's informed (and covetous) eye as 5.5mm Spectra Cord, claimed by its manufacturer to be ten times stronger than steel. Its minuscule diameter meant Baxter had been able to fit a good fifteen, maybe twenty yards worth into his backpack. Parlabane couldn't work out how it was likely to factor into the imminent sub-aquatic low-jinks, but was pretty confident he wasn't going to like it.

'The good news is that I'll be going first, as somebody has to thread the needle. Then you'll be coming through one at a time, attached to the rope, so that the person ahead can speed your progress by giving you a tow. The bad news is the running order, which will be as follows: Tim, then Grieg, then Kathy, Max, Emily, Rory, Jack, Toby and finally Joanna.'

Each of them cast a glance at the person mentioned before their own. Bracketed by the peace-making Vale and the neutral or abstaining Joanna, the rest were being forced to rely upon last night's foes. Cute. Grieg put a hand up, the eejit evidently regressing to schoolboyhood perhaps in response to the class-trip vibe generated by steamy-windowed transport and the forced company of people you couldn't stand.

'I can't do this. I get really claustrophobic. I'm sorry.'

Baxter just smiled and bent down to his backpack again, from which he 121

pulled a sheaf of photocopied papers. He flicked through them until he found the one he was looking for, holding it out to Grieg.

'Your acceptance form. Clothing and shoe sizes, special dietary requirements (unticked), medical information. According to this, you are not pregnant, not on prescribed medication and do
not
suffer from claustrophobia. Get in line.'

There was a burst of cruelly delighted laughter at this from Rory. Anyone else who might otherwise have enjoyed Grieg's humiliation had their pleasure curtailed by the knowledge that the same emergency exit had just been slammed in all their faces.

Grieg shrugged, muttering something about 'worth a try'. Rory slapped him on the back, still laughing.

'Always read the small print,' he told him. 'Come on then, let's do this,' he added, booming to the whole assembly with deliberately overplayed enthusiasm as he began removing his fleece.

'Eh, not so fast, Rory,' Baxter cautioned. 'Who said anything about getting undressed?'

'But we've got suits on,' Rory protested, confused.

'The suits are to stop you getting hypothermia from wandering around in wet clothes.'

'And what's the point of that?'

'Two points. One, a degree of realism: you wouldn't be leaving your clothes behind if you really had to negotiate a hazard like this. And two, it'll flush out anyone here who ignored the instruction at breakfast to leave your mobile phones behind.'

'Bollocks,' Rory grunted. He zipped his fleece back up and removed a small metallic rectangle from an inside pocket, handing it to the waiting Baxter.

'There's next to no signal out here,' Baxter reiterated. He had previously mentioned it when he instructed them not to bring their mobiles, at which juncture it became apparent the others hadn't yet discovered that their phones had been disabled. 'Ironically, due to the hills, just about the only place you can get a signal round here is in the vicinity of the hotel, where there's landlines anyway.'

He popped the phone into his trouser pocket and, grinning at Rory, proceeded to strip down to his drysuit, placing his clothes and boots next to his backpack near the edge of the bridge.

'I'm not here to play - I'm just the ref,' he explained, taking hold of the rope and slipping carefully into the water. It came up to just below his chest. He tossed one end of the rope to Vale, took a breath then disappeared below the surface, gently submerging himself rather than diving. Parlabane began counting the seconds.

122

'Let's chuck the bastard's clothes in while he's under,' Grieg suggested.

'Not with my moby in his pocket,' Rory replied.

Baxter emerged at the other end, breaking the surface as unhurriedly as he'd disappeared. It may have been in order to assure them that the journey didn't require haste or flailing desperation, but his pace was equally likely to be down to cautious footing, minus the protection of his boots. Parlabane had lost count due to the distraction of Grieg's suggestion. The figure wouldn't have mattered anyway. It was going to feel like forever, no matter what.

Vale got the ball rolling after carefully placing his digital camera on the far side of the bridge, jumping in with a loud splash and markedly less concern for what was underfoot. Baxter ordered Grieg to get in too, to help pay out the rope and to pull it back when his own turn came. He waded in reluctantly from the side, hissing breathy curses at the temperature of what flooded his boots.

Spontaneous hugging, high-fiving and vocal whooping were, in Parlabane's book, just not acceptable between sober adults enjoying the privilege of having been born east of the Atlantic. It was a foul, phoney and nauseating thing to behold, deserving of all the scorn and cynicism one felt compelled to pour upon it. Parlabane, however, felt little such compulsion even as he watched all of the above unfold, knowing he would not be in a position to pass judgement until he was on the other side of that tunnel. He watched Vale bashfully tolerate Grieg's grateful embrace and Kathy grasp the singularly unhuggable Grieg in much the same way. Max burst forth from the water yelling in relief and self-salutation, laughing as he offered a two-handed shake in thanks to Kathy, then sharing a double high-five with Emily after she enjoyed the benefits of his speedy and enthusiastic tugging. Emily in turn gigglingly endured a sustained bear-hug from the bellowingly exhilarated Rory That was when the scorn and cynicism started to creep back, and indeed became the thing that sustained him during those endless seconds in the miniature abyss. It was cold, dark, lonely and scary, as he travelled a distance that was impossible to measure at a pace that was impossible to gauge. The weight of his clothes made it feel like he was swimming through treacle, the exertion a further strain on his bursting lungs, and every pull on that rope was a divine act of succour for which he greatly owed its source. But in spite of it all, he knew there was still no fucking way he was going to hug Rory Glen.

'Wooh! Way to go, Jack, welcome to the other side,' Rory said, one hand helping Parlabane to his feet, his other arm poised to initiate an embrace.

'Aye, very good, whatever,' Parlabane replied, withdrawing his right hand to wipe his hair from his eyes, at the same time raising his left to deflect any unsolicited manly affection. Rory looked a little put out at this show of bad 123

grace, and Parlabane surprised himself by feeling bad about this. 'Nae offence, big yin,' he added, by way of reparation. 'It's just that the last time I came out a tunnel like that, a nurse skelped my arse and it all kind of went downhill from there.'

Parlabane called the go-ahead to Toby and began pulling when he felt resistance on the rope. Thinking of the dead weight of even just his own clothes, he felt that bit more churlish about his failure to show Rory more gratitude. Rory's powerful shoulders must have shaved a good few seconds off his time submerged, a favour he wasn't sure he'd be able to pass on to Toby. He was giving it his utmost, and since recovering from what happened in prison, he was in arguably the best shape of his life. Unfortunately for Toby, that best shape was still short, light and sinewy. Mother nature and father heredity had bestowed upon Parlabane a low centre of gravity and a blessed middle ear. Stealth, agility, balance and aim came with unearned ease. To that, he had added enough muscle to haul himself around vertically, with or without the aid of ropes and pulleys, but not enough to change the fact that Toby had drawn the short straw. Doubly so, given that if he did make it through alive he'd then have the task of assisting the heaviest member of the party. After a few full-blooded heaves, Parlabane had only managed to haul through a paltry length of rope, and was beginning to wonder whether the guy had forgotten that he was allowed to propel himself to some degree. This prompted an urgent consideration that, given a bump on the head going under, this could actually be the case.

'Rory, gimme a hand here,' Parlabane asked. 'I think something's wrong.'

Baxter stepped forward to offer a third pair of arms as a cold note of concern rippled around the pool. The rope progressed at speed until all the resistance was suddenly lost, dumping the three of them in the soup like tumbling dominoes. They all got to their feet as quickly as they could, Parlabane the nearest and first to approach the bridge. As he did, a figure erupted from the water, spitting a mouthful accurately into his face, standing upright, opening its arms and singing: 'Ta-raa!'

Wiping the water from his eyes, he saw, amidst gales of laughter, that it was Joanna, which while being itself a relief, still begged a pertinent question. Rory gave it voice.

'Where the hell is Toby?'

A number of necks strained to look over the bridge, but he was not to be seen on the other side.

'There's more than one tunnel down there,' Toby announced, revealing himself to be standing behind the group, watching the fun unfold.

'As the actress said to the bishop,' Rory added, clearly feeling less selfconscious about yesterday's little moment of chastisement. 124

There ensued more whooping, back-slapping and general subsumation of all into one single unified consciousness. Parlabane was starting to wish he'd drowned.

125

What's Under Your Feet

The kitchen had an air of unaccustomed, almost unnerving quiet despite all hands being present and busy. Dinner preparations were under way early, given a welcome head start because lunch had been taken care of immediately after breakfast, in the form of a hamper to be eaten on the move. It didn't look much of a day for al fresco dining, but having humped themselves around the hills for a few hours, the UML guests would no doubt find that hunger, as well as making the best sauce, could also make a restaurant of a rainy outcrop. There was an undoubted manifestation of calm after the storm, following the hot-blooded antics of the night before. Part of it was inevitably the process of simply getting on with the UML weekend, now that it was in flow, dissipating the tension built up by so long waiting and worrying about it. In happy accordance with the swan's feet principle, from the guests' point of view, the hotel appeared to be running itself with all grace and efficiency. What it had taken to achieve that was futile to dwell upon.

Right enough, it wasn't only the hotel staff's frantic activities that were concealed beneath the surface. According to Julia the housekeeper, she'd had to grant one of the UML blokes access to another guest's bedroom before breakfast while the occupant was upstairs in the fitness room. Under orders to comply, Julia had nonetheless insisted on witnessing what he got up to, which turned out to be tampering with a mobile phone. Silly games. It was like
Big Brother
without the beachwear.

Naturally, the biggest factor in the kitchen's newfound cordiality was Mathieson, who had barely said a word the whole morning and had failed to even make eye-contact with Alison or Ger. Apart from a few grunted one-word answers, the only thing she'd heard him say (or more accurately overheard him say when he didn't know anyone else was nearby) was when he asked Charlotte whether the journalist had mentioned anything about the food last night. Charlotte replied that she didn't even know which one the journalist was, prompting the slightly desperate enquiry as to whether
any
of them had commented on the quality of the meal. Charlotte gave a diplomatic, but for that, transparently platitudinous answer: 'They all said it was nice.'

Alison loved that. Charlotte didn't have the devilment to be deliberately 127

offending him, but she couldn't have said anything less satisfying to his hungry ego.

Mathieson was noticeably less full of himself even before this inadvertent put-down, though this took the form of quietly seething as opposed to any genuine humility or penitence. Ger had fairly clipped his wings, and it wasn't like him to handle anything with good grace. Still, the tangible benefit was that he kept his mouth shut and Alison was able to enjoy some music on Mathieson's now degreased CD player while she worked, without the usual accompaniment of unsolicited comment and monomaniac whining. It wasn't her music, but it was one of Ger's albums that she had developed a liking for, and that she already knew would make her think of this place whenever she heard it in the future. This music had occasioned one of the first things Ger said to her that could be construed as in any way solicitous, in as much as it was evidence that he must have been paying her attention even when he didn't appear to be listening.

'There's one for you,' he'd muttered, indicating the CD player as a bassline picked its way ominously across the intro.

'How so?' she asked warily, listening to the lyrics. It was, as Mathieson was to frequently and scornfully point out, about an electric heater. She was waiting for the punchline.

'This is the first time you've been away from home, isn't it?' he asked. 'Away from Inversneck and the family hearth.'

'Yeah.'

'I'm no' sayin' you're a wee lassie or anythin', just. . . Bet it feels a bit of a leap. A bit scary, a bit exciting, a bit sad.'

'All of the above,' she admitted. 'But you've got to do it sometime.'

'That's what the song's about. The first thing you buy for your newly independent digs, maybe a heater or a kettle or whatever. It represents that big leap, from which there's no goin' back, into a wider, deeper, scarier,
older
world.'

Alison listened.

I won't melt your precious wings, so come on and plug me in.
She nodded. It was Ger's way of saying he understood she might be feeling a little vulnerable. He didn't strike her as the type to be eagerly on the lookout for damsels in distress, but it let her know she had a friend. She hadn't bought a heater (lack of ventilation in her room other than a postage-stamp-sized, grimy and cracked window made this unnecessary), or indeed a kettle, but she had been thinking a lot about the significance of this time. So long spent dreaming of spreading those precious wings, it was still daunting to do so, even when her maiden flight had only taken her to McKinley Hall. It wasn't much, but for the time being it was her new world, and 128