Iain Banks: Walking on Glass

"I have never even considered any other explanation," Sarah said, smiling, still looking at herself. Slater laughed.

He did love her. It was all that a brother-sister relationship was supposed to be, all that people meant when they talked of loving someone like a brother or a sister... it was just that, but not only that. He wanted her. At least sometimes, at least when he did not hate himself for wanting her in the way he did.

Perhaps it was possible, though. Perhaps he could just love her solely and conventionally as a sister. She was worth all that alone, after all. She could not mean less to him. Sex was only that, surely, and indeed with her only more intense...more dangerous in its feel than with others; not better. Worse, in fact, in its penumbra of guilt and self-disgust. He should, he really ought to make an effort; let what had happened to Graham, what they had done to him be a tragic landmark, a reason almost... at least not let it go to waste...

Sarah went to the old mono record player which stood on a small table on the far side of the bedroom. She took her current favourite Bowie album, his latest, and put it on at the start of her favourite track, the song which was a single and still in the charts; Let's Dance , the title track. The stylus scraped into the groove, neatly between tracks. The old speaker crackled slightly and hissed; she turned the volume up, put the arm mechanism on to repeat.

Slater lay on the bed, turned sideways, watching her. He forgot about the accident he had helped cause, about Graham and the hurt he had contributed towards, as he watched his sister sway and move in front of the record player. The music punched out, filling the small room; she nodded her head, her body moved inside the thin blue silk, in time to the first few lyrical bars of the song. He felt his desire grow for her again.

She knew the song well. Just before Bowie's voice started, just before the words "Let's dance," she turned, smiling to her brother, put her slender fingers to her shoulders, opening the blue silk gown and letting it fall from her, collecting in soft folds about the pink trainers as she nodded twice in time to the music and over the first phrase mouthed the words "Let's fuck ..."

And for a moment, behind his eyes, where he felt he really lived, he felt complete despair, and the absolute necessity of keeping what he felt away from her, of stopping it from showing on his face.

He seemed to halt then, in some frozen moment, an expression of feigned delight and surprise impacted on his face, as behind it, inside him, a pain he could not name, like his wanting, with his wanting, arose and overwhelmed him.

From the notebook of Detective Sergeant Nichols; interview with Thomas Edward PRITCHARD. Islington Police Station, 28/6/83 .

Q: What about the bike then did you get its no?

A: O yes I got that bastards no. alright. It was STK 228 something. Either I or T. T, I think.

Mr Williams - Mike, as he liked to be called - was Steven's friend in the hospital. He called Doctor Shawcross "Doctor Shock" because he said if you were bad and didn't do what they told you to do, they gave you electric shocks. Mr Williams was funny. He made Steven laugh lots and lots. He could be cruel sometimes, too, like when he had dropped the spiders into the lap of Harry-the-guy who-hated-spiders the other day (Mr Williams had used a long word instead of "the-guy-who-hated-spiders', but Steven couldn't remember what it was). That had been cruel, especially as they had been at dinner at the time, but it had been funny too.

Steven had been blamed for that, and they had punished him for it, but he couldn't recall what the punishment had been.

The crows called his name.

Dr Shawcross sat in his office, staring out of the window at the unleaved trees of the Kent countryside, watching a few crows flap lazily from tall branches, out over the bare brown fields. In front of him, spread out on his desk, was the file on Steven Grout. Dr Shawcross had to write a report on Steven, for the insurers of one of the vehicles involved in the accident which had resulted in Grout ending up here, in the Dargate Sheltered Unit.

It was February 16th, 1984 (Dr Shawcross had already noted the date on the sheet of paper he was going to draft the report on). It was cold. The car had been very slow to start that morning. Dr

Shawcross hummed tunelessly to himself and reached down to the floor where his briefcase was. He glanced over the previous reports on Grout as his right hand fumbled in the case for his pipe and tobacco. He found them, put the pipe on his desk and started to stuff the tobacco into the bowl.

His mind wandered when he saw the date of Grout's accident; June 28th last year. He sighed. Summer seemed such a long way away, but at the same time there was that paper he had to write for the conference in Scarborough in June; that would come around soon enough; he'd be pushed for time on that, he'd bet.

Steven Grout (no middle name) had been involved in a road traffic accident on June 28th, 1983. A beer barrel struck him on the head after bouncing off the back of a lorry. Grout had fallen into the stream of traffic and been run over by a car. His scalp was lacerated, skull fractured, both clavicles and the left scapula sustained fractures, and he had multiple rib fractures as well.

Dr Shawcross experienced an odd sensation of deja vu, then suddenly recalled that he'd read something about the trial of the case which resulted from this accident in the paper just the other day (was it yesterday?). Hadn't somebody famous been involved, or somebody connected with somebody famous? Some public figure, anyway, and some sort of scandal. He couldn't remember. Maybe the paper was still in the house. He'd check when he got back in the evening, if he remembered, and Liz hadn't thrown the paper out.

Dr Shawcross read through the previous reports, packing the tobacco into the bowl, putting the pipe in his mouth, then patting his pockets one by one as he searched for his matches. His eyes flitted over the typed sheets as he refreshed his memory, only certain important words and phrases really registering: cyanosed flail chest... intubation... raised intracranial blood-pressure and Dexamethasone and Mannitol... pulse slowing... blood pressure increase... very slow response to deep painful stimulus... eyes deviated dysconjugately... possible frontal lobe contusion... neck angle a tracheostomy was performed...

Dr Shawcross tutted to himself, pulled open a drawer, rummaged briefly, found a box of matches. He lit his pipe.

The latest of the reports concerned Grout when he was physically more or less recovered, and in the rehabilitation ward of a hospital in North London. Grout had been totally disorientated in time and space, the report said. He had been capable of holding a conversation but unable to remember any fact for longer than a few minutes; no recollection from day to day of the nursing staff who tended him.

Dr Shawcross puffed away on his pipe, once waving a lock of blue smoke away from his eyes as he read (he was supposed to have given up for the new year. Well, at least he didn't smoke in the house nowadays. Well, hardly ever).

The patient improved only slowly; conscious and alert but still disorientated; marked impairment of reading ability and memory; vague recollections of the distant past (now knew he had been brought up in a children's home), but thought the date was June 28th, 1976.

One phrase kept cropping up time after time in the report, as various follow-up and check-up examinations were recorded, and Grout's post-traumatic amnesia lengthened: little insight into his disability... no insight into his disability... lack of insight into his condition... still no insight into his disability...