Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  I thought about this. ‘All right.’

  ‘Half an hour, then. I will wait for you.’

  ‘See you soon.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The phone clicked off.

  At the Dorchester, number 607 was a suite. I hesitated at the door. I was sweating. Mostly this was because I had walked from Capital Live!. The stuff I thought I might have to tidy up had proved utterly trivial or just entirely fit for putting off until tomorrow or later, and so I’d made my excuses – the following day’s show was pretty much prepared already – and left. I’d walked the streets under the low grey sky. It was warm and the air felt thick and humid for May.

  Walking gave me time to think. Was I doing the sensible thing here? Well, that was hardly worth answering. Objectively, knowing whose wife I was, hopefully, about to fuck, I was behaving like a masochist with a death wish. Or not, of course; maybe she’d been exaggerating that night on the terrace outside Sir Jamie’s bedroom. Perhaps she’d been dramatising the whole thing because doing so fulfilled some appetite for mystery, and her husband didn’t give a damn what she did or who she did it with.

  I fingered the little sliver of plastic in my pocket. The whole cloak-and-dagger set-up with the key card was either faintly amusing and reassuring, or deeply worrying. What was I doing? He’s a gangsta, mate. We reassure ourselves that we’re all special, but was anybody that special, was anybody so extraordinary they were worth taking the sort of risk I might be taking?

  Of course, people had been taking mad risks for sex, lust, love, for as long as we’d been people. Wars had been fought for what you could, if you were being uncharitable, characterise as basically a bit of slap and tickle. Holy books had been rewritten, the laws of God changed to facilitate the having of some desperately yearned-for piece of ass. Desire was the back-handed compliment humanity had no choice but to pay itself. It was just the way we were, it was what we did. We couldn’t help ourselves.

  Seen one, seen ’em all, I reminded myself. But then that, of course, was such shit. Sexists said that the way racists claimed, They all look the same to me. Both were confessions of personal inadequacy, of the inability to really see.

  I used the key card and stepped into a dark hallway, illuminated only, once I’d closed the door, by light spilling from a small loo on the other side of the hall. The air was very warm; I had to take my jacket off. On a small table opposite, a huge display of flowers filled the air with a thick, sweet scent. There were two large doors, left and right, both ajar, both rooms dark beyond. Just ambient sound of the city in both directions, heavily muffled. The first door led to a sitting-room, darkly curtained, the afternoon sunshine held at bay by drapes thick as carpets, tall as the distant ceiling. All a bit Edwardian, but suitably sumptuous. The other door led to the bedroom.

  There had been a light on in here all the time. Celia was sitting at a roll-top desk on the far side of the room, reading by a desk lamp. She was wrapped in a white robe that was too big for her. Her golden brown hair was down, spreading and reaching almost to the seat of the chair. She turned round when she heard the door open. She wore little round glasses. It felt even warmer in the bedroom; a vent thundered quietly overhead, producing a draught of tropical heat that was already drying the sweat on the back of my neck and uncombing my hair.

  She raised one finger to her lips. My heart was thudding; I was half expecting muscled goons with eighteen-inch collars to burst out of the wardrobe, whack me on the back of the head, gaffer-tape my mouth and zip me into a body-bag… though, from the impression I had of the room from the desk lamp’s weak light, this place was too posh for wardrobes; it had a dressing-room, instead. I stood there in the heat, wondering how much initiative she wanted me to take; how much, indeed, I wanted me to take. This whole silent running deal – or at least me agreeing to it – had put that ball pretty firmly in her court. The dome of an elegantly gleaming trolley sat in one shadowy corner of the bedroom. A champagne bucket and two glasses sat on a low table in front of a towering display of lilies. The flowers’ scent saturated the blood-warm air.

  Celia closed her hardback, took off her glasses, got up and walked over to me, raising herself on her toes with her last step and kissing me just as she had on the night of the storm. She smelled of musk and roses. I used both hands to undo the rope-thick belt, then pulled her robe open. Her skin was smooth and warm, warmer even than the over-heated air of the room. I held her away a little to look at her. She let the white robe fall.

  My eyes went wide and I breathed in, seeing the strange, curled imprint of her lightning scar for the first time. I was about, I think, to say, ‘Good God,’ but she anticipated me, and gently put her cupped hand over my mouth, silencing me as I stared at the tracery of dark brown lines. She stood still in the glowing white whorl of the fallen robe, letting me inspect the fern-mark, raising her arms and gathering up her hair to let me see better, displaying herself quietly.

  On, not in, a vast bed beneath a swooping canopy, we fell to our shared cause. I let her undress me, an urgency in her hands and expression I could not comment on. I stroked her hair while she did this, ploughing its rich thickness with my fingers. Her body was the most sensuous thing I had ever seen in my life, limbs slim but muscled enough to curve, waist tiny. Her areolae and nipples were unexpectedly pink for her caramel skin, whose tone – save for the lightning-intaglioed print descending her left flank – didn’t vary anywhere except faintly on the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. Her pubic hair was darker than that on her head, surprisingly soft but tightly curled. She skinned my jeans off. The head of my cock was already protruding out the top of my Calvins, purple and positively polished-looking between the grey cotton and the pasty flesh of my irredeemably pale Scots skin. I had always thought this looked a bit gross – erections usually did, regardless of the circumstances – but she smiled when she saw it, as though it was already an old friend, and peeled off my briefs.

  I mimed putting on a condom and pointed at my jacket, which she’d hung over a chair. She shook her head. I raised my eyebrows and shook my head slightly in what I hoped looked like a suitable translation of, You sure? She nodded emphatically.

  Well, okay, I thought, as she kissed me again.

  I wanted her so much, so immediately, but I decided to take charge a bit, and got her down on her back. I wanted to see her, to experience every part of her with as many senses as I could bring to bear. I knelt between her legs, clutching her perfect little buttocks in my hands and lifting her up. Her vagina was pink as her nipples, parenthesised by the full, rosy-grey folds of her labia, fronded and frilled and rising to the little puckered lip of hood hiding the glistening stubby button of her clitoris. Her cunt smelled of talc, tasted of sweetened salt. I buried tongue and lips in her, pressing and nosing her like some truffling hound while rubbing and pressing the tiny rosette of her anus with one thumb, listening to her breath quicken, feeling as though my mouth would burn with the engulfing heat of her.

  Entering her was a slow, gradual, almost tentative process, just the opposite of what I think we’d both expected. I found myself quivering, shaking like some adolescent getting laid for the first time, my mouth suddenly dry, tears – tears! – welling in my eyes. She lay on her hair, head to one side, facing the darkness, the tendon on the side of her neck a taut, deeply shadowed column, her arms thrown out across the bed, fingers clutching, caging fistfuls of plump white pillows, her legs in a tensed V, toes pointing, then, finally, when at last I was fully in her, she gasped and threw herself around me, arms and legs wrapping and squeezing me with an astonishing power, as though my whole body was one huge cock and her body a hand, limbs fingers.

  I even managed to come quietly, but then, afterwards, lying there, chests heaving, limbs trembling, she rolled over to me, slick with sweat, and put two fingers delicately to my lips. ‘It’s all right,’ she said softly. These were the first articulate sounds she had made. ‘We can talk now, Kenneth.’

  It did cros
s my mind to shake my head, or just ignore her, or pretend to fall asleep; in other words, or their lack, tease her, but instead I said, ‘You’ve changed your mind?’ She had said to remain silent throughout.

  She nodded slowly. Her long, thick hair fell spooled, tangled, heavy on my chest. ‘Just the beginning was enough. And that you were prepared to.’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘Uh-huh?’ she said, mimicking me.

  I took a handful of her hair, rolling my fist around in it, taking up all slack. Her head tipped towards my hand. Her large, darkly amber eyes gazed down. ‘You are a very singular woman, Celia.’

  ‘Will we do this again?’

  I raised my head and made a show of looking downwards. ‘In about five minutes, I’d guess.’

  She smiled. ‘You will meet me again?’

  ‘Oh, I should think so.’

  ‘Good. We won’t be able to go out, to meet in public. It will have to be like this.’

  ‘This is okay. I can handle this.’

  ‘Handle me,’ she whispered, lowering herself into my arms.

  So began my erratic, erotic tour of the luxury hotels of London. Every few weeks – apart from once when holidays got in the way – a courier would deliver a slim package holding only a hotel key or key card. The accompanying phone call got shorter and shorter each time until all I would hear was, ‘The Connaught, three one six,’ or ‘The Landmark, eight one eight,’ or ‘The Howard, five zero three.’

  In a succession of tall-ceilinged, feverishly hot, darkened suites, on top of a series of King- or Emperor-size beds, Celia and I pursued our sporadic affair.

  That first time, in the Dorchester, it turned out we had longer than she’d first said; not until six but until ten, when she really had to go. I’d nodded off at one point, into sharply sultry dreams of swimming in thick red perfume beneath a fiery lilac sun, then woke to find all the lights out but the room illuminated from outside and below and her standing by the windows, looking out between the drawn-back curtains, the silvery lustre of a full moon combining on her skin with the glow of the hotel’s floodlights reflecting from the ceiling and framing her slim, dark form with gold.

  I padded up behind her, held her, and she put her hands on mine at her shoulder as I nuzzled her neck and hair. That was when I asked her about the long, swirling mark on her left flank, and she told me about the lightning strike.

  The dark bodies of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park lay strung with pinprick cords of light. Below us, cradled in the scoop of the building’s forecourt facing Park Lane, a great dark tree rustled in a freshening breeze, new growth all green and black and full of life and movement and promise.

  ‘Who are you, Celia? Tell me about yourself,’ I said into the darkness, later. ‘If you want.’

  ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘Everything about you.’

  ‘Everything would be boring, Kenneth. Don’t you know that? Knowing everything about anybody would be boring.’

  ‘Not you, I suspect.’

  ‘I told you; I am a married woman, a housewife, a listener.’

  ‘Perhaps you could start a little closer to the beginning.’

  ‘I am from Martinique. You know where that is?’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘My father was a fisherman, my mother a waitress. I have four brothers, five sisters.’

  ‘My, your parents were busy. Sexual athleticism runs in the family, then.’

  ‘I studied languages, I became a model, I moved to Paris, then London. I met a man who I thought loved me.’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps that’s not fair to him. He thought he did love me. We both did, then.’

  ‘What about you loving him?’

  Her body tensed fractionally against mine, then relaxed again. ‘Love,’ she said, as if saying, tasting the word for the first time, getting the measure of its meaning in her mouth and mind. ‘I don’t know.’ I felt her turn her head to stare off into the shadowy heights of the room. Eyelashes flitted against the skin of my shoulder. ‘I felt fondness for him. He was kind to me. He helped me. Helped me considerably. I don’t mean to say that I married him out of gratitude, but I felt that I knew him and that he would be a good husband.’

  ‘And is he?’

  She was silent for a while. ‘He treats me well. He has never struck me. He became cold towards me about the time when it was found I could not have children.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘The point is more that it does not matter that he is a good husband to me; what matters is that he is a bad man to others. He would say they always deserved it, but…’

  ‘Did you know he was like that when you married him?’

  She was silent for a moment. ‘Yes and no. I knew a little. I did not want to know it all. I should have.’

  ‘Do you mean to stay with him?’

  ‘I would be afraid to tell him I was leaving him. Also, practically my whole family works for one of his businesses now, on the island.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘Ah, indeed. What about you, Kenneth?’

  ‘What don’t you know from my many exciting and unfailingly accurate profiles in top media outlets?’

  ‘Your marriage? Your wife?’

  ‘I married a nurse called Jude. Judith. Met in a club when I was between jobs, not long after I moved down to London. Great sex, similar interests, robust cross-platform political beliefs with only a few troublesome legacy systems – she believed in astrology – compatible groups of friends… and we certainly thought we were in love. She didn’t really want to get married but I insisted. I knew what I was like; I knew I was very likely to stray, or certainly to want to stray, to be unfaithful, and I came up with this bizarre concept that if I got married then the fact I’d made a solemn promise to her to forsake all others, made a legally binding commitment, would stop me.’ I paused. ‘Probably the single most barmy idea I’ve ever entertained in my entire adult life, and that when, by common assent, the field of other contenders is both wide and deep.’ I shrugged gently, so as not to jar her head where it lay against my shoulder and chest. ‘However. I cheated, she found out, confronted me with it, and I swore it wouldn’t happen again. I meant it, too. I always meant it. Repeat until no longer funny.’ I breathed deeply. ‘She’s okay now; in a stable relationship. I still see her now and again.’

  ‘Do you still love her?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘You still sleep with her.’

  I felt my body jerk. She must have felt it too. ‘You guessing, Celia?’ I asked. ‘Or are we in some creepy Play Misty For Me vibe here?’

  ‘Guessing, you would call it. I am good at it.’

  ‘Well, as you guessed.’ I shrugged again. ‘We never mean to, it just happens… Old times’ sake, I suppose. Lame, but true. But anyway not for a while.’

  ‘And you have a regular girlfriend?’

  ‘Yes. Nice girl. Bit mad. Works for a record company.’

  ‘She doesn’t know, I hope. About you and me. I hope nobody does.’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘You don’t mind? Some men like to boast.’

  ‘Not me. And no, I don’t mind.’

  Usually we met on a Friday, but not every time. Never at the weekends. She said this was because she liked to listen to me on the radio beforehand. Soon, with every show I did, I’d start to wonder, was she listening? More to the point, was she listening in an eight-hundred-quid-a-night suite, slowly undressing in the darkness while a cranked-up heating system wound round to maximum gradually toasted every molecule of air in the place?

  On several occasions, especially on Fridays, I had to stand people up. Jo, a couple of times. I claimed a commiserating, men-only drinking party with a just-dumped colleague on the first occasion, and plain alcohol-induced forgetfulness in a mobile-reception-free dive bar the second time. Jo shouted at me on both occasions, then wanted to have sex, which was awkward. I just about managed it the first time, though I felt a) sore, and b) guilty t
hat I was still thinking about Ceel. The second time I faked incapability through drunkenness. I began to make Friday night engagements tentative rather than firm.

  Wherever it was I met Ceel, she was always there, always waiting, almost always reading a book – usually something recent I’d heard of: White Teeth, Man and Boy, Bridget Jones’s Diary. Once it was The Prince, once Madame Bovary, and once the Kama Sutra, which she was reading for ideas we didn’t really need. Twice it was A Brief History of Time. The room – suite – was always dark, always hot. There would be something light to eat if we wanted, and vintage champagne. It was a while before I realised the glasses we drank from were always the same ones, and that there would always be a different, spare glass present. She brought the crystal flutes herself; they belonged to her. She seemed pleased that I’d noticed.

  ‘You were a model, you said?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What, like, clothes?’

  She gave a one-breath laugh into the warm dark. ‘Those are what one usually models, Kenneth.’

  ‘Swim-wear, lingerie?’

  ‘Sometimes. I began in swim-wear, when a magazine came to the island to shoot a feature and two of their models were hurt in a car crash. That’s how I got my break.’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Did they break anything?’ I shook my head, already feeling foolish. ‘Sorry, I-’

  ‘The two models? Yes, one broke an arm and both had facial injuries. I don’t think either ever worked as a model again. It was very upsetting. Not how I’d have chosen to get into such a career.’

  ‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Did you appear mostly in French magazines?’

  ‘Yes. I’m afraid I have no portfolio to show you.’

  ‘What was your modelling name?’

  ‘Celia McFadden.’

  ‘McFadden?’ I said, laughing. ‘What possessed you to take a Scottish name?’