Iain Banks - The Bridge

'That's not what you said when Prague burned and Paris didn't,' she told him. He sighed, looking at all the old LPs.

'Yeah, I know.'

'In fact,' she added, 'it's not what you were saying when that nice Mr Nixon got elected, either, or when May Daly -'

'OK, OK. So what do you want to hear?'

'Oh, put on Ladyland again,' she said, sighing. He took the record to the radiogram. 'Do you want to eat out?' she asked him.

He wasn't sure. He didn't want to leave the cosy intimacy of the house; it was good to be alone with her. Also, he couldn't afford to eat out all the time; she paid for most of the meals. 'Could do, could do,' he said, blowing some dust off the needle under the heavy Bakelite arm. He had stopped making jokes about the radiogram's antiquity.

'I'll see what's in the fridge,' she said, unfolding from the floor, standing and straightening the kimono. 'I think the stash is in my bag.'

'Oh goody ,' he said, 'I'll roll a funny cigarette.'

They played cards later, after she'd called her parents to say they'd be back tomorrow. Afterwards, she took out tarot cards and started to tell his fortune. She was interested in the tarot, in astrology and sun signs and the prophecies of Nostradamus; she didn't believe deeply in them, they just interested her. He thought that was worse than believing in them completely.

She got annoyed with him during the reading; he was being sarcastic. She packed the cards away, upset.

'I just want to know how it works ,' he tried to explain.

'Why?' She sprawled over the couch behind him, reached down and lifted the record cover they were using as a crash-board.

' Why ?' he laughed, shaking his head. 'Because that's the only way to understand anything. First, does it work ? Then, how ?'

'Perhaps, dearest,' she said, licking a cigarette paper, 'not everything has to be understood; perhaps not everything can be, not like equations and formulae.'

They kept returning to this. Emotional sense versus logic. He believed in a sort of Unified Field Theory of the consciousness; it was there to be understood, emotions and feelings and logical thought together; a whole, an entity however disparate in its hypotheses and results which nevertheless worked throughout on the same fundamental principles. It would all eventually be comprehended; it was just a matter of time, and research. It seemed so obvious to him that he had great and genuine difficulty understanding anybody else's point of view.

'You know,' he said, 'if I had my way I wouldn't let anybody who believed in star signs or the Bible or faith healing or anything like that use electric power, or ride in cars and buses and trains and aircraft, or use anything made of plastic. They want to believe the universe works according to their crazy little rules? OK, let them live that way, but why should they be allowed to use the fruits of sheer fucking human genius and hard work, things produced only because people better than them once had the sense and the hope to - will you stop laughing at me?' He glared at her. She was shaking with silent laughter, her pinkly quivering tongue poised to lick another paper. She turned to him, eyes glistening, and held out a hand.

'You're just so funny, sometimes,' she said. He took her hand, kissed it formally.

'So glad I amuse you, my dear.'

He didn't think he'd said anything funny. Why was she laughing at him? In the end, he had to admit, he didn't really understand her. He didn't understand women. He didn't understand men. He didn't even understand children very well. All he really understood, he thought, was himself and the rest of the universe. Neither anything like completely, of course, but both well enough to know that what remained to be discovered would make sense; it would fit in, it could all be gradually and patiently fitted together a bit at a time, like an infinite jigsaw puzzle, with no straight edges to look for and no end in sight, but one in which there was always going to be somewhere for absolutely any piece to fit.

Once, when he was quite small, his dad had taken him to the railway shed where he worked. They overhauled locomotives there, and his dad had taken him round, showing him the huge, tall steam engines being taken apart and put back together, scraped and cleaned and repaired, and he remembered standing watching a massive loco on a static test working up to full speed on a set of buried, whining steel drums, its man-high wheels spinning in a blur, heat quivering from its metal plates, steam whirling about the strobing spokes; linkages and bars and piston rods flashed in the lights of the echoing, ground-shaken shed, and smoke from the engine's chimney pulsed and hammered up a great riveted metal tube which vented it to the shed roof. It was a terrifyingly noisy, blastingly powerful, indescribably vivid experience; he was at once aghast and ecstatic, filled with a sense of appalled, ravished awe at the sheer, stunning, contained power of the machine.

That power, that controlled, working energy, that metal symbol of all that could be done with work and sense and matter resounded in him for years. He would wake up from dreams, panting, sweating, heart pounding, unsure whether he was frightened or excited or both. All he knew was that having seen that pounding, stationary engine, anything was possible. He had never been able to describe the original experience to his own satisfaction, and he had never tried to explain that feeling to Andrea, because he could never fully explain it to himself.

'Here,' she said, passing him the joint and a cigarette lighter, 'see if you can get this to work.' He lit the joint, blew the smoke at her, in a ring. She laughed and waved the fluid grey necklace away from her newly-washed hair.

They smoked the last of his opiated dope. They got the munchies and she made some wonderful scrambled eggs he never forgot and she could never reproduce, they went giggling and sniggering down to the nearest hotel for a quick drink before closing time, then giggling and sniggering back up the road to the house; they started goosing each other, then groping, then kissing, and finally they screwed on the grass at the roadside, invisible (and very cold and quick) in the fog, while twenty feet away people's voices sounded now and again and car headlights crept slowly past.

Back at the house they dried off and warmed up and she rolled another joint and he read a six-month-old paper he'd found in a magazine rack, laughing at the things people found important.

They went to bed, drank the last of the Laphroaig she'd brought, and sat up singing songs like Wichita Lineman and Ode to Billy Joe , with the lines changed - regardless of whether they scanned or not - to make them Scottish ('I am a lineman for the County-Counsell ...', '... and throw them in in the muddy waters off the Forth Road Bridge ...')

He drove the Lotus back, in the fog, at lunchtime on the Monday, slower-than he wanted, faster than she liked. He'd started a poem on the Friday, and he tried to go on with it now, while he drove, but the rest of it just wouldn't come. It was a sort of anti-rhyming, anti-love-song poem, partly a result of him being sick to death of songs rhyming arms and charms and blethering on about love lasting longer than the mountains and the oceans (ocean/emotion/devotion, chance/dance/romance) ...

The lines he had, but could not add to in the fog were:

Lady, that soft skin, your bones and mine

Will all be dust before another mountain's razed.

No oceans, not a river, hardly a stream will dry

Before our eyes do, and our hearts.

Some things echo more than others. Sometimes I hear the last sound of all, that never echoes because there is nothing to bounce back from; it is the sound of final nothing, and it comes booming through the great pipes that are the bridge's marrow-less bones like a hurricane, like God farting, like every shout of pain collected and replayed. I hear it then; a noise to rupture ears, split skulls, shatter walls, break souls. Those organ pipes are dark tunnels of iron in the sky, enormous and strong; what other sort of tune could they play?