Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  Now may be a good time to think of something happy, inside here.

  When I first came to London in ’94 it wasn’t as a DJ. I’d lost my job with StrathClyde Sound after a series of disputes (the last straw, absurdly, had been a campaign I’d called Don’t Rubbish Our Stations, to bring back litter bins to Scottish railway stations, because the IRA had never carried out any terrorist attacks anywhere in Scotland and so there was no need to ape the English safety precaution of removing bins because they were potential places to leave a bomb). So I decided to make the move down south to the big smoke, like generations of Scots before me. In London, I’d got nowhere with the few contacts I had and the dozens of demo tapes I’d sent off, so I got a job as a bike courier, whizzing through the crowded streets on an already well-used Bandit that had cost me the last of my savings, weaving in and out between the cars and trucks and buses and going the wrong way round the occasional traffic island to get documents and disks and drawings from one office to another as quickly as possible.

  Then I got a job with a firm of Motorcycle Chauffeurs, somehow convincing the manager that I was a good, responsible, and above all smooth driver (miraculously, I’d held on to a clean licence in all the mayhem of London dispatch biking, though I had been knocked down twice). The idea was that the London traffic had become so congested there was an almost literal gap in the market for getting people from one bit of the capital to the other quicker than a taxi or a limo could. A big bike was the answer; a Honda Pan European or a 1200 BMW tourer, complete with panniers to carry an extra helmet and an over-suit for the client and a tall enough screen so that the worst of any weather was kept off them (providing you were moving, though of course being on a bike, you should be able to, even in a serious jam).

  The company did well enough but then ran into cashflow problems and was taken over by a limo firm; they lost half the drivers but I was one of the lucky ones.

  One late spring morning, at the start of an early shift, I was called to an emergency job taking somebody from Islington to Langham Place. A car hadn’t shown and I was nearest. I pulled up at a nice, semi-posh terraced house in Cloudesley Square, one of the district’s leafier bits, and this elfin blonde in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt appeared, running down the steps pulling on a pretend biker’s jacket and waving goodbye to a sleepy-looking guy standing in the doorway, wearing what looked like a very small woman’s dressing-gown.

  ‘Hi!’ she said, pulling on the helmet I had held out to her.

  She had a small, friendly looking face, profoundly unkempt short, curly hair and crinkly eyes that were about as wide-set as they could be in such a thin face. Cheeky-looking, somehow. I was sure I recognised her. Come to think of it, the guy in the too-small dressing-gown had rung a bell or two as well.

  ‘Morning,’ I said, helping her with the buckle under her chin. This wasn’t as easy as it ought to have been because she was bouncing from one foot to the other all the time. ‘You’ll have to stop jumping up and down,’ I told her gently.

  ‘Sorry!’ She waggled her eyebrows. The helmet was a bit big for her, but I did the strap up as tight as I could.

  I got the buckle fastened and she swung her leg over and jumped on behind me. ‘Broadcasting House! Langham Place!’ she yelled, helmet banging against mine. ‘Fast as you can! If that’s okay.’

  I nodded and we set off. It was about ten to six. We didn’t quite make it in time but her producer filled for her and played a couple of records back to back and – parked up by a wee café on Cavendish Street and listening on my FM earpiece – I heard her start her show, and smiled when – breathless, giggling, apologising – she said thanks to the bike guy who’d helped her get there almost on time. ‘Sorry I forgot to ask your name,’ she said. ‘But if you’re listening, mate, well done. Right…’

  Samantha Coghlan was something very close to being the nation’s darling at the time. Sam had presented various shows on children’s TV, been a big hit there, tried some more serious TV without any great success – one of those deals where they keep adding zeros to the money on offer until the talent has to say yes, then the execs stand around scratching their heads, wondering what exactly to do with the star they’ve bought – and then made the move to national radio in what at first looked like an act of desperation by both her and Radio One.

  As it turned out, though, she was perfect for the Breakfast Show. Well, perfect apart from sleeping in all too often with her celeb film-star boyfriend after showbiz parties and general late nights with their famous friends. Breezy and pally, but sharp and funny too, Sam added a million and a half listeners to the show and reinvigorated a career that might just have been starting to stutter. Within a year she was winning awards, fronting a TV rock and pop show to even more acclaim and helping a couple of major retailers lift their profile with a generation of customers they’d been losing touch with.

  I became Biker Ken, her preferred mode of transport for most of that summer. I’d made a decision right at the start to keep quiet about my own dormant radio career. Sam started to mention me on air more often, and over a couple of months I became one of the disparate cloud of friends, acquaintances, hangers-on and, well, parasites she would mention – always funnily, never bitterly – during the course of her show; a cast of characters she built up apparently without thinking about it until we became part of a sort of real-life soap opera the listening public followed avidly five mornings out of seven.

  After a while – once the bike hire company equipped us with two-way intercoms so that we could, if the client wanted to, communicate with each other – she started asking me, en route, about what I’d done before I’d become a bike chauffeur. Finally I couldn’t keep my old career quiet without either being rude or lying, so I confessed all.

  ‘Brilliant! Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Great! Come on the show!’

  ‘Look,’ I told her, ‘I’m not going to say no, Sam, but you may want to recon-’

  ‘Na; come on! It’ll be fun!’

  So I did. And found I hadn’t lost my radio voice or my touch, and was suitably, humbly funny for a five-minute spot with her one morning when I was off duty. That afternoon, I got a call from one of the stations I’d sent a demo tape to a year earlier; would I like to come in and do an audition? So, Sam gave me my big break.

  The lovely Samantha parted company with her listeners one tearful morning that autumn, leaving to go off and have babies in LA with her actor fiancé, whose career had taken off in serious style. We all missed her, but by then I had my own late-night show on a new commercial London station called M25. I sent her flowers; she sent a gracious, funny, affectionate note that I still had. She was a happily married mother of twin girls and a big hit on the Hollywood social scene, last I’d heard, but what I remembered most was not her leaving, or those five generous minutes on her show that kick-started my own stalled career, or even that morning when I first met her; what I remembered most, what I remembered now, was charging down the sleepy streets in the light of a new summer’s morning, heading south for Langham Place through the sparse five-thirty traffic with the big bike humming beneath us. She held onto the grab handles at first, then, after a couple of weeks, asked if it would be okay to put her arms round my waist.

  I’d said, Of course, and so, about three mornings out of five, and usually by the time we got to Caledonian Road, she’d clasp her gloved hands in front of my belly and put her helmet against mine and then fall comfortably asleep for the rest of the journey.

  When we started wearing the intercom units, I could hear her snoring sometimes, ever so gently, as we thrummed smoothly down the quiet, side-lit streets towards the heart of the slowly waking city.

  In all my life to that point, I had never been happier.

  Since then, only when I’d been with Ceel.

  And I’m thinking about her now, because now I’m in a box, all trussed, bound up, blind in the darkness and petrified that something gruesome is going to happe
n to me, because all that I did earlier, all the business with the getting into and getting out of Merrial’s house was somehow not enough, and the bad men have come for me and taken me away and I’m terrified for myself and for Celia, because I have the awful, gut-churning, bowel-chilling feeling that when they take me out of here I’m going to see her and she’ll be in just as much trouble as I am.

  They came in the depths of night and the bottom of the tide, when the whole ship was tilted, out of true and out of kilter, sloping away to one side on the dark slope of ancient mud where the smell of cold death rises from.

  I woke up panicking again, but this time because I thought I’d heard something. I lay there across the bed in the darkness, not daring to move. Had I heard something? Sometimes I used to be sure I heard a great banging noise the instant before I woke, but Jo would always say that I must have been dreaming. Had that happened this time? I heard another noise, somewhere above me. I started to move my hand towards the head of the bed, where the big black Mag-Lite torch/club lay. Maybe I was dreaming. Or maybe it was Jo come back, shame-faced, unable to live without me. Maybe, better, it was Ceel; I’d left the door unlocked or she’d learned how to pick a lock from her husband’s crim pals.

  Another noise. Oh, sweet Jesus. Forget the Mag-Lite. Activate the fucking Breitling’s emergency satellite signalling gizmo, dickhead. I started to bring my hands together.

  The light clicked on. My eyes hurt. I spun round, turning over in the bed in time to see a tall, well-built white guy I didn’t recognise standing above me; another big guy stood at the door to the bedroom, some sort of large box just behind him. They looked like I had; overalls and baseball caps. My right hand moved to my left wrist, where the big Breitling was, but it was all happening too slowly. The first guy punched me hard in the belly and the wind whooshed out of my lungs. He grabbed my wrist and tore the watch off my hand.

  Released, I curled up, gasping and mewling, bunched round the pain and the wheezing vacuum formed by the punch, and they bound me in that position before I could do anything about it, quickly and efficiently sticking silver gaffer tape over my mouth and tying my hands and ankles all together with the same plastic ties the cops use. They both wore latex gloves, like surgeons. They frisked me quickly, efficiently, taking everything out of my pockets. Then they roped my neck to the same four-way knot securing my wrists and ankles so that I was trussed into a fetal position. That way I fitted into the foam-lined metal shell of a washing machine in the big cardboard box I’d glimpsed earlier, which they must have lifted down the stairs. They lowered me into it, sitting me on my buttocks and feet, and then secured the lid, cutting out all light. I heard the cardboard flaps slap down above me and the tearing noise of more gaffer tape being applied, then I felt myself being lifted up the steps.

  I was on my side now, lying on and surrounded by what felt like thick expanded polystyrene. I tried to move, tried to scream down my nose, tried to kick or punch or do anything, but all that happened was I produced a pathetic keening noise through my snotty nostrils and got myself all hot in the tiny, insulated space. I felt myself carried up the gangway, along the pontoon, up the slope to the car park, and then heard the faint noise of what sounded like a pair of van rear doors opening. I was placed down, the doors closed with a muffled thud and a few seconds later the van, engine unheard within all the foam padding around me, started off, swinging into the main road and accelerating away.

  Oh God, oh fuck, oh shit. The very, very best I could hope for now was that this was still something to do with that wanker and his dangerous driving case. Mark whatever he was called. Maybe he was still trying to get away with a functioning driving licence; maybe he had persuaded my new pal Mr Glatz that, after all – and despite our little word outside the Imperial War Museum – I still needed to be leaned upon. Maybe he’d found new crim pals willing to do the job for him. Maybe he had more villainous resources of his own than Mr Glatz had credited him with. Maybe all this was just to get me utterly fucking petrified – if so; hey, mission accomplished, guys! – so I’d agree to change my witness statement.

  Except I didn’t think so.

  It was all so fucking easy and efficient and well thought-out, somehow. Too practised. These fuckers had done this before. It was Merrial.

  But maybe not. Maybe when we got to wherever we were going – and it was always possible we were going somewhere really terminally and immediately god-awful, like a crusher or an incinerator, or just the edge of an old dock – maybe I’d see this guy Southorne, not John Merrial. Maybe.

  I started to cry. The pain in my abdomen was receding now, but I started to cry.

  The van swung smoothly through the city’s night-time streets, this way and that.

  All the things I’ll never get to say. All the rants I’ll never get to rant. There was one shaping up about context, about blindness, about selectivity, about racism and our intense sucker-hood when it came to reacting to images and symbols, and our blank, glazed inability to accept and comprehend reality in the form of statistics.

  It’s because there was a reliable-sources statistic Phil discovered the other day; that every twenty-four hours about thirty-four thousand children die in the world from the effects of poverty; from malnutrition and disease, basically. Thirty-four thousand, from a world, a world-society, that could feed and clothe and treat them all, with a workably different allocation of resources. Meanwhile, the latest estimate is that two thousand eight hundred people died in the Twin Towers, so it’s like that image, that ghastly, grey-billowing, double-barrelled fall, repeated twelve times every single fucking day; twenty-four towers, one per hour, throughout each day and night. Full of children.

  We feel for the people in the towers, we agree with almost any measure to stop it ever happening again, and so we should. But for the thirty-four thousand, each day? Given our behaviour, and despite the idea we’re supposed to love our children, you could be forgiven for thinking that most of us just don’t give a damn.

  So, maybe not such a terrific world to be contemplating leaving, then (a straw caught in the undertow, heading downwards into the darkness, to clutch at). At least I said I loved Ceel. I told her, in the conventional three words. That’s something. Not much, perhaps, and she never did return the sentiment, but it’s something that I got to say, maybe the last unforced thing I’ll ever say.

  It seems like a long time before the van stops. Then it starts again, moving slowly. It jiggles over what feels like some roughish ground or badly pitted roadway, then angles down. One left corner, taken slowly, then a series of them, as though we’re on a spiral ramp, heading downwards. Then we stop.

  It feels like my heart is thrashing against my ribcage, desperate to escape; a rat in an already humming microwave. Sweat pours off me in the tightly insulated confines of the box. Then I’m lifted, set down, and there’s the sound of tape being ripped from the cardboard above me. The lid comes off and a little light seeps in. I’m hoisted out easily by the two overalled guys who had put me into the box. They undo the rope holding my neck down to my ankles and wrists, then cut a plastic tie holding my wrists and ankles together. I’m opened out like a penknife and stand precariously between them, ankles still tied to each other and wrists the same. I’m in a big rectangular concrete tunnel. It’s quite dark, lit only by a couple of armoured glass ceiling fixtures.

  The van we came in was a white Astramax and a little part of my brain that doesn’t believe all this is really happening to me thinks, Ah! Of course it’s an Astramax; what else? Ahead there are two wire mesh gates and distant ceiling lights forming a grid in a larger space beyond. The air smells dank and filthy like rain-diluted sewage; it feels cold on my sweat-beaded skin.

  They drag me to the mesh gates and push them open. We’re on a slight slope. Beyond, the slope disappears into darkness black as night, the darkness of an infinite pit.

  Lights come on across the black gulf. The mainbeams of a car, blinding. The blackness is water. We splash into it,
raising a smell of something dead and rotten into the air. The water is only a couple of centimetres deep, barely more than a film. The toes of my shoes are dragged through the thin covering over old but still smooth concrete. About fifteen metres in from the shallow ramp we entered from, we get to the place where the car is. It’s a big, dark, modern Bentley. By its offside there is a little island of pallets; about two dozen squares of anaemic yellow-white undressed wood arranged to provide a sort of crude pontoon above the shallow sheet of dark water. The Bentley sits beside the pallet island for all the world like a liner tied up to a quayside.

  In the centre of the pallets, a single metal column comes down from the roof. There are two piles of bricks on each side of the column, about sixty centimetres high, bound to the black iron column with thick black insulating tape. A metre away, facing this, there is a single big plain wooden seat, sturdy and armless, the sort of thing you might find at the head of a farmhouse table.

  When I see it I try to struggle, but it’s almost comically ineffective. I suspect the two guys holding me don’t even notice. They put me in front of the seat. When I resist being sat in it the one who hit me before whacks me with one fist, crunching into my cheek. I lose it for a moment and when I’m fully aware again I’m already tied and taped into the seat and they’re just finishing taping my feet to the iron column. My heels are resting on the piles of bricks, one on either side of the metal post.

  I can’t believe this. My head feels like it’s revolving and somersaulting and vibrating, like it’s a fairground waltzer and my brain’s the single hapless, helpless passenger. When I’m quite secure and unable to move much beyond a twitch – my head is the only part of me I can really control at all – the driver’s door of the Bentley opens and John Merrial gets out. He’s dressed in a black three-piece suit with a high-necked waistcoat. Black gloves. The two guys, one to each side of me, straighten fractionally.