Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  Ed looked round, chewing his bottom lip. ‘Fink that was a wind-up?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Deliberate?’

  I shook my head. ‘I doubt it; I’ve had Jo’s accidental calls jam my phone for hours at a time before. Usually her and her girlfriends in a bar or a club.’ I released a deep breath. ‘Plus, ah, that is the way she expresses herself, during the act. I don’t think she’s a good enough actress to fake that.’

  ‘Woh. Right then. So. You two have one of them open relationships then, do ya?’

  ‘Looks like it,’ I said. ‘Just neither of us ever bothered to tell the other.’

  Ed looked concerned. ‘You still want to hear some tunes, man, or would you ravver ave a drink or a smoke or sumfing?’

  ‘Na, play some tunes, Ed. Bangin tunes, in fact; play some bangin tunes.’ I gave a small, not funny laugh.

  Jo said: ‘Listen.’

  And I said: ‘Oh-oh.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘These days, people our age – okay, my age and also your age – don’t say “listen” like that without it meaning something pretty fucking serious.’

  Jo looked down. ‘Yeah, well…’

  Here we go, I thought.

  We were in the London Aquarium, housed in the old GLC building on the South Bank of the Thames, beside the London Eye. Mouth Corp Records were having a bash and I’d been invited. So had Jo. She’d pretty much just arrived, coming straight from Heathrow off the flight from Budapest.

  The aquarium was a slightly spooky place for a party, I thought. Especially a music industry party. Sharks in abundance; as above, so below. The light was kind of freaky too; apparently the fish wouldn’t take kindly to lots of flashing disco-stylee lights, strobes and shit, so all you had was this bluey-green wash of underwater luminescence, making everybody look slightly sick. The light slid off Jo’s facial metalwork, visual echoes of the green and blue diodes on Ed’s music gear the night before.

  I’d asked her how she was and been told, Okay. I’d thought the better of asking her if she’d made any accidental phone calls twenty-four hours earlier, but now, with virtually no preamble, I was getting a ‘listen’.

  ‘Look,’ Jo said. People passed on either side, somebody said, Hi, and great, sleek, grey bodies moved sinuously behind and above her.

  ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Now it’s “look”? We’re covering the senses one by one, are we? What’ll your next exhortation be? “Sniff”?’

  Jo sucked her lips in and looked at me. ‘You don’t want to make this easy on either of us, do you?’

  ‘Make what easy, Jo? Why don’t you tell me?’

  ‘Ken, I think we should, ah, you know; split up.’ She said this and drew herself straight, putting her shoulders back and her head up, as though defiant. I thought of the night we met, and the way her stance had shown off her nipples through her T-shirt. Now she wore a big, ribbed yellow jumper with a roll neck. Black jeans. Only the DMs were the same.

  I stared at her. Of course I’d known that this was the most likely thing she was going to say after ‘listen’, but somehow it still came as a shock, and I was left temporarily speechless for the second time in two days, and this time not in a good way. I’d thought that maybe she was going to say she knew what had happened with the phone and she was sorry, or that she was pregnant (always a good stand-by, that one, if unlikely as we always, but always, used a condom) or maybe something else entirely, like she was taking a job in LA or Kuala Lumpur or had decided to become a nun or something, but I’d known, at least since last night, in Ed’s studio, that maybe whatever it was we had had going was near the end.

  Still, I found myself feeling kind of crushed, and surprised. I opened my mouth. She was still sucking in her lips, making her nose look longer. She had taken a sort of half-step away from me, almost bumping into people standing talking behind her, in front of the thick, distorting glass of the aquarium windows. I wondered if she thought I was going to hit her. I never had. I’d never hit any woman; never would. Oh, well, apart from ‘Raine’, of course, but I reckoned I could claim massively extenuating circumstances there.

  ‘Oh, well,’ I said. I looked down at my bottle of Pils. I supposed I could throw that in her face, like Jude had thrown her G &T in my face at Craig’s during the first hour of the New Year, but then Jude had had the forethought to arm herself with a nice wide tumbler; I had a narrow-necked bottle. To achieve a satisfactory soaking of my intended victim I’d have to ask Jo to wait a second or two while I jammed my thumb in the bottle and shook it up before emptying it in her face. That would be inelegant, somehow. Anyway, I didn’t really want to do it.

  So she’d cheated on me. Probably not the first time, but, well, so what to that, too; I’d done more than my own fair share of cheating.

  ‘Is that all you can say?’ she said. ‘“Oh, well”? Is that it?’

  ‘I heard you fucking somebody last night, Jo,’ I told her. ‘On the phone. Your mobile; it did that thing again.’

  She stood, blinking. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said. She nodded. ‘Found it on the floor this morning; batteries flat.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Woh.’ She looked down at the floor, nodding, then up to me. She spread her arms. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out that way.’

  ‘Well, I did.’

  ‘Were you going to say anything?’

  ‘Hadn’t decided. I thought in the meantime you might have realised what had happened and whose mobile yours had rung, and when, and you’d be all contrite, or come up with some embarrassingly unlikely explanation.’

  ‘Were you getting ready to dump me?’

  ‘Not particularly, Jo. It had occurred to me in the past that, well, all those foreign trips, the nights away, the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, drugs and drink and stuff; I kind of suspected you might have had the occasional adventure and so-’

  ‘And what about you?’ she asked, raising her head again, the underwater lights glinting on the studs and bars barnacling her face.

  ‘You mean,’ I said, ‘have I been playing away, too?’

  ‘Yes. Well?’

  ‘Wait a minute,’ I said, starting to feel angry now. ‘I’m being far too fucking reasonable here. I heard you fucking somebody else last night; you didn’t hear me. And now you’re dumping me and you’re looking for some sort of justification after the fact? Well, no fucking way. You have no fucking right to start asking me questions. Yes; yes, I was going to dump you as a matter of fact. Actually, in my heart, in my head, I’d already dumped you, before you dumped me.’

  ‘Don’t be so childish.’

  ‘Fuck off, Jo.’

  ‘Don’t you even want to know why I want out of this relationship? ’

  ‘I don’t know and I don’t care. Maybe your new guy’s got a bigger cock than I have; who fucking gives a damn?’

  ‘Oh, Ken, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Look, I hope you’re both very fucking happy, okay? Now just get the hell away from me. And get your stuff off the Belle, as well.’ This was more like it, I thought. This was taking the initiative. I deserved to, after all, dammit; I was the injured party here. ‘I’ll give you till Monday morning to clear your shit off my boat then it all goes over the side. Goodbye.’ I turned and walked away, the effect barely spoiled by bumping into somebody and accidentally spilling a little Pils over their sleeve and having to mumble an apology as I stalked off.

  I half expected Jo to follow me and remonstrate – and by golly this seemed to me to be a situation where a person could reasonably employ a word like ‘remonstrate’ or even ‘inveigh’ rather than just ‘object’ or ‘argue’ or something. But she didn’t.

  I spent the remainder of the party getting profoundly hammered on an exciting variety of alcoholic beverages and I didn’t see Jo for the rest of the evening. This was probably because she’d taken me at my word about chucking her stuff in the drink and didn’t trust me to wait as long as Monday morning, because when I did eventually roll home in the wee
hours and poured myself out of the taxi and into the Temple Belle, she’d already been and gone; her clothes and bits and pieces had been cleared out and on the mat under the letter box lay her key.

  I stared at it for a while, picked it up after only four or five attempts, took it out onto the deck and threw it wildly into the dark receding waters.

  ‘It was always going to happen. You weren’t right for each other.’

  ‘Craig, Christ almighty, you sound like my mother.’ We were sitting on a bench near the top of Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath, looking out over the city, submerged beneath the watery sun and drifting showers of a cool January afternoon. Craig had walked here. I’d taken the tube.

  I was probably still too hungover/drunk to drive, but I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to, at least not in the Landy; somebody had slashed a couple of its tyres and smashed both headlights last night. I’d reported it to the police and they said, Yes, they knew; they’d been round during the night after the trembler alarm in the Landy noticed the list to one side and informed the Mouth Corp security centre, which in turn had alerted the cops. They’d tried my door for ten minutes and my phone for half an hour before they gave up and left me to snore the sleep of the truly drunk. The CCTV tapes would be studied. Probably kids, that’s all.

  Yeah, right, I thought. Just when I’d been hoping that maybe whatever bad shit had been going on, it wasn’t any more. Oh well.

  ‘Aye,’ Craig said, in response to my accusation of sounding like my mother. ‘And what do mothers know? Best.’

  I shook my head. ‘People always give you this You weren’t right for each other stuff afterwards.’

  ‘Course they do; if anybody ever tells anybody before, when it could do some good, they get accused of being jealous or something, and then when the relationship does break up, they get accused of causing it. You can’t win. Best just keep quiet until it’s over.’

  ‘Did you not like Jo?’

  ‘I didn’t dislike Jo. I thought she was all right. This wasn’t one of those occasions where you’re waiting for it to end so you can tell your friend what you thought of his or her ex. I just meant in theory. Jo was all right, but she was nearly as daft as you, and she’s more ambitious. You need somebody who’ll steady you a bit, not a fellow nutter you can fuck.’

  ‘I don’t think Jo was as crazy as you seem to think she was.’

  Craig tipped his head once. ‘Well, she was pretty off the rails at times. I’m amazed you lasted as long as you did.’

  I sighed. ‘Yeah, Kulwinder said he was surprised we’d lasted as long as we had at the nine-eleven party.’ I watched the slow procession of big jets angling in around the distant scape of clouds, settling onto the gentle, invisible slope that would slide them west into Heathrow.

  ‘She tried to get off with me you know, once,’ Craig said.

  I looked at him. ‘You’re kidding.’ Now this could be awkward.

  ‘Na; it was one time she’d lost you or something; during the summer. You’d had an argument and you’d stormed off and left your mobile behind and she assumed you’d come to mine, so she turned up on the doorstep. I invited the lass in; impolite to do anything else, specially as she was in tears. Offered her a drink, did the agony aunt thing…’

  ‘… Agreed what a bastard I was.’

  ‘Excuse me; I trod the fine line between masculine solidarity and lending a sympathetic ear to a distressed female.’

  ‘So one thing led to another,’ I said.

  Oh shit, what if he had fucked her? Even if he wasn’t going to admit to it here, what if he had? Think, Ken. Was I bothered? Well, was I?

  Not particularly. I mean, I had no right to be jealous or upset, not with Craig, anyway, given what had happened with Emma, but that sort of logical, quid-pro-quo consideration wasn’t the kind of argument that carried much weight with the set of instincts and part-programmed reactions that constitute the human heart.

  ‘Well, no, not one thing leading to another,’ Craig said. ‘She just grabbed me. Out of the blue.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘We’d had about a half-bottle each-’

  ‘Wine?’

  ‘Yeah, of course wine; I wasn’t feeding the girl whisky.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘I’d got up to uncork another-’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘Yes; I was still being polite and supportive. Fuck off with the suspicion and innuendo, will you?’

  ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  ‘Just wrapped herself around me. I turned round – surprised, you know – and she slapped her mouth over mine and grabbed my balls.’

  ‘Fucking hell.’ I looked up at the clouds, then back at Craig. ‘You did the decent thing, though.’

  ‘No, Kenneth,’ he said, stretching his long legs out. He was wearing grey trackie bottoms under a jacket last fashionable ten years ago. ‘The decent thing would have been to have shown her how wonderful the act of love can be when you do it with a real man, but I didn’t do that.’

  ‘Bet you snogged her for a while, you bastard. She was a good kisser.’

  Craig considered this. ‘Hmm. I’d been putting that down to shock, but you’re right.’

  ‘You didn’t fuck her, did you?’

  ‘No. I did the self-sacrificing, You’re beautiful and I’m flattered but if we do we’ll both regret it in the morning thing. God help us, we even agreed it wouldn’t be right to betray you; it was worth depriving ourselves of some pleasure for your sake.’

  ‘Oh, fuck.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Just had a terrible thought.’

  ‘What? Who are you calling?’

  ‘She went looking for me at Ed’s once.’

  ‘Wuh-oh.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  Craig made as if to get up off the bench. ‘Want me to…?’

  ‘Na; if you’re going to see me humiliated we might as well get it over with now.’

  ‘You fucked her, didn’t you?’

  ‘No, I didn’t!’

  ‘Look, Ed, she told me she’d gone to yours, once. She went to Craig’s once, too, and she threw herself at him.’ (‘Hey!’ said Craig. ‘I resent the implication.’ I ignored him.) ‘You trying to tell me Jo didn’t try it on with you?’

  ‘Ah…’

  ‘Ah? Ah? Is that what you’re fucking giving me? Fucking “Ah”?’

  ‘Well…’

  ‘You did fuck her! You shite!’

  ‘She fuckin jumped me, man! It was practically rape!’

  ‘Fuck off, Ed.’

  ‘An anyway, she said she’d never done it wif a black guy; wot was I supposed to do? Deprive her?’

  ‘Don’t bring race into it, for fuck’s sake! And don’t give me this big black stud bullshit either!’

  ‘I didn’t bring race into it, man, she did!’

  ‘Aw, Ed, fuck off; how could you?’

  ‘I couldn’t help it, man.’

  ‘Well, fucking try learning, you overgrown adolescent!’

  ‘Look, man, I am sorry; I felt terrible the next day an it never appened again.’

  ‘Yeah, you’d had your fun, fucked your friend’s girl and added another notch to your fucking ceiling mirrors; why bother?’

  ‘Ken, listen; if I could go back in time an make it that it nevvir appened, believe me I would. I nevvir told you because I didn’t want to hurt you or do anyfin against you an Jo. I wish it just adn’t appened, I truly do. But it did, an I’m sorry, man. I really am sorry. I’m asking you to forgive me, right?’

  ‘Well – just – I’m not -’ I spluttered. ‘Just let me fucking be angry at you a bit longer!’ I said. ‘You bastard!’ I added, rather ineffectually.

  ‘Sorry, man.’

  And I thought, Yeah. We’re all sorry. Everybody is so fucking sorry. It should be the fucking species’ middle name; Homo S. Sapiens. Maybe we could change it by misdeed poll.

  ‘… Listen,’ Ed said.

  Something cold seemed to land in my
guts. Oh, good grief. A ‘listen’ from Ed; now what?

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You got this telly fing tomorrow, aven’t you?’

  Oh fuck, he’d heard about Robe after all and worked out that I might want a gun to take into the studio. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Best of luck wif it, all right? Hope it goes well. You give this Nazi geezer wot-for, yeah?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said.

  ‘You can go back to bein mad at me now if you want, or you can wait till we meet up next weekend an shout at me then. If we’re still meetin up. We still meetin up?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  ‘I’m sorry, man.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Still bruvvers?’

  ‘Yeah, I suppose so. Still bruvvaz.’

  Craig invited me to supper. I suspected it was a sympathy thing; Nikki was staying and Emma was coming round and I think what they really wanted was a quiet evening meal with just the three of them.

  What I really wanted was to see Nikki again, just to be sure that we were okay, and that nothing had changed, at least not for the worse, after the New Year party, because that kiss – those two kisses – had left me worried. I’d let her kiss me, and I’d kissed her back, and the more I’d thought about this over the intervening period, the more ashamed I’d become, and I felt a terrible urge to tell her that it had changed nothing, and of course it would never happen again, and that I was sorry, too, for the time in the Land Rover in the rain, on the day of the crash, when I’d tried – in what now felt like a deeply sad and desperate way – to persuade her to have lunch with me, and that I’d always, always be a good friend and a good uncle for her, for the rest of her life… Though at the same time I also wanted not to have to say anything at all, and to have everything be just the same as it had always been between us, with no awkwardness or distance.