Free The Quarry by Iain Banks Page B

them corporate bunnies.
    Last year, when Alison and Rob dropped in while driving back from Scotland, Hol happened to be here for the week and I remember this exchange, over tea and cake:
    ‘… No, we’re thinking about buying a place out there.’
    ‘Oh, good grief,’ I heard Hol mutter.
    ‘Yeah,’ Rob said, ‘but not on one of the islands. Those are a bit … you know.’
    Alison nodded. ‘Yeah. No. But there are lots of beautiful apartments near the Burj, though. Really tasteful. Cheap now but a really good investment in the medium-to-long. Honestly, Grayzr Arab Street is growing scary-fast, even faster than vanilla Grayzr. Ground-flooring there would be a sound move, strategically.’
    Hol looked at both of them. ‘Seriously?’ she said. ‘Fucking seriously ?’
    ‘And there’s more autonomy out there,’ Rob added. ‘You’re not exposed to the beady gaze of Head Office the way you are in Londinium.’
    Hol looked at them for a bit, then nodded. ‘You should move to Saudi,’ she told them. ‘They take an even more hands-off approach there.’
    … I believe the remark might have caused a certain frostiness.
    But back to now, and breakfast:
    ‘Hon,’ Hol says to me, ‘you’ve been running after us for over half an hour. Sit down; have something yourself.’
    ‘I’m fine,’ I tell her.
    I’ve been up for a while. I woke really early, played an hour of HeroSpace and then spent forty minutes in two of the top-floor bedrooms – where all the spiders live and there’s a near-constant sound of dripping water even on dry days – peering into old packing cases and soggy cardboard boxes, looking for S-VHS-C tapes (nothing, though if we ever discover an urgent need for damp back copies of the Bew Valley and Ormisdale Chronicle and Post dating from the nineties, I know just where to lay my hands on them). Then I had a shower, because Hol said I was a bit whiffy yesterday. I’m wearing a fresh set of clothes, three days early. I even stripped my bed; I’ll put new sheets on it tonight.
    ‘Paul,’ Alison says. ‘You still see Marty F?’
    (I have no idea who Marty F is.)
    ‘Not for a while,’ Paul says. ‘He’s in LA these days. Married with two.’
    ‘What?’ Haze says. ‘Two wives ?’
    ‘Yeah …’ Paul says, smiling faintly at him as he munches his toast.
    ‘Weren’t you thinking about going out to the States, Hol?’ Ali asks. ‘Thought you seemed all set at one point. What happened with that?’
    ‘It was being talked about,’ Hol says.
    ‘ New Yorker , wasn’t it?’ Rob says.
    ‘Mm-hmm.’
    Haze whistles appreciatively.
    ‘Hmm,’ Ali says. ‘That’s quite …’
    ‘Prestigious?’ Rob finishes for her. ‘About as cool as reviewing gigs gets, I guess.’ He smiles at Hol.
    Hol just shrugs.
    ‘Way to go, Hol,’ Haze says. ‘The New Yorker ; yeah.’
    ‘And?’ Ali says, gesturing. ‘Just … deal fell apart? Visa knocked back? You owned up to being in the SWP? What?’
    ‘I thought I could do it from here but it turned out it would have meant moving to the States,’ Hol tells her.
    Ali glances at Rob. ‘Preferring London to New York, Hol? Really?’
    Hol shrugs again. ‘Preferring home to away.’
    ‘No idea you were such a home-loving gal,’ Rob says.
    ‘But I thought you hated it here,’ Ali says.
    ‘No, just what and who’s happened to the place.’
    ‘Arooga,’ Haze says. ‘Politics alert!’
    ‘Amber warning of rants ahead,’ Rob says, and winks at Hol, who smiles thinly back.
    ‘But I thought that was your ambition, wasn’t it?’ Ali says. ‘Moving to NYC or LA? Get stuck into Hollywood at closer range? No? Once?’
    ‘Once,’ Hol says. ‘That was a while ago. There’s still the occasional decent film made here in dear old Albion, and our Continental cousins haven’t given up the medium entirely either.’
    ‘Yeah,’ Haze says, ‘but compared to Hollywood …’
    ‘They make more movies in Bollywood,’ Rob tells him.
    Haze’s nose