Iain Banks - The Bridge

It turned up, crumpled and grubby, beneath the passenger seat. He washed it and managed to get all the footprints off, but the blood stain, dried in a rough circle like some incompetent piece of tie-dying, wouldn't shift. He offered it to her anyway. She told him to keep it, then changed her mind, took it away and returned it a week later, spotless, nearly as good as new, and monogrammed with his initials. He was impressed. She wouldn't tell him how she and her mother had cleaned it. Family secret, she said. He kept the scarf carefully, and never wore it when he knew he'd be getting really drunk, in case he left it lying in some bar.

'Fetishist,' she told him.

The Fabulous Make-Your-Mind-Up Referendum was, effectively, pochled - rigged, in English. A lot of carpentry work in the old High School went to waste.

Andrea was translating Russian texts and writing articles about Russian literature for magazines. He knew nothing about this until he read something of hers in the Edinburgh Review ; a long piece on both Sofia Tolstoy and Nadezhda Mandelstam. He was confused, almost dizzy, when he read it; it must be the same Andrea Cramond; she wrote as she talked and he could hear the rhythm of her speech as he read the printed words. 'Why didn't you ever tell me?' he asked her, feeling hurt. She smiled, shrugged, said she didn't like to boast. She'd written a few pieces for magazines in Paris, too. Just a sideline. She was taking piano lessons again, after giving them up in high school, and going to night classes to study drawing and painting.

She was also in a partnership, of sorts; she'd put some money into a feminist bookshop a couple of her old friends had started; other women had come in on the project and now there were seven of them in a collective. Financial madness, her brother called it. She helped out in the shop sometimes; he would go there first when he wanted to buy a particular book, but he always felt vaguely uncomfortable in the place, and rarely browsed. One of the women denounced Andrea at a meeting for kissing him goodbye once, after he'd bought some books; Andrea just laughed at her, then felt very unsisterly. She apologised for the laugh but not the kiss. After she'd told him this, he was careful not to kiss or touch her when he visited the shop.

'Oooohh, shit,' he said, as they sat up in bed in the small hours watching the election results come in. Andrea shook her head, reached for the Black Label on the bedside cabinet.

'Never mind kid; have a whisky and try not to think about it. Think about your top rate of tax.'

'Fuck that; I'd rather have a clear conscience than a healthy bank balance.'

'Tut; you'll have your accountant turning in his filing cabinet.'

Another returning officer announced another Tory win; the Ya-hoos ya-hooed. He shook his head. 'The country really is going to the dogs,' he breathed.

'Certainly gone to the bitch,' Andrea said, swirling her whisky round in her glass and looking at the television through it, brows creased.

'Well... at least she's a woman.' he said glumly.

'She may be a woman,' Andrea said, 'but she ain't no fuckin' sister.' Scotland voted for Labour, with the SNP a close third. What it actually got was the right honourable Margaret Thatcher, M.P.

He shook his head again. 'Oooohh, shit.'

The business did well: they had to turn contracts away. Within a year his accountant was telling him to buy a bigger house and another car. But I like my little flat, he complained to Andrea. So keep it, but buy another house, she told him. But I can only live in one at a time! Anyway I've always thought it was immoral to have two houses when there's folk going homeless. Andrea was exasperated with him: 'So let somebody live in the flat, or in this house you're going to buy, but remember who'll get all those extra taxes you'll be paying if you don't do what your accountant says.'

'Oh,' he said.

He sold the flat and bought a house in Leith, near the Links and with a view of the Forth from the top storey. It had five bedrooms and a big double garage: he bought a new GTi and a Range Rover, to keep his accountant happy and fill up the garage: the four-wheel drive was useful on business trips when they had to visit sites. They were doing a lot of work with firms in Aberdeen that year, and he dropped in on Stewart's people. On a later trip, he ended up in bed with Stewart's sister, a divorced teacher. He didn't ever tell Stewart, not absolutely certain whether he might mind or not. He did tell Andrea. 'A school teacher,' she grinned. 'An educational experience?' He told her about not wanting to say anything to Stewart. 'Kid,' she said, taking his chin in her hand and looking at him very seriously, 'You're an idiot.'

She helped him decorate the house, bullying him into a complete new scheme.

He was up a ladder, painting an elaborate ceiling rose one evening, when he felt a sudden, dizzying surge of déjà vu. He put the brush down. Andrea was in the next room whistling away to herself. He recognised the tune: The River . He stood on the ladder, in the echoing, empty room, and remembered standing in a wide room full of sheet-draped furniture in the house in Moray Place a year earlier, dressed in the same paint-spotted clothes, listening to her whistle in another room, and feeling enormously, simply happy. I am a lucky bastard, he thought. I have so much, so much around me that is good. Not everything; I still want more, I probably want more than I could handle; in face I probably want things that would only make me unhappy if I had them. But even that's OK; that's still part of the contentment.

If my life was a film, he thought, I'd roll the credits now; fade on this beatific smile in an empty room, the man on a ladder making things better, renovating, improving. Cut. Print. The End.

Well, he told himself, it isn't a film, laddie. He was filled with a surge of pure joy, simple delight at being where and who he was and knowing the people he did. He threw the paint brush into one corner of the room, jumped off the ladder, and ran through to Andrea. She was rolling paint onto a wall. 'God, I thought you'd fallen off the ladder. What's the cheesy grin for?'

'I just remembered,' he said, taking the roller out of her hand and chucking it behind him, 'we haven't christened this room.'

'Well, neither we have. Must remember the smell of paint does this to you.'

They screwed up against the wall, just for a change. Her shirt stuck to the wet paint; she laughed until the tears ran down her face.

He had become a film buff. During the last festival they'd both gone to more films than plays or concerts, and he suddenly realised he'd missed out on hundreds of films he'd heard of and wanted to see. He joined a film society, he bought a video recorder and scoured video shops for films. Whenever business took him down to London he'd try to cram in as many cinema visits as possible. He liked almost everything; he just liked going to the cinema.

A Scottish group called the Tourists had some chart success; their lead singer went on to become half of the Eurythmics. People would ask if he was related to her. No such luck, he sighed.

There were soft voices, nice bums. Andrea had her various flings, and he tried not to feel jealous. It isn't jealousy, he told himself; it's more like envy. And fear. One of them may be a nicer, kinder, better man that I am, and more loving.

She was out of circulation for almost two weeks once, having some sort of time-lapse relationship with a young lecturer from Heriot Watt which went from love-at-first-sight to slammed doors, thrown ornaments and smashed windows over the space of twelve days. He missed her, while all this was going on. He took the second week off and headed north-west. The Range Rover and GTi had been supplemented by a Ducatti; he had a one-man tent, a Himalayan standard sleeping bag and all the best hiking gear; he took the bike roaring up to the western highlands and spent days walking alone in the hills.