Iain Banks - Walking on Glass

Graham caught a glimpse of the bike's number: STK 228T. It was the first time he had seen the bike since that night in January when he first met Sara, when they had arrived here in the taxi. He hadn't thought to look at the bike properly then, and had always avoided coming up this way when he knew Stock was about. The rider straddling the machine got off it, took its key out and went - not entirely steady on his feet, Graham thought - to the door of Sara's flat, and put a key into the lock. Seconds later he was gone.

"Did you think he looked six foot?" Graham said, looking at Slater as they sat down. Slater nodded, took a drink.

"Easily. Looked a bit tipsy, I thought. What a hunk, though, eh?" He waggled his eyebrows up and down theatrically. Graham let his shoulders slump, and looked away.

" Do you mind?" he said. Slater nudged him.

"Don't take it so hard, kid. I'm absolutely certain it'll all work out. Believe me,"

"Are you really?" Graham said, turning to his friend.

Slater looked into Graham's face for a few seconds, watching him bite his lower lip, then his own lower lip trembled and finally a smile burst out over Slater's face as he turned away, shaking his head, sniggering.

"Well, to be honest, no, but I was trying to be encouraging. Good grief, how on earth should I know?"

"Jesus," Graham breathed, and finished his half pint of bitter. He stood up, sighing. Slater looked at him unhappily.

"Oh God, you're not going out in a huff, are you?"

"I'm just going outside for a little bit... to have a look round. I won't be too long."

"You know," Slater said, weakly slapping the table top beside his drink, "Gates, you're going to have to get those lines right before we hire the ice-breaker." The last few words were barely comprehensible as Slater collapsed, forearm on table, head on forearm, his back shaking as he laughed, muffled grunts of mirth echoing off the floor beneath him. Some of the older customers in the bar looked at him suspiciously.

Graham frowned deeply at Slater, wondering what on earth he was talking about, then left and went for a quick, stealthy walk round the back of Half Moon Crescent and up a little side alley, listening for any shouts or arguments from inside the flat. There was nothing. He went back to the pub, where Slater had bought him a pint. As Graham sat down Slater started to shake and his face went red; tears appeared in his eyes, and finally he had to splutter, "Fucking Norwegian bastards!" He fell sideways on the bench seat and doubled up with silent, spasmic laughter. Graham sat, feeling terrible, hating Stock and Slater and feeling sick about Sara and what she might be doing right now, and half-wishing that the pub landlord would throw Slater out.

Luckily, despite his threats. Slater did not tell Sara he and Graham had been there that day. They sat in the park later that week, getting slightly drunk on the champagne, and Slater talked about lots of things, but not that.

"I've just had this great idea," he announced from the grass, holding up his plastic cup. They had almost finished the champagne.

"What?" Sara said. She sat against the tree, Graham's head on her shoulder. He was pretending to be asleep so that he could keep his head there, near her soft, warm-scented skin.

"Interdopa," Slater said, waving the cup around at the still blue sky. This hippy turns up on your doorstep, bums a fag off you and shoves a lump of crumpled silver paper into your hand..."

"Put me down for the inaugural run," Sara laughed gently. Graham wanted to laugh, too, but could not; better to rest here, feel her lovely body shake, tremble under his head and touch...

He still remembered that feeling; weeks later he could still shiver at the thought of it. It was like the first time he had ever spent a night with a girl, back in Somerset. The next day, with his friends in the pub at lunchtime, watching a local football match in the afternoon, having dinner with his parents that evening, later watching a film on television at a friend's house, he kept having flashbacks; a flesh-memory of the feeling of that young woman's skin would suddenly make him shudder and his head swim. He recalled with some shame that he had been naive enough at the time to wonder if this feeling was love. Luckily he hadn't talked to anyone about it.

He could see the White Conduit ahead now, and he remembered how wretched he had felt that afternoon. Since then he had been back here once again when he knew he wasn't expected. He'd said to Slater he was going home, when they parted at lunchtime in the sandwich bar in Red Lion Street, but in fact he came up here, and saw Stock arrive on the bike not long after he started watching. This time Sara was visible, moving about in the room she usually greeted Graham from when he pressed the entryphone buzzer. Stock had let himself in, and Sara had not reappeared.

Graham felt sick, and left soon afterwards. He got throwing-up drunk all by himself in Leyton that night.

The day in the park had been good, though. He had kept his head on Sara's shoulder for ages, until his back and neck ached, but she hadn't appeared to mind, and once had even stroked his hair, absently, with one caressing hand. Ed had come back later on; he'd had a half-hour's row on the Serpentine.

"You should've come down when I was nearer the front of the queue, you should," he told them. He had bought some small dumpy cans of McEwan's Export, and handed the others one each. He sat down to read.

"You see?" Slater said loudly, still lying down, his voice slightly affected by the champagne he'd drunk. This man is a fucking socialist at heart and even he doesn't realise it!"

"Give it a rest, Dick," Ed told him mildly.

Slater poured the last of his champagne over his own forehead. "He calls me Dick ," he gasped in a strangled voice, and rolled over onto his face. "Me: the communal ranger, superhom, the pinko pimpernel, the man in the Faberge mask; I'll scratch the mark of Zero on your foreskin, you -"

"Shush now," Sara ffitch said, her voice resonating in her chest, buzzing Graham's head with glorious sensation. Slater went quiet; he started snoring lightly a few minutes later.

A pretty girl, blonde, wearing a short bouncy skin and a thin pink top through which Graham could just make out the outlines of her nipples, passed him on Penton Street. He watched her walk by, but didn't make it obvious.

He had always worried about this. He didn't want to be sexist, but how the hell did you not look at attractive women? He didn't say anything to them, or try to touch them; he'd never dream of that; he despised the stupid idiots who did that sort of thing; they made him ashamed to be a man; they were the sort Slater accused of "carrying their brains in their scrotums" (or did Slater say "scrota'?); but looking...as long as it didn't embarrass the woman... that was all right.

Especially now, or maybe, with a bit of luck, until now. It had been a strange, awkwardly sexual time for him. He had been worrying - of all things! - about masturbating.

He found it difficult, almost unpleasant to think of Sara at night, in bed, before he went to sleep. But to think of other women, previous sexual encounters, seemed wrong too. It was absurd, it was crazy, it was like being pubescent again, or worse; it didn't even make much sense in terms of the beliefs he had worked out long before about sexual fidelity, but there it was. He hated the idea of pornography, even soft pornography, but he had almost come round to the idea that it might be better to buy one of the glossy girlie magazines and accept the inhuman, labial beauty of those seductive image-women; it would at least absolve the release of his sexuality from the responsibilities of the real world.

"Most people's ultimate sexual fantasies, their idealised desires, are built of clay," he recalled Slater saying. Slater had just discovered that most of the weight of a glossy magazine came from kaolin, the same clay used in a morphine mixture to clog up people's guts when they had the runs. Graham seemed to remember Slater had been talking about gay photo-mags, but the point was the same.