The Steep Approach to Garbadale by Iain Banks Page B

boat handler, either, Alban suspected, probably putting them all at risk. The guy made everybody else wear life vests, though he didn’t wear one himself.
    Also, the girls sounded vacuous, the way they screamed so easily. Alban felt sadly disappointed in them, though he didn’t really know any of them. He’d noticed that Sophie went back to saying ‘yah’ a lot when she was around these people. Her dentist had replaced her earlier cemented-in braces with a set she could take out, and she had removed them today.
    Alban didn’t go on either of the speedboat runs that Sophie took - he stayed in the quayside café, reading L’Étranger in French, for next year’s class, very slowly, being made occasional fun of, but ignoring it - but he’d have put money on Sophie going all girlie, too, and screaming like a banshee every time the boat slammed off a wave or the least little bit of spray splashed any of them in the face.
    The moment hit him as they got back to the house, picked up from Lynton and delivered home by Aunt Clara. His dad was crossing the hall carrying some bags as they came in through the front door, laughing and joking, Sophie leading the way.
    ‘So, Sophie,’ Andy asked her, ‘did you enjoy the speedboat?’
    ‘Yes I did!’
    ‘Did you get awfully wet?’
    ‘Blimey, Uncle, I didn’t enjoy it that much.’
     
He is collecting her, scooping up the crumbs that fall from her mouth, clutching at them, cradling them, holding them up to look at them, minutely inspecting them, treasuring them, putting them into wildly ornate frames of desire and hope, encapsulating them in precious metal boxes and cabinets studded with jewels like some mouldering flake of bone declared a Catholic relic; something to be venerated, worshipped through its association, its alleged provenance.
    The first is not something she said, just something he associates with her. He remembers a line - it’s from a play, he thinks, maybe one by Shakespeare, from school (he wishes now he’d paid more attention in that particular lesson). It goes, ‘Cuz, cuz, sweet cuz.’ That’s it. That’s all. It’s nothing really, just sounds, but it has become like a precious incantation for him, a sort of mantra.
    ‘Cuz, cuz, sweet cuz.’ He’s been whispering it to himself for the last few nights as he’s started to fall for her, lying in bed in the darkness, repeating it over and over, as if it’s a spell, as though it might magically bring her to him, cause her to blur and shimmer into existence like she’d been beamed up or something. ‘Cuz, cuz, sweet cuz. Cuz, cuz, sweet cuz. Cuz, cuz, sweet cuz . . .’
    The rest have accumulated, the rest are all her own. He can still hear her say, ‘They’ve all bloody gone!’, still remember, with extraordinary precision, the exact tone and syllabic weighting of her voice when she said, ‘Fell off me ’oss, guv’, still replay in his head - every subtle nuance of pitch and timing and pronunciation captured as though on the most perfectly faithful recording mechanism ever invented - ‘Blimey, Uncle, I didn’t enjoy it that much.’
    That last one is the jewel of jewels, the star of the cast. The quickness of it, the easy confidence, the sheer unashamed sexuality it revealed! (His dad had looked at her, not getting it for a moment. When he did, Andy had made a single explosive noise halfway between a laugh and an embarrassed cough. Then he’d grinned, gone slightly red and busied himself with packing the car. A couple of Sophie’s girlfriends had squealed, one slapping her on the arm. Sophie had just kept on going across the hall, unconcerned, red hair undulating as she skipped to the stairs; la la la.)
    He’d got it instantly, might even have been on the brink of saying something himself if she hadn’t (the influence of his pal Plink, perhaps, seeing a sexual reference in everything. Or just rampant hormones). He stood and watched her go, her pals streaming around him, a huge smile