Iain BANKS
Espedair Street
ONE
Two days ago I decided to kill myself. I would walk and hitch and sail away from this dark city to the bright spaces of the wet west coast, and there throw myself into the tall, glittering seas beyond Iona (with its cargo of mouldering kings) to let the gulls and seals and tides have their way with my remains, and in my dying moments look forward to an encounter with Staffa's six-sided columns and Fingal's cave; or I might head south to Corryvrecken, to be spun inside the whirlpool and listen with my waterlogged deaf ears to its mile-wide voice ringing over the wave-race; or be borne north, to where the white sands sing and coral hides, pink-fingered and hard-soft, beneath the ocean swell, and the rampart cliffs climb thousand-foot above the seething acres of milky foam, rainbow-buttressed.
Last night I changed my mind and decided to stay alive. Everything that follows is... just to try and explain.
Memories first. It all begins with memories, the way most things do. First: making a cloud.
Inez and I made a cloud once. Seriously; a cloud, a real honest-to-goodness cloud up in the big blue sky. I was happy then, and doing something like creating a cloud just filled me with delight and awe and a delicious, frightening feeling of power and tininess together; after it happened I laughed and hugged Inez and we danced in the cinders and kicked up the black smoking debris which scorched our ankles while we jigged and swirled, choking, eyes watering, laughing and pointing at the vast thing we'd made, as it gradually drifted away from us.
The sooty lengths of straw smudged our jeans and shirts and faces; we made each other up as commandos, painting dry streaks on the other's brows and cheeks and nose. The smell clung to our hair and stayed under our nails and up our noses after we changed and only washed quickly , did not shower, and at dinner with her parents we kept glancing and remembering and grinning at each other, and when as usual I crept along to her room that night just as usually feeling foolish; if my fans could see me now; tiptoeing like some scared kid — the smoke smell was in her hair and on her pillow and the taste of it on her skin.
Now, making a cloud would doubtless depress me. Something to block the sun, cast a pall, rain soot, rain rain, and cast a shadow...
That was... long ago. We'd just finished working on Night Shines Darkly, or maybe it was Gauche; I can't remember. Inez always kept a diary and I used to ask her things about the past sometimes, but I grew too used to that, and now... now I'm sort of lost without her to tell me what happened when. Maybe it was '76. Whenever. I was there that summer. End of summer... September? Is that when they harvest? I'm a city boy so I'm not sure; a country lad would know.
Her parents were farmers, in Hampshire; Winchester was the nearest big town. I only remember that because I kept humming 'Winchester Cathedral' all the time, which was pretty ancient even then, and annoyed me almost as much as it annoyed Inez. The harvest had just been gathered and the fields shorn and the stubble lay about in long raggedy lines (Blonde on Blonde, I remember thinking), and crows flew about, twirling and dipping and bouncing when they landed, and strutting and jabbing at the hard dry ground. Inez's dad usually burned off the stubble by dragging a petrol-soaked rag behind his tractor, but Inez asked if she and I could do it that day, on the top field, because the wind was right and anyway it wasn't near a road.
So we walked sweating through the fields on a beautiful bright day; the fields were either crew-cut, still waiting to be set alight, or burned black-flat, so that from above the whole countryside must have looked like some haphazard, anarchic chessboard. We sweated up the hill with rags and jerrican, past a rusty old half-fallen building, all corrugated decrepitude, through a copse of tall trees (for the shade) and then to the field, where the passing shadows of small clouds moved slowly.
And we set fire to the stubble. Soaked the rags with gasoline and then dragged them on lengths of rope and chain down two sides of the huge square field, until the fire had caught in a pair of long crackling lines, and the bright orange flames surged through the dry straw, rolling yellow-red inside the dark grey bank of smoke while we stood, breathless, wiping sweat from our brows, kicking dust-dry clods of earth over the guttering flames of the rags we'd towed.
The blaze moved over the field, leaping down the rows of desiccated stalks and flinging them burned or burning to the sky; flames flicked curling against the wall of grey smoke like broad whips, leaving the scorched ground smoking greyly, tiny clumps still burning, miniature whirlwinds dancing madly while the wall of fire crackled and flowed and leapt beyond. Smoke flooded the sky, brown against the blue; it made a shining copper coin of the sun. I remember shouting, running down the side of the field, to keep pace, to see, to be part of it. Inez followed, striding down that smoky margin, arms crossed, face gleaming, watching me.
The piled stubble burned quickly, and the fierceness of the blaze made me squint; the heat of the flames hurt my eyes, and the smoke when it swirled, backing up momentarily, filled my nose and mouth and made me cough. Rabbits ran away from the wave of fire, white tails bobbing into the wood; fieldmice scampered for ditches, and the crows circled away and swooped for the tree tops, croaking distantly over the sizzling voice of the fire.
When the flames began to die, reaching the barren edges of the field, Inez looked up, and there was our cloud; a thunderhead of white crowned the vast fist of grey-brown smoke we'd sent up. It towered over us, slowly drifting away with the rest of the puffy white clouds, its white-capped head plain and perfect above the lumpy stalk of swirling brown smoke. I was amazed; I just stood and stared, mouth open.
I thought even then it looked like a mushroom; it was an apt description, and as the cloud and the last of the smoke drifted off, casting its shadow over a village in the next valley, you couldn't help but make the obvious comparisons... but it was beautiful; and it hadn't hurt anybody, it was part of the way country life was run, part of the seasons' cycle, glorious and sublime.
Normally, I'm sure I'd have thought there must be some way of using the experience; there had to be an idea, a song in there somewhere... but I didn't, maybe because we'd just finished the album and I was sick of songs, especially my own, and this whole rustic thing was supposed to be a complete holiday from work. Can't fool the old subconscious, though; if it sees a fast buck to be made out of something that's happened, it'll use it, whether you like it or not, and — much later — I realised that that was just what had happened.
One of the ideas for the 1980 world tour came from that sight, that day, I'm sure. We called it the Great Contra-flow Smoke Curtain. It cost a fortune to get right and ages to set up, and it was only because I was so insistent that we persevered with it; nobody else thought it was worth the trouble. Big Sam, our manager (and, for a manager, remarkably close to being human), couldn't see past the columns of figures, never mind the columns of smoke; total apoplexy; just couldn't understand my reasoning, but there was nothing he could do except shout, and I have a gift for listening quietly regardless of the incoming decibels. Listening quietly, but not at the right time.
Story of my life, or a sub-plot at least. Either I know I ought to do something but I just don't get round to it, or I keep hammering away furiously at something I end up profoundly regretting later. The Great Contra-flow Smoke Curtain was an instance of the latter. We got the damn thing to work eventually, but I wish we hadn't. I wish I'd listened, and I'll blame myself to the end of my days for being so determined to impose my own will on the others. I didn't know what was going to happen, I couldn't have guessed the eventual, awful, result of my expensive pig-headedness, and nobody ever said they held me responsible, but... The point here is, however, that the cloud Inez and I made was used; money was made out of it. Exploitation will out. It has its own survival instinct.