Read The Steep Approach to Garbadale for Free Online

with developments. ’
    ‘Hey, we’re partners, not Siamese twins.’
    Al turns away again, but he’s thinking. ‘Ah, hah,’ he says softly. There’s a surprisingly long pause. ‘And you want to stand in the way of this fucking behemoth.’
    ‘And we can do it,’ Fielding tells him. ‘If people believe. I mean, we need to get to them before the EGM at Garbadale, but there’s time. We could do it. We’d need to be there at Garbadale, too, obviously, but there’s work to be done beforehand. Just a couple of weeks, max, Alban, that’s all. Expenses on me, obviously.’ Fielding leaves a gap. He can hear the river gurgling. ‘What do you think?’
    Alban shakes his head. Says nothing.
    ‘Jeez, Al,’ Fielding says, ‘is the tree-chopping business so fucking entrancing you can’t tear yourself away?’
    Alban laughs. ‘No,’ he says, pushing his fingers through his hair again. ‘I’ve been invalided out, anyway.’
    ‘What?’ Shit , Fielding thinks, did I miss something? Has Al sliced off a finger or some toes or something? He lost the top of one little finger years ago, not long after he first started this forestry crap, but has he lost something else?
    ‘See these fingers?’ Al says, holding up the index and middle fingers of each hand.
    Fielding nods. ‘They all seem to be there.’
    Al looks at them, too. ‘Yeah, but so’s something called white finger.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘You get it from too much vibration. Starts killing off blood vessels or something. The doc explained it all. Handled too many old chain-saws in my time. Shouldn’t really have happened so quickly but I must just be especially vulnerable.’
    ‘Shit. Is it sore?’
    ‘No.’ He rotates the fingers round in front of his face, inspecting them. ‘Lost a bit of sensitivity, and I need to watch they don’t get too cold in the winter, but I can live with it.’
    ‘So you’re out?’
    ‘Yup.’
    ‘Couldn’t they find you a desk job?’
    Al grins. ‘It was the cutting-down-trees bit I liked. They offered me a driving job, hauling trees or stripping them or stacking or whatever, but I wasn’t interested.’
    ‘So . . .’ Fielding holds up both arms. ‘Why not—?’
    He lets his voice fade as Al turns to look upriver again.
    The waters run on away beneath them both.
    ‘Look,’ Fielding says, ‘won’t you at least come and see Beryl and Doris? Jesus, man, it’s only Glasgow.’ Actually, Fielding has himself a kind of horror of meeting the two great-aunts. Not that he’s going to mention that, obviously. ‘They’d love to see you,’ he tells Alban, possibly truthfully. ‘We could drive through today.’
    Nothing.
    Then Al says, ‘Maybe. I don’t know.’
    God , Fielding thinks, he sounds depressed, defeated . Well, this is something, he supposes.
    After a while Al says, ‘You said that pretty much the whole family’s going to be there, at Garbadale.’
    ‘They kind of have to be. Gran’s got - well, the Trust has got, but that means Gran - proxy voting rights for anybody who isn’t. Effectively.’
    ‘Okay,’ Al gives a big sigh. ‘And from the States?’
    ‘Oh, whole bunch o’ folks.’
    Al’s shoulders shake with what might be another laugh. ‘We’re both being coy here, Fielding. We both know . . .’
    This time it’s Al’s voice that trails off.
    Fielding clears his throat and says, ‘I understand Sophie is going to be there. Cousin Sophie. She accepted the party invitation, registered for attendance at the EGM. I guess she’ll be there.’ A pause. ‘Though, obviously . . .’
    Fielding is suddenly aware that he might be about to shoot himself in the foot while it’s still in his mouth, so he shuts up.
    Alban puts his head down into the V of his outstretched arms and his clasped hands, as though studying the river passing immediately beneath.
    As though praying.
    He looks up and turns, smiling. ‘You fit for some lunch?’
    ‘Good idea,’ Fielding says.
    They walk back towards the