Iain Banks - Walking on Glass

She looked into his eyes, and he felt he was being assessed in some way; she took a deep breath, nodded at the table between them. "Shall we sit?" she said. It sounded like an odd thing to say. Sara drew out one of the small plastic chairs, her back to the window, and sat down. She watched as Graham sat down too. She had her hands on the table; he put his there, spread out like fans, thumbs just touching, as hers were.

"When do the rest of the people for the seance turn up?" he asked, then wished he hadn't. Sara smiled at him in a strange, distant sort of way. Graham wondered if perhaps she was on something; she had something of the disengaged look people often have when they've been smoking dope.

"I didn't have time to get the salad together," Sara said. "Do you mind if we have a talk first?"

"No; on you go," Graham said. There was something wrong; he felt bad. Sara wasn't the way she usually was. She kept looking at him with that odd, vacant, assessing gaze which made him uncomfortable, made him want to curl up and protect, not be himself and open out.

"I've wondered, Graham," she said slowly, not looking at him but looking at her own hands where they lay on the black surface of the table, "about how you... see the sort of relationship we've had." She looked up at him briefly. He swallowed. What did she mean? What was she talking about? Why?

"Well, I..." he thought as hard as he could about it, but he had had no time to prepare, to think about the subject. With some warning he could have talked about it perfectly easily and naturally, but just to be asked outright like this... it made things very difficult. "I've enjoyed it, to some extent," he said. He watched her face, ready to alter the way he was expressing himself, even alter what he was saying, according to the reception of his words on the white surface of her face. Sara gave him no clues, however. She was still gazing at her pale, thin hands, the lidded eyes almost hidden from Graham's view. A small white section of the scar tissue round her neck showed from the square neck of the T-shirt, by the pale column of her neck.

"I mean, it's been great," he said awkwardly, after a pause. "I realise you've had... well, that you've been involved with... somebody else, but I..." He dried. He couldn't think what to say. Why was she doing this to him? Why did they have to talk about this sort of thing? What was the point? He felt cheated, abused; sensible people didn't talk about this sort of thing any more, did they? There had been so much rubbish talked and written and filmed over the years; all that romantic crap, then the idealistic, unrealistic naivety of the sixties and the wide-eyed evangelism of the new morality of the seventies... all that had gone; people were less inclined to talk, more liable just to get on with it. He'd talked to Slater about this and they'd agreed. It wasn't so much a backlash, more a slack pausing for breath, so Graham believed. Slater thought it meant The End, but then to Slater little didn't.

"Do you think you love me, Graham?" Sara asked, still not looking at him. He frowned. At least the question was more direct.

"Yes, I do," he said quietly. It felt wrong. This wasn't the way he had envisaged telling her. This afternoon setting, the lightness of the room, the distance of black-painted table between them; nothing suited what he had to say, what he wanted to tell her he felt.

"I thought you might say that," she said, still staring at her long white fingers on the table top. Her voice chilled him.

"Why are you asking all this?" he said. He tried to sound a little more jocular than he felt.

"I wanted to know..." Sara began,'... how you feel."

"Feel free," Graham said, laughing. Sara looked at him, calm and white, and he stopped the laughter in his throat, killed the smile on his face. He cleared his throat. What was going on here? Sara sat for a moment, silent, while her fingers lay on the table, inspected and observed

Perhaps he should show her the drawings he'd done of her, he thought. Perhaps she was upset about something, or just depressed in some general way. Maybe he ought to try and take her mind off whatever it was. Sara said, "You see, Graham, I've deceived you. We have. Stock and I."

Graham felt his stomach go cold inside him. At the mention of Stock's name something happened deep inside him, a gut reaction of ancient, evolved fear and distress.

"What do you mean?" he said.

Sara shrugged jerkily, the tendons on her neck standing out like taut ropes. "You know what deception is, don't you, Graham?" Her voice sounded odd; not like hers at all. He formed the impression that she had thought this out, that like him she had thought in advance about the things she would say (but she, choosing the ground in advance, had the advantage), so that her spoken words were more like lines, something to be acted out on the tense stage of her body.

"Yes, I think so," he said, because she was silent, and it seemed they would go no further until her question was answered.

"Good," she said, and sighed. "I'm sorry you've been deceived, but there were reasons. Do you want me to explain them to you?" She looked up again, once more just for a second or so.

"I don't understand," Graham said, shaking his head, trying, by the expression on his face, the tone of his voice, to make it clear that he wasn't taking all this as seriously as Sara was. "How do you mean 'deceived'? How have you been deceiving me? I've always known about Stock, I've known about your relationship, but I haven't... well, I might not have been ecstatically happy about it, but I didn't -"

"Do you remember that time when it was raining and you rang up from... a callbox, I think you said?" Sara interrupted.

Graham smiled. "Of course, you were under the bedclothes with your Walkman turned up full blast to drown out the thunder."

Sara shook her head quickly, briefly, so that the movement looked more like some nervous spasm than a sign. She kept looking down at her hands. "No. No, I wasn't. What I was doing underneath the bedclothes was screwing Bob Stock. When you rang, and rang and rang, he took his... stroke from the pulses of the bell." She looked up into his eyes, her face quite serious, even unpitying (while his aching guts turned inside him). A cold, uneven smile crossed her face. "As a third party, you were quite a good screw. Rhythm and staying power."

He felt he could not speak. It was not the fact of the tawdry revelation itself so much as the tone of its delivery which hurt; this clinical, deadpan expression, the flat voice, even if this outer calmness was belied by that tensioned neck, the jerkiness of her movements and gestures. She went on:

"That time I talked to you from the window, when you were down in the street, the day we went to Camden Lock... Stock was behind me; he put the window down on my back. All I had on was that shirt. He took me from behind, you know?" The corner of her lips jigged nervously twice, then twisted with a tiny dry hint of a smile. "He'd always said he might do it, one of the times he was there when you called. I'd dared him to do it. It was very... exciting. You know?"

He shook his head. He felt he was going to be sick. This was absurd, insane. It was like all Slater had ever joked about, like all the most sexist caricatures of female deception. Why? Why was she telling him all this? What did she expect from him?

She sat on the far side of the circular black table, her hair severely gathered back, that thin, nearly translucent face brought to its own point, decks cleared for action. She was watching him now, he thought, the way scientists must watch a rat; some animal with its brain exposed, wires into it, hooked up to a machine with its tiny, electric, animal thoughts bleeped and phosphoresced, recorded by glowing green lines and the smoothly unrolled lengths of paper and the thin metallic scribbling of scratching pens. Why, though? Why? (And thought, does the rat ever know, could it ever comprehend, the reasons for the cruel uses it was put to?)