Iain Banks: Walking on Glass

Ashton had started after him; Steven heard his trotting steps behind him; so he ran, ignoring the older man's shouts until eventually he outdistanced him. Ashton had shouted one last thing at him, but Steven had been too far away, breathing deeply, an expression of triumph on his face. He'd got away from them. It was a small escape, a little rehearsal, but it was something.

So now he walked, still angry with them, but glad to be away, glad to have salvaged something from yet another of their attempts to grind him down, make him feel small, drive him into despair.

They wouldn't succeed that easily! They had surrounded him with horror and stupidity, with all the paraphernalia of this so-called-human excess, and they expected it to bring him down, to reduce him still further from the once proud state he had fallen from, but they would not succeed. They were trying to wear him down, but they would fail; he would find the Key, he would find the Way Out and escape from this... joke, this awful solitary confinement for Heroes; lie would leave them all behind and take his rightful place in the greater reality again.

He had Fallen, but he would Rise.

There was a war somewhere. He didn't know where. Not a place you could necessarily get to by travelling anywhere from here, late Twentieth Century London, Earth, but somewhere, sometime. It was the ultimate war, the final confrontation between Good and Evil, and he had played a major part in the war. But something had gone wrong, he had been betrayed, lost a battle with the forces of chaos and been ejected from the real battleground to languish here, in this cesspit they called "life'.

It was part punishment, part test. He could fail entirely, of course, and be demoted still further, with no hope of escape. That was what they wanted, the ones who controlled the whole seedy show; the Tormentors.

They seemed to want him to try and call their bluff, to stand up and say: "Right, I know what it's all about, you can drop the pretence. Come out wherever you are and let's get it over with', but he knew better than that. He had learned that lesson as a child, when the others had laughed at him, and they sent him to see the school shrink. He wasn't going to try that again.

He wondered how many people in all the mental hospitals in the country - or the world, come to that - were really fallen Warriors who had either cracked up from the strain of trying to live in this hell-hole, or simply made the wrong choice and thought that the test was just seeing through the whole thing and then having the courage to stand out and make that challenge.

Well, he wasn't going to end up like one of those poor bastards. He would see it through, he would find the Way Out. And he might not even stop at simply escaping; he might just smash up the whole foul contraption of their testing and imprisonment apparatus - this "life" - while he was about it.

He was starting to feel faint. He had about another ten paces to go to the next parked car, within the wheelbase of which he would be safe from the laser-axles of the passing traffic.

All the traffic, every single vehicle which passed him was equipped with lasers in its axles; they could register a hit on his legs unless he was above them, or shielded by a wall, or between the wheels of a parked car, or holding his breath. Of course, he knew that the lasers didn't hurt; you couldn't see them and they did no harm by themselves, but he knew that they were another of the ways that they - the Tormentors - took points off him. He knew all this from dreams, and from having worked it out. As a child he had done the same thing, as a game; something to make life more interesting, give it some purpose... then he had begun to have dreams about it, to come to realise that it was real , that he had had an insight when he started to play the game. He had to do it now; it felt horrible and uncomfortable when he tried to stop, even just to see what it was like walking down a street breathing "normally'. It was like the feeling he used to get when he played another game from his childhood; that of closing his eyes and walking for a certain number of steps along, say, a wide path in a park. No matter how certain he might be immediately before he closed his eyes that there was plenty of space in front of him, no matter how positive he was as he walked with eyes closed that he wasn't veering off to one side and there was tarmac under his feet rather than grass, he still found it very hard, almost impossible, to walk more than about twenty paces with his eyes closed. He would be certain, positive, that he was about to walk into a tree, or a post or sign he hadn't noticed; even that somebody had been watching from behind a tree and was about to leap out and punch him hard on the nose.

Better to keep your eyes open; better to trust your instincts and take deep breaths between the parked cars. You couldn't be too careful.

He got to the car and stopped opposite it, breathing deeply. He took off his hard hat and wiped his brow, after checking for scaffolding. The safety helmet was another of his discoveries, his good ideas. He knew how vulnerable people's heads were, and how important his own was. He knew they would just love to arrange a little "accident" with some spanner or brick falling from a building, or, more plausibly still, from some scaffolding. So he had worn that hard hat, since even before he left the home. No matter what the job was, or what else he might be doing, he wore the hat when he was outside. They had laughed at him in the road gang; who did he think he was? they said. Poncy engineers wore hard hats everywhere, not your labourers. Or was he frightened of pigeons then? Going a bit thin on top as well as inside, eh? Ha ha. Let them laugh. They wouldn't get the hat off him. He had two spare hats in his room just in case he ever lost his usual one, or somebody stole it. People had done that before now, too.

He started walking again, treading carefully on the cracks between the paving stones. A careful, steady stride was very important, anyway. Good for the breathing and the heart rate.

People stared at him sometimes, jumping from one paving stone border to another, then taking some mincing little half-steps over others, his face going strange colours as he ran out of stored air in his lungs, sweating under a hard hat with no construction sites anywhere in evidence, but he didn't care. They'd be sorry, one day.

As he walked, he wondered what he would do today with his new-found freedom. He had lots of money; perhaps he would get drunk... the pubs would be open soon. He supposed he ought to go and sign on; let the unemployment people know he was out of a job again. He wished he could remember what you were supposed to do when you wanted to register as unemployed, but he always forgot. Obviously the whole unemployment, Social Security system had been set up to confuse, anger and demoralise him. He kept meaning to take notes, write down all the separate moves you were meant to make, forms fill out, offices visit, people see, but he always forgot. Anyway, he always told himself that this would be the last time; this time he would find some really good job in which he would get on really well and his talents would be appreciated and people would like him and he would surprise all his Tormentors, so there would be no reason to go through the whole fraught and sapping business of signing on again. He wondered vaguely about going back to Mrs Short's boarding house and getting a pen and paper.

He would go back to his room. He always felt better there, and he still felt like a good wash; he needed to get rid of all this sweat and clamminess, wash all the dust and the lead off his face and hands. He could do that back at Mrs Short's. He would gain strength from being back with his books, his bed and his little bits and pieces. He could have a look at the Evidence, again; that would be good. He could start re-reading a book.