Hol’s seen them too. ‘Think that’s him?’ she says. She’s staring over to where the lights were, south, heading south-west, though we’re too far down in the half-sunken, tree- and hedge-lined lane for her to have any chance of seeing them from here. It’s so dark you can’t tell that, though.
‘Only lights I could see,’ I tell her.
‘Me too,’ she says, arming her way into her fleece.
‘Where’s the wipers?’ I ask Hol. It isn’t raining now but drops from earlier are still dotting the screen.
She reaches, flicks a stalk. ‘Here.’
The little Polo feels dainty, tinny and delicate after the tank-like Volvo. I crunch the gearbox a couple of times but Hol doesn’t complain.
‘If he’d turned the other way, into town,’ I say, ‘we’d probably not have seen him.’
‘So it might not be him we’re following.’
‘Maybe not.’ The Polo’s engine makes lots of noise but doesn’t make it move very fast. It hangs on okay in the corners, though.
‘I take it Guy isn’t in the habit of doing this? Going off in the middle of the night?’ Hol asks.
‘Never,’ I tell her. I had to resist the strong urge to take a moment to close the garage doors when we ran out of the house a couple of minutes ago. At least Guy had closed the front door of the house.
‘Think he might be going off to end it all?’
‘Worried he might be,’ I confess, glancing over at her.
Hol has her mobile out, puts it to her ear. ‘Trying calling him. You never know.’
‘I think he might be going back to Yarlsthwaite,’ I say, suddenly realising. ‘To the tower. Or the cliffs.’
‘Maybe he just wants to get there under his own power,’ Hol says. ‘Climb it himself, to prove … that he can, without people trying to help.’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t think so.’
The car park at Yarlsthwaite is empty. There’s no sign of the Volvo at Ullisedge community park either: another clifftop location notoriously popular with suicides. And doggers, I’ve heard, though there are no obvious signs. The night is mild and the gentle breeze smells damp and fresh.
‘Where now?’ Hol asks.
‘Leplam lake,’ I tell her.
We head under the motorway at the Ormiston interchange, make for the lake. No sign there either. There used to be places where you could just drive straight from the bit beside the proper car park into deep water, but the council have closed that section off with a berm and boulders and there are chained bollards protecting the rest.
‘I always thought, if I wanted to end it all,’ Hol says, ‘I might just drive really fast down the motorway and then into … I don’t know. Some bit of concrete. A bridge support, maybe. Though they seem to have protected all that stuff with crash barriers. Or take an ordinary road, and hit a tree, or swerve into the path of a truck. Only that seems a bit selfish; hard on the trucker. Not that I’ve a lot of time for – what?’
‘We can go back that way anyway,’ I tell her.
‘What way?’ she asks as I spin the car round and head for the car park exit and the road.
‘Just this place I know,’ I say.
Cresting the moor road, approaching the bridge that arches high above the motorway – the bridge that I usually reach from the other side, by walking for nearly an hour over the fields and the moor, where I’ve stood and stared at the traffic and watched for random jams – we can see that there’s a car – an estate – sitting in the middle.
Its headlights are pointing towards us. Getting closer, as we start to descend, we can see that it is the Volvo, and the driver’s door is hanging open. Closer still, from the place where the bit of relatively modern approach road gives out onto the bridge proper, we can see there doesn’t seem to be anybody around, and nobody in the car either, unless they’re lying down or hiding.
‘Oh, fuck,’ Hol says softly.
I can feel my mouth going dry. The traffic beneath us is flowing normally, though, in both directions. It’s not even five yet, but there’s a respectable amount of trucks and cars labouring or thundering or just humming along beneath us, and all of it without the benefit of lots of flashing blue lights.
We drive onto the bridge, stop in front of the Volvo, get out.
The car’s engine is silent. The headlights look a normal kind of brightness so it can’t have been here that long; the battery needs replacing and doesn’t hold much of a charge.
Guy’s head pops out from behind the rear of the car, looking down its grimy flank at us. ‘Fuck me, can a man get no peace to contemplate his imminent demise? What’s up? Has Rob attacked somebody else, or Ali come back with the rozzers?’
‘Christ, you had us worried,’ Hol says, walking up to where Guy is sitting on the little kerb, a metre or so behind the rear of the car. His stick lies at his side.
‘Did I now?’ he asks. ‘How thoughtless of me.’
‘Hi, Dad.’ We both sit on the kerb with him. Then I get up again, turn the Volvo’s lights to sidelights only and close the door. I sit back down.
‘Just … heard you going, taking the car, not closing the garage door,’ I tell him.
‘Yeah, well, didn’t want to risk leaving time for somebody to come out and try to stop me,’ Guy says. He pulls out what looks like one of Haze’s joints, lights it and inhales deeply. There are the remains of two joints in the gutter between his feet. ‘You know, with some spurious … concern that I might be off to do what people commonly refer to as “something stupid”, i.e. top meself.’
‘That what you were going to do?’ Hol asks.
‘Might still.’ Guy shrugs, glances behind us towards the railings and traffic moving beneath. ‘You two could help push me over. Fuck Dignitas.’ The traffic makes a coming-and-going noise like surf on fast-forward.
‘Was that really what—’ I begin.
‘Oh, yes,’ Guy says, pulling hard on the joint. He puts his head back and it’s like that bit in The Wrong Trousers when a light goes off in Gromit’s kennel and you suddenly see he’s been crying. Guy’s upper cheeks and the sides of his nose are wet with tears. ‘Took some extra opiate, just so I could move better, not trying to overdose … But yeah, that was indubitably the fullness of my attention, oh yes. Intention, I mean. And there; that’s why.’
‘What?’ Hol asks.
‘Think it’s going into my brain, Hol,’ he says, his voice hollow. ‘Can’t think of the right words, increasingly.’
‘Everybody gets that,’ Hol says.
Guy shakes his head. ‘I never.’
Hol puts her arm round him. Guy hesitates, then puts his head on her shoulder. I do the same from the other side. To my surprise, after a moment or two, he rests his head on my shoulder.
‘Well,’ Hol says, ‘it’s your life, Guy, but I don’t think either of us is sorry we disturbed you.’
He says nothing for a while, then sighs deeply, wheezing a little. ‘Oh,’ he says at last, ‘I just want to be shot of all of you, and let you be shot of me. I just wanted to say, Fuck you all. Not so much to you, not to the … everybody here this weekend, but to everybody else; to the world as revealed in wank-rag tabloids and any quick channel-hop. That was the mistake I made earlier: put the telly on, caught some repeated drivel; game shows, show-pony sport, special-agent spy wank. That’s what I want to say Fuck You to; to the world and his wife and his fuckwit children, to all the idiots bought off with puerile telly and corrupted sports and brainless movie product and fame for the fucking sake of it, and the slow but steady rehabilitation of torture at all levels, whether it’s watching some witless D-list celeb scranning witchetty grubs and showering in dung beetles or hearing that our brave fucking boys have ripped the balls off another teenage rag-head in some-or-other dusty Benightistan. All that shit. All that fucking shit.’
Hol is silent for a while. Eventually she says, ‘Yeah, well, we haven’t exactly covered ourselves in glory, our generation. But there’s always anothe
r one coming along. They might do better. Even when it’d be less painful to just make our peace with despair and get on with it, there is always hope. Whether we like it or not.’
‘Not for me there isn’t, Hol,’ Guy says, and just sounds weary.
Hol sighs. ‘Which is always going to colour your judgement of everything else, isn’t it? Even if it feels like all that’s happened is you’ve escaped your last illusions and you’re finally seeing things clearly.’
Guy laughs silently against me. Or maybe he’s weeping. But I think it’s a laugh, in the end. ‘Yeah, Hol,’ he says, reaching down and flicking one of the dead joints along the side of the kerb. ‘We are all of us in the gutter.’ He pulls on the lit joint. Because his head is still on my shoulder, some of the smoke goes into my eyes, making them water. ‘But some of us,’ he wheezes, ‘are staring down the drain.’
I feel Hol hug him gently.
‘Anyway,’ he says, coughing. ‘I still couldn’t jump, in the end.’ He pulls on the joint again. ‘More of a coward than I thought.’ He laughs. I feel him shiver. ‘Thought I could at least control something, take fucking charge of something, impose my own fucking schedule on what was happening to me, rather than just being … prey to it.’ He raises his head from my shoulder, looks at the Volvo. ‘Specially as, like I say … all these little … attacks of aphasia, lately.’ He looks at both of us in turn, grimacing as he turns his neck this way and that. ‘My bum’s cold,’ he announces.
He starts trying to get up and we both help him; he opens the estate’s tailgate and sits in there, looking hunched and shivery. I pull the blanket from the car and wrap it round him, then I sit back on the kerb again. Hol stands, instead, arms crossed, on the road, looking down at Guy.
‘But then I chickened out,’ he tells us. ‘I mean, I’d worked out how I could have levered myself over the railings using my stick and everything … but then I started thinking that maybe it doesn’t look high enough to kill me outright, and that would be a bit shit, and then what about the poor fucker I throw myself in front of, even if I wait till there’s a gap in the traffic? Then I thought I could wait for a Range Rover or a big Merc or a Beemer or an Audi – something flash, with a personal twat plate – try to fucking aim for that, on the plausible grounds that whoever was driving it would be a rich fucker and like as not deserved a bit of compensatory trauma in their pampered fucking life.’ He shakes his head. ‘Then I thought, But what if they’ve got kids in the car? Even if they are spoiled, over-indulged brats, do I have the right to …? So I gave in to fucking … compassion in the end. Me! Things have come to a pretty pass, I tell you.’ He hangs his head, shakes it. He pulls in a deep, wheezing breath, and looks up again, blinking.
‘And then I realised I was just looking for excuses for myself, and I wasn’t going to do it anyway. So I gave up and sat meself down here to have a smoke and think about it.’ He smiles at both of us and says, ‘And so, my friends, I have smoked, and I have indeed thought about it. And …’
He doesn’t say any more. He just looks away, towards the downward brow of the hill where the floor of the cutting and the motorway fall away and where all the white lights blink into existence and all the red lights suddenly disappear.
There’s a silence then, filled from beneath with the rise and fall of the noise of the traffic, and I smell the diesel fumes, laid out across the cold, early-morning breeze, and I wait for Guy to say more, or for Hol to say something else, but neither of them does say anything, so eventually I ask, ‘Do you want to go back home now, Dad?’
8
‘Doesn’t look much bigger, really, does it?’ Hol asks.
It’s summer and the sun is coming and going behind lots of little puffy white clouds, painting the ground and half the curved wall of the quarry with sliding patterns of shade. We’re standing on the loop of the driveway, just in front of where the house used to be. We’re looking through a chain-link fence into the quarry. Big yellow trucks, made toys of by the distance, trundle about the place.
‘I did think it would look … bigger,’ I agree. ‘Fast work, though. Didn’t think the house would be gone this quickly.’
Guy died two months ago, in the Bewford hospice. He was only there for the last week; I managed him at home until then.
The day Dad died, I stayed in the spare room at Mrs Willoughby’s, which was kind of her. I was alone in the house the second night, and felt almost nothing at first, but then woke up in the middle of the night with an already sopping pillow, crying. I sobbed quietly for some time, curled up round a pain in my belly I worried for a while might be the start of my own illness, my own cancer, somehow inherited despite everything, but it was gone by the morning and has never reappeared.
The Power of Attorney action was dropped by the council a week later, coincidentally on the same day I got the notice informing me the house had to be vacated in ten days, after the final appeal against the quarry company’s land purchase was turned down.
Not everybody was there for the funeral. Ali was in Indonesia and couldn’t make it; Rob felt embarrassed by his behaviour on that last weekend we were all together, and declined. I got to speak to him on the phone, at his office in London, after a few days of persistence, but he still couldn’t be persuaded.
The evening of the funeral – the wake was back here, and fairly subdued – I ended up sitting on a couch between Hol and Pris, crying a little and being hugged from both sides and falling asleep between them. They saw me to my room together. I fell asleep on top of the bed with all my clothes and one shoe still on. I had a dream that I woke up to find somebody standing over me in the darkness, holding a tape-measure, but it wasn’t anybody I recognised, and my imagination may have added the detail of the tape-measure afterwards.
The estate isn’t settled yet but the lawyer says there ought to be some money coming to me after Guy’s many debts are settled; maybe twenty-five to thirty thousand, which is not exactly life-changing – my life has changed quite enough already, frankly – but also not to be sniffed at.
Hol’s cheque for two thousand did clear. She was borrowing from Paul and Rob to pay me back.
The only part of my inheritance I’ve received so far is a name and address:
Mrs Elisabeth McKelvie
28B Tonbridge Avenue
Maroombah
NSW 1124
Australia
The lawyer had instructions to pass this on to me as soon as Guy died. I’m still trying to decide what to do with this. Maybe nothing. Maybe I’ll just write a letter; that would seem the most obvious thing. Or maybe I’ll fly off to the other side of the world without telling anybody and turn up on her doorstep and ring the bell. That would be fitting. Though, knowing Guy, this could turn out to be a joke, and she’ll stand there blinking uncomprehendingly at me and we’ll have no connection of any sort whatsoever.
Since the funeral, Rob and Ali have split up. Rob is now based in Mountain View, California. Ali is in Dubai.
Pris seems happy with Rick; we hardly hear from her. They’re still on the south coast.
Paul has been offered a promotion within his company that will mean relocating to New York City. The news leaked and there is already talk of him being deselected as Labour party candidate for the Bewford City constituency at the next election.
Haze – amazingly – appears to be on the run in France after certain financial irregularities came to light at the women’s football team he managed, following his abrupt dismissal. Hol says it’s hard to know whether this is hopelessly tawdry or actually quite impressive.
Hol and I live together, for now, in her little flat in Maida Vale. I have the boxroom, which has just enough space for a sort of upper-bunk single bed with a desk underneath – this is where I play HeroSpace – and a clothes rail. There is no room in the tiny kitchen for a washing machine; we go to a launderette. Hol is paying me back the remainder of what she owes by still covering all the rent. I chip in for half the other outgoings. This suits both o
f us. Hol is fairly house-proud herself, but I keep the place extremely neat and tidy.
No more has ever been said about the night that Hol came into my room, or what might have happened, and Hol is a little more formal and correct with me than she used to be, I think.
I’m not sure I really like London very much; it’s so noisy and frenetic and people seem to struggle to find the time to be polite to each other. But, still, it’s exciting, and we’ve been to see lots of places I’d only ever heard of or seen on TV or film, which is fun. I suppose London will do for now.
I can’t decide if I want to move back up here at some point, or not. I miss it, but Hol says sometimes missing somebody or something is just a natural part of your life, and doesn’t mean you absolutely have to go back to that person or place.
Tricky one.
Also, Hol takes me along to as many films and previews as she’s allowed to, which is nice of her. I’ve started a film review website of my own to try to look as professional as I can, though not all the distributors and preview theatres are falling for this. The website is doing okay, actually. I can’t dissect a film the way Hol can, or put it in the context of others going back to way-back-when, but apparently I have some fresh and original insights. So there.
‘Well, Kit,’ Hol says, giving the chain-link fence a rattle just for the hell of it, then dusting her hands off, ‘in the end we’re just standing here looking into a big fucking hole in the ground.’
‘Yes,’ I say, and take one last look round at the expanded emptiness of the quarry. ‘We are.’
‘Never mind.’ She looks at her mobile. ‘Come on,’ she says, stuffing it back in her pocket. ‘Time for tea with Mrs Willoughby.’
We get back into Hol’s little faded red Polo and drive off.
Iain Banks, The Quarry
(Series: # )
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