Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  Dead Air

  Iain Banks

  Iain Banks' daring new novel opens in a loft apartment in the East End, in a former factory due to be knocked down in a few days. Ken Nott is a devoutly contrarian vaguely left wing radio shock-jock living in LondonAfter a wedding breakfast people start dropping fruits from a balcony on to a deserted carpark ten storeys below, then they start dropping other things; an old TV that doesn't work, a blown loudspeaker, beanbags, other unwanted furniture…Then they get carried away and start dropping things that are still working, while wrecking the rest of the apartment. But mobile phones start ringing and they're told to turn on a TV, because a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Centre. At ease with the volatility of modernity, Iain Banks is also our most accomplished literary writer of narrative-driven adventure stories that never ignore the injustices and moral conundrums of the real world. His new novel, displays his trademark dark wit, buoyancy and momentum. It will be one of the most important novels of 2002.

  Iain Banks

  Dead Air

  © 2002

  For Roger

  With thanks to Mic and Brad

  One. ‘ B ’ IS FOR APPLE

  ‘You’re breaking up.’

  ‘-orry?’

  ‘Never mind.’

  ‘-at?’

  ‘See you later.’ I folded the phone.

  This was three weeks before the stuff with the Clout club and Raine (sorry; the stuff with the Clout club and ‘Raine’) and the taxi and the road under the railway bridge and the window and the nose-biffing incident and basically the whole grisly West-to-East-End night experience when I realised some bastard or bastards unknown seriously wanted to harm me, or even – and this was according to their own threats – kill me.

  All of which actually happened not far from here (here where we’re starting; here where we’re picking up our story precisely because it was like the start and the end of something, a time when everyone knew exactly where they were), all of it probably within sight, if not a stone’s throw, of this raised here. Maybe; there’s no going back to check because the place where we’re starting’s not there any more.

  Whatever; I associate what happened in one place with what happened in the other, with things beginning and finishing and – like the first tile in one of those impressive but irredeemably geeky record-breaking domino-falling displays that people stage in sports halls, where one tiny event leads to a whole toppling, fanning, branching cascade of tiny events, which happen so fast and so together they become one big event – with just stuff generally being set in train, being pinged from a rest state into restless, reckless, spreading, escalating motion.

  ‘Who was that?’ Jo joined me at the parapet.

  ‘No idea,’ I lied. ‘Didn’t recognise the number.’

  She pushed a short glass into my hand. There was ice in the whisky and an apple squatting on top of the glass like a fat red-green backside on a crystal toilet. I looked over my shades at her.

  She extracted a strip of celery from her Bloody Mary and clinked my glass with hers. ‘You should eat.’

  ‘I’m not hungry.’

  ‘Yeah. Precisely.’

  Jo was small with very thick black hair – cut short – and very thin white skin – variously pierced. She had a wide, rock-star’s mouth, which was sort of fitting as she did PR for the Ice House record label. Today she was looking vaguely Drowned World-era Madonna-ish, with black tights, a short tartan skirt and an old leather jacket over an artfully ripped T-shirt. People, not all Americans, had been known to call her cute and feisty, though not normally twice. She had a temper, which was why I automatically lied about the phone call even though I had no reason to. Well, almost no reason.

  I hoisted the apple from the glass and took a bite. It looked shiny and great but tasted of nothing much. Jo was probably right that I ought to eat something. Breakfast had been some orange juice and a couple of lines of coke each. I did very little of that stuff these days, but I had this theory that the last time you want to get coked up is late at night when you just make your body stay up way beyond the time it wants to and you therefore stand a good chance of missing the next day; snort during the hours of daylight instead and sort of slide off into alcohol as the evening descends, so maintaining something remotely like the body’s usual rhythms.

  As a result we hadn’t eaten much of the wedding brunch at all and probably should force ourselves to eat a little, just to keep things on an even keel. On the other hand the apple was pretty unappetising. I put it down on the chest-high brick parapet. It wobbled and started to roll towards the drop. I caught it and steadied it before it could fall the hundred or so feet to the pitted asphalt of the abandoned car park beneath. Which was not, in fact, totally abandoned; my pal Ed had left his gleaming new yellow Porsche at one end, near the gates. Everybody else had parked in the almost unnaturally quiet and empty street on the other side of the old factory.

  Kulwinder and Faye had lived here in the not-yet fashionable bit of London ’s East End north of Canary Wharf for a couple of years, always knowing that the place was likely to be demolished at any time. The red-brick building was over a century old. It had originally made stuff with lead; mostly lead soldiers and lead shot (which apparently needed a big tall tower to drop little spits of molten lead down into a big water pool). Hence the height of the place; eight tall floors, mostly full of artists’ studios for the last dozen years or so.

  Kulwinder and Faye had leased half the top floor and turned it into a big New York style loft; spare, echoing and vast. It was as white as an art gallery and it didn’t really have many readily identifiable rooms; instead it had what stage people would call spaces. Mainly one big space, full of minimalism, but very expensive and artfully arranged minimalism.

  However, some developer had finally got their planning permission and so the place was getting knocked down in a week or two. Kul and Faye had already bought a place in Shoreditch. Buying seemed to encourage the need for further commitment so they’d got married this morning and Jo and I were two of the fifty or so guests invited to the wedding (I couldn’t make it; show to do) and the subsequent feast back at the loft. Not, like I say, that we’d eaten much.

  I frowned and dug into my glass to hook out the ice, dropping the glistening blocks on the wide brick parapet.

  Jo shrugged. ‘That’s the way it came, hon,’ she said.

  I sipped cold whisky and looked out towards the unseen river. The roof terrace faced south and east, producing shadowed views beneath the scattered clouds floating over the towers of Canary Wharf and the unending cluttered flatness of Essex. A cool wind chilled my wet fingers.

  I didn’t like it when Jo said ‘hon’. Thought it sounded like an affectation. She said ‘daunce’ sometimes, too, when she meant ‘dance’. She’d grown up in a posh bit of Manchester but she sounded like she was from somewhere between Manhattan and Mayfair.

  I looked at the slowly melting ice cubes puddling on the brickwork and wondered if there were similar little things about me that were starting to annoy her.

  I flicked the lozenges of ice overboard, down to the cratered asphalt of the car park.

  ‘Ken; Jo. How you two doing?’ Kulwinder joined us.

  ‘Fine, Kul,’ I told him. He was wearing a cool black suit with a white shirt and Nehru collar. Skin as rich and glistening as dark honey; big liquid eyes, currently shielded by some silver-framed Oakleys. Kulwinder was a gig promoter and one of those annoying people who was effortlessly stylish, never more so than when they went back to some old fashion people had half forgotten but which – when picked up again by somebody like Kulwinder – everybody suddenly realises actually looks pretty good. ‘Married life still suiting you?’

  He smiled. ‘So far so good.’

/>   ‘Nice suit,’ Jo said, touching his sleeve.

  ‘Yeah,’ Kul said, holding out one arm and inspecting it. ‘Wedding present from Faye.’

  Faye was a journalist/newsreader on the radio station I work for; she and Kul met at one of our after-show pub afternoons. I think I’m on record on air describing Faye as ‘comely’.

  ‘When do you head for NYC?’ I asked. They were honeymooning in the States; New York and Yosemite. Just for six days due to Kul’s gig work and the move to Shoreditch next week.

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  ‘Whereabouts are you staying?’

  ‘Plaza,’ Kul said. He shrugged. ‘Faye always wanted to stay there.’ He took a drink from the bottle of Hobec he was holding.

  ‘You going on Concorde?’ Jo asked. Kul liked to travel in style; drove a restored Citroën DS.

  He shook his head. ‘No. Hasn’t started flying again yet.’

  Jo looked at me accusingly. ‘Ken won’t take me to the States,’ she told Kul. He raised his eyebrows at me.

  I shrugged. ‘I was thinking I might wait until democracy had been restored.’

  Kulwinder snorted. ‘You really don’t like Dubya, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t, but that’s not the point. I have this old-fashioned belief that if you lose the race you shouldn’t be given the prize. Getting it handed to you because of electoral roll manipulation, the police in your brother’s state stopping the black folks from voting, a right-wing mob storming a counting station and the Supreme Court being stuffed with Republican fucks is called… gosh, what’s the technical term? Oh, yeah; a coup d’état.’

  Kul shook his head and looked at me with his big, dark eyes. ‘Oh, Ken,’ he said sadly. ‘Do you ever get down off that high horse?’

  ‘Got a whole stable full of them, Kul,’ I told him.

  ‘Shit,’ Jo said, staring at her mobile’s display. I hadn’t heard it ring; she usually had it set on vibrate (which about six months ago gave me the idea for one of the show’s more long-running and successful items. Well, long-running in the sense I still went back to it now and again, and successful by the perverse standards of me and my producer in that we’d had dozens of complaints about our crudity and obscenity rather than the more common handful). Jo thumbed a button, scowled heroically and said, with a totally insincere brightness, ‘Todd! How are you? What can I do for you?’

  She shook her head and sneered down at the phone while Todd – one of her bosses at Ice House and allegedly deeply inadequate in every way – talked. She held the phone away from her and clenched her jaw for a moment, then turned and put the phone back to her ear. ‘I see. Can’t you deal with it?’ she said as she walked slowly along the broad terrace. ‘Right. No. I see. Yeah. Yeah. No, of course…’

  ‘So, what about you, Ken?’ Kul asked, leaning on the parapet and glancing at Jo, who was a few paces away now and giving the finger to her phone while still making noises into it. ‘Jo going to make an honest man of you?’

  I looked at him. ‘Marriage?’ I asked softly, also glancing at Jo. ‘Are you talking about marriage?’ He just grinned. I leaned on the parapet too, looking down at the gradually browning flesh of the apple. ‘I don’t think so. Once was enough.’

  ‘How is Jude?’

  ‘All right, last I heard.’ My ex was currently shacked up with a cop in sunny Luton.

  ‘Still in touch?’ Kul asked.

  ‘Very occasionally.’ I shrugged. Slightly dodgy territory here, as Jude and I did meet up now and again and on a few of those occasions had – despite all the bitterness and recriminations and other usual failed-marriage stuff – ended up falling into bed. Not something I wanted Jo to know about, or Judith’s boy in blue. Not something I’d talked about with any of my friends in fact. Also not something that had happened for over half a year, so maybe that was over at last. Probably just as well.

  ‘You must have been seeing Jo since about when Faye and I met up,’ Kul said. Jo was on the other edge of the terrace, leaning on the parapet facing south, still on the phone and shaking her head.

  ‘That long?’

  ‘Yeah; about eighteen months.’ He drank again, looking past me at Jo. ‘I guessed you’d either be settling down or splitting up,’ he said quietly.

  I showed the surprise I felt. ‘Why?’

  ‘Ken, your relationships rarely make it past the year-and-a-half mark. A year is probably the average.’

  ‘Jesus, Kul, do you keep notes on this sort of thing?’

  He shook his head. ‘No, I just remember stuff, and I can see patterns.’

  ‘Well,’ I began, and would maybe have half admitted that perhaps Jo and I weren’t going anywhere, except she shut her phone and came marching over to us. ‘Trouble?’ I asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said, almost spitting. ‘Those fucking Addicta wankers again.’ Addicta were Ice House’s latest hot band. Happening; their time was very definitely now. I kind of liked their music – melodic English grunge with oases of surprising wistfulness – but had come to hate them in a vicarious, solidarity-inspired way because they were, according to the usually reliable source that was Jo, such total and complete arseholes to deal with. ‘That fucking useless cunt needs me to go and hold their fucking hands while some fucking precious snapper drapes them across a fucking Bentley or something. Supposed to happen yesterday but the fucking dickhead forgot to let me know.’ She kicked the parapet with one Doc Marten. ‘Cunt.’

  ‘You’re upset,’ I said. ‘I can tell.’

  ‘Oh, fuck off, Ken,’ she breathed, heading for the flat’s interior.

  I watched her go. Chase after and try to smooth things, or let her go, not make a bad thing worse? I hesitated.

  Jo stopped briefly to talk to Faye, who was heading in the opposite direction with some people, then she was gone. In a moment Faye was smiling at me and introducing these people and the possibility of pursuit and attempted mollification had gone.

  ‘Ken. Thought you were avoiding me.’

  ‘Emma. As if,’ I said, sitting beside her on one of the main space’s two chrome and black-suede couches. I chinked glasses. ‘You look great,’ I told her. Just jeans and a soft silk shirt, an Alice band in her hair, but she did look good. It’s a few drinks later here, but it definitely wasn’t the drink talking or looking. She just raised her eyebrows.

  Emma was married to my best pal from school days in Glasgow, Craig Verrin; Craig and I were our own little two-guy gang for fifth and sixth year, before he left for University College London and within a year was settled down with Emma and a baby girl. Meanwhile I – viciously scapegoated by my teachers and examiners on some trumped-up charge of not having done the necessary work to pass my exams – left to make tea and score drugs for the more lazy and dissolute DJs on StrathClyde Sound.

  Emma was smart and funny and attractive in a delicately blond way and I’d always loved her to bits, but things had become a little spoiled between us because we shared the guilty secret that, just the once, we’d slept together. She and Craig had been going through a bad patch when it had happened after Craig had strayed and been found out, and they were split-up again now – had been for a couple of years – so it somehow seemed not quite as bad as it could have been… but still. My best pal’s girl; what the hell had I been thinking of? The next morning had been probably the most embarrassing of my life; Emma and I had both been so ashamed it had been pointless trying to pretend to the other that what had happened had been anything other than a colossal mistake.

  Well, it was just one of those things you wished you could delete from reality. I supposed we’d both done our best to forget about it, and just the passing of time made the guilt less sharp, but sometimes, when Emma and I looked each other in the eye, it was like it had been only yesterday, and we both just had to look away. I lived in intermittent terror that Craig would find out.

  I suppose it was sort of similar to but different from when Jude and I fell into bed. And it was another relationship I couldn’t talk
to anyone about. Come to think of it I couldn’t talk about most of my relationships/liaisons/whatever you wanted to call them, for one reason or another. I certainly couldn’t talk about the other big one; the one with Celia – Celia the svelte, Celia the sexy, Celia the slinky as a seal – either. Jeez, a shallow person could come away from a review of my private life with some sort of idea that I liked a frisson of danger in my dalliances, but that particular one was not just dangerous, that one could get me very seriously hurt, or worse.

  In my darker moments it sometimes occurred to me that these entanglements – or one of them – would be the death of me.

  ‘Haven’t seen you for a while.’ Emma was leaning towards me, talking quietly, voice nearly lost in the party’s hubbub.

  ‘Things have been hectic.’

  ‘I bet. I saw Jo storming out.’

  ‘Well, no; that wasn’t quite a storm. It wasn’t a common walk, either, granted. Somewhere in between; more of a flounce.’

  ‘Something you said?’

  ‘Remarkably, no. No, that was a work-related flounce, or storm. Where’s Craig?’

  ‘Picking up Nikki.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Should be here soon.’

  ‘And how is the gorgeous-?’

  ‘So,’ Emma broke in. ‘How’s your programme going?’

  ‘You have to ask?’ I pretended to be hurt. ‘Don’t you listen any more?’

  ‘You lost me when you were banging on about how only criminals should have guns.’

  ‘That’s not quite what we were saying.’

  ‘Maybe you should have been more clear. What were you saying?’

  ‘I can’t remember,’ I lied.

  ‘Yes you can. You were saying criminals should have guns.’

  ‘I was not! I was saying the idea that if you took hand-guns away from ordinary law-abiding people then only criminals would have guns was a crap argument for keeping guns.’