Iain Banks: Against a Dark Background

‘Ssh,’ she told her, cuddling her against her chest.

Still squatting, Xellpher waddled over towards the car’s doors, taking his communicator out of his pocket as he did so.

All the windows burst at once, spraying them with glass. The car shuddered.

She heard herself scream, clutching the child to her and falling down to the floor of the car. She bit the scream off. The car shook as more shots slammed into it. In the sudden silence, Xellpher muttered something; then there was a series of sharp concussions. She looked up to see Xellpher firing his hand gun out the shattered window towards the cliff. More shots cracked into the car, blasting splinters of wood into the air and puffing dust and little bits of foam from the hide seat coverings.

Xellpher ducked, then jumped up, firing back for a moment then diving to the floor and changing the clip in his gun. Shots tore into the car, smacking the metal and making it hum. She could taste the odour produced by Xellpher’s gun, acrid and burnt at the back of her throat. She glanced down at the child, wide eyed but unharmed beneath her.

‘Code zero, repeat, code zero,’ Xellpher said into the communicator during a brief lull in the firing. He slipped the machine back into his pocket. ‘I’ll open the door on the lee side,’ he told her loudly but calmly over the noise of puncturing metal and whining ricochets. ‘The drop is only ten metres onto snow. It might be safer to jump than stay here.’ The firing thrummed against the car, juddering it. Xellpher grimaced and lowered his head as a cloud of wood fragments sprayed off the wall by one smashed window. ‘When I open the door,’ he told her, ‘throw the child out first, then drop yourself. Do you understand?’

She nodded, afraid to try speaking. The taste at the back of her throat was not the smoke from his gun; it was fear.

He pushed himself back across the wooden slats to the door; the firing went on, sporadic gusts of furious noise and vibration. Xellpher smashed something, reached and pulled; the door swung in and along the wall. She could see their skis in their bins on the outside of the car, chopped off at window level by the gunfire. Xellpher looked out.

His head burst open; it was as though his body had been hit by some invisible cannon ball, throwing it back from the opened door and thumping against the other wall of the cable car.

She couldn’t see properly. She only started screaming as she realised the warm sticky stuff in her eyes was his blood.

Another shot from that side tore so me of the seats out and sent them bouncing to the floor; the whole car shook and swayed. She cuddled the child, hearing her scream and hearing her own screams, then she looked up as another blast set the car rocking from side to side again. She crawled towards the door.

The blow was astonishing, beyond comprehension. It was as though she had been hit by a train, by a power-hammer, by a comet. It hit somewhere below her chest; she had no idea where. She couldn’t move. In an instant she knew she was dead; she could have believed she had been torn in half.

The child was screaming beneath her. Almost at the door. She knew the girl was screaming because of her mouth, her face, but she couldn’t hear anything. Everything seemed to be getting very dark. The door was so close but she couldn’t move. The child dragged herself from under her, and she had to struggle to keep her head up, using one of her arms to support herself.

Child stood there, shouting something, face puffed and tear-streaked. So close to the door, but she couldn’t move. Ending now. No way to bring up a child. Silly, stupid, cruel people; like children, like poor children. Forgive them. No idea what’s next, if anything. Nor they. But forgive. Poor children. All of us, poor frightened children. Fate, nothing in your grubby creed’s worth this…

The grenade flew through the door, hit Xellpher’s body and landed clicking on the slatted floor behind the child. The child hadn’t seen it. She wanted to tell her to pick it up and throw it away, but she couldn’t get her mouth to work. The child kept screaming at her, bending down and screaming at her.

She reached up and with the last of her strength pushed the screaming child out of the door, a second before the grenade exploded.

Sharrow fell howling to the snow.

La, la, la, la-la;

Can you see-ee any clearer from a glass shore?

Hmm, hmm, hmm, hmm-hmm…

One line was all that came back to her. She stood on a fused beach with her arms folded, her boot heels scuffing the grainy, scratch-dulled surface, her gaze sweeping the flat horizons, and she half-whispered, half-sang that one remembered line.

It was the slack-water of the atmosphere, when the day winds blowing onto the land had died, and the night-breeze, delayed by a warmth-lidding overcast, had yet to be born from the inertia of archipelagic air.

Seaward, at the edge of a dark canopy of overhanging cloud, the sun was setting. Red-tinged waves fell towards the glass beach and surf frothed on the scoured slope, to be blown away along the curved blade of shore towards a distant line of dully glinting dunes. A smell of brine saturated the air; she breathed deeply, then started to walk along the beach.

She was a little above average height. Her trousered legs looked slim beneath her thin jacket; black hair spilled thick and heavy down her back. When she turned her head a little, the red light of the sunset made one side of her face look flushed. Her heavy, knee-length boots made rasping noises as she walked. And as she walked, she limped; a soft bias in her tread like weakness.

“ … see-ee any clearer… ” She sang softly to herself, pacing along the glass shore of Issier, wondering why she’d been summoned here, and why she had agreed to come.

She took out an antique watch and looked at the time, then made a tutting noise and stuffed the watch back in her pocket. She hated waiting.

She kept walking, heading along the tipped shelf of fused sand towards the hydrofoil. She’d left the ageing, second-hand craft moored-maybe a little dubiously, now she thought about it-to some indecipherable piece of junk a hundred paces or so along that unlikely shore. The hydrofoil, its arrowhead shape just a smudge in the dimness, glittered suddenly as it rocked in the small waves hitting the beach, chrome lines reflecting the ruddy glare of the day’s dying light.

She stopped and looked down at the motley red-brown glass surface, wondering just how thick the layer of fused silicate was. She kicked at it with the toe of one boot. The blow hurt her toes and the glass looked undamaged. She shrugged, then turned round and walked the other way.

Her face, seen from a distance, looked calm; only somebody who knew her well would have detected a certain ominousness about that placidity. Her skin was pale under the sunset’s red reflection. Her brows were black curves under a wide forehead and a crescent of swept-back hair, her eyes large and dark, and her nose long and straight; a column to support the dark arches of those brows. Her mouth-set in a tight, compressed line was narrow. Wide cheek bones helped balance a proud jaw.

She sighed once more, and sang the line from the song again under her breath. The tight line of her mouth relaxed then, becoming small, full lips.

Ahead of her, a couple of hundred paces up the beach, she could see the tall, boxy shape of an old automatic beachcomber. She walked towards it, eyeing the ancient machine suspiciously. It sat, silent and dark on its rubber tracks, apparently deactivated for lack of flotsam, waiting for the next tide to provide it with fresh stimulus. Its battered, decrepit casing was streaked with seabird droppings glowing pink in the sunset light, and while she watched a foam-white bird landed briefly on the flat top of the machine, sat for a moment then flew away inland.