by Iain Banks
‘Oh, I’m comfortable with it,’ I said. A fucking Holocaust denier? Somebody from the extreme Christian right prepared to put themselves up for a tongue-lashing? What self-respecting militant liberal wouldn’t want to get their teeth into one of those fucks?
Debbie’s eyes were so narrow they were almost closed. ‘Why do I feel that this might just be a good idea,’ she asked slowly, ‘and yet we seem to have come back to the original, totally facile and childish proposal that the way out of all this was to insult Christians some more?’
‘Oh, come on,’ Phil said with a laugh in his voice. ‘This guy’s Christian like Satan is Christian. The point is he’s wildly anti-Semitic and he’s mad. Articulate, but mad. Ken’ll be seen defending-’
‘You sure this guy’s mad?’ Debbie asked.
‘Well, he agrees with the idea currently gaining ground in sections of Arab society,’ Phil said, in the sort of slow, considered voice that told me he felt back in control here, ‘that the September eleventh attacks were organised by the International Zionist Conspiracy to discredit Islam and give Sharon carte blanche against the Palestinians. But it’s okay; he hates the Arabs too. This guy has a consistent belief system totally based around race, religion and sexuality; Nordic/Aryan/ Christian/straight equals good… everything else is just shades of evil.’
‘Who is he? What’s his name?’
‘His name is Lawson, umm… Briarley or something.’
I was only half listening. It was while Phil was talking about this that I thought of it; my big idea. I knew what I was going to do. If they did let me onto the show with that anti-Semitic fuck, I knew exactly what I was going to do to him.
It was perfect! Mad, bad and dangerous to contemplate and it probably meant I was a bit mad, too, but hey; fire with fire. My mouth went dry and my palms felt suddenly pin-pricked with sweat. Oh, fuck, I thought. What a sweet, beautiful, terrifying idea. Did I really dare?
‘Okay, I’m going to have to consult on this,’ Debbie announced.
I clicked back to reality. Debs was going to kick it upstairs. Sensible woman.
‘Fine by me,’ Phil said. He looked at me and I nodded. ‘But we need a decision by Friday at the very latest; tomorrow would be better.’
‘We’ll have one,’ Debbie said. She pushed back on her desk, her big, black, leather executive chair rolling over the wooden floor. We were excused, obviously.
‘Debbie?’ I said, getting up.
‘What?’
‘I want you to make it very clear to whoever else you talk to about this that I really want to do it. I mean, really want to do it. I think it’s important.’ Phil looked at me with a frown, then smiled at Debbie.
‘I’ll let you know,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, I think we’d all really appreciate it if you avoided offending any major ethnic or religious groups. Could you do that for us?’
‘We can certainly try,’ Phil said merrily.
‘Fuck.’
‘No, it’s okay,’ Phil said as we walked away down a broad corridor lined with framed plaques, discs, awards and letters of thanks and endorsement, none of which were mine. ‘This is a feature, not a bug.’
‘You weren’t making any of that up in there, were you?’
Phil grinned. ‘Course not, you silly sod.’ ‘Sod’, which I was under the impression had dropped off most people’s List Of Plausible Invective around about the early seventies, was Phil’s most powerful expletive. ‘I’ll call the Breaking News people before we hit the pub.’ He frowned at me as we stepped into the lift. ‘Didn’t realise you’d be quite so keen.’
I wasn’t going to tell him about my idea. Best if he didn’t know for his own sake, apart from anything else. ‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Keen Ken; that’s what they call me.’
‘No they don’t.’
Three. DOWNRIVER, UPTOWN
‘‘What I said was, these namby-pamby Holocaust revision people didn’t go remotely far enough. It wasn’t just the Holocaust that didn’t happen, it wasn’t just the death camps that were faked; the whole of the Second World War is a myth. Occupation of Paris? Battle of Britain? North African Campaign? Convoys and U-Boats? Barbarossa? Stalingrad? Kursk? Thousand-bomber raids? D-Day? Fall of Berlin? Singapore? Pearl Harbor? Midway? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? None of it happened! All special effects and lying. Guys of a certain age; you remember thinking how close those Airfix Spitfires and Lancasters looked to the real thing you saw in the film footage? That’s because they were just models too! All the old airfields, the concrete tank traps, a few so-called bomb-sites; they were built after the war.’
The girl looked uncertain, then she laughed. ‘That’s insane.’
I clinked her glass. ‘That’s the point. And besides, I said, what sort of chicken-shit Neo-Nazis are these people anyway? They should be saying, “Sure we killed six million; wish it had been more”, not splitting hairs about whether it was one million or two million and whining about the fucking Führer being misunderstood.’
‘You don’t actually believe any of this, do you, though?’
‘Are you mad?’ I cackled. ‘Of course not! I’m taking the piss out of fascist fuckwits!’
‘So is this what this TV thing’s about?’
‘Yeah. They’re going to get one of these nutters for me to “debate” with.’
‘Should people like that really be allowed to say that sort of stuff on national TV, though?’
‘Ask Channel Four that, not me,’ I said, drinking up. ‘But, yes, I think they should. You can’t hide that poisonous shit away for ever; it’ll come out somewhere. Better to face it and squash it. I want it out in the open. I want to know who these people are, I want to know where they live.’ I finished my drink. ‘That’s why these cowardly little shits love the Internet. They can post any sort of hate-filled drivel they want with no comeback because on-line they can hide. It’s the perfect medium for bullies, liars and cowards.’
We were in the Golden Bough, our usual after-show drinking hole, in Hollen Street. The Bough was a basic central London pub; one of those places neither flattered nor insulted to be called a boozer. Not fashionable, rarely crowded to the point of standing-room only (save on a Friday evening and Saturday night), reasonable juke box, basic, unpretentious food, only one gaming machine – tucked out of the way under the stairs to the small first-floor function bar – and a solid, unadventurous choice of drink.
There was no particular crowd associated with the place. Instead you got a smattering of all sorts in the Bough: workmen in dusty boots and paint-specked overalls, advertising creatives, theatre types, tourists, office workers, music people, film people, homeless guys nursing a half and keeping warm, waiting staff from restaurants and posher bars, one or two girls from the sex shows, and us. There was one dealer who used the place, though for a quiet drink, not for dealing. A couple of cops stuck their heads round the door about once a month or so.
The manageress was Clara, a brusquely rotund, no-nonsense, half-Portuguese grandmother with a dry, wheezy laugh and sixty-a-day habit. Nobody we know has ever seen her without one of two turban-like things on her head – one green, one yellow – and there was a long-standing, variable-odds pot-bet, which has allegedly been running with a rolling roster of regulars for over twenty years concerning whether she was bald underneath there or not. Last time I’d checked it had been 65/35 for slap-headedness and I’d stood to make a fiver if it turned out she wasn’t.
‘Can I get you a drink? What’ll it be?’
‘Oh, thanks. WKD blue. Cheers.’
‘I haven’t asked you your name,’ I said to the girl as I signalled to Clara.
‘Tanya.’ She stuck her hand out.
‘Ken. Pleased to meet you, Tanya.’
Tanya had overheard Phil and me talking about the Breaking News thing earlier. I’d seen her staring, brows pinched, at us and she hadn’t looked away when I’d stared back. I’d guessed she’d picked up an alarming selection of race-hate-associated buzzwords and wa
s thinking about either walking out or throwing her drink at us and then running.
‘It’s okay,’ I’d said to her, past Phil’s shoulder. ‘We’re both nice liberals really and this is genuinely one of those rare occasions when it honestly isn’t as bad as it sounds.’
Tanya was quarter Jewish, which was one reason she had been taking offence at what she’d thought she’d been overhearing. She worked for a film company in Wardour Street. I could be pretty sure of this because Phil had grilled her about the film industry, albeit subtly, for a few minutes. Phil had this paranoid theory that unscrupulous tabloid journalists had realised we drank in the Bough, that they thought we were worth exposing in some way and were likely to send somebody here to coax me into saying something I might regret, thinking I was talking off the record to a civilian when in fact it was an undercover journo and I was very much on the record.
Given what I say when I know I’m on record and on air, this seems a fairly bizarre fear, but there you are.
Anyway, Tanya seemed to pass Phil’s hostile-journo filter and he lost interest in her when our production team and assistant gaggle walked in.
Tanya was short and slim and dark and always moving; sort of half dancing, swaying to and fro, seemingly without really knowing she was doing it, rhythmic and slow like an underwater plant in a meandering river’s languorous undercurrent. I’d seen girls doing this before in situations like this and it often meant they were loved up, but I didn’t think she was. She had wide grey-green eyes and hair in little black spikes.
We ended up with the others from our show and a couple of people from Timmy Mann’s, the one after ours, though not the boy Mann himself. It turned into a moderately serious drinking session, all sat round our favourite circular table in one end corner of the Bough. I was getting on, I thought, awfully well with Tanya, who laughed at all my jokes and touched me on the forearm a couple of times.
I’d been supposed to meet up with Jo that night and take in a film but Jo had to cancel – yet another Addicta crisis – and I’d started thinking that maybe I should see how things progressed with Tanya instead.
Tanya was drinking her blue WKDs very slowly and I had moved on to whiskies after a couple of pints of Fuller’s, but for the past two Scotches I’d been cheating. When nobody was looking I’d lower the short glass towards the floor and upend it, letting the drink fall onto the ancient and already pretty tacky carpet underneath. Jeez; they were single twenty-five mill measures with no water; probably evaporated before they made it to the floor, but the point was they weren’t getting me drunk. If anything did develop with the lovely Tanya, I’d be in a fit state to appreciate it.
All in vain; Tanya had to go at six to meet some friends, and would not be dissuaded. I even followed her to the door of the pub and out onto the street. She gave me her mobile number and disappeared into the twilight, heading for Tottenham Court Road Underground station. I sighed as I watched her go, looking at the display on my Motorola where her number still glowed.
The phone’s screen went dark and I went back inside.
Our drinking party started to break up as people went off to catch trains, tubes and buses. Phil and I decided on takeaways from the Taj, our local curry house round the corner from the Bough, then went our separate ways. I felt sober enough to drive, but I knew I wasn’t, so I left the Landy in the Mouth Corp car park and got a mini-cab home, suffering a lecture on the superior qualities of wholesome Caribbean soul food compared to this highly suspect Indo-Pakistani fare from Geoff, the Jamaican driver I always seemed to end up with whenever I was clutching a carrier bag full of curry or a leaking parcel stuffed with doner kebab.
‘Me car gonna stink now, mon!’
‘Here’s an extra fiver, my good fellow; wave it around and it should help disperse the ghastly sub-continental pong.’
Geoff thought this was so funny he lit a big spliff as he drove off down Lots Road, cackling and trailing clouds of ganja smoke.
Sometimes I told people I lived in a tied cottage. The houseboat at Chelsea Wharf used to be one of Sir Jamie’s pads in the city, back when he was basically trying to be Richard Branson (Sir Jamie even had a supposedly trademark beard back then, too, though he switched to a pony-tail and earring shortly afterwards, surrendering the high ground of facial fuzz to the Bearded One). The Temple Belle was an old and much-converted coaster. It still belonged to Mouth Corp but it was rented to me at an extremely reasonable rate. I was on a pretty good contract since I’d shifted to the late-morning show and I could probably have afforded the rent or mortgage if I’d had to pay the market rate for the tub, but getting it cheap certainly made an appreciable and very pleasant difference, though it did, as Phil had been the first to point out, give Sir Jamie an extra hold over me; if I lost the day job I lost the cool houseboat and Chelsea address too.
The Temple Belle was riding high on the flood tide as I walked down the jetty past the other houseboats; music and light came from a couple of them. Upriver, where the breeze was coming from, seeded with light rain, a train grumbled across Battersea railway bridge. Nearer, the towering façade of the Chelsea Reach development glittered with a cheesy opulence. The river was silent and traffic pretty much inaudible. The high tide meant there was no awful smell; the main drawback of living on the boat was that at low tide, especially on a hot summer’s day, the revealed mud smelled of ancient shit and things long dead. Probably because that was exactly what it was.
Despite the rain and my empty belly, I hesitated by the old wheelhouse with the door keys in one hand and the slowly cooling curry in the other, looking out at the dark water for what turned into a minute or two, feeling a little lonely all of a sudden, and then – in my defence, almost immediately – a bit ashamed for feeling sorry for myself. The gentle background roar of the unsleeping city filled the sodium-stained skies and I stood listening for the river’s dark, liquidic music in vain.
From my parents’ house, in Helensburgh, thirty kilometres down the north bank of the Clyde from Glasgow, I could see the river from my bedroom. I grew up watching the distant cranes of Greenock gradually disappear as the shipyards closed, to be replaced, later, by offices, shops, housing developments and leisure facilities. By then we’d moved to Glasgow itself to be near my father’s new dental practice in the city centre. Our first-floor flat in the leafy South Side was big – my brother Iain and I had rooms easily twice the size of those we’d had in the bungalow in Helensburgh – but the outlook was to the broad, tree-lined street, the parked cars and the tall red sandstone tenements like ours on the far side. I missed the view of river and hill more than I’d expected.
I met Jo on a river cruise one sticky summer night, Ceel in Sir Jamie’s glittering new penthouse at Limehouse Tower, during a storm.
‘You’re the guy did that Cat Stevens cover. Didn’t you get sued?’
Late summer, 2000. I was still doing the Capital Live! pre-midnight programme at the time and had been talking to my then producer near the stern of the little river cruise boat. We had been watching the metallic shells of the Thames Barrier pass – each one like a sinking ship, up-ended, the last of the sunset’s ruby light flaring from their summits – when this crop-haired, blond semi-goth with lots of facial metalwork barged in between us.
Producer Vic stepped back to give her room, looked the girl up and down, decided I probably didn’t mind being interrupted by her, raised his eyebrows at me and wandered off.
I did a bit of entirely justifiable sizing-up myself – the girl was all in black: DMs, jeans, scoop-necked vest, battered-looking biker’s jacket off one shoulder. About mid-twenties. ‘I wasn’t exactly sued,’ I said warily, wondering if I was talking to a journalist. ‘There was an exchange of lawyers’ letters that seemed to cost as much as serious litigation, but we managed to avoid an actual writ.’
‘Right.’ The girl nodded vigorously. ‘Oh. Jo LePage,’ she said, holding out a hand to shake while nodding back towards the glass superstructure of the boat, where
music thudded and impressive-ten-years-ago disco lights flashed. ‘I’m with Ice House,’ she explained. ‘The record company. You’re Ken Nott, the DJ, right?’
‘Right.’ I shook her hand.
‘Right. What was that song? “Rushdie and Son”?’
‘Uh-huh. But the tune was mostly “Moonshadow”.’
‘Ha. Right. What was it? “I’m being shadowed by a fundamentalist…?”’ she sang, huskily but in tune.
‘Nearly,’ I said. ‘It was, “I’m being stalked by a fundamentalist. I think I’m being shadowed.”’ I spoke rather than sang the lyrics. I was still feeling wary of the girl. Just because she said she was from the record company didn’t mean she really was. I had already given at least one interview without knowing it, one drunken, loved-up night to a girl in a club who turned out to be a reporter for a tabloid with a dreadfully unreconstructed attitude to drugs and drug-taking. The resulting interview had nearly got me fired and started an argument between Capital Live! and the paper about whether she’d told me she was a reporter at the start of our conversation or not. I’d claimed she hadn’t but it was just possible she had and I’d not been listening because I was too busy grinding my teeth and staring at her tits.
Jo had rather impressive breasts, too; not large, but high and bra-less beneath her top. The deck lights strung above us showed her nipples as little sharply defined bumps raising the thin black cotton.