The Steep Approach to Garbadale (7 page)

‘Whit are ye talkin’ aboot? If ye take aff all yer clothes, of course ye’re fuckin’ naked.’

‘No, but,’ Tango says, ‘what I’m sayin’ is, if ye’ve got a tattoo, ye canny take
that
off. So you’re never totally naked. De ye no’ see?’

‘Ah see yer aff yer chump, that’s - Oh-aye, it’s Yakuza. How’s it hingin, Yak?’

Al says, ‘Afternoon all.’

The new arrival proves to be a fat wee guy with hilariously long dark hair. He’s wearing jeans and a black leather waistcoat and looks like a roadie for Black Sabbath circa 1970. Two narrow-set eyes, a large nose and a fat spliff all poke out through the curtains of hair on either side of his face. He looks puzzled when he sees Fielding, then sort of nods. The only other person present is Tango, with whom Al requests a word. They head out of the room. Fielding sits down on the couch, thinking how good it’s going to be to get out of here. There’s a familiar-looking silvery box sitting by Tango’s television, wires joining one to the other and a couple of games controllers lying on the carpet beneath the TV. The wee fat guy sits and looks at Fielding while Fielding looks at him, determined not to be stared down. Fat Boy smokes prodigiously, creating a thick grey screen in front of what little of his face isn’t obscured by hair. After a while he grins and holds the joint out. ‘Want a toke?’

Fielding nearly does, just because he’s expected to say no, but sense prevails. ‘No, thanks. Driving.’

The hairy guy nods, sucks another lungful. He holds it, then breathes out. Fielding thinks about opening the window again. He suspects he’s getting stoned just sitting in the same room. ‘Don’t believe we’ve been introduced,’ the hairy guy says at the end of the next exhalation.

‘Fielding.’

‘Aw aye. Ah’m Burb.’

Fielding smiles perfunctorily and nods. The hairy guy sees Fielding glance at the games machine. ‘That’s mine,’ he says. ‘Goanae play a game, me an’ Tango.’

‘Really.’ Fielding spots the DVD lying on the shelf holding the TV, recognises the cover immediately, and grins broadly.

Alban and Tango come back. ‘Maybe just a day or two,’ Al’s saying. Slung over one shoulder is a small backpack, not the scruffy great torso-sized squaddy-issue monster Fielding had seen earlier.
Guess I
haven’t been quite as persuasive as I’d hoped
, Fielding thinks. Still, one thing at a time.

Al looks at him. ‘You fit?’

‘Vamanos muchachos,’ Fielding says, standing.

‘See you later, big man,’ Tango says, seeing them to the front door. ‘Nice tae meet you, Fielding. Anytime.’

‘Too kind. You take care.’

Through in the living room, Fielding can see Burb turning on the Spraint Corp V-Ex games machine. Into the slot is slid the disc that bears the legend
Masters of EMPIRE!

2

O
nce, in the middle of the night, in the centre of a great plantation, he’d been drinking with a couple of his coworkers; good guys who’d become pals. They were on Speyside, in what had been a big forest, staying in an old caravan the forestry people had provided. They’d been drinking whisky and cans of beer and playing cards. He’d been making steady money at poker through the evening until a couple of wild bets towards the end of the night when he’d lost most of what he’d accumulated and they all ended up fairly close to where they’d started. They’d had a cup of tea and a biscuit about three o’clock, then collapsed snoring and smelly into their sleeping bags. Tomorrow was supposed to be a full working day but they knew the foreman was away in Inverness until at least noon, and they were ahead of schedule.

He awoke before dawn with a painfully full bladder. He stumbled in the darkness, stepped into his unlaced boots and went out to pee wearing just his briefs.

It was late summer and a clear night. He stood in the bright light of a full moon, a few feet away from the caravan, peeing into the tumble of branches near the side of the road. They’d been clearing the trees, the final cut, bringing down the tall Sitkas, stripping them with machines like giant pencil sharpeners, carting them off on big trucks. What was left - what he could see as far as a ridge a kilometre distant - was a chaos of smashed branches and torn pieces of smaller trees; a pale jumble of fractured wood like something from a volcanic disaster or the first days of a war. He looked up at the stars, then back down at the frozen fury of shattered wood. The pee went on. It had been a very full bladder. He’d better drink some water when he went back in or he’d have a head in the morning.

The fox trotted silently round the corner of the caravan and stopped, head slightly to one side, looking up at him. It was beautiful. Its coat shone in the moonlight: inky black, brilliant white and a red he wasn’t sure he could actually make out in the moonlight or was just seeing because he knew it was there. The light was so intense he could see the moon reflected in the creature’s eyes. A hint of moisture glistened on its black nose.

He looked back at it and slowly tipped his head to one side, too. The fox took a couple of cautious steps forward, putting its nose near where his urine was landing. He was very tempted to twist his body ever so slightly and direct the piss straight at it - it was, he thought, what most of the guys would have done - but he didn’t. The fox took a delicate sniff, then looked up at him again. He was about out now, the stream of pee falling back and breaking up. He smiled at the animal and shrugged. The fox trotted round and past him, head slightly down, giving him one last glance before it disappeared round the other end of the caravan.

He hadn’t ever mentioned this to anybody, not even to the guys the next morning. It wasn’t all that remarkable, anyway - they saw deer and squirrels all the time and sometimes stoats and wild cats and pine martens - but it was something he wanted to keep to and for himself. He wondered if the fox had lived in the forest and was having to leave because it was all torn up now, or if it was moving in after new opportunities had been opened up for it, or if it didn’t - and perhaps couldn’t - care. He wondered if the animal had somehow known that men had created this monoculture plantation over the ruins of earlier forests, then created the chaos, and whether it could in any sense blame them.

 
Alban sat watching the A9 unroll towards the silver snout of the car, the three-pointed star like some indiscriminate gun sight. They were heading away from Perth on the long downward slope towards the plain of the River Earn, a Sitka forest on one side of the car, the view across the flood plain to the northern slopes of the Ochil Hills on the other. A black and red iPod linked into the car’s entertainment system was playing old dance music, from Fielding’s wild years. Alban could feel the slim bulk of the folded letter in the back pocket of his jeans. He was remembering a conversation from years ago.

The music in the car changed from something Alban barely recognised or remembered to the Chemical Brothers’
Block Rockin’ Beats
. Fielding whooped and turned up the volume. ‘Oh yes!’ he said, smiling broadly at Alban. ‘Remember this? Remember Singapore? Oh, fuck! That was fucking crazy, man.’

‘Yeah,’ Alban said. ‘I remember.’

 
‘Let’s get drunk.’

‘Woh! Not like you, cuz. What’s the problem? Don’t answer that. Good idea. Let me just say that right now. However, I have a counter-proposal. A not mutually exclusive counter-proposal re the above.’

‘Fielding, what the hell are you talking about?’

‘Let’s get wasted as well.’

‘Wasted? You have drugs?’

‘Most certainly do. Never travel unprepared.’

‘You brought drugs to Singapore? Are you fucking insane? Haven’t you been paying any attention at all? Do you know what they do to people who import drugs to this place?’

‘Alban, get real. I’m not a fucking dealer, just a user. And if I did get caught, so what? I’m rich, I’m white, I’m male, I’m an executive with an internationally respected games company with lawyers to command and, as of the other night, I’m on first-name terms with the British High Ambassador of Commissions or whatever he is.’ He laughed, waved his arms. ‘What could possibly go wrong?’ He laughed louder.

It was 1997. They were in Singapore attending a toys and games trade fair, promoting
Empire!
(unashamedly, in an ex-imperial outpost, Alban had pointed out) and the other products of the Wopuld company to wholesalers. The day’s work was done, the trade fair over, their display was being packed away in the exhibition centre and they had a free evening plus a day off to follow so they were in a quiet corner of the main bar of Raffles, drinking Singapore Slings because Fielding had this thing about Geographically Appropriate Alcoholic Beverage Consumption - Manhattans in Manhattan, etc.

‘You fucking lunatic. What have you got?’

‘E, coke, dope. Some K, but it’s rubbish.’

‘Jesus H. Christ. We’d better take it fast just to get rid of it and remove the evidence.’

‘That’s more like it.’ Fielding raised his own glass and nodded at Alban’s. ‘Drink up. We’ll have a rickshaw race back to the hotel. Loser buys the drinks all night.’

‘I am
not
having another fucking rickshaw race. My last guy was four foot tall and a hundred and three. I wanted to get out and take over and tell him to sit in the back and relax while I wheeled him back to whatever old folks’ home he’d wandered out of.’

‘Well,
I’m
racing. And I’m deeming you to be racing, too, like it or not. If you lose I’m just going to walk out of wherever we end up drinking and you’ll either have to pay up or do a runner. Don’t think I won’t.’

‘I might just do the runner. If they catch us, you’ll be the one in possession.’

Fielding gasped stagily and picked up his jacket. ‘That’s not very cousinly of you.’

‘Yeah, well, family bonds don’t mean what they used to.’

‘Ooo!’ Fielding camped. ‘What’s all that about?’

‘Nothing. Never mind.’

 
It’s the next day and Alban is seriously fucked up. He seems to have lost a day or a night, and he appears to be living the current waking period in some sort of shuffled order, slabs and tranches of experience and awareness traincrashing into one another in no discernible order whatsoever, just a blurred riffle of sensations and events thrumming past, some of which might be flashbacks - he’s not sure.

‘History is finished. It’s all over! Even Deng said it’s glorious to be rich. Capitalist democracy has won and the rest is mopping up. That Jap guy was right.’

‘Bullshit. You need to read more science fiction. Nobody who reads SF comes out with this crap about the end of history.’

‘Science fucking fiction? Do I look like some sort of fucking anorak?’

‘Oh, fuck off.’

‘Why have we stopped?’

‘Oh my God. We’re going to die.’

They were in a cable car that went from this enormous grey building with giant circular windows to a low island just offshore which seemed to be called Semosa or Samosa or Sentosa or Samoa. They couldn’t exactly tell because even when they looked right at the signs for the place, the letters seemed to change in front of their eyes. (‘Samosa, he was some sort of fascist general or something, wasn’t he?’ ‘Or one of those fried triangles. Don’t ask me.’) The last time Alban looked at the sign it appeared to say Lampedusa, and that’s just totally wrong. He didn’t even risk mentioning that one to Fielding.

There doesn’t seem to be any good earthly reason for there to be a cable car going from this tall building to this low-lying, just-offshore island, so that’s exactly why it seems absolutely necessary to make the trip but now the cable car’s come swinging to a stop over the slack brown waters of the strait beneath and they’re just hanging there in the baking sunlight, looking out through the hazecrammed sky towards the distant towers of the city centre. They’re sharing the car with about a dozen Malays and Chinese and having to mutter, which must look suspicious in itself, only Alban has no reliable idea how loud they’re really talking and that’s paranoia-inducing all by itself.

‘Have we taken all the drugs?’

‘Most of them. Will you keep your voice down?’

‘What if they’ve stopped the cable car because they know we’re on board and we’re carrying?’

‘Don’t be stupid. Why would they stop the car? What are they going to do? Rappel down from a helicopter?’

‘It’s suspicious.’

‘It’s not suspicious, it’s just one of those things.’

‘Don’t trot out bourgeois clichés at me, you—’

‘Just try to keep calm.’

‘I am calm. This is calm. This is me being calm. See; I am calmness personified.’

‘Let go of my shirt.’

But it was the middle of a warm, intensely humid night and they were walking the streets, through the stink of shit and rotting fruit and perfumes and within the echoes of low-rise buildings, stepping over scuttling cockroaches the size of mice that looked the size of rats under the lens of chemical enhancement and passing by sudden courtyards where a tiny, ancient, leathery man is skinning what looks like a monkey on a bloodstained table, smoking as he pulls the furred skin away from the white and pink beneath, and open doorways to temples reveal guys in loincloths and surrounded by fumes and incense and wild bunches of flowers standing chanting, facing barely seen altars; snapped shots of imagery while they pace with jackets over shoulders and their shirts sticking to their bodies and their hair sticking to their scalps because they’ve just been to a club and they’re still hot from dancing and talking to two girls who might not have been real girls and then there was nearly a fight and Alban had to pull Fielding out of it and the only tune they can remember from the club is
Block Rockin’ Beats
and it’s impossible to cool down because the humidity is like walking around in a wetsuit constantly being topped up from a kettle until they hail a taxi just for the air conditioning and sit listening to the merry chime, chime, chime noise from the device that makes that noise when you go over the Singapore speed limit and Fielding insists on being taken to the zoo because he’s heard they have polar bears there in a huge chamber that’s kept at the sort of constant, chilly temperature that is acceptable to your average top land predator of the Arctic wastes.