The Steep Approach to Garbadale (8 page)

‘It’s the middle of the fucking night! The zoo’ll be closed, you idiot! Look. Look!’ Alban holds up his watch. ‘It’s half past four in the fucking morning!’

‘That’s not right. Your watch must still be on UK time or something. ’

‘Then why does the cab’s clock say the same?’

‘That’s not the clock - that’s the fare.’

‘Believe me, that is not the fare. I’m asking the driver.’

He asks the driver, whose command of English seems mysteriously to have disappeared since he accepted the fare.

‘What was that?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What were you asking him?’

‘Whether the zoo would be open at five in the morning.’

‘What did he say?’

‘He just smiled and talked a lot of . . . I don’t know.’

When they get there, the zoo is extremely closed and they nearly lose the cab for the return trip because Fielding wants to negotiate a reduced tariff on account of the fact that the driver should have known the zoo would be closed and was blatantly exploiting their innocent touristic ignorance and he threatens to summon the Tourist Police if there indeed is such an entity and Alban has to calm both him and the taxi driver down and only persuades the latter to take them back to the centre of town again by handing over the whole two-way fare and an arguably extortionate tip in advance, something that even then he only gets away with because Fielding has gone off to shout loudly at - and kick - some nearby chain-link fencing.

Before, or possibly after, with brains totally fried, they’re in the World Famous Tiger Balm Gardens, going on all the rides and staring goggle-eyed at the various bizarre and totally twisted tableaux and paintings and dioramas that depict in vibrant, pulsating colour, with little left to the imagination, the suite of utterly grisly tortures that await those who smuggle drugs into Singapore or take drugs while they are there or are in some other way bad. There seems to be some sort of ghoulishly barbaric competition going on between the local belief system’s grisly squad of supernatural demons and the jolly japesters of the various Singaporean law enforcement agencies concerning who can be most inventively horrible, and it is profoundly not what you want to see when you’re up to your eyelids in a whole unholy cocktail of supremely illegal and remarkably powerful drugs, not all of which are yet safely - ha! - actually inside your body or that of your partner in crime.

They wander around, assaulted by appalling images on all sides, bludgeoned by the screams - happy screams, definitely
happy
screams - of small children and impressionable adults, damp and getting damper as they stroll and stagger through clouds of water vapour being sprayed from path-side sprinklers studded amongst the flowers and shrubs.

Riotous profusions of insanely vivid blooms flourish everywhere; greenery of a thousand shades and wild outburstings of flowers fill every speck of un-concreted, ill-asphalted ground in the gardens. Alban keeps wanting to stop and look at all this fabulously fascinating flora and maybe take notes or something or take photographs with the disposable camera he’s bought for the purpose - in fact, with one of the two disposable cameras he now has, because he forgot he’d bought the first one - but Fielding continually hustles him onward, demanding they exhaust the possibilities of the various exciting rides before they start looking at fucking flowers. Throughout the city Alban has sensed this vast, extravagant energy of growth and greenness forever trying to burst out through all the cement and tarmac, clawing at every missed nook and cranny in this fanatically self-controlled city, punching from every vacant patch of ground larger than a postage stamp like a violent reproof.

They get kind of locked into the water slide, which provides a fine view of the harbour and the docks and the ships at the quay-sides and anchored offshore and steaming slowly along the nearer shipping lanes, not to mention Sentosa island, they think, which is where they’re going next or possibly have already been to. The extra soaking at the bottom of the ride each time makes no difference whatsoever to their clothes and helps keep them cool. Then at the end of one turn, Fielding doesn’t get out and Alban realises his cousin is asleep and snoring. In a way this is fine because it means they can go back to their hotel, but in a way it isn’t really fine at all because Alban’s forgotten which hotel it is they’re staying in and has been trying to think of its name for the last two hours or so. He’s checked his pockets but can’t find a key card and he’s looked in Fielding’s wallet and pockets too and for the last half-hour or so he’s had to contemplate desperate measures like just approaching people at random and asking if they recognise him or Fielding and might remember, say, which hotel bar, reception or restaurant they might have happened to see them in, though he suspects this plan may be a little on the optimistic side.

He’s hauling a stumbling, incoherent Fielding along the path to the exit, thinking that maybe by some miracle he’ll find a taxi driver in the rank who remembers taking them back to their hotel some time over the last week or so, when a tall tanned white guy in a baseball hat and shorts and a bum bag comes up to them, all smiles, and greets them both by name.
Fuck, we’re rumbled; it’s the pigs
, Alban has time to think, but he’s wrong; it’s just friendly cousin Steve - Linda and Percy’s eldest - the guy who’s never at home because he’s always somewhere in the world installing or maintaining or replacing container terminal cranes but whom Alban and Fielding have both met at a couple of family weddings over the last few years. Which is great, though of course cousin Steve has absolutely no idea which is their hotel either.

While Alban is desperately trying to make small talk and remember how people behave when they’re straight, Fielding wakes up with a start and stands staring at Steve with a stunned, terrified expression on his face and is unquestionably just about to start gibbering or screaming or throwing punches or running away or possibly all of the above when Alban throws himself on Steve’s mercy by claiming they’re both suffering mightily from some dodgy prawns consumed a couple of hours ago - the near-hallucinatory effects of which may admittedly have been accentuated by a beer or two - and could do with some help.

Steve’s hotel is nearby. He takes them there and they straighten out sufficiently in his room while he’s away summoning a doctor to be able to bribe the medic when he arrives so that he accepts and even confirms their story. Fielding wants to score some more drugs off the doc, but that’s just going too far.

Somehow they’re able to have a couple of beers in the hotel bar with Steve and push down a few morsels of a Vietnamese meal before making their excuses and heading back for the thankfully now remembered hotel and crashing for the next fourteen hours.

 
The reason he’d wanted to get drunk in the first place - being brutally honest - was because he was feeling sorry for himself. The reason he was feeling sorry for himself was he’d been rejected, again, by Sophie. She worked for the family firm, too, in the US sister company. When he’d started working for Wopuld Games Ltd he’d imagined they’d bump into each other all the time, but they almost never did. She’d been there in Singapore at the trade fair, though.

‘Shit, that was close,’ Fielding muttered. There was a beeping noise from somewhere and the big car’s nose dipped as it braked sharply. A speed camera zipped past. Fielding was watching the rear-view mirror intently. He flashed Alban a grin. ‘Made it!’

Alban had to turn his face away. The exit for Auchterarder and Gleneagles disappeared behind them as the car accelerated again, heading for Glasgow.

 
He’s too young to be there, of course, but he is, all the same. He’s with her as she comes down from her room, down the wide, gleaming staircase under the tall, south-facing window and walks across the creaking parquet of the main hall towards the kitchen, and he’s there as she
turns into the short corridor that leads past the gunroom and the inside log store and the drying room to the cloakroom, and he watches as she stops and chooses what to wear to go outside.

He woke from the doze and the dream - the recurring nightmare, he supposed, if it hadn’t become so familiar and if he didn’t know the ending so well by now - to find Fielding humming along to the last
Coldplay
album. They were just turning off the M8 where it passes through the centre of Glasgow, about ten minutes or so from Beryl and Doris’s house.

Fielding grinned. ‘You okay?’

Alban rubbed his face, scratched through his beard and yawned. ‘Fine.’

 
He stood, resting a moment, in the sunken garden, south-west of the house on the far side of the abbey ruins, the rake held at the top in both hands and snugged in under his chin. He breathed deeply, taking in the sharp tang of wild garlic. A strong gust of warm wind moved the branches of the Scots pines along the western edge of the garden, shifting their shaggy, asymmetric tops slowly while the nearby stand of birches swayed together, like dancers. Blackthorns and wild roses rustled in the breeze, white and red blooms bobbing over the long grasses and the herringbone patterns of the brick pathway.

He looked at the wall of the abbey, hanging over the little valley like a grey cliff surmounted by the pointed arches of its empty windows, like a series of giant grey whalebones leaning against the sky. There was some ivy in a few places on the abbey’s ruined walls, but last year he’d been to the gardens at Dunster Castle, not far away, just south of Minehead, and seen much more interesting climbers on the walls of the castle; stuff like
Solanum laxum, Clianthus puniceus
and
Rosa banksiae
‘Lutea’. They’d look good on the abbey’s walls. He knew he’d taken notes at the time of his visit to Dunster but couldn’t recall offhand in which direction the wall with the climbers had been facing. Had it been south? This was the abbey’s south wall he was looking at. South should be perfect. They weren’t the kind of plants that needed a lot of shade. He’d have to see about getting cuttings.

Movement on the path from the house.

Cousin Sophie, in a long white T-shirt and black leggings. Limping. She waved and hobbled down towards him. Looked like she could barely flex her right knee at all.

‘What happened to you?’ he asked.

‘Fell off me ’oss, guv.’

Her gleaming red hair was held back in a ponytail. Her mega T-shirt said,
Welcome To The Pleasure Dome
. One of his school pals, Plink - Robbie Alford - always seemed to find a double meaning in everything. Alban could just hear him saying something like, You can pleasure my dome any time, love. Alban thought about saying this, then thought perhaps not.

‘See,’ he said instead. ‘Horses. Dangerous animals. Could have told you.’

He meant it lightly and he’d thought he’d been smiling when he’d said it, but she seemed to take it badly, scowling and saying, ‘Anyway, how are your balls today, cousin?’

He felt himself rock backwards slightly. ‘Ahm, they’re, ah, fine, thanks,’ he said, thoroughly fazed.

‘Super,’ she said acidly, nodding at the rake he was holding. ‘Well, don’t let me keep you.’ She turned and started back up the path.

He didn’t say anything. He watched her go. When she was almost out of sight, near the corner of the ruined abbey, she stopped, still turned three-quarters away from him, only her upper body visible, and looked down and seemed to nod downwards once, very sharply, as though she was angry or upset. Then she went on, copper hair bobbing slowly away out of sight.

He was annoyed with himself. He should have said something like, Great, actually; had a couple of really painful wanks last night, thanks. That would have got her back. He shook his head and gripped the rake properly, getting back to work. You never thought of the right thing to say at the time.

 
It was late afternoon of the same day. Alban and Sophie had been given the job of setting the table for a big family dinner that evening, with extra guests invited from amongst the many local friends of Uncle James and Aunt Clara. A couple Andy and Leah had known when Lydcombe had been their home had also been added on.

The table in the dining room was extended to its fullest extent, and had to be polished. The finest silverware was brought out and also had to be polished. It was surprisingly warm work; they opened the dining room’s windows, letting in a cooling breeze. Sophie’s face shone, little beads of sweat at her temples. She limped upstairs to put her hair up and swap her leggings and baggy T-shirt for shorts and a thin blouse. Later she opened a couple of the buttons, fanning herself.