Iain Banks - The Business

Short rusty posts, which must once have carried the speakers for the parked cars, were arranged in serried rows across the weed-strewn lot. We parked alongside a handful of four-wheel drives and sport utilities by the projection building, which looked a lot like a concrete bunker, with no proper windows but a scattering of small rectangular apertures all facing in the direction of the absent screen. A long tube poked out of one hole.

'Miss Telman! Good to meet you. Jebbet E. Dessous. Call me Jeb, I don't answer to much else. I'll call you Miss Telman till I get to know you better, if that's all right with you. How was your flight? Cabin okay?'

Bustling out of a door in the projection building came a large, red-faced man dressed in the sort of speckled beige army fatigues the world has come to associate with the Desert Storm campaign. He wore a similarly camouflaged cap — incongruously, it was the wrong way round, as though he was trying to look New York Hip of about five years ago — from under which stuck tufts of hair that might have been sandy or just yellowing white. He thrust out one massive hand.

His grip was delicate, even sensitive.

'How do you do, Jeb. Everything's been good.'

He let go and stepped back to look at me. 'You're a fine-looking woman, Miss Telman, hope you don't mind me telling you that. My opinion of my dumb-ass nephew has gone up, and that takes a lot of doing, I'll tell you.'

'How is Dwight?'

'Oh, still stupid.' He nodded at the Jeep. 'Come on, I'll take you to him.' He looked up at the sky with a frown, then pulled his cap the right way round.

Jebbet E. Dessous' driving style was more muscular than that of Mr Eastil, who sat in the back, holding on tight and chewing on a cold cigar.

'Sing us a song, John,' Dessous shouted, as we swung round the outskirts of the deserted town.

'What do you want to hear?' Eastil asked. I got the impression this was not an unusual request.

'Anything.' Dessous looked over at me and tapped the centre of the Jeep's bare metal dashboard. 'Can't get any sort of sound system in these things,' he said. I just nodded.

John Eastil launched into an enthusiastic — no, make that just loud — rendition of an old song I vaguely recognised but couldn't place until he got to the chorus, when I realised it was 'Dixie Chicken' by Little Feat. Dessous tried singing along too, but was patently tone deaf.

We headed along the bottom of a small dry creek towards the jumbled shape of a sprawling stone-and-log-built cabin, which looked like it owed something to Frank Lloyd Wright. Probably an apology.

'Boy comes here to write,' Dessous shouted at me.

'I see. How's he doing?'

'Oh, got some play opening in New York, so he says. Dumbass fool probably financed it himself. Still wants to make it in Hollywood, get his name above the titles. That's what — well, you'll hear.'

'Uncle Freddy seemed to think Dwight had some mad scheme you wanted me to talk him out of.'

'I don't want to prejudge anything here, Miss Telman. I don't know you, don't know which way you'll jump. I just want you to be honest with the boy. He talks about you a lot. Might listen to you. Sure as hell doesn't listen to me.'

'I'll do my best.'

'Yeah, well, just give it your best shot.'

We stopped outside. Eastil stayed with the Jeep again while Dessous jumped out, strode to the door, hammered on it once and marched in. 'Dwight!' he hollered, as I followed him. 'You decent, boy? I got a lady here to see you!' He pulled his cap off and ruffled his hair.

The cabin's shady interior was all long, low couches, split levels and rugs over naked concrete both underfoot and on the walls. From a distant room came a whoop, and Dessous turned in that direction.

'Hold on, hold on, just backing up!'

We found nephew Dwight in a bedroom with a view over the creek. The broad bed was covered in sheets of paper; on the desk by the window stood an elderly Apple Mac. Dwight was standing in front of the machine, clicking with the mouse. He glanced round. 'Yo, Uncle. Hi, Kate! How the hell are you?' Dwight was a sharp-featured, awkwardly tall guy, only a little more than half my age; he was barefoot and wearing jeans and a dressing gown; his mid-length brown hair was half held in an unravelling pony-tail. He had a goatee beard and patchy stubble. He tapped the keyboard, turned the screen off and then came over to me, took both my hands in his and kissed me wetly on both cheeks. 'Mwah! Mwah! Great to see you! Welcome!'

'Hello, Dwight.'

'Your idea is what?'

We were sitting on a terrace overlooking the dry creek, Eastil, Dessous, Dwight and I, drinking beers. The stars were starting to come out. Thick jackets and a warm draught from the opened terrace doors kept us on the warm side of hypothermic.

'It's brilliant!' Dwight exclaimed, waving his arms about. 'Don't you think?'

I resisted the urge to suggest it was he who wasn't thinking, and just said, 'Run it past me again?'

'There's this, like, thing that looks like a ship's funnel or something, right? In Mecca, right in the centre. Where the Muslims go on pilgrimage to, okay? It's like the thing they're going there to see; this rock, inside this big sort of black shrouded building thing, in the centre of this humongous square in Mecca.'

'The Kaaba.'

'Cool!' Dwight looked delighted. 'You know the name! Yeah, the Kaaba, man. That's it!' He swigged from his bottle of Coors. 'Well, the idea for the movie is that…oh, yeah, like, hold on, this rock that's in the Kaaba, right? It's supposed to have fallen from the sky, be a gift from God, from Allah, right? I mean, obviously nowadays everybody knows it's a meteorite, but it's still holy, like, still venerated, okay? Or they think they know it's a meteorite,' Dwight said, leaning across the table and nearly putting one elbow in a bowl of dip. 'The idea for the movie is that it isn't a meteorite at all, it's a fuckin' spaceship!'

'Dwight!' Dessous said sharply.

'Aw, Uncle,' Dwight said, with a sort of exasperated laugh. 'It's okay. Kate's cool about it. Sometimes even women cuss these days, you know?' He looked at me and rolled his eyes.

'You can swear in front of women if you want, nephew, but don't swear in front of women in front of me.'

'Yeah, right,' Dwight said, casting his gaze briefly towards the stars again. 'Anyway,' he said, and with gratuitous emphasis went on, 'the idea is that the rock inside the Kaaba isn't a rock: it's a lifeboat, it's an escape pod from an alien spacecraft that blew up above Earth fifteen hundred years ago. The lifeboat half burned up in the atmosphere so that's why it looks like a rock, or maybe it's designed to look like a rock, right, so nobody tries to look inside it — I mean, maybe all this happened in some sort of, like, war, okay? So it had to be disguised, right? Anyway, it crashed to the ground in Arabia and got taken for this incredibly holy, like, thing. And, like, maybe it did something, you know? Maybe that's why it was venerated and stuff, because it did something that rocks don't usually do, that even meteorites don't usually do, like float above the ground or dig itself out of the sand or something or zap somebody who was trying to cut into it. Whatever. But it gets taken to Mecca and everybody comes to worship it and stuff, but…' He chugged some more frothy beer. 'But, being a lifeboat, it's sent out a distress signal, right?' He laughed, obviously greatly taken with his own free-wheeling inventiveness. 'And it's, like, taken all this time until now for the distress signal to get back to aliens and them to get here. But as our story begins — I mean, we might have had some sort of pre-titles stuff featuring the firefight between the spaceships and the lifeboat streaking down through the atmosphere, watched by shepherds tending their flocks by night, or whatever — anyway, as our story begins properly, the mothership's, like, here. And there's these alien guys inside the escape pod and they're just starting to wake up.' He sat back, eyes wide with enthusiasm. He spread his arms. 'What do you think? I mean, like, that's just the start, but what do you think of it so far?'