Iain Banks - The Bridge

'Look, just clear off, right?'

'Don't you recognise me? Look at my face, man, not the damn overalls. At least take a message to Mr Brooke ... is he here yet? Brooke, the engineer; small dark fellow, slightly hunched ...' The doorman is taller and heavier than me, or I might try to force my way in.

'You clear off now or you're in trouble,' the fellow says, glancing down the broad corridor outside the bar as though looking for somebody.

'I was here the other night; I was the chap who gave that fellow Bouch back his hat; you must remember that. You held the hat in front of him and he threw up into it.'

The doorman smiles, touches his cap, lets a couple I do not recognise into the bar. 'Look pal, I've been off the last two weeks. Now just you fuck off or you're going to be sorry.'

'Oh ... I see. I'm sorry. But please; if I write a note, would you -'

I get no further. The doorman takes another look round, discovers the corridor to be deserted, and punches me in the stomach with one heavy, gloved hand. It is stunningly painful; as I double up, he lands another blow on my chin, jarring my whole head. I stagger back, ringing with pain; he cracks me across the eye. It is the shock of it, I suppose.

I hit the planking of the floor in a daze. I am picked up by the rump and neck of my overalls and dragged and scraped across the deck, through a door into the cold open air. I am dumped on an open metal deck. Two more heavy blows strike my side; kicks, I think.

A door slams. The wind blows.

I lie for some time, the way I was dropped, unable to move. A throbbing, pulsing pain builds up sickly in my belly; without seeing where I am (I think there is blood in my eyes), I vomit up the fishcake sausage and seaweed.

I lie on my cramped bed. The man and woman in the room above are having an argument. I am racked with pain; I feel nauseous but hungry at the same time. My head, teeth and jaws, my right eye and temple, my belly, guts and side all ache; a symphony of pain. In all this, the nagging whisper that is my old injury's echo, the deep, circular chest pain I am so used to, is quite drowned out.

I am clean. I have washed my mouth out as best I could and placed my handkerchief over my cut eyebrow. I am not quite sure how I walked or staggered back here, but I did, my dazed pain like drunkenness.

I find no comfort in my bed, only a new place to appreciate the waves of pain which flood me, beating on the body's shore.

In the end, but in the middle of the night, I drift off to sleep. But it is an ocean of burning oil I am cast adrift upon, no sea's repose; I pass from waking agonies which the reasoning mind can at least attempt to place in context - looking forward to a time when the pain has ceased - to the semi-conscious trance of torment in which the smaller, earlier, deeper rings of the brain know only that the nerves scream, the body aches, and there is no one to turn crying to for comfort.

I do not know how long I have been here. A long time. I do not know where this place is. Somewhere far away. I do not know why I am here. Because I did something wrong. I do not know how long I will have to stay here. A long time.

This is not a long bridge, but it goes on for ever. I am not far from the bank, but I will never get there. I walk but I never move. Fast or slow, running, turning, doubling back, jumping, throwing myself or stopping; nothing makes any difference.

The bridge is made of iron. It is thick, heavy, rusting iron, pitted and flaking, and it makes a dead, heavy sound beneath my feet; a sound that is so thick and heavy it is almost no sound, just the shock of each footfall travelling through my bones to my head. The bridge seems to be solid iron. Perhaps it was not once, perhaps it was riveted together once, but now it is one piece, rusted into one, decaying into a single rotting mass. Or it may have been welded. Who cares.

It is not large. It bridges a small river I can see through the thick iron bars which rise from the edge of the balustrade. The river flows straight and slow out of the mists, under the bridge, then just as straight and slow away again, into the same damned mist downstream.

I could swim that river in a couple of minutes (if it wasn't for the carnivorous fish), I could cross this bridge in much less than that, even walking slowly.

The bridge is part of a circle, perhaps the upper quarter in terms of height. Its whole forms a great hollow wheel which encircles the river.

On the bank behind me, there is a cobbled road leading off across a marsh. On the far bank are my ladies, reposing or disporting in a variety of small pavilions or opened wagons resting on a small meadow surrounded - so I see on the odd occasions when the mist thins slightly - by tall, broad-leafed trees. I walk for ever towards the ladies. Sometimes I walk slowly, sometimes fast; I have even run. They beckon to me, they wave and hold out welcoming hands to me. Their voices call to me, in tongues I cannot understand, but which are soft and lovely to me, warm and beseeching to me, and which fill me with furious desire.

The ladies walk back and forth, or lie among satin pillows in their small pavilions and broad wagons. They wear all sorts of dress: some severe and formal, covering them from neck to sole, some loose and flowing, like silk waves on their bodies, some thin and transparent, or full of carefully positioned tears and holes, so that their full, young bodies - white as alabaster, black as jet, gold as gold itself- shine through as though their youth and primed nubility was something bright that burned within them, a warmth my eyes detect.

They undress for me, slowly, sometimes, while watching me; their large sad eyes are full of longing, their slender, delicate hands going softly to their shoulders, opening, sloughing off, brushing away straps and layers of material as if they were drops of water left after a bath. I howl, I run faster; I scream for them.

Sometimes they come to the lip of the bank, the very edge of the bridge, and tear their clothes off, screaming to me, clenching their little fists and moving their hips, going down on their knees, legs spread, crying to me, holding out their arms to me. I scream then too and throw myself forward, I sprint for all my worth or, stiff with desire, hold my prick like some stunted flagpole in front of me, running and shaking it and bellowing with frustrated desire. Often I ejaculate, and - fall weakly, used up, to the hard iron surface of the bridge's curved deck, to lie there, panting, sobbing, crying, beating the flaking iron surface with my hands until they bleed.

On occasion the women make love to each other, in front of me; I wail and tear my hair. They take slow hours sometimes, gently kissing and stroking, caressing and licking each other; they cry out at orgasm, their bodies jerking, clutching, pulsing in time to each other. Sometimes they watch me as they do this, and I can never decide whether the look in their large, moist eyes is still sad and longing, or satiated and mocking. I stop and shake my fist at them, yell and shout at them. 'Bitches! Ingrates! Bloody torturers! Hellbags! What about me? Come here! You come on here. Here! Come on; just step on! Well throw me a fucking rope then!'

They do not. They parade, they strip, they fuck, they sleep and read old books, they make meals and leave small rice-paper trays of food on the edge of the bridge so that I can eat (but sometimes I rebel; I throw the trays into the river; the carnivorous fish demolish food and tray) but they will not step onto the bridge. I recall that witches cannot cross water.

I walk; the bridge revolves slowly, rumbling and shivering just a little, the bars which rise from its edges moving slowly, stroking through the mist. I run; the bridge quickly revs up, matches my speed, quivering beneath my feet, the bars on either side of me making a soft ripping noise through the mist-filled air. I stop; the bridge stops. I am still above the centre of the small, slowly flowing river. I sit. The bridge remains static. I jump up and throw myself towards the bank where the ladies are; I roll, scramble, I hop or skip or jump; the bridge rumbles one way or the other, never more than a few steps out of step with me, and always, always, bringing me back, in the end, to its shallow summit, its mid point over the sluggish stream. I am the keystone of the bridge.