Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  The trouble was that Emma would be there, too, and if Craig mentioned what had happened with Jo – I’d asked him not to say anything to Nikki or Emma, and especially not to mention Jo and Ed, but still – then it might get awkward, given the history I had with Emma. It was a very slim sliver of history, I kept on telling myself, but it was no less potentially lethal for my relationship with Craig for that.

  I was in danger of losing one girlfriend, two best friends and – tomorrow – maybe my job, and liberty, all in one insane forty-eight-hour period.

  Screw the nut, I thought. Batten down. Supper would have been nice, and I had such a bad hangover I’d probably not want to drink very much and so it would actually constitute quite a sensible, measured preparation for the big day tomorrow, but I decided to say no. Other plans.

  ‘Ken, hi.’

  ‘Amy, kid; how are you?’

  ‘Brilliant. You?’

  ‘Ah… kinda, you know.’

  ‘Darling, no, I don’t. What? Is there a problem?’

  ‘Jo and I are… over.’

  ‘Oh! I’m sorry to hear that. You seemed so close.’

  ‘Well,’ I said. Did we? I thought. I wouldn’t have said so, but then maybe that was just the sort of thing you said when somebody told you something like this. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s… it’s, ah, very finished with. Kind of saw it coming, but… hit me a little harder than I’d expected, must confess.’

  ‘Gosh. You poor thing.’

  ‘Yeah. Nearly two years.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Yeah. Feels like longer.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Felt quite a lot for her, I have to say.’

  ‘Well, of course.’

  ‘… All gone now.’

  ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘… Anyway.’

  ‘Hmm. Are you going to be all right?’

  ‘Amy… I’ll live.’

  ‘Oh, dear; you sound so sad!’

  ‘Ah, I’ll get over it. One day.’

  ‘Oh! Is there anything I can do?’

  ‘Well, I suppose…You could let me take you out to dinner. Tonight, even. How does that sound?’

  ‘That sounds like a totally bloody marvellous idea, Ken. I was at a bit of a loose end myself, actually.’

  I looked at the mobile, thinking, Well, you might have got on-message a bit earlier there, woman.

  ‘Amy, for goodness’ sake. There are two lies here: one is that private management is automatically better than public-’

  ‘But it is! Have you ever dealt with a local authority, Ken? Those useless bloody people wouldn’t last two minutes in the real world!’

  ‘Neither did Railtrack once the government subsidy was whipped away.’

  ‘Ha! I bet they got their people from local government.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be… look. The other great lie is that private can be cheaper; it brings in extra money. But that’s bullshit! Just Treasury accounting rules. Infrastructure costs no matter who builds it. You have to invest in it, so invest as cheaply as possible; pay the least you can in interest payments. And that’s even before you factor in the profits a private investor expects, too; that comes on top. So, ask yourself: who or what can borrow money cheaper than any commercial concern? Answer: the state.’

  ‘I think you’ll find that depends on which state, actually, Ken.’

  ‘Okay, the British state can borrow money cheaper, for a smaller interest rate, than any commercial concern.’

  ‘Yes, because it doesn’t go wasting it on things the private sector can do better.’

  ‘Amy, that’s ridiculous!’

  ‘No, it isn’t. And what about risk?’

  ‘What risk? If it all goes wrong the poor bloody taxpayer ends up paying.’

  ‘There’s always a risk, Ken,’ Amy said, smiling thinly at me. ‘Life is full of risk.’

  I sat back in my seat. We were in La Eateria, an achingly trendy new restaurant in Islington. Wooden garden furniture for tables and chairs, and walls lined with that perforated orange plastic stuff builders use to create instant fences. Menu pretentious, food barely adequate, staff surly. I was amazed it wasn’t busier. Still, it was a Sunday night.

  Amy looked great, with her fine, now straight blond hair glowing in the light of what looked like car headlights dangling from the ceiling. She was dressed in black tights and skirt, and a clingy black long-sleeved top with a gold chain lying on the tanned skin revealed by a square, low neck.

  So she looked superb and she’d dressed up – if she’d appeared in paint-speckled jeans and an unironed T-shirt I’d have known there was no way anything was going to happen – and yet, suddenly, for the first time in all the times we’d met to eat, she’d turned into Little Miss Capitalist Lobby Girl.

  Until now all our lunch and dinner dates-that-were-not-really-dates had consisted of eating, drinking and flirting. Dammit; they’d been great fun! Certainly no arguments about fucking PFI and PPPs. I mean, I knew that the lobbying firm she worked for was involved in promoting that sort of crap, but, Jeez, she’d never started pushing it at me. I’d made one off-hand remark about Railtrack and the forthcoming attractions of Postrack and Tubetrack, and she’d jumped down my throat feet first.

  ‘You know what really gets me?’ I said, putting my fork down. I hadn’t eaten much of my main course. The chef here seemed obsessed with height and apparently chose his ingredients and cooking methods to ensure the maximum altitude and stability of the towers of material the kitchen created, with edibility and taste coming way down the list of priorities. Probably somewhere between the grid of soggy rosti and the layer of glue-like mustard mash acting as a hold-fast.

  ‘No, I don’t know what really gets you, Ken,’ Amy said, levering a forkful of her lamb and figs towards her mouth, ‘but I have the awful feeling you’re just dying to tell me.’

  Dying to. Shit, I hadn’t even told her about the whole ‘Raine’ thing, my inadvertent trip to the East End, the threatening phone call and the slashed tyres on the Landy yet. I’d told Craig, Ed and Jo, and sworn them all to secrecy, but with Amy I’d been holding it in reserve for later in the evening. Now I was starting to think there was no point.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What I want to know is, why put what is basically greed above the urge to serve? What’s wrong with wanting to help people? Isn’t that what politicians say they want to do? They say they just want to serve society, they tell us that’s why they became politicians in the first fucking place, so why don’t they side with the nurses and the teachers and the fire brigade and the police and all the other people who really do serve?’

  ‘They do side with the police, Kenneth.’

  ‘Oh, so they do. But what about everybody else? So are they lying about wanting to serve, and just want power, or have they just not made the connection yet?’

  Amy sat back too, breathing deeply and flexing her shoulders. I tried to keep eye contact and appreciate her breasts by peripheral vision only, but it was almost an insult to them. On the other hand, maybe I should make the most of the view, because it looked like what I was seeing now was all I was ever going to see. Amy shook her head and said, ‘You really are quite naïve, aren’t you, Ken?’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Yes. You seem so clued-up and clever but really you just scratch the surface of everything, don’t you?’

  ‘If you say so, Amy.’

  She looked at me for a bit. Her eyes were greeny-blue and her irises had that over-defined look you get with contacts sometimes. She was still breathing fairly deeply and I just let my gaze fall to her chest, which was pleasant in a regretful sort of way. ‘You’re just Sir Jamie’s little performing monkey, but you think you’re some sort of cool radical type, isn’t that right, Ken?’

  I thought about this. ‘On a good day,’ I conceded. ‘With a following.’

  ‘I suppose you think you’re Mouth Corp’s conscience or something, don’t you?’

  ‘Oh, no. Jester, maybe; bl
adder, bit of string, that sort of thing, you know.’

  Amy sat forward. ‘Think about this, Ken,’ she said. I sat forward too, eager to be given something to think about. ‘You let Sir Jamie get away with more,’ Amy told me. ‘By employing you and allowing you to do your little rants and letting you criticise bits of the Mouth Corp empire and the people and the organisations it gets into bed with, Sir Jamie can give the impression of being even-handed and fair and able to tolerate criticism. What’s actually going on is that the bad corporate stuff, which Mouth Corp does as much as anybody, gets a lot less publicity than it deserves, thanks to you.’ She sat back. So did I. But she wasn’t finished. ‘You cost the radio station the occasional ad placement and Mouth Corp loses the odd contract, but Sir Jamie gets his money’s worth out of you, Ken, don’t think he doesn’t. You’re part of the system, too. You help make it work. We all do. It’s just that some of us know it and some of us don’t.’

  She dabbed at the corner of her mouth with her napkin.

  I looked at her for a moment. Her eyes were bright. She was smiling. I thought about Ceel and wondered suddenly what the hell I was doing here. ‘So,’ I said, ‘do I get to fuck you or not?’

  She laughed and leaned forward again, which was a good thing in itself. Voice lower this time. ‘Have you got any drugs, Ken? Any E? Or Charlie?’

  It actually occurred to me to lie and say no. Can you believe that? ‘Not on me.’

  ‘Get some.’

  ‘Okay.’

  So we did, but it wasn’t very good. The drugs or the sex.

  Eight. DENIAL

  Maybe Jo’s right; I hate so many things. I’m a media person and there’s so much media stuff I just despise. From comics who make fun of their audience – ah, the masochism of paying good money to be insulted in public – to crap like Big Brother; hours and hours of boring, self-obsessed dimwits trying to be zany while performing pointless, stupid tasks that would be an insult to anyone with half a brain. Ali G, Dennis Pennis, Mrs Merton, Trigger Happy TV; shows that make me squirm with embarrassment and, sometimes, feel the beginnings of sympathy even for people who deserve nothing but my unalloyed hatred. God, I hated so much TV these days, and the terrifying thing was, it was this stuff that was popular, I who was out of step.

  Numty TV, we called it on the show (part of our long-term and deeply insidious campaign to bring more Scottish words into day-to-day English usage). The only aspect of Numty TV I liked was the not-obviously-set-up entries on You’ve Been Framed, but part of me was ashamed of that, because I couldn’t help feeling there was an edge of cruelty watching this stuff; you see a clip begin with some bozo on rollerblades wobbling towards the camcorder at high speed, or perched precariously on a still shiny mountain bike and tearing down a rutted path between the trees, or almost anything to do with jet skis, high winds, people on a rope swing over a muddy puddle, or weddings or wedding reception dances, and you could feel yourself thinking, Oh goody; this’ll be a laugh. It was fun watching people making fools of themselves, but the question is, should it be?

  Better to watch the truly despicable suffer, which was why I was here, I supposed.

  Here was a Victorian warehouse in Clerkenwell converted into a TV studio and the place where Winsome Productions would be making their new, if much-delayed and re-scheduled, late-evening news magazine and analysis show Breaking News. Most of it would be live but the bit I’d be doing was being recorded. Sensibly. After I’d had my mad, bad idea for what to do here, I’d felt really deflated when I’d learned that the piece with the Holocaust denier would be taped rather than shown live; I’d wanted the buzz of it happening for real (but then I also started to feel relieved, thinking, Well, no point in doing it at all, then… before I caught myself, and thought, Oh yes there is; no chickening out).

  Though I might still chicken out. There was a heavy metallic lump in the right pocket of my jacket reminding me that I had something to do here, something nobody was expecting, but I knew that when it came to the moment, I might still ignore it, play along, do what everybody expected me to do, and do nothing more than shoot my mouth off.

  It was late afternoon. I felt over-briefed. Phil had gone through the obvious stuff with me, and so had yet another young, attractive, breathless, awfully well-spoken researcher.

  Our presenter would be Cavan Lutton-James, a slim, darkly handsome and energetic guy with a quick, clipped but clear delivery and a natty interview style, which could veer from emollient to biting in the turn of a phrase. He was Irish, so I’d already stockpiled one or two remarks about Ireland ’s inglorious part in the great war against Fascism, to keep in reserve just in case any misguided ideas about balance caused him to start siding with the bad guy. A bad guy I hadn’t seen yet; they were keeping us apart.

  The only person I’d met in the Green Room – apart from a couple of attractive but breathlessly awfully production assistants, at least one of whom was called Ravenna – was a young comedian called Preston Wynne, who came across as a bit of a fan boy and was supposed to record a topical, robust, cutting-edge, irreverent, yada-yada piece on something or other, after we’d done the big Holocaust denial discussion/confrontation. He was still working on his script while he sat in the Green Room, clattering quietly on his iBook, staring at a plate of gourmet sandwiches and drinking too much coffee. I almost felt like telling him to let the piece run longer than he’d been told, and even be prepared to pad a little, because the bit I was going to be on might not have quite the run-time the producer was expecting, but of course I didn’t.

  I didn’t even have a drink in the Green Room. I really wanted one, but I kept myself sober because I wanted to be sharp and fully alert for what was going to happen.

  Phil and I had spent a sober lunch in the corner of the Black Pig, another basic Soho boozer similar to the Bough. Phil was obviously worried I was going to make a mess of things, lose my rag, freeze, rant incoherently and start foaming at the mouth; whatever. He’d really wanted to come along with me but I’d told him weeks ago he wasn’t going to. Partly this was for the stated reason, that he wasn’t my dad and I didn’t need my hand held, but partly also it was because he might, a) guess just from my look or behaviour closer to the event that I was going to get up to something seriously off-piste and so give the game away, and b) catch a little less flak from our mutual bosses after I’d done what I intended to do. If I had the guts to actually do it.

  ‘Umm… what else. Oh, yeah, and obviously, the whole thing about the Second World War not happening, too; that’s obviously a brilliant line to take. It’s so basically ludicrous, yet it’s not intrinsically any more so than claiming the Holocaust didn’t happen.’

  ‘I know, Phil,’ I sighed. ‘We have kind of been through this.’

  ‘I know, I know, but you’ve got to get this rehearsed.’

  ‘No, I don’t. Actually rehearsed is the last thing I want it to be.’

  ‘Too risky. What if you make a mess of it?’

  ‘Look, I don’t make a mess of it in front of a million radio listeners five days a week, why should I make a mess of it in front of a late-night Channel Four audience of probably fewer people… when it’s taped, for fuck’s sake?’

  ‘Oh, yeah, and you won’t swear, will you?’

  ‘Phil, have I ever fucking sworn on air?’

  Phil looked like a man with severe diarrhoea sitting in a Land Rover heading quickly down a bumpy jungle path towards extremely distant toilets. ‘Well, no,’ he admitted, ‘but I still don’t know how you do it. I mean, it doesn’t seem possible you’ve managed to avoid it all these years.’

  ‘Well, I have.’

  ‘What, even on Inverclyde Sound?’

  ‘StrathClyde Sound; the radio station where the creative’s typist missed the space bar rather than accidentally hit the exclamation mark key, and no, not even there. It’s because even though it might not sound like it, I do have a pretty accurate idea exactly what I’m going to say the instant before I say it, I never
forget the context – am I in the pub or the studio? – and there’s just sufficient time for my on-board censor to step in and make the relevant – if not always perfectly elegant or sometimes even grammatical – amendments.’

  ‘Right. Well.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s late-night Channel Four, for Christ’s sake, not Blue Peter. If they can say “fuck” on Sex and the City I don’t see why I can’t. Christ, I heard a “cunt” on Larry Sanders once.’

  Phil’s eyes went wide. ‘Oh, no, I really don’t think you should-’

  ‘Look, will you just calm down a bit?’ I told him. ‘I’m not going on intending to swear, okay?’

  He said, ‘Okay,’ but he still looked worried.

  Of course, what I wanted to add was, Dammit, man, I won’t have time to swear; it’ll probably all be over in about five seconds and I really wouldn’t worry your ugly big head about what I’m going to say.

  Again, though, I didn’t.

  I was plumbed in. I’d half expected it would be radio mikes (always attached to you with a warning not to visit the loo with them switched on, in case you want to cause the sound engineers, ooh, seconds of hilarity), but they were using hard wire instead. What appeared to be a clone of one of the attractive but awfully assistants slipped the wire beneath my jacket, under the button of my shirt just above the waistband of my trousers and then – once I’d worked it upwards – attached it between the top two buttons of my shirt. I was going for the relaxed, casual, open-necked look. Besides, they take your tie off you in the nick, along with your belt and laces.

  The awfully assistant smiled as we were negotiating the cool black wire up between my chest and the fabric of the shirt, and I smiled back, but while we’d been doing this her bare arm had swung against my jacket and made the pocket clunk off the seat and I was secretly terrified she was going to see the sweat prickling up underneath my make-up and ask, ‘Hey, what’s that hard, heavy, metallic thing in your jacket pocket?’