Iain Banks - The Business

'But why is that sad?'

I looked at his big, dark, melancholy face. 'Because there are few things more forlorn and useless than a damp, used firework, and when I look back it just seems so pathetic that we used to treasure the damn things.' I shrugged. 'That's all.'

The Prince was quiet for a while. A few more rockets lit up the skies above Harrogate. 'I used to be frightened of fireworks,' he said. 'When I was smaller.'

'The noise?'

'Yes. We have fireworks on many of our holy days and on the monarch's birthday. My father would always insist that I let off the biggest and loudest of them. It used to terrify me. I would never sleep the night before. My nurse would stop my ears with wax, but still when I set off the larger mortars the blast would all but knock me head over heels, and I would start to weep. This displeased my father.'

I didn't say anything for a while. We watched the tiny, silent sparks climbing, spreading, falling in the distance.

'Well, you're in charge now, Suvinder,' I told him. 'You can ban fireworks if you want.'

'Oh, no,' he said, and looked mildly shocked. 'I could never do such a thing. No, no, they are traditional and, besides, I came to tolerate them.' He smiled hesitantly. 'I would even say that now I love them.'

I put my hand out and touched his arm. 'Good for you, Prince.'

He looked down at my hand, and seemed to be about to say something. Then his secretary B. K. Bousande appeared at the door, clearing his throat.

Suvinder Dzung looked round, nodded, then smiled regretfully. 'I must go. Good night, Kate.'

'Good night, Suvinder.'

I watched him pad quickly, silently away, then turned back to look out of the dark window, waiting for more of the tiny lights climbing above the town, but there were none.

'You bitch.'

'You asked for it.'

'I was just trying to help.'

'So was I.'

'What do you mean?'

'Well, you spoke so highly of this Dr Pegging I thought I'd give him something more to work on. You can afford it. Think of the poor man's fees. And I think you've got a crush on him anyway. Gee, I imagine calling up a complete stranger thinking they're your best friend is probably worth a whole year's extra treatment.'

'Ex-best friend.'

'Whatever.'

'Oh, Kate, don't be so horrible!'

'I'm sorry, Luce. Bygones?'

'I suppose.

Word came through from Jebbet E. Dessous' people that the middle of the week was far too late to meet up; they wanted me there a.s.a.p.

So: Uncle F's Lancia Aurelia to Leeds-Bradford, where some sort of fuck-up by British Regional Aeroflot — a fairly regular occurrence judging by the bitter comments of some of my fellow non-passengers — meant I had to hire a helicopter from a company in the airport; I phoned our corporate lawyers to let them know we'd be charging BA for the relevant amount on my company credit card. I'm with the Prince on this one: I don't like helicopters either, or light aircraft for that matter, though in my case it's just because of the statistics.

Anyway, to Heathrow in a Bell Jetranger with a business-like pilot, who thankfully didn't indulge in any small-talk, then the tiny-windowed luxuriously upholstered cigar tube that is Concorde. No free seats and I was sat next to a smug advertising account director who was himself invasively well upholstered and determined to make the most of both the free champagne and four hours of enforced intimacy. I slipped my earphones on and turned up the Walkman. Sheryl Crow at volume shut him up.

I fell asleep after the album finished, and woke up as we were decelerating through bumpy clouds. I was in that drowsy, disconnected state where the bits of the brain that dream dreams and come up with crazy ideas haven't been brought back on message by the rational part, so that everything goes a bit haywire, and I remember watching the US coast, far, far below, and thinking, Well, here I am, and Stephen's in Washington DC; at least if there's some comprehensive world-wide catastrophe we'll be on the same continent. In the event of some deep-impact type disaster — if I survived — I could start walking and attempt to find him. Yes, and Mrs B might have died tragically and we could start a new life together…

I shook myself out of it and looked out my US passport, to speed the formalities when we landed.

JFK, an American 737 to Chicago (iffy lunch but the coffee had improved), a slim commuter Fokker to Omaha and a very noisy military-looking Huey to Jebbet E. Dessous' vast property on the Nebraska/South Dakota border; eighty thousand acres of plains, cattle, scrub, trees, roads like a map grid and all the dust you could eat. The co-pilot who helped strap me in insisted I wear a pair of heavy olive-green headphones for the journey. My hair, which had survived intact for four flights, one ocean and half a continent but which has always reacted badly to hats and serious headphones, was going to need fixing later on.

Half an hour in we hit some low-level turbulence over a series of pine-covered ridges. My lunch began to let me know it hadn't really settled down properly and was thinking of relocating. I considered the potentially onomatopoeic name of the helicopter I was travelling in, and tried to take my mind off my nausea by thinking of other modes of transport with dubious names, but only got as far as Sikorsky and the Cess in Cessna before we reached calm air again and my lunch decided that — on balance — it was happy where it was.

We landed in late afternoon in a dusty airport on the outskirts of what looked like a small deserted town, kicking up a great rolling ochre cloud.

'Welcome to Big Bend, ma'am,' the pilot said.

'Thanks.'

I took my time unclipping my harness and disconnecting the headphones while the dust settled. An ancient Willis Jeep in US army colours roared up and sat just outside the limit of the slowing rotor blades.

The breeze was cold and sharp and dry beneath a lapis sky stroked with feathers of high pink cloud. I could hear the steady crack-crack-crack of heavy machine-gun fire from some way off. The co-pilot dumped my bags in the back of the open Jeep and jogged back to the Huey, which was powering up again.

'Ms Telman.' The driver was a grizzled but healthy-looking guy a decade or so older than me, dressed in army fatigues. He stuck out one hand. 'Eastil. John Eastil. That all your luggage?'

'How do you do. Yes, it is.'

'I'll take you to your cabin. Hang on.' He spun the Jeep's wheel and gunned the engine; we roared away from the Huey. 'Sorry it's not a limo.'

'That's all right. Good to get some fresh air.' Actually I was pleasantly surprised by the way Mr Eastil drove: it was a lot more relaxing than Uncle Freddy's floor-the-pedal-and-damn-the-speed-bumps banzai style.

'Take you long to freshen up, Ms Telman?' Eastil asked. 'Mr Dessous would like to meet with you directly.'

'Five minutes.'

My cabin was a ten-minute drive away; a sprawling wooden thing set in amongst the pines overlooking a slow-flowing river winding through a shallow valley carpeted with long, pale grass. While Eastil waited in the Jeep outside I hung up my suit carrier, washed my face, squirted perfume behind my ears, dragged a brush through my hair, a toothbrush across my teeth and plonked the sad-faced monkey on a bedside table. The walk-in provided a skiing jacket, which I pulled on as I strode out to the Jeep.

We drove back into town, through its deserted streets and out the far side. We arrived at an old drive-in movie theatre; a huge field shaped like a baseball ground with the gantry for a vast screen at the wide end, though there was no screen, just the slim web of girders of its support structure. There were a lot of trucks and heavy rigs scattered around, and two big mobile cranes, one of them with its jib extended and its body raised up off the ground by its extended jacks.