Iain Banks - Walking on Glass

Why ? he asked himself for the thousandth time. Why do I do that to her ? Why do I need to ? He knew he wasn't like that really. It went against everything he believed in. So why?

Sarah took a plain, blue silk dressing gown from the bottom of the bed and tied it around her. She still wore the pink training shoes she had put on after her bath.

Slater sighed. He said, "None of which alters the fact that you shouldn't have done it, not without me here."

Sarah shrugged, without turning round. "I'm going to have some orange juice," she said. "Want some?"

" Sarah ."

"What?" She turned to look at him. Slater looked at her accusingly. She grinned back at him. "I handled it," she said. "Nothing went wrong, did it?"

"He's bigger than you are. He might have got violent. He is a man, after all, dear. We chaps are all the same, didn't you know?" He could not resist smiling as he said it.

"Luckily, you aren't all the same at all," Sarah said, and went through the doorway, across the hall to the sitting-room and kitchen. "Not at all," she said from the other room as she walked. "Not even slightly."

Slater lay on the bed, shivering once as his flesh dried. He got up and took a piece of paper from the small dressing table by the side of the bed. It was an old Labour election leaflet, blank on one side. He took a pen from the inside pocket of his biker leathers - strewn on the floor with her dungarees and T-shirt - then sat up in bed and started to write, quickly and in a small, scratchy, precise hand.

He wrote:

Dear Graham,

I know what Sarah has told you. It was not the whole truth. I'm afraid. The fact is that I am Stock (and so, once, was Sarah, as I'll explain). There is no Bob Stock, there's only me.

Sarah is my sister and we've had (horror of horrors!) an incestuous relationship for the past six years or so (blame single-sex public schools, I say). Sarah is married and her husband was having her followed. I couldn't risk being seen with her, so I invented Stock; I keep the bike in a car park at the back of the Air Gallery; I know somebody who works there and they keep the leathers and crash helmet. I dress there and visit Sarah using the bike, looking terribly butch and incognito.

So far so good, you might think, but we needed more; it wasn't all that important that Sarah was known to be committing adultery, but it was important, at least until very recently, that it wasn't known who with. Quite apart from the fact that what we're doing is reasonably illegal , it would have done terrible things to our parents. Dear dad, you see, was Conservative MP for Salop West. Even you might have heard of him; very strong line on family life, morality and that son of thing; supported the Festival of Light, the National Viewers and Listeners Association (Mary White-house's mob), and SPUNK, or whatever they call it; the Society for the Prevention of Unborn Conservatives (sick!). Pro-hanging, of course.

The old bugger having made his reputation peddling this sort of reactionary moralist nonsense, the revelation that his two children were humping each other would have finished him; that applied at the start of all this, but became even more important when Mag the Hag announced the election. Anyway, going back to where you came in, I think you'll appreciate that the situation was such that we needed another safeguard to stop me being identified. We needed somebody else, to draw the heat, to distract the chap we knew was trailing Sarah. We chose you. All right; I chose you.

Why couldn't we just have stopped seeing each other? I hear you ask. Tried that. Just not poss. Sarah got married trying to get out of this whole thing, and I moved down here, but neither of us could stop thinking about the other; just couldn't forget. I suppose we must be doomed for each other.

I think you fell for Sarah a bit (though being you you made it impossible to tell; you could have been cranium-over-Achilles for the girl and still have given nothing away; acting Joe Cool as usual) and if my fucking bike hadn't conked out on me (I think some bastard put sugar in the petrol tank) we were going to let you down easier; I was to appear in the street outside while Sarah was explaining to you in the flat that she liked you too much to start anything because she was basically a bad "un and she and Stock deserved each other... well, it seemed like a good idea at the time; you hustled out the back door as Sarah panicked; unrequited but smug , knowing You Were Too Good For Her, and her, worthless bitch, back with the bad guy. Oh well.

Anyway, the election's over, as you might have noticed, and our father was one of the only two Tories to lose their seats in a Conservative landslide (to a Liberal; ha ha), and he's retiring from politics. Sarah isn't being followed any more, as far as I can tell, so the need for most, if not all, of the subterfuge is gone... sorry.

Why protect the old fascist in the first place?

What can I say? That blood is thicker than water maybe, but also that if anything had come out about Sarah and me it might not only have ruined our father but it would certainly have killed our mum, who really isn't a bad sort. (Fuck it; we both still love her. There.)

Family loyalty, in other words. I don't know.

Well, you must admit we were thorough; we even arranged for you to see "Stock" when I was there (you remember; in the pub?); that was Sarah, padded out with jeans and jumpers and walking on tip-toe with several dozen of my socks stuffed into the bottoms of my boots.

I don't know how to -

Sarah came back then, with two glasses of orange juice and a large plate with small pieces of bread topped with pate, various cheeses and honey. "Here," she said, putting the plate and one glass down by the side of the bed, on the small dressing table. "What are you writing?"

"A letter to Graham, telling him the whole truth. All of it. Nothing but," Slater said. Sarah looked at him without saying anything, took a drink from the slim glass she held.

Slater looked at the letter, reading his own scrawled lines with a frown on his face. "You know," he said to his sister, "I really wish I could send this to him."

"If you've told the whole truth, you certainly can not."

"Hmm. I know. But I need to write it anyway. For me." He looked at her. "I guess I'm still tense."

She moved closer to the bed, looked down at him, "You still worried about that crash?" she said.

Slater put the pen and the paper down on the dressing table. He rolled his eyes, then put his hands over his face. "Yes, yes!" he said, and pushed his fingers through his dark hair, staring at the ceiling while she watched him calmly. "Oh God, oh Doom! I just hope they didn't get the number!"

"What, of the bike?" she said, drinking her orange juice.

"Yes, of course!" He shook his head at the ceiling, then levered himself back up on one elbow, and read over the letter Graham would never read. What to say next? How to finish it off? Sarah watched for a while, then turned away and combed her hair. She heard a rustle of paper, the clatter of the pen on the dressing table, after a while. She turned to look at him.

"Better?" she asked, putting the comb down. Slater lay on the bed, the paper crumpled in one outstretched hand. He shook his head, still staring at the ceiling, then let the crumpled ball of paper roll out of his hand. At the same time he croaked, "Rosebud!" The paper ball rolled along the floor. She smiled, kicked the paper with one pink-shoed foot towards the bin.

She turned and studied herself in the mirror, calmly stroking her bruises.

"Have you ever," Slater said, "entertained the idea that we might be evil? I mean that despite the fact you're beautiful and I'm right ... that nevertheless, for some horrible, maybe genetic reason, maybe class, even, we -"