Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  ‘I bet you started this, didn’t you, Ken?’ I turned to find Nikki perched on her crutches, all grumpy glare.

  I held up my hands. ‘Guilty,’ I said, surprised at her expression. ‘Why? What’s wrong?’

  ‘Throwing perfectly good food away is wrong, Ken,’ she said, shaking her head as though at a child who needed to be told that scrawling on the walls with crayons was bad.

  ‘It was only a few bits of fruit,’ I said. ‘It would probably have been-’

  ‘Oh, Ken,’ she said. She shook her head and stumped away.

  Kul came back with a cardboard box full of bottles of Cava and started handing them out to the many grasping hands. ‘Just for dropping,’ he told people seriously. ‘I beg of you; whatever you do, don’t drink it.’

  I half-heartedly considered trying to get to within bottle-handing-out range of him, but the press of people was too great.

  I turned to Amy and held up my hands.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said.

  We leaned back against the east-facing parapet. She put out her hand to shake. ‘Good new game, Ken.’ She looked flushed, excited.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, keeping hold of her hand. ‘I liked it more in the old days.’

  ‘Really?’

  More big cheers as the full Cava bottles hit with satisfyingly loud thuds and booms. ‘Shake them first! Shake them up first!’ somebody was shouting.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Call me a purist, but I feel the soul kind of went out of it when we switched from fruit and lost our amateur status.’

  ‘You can’t live in the past, Ken.’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘We should be proud we were there at the start.’

  ‘You’re right. Was it my idea or yours?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe we had it together.’

  ‘Indeed.’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘Great minds.’

  ‘Idea; time had come.’

  ‘Not about ownership; about result.’

  ‘Destiny.’

  ‘-’s Child.’

  ‘Synchronicity.’

  ‘The Police,’ I said, just as my mobile went (I keep mine on vibrate, too). As I pulled it out of my jacket, Amy’s ring-tone sounded; something classical I knew but couldn’t name.

  ‘Ha-ha,’ she said. ‘Synchronicity indeed.’

  I laughed and looked at the display on my phone; my producer, calling from the office. I heard one or two other phones going off around the place and thought I could hear the land-line in the apartment too and wondered hazily whether for some bizarre reason everybody here had something urgent they had set alarms for, a little after two o’clock on a Tuesday in September.

  ‘Yo, Phil,’ I said. Amy answered her call too.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘ New York?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘The World Trade Center? Isn’t that-?’

  ‘A plane? What, a big plane, like a Jumbo or something?’

  ‘You mean, like, the two big, um, skyscrapers?’

  Kulwinder was walking back through the crowd of people as more phones went off and faces started to look puzzled and the atmosphere began to change and chill around us. He was heading for the loft’s main space again, talking to somebody on his phone. ‘Yeah, yeah, I’ll put the TV on…’

  Two. DRESS-DOWN WEDNESDAY

  ‘Half Man Half Limp Bizkit there. Their Mission Impossible theme-ette. Hasn’t been on the play list for a while, Phil. You attempting to make some sort of point with that title?’

  ‘Not me, boss.’

  ‘You sure, Phil?’ I looked across the desk at him. We were in our usual studio at Capital Live!. I sat surrounded by screens, buttons and keyboards like some sort of commodities dealer, because that’s the way studios have gone, even in the relatively short time that I’ve been in the wonderful world of radio broadcasting; you had to search for the two CD players – in this studio, up to my right between the e-mail screen and the callers’ details screen – to reassure yourself that you weren’t some suit playing the futures market. Only the microphone, angle-poised out from the main console, gave the game away.

  ‘Positive,’ Phil said, blinking behind his glasses. Phil’s glasses had thick black frames, like Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, or Woody Allen as himself. Phil Ashby was a big, gentle, rumpled-looking guy with thick, unruly, prematurely salt-and-pepper hair (the grey entirely down to me, he said, though I had photographic evidence to the contrary) and a slight West-country burr to his voice; he had a relatively slow, drawly, almost sleepy delivery, which, though I’d never admit it to him, complemented my own voice. A running joke we’ve used is that he’s on permanent Valium while I’m forever speeding, and one day we’ll swap drugs and just both sound normal. Phil had been my producer for the last year here at Capital Live!. Another two months and I would have established a new on-air employment record. I rarely last more than a year before I get sacked for saying something that somebody somewhere thinks I shouldn’t have. ‘Lalo.’

  ‘What?’ It was my turn to blink.

  ‘Lalo,’ Phil repeated. I could only see his head above the various screens and electronic gear between us. Sometimes I couldn’t even see that if he’d got his head buried in a newspaper.

  ‘Isn’t that one of the Teletubbies? I only ask because I know you are an expert.’

  ‘No; Lalo Schifrin.’ He fell silent, shrugged.

  ‘Good radio shrug there, Phil.’ I had sound effects for many of the silent syllables that made up Phil’s fractured body language, but I was still working on one for a shrug.

  He raised his eyebrows.

  ‘Right.’ I picked up an old-fashioned mechanical stopwatch from the green baize of the desk. I clicked it. ‘Okay, I’m putting the dead air stopwatch on you until you explain yourself, Ashby.’ I glanced up at the big studio clock above the door. Another ninety seconds and we were off air. Through the triple glazing, in the production suite where producers used to be decently confined, in the good old days, our assistants appeared to be conducting a low-level conflict, which consisted of throwing paper planes at each other. Bill the newsreader wandered in on them, waving his script and shouting.

  ‘Lalo Schifrin,’ Phil said patiently into the silence on our side of the glass. ‘He wrote the original theme for Mission Impossible.’

  I clicked the stopwatch off. ‘Four seconds; you’re not even trying. So; Lalo. You mean for the TV series, I take it.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Bully for him. And your point would be, caller?’

  Phil knitted his brows. ‘Vaguely pop-related people with names that sound like they were given them by babies.’

  I snorted. ‘Just people? So “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, by the Fabs, wouldn’t count? Or “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”? Or “Gaba-Gaba Hey”?’

  ‘Hardly target audience, Ken.’

  ‘Is Lalo?’

  ‘Jay-Lo.’

  ‘Jay-Lo.’

  ‘Jennifer Lopez.’

  ‘I know who Jay-Lo is.’

  ‘P. Diddy, for that matter.’

  ‘Lulu? Kajagoogoo? Bubba without the Sparxx? Iio? Aaliyah?’

  ‘Gawd rest the poor girl’s soul.’

  I shook my head. ‘It’s only Tuesday and we’re at the Friday bottom-of-the-barrel stage already?’

  Phil scratched his head. I pressed a Function button on my FX keyboard; an exaggerated, wooden, head-scratching noise of dubious comedic value sounded in my headphones. It was either that or the dead air watch again, and you can over-do these things. Our listeners, whom we knew – thanks to some very expensive, pro-active and robust market research – to be statistically stoutly loyal and containing a major proportion of ad-agency prime-target As and Bs with a lofty disposable income profile, would be familiar with the array of assertedly wacky and indeed even zany sound effects I used to give them an idea of Phil’s silent on-air actions. They also knew about dea
d air, which is the terrifically technical term us radio boffins use for silence. I took a breath. ‘Can we talk about what we haven’t talked about yet?’

  ‘Must we?’ Phil looked pained.

  ‘Phil, I was held off the air for three days last week; we played the pop equivalent of martial music through the whole show yesterday-’

  ‘What, is that what you get from Marshall amps, yeah?’

  ‘-and yet we’re told the world changed for ever seven days ago. Shouldn’t a purportedly topical show reflect that?’

  ‘I didn’t even know you knew the word “purportedly”.’

  I leaned closer to the mike, lowering my voice. Phil closed his eyes. ‘Thought for today, listener. For our American cousins…’ Phil groaned. ‘If you do find and kill Bin Laden, assuming he is the piece of scum behind this, or even if you just find his body…’ I paused, watching the hands on the studio clock flick silently towards the top of the hour. Phil had taken his glasses off. ‘Wrap him in pigskin and bury him under Fort Knox. I can even tell you how deep: thirteen hundred and fifty feet. That’s one hundred and ten storeys.’ Another pause. ‘Don’t worry about that noise, listeners, it’s just the sound of my producer’s head gently thumping on the desk. Oh, one last thing: as it stands, what happened last week wasn’t an attack on democracy; if it was they’d have crashed a plane into Al Gore’s house. That’s it for today. Talk to you tomorrow, if I’m still here. News next after these vital pieces of consumerist propaganda.’

  ‘I was in Bond Street this morning. DKNY had no normal stock that I could see at all. Do you know what they had instead, Kenneth?’

  ‘No, I don’t know, Ceel. Why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘They had five thousand red T-shirts with the twin towers on them. Five thousand. Red. That was all. In the whole shop. It was like an art gallery, not a shop. I thought, Hey, that’s really touching, really artistic. I also thought, They’ll never sell all those, but somehow it didn’t matter.’ She turned in the bed and looked at me. ‘Everything seems so quiet, so spooky, don’t you think?’ She turned back again.

  I stroked away a rope of her long brown hair and licked at the valley between her shoulder blades. That hollow was the colour of milk chocolate and tasted of salt. I breathed in the warm scent of her skin, senses swimming, losing myself in the sweet, heady microclimate of her long, slim body.

  ‘It’s the planes,’ I said at last, smoothing a hand down her flank, over waist and hip to thigh. Her body, so light for somebody so definitely black, looked dark as old mahogany against the startling whiteness of the hotel sheets.

  ‘The planes?’ she asked, taking my hand and holding it in hers.

  ‘They’ve stopped them flying over the city on the way into Heathrow. So another Mr Atta can’t crash-dive into the Canary Wharf tower or the Houses of Parliament. Makes the whole place seem quieter.’

  (That day, sitting in the ruins of the abandoned party at Faye and Kulwinder’s, while it slowly dawned on those two that they would not be going to NYC for their honeymoon, at least not the following day and probably for many days, we kept going out onto the terrace to look at the Canary Wharf towers, tall against the skyline less than a mile away, half expecting to see them hit by a plane and crumble with the same awful grandeur as the first tower. ‘It’s Pearl Harbor II,’ we said. ‘They’ll fucking nuke Baghdad.’ ‘I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe I’m seeing this.’ ‘Where’s Superman? Where’s Batman? Where’s Spiderman?’ ‘Where’s Bruce Willis, or Tom Cruise, or Arnie, or Stallone?’ ‘The barbarians have seized the narrative.’ ‘Fuck, the bad guys are re-writing the scripts…!’ ‘Challenger and Chernobyl were SF, Aum Shinrikyo and the Tokyo Underground was manga; this is a disaster movie directed by Satan.’

  Switching channels, some man on the Beeb was saying that when people claimed they’d seen people jumping from the towers they were really only seeing cladding falling off. Then you switched back and saw the bits of cladding holding hands as they jumped together, skirts blowing up around their bodies. Then the second tower collapsed, and there was no more jumping or falling to be done, just the catching up with the additional fragments of atrocity popping up and ploughing in elsewhere in America.)

  ‘I see,’ Celia said softly, turning away again. ‘You’re right.’ She stroked my hand. ‘But I mean it’s really quieter, too, Kenneth.’ Ceel was the only person apart from my mother who ever called me Kenneth. (Well, also apart from Ed, who sometimes called me Kennif, and Ed’s mum, who’s been known to call me Kennit, but that doesn’t count.) ‘Less… fewer people. Especially in places like Mayfair and Knightsbridge, and Chelsea, too.’

  ‘Ah; the posh places; the hedonistic ’hoods. You reckon they’re quieter?’

  ‘Yes. I think they’re all staying in their places in the country.’

  ‘You’re probably right. So why are you still here?’

  ‘I hate Gladbrook.’

  Gladbrook was Ceel’s place in the country, or rather her husband’s. Deepest Surrey. Disliked it the instant I heard of it, even before Ceel told me her husband only really used it for business meetings and impressing people. She said she could never feel at home there and hated staying so much as a single night. I mean, Gladbrook; it even sounded wrong, like the name of an off-the-shelf company some well-smarmy City type would buy to front a dodgy tax-shy scam. Never actually been there, but I saw the estate agent’s details for the place once; basically a coffee-table book, it should have had its own ISBN number. Ran to a good forty pages including all the glossy photographs, but all anyone needed to know was that the main house had a heated driveway. You know; for all those blizzards they get in Surrey.

  ‘Is that where Mr M is?’

  ‘No, John is in Amsterdam again.’

  ‘Hmm.’ John. Mr M. Mr Merrial. In the import-export business. Drugs, to begin with; people, largely, these days. Plus fingers in more pies than he has fingers. Some of Mr M’s business interests were even legal these days; impressive property portfolio, apparently. A man a little older than me; maybe about forty. A quiet, even diffident guy, by all accounts, with a half-posh, vaguely south-east accent, pale skin and black hair, usually dressed in an unshowy Savile Row suit and not at all the sort of chap who looks like a multi-millionaire crime lord who could have people much more important than me rubbed out as quietly and efficiently – or as painfully and messily – as he wants, any day of the week. And I’m screwing his wife. I must be fucking mad.

  (But then when we fuck, and I am lost in her, surrendered to those depths beyond mere flesh, nothing could be better, nothing ever has been better, nothing ever will be better. There is no one like her, no one so calm and studied and child-like and innocent and wanton and wise all at once. She thinks I am mad, too, but only for wanting her so much in the first place, not for risking whatever her husband would do to me if he ever found out about us.

  For herself she says she has no fear because she feels she is half dead already. I have to try to explain this. She doesn’t mean half dead in any trivial sense of being tired-out or tired of life or anything like that, but half dead in a way unique to – and only capable of definition by – her own bizarre, self-made religion, a belief system without name, ceremony or teachings, which she cleaves to with the airy casualness of the truly convinced, not the fundamentalist intensity of those who secretly guess they may well be wrong. It’s a mad, bastard concoction of Voodoo spirituality and cosmologically intense physics, like something Stephen Hawking might have dreamed up on a really bad acid trip.

  Me, I was a Humanist, an Evangelical Atheist, a fucking card-carrying member of the Rationalist Inquisition, and Ceel’s totally barking but utterly unrufflable beliefs just drove me crazy, but the truth was neither of us really cared and the only time we discussed stuff like that was in bed; she enjoyed being told she was nuts and she loved the way it got me worked up.

  What it boiled down to was Ceel sincerely believed herself to be half dead in the sense of existing in t
his world while in a deeply soul-entangled state with a twin Ceel in another reality who was dead, a Ceel who died almost exactly half her life ago, when she was fourteen.

  It’s all to do with lightning, with the lightning… We’ll come back to this.)

  ‘And have you seen, Kenneth, how everybody’s become so suspicious?’

  ‘Suspicious?’

  ‘Yes; looking at each other like everybody they meet might be a terrorist.’

  ‘You want to take the Underground, kid. People have started eyeing each other; especially anybody carrying anything that might be big enough to be a bomb, even more so if they put it down on the floor and could even conceivably leave it there when they get off.’

  ‘I get claustrophobic on the Underground.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘I take buses sometimes,’ she said in a small voice, as though to apologise for having a chauffeur-driven Bentley on call and an unlimited taxi account.

  ‘So you’ve told me. And may I express, on behalf of the struggling masses, our gratitude that you deign to descend amongst us and grace our mean and surly lives with your radiant presence, ma’am.’

  She slapped my hand gently and made a tutting sound. I took my hand away and brought it down over her flat belly, through the soft spring of curls and dipping to the cleft beneath.

  Her upper thighs tensed, closing fractionally. ‘I’m a little sore there, from before,’ she said, taking my hand again. She held it as she rolled over on the snow-white sheets and settled on her front.

  (On her left side there is a strange patterning of dark shadows, exactly as though somebody had traced a henna tattoo of forest ferns upon her light-brown skin. It stretches from one shoulder, skirting her breast, and continuing down to the honeyed swell of her hip. This is from the lightning.

  ‘What is that?’ I remembered breathing, on the night of the day that I first saw it, nearly four months ago in the alloyed sheen of golden street and silver moon light, in another room across the city. It was like something from an iffy Science Fiction series, from budget Star Trek or Alien Nation or something; thinking it really was some sort of weird fern/henna tattoo I even tried to lick and rub it off. She just lay there, watching me, great dark eyes unblinking.