by Iain Banks
‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I heard it at a party once. Never did get hold of a copy.’
‘Well, I’d love to, ah, provide you with one,’ I said, grinning, ‘but I don’t even have a copy myself any more.’
‘Sorry,’ she said, smiling. ‘I wasn’t trying to blag one.’ She pushed her hand through her spiky blond hair, exposing ink-dark roots in an unselfconsciously endearing gesture and looked back briefly at the main party.
‘What do you do at Ice House?’ I asked her.
She shrugged. ‘Bit of A &R, bit of what my boss calls asset management. Looking after bands.’
‘Anyone I might have heard of?’
‘Hope so. Addicta? Heard of them?’
‘Yeah. Heard the hype, certainly.’
She shook her head emphatically. ‘Not hype. They are really good.’
‘Right. I saw an interview with them. The lead singer seemed a bit full of himself.’
She grinned. ‘And your point would be?’
I smiled. ‘Yeah, I guess it kind of comes with the territory.’
‘They’re okay,’ she said. ‘The band. Brad can sound arrogant but he’s just being honest in a way; he’s good and he knows it and he isn’t into false modesty.’
‘Woh-no,’ I agreed. ‘I don’t think he’ll ever be accused of that.’
She looked around. ‘So. Enjoying the cruise?’
‘No.’ I sighed. ‘I hate these things,’ I said to her quizzical expression. ‘Well, apart from what happened to the Marchioness… I always feel trapped. You can’t get off. A normal party or gig or do, you can always bale out and head for the door. One of these things, you’re along for the whole ride, whether you’re totally bored or… well, the opposite of bored. A couple of times I’ve met somebody and, ah, you know, been getting on exceptionally well with them-’
‘Ah. A female somebody.’
‘A female somebody of the complementary gender of choice, indeed, and we’ve suddenly found ourselves in an ungregarious mood and wanted to be somewhere together, just the two of us, and… well, we’ve had a very frustrating wait for the end of the cruise.’
She smiled widely and took a bottle of beer from one jacket pocket. ‘You make a habit of picking up women on these cruises?’
‘Just twice so far.’
‘Of course you could always have joined the metre-under club, or whatever you’d call it, fucking in the loos in the boat.’
‘You know,’ I said, frowning as though this had just occurred to me, ‘I’ve never known a relationship that started in a toilet last very long. Odd that. Hmm.’
‘Why are you looking at me like that?’
‘Beg your pardon. Counting your piercings.’
‘Uh-huh?’
‘Uh-huh. Seven, that I can see.’
‘Ha,’ she said, and hoisted her T-shirt to show a belly button neatly cinched with a little bone-shaped metal rod.
‘Eight,’ I said.
She drank and wiped her lips with the back of one hand, left her mouth hanging open, her tongue running along the inside of her lower teeth as she nodded and made an obvious job of measuring me up. ‘Nine, altogether,’ she said, and performed a little movement that made me think at first she was taking a bow, then I realised she was making as though to look down at herself.
‘My,’ I said. ‘Must be fun going through airport metal detectors. ’
Her brows furled a little. ‘Everybody says that.’ She shrugged. ‘Not a problem.’
‘Well, that’s airport security’s loss.’
‘You’re not into piercings?’
‘What can I say? I’m a fully paid-up hetero male.’ I grinned.
A hoisted eyebrow made it look like she took the second meaning. She glanced back at the lights of the boat again, her facial metalwork glinting. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you want to dance?’
‘Gee, I thought you’d never ask.’
We didn’t join the metre-under club, or whatever she’d called it. We waited a whole extra hour and had boisterous, energetic sex back on another boat, my new home, the Temple Belle. I found the ninth piercing.
‘Whoo! Rock the fucking boat, man.’
I woke in the depths of the night, my arm gone to sleep beneath her. The Temple Belle rested on some not-quite-perfectly-level mud at the bottom of the tide, so that you could, to that minimal extent, tell what the state of the tide was even at night, down in the main bedroom with the skylight curtains closed, by the presence or absence of a faint sensation of being tipped towards the head of the bed. I had that feeling now. I took a deep breath, testing for the smell of decay that sometimes infected the air on summer nights like this, born of the mud and capable, on really warm, still nights like this, of insinuating its way even down here. Nothing. Just her perfume.
The girl slept on, sprawled half across me, muttering quietly in her sleep. She liked to talk during sex, too, and she liked being bitten. Well, nipped, really, but fairly hard. She professed herself amazed that I didn’t share this predilection. She made a strange little exhaling noise in her sleep, like an exasperated sigh, then snuggled up closer to me and fell still and silent, breathing slowly and regularly.
Just visible in the glow from the radio alarm, a little plastic canister rested on the bedside table; her party contacts. Jo wore fashion contact lenses that made her eyes seem to fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Dancing with her on the cruise boat with its dated lighting rig had been… interesting.
Looking carefully at her face, I could just make out the soft reflections from some of the surgical steel piercings that punctuated her skin. I didn’t mind in the least if people wanted to get tattoos or prick their bodies with bits of metal – was it better, worse, or no different from having a face-lift, or collagen implants, or liposuction, or Botox injections? I didn’t know. But the more you thought about it, the more shoving lumps of metal through your skin did seem a slightly odd thing to do. The lengths we go to to differentiate ourselves, I thought. But then people had earrings and metal fillings in their teeth, and there were much weirder things, like the tribe that put more and more rings round the girls’ necks as they grew, until they were extended to such a length that if the rings were taken off, their necks just collapsed, and they died.
Jo was fun, UV contacts and all. We’d already established we were both between serious relationships (which kind of implied we were both ready to start a new one).
We’d see.
‘-guest in your country, sir, and I could not believe that which I was hearing here in the city of London was not really coming out of Kabul, or Baghdad. I could not believe my ears. I had to look around and reassure myself I was in a London cab, not-’
‘Mr Hecht-’
‘Where the hell do you people get off? Dear God, man, we lost four thousand people in a morning. Every one of them innocent civilians. This is war. Don’t you understand that? It’s time to wake up. It’s time to choose sides. When the President said that you’re either for us or against us, he spoke for all decent Americans. Your Mr Blair’s chosen which side he’s on and we’d like to think he speaks for all decent English people, but I don’t know what side you think you’re on. It sure doesn’t sound like ours.’
‘Mr Hecht, if the choice is between American democracy and murderous misogynists and a state governed by diktat and sharia, believe me I am on your side. I’d shop – I’d turn in my own brother if I knew he’d had anything to do with the attacks on September the eleventh. Mr Hecht, I know it doesn’t sound like it usually, and I’m sure it didn’t sound like it to you when you heard me yesterday, but there’s a lot about America I love. I love its freedoms, its celebration of free speech, its love of… betterment. It is still the land of opportunity, I know that; there’s no greater place on Earth to be young and smart and healthy and ambitious. A lot of us Brits affect to be appalled so few Americans have passports, but I’ve been to the States, I’ve travelled all over it and I know why they don’t; America is a world in itself. The states are like c
ountries, the sheer scale of the place, its variety of climate and landscape; it’s stunning, it is truly beautiful. And is there any nation and ethnic group in the world not represented in the States? Americans don’t have to go out into the world; the world’s already come to them, and you can understand why.
‘I still have a lot of issues – I have a problem with anybody who voted for the man claiming to be your president, for example… but then as not all Americans are eligible to vote, and half of those who were eligible to vote didn’t bother to vote, and less than half of those who did vote voted for Dubya, that means I guess I’m probably only appalled by about twenty per cent or less of the population, which is not so terrible. But these are like the issues you have with a family member you love; they only matter so much because you’re so close to them in the first place. My point is that in your anger and your pain, you’re – your government is making a series of awful mistakes, mistakes that will damage America, damage all of us in the future. And I do not want to see that.’
‘Well, this is like listening to two different people, sir, I don’t know how you square what you’re saying now with what you said yesterday.’
‘Mr Hecht, I’m saying that there’s a kind of madness built up about this already, a denial that benefits nobody. No, that’s not true; it will benefit the sort of people who did this. Your denial will benefit your enemies. If you don’t understand this, if you don’t understand them, you’ll never defeat them. So believing that America was attacked out of jealousy is not just ludicrous and self-deluding, it’s self-defeating as well. This was not an act of grossly over-developed petulance, for God’s sake. Twenty highly motivated men do not train for months to kill themselves in a meticulously planned and executed operation that the biggest, best-funded security services in the world don’t get the faintest whiff of – even though it’s happening right under their noses – because you’ve got more domestic appliances than they do. What was the phrase? “It’s the economy, stupid”? Well, in this case, it’s the foreign policy. It’s that damn simple.
‘It doesn’t even matter if you or I don’t see it this way, Mr Hecht, but to them it’s every corrupt, undemocratic regime the United States has poured money and arms into since the last world war, propping up dictators because they’re sitting on a desert full of oil and helping them crush dissent; it’s the infidel occupying their holy places, and it’s the unending oppression of the Palestinian people by America’s fifty-first state. That’s the way they see it. You can argue with their analysis, but don’t kid yourself any of this happened because they’re just jealous of your shopping malls.’
‘Damn right I’d argue with their analysis. So are you now trying to say you are on our side?’
‘May I refer my honourable friend to the answer given above?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘No, I’m sorry, Mr Hecht; a piece of British Parliamentary phraseology we use on the show sometimes. Look, Mr Hecht. Do I think you should invade Afghanistan? For what it’s worth – and it’s worth almost nothing, I realise that – no. But, when you do, it couldn’t happen to a nicer regime. I’ve been banging on about the Taliban for years. But don’t forget you helped put them there; you funded the Mujahidin and you armed Bin Laden and supported the Pakistani security service, like you once supported the dictator Saddam Hussein because you needed him and like you’re supporting the dictator General Musharraf and the grotesque mediaeval despotism of the Saudis now, because you need them… Meanwhile, New Missile Defense, which destroys arms limitation treaties with pinpoint precision but is utterly guaranteed to have no discernible effect on any enemy missile whatsoever, which needs a homing beacon in the nose of its target to miss it in the same hemisphere, and which, after September the eleventh, has been proved to be an even more wilful and irrelevant waste of money, is a hundred per cent certain to happen. I mean… this is madness, Mr Hecht. It’s national psychosis.’
‘We have a right to defend ourselves, sir. We had that right before nine-eleven. Now we have the right to demand it. And we’re going to have it whether it suits people like you or not. If you want to be part of it, fine. But if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’
‘You know something, Mr Hecht? Back when I was a teenager, just starting to think for myself, I came up with a very basic formulation. I decided that whenever somebody says, You’re either for us or against us, you had to be against them. Because only moral simpletons and outright conniving rogues see, or even claim to see, the world in such preposterously black and white terms. I am deeply dubious about being on the same side as anybody that stupid or that disingenuous, and certainly will not be led by them. Evil always starts with a good excuse, Mr Hecht. George W. Bush may be, in effect, President by acclaim now, and, compared to the people who attacked America, he’s personally almost blameless, but the fact remains he got where he is by chicanery and deceit and – not even very deep down – he’s a sad, inadequate little man.’
‘Go to hell, sir, as you surely will.’ Mr Hecht hung up.
‘Think we lost him, Notty.’
I took a deep breath. ‘That is your single deployment of that word for this year… Philly-Willy.’
‘US Embassy on line one!’
‘Oh, stop it, you’re killing me.’
‘Ken, great to meet you. Come in, come in. Ah, yes, let this delightful young lady take your coat…’
‘Nice to meet you, ah…’
‘Jamie. Call me Jamie. No standing on ceremony here. Come on in to the body of the kirk, as they say. I have Scotch blood too, you know. Us Heelanders have to stick together against these Sassenachs, eh? Listen, we’re all really excited about you joining us at Capital Live!. I hear you’re doing incredibly well. Caught you a few times myself; wish it was more. Schedules, meetings, business; you know, but I’ve heard you. I have heard you. Very good, very good. Very near the bone, very near the bone, but I like that. That’s my style, too. Edge work. Nothing like it, is there? The danger, the risk. Risk-taking; that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Don’t you think? So, how are you settling into the old Temple Belle?’
‘Ah, very nicely,’ I said. I hesitated, wondering whether to point out that I’d been settled in there for over a year.
‘Brill. Superb, superb! Ah. Helena. Like you to meet Ken. Ken Nott. Ken; this is my wife, the lovely Helena. Ah; drinks. Excellent, excellent. Ken. Champagne?’
‘Lady Werthamley,’ I said, nodding to her. ‘Thank you.’
Sir Jamie Werthamley, our Dear Owner, had a penthouse in the top two storeys of his own newest office building, Limehouse Tower, overlooking the river at Limehouse Reach. This was April 2001 and I’d been working for him for nearly a year by then – three months of that on the relatively prestigious late-morning show – but this, one of his birthday parties, was my first chance to meet him (strictly no presents, the invitation had said, which might have seemed superfluous for a man who owned several gold mines, a bank, a Caribbean archipelago and his own airline. Anyway, I’d happily complied).
Sir Jamie was a young-looking fifty; ginger going grey. The trademark pony-tail was long gone but the single diamond stud in his ear was still there. He was dressed casually in designer jeans, a white T-shirt and a blue jacket that looked glossily fine and very expensive. I’d dressed in my best smart-but-casual but I felt like a tyke next to him.
There were maybe a hundred people in the sunken space of the main room, which, famously, had been fashioned by a film-set designer. The room held the crowd easily. I had my coat whisked away by what looked like one supermodel and a glass of dark gold champagne slipped into my fist by another before I’d really had a chance to draw breath. Sir Jamie was the touchy-feely sort; taking your hand, cradling your elbow, patting your back, gentle-punching upper arm, all that stuff. And all the time talking in that intense, breathily enthusiastic manner, words only just getting out of each other’s way in time. In that respect he was exactly the same as when he was
interviewed on TV.
His wife sat, upright and poised, in a tall, high-tech wheelchair. Lady W had suffered a bad fall horse-riding ten years earlier, not long after they were married. She wore something blue and gauzy, and a few shimmering pieces of diamond and platinum jewellery. She was maybe ten years younger than her husband and had raven black hair and violet eyes.
‘Call me Helena, please,’ she said, letting go of my hand.
‘Thank you, Helena.’
She turned the wheelchair round using a little joystick at her right hand and moved it towards the steps down into the sunken part of the room. ‘I listen to your show, Ken,’ she said over her shoulder as I walked after her.
‘Thank you.’
‘You are terribly outspoken, aren’t you?’
‘That’s my job, Helena,’ I said as Lady W’s chair got to the top of the steps and stopped.
‘You do upset a lot of people.’
‘I’m afraid I do.’
‘A lot of important people, in fact.’
‘Guilty as charged, ma’am,’ I agreed.
‘I know quite a lot of those people.’
‘I… I’d be surprised if you didn’t,’ I said evenly.
She snorted in a very English public schoolgirl way and looked up at me, winking. ‘Yes, well, keep up the good work. Now, who shall we find for you to talk to?’ She surveyed the room. I did, too. The space itself was very swoopy and primary coloured. It did look like a film set; actually it looked like the bad guy’s lair in an Austin Powers film, which was a funny thing to spend a couple of million quid on, but there you were. The windows, facing south and west, were three metres tall and easily fifteen long; great slabs of darkness sprinkled with the lights of London.
There were a lot of famous faces, from, I guessed at the time, pretty much every walk of life that led to people getting their faces into the papers or onto TV apart from crime. (Actually I was wrong about the crime bit.) I imagined that the people I didn’t recognise were just plain rich, or powerful in a low-profile way, or both, and realised there was a decent chance that I was the least important person in the whole apartment, with the not-a-given exception of the supermodel-resembling serving staff.