Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  ‘You have faith in reason,’ she said calmly, tucking some strands of hair back into place. ‘Don’t you?’

  I laughed out loud, waving my arms about. ‘This is crazy!’ I yelled. ‘We’re standing here on top of a tower block in the middle of a fucking hurricane getting soaked to the skin and we’re talking about philosophy?’ I left my arms spread. ‘Does the essential absurdity of this situation not strike you, too? Celia?’ (I added, in case she thought I’d forgotten her name).

  She put her head to one side again. Another staggering gust of wind, another adjustment of stance. ‘I’m sorry. Are you cold?’ she asked, sounding concerned. ‘We could go in.’

  ‘No, no,’ I told her. ‘I’m fine out here if you are. I’m a Scotsman; we’re legally and morally bound not to admit to feeling cold, certainly not in the presence of thinly clad females and especially not heart-stoppingly beautiful thinly clad females we might legitimately assume are used to balmier climes. The penalties are actually quite severe. They endorse your passport and-’

  She was nodding, a tiny frown creasing her brows. ‘Yes. You only become inarticulate when you are being especially sincere, ’ she said, concluding.

  That took the wind out of my sails. My hands dropped; I’d been talking with them as well. ‘What are you?’ I demanded. ‘Celia, come clean; are you some sort of flying squad critic-come-philosophical psychoanalyst?’

  ‘I am a married woman, a housewife, a listener.’

  ‘Married?’

  ‘Married.’

  ‘Do you give your husband this hard a time?’

  ‘I would not dare.’ She looked quite serious. Then she shook her head. ‘Well, I might, but he would not understand.’

  Fuck this; I was getting cold. This was the most interesting, even unusual woman I’d met in a long, long time, but there comes a point.

  I held her gaze and, after a breath, said, ‘And are you a faithful wife, Celia?’

  She didn’t say anything for a while. We just stood there looking at each other. I could see little drops of rain on her face like sweat or tears and her hair was coming undone in the tearing wind. She shook in those gusts, as though shivering.

  ‘I have been,’ she said eventually.

  ‘Well, I-’

  She stopped me, holding up one hand towards my mouth, shaking her head. She glanced behind me, to the still open window.

  ‘My husband is…’ she began, then stopped. She tutted, looked down and to one side, and pinched her lower lip briefly with the fingers of her right hand. She looked up at me. ‘Once,’ she said, ‘I thought that if I really, really hated somebody, I would make love to them, and have my husband find out. But only if I really hated the person, and wanted them dead, or perhaps thought that they wished they were dead.’

  I let my eyebrows rise. ‘Holy shit,’ I said, reasonably. She did not look like she was joking. ‘He is, ah, of the jealous persuasion, then.’

  ‘You do not know his name.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said, embarrassed. I tapped my temple. ‘Was it Merry-?’

  ‘Merrial,’ she said. ‘He is John Merrial.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Not ringing any bells.’

  ‘It should, perhaps, I think.’

  ‘Well, you have the advantage over me,’ I said.

  She nodded slowly, solemnly. She said, ‘I would like to see you again, if you would like.’ Her voice was nearly drowned by the wind.

  ‘Yes, I’d like,’ I said. I was thinking, I haven’t touched her, kissed her, anything, yet. Nothing.

  ‘However you must know that if I were to see you,’ she said, ‘it would have to be seldom, and secretly. It might seem, sound… casual,’ she said, frowning again, as though she wasn’t putting this just as she would like. ‘But it would not be. It could not be. It would be…’ she shook her head ‘… of significance. Not something to be entered into lightly.’ She smiled. ‘I make it sound all very formal, do I not?’

  ‘I’ve suffered more romantic propositions.’

  I moved slowly forwards and reached for her. She came up on her toes, raising her head and tipping it, bringing her hands to either side of my face and opening her mouth to mine, while the wind tugged and pushed and jostled us and the rain sowed the gusts like a soft, cold shrapnel of the storm.

  Jo had been at a big Ice House bash that night. She rolled in drunk half an hour after me, staggering down the steps into the Temple Belle, grinning and smelling of smoke. She laughed and started tickling me, then kissing me, then we fell into bed.

  She had a way she preferred to be fucked sometimes when she was drunk like this; on her back, naked but for her T-shirt lifted up over her head and caught round her neck with her arms folded up inside it, making a sort of square around her head, her face hidden in the black cotton as she yelled and whooped, a horny, swearing wild-child in the carnal negative of a burka.

  ‘John Merrial? Mr Merrial?’ Ed said. ‘He’s a gangsta, mate.’

  ‘He’s what?’

  ‘He’s a fuckin gangsta, I’m telling you. Crime boss. Whatever you want to call it. Yeah; boss is better. Mind you, I’m saying that, but could be he’s not much involved in actual villainy these days. Gone legit, inne? Like in The Godfather Part Two, when they talk about in a while they’ll be totally legit by the end of the year or whatever it is, you know? That sorta fing. Course, on the uvver uvver hand, there’s better profits in stuff like drugs and refugees an cars an computah crime an stuff.’

  ‘Computah crime?’

  ‘Yeah. You know; fraud. Must be hard to give up on that sorta action an let uvvers in. Pride involved, even, I should fink. Plob’ly. Why?’ Ed’s eyes went wide. ‘Fuckin ell, Ken, you ain’t finking of sayin sumfink orrible about him, are you? Fuckin say it ain’t true. I’m serious, mate. Fuckin bargepole, know what I’m sayin?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of saying anything about him,’ I said truthfully. ‘I just saw him at a party the other night and somebody said who he was but not what he was and I thought I’d ask. I had no idea he was a cross between the Kray brothers and Al fucking Capone.’

  ‘Well, he is. Leave well alone, know what I mean?’

  ‘I am leaving him well alone.’

  We were in Ed’s then new car; a black Hummer with darkened windows. It made my Land Rover feel like a 2CV. We were driving through the streets of south London on the way to a gig in an old cinema in Beckenham. Ed was determined to make me some sort of club DJ, or at least teach me the intricacies of getting two bits of plastic to revolve at different rates so that the tunes contained sounded like they had the same bpm.

  ‘Wot sort of party was this you was boaf at, anyway?’

  ‘The Dear Owner’s. Sir Jamie. One of his birthday parties.’

  ‘What? Does he have more than one, like the Queen? An official birthday and a real one? What’s that about, then?’

  ‘Just the one birthday, but several parties. I think I was at the second most exclusive soirée.’ We drew up, obstructed by a bus loading people at a stop on one side, and the oncoming stream of traffic on the other. There was, in fact, a sizable gap between the two, one you could have got any normal car, or even a Transit van, through quite comfortably (the Landy could have made it with both doors wide open), but Ed was probably right in erring on the side of caution, especially as the machine was left-hand drive. Behind us, a horn sounded. ‘Jesus Christ, Ed,’ I said, looking at the rear end of the bus to our left, and the Hummer’s expanse of bonnet, ‘I do believe this thing is literally wider than a London bus.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s rough, innit?’ Ed grinned, teeth like a snow field.

  ‘Rough?’

  ‘Yeah; wicked, innit?’

  I slapped the transmission tunnel. This was a tall, black-fur-lined box between Ed and me about the size of a big fridge-freezer combo; you could have believed the thing had a spare Mini hidden underneath. If Ed had been any shorter I’d have had to rise out of my seat to make sure he was really there.
‘What the fuck is it with this fucking black patois shit?’

  ‘What?’ Ed said innocently. We still weren’t going anywhere. The horn from behind sounded again. I didn’t know who was leaning on it, but they were brave. If I’d been stuck behind a blacked-out Hummer I wouldn’t have done that; I’d have been too scared the fucker would get slung into reverse and just roll right over me.

  ‘Rough means good,’ I said indignantly, ‘wicked means good, fucking hell, bad means good. I mean, I realise there are issues about slavery and centuries of oppression here, but do you have to take it out on the language?’

  ‘Na, mate,’ Ed said, finally making slow forward progress as the bus rolled off ahead of us. ‘It’s like you go so far into the concept, right, the meaning, that you come out the far side. Know what I mean?’

  I looked at him.

  ‘What?’ he asked.

  ‘My mistake,’ I said, waving one hand and looking away. ‘Silly old me. I didn’t even realise that meanings had sides you could come out of. Serves me right for passing up a university education. That’ll learn me. Or not, as is in fact the case.’

  ‘It’s what language is about, innit? Communication.’

  ‘You don’t say. But if people make words mean the opposite of-’

  ‘But everybody knows what they really mean, don’t they?’

  ‘Do they?’

  ‘Course they do. It’s about context, innit?’

  ‘But hold on, the first time somebody said bad when they meant good, how did anybody know what the hell they really meant?’

  Ed thought about this. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Way I see it, it was like this. Some bloke was trying to cop off wif this bird, right? An she was a bit coy, right, a bit not wantin to seem too eager, but still wantin it, yeah? An she says, Oh, you wicked man. Or somefing. Like, maybe he’d been telling her all the fings what he wanted to do wif her and she was pretendin to be modest but actually she was gettin really wet, right? He was gettin her juices flowin. But she calls him wicked, an smiles, an they boaf know what she means, see? So that’s the first time that somebody says wicked an means good, brilliant, bring it on. So then, like, by extension, know what I mean, people start using uvver words what are the opposite of what they seem to mean, like rough for cool and bad for good, cause it’s not, like, really much of a leap from usin wicked that first time, an the reason that all this is happenin in the black community, right, here or in the States, is precisely because the bruvvers haven’t got much else that is theirs. We could be boxers or musicians an that, but all these uvver, like, modes of expression is closed off to us artistically, and so we fuck wif your language. An that’s what I fink happened. Plob’ly.’

  I stared at him. ‘There could actually be a grain of truth in that silo of gibberish,’ I said. (Ed went, ‘Hee hee hee’, in a wheezy voice.) ‘But this still doesn’t explain how you can come out the other side of an accepted lexicological meaning for a perfectly clear and unambiguous term such as “bad”.’

  ‘It’s like Klein bottles, innit?’

  ‘It’s like what?’

  ‘Klein bottles. They’re like four-dimensional bottles what can only exist in fuckin hyperspace, man.’

  ‘What the fuck has that got to do with anything?’

  ‘My old mum knitted me a Klein bottle hat when I was a nipper.’

  ‘Are you on drugs?’

  ‘Hee hee hee. Na, but listen, like, the spout of a Klein bottle sorta curves round and goes back into the bottle, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It may astonish you to know – and it certainly appals me to admit – that I do sort of know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘So that’s like the meaning I was talking about earlier, innit? Goin out beyond itself an then coming back in. Bleedin obvious, I should fink. Fuckin pay attention, Ken.’

  I was actually lost for words. Eventually I recovered enough to say, ‘And you seriously had a hat that resembled a Klein bottle, you mad fuck? Or was that the bit I hallucinated?’

  ‘Me mum was doing this Open University course, wasn’t she? Geometry an that. So she decided to knit a Klein bottle, and then it sorta turned into a Bob Marley hat. Fuckin orrible it was. She made me wear it to school once, too, cos she was so proud of it; came to the school gates wif me an everyfin so I couldn’t accidentally lose it.’

  ‘I do trust that your pals did the decent thing and kicked the living shit out of you.’

  ‘Ha! They did, too.’ Ed shook his head, a happy, nostalgic expression on his face. ‘Never liked mafs, ever since.’

  We were silent for a minute or so. Then I said, ‘Hey, we just went past a cop car without you getting pulled over.’

  ‘That’s cause they fink you’re driving the fucker.’

  ‘Of course; white man in the right-hand seat. Easily enough to confuse the average plod, I’ll grant you.’

  ‘Zactly. Why else do you fink I offered you a lift?’

  ‘You fuck! You’re exploiting me!’

  ‘Hee hee hee.’

  Four. LACKING THAT SMALL MATCH TEMPERAMENT

  “No, no, I’m for lots more CCTV cameras. I think they should be everywhere, and especially in police stations.’

  Craig, rolling a joint on the kitchen table, sniggered.

  ‘I’m serious,’ I told him. ‘Canteen culture? Sounds interesting. Let’s see it. Total coverage; even the toilets. No more of these black or Asian guys beating themselves up, throttling themselves and stamping on their own heads, and then blaming our stout-hearted defenders of decency!’

  ‘The stairs,’ Craig suggested. ‘Don’t forget the stairs.’

  ‘Oh, Christ, yeah, the stairs; you’d want serious Sky Premier League coverage on the stairs; top and bottom at the very least. With the important Player Cam option, naturally.’

  ‘Prisoner Cam.’

  ‘Sus Cam. Con Cam.’ I nodded vigorously, with the intense concentration on total trivia of the truly stoned. ‘Crim Cam.’

  ‘Shplim shplam bim bam,’ Craig wheezed, laughing.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You still not got Sky yet?’ Craig said, raising the joint to lick the Rizlas.

  ‘Did you really say…? But, moving on. What, Sky? No fucking way,’ I said vehemently. ‘I’m not giving that shite Murdoch any of my… soft-earned dosh.’ I’d moved into the Temple Belle a year earlier. It hadn’t been lived in for many years so it only had terrestrial; Craig had been trying to persuade me to have Sky fitted ever since.

  ‘Mind you,’ Craig mused, ‘for a Clydebank supporter, what’s the point? I suppose.’

  ‘Fuck off. Hun.’

  Craig and I had this unpleasant though also comforting habit of reverting to our West Coast Male Scottish cultural stereotype when we met up, talking about football. Craig was a bluenose, a Rangers supporter. Almost his only failing, really, unless you were going to count his part in a long-term-struggling marriage (and in a spirit of male solidarity and the above-mentioned cultural stereotype, I was duty-bound to blame that mostly on Emma, regardless of anything else).

  It was early May 2001, a couple of weeks after the party at Sir Jamie’s groovy pad at the top of Limehouse Tower. We were sitting in the kitchen of the family home in Highgate, an elegant three-storey terraced house with a large conservatory and lots of decking in the garden. Emma had her own place these days, a garden flat a couple of streets away. Nikki lived with Craig but spent occasional nights at Emma’s. Those tended to be the nights I came along and Craig and I got the chance to relive an adolescence that he – a father and effectively a husband at eighteen – had quit maybe too abruptly and I – arguably dissolute, still alone but variously entangled at thirty-five – had never quite shaken off.

  So we listened to some music, smoked joints, drank beer – or wine, more often these days – and talked about women and, of course, fitba. It was my misfortune to be, nominally at least, a Clydebank supporter (could have been worse; I might have decided to support Dumbarton). Clydebank were the closes
t team of any note to where I grew up, in the prim grid of sunny, south-aspected Helensburgh, a town far too middle class to have anything as proletarian as a decent football team of its own. The Rugby Club, on the other hand, was a social centre almost on a par with the Golf Club. Clydebank is one of those teams at least one level beneath the big Scottish clubs that are themselves a level beneath the big two, the Old Firm of Celtic and Rangers. Craig had inherited his Rangers scarf from his dad. They were posh Hun; not bigoted or anti-Catholic, but unswervingly committed to the team.

  ‘Supporting a team like Clydebank has its compensations,’ I told Craig as he lit the spliff, blowing smoke into the darkened kitchen. I had a sudden vision of Nikki the next day, sniffing the air and flying round opening windows here and in the adjoining conservatory. ‘Da-ad!’ Though actually these days she would say, ‘Crai-aig!’

  ‘Compensations?’ Craig said, cupping his free hand to his ear. ‘Hark! Do I hear the sound of a straw being grasped at? Why, I do believe I can!’ I just looked at him. In fact what he could hear was Moby sounding soulful and interesting on the kitchen mini system. ‘What compensations?’ he demanded. ‘Having to travel to Cappielow for your home games, or visiting East Fife?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ignoring the insults. ‘I mean that it prepares you more comprehensively for life as a supporter of the national team.’

  ‘You what?’ Craig said, sounding very London for a moment.

  ‘Think about it,’ I told him, accepting the joint. ‘Ta. If you support a team like Clydebank you get used to disappointment…’ I paused to pull on the number, then talked out through the smoke. ‘The grossly truncated cup run, the good players – the very rare good players – sold on before they have a chance to do much for the club beyond show up the rest of the team for the sorry plodders they really are, the mid-season nervousness as they sink towards the lower reaches of the league, even, in the long term, the occasional promotion you know will probably end in demotion the following year; the just plain boring, inept displays of football where you sit in the cold for two hours realising you’ve doled out twenty quid to watch two gangs of intellectually challenged bampots running around a muddy field hacking away at each other’s legs and seemingly competing to see who can punt the ball the furthest up the park, while your fellow men around you hurl abuse and insults at their own team and the other supporters.’ I took another deep toke and handed the J back.