Iain Banks: The Business

'Aye, well, ye'd better no.'

'Kate, is your mother very young? I take it your father's not around, is that right? That's a nice wee dress, but it's a bit thin for this weather, and too small for you. You look hungry and too small for your age. Do you go to school every day? Are you doing well there?'

'Ahm goin hame.'

'Ready to roll, ma'am.'

'Thanks, Gerald. Just a minute. Kate, turn round. I'm serious. This is serious. Do you want to stay here for the rest of your life? Well, do you? Kate: what do you want to be when you grow up?'

'…Hairdresser.'

'Do you think you'll get to be one?'

'Mibby.'

'Kate, do you know of all the other things you could be?'

'…Ma pal Gale wants tae be a air hostess.'

'Mon, Katie. Ahm freezin.'

'There's nothing wrong with being a hairdresser or an air stewardess, Kate, but I think there might be a lot of other things you could be, if you wanted. If you knew. Let me talk to your mother. May I talk to her?'

'Katie, ahm fuckin freezin, so ah am.'

'Missis…you're no a bad wummin, are ye?'

'No, Kate. I'm not a saint, and I've used my share of Irish pennies in my past, but I'm not a bad woman. Am I a bad woman, Gerald, would you say?'

'Certainly not, ma'am. Always been very nice to me.'

'Katie, mon…'sfuckin brass monkeys oot here, so it is.'

'Ye could gie us a lift, then. Zat okay, aye?'

'Really? Well, yes.'

'Aye. Come oan, Simon. We're get tin a ride home in this wummin's braw big car. Wipe yir feet.'

'Eh?'

And that is how I met Mrs Elizabeth Telman, a Level Two executive in the Business, one rainy Saturday afternoon in the autumn of 1968, outside Coatbridge, to the east of Glasgow.

Mrs Telman was one of those people who always seemed about six inches taller than she really was, to me. Even now when I think of her, she appears in my memory as a tall, elegant woman, as lithe and slim as my mother was wee and dumpy, yet the two were within a couple of inches of each other in height and not really that different in build. I suppose Mrs Telman just held herself straighter. She had long, raven hair which she only stopped dyeing, gradually, in her seventies (my mother was mousy brown, though I inherited hair somewhere between fair and blonde, apparently from my maternal grandmother). Mrs Telman had a wide mouth and long fingers and an accent that sometimes sounded American, sometimes English, and sometimes something else entirely, something tantalisingly foreign and exotic. There was a Mr Telman, but he lived in America; the two had been estranged since barely a year after their marriage.

Mrs Telman had Gerald drop Simon at his house and then took me to the local shop where I bought my two replacement bottles of fizz. We arrived at my house just as my mother was staggering up the path with her carry-out, fresh, if that's the word, from the pub.

I think Mrs Telman decided she wasn't going to get much sense out of Mother right then, and so arranged to return the following morning.

My mother threatened to slap me for talking to a stranger. That night, very drunk, she cuddled me to her, her breath sweet with the smell of fortified wine. I tried not to squirm, and to appreciate this unusually drawn-out burst of physical affection, but I couldn't help thinking of the rich, subtle, beguiling odours in Mrs Telman's car, some of which seemed to come from the car itself, and some from her.

She reappeared, to my surprise, the next morning, before my mother was up. Once my mother was dressed we went for a drive. I was given a Milky Way and got to sit up front with Gerald, which was good, but I couldn't hear what was going on in the back because of the glass partition, which was annoying. Gerald kept me entertained by telling me what he thought the other drivers were saying and thinking, and letting me work the indicator switch on the dashboard. Meanwhile my mother and Mrs Telman sat in the back, swapping my mother's Woodbines and Mrs Telman's Sobranies, and talking.

That night I got to sleep with my mother for the first time in years, all the way through to the morning. I was hugged even more fiercely, and I puzzled over her hot tears.

The next morning Gerald picked my mother and me up and took us through to Edinburgh, to Mrs Telman's huge, grand red sandstone hotel at the end of Princes Street. Mrs Telman wasn't there herself: she was off doing something important somewhere else in the city. We went to a big room, where — to my consternation and my mother's embarrassment — I was washed again by a large lady dressed like a nurse, given a medical inspection, and then measured and dressed in a scratchy shirt, skirt and jacket that were the first entirely new clothes I'd ever worn. Part of my horror at all this was because I thought we were in a public room where anybody might walk in and see me in my knickers; I didn't realise that these rooms were Mrs Telman's, that we were in her suite.

I was taken to another room where a man gave me lots of sums and other tasks to do; some were purely arithmetical, some were questions about lists, some consisted of looking at little diagrams and then looking at others and deciding which one fitted with the first lot, and some were more like little stories I had to complete. They were fun. I was left alone with a comic while the man went away.

Mrs Telman came and took us to lunch in the hotel. She seemed very happy to see me, and she kissed my mother on both cheeks, which made me jealous, though I wasn't sure of whom. Over lunch, while my mother and I swapped conspiratorial looks as we tried to work out which cutlery to use, I was asked if I wanted to go to a special school. I recall being horrified. I thought special schools were where bad boys were sent for thieving and vandalising, but after this was cleared up and I was assured I would get to go home of an evening, I agreed, tentatively.

I started at Miss Stutely's School for Girls in Rutherglen the next day. I was a year behind the others, but physically no bigger than any of my classmates, and shorter than several of them. I was picked on for three-quarters of that first day, until I sent a girl home with a broken nose following a fight during afternoon play-time. I was almost thrown out and had to sit patiently through several stern talkings-to.

A tutor came to our house in the evenings to give me extra lessons.

Mrs Telman found my mother a job in an office-machine factory in Stepps; the same factory Mrs Telman had been on her way to inspect when her car had picked up a puncture. We ate better, we had proper furniture, a phone and, soon, a colour television. I found I had a lot fewer uncles than I'd thought I had, and Mother stopped walking into doors.

When I left Miss Stutely's and entered Kessington Academy in Bearsden, we moved from our terrace in Coatbridge to a semi in Jordanhill. My mother was now at another factory, helping to make things called computers, not adding machines. She never married but we went on holidays with a nice man called Mr Bullwood. Mrs Telman came to visit us every few months, and always brought book tokens for me and record tokens, clothes and little things for my mother. My mother died suddenly at Easter 1972, while I was on a school holiday in Italy. We had taken buses, ferries and trains to get to Rome, but I flew back alone. Mrs Telman and Mr Bullwood met me at Glasgow Airport and took me in Mrs Telman's car — still driven by Gerald — straight to the cemetery in Coatbridge. It was a warm, sunny day; I remember watching her coffin disappearing behind the curtains at the crematorium, feeling worried that I could not seem to cry.

A smallish man with shaking hands, wearing a shiny and badly fitting suit with a black armband up by one shoulder, came to me afterwards and breathed whisky over me, telling me with tears in his rheumy red eyes that he was my father. Mrs Telman put an arm round my shoulder and I let myself be guided away. The man shouted things at us.