by Iain Banks
We crossed Oxford Street and started to head up Cleveland Street, following a motorcycle courier on a Honda VFR. Perhaps, I thought, a little reminiscing about my days as a fearless gonzo courier – only a few years ago, after all – would impress Nikki. It started raining and I turned on the wipers, to hilarious effect. I looked at Nikki. ‘Well, do you listen to Capital Live!?’
‘Mmm… sometimes,’ she said, not looking at me.
‘Yeah, well, exactly. You’re eighteen; you should be part of our target audience. What do you listen to, anyway?’
‘Umm, well, they sort of come and go? But I think they’re all illegal black stations from south of the river.’
‘What? K-BLAK? X-Men? Chillharbour Lane?’
‘Yeah, and Rough House, Precinct 17.’
‘Radio Free Peckham… is that still going?’
‘No, it was closed down.’
‘Well, frankly, good for you for ignoring the usual commercial tat.’ I was snatching glances at Nikki to see if she was impressed that I knew all these cool illegal stations, but she didn’t seem to be. ‘Not,’ I added, ‘that many of them play much Radiohead, as I recall.’
‘Sadly, no.’
‘Never mind. Radiohead are local where you’re going; bound to get loads of air time in Oxford.’
‘Hmm.’ She sounded distracted and when I glanced over she was looking at a clothes shop window. I looked ahead again.
‘Shit!’
‘Oh-!’
A blue car swept out of a side street right into the path of the courier in front of us. I caught a brief glimpse of the car driver, looking the wrong way and talking on his mobile. The bike rider didn’t have time to bail or brake, just went whump into the BMW Compact’s wing; the bike stood on its front wheel then clattered back to the rain-greased street just in front of us, files spilling from one pannier and skidding papers over the street and into the gutter. The rider went sailing over the Beemer’s bonnet as it braked and skidded to a stop. He landed heavily on the road ahead, sliding on his back a metre to hit the kerb hard with his helmet.
‘Oh! Oh!’ Nikki was saying.
I’d pulled up. ‘He’ll probably be okay,’ I told her quickly. ‘You just stay here.’
She nodded. She cleared some hair from her face with a trembling hand and pulled a mobile from her jacket as I opened the door. ‘Should I phone for an ambulance?’ she asked.
‘Good idea.’ I jumped out and ran past the white-faced car driver, just getting out, still holding his mobile. It crossed my mind to tell him what a fuckwit he was, but I didn’t. A couple of people were already standing looking down at the black figure lying in the road. He wasn’t moving. Some kid in a puffa jacket was squatting by him, doing something to his helmet.
‘Just leave the helmet on, yeah?’ I said to the kid, kneeling on the courier’s other side and carefully lifting up his visor.
Behind me, somebody had the sense to turn off the fallen bike’s engine, which was more than I’d thought to do.
The courier was older than me; grey beard, glasses, face pinched by the helmet’s foam padding. He blinked. ‘Fuck,’ he said weakly.
‘How you doing there, pal?’ I asked him.
‘Bit sore,’ he croaked. The rain was making little spots on his glasses. He put his gloved hand up towards the helmet’s fastening. I held on to it.
‘Hold on, hold on,’ I said. ‘Can you feel everything? Waggle your toes and stuff?’
‘Ah… yeah, yeah, I think… yeah. I’m all right. I think I’m all right. Breathing’s a bit… What about the bike?’
‘Think you’re going to need new forks.’
‘Shit. Fuck. Ah, rats. You a biker too, eh?’
‘Yeah. Used to be.’
He looked away to one side, where I sensed more people standing, and somebody approaching. I turned round and saw the car driver. The biker coughed and said wheezily, ‘If this cunt says, “Sorry, mate, I didn’t see you,” deck him for me, will you?’
Nikki was beautifully bedraggled by the rain.
‘You didn’t need to get out, kid,’ I told her. She was trying to dry her hair with a small chamois leather. The Landy’s interior was trying to mist up.
‘The operator was asking me where the incident had taken place, and I couldn’t see the street names,’ she explained. ‘Then I thought I’d better stop the bike’s engine.’
‘Well, I think the guy’s going to be all right. We did good. We make a fine emergency team; triples all round.’
I’d left our details with the cops, and the biker had been persuaded to take the ambulance; he was still dazed and might have some broken ribs. Nikki had handed him the VFR’s keys, though the cops had taken them away again because they wanted them left with the machine.
She gave me back the chamois leather. ‘Thanks.’
‘You’re welcome.’ I used it on the windscreen. ‘Blimey. Welcome to London, eh? Oh; do just say if you need a stiff drink or anything.’
She shook her head. ‘No, thanks.’
‘Yeah, just straight home, I think.’ We continued north, through the rain, for Highgate.
‘This is about what I think it’s about, isn’t it?’
‘Think so.’
‘So, what do you think?’
‘That we’re going to get carpeted, old son.’
‘Cripes, Biffo. A rocket from the WingCo, eh what?’
‘Severe dressing down. After you.’
‘Tally-fucking-ho.’
‘“… Well here is an alternative fatwa: women of Islam, judge your men, and if they are bad, kill them. They oppress you and scorn you and yet they are frightened of you; why else would they keep you from power and the sight of other men? But you have power. You have the power to judge whether your man is good or not. Ask yourself this: would your husband kill another person just because they are Jewish or American or something else people are simply born to be? Allah has let people be born these things; would your man kill them for no other reason than the faith or the country they were born into, by the will of Allah? If he would then he is a bad person and deserves death, for he brings shame upon your faith and the name of Allah. When next he comes to you, have a kitchen knife concealed beneath your bedclothes, or a pair of scissors, or even a penknife or a carton-cutter, and slit his unworthy throat. If you have no knife, bite out his throat. If you wish only to mutilate him, use a knife or your teeth on his manhood.” But do we actually say-’
Debbie Cottee, our Station Manager, used the remote to click off the DAT machine on the other side of her light, airy office. She slid her glasses down her nose and looked at me with weary, bleary blue eyes. ‘Well?’
‘Hmm, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Do you think we’re using too much compression on my voice?’
‘Ken…’
‘But nobody,’ Phil said, ‘was actually saying that. I mean, there was a bit just before that where Ken was saying that we didn’t force Muslim women in this country to wear mini-skirts or bikinis, whereas a Western woman going to Saudi has no choice but to conform to their dress-code. The whole point is about toleration and intolerance, and about public figures like religious leaders being allowed to pass what is in effect a death sentence, without any sort of trial or defence, on nationals of another country. That was the whole point of putting the bit at the start pointing out that nobody in a position of responsibility in the West would say something like that-’
‘Is fucking irrelevant, Phil,’ Debbie said, putting her glasses down on the surface of her desk, which covered about the same area as our whole office. Her view, from near the top of the Mouth Corp building, was out over the Square and the cluttered rooftops of Soho, towards the blunt, pitted blade of Centrepoint. Debbie was thirty but looked older; she was fit in a chunky sort of way, her hair was mousy brown and she had tired, puckered eyes.
‘I’m not sure I see it as irrelevant at all, really,’ Phil said with the air of an academic discussing some fine point of ancient Etruscan prop
erty law, or the historical basis of estimates for the Yellow River’s silt-deposition rate during the Hang dynasty. ‘The whole point is that you put a disclaimer at the beginning and the end. You’re not saying, “Go and kill these people.” You’re saying, “No one here is saying, ‘Go and kill these people.’”’
Debbie glared at him. ‘That’s just semantics.’
‘No, it’s… grammar,’ Phil said, appearing baffled that anybody could possibly think otherwise. He looked briefly at me. Of course it was semantics rather than grammar (I was almost positive), but Debbie, who was certainly one of the more human execs in the Mouth organisation in general and Capital Live! in particular, and not an ignoramus, wasn’t quite smart enough to feel confident arguing the toss over that. At such moments I loved my producer.
‘Phil!’ Debbie said, slapping the surface of her desk. Her flat-screen monitor wobbled. ‘What if somebody, what if a Muslim person switches on just after your so-called disclaimer at the start of this, this… diatribe, and then switches off, totally fucking incensed – as well they fucking might be, if they can even believe their ears – just before the end? What the fuck are they going to think they just heard?’
‘Oh, come on,’ Phil said. ‘That’s like asking what if somebody hears the word “country” but switches off before the “-ry” bit. I mean, it’s just one of those things.’ He held his hands out.
‘That’s one word; this is a whole speech.’
‘Yes, but it’s the principle,’ Phil insisted stubbornly.
Debbie switched from Phil to me. ‘Ken,’ she said, ‘even for you…’
‘Debbie,’ I said, holding up both hands as though in surrender. ‘We’re proving our own point here.’
‘What?’
‘About prejudice, about bigotry.’
‘How does insulting people do that? How does the Islamic Council of Churches screaming down the phone at me do anything to defeat bigotry? You’re just-’
‘Because we had the Head Rabbi screaming down the phone last month,’ I pointed out.
‘The Israel-as-a-rogue-state rant,’ Phil said, nodding.
‘So fucking what?’ Debbie said loudly. ‘Are you trying to claim that insulting two religions is somehow better than insulting one?’
‘It’s being even-handed,’ I agreed.
‘It’s being bigoted towards ethno-religious groupings!’ she shouted. ‘It is, arguably, inciting religious and even racial hatred towards Jews and Muslims!’
‘That’s not fair,’ I protested. ‘We insult Christians too whenever we possibly can. We did that whole week of Christ as Certifiable Nutter.’
‘But he was a Jew!’ Debbie yelled. ‘And sacred to Islam as well!’
‘One stone; three birds!’ I yelled back. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘All Abrahamic religions have been selectively targeted, over time, for trenchant, robust, but above all fair criticism,’ Phil put in. ‘I have the relevant records.’
Debbie looked from Phil to me. ‘This isn’t a fucking joke, guys. There are mosques, synagogues being fire-bombed-’
‘You sure?’ Phil said.
‘-people being attacked because they’re “Middle Eastern” in appearance-’
‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Jesus; Sikhs have been attacked for being Islamic terrorist sympathisers.’ I spread my arms. ‘So proving the essential point here; bigots are fuckwits. ’
‘The point,’ Debbie said exasperatedly, ‘is that some nasty little dickhead from the National Front or the British National Party could listen in to a programme of yours where you lay into the Jewish people or the Muslims and fucking cheer you on, Ken.’ Debbie slapped the desk again, but softer this time. She put her glasses back on and fixed her gaze on me. ‘Now is that what you want?’
This was actually a pretty good point, and one that Phil and I had worried over ourselves. ‘That’s why we have to attack bigotry and stupidity everywhere!’ I blustered. ‘If we stop now they’ll be left thinking the last lot we went after were the definitive bad guys.’
‘What?’ Debbie said, looking over her glasses at me again. (Fair enough; this last assertion didn’t make much sense even to me.)
‘I think that is a fair point,’ Phil said, nodding.
‘Well, here are another two points, gentlemen,’ Debbie said, sticking her glasses back up her face and pulling herself closer in towards her desk. ‘There’s such a thing as this station’s licence and the Broadcasting Standards Authority. There are also such things as our advertisers. They pay all the fucking bills and they can pull their ads even faster than the BSA can pull our licence. Several already have.’
‘But they’ve been replaced,’ Phil said, looking just a little red in the face now. He took his glasses off.
‘For now, at lesser rates,’ Debbie said steelily.
‘Rates have been going down everywhere for the whole year!’ Phil protested. He started polishing his glasses with a clean hanky. ‘New ones are always going to be lower than old ones in the current climate! It’s-’
‘Some very important people, some very vital advertisers, have been having words with Sir Jamie,’ Debbie said through clenched teeth. (To our credit, I thought, at this point not one of the three of us even glanced towards the Dear Owner’s portrait on the wall.) ‘At cocktail parties. In his club. At board meetings. On the grouse moors. At charity events. Over his mobile and his home phone. He is not happy. He is not happy to the extent that he is seriously weighing up which he needs most: your show or his good name. Which do you think he will choose?’ She sat back, letting this sink in. ‘Guys, you run a reasonably successful programme for us, but in the end it’s only ten hours of air time per week out of one hundred and sixty-eight. Sir Jamie’s backed you until now, Ken, Phil, but he can’t let you jeopardise the station, let alone the reputation of the Mouth Corporation or the goodwill he’s built up from nothing over the last thirty years.’
Phil and I looked at each other.
‘Jesus Christ, Debs,’ Phil said shakily. ‘Are you telling us to tone it down, or are we sacked? I mean, what?’ He put his glasses back on.
‘You’re not sacked. But it’s not just tone it down, it’s make amends.’
‘Make amends?’ I squawked.
‘This attacking Islam and Judaism, in particular, has to be reversed.’
‘So we can attack Christianity?’ I suggested. Debbie glared at me. ‘What?’ I said, holding out both hands.
‘We’ve got the perfect thing,’ Phil announced, just like that.
I did probably the first genuine double-take I’d ever done in my entire life. ‘We have?’
Phil nodded. ‘Ken doesn’t know about this yet,’ he told Debbie.
‘I don’t?’
‘Suggestion came in just yesterday from the Breaking News people.’
(I just managed to prevent myself saying, ‘It did?’)
‘The new Channel Four thing?’ Debbie asked, eyes narrowed.
‘Yeah; their competitor for Newsnight,’ Phil said.
‘Weren’t they trying to poach Paxman for that?’
‘I think so, but he wasn’t having it. Last rumour I heard was their main presenters would be Cavan Lutton-James and Beth Laing.’
‘She’s on Sky, isn’t she?’
‘Contract coming up for renewal.’
‘Anyway,’ Debbie said, waving one hand.
‘Anyway,’ Phil said. ‘They’re still doing dummy programmes at the moment but they start for real on Monday and they want something hard-hitting and controversial; something that’ll get them headlines.’
‘I thought they just wanted me to practise on in one of these dummy programmes,’ I said. (Stupidly, I realised, as soon as I’d closed my mouth again; it was entirely possible Phil was winging it here.)
‘They did, at first,’ Phil said. ‘I persuaded them otherwise.’
‘They want Ken for the Monday programme?’ Debbie asked.
‘If we can get
the terms right,’ Phil said.
Debbie could probably see the surprise on my face. ‘You’re not Ken’s fucking agent, Phil.’
(This was true, though he sometimes acted like one. My real agent, the long-suffering Paul, complained that thanks to my – to him incomprehensibly bizarre – political fastidiousness, what I needed was an anti-agent; somebody who would look for brilliantly remunerative work I could then cheerfully turn down. In fact, he said, aside from contract negotiation time at the station, all I really needed was an answering machine that shouted ‘No!’)
‘I mean the terms of control over content and the people involved,’ Phil explained patiently. ‘I didn’t want Ken going in there thinking he was about to do a short piece of light relief about mike technique or something and then being confronted with half a dozen swivel-eyed fanatics representing all the different brands of fundamentalists we’ve upset over the last year. That’s the sort of thing that can happen and I just wanted to make sure it wouldn’t.’
‘Why is Ken looking like… well, like that?’ She gestured at me. Like what? I thought. I tried to look business-like and unperturbed.
Phil glanced my way then said, ‘Look, this is something Ken and I talked about. We’ve had too many dodgy, manipulative offers for TV appearances for him in the past. Either they’re too trashy to be worth considering in the first place, or they sound really interesting and we get all fired up about it then it falls through, or they change their mind, or it turns out there was some hidden agenda. We agreed that I’d handle these proposals until there was something worth taking to Ken, then we’d talk about it.’ Phil glanced at his watch. ‘If it hadn’t been for this meeting we’d be doing just that right now,’ he said. (Happily he didn’t add ‘in the pub’.) He looked at me. ‘Sorry to land this on you like this, Ken.’ I waved a hand.
‘So…’ Debbie said, still sounding and looking suspicious. ‘What are you proposing?’
‘That we give them something hard-hitting and controversial, ’ Phil said.
Debbie still looked deeply dubious, but I could see she was interested. ‘Which would be what?’
‘One of their ideas is to get Ken to debate with a genuine Holocaust denier; a guy from the extreme-right Aryan Christian Movement who claims the Allies built the death camps after the War,’ Phil said. All three of us exchanged looks. ‘I wasn’t so sure about that,’ he added. ‘But, well, maybe – given what you’ve been saying about the perceived if mistaken bias against the Jewish and Muslim faiths – that would be the way to go after all.’ He turned from Debbie to me. ‘Obviously, only if you feel comfortable with the idea, Ken. I’m still not sure about it, frankly.’