Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  ‘It was my maiden name,’ she said, sounding surprised.

  ‘You’re a McFadden, from Martinique?’

  ‘My great-great-grandfather was a slave on Barbados. He was given the name of his slave master, who may have been his biological father. He escaped, and ended up in Martinique.’

  ‘Woh. Sorry.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ Celia said, shrugging. ‘You changed your name, didn’t you?’

  ‘Yeah. Not officially, just for the radio. It still says McNutt on my passport.’

  ‘McNutt?’ She smiled.

  ‘Yes, with two “t”s. So, this,’ I said, changing the subject and stroking the lightning scar, ‘has appeared in public, has it? It wasn’t a problem?’

  ‘Perhaps it was a small problem. I always had enough work but I’m sure I lost some jobs because of it. But no, I don’t think it ever appeared.’

  ‘What did they do, cover it with make-up?’

  ‘No. They shot from the other side.’

  ‘So all your model shots are from the right?’

  ‘Mostly. Though they don’t all appear so once they’re printed. You just reverse the neg.’

  ‘Oh, right. Of course.’

  ‘Sometimes, when the light or the background meant we had to, they would shoot from my left side and I would hold my arm in a certain way and if there was anything of the scar visible it would be air-brushed out later. It is not a problem.’ She shrugged. ‘Covering things up is easy.’

  The latest she ever stayed was ten p.m. I was welcome to stay longer if I wanted, but I never did, and I knew she preferred me to leave first. She would arrive and depart with her hair tightly compressed under a wig – usually blond – and wore large dark glasses and baggy, undistinguished clothes.

  In Claridge’s, she’d stripped the bed to its bottom sheet and covered the surface and a dozen extra pillows in red rose petals. The lights mostly stayed on for that one. This was where she finally explained her insane theory about having half died when the lightning struck her.

  ‘What?’

  ‘There are two mes. Two of me. In different, parallel worlds.’

  ‘Hold on. I think I know this theory. Simple idea but the complexities are hideous.’

  ‘Mine is quite simple.’

  ‘Yeah, but the real one is confusing to a bonkers degree; according to it there are an infinity of yous. A pleasing prospect, I might add, except there is also, are also… anyway, an infinity of mes, too, and your husband. Husbands. Whatever. See how confusing it is?’

  ‘Yes, well,’ she said, waving one dismissive hand. ‘But for me it is very simple. I half died then, when the lightning struck me. In that other world I am half dead, too.’

  ‘But also half alive.’

  ‘Just as in this one.’

  ‘So did you fall off this cliff in the other world, or not?’ I asked, deciding to humour this matter-of-fact madness of hers.

  ‘Yes and no. I did, but I also fell back onto the grass, just as I did here.’

  ‘So in this world, here, you fell off the cliff too?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And yet you woke up on the grass.’

  ‘That part of me did. This part of me did.’

  ‘So in the other world? What? If you woke up on the grass in this one, she must have not woken up, because she was lying dead at the bottom of the cliff.’

  ‘No, she woke up too, on the grass.’

  ‘So who the hell fell off the bleedin cliff?’

  ‘I did.’

  ‘You did? But-’

  ‘Both of I.’

  ‘I and I? What, now you’re a Rastafarian?’

  She laughed. ‘We both fell off the cliff. I remember it happening. I remember seeing myself fall, and the noise the air made, and how my legs made a useless running motion and how I could not scream because the air had been knocked out of my lungs and how the rocks looked as I fell towards them.’

  ‘So did the lightning kill… half kill you, or was it the fall?’

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘I don’t know. Does it?’

  ‘Perhaps both did. Or half did.’

  ‘I think we’ve gone on to quarters by this stage.’

  ‘Perhaps either would have been enough. All that matters is that it happened.’

  ‘It would be useless to suggest, I suppose, that this might all really only have happened in your head, the result of having ninety thousand volts zapped through your brain pan and down your body?’

  ‘But of course it is not useless to suggest it! If that is what you need to believe to make sense of what happened to me by your way of thinking, then of course that is what you must believe.’

  ‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

  ‘Yes, I know. But, you see, when it happened, I was there, and you, my dear, were not.’

  I let out a long breath. ‘Right. So… so what are the symptoms of you being only half alive in this world… and the other one? You do seem wholly and, I would risk saying, even vibrantly alive in this world, to me. Especially about ten minutes ago. Oh, though there is that thing about the French calling it the little death, of course. Though that’s not what you’re talking about, is it? But back to the symptoms. What makes you feel this?’

  ‘That I feel it.’

  ‘Right. No, no, not right. I’m not getting it.’

  ‘It feels obvious to me. In a way I always knew it. Reading about parallel universes simply made sense of that feeling. I didn’t feel any more certain of what I felt, and it did not really alter what I felt, or what I believed, but it made it more possible for me to explain it to others.’

  I laughed. ‘So all we’ve been talking about in the last five minutes is after it became easier to explain?’

  ‘Yes. Easier. Not easy. Perhaps “less difficult” would be a better formulation.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘I think it might all change on my next birthday,’ she said, nodding seriously.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because the lightning hit me on the day of my fourteenth birthday, and on my next birthday I will be twenty-eight. You see?’

  ‘Yes, I do. My God, your aberrant personal belief system is actually contagious. I suppose they all are.’ I sat up in the bed. ‘You mean that on the day of your twenty-eighth birthday, in April next year…’

  ‘The fifth.’

  ‘… What?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps I die. Perhaps the other one of me dies.’

  ‘And if the other one dies?’

  ‘I will become fully alive.’

  ‘Which will manifest itself…?’

  She smiled. ‘Well, perhaps I will decide that I love you.’

  I stared into those amber eyes. It seemed to me then that she had the most direct, clearly honest gaze of anybody I had ever met. No humour there just now, no irony. Not even doubt. Puzzlement, perhaps, but no doubt. She really believed all this.

  ‘There,’ I said, ‘is that big little word that neither of us have spoken until now.’

  ‘Why should we speak it?’

  I wondered what that meant. I might have pursued the matter, but then she shrugged again, and her immaculate breasts moved in just such a way that in this world and surely any other all I could say was, ‘Oh, come here.’

  In the Meridien Piccadilly, finding she had a suite with a kitchen attached, she had already been across to Fortnum and Mason and bought the ingredients to make an omelette, flavoured with saffron. She was trying out different types of underwear on that occasion, so that I came, bizarrely, to associate the smell of eggs cooking in olive oil with a basque and stockings.

  I laughed as she presented the tray to me in bed.

  ‘What?’ she asked.

  ‘You spoil me,’ I said as she jumped up onto the bed, her stockinged legs folded neatly beneath her. She took up a fork. I gestured at the food, at her. ‘This is… pretty much most guys’ fantasy.’

  ‘Good,�
�� she said. She looked round the dark bedroom, then at me, and smiled. ‘No complaints here, either.’

  ‘Think you might let me pay for one of these conjugal visits one day? Or even take you away for a weekend?’

  She shook her head quickly. ‘It’s better this way.’ She put the fork down. ‘This has to be outside of real life, Kenneth. That way we can get away with it. We expose ourselves less. Less of a risk is taken. And, because this happens outside of our normal lives, it feels less connected to what we might talk about to other people. It is like a dream, no? So we are both less likely to say something that might give us away. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. Just a residual scrap of old-school male pride, wishing to pay for something. But it’s all right; being an intermittently kept man rather appeals to me.’

  ‘I wish you could take me out,’ she said, smiling at the thought of it. ‘I would love to sit in a café with you, watching people go by. Go to lunch with you, sitting on a terrace by a river, in the sunlight. Be taken to a play or a film or to dance. Sit on a beach with you, under a palm tree, perhaps. Just the two of us crossing a street, holding hands. I find myself dreaming of these things sometimes, when I am low.’ She looked away, then back. ‘Then I think of this. The next time we shall meet. That makes everything well.’

  I gazed into her eyes again, lost for a thing to say.

  She smiled, winked. ‘It will get cold. Eat up.’

  In the Lanesborough we spent hours in a cavernous bath, experimenting with various lotions and creams; she emptied a bottle of No. 5 into the oiled foam and I smelled of it for three days.

  ‘What do you do, Ceel?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘How do you pass your days? What is your life like?’

  ‘I’m not sure I should tell you. This is supposed to be separate, not attached to our real lives, don’t you remember?’

  ‘I remember, but telling me what a more normal day is like isn’t going to make that big a difference.’

  ‘I do what the women of rich men are supposed to do; I shop and lunch.’

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘Some. Different friends for different things. Some for shopping and lunching, some at my health club, some for ice skating-’

  ‘You skate?’

  ‘A little. Not well. There are a couple of friends I have from my modelling days who are also married now, or settled down, with rich men. Just two who live in London. I visit Paris to see friends there, and one of my brothers. It is so easy now, with the train.’

  ‘You go to Paris a lot?’

  ‘A few times a year. Sometimes I go there with John. Usually he travels alone. He’s away often; Europe, South America. I go to Paris more than anywhere else. John doesn’t like me to spend nights away unless he knows the people I stay with well. In Paris it’s all right because I stay with my brother, who works for John and lives in a company apartment.’

  ‘What does your brother do?’

  She looked at me. It was one of the few occasions she’d ever looked even slightly angry. ‘Nothing bad,’ she said sharply.

  ‘Okay.’ I held up my hands. ‘Do you have any really close friends?’

  She turned away. ‘Most of the women my age have children, and that separates us.’ She shrugged. ‘I spend time on the phone each day, calling my family back on the island. And they come to visit sometimes.’ She paused. ‘Not as often as I’d like.’

  (Later, while she was in the bathroom, I noticed her Bridge shoulder bag lying on a chair, and her mobile phone inside its little brown leather cave, a green light blinking slowly. She usually switched her phone off while we were together. This must be the phone my mobile knew only as Anonymous. I watched the faint green light for a few more beats of its tiny silicon heart.

  Looking straight at it, it almost disappeared. I could see it better from the corner of my eye.

  I swallowed a little pride, not to mention some principles, and quickly rolled over and dug the dainty Nokia out. I’d had a similar, if chunkier, model to this, two mobiles back, and knew how to access the phone’s own number. I scribbled it on a piece of hotel paper and stuffed the note in a jacket pocket after I’d returned the phone to her bag, long before she reappeared. This was a safety precaution, I told myself. In case I ever needed to warn her of something; like a terrorist threat we’d heard about via the newsroom but couldn’t broadcast because it would cause mass panic… Yes, something like that, say.)

  In the Berkeley she had brought drugs and we had time to have frenetic coked-up sex and make slow, stoned love.

  ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

  ‘Mais non! But I don’t!’ she giggled, coughing.

  A little later, lying there in a stunned haze of drugged satiation, limbs spread where they’d fallen on our uncoupling, I watched a small patch of sunlight – the product of a sunbeam penetrating the tall sweep of the drawn-over curtains from the very centre of their summit – move slowly across the white sheets towards her left arm. Half asleep, I kept staring at the molten coin of yellow as Ceel drifted into a quiet, smiling doze. The egg-sized blob of buttery light slid gently up her coffee skin, slow as the hour hand on a clock, and revealed the tiny, years-old scars spattered on the flesh above the veins on her upper arm and the inside of her elbow.

  A flurry of them, like pale, minutely puckered tear-shaped freckles on that smooth surface of golden brown.

  I gazed at her face, lying half averted on the pillow, her blissful smile directed into the darkness of the suite, and then I looked down again at her arm. I thought about her time in Paris, and about Merrial and the bad situation he’d helped her out of. I decided I would never say anything, if she didn’t.

  Beneath the light, beneath the skin, her blood pulsed slow and strong, and I imagined it, minutely warmed by that small fall of light, coursing through her body while she stared, unconscious and blind, back to the memory of a poisoned chemical rapture.

  A few times I tried to follow her, to see where she lived, or just what she did next after one of these trysts. There was a bar in the Landmark with a view of reception. I sat there pretending to read. I’d peeked in her bag earlier to check which wig she was wearing that day, and in the wardrobe to see what clothes she’d arrived in; it was a grey suit, hanging neatly above some Harvey Nics’ bags. I sat there and I watched really carefully but I still didn’t see her. I don’t know if she had more than one wig, or if I just glanced down at the wrong moment and she’d walked quickly through, the bill already paid, or what, but I sat there for an hour and a half, drinking whisky and nibbling rice crackers until my bladder drove me from my look-out post.

  A month later I tried again, sitting in a café across from the Connaught. Again, I didn’t see her, but after about an hour I got a call on my mobile.

  Anonymous, said the screen. Oh-oh.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘I live in Belgravia. Usually I go straight home. Sometimes I do a little more shopping. Bookshops, often… Are you still there?’

  ‘Yup. Still here,’ I said. I took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You would make a very poor spy.’

  ‘Yeah.’ I sighed. ‘It’s not…’

  ‘It’s not what?’

  ‘It’s not some weird, obsessive thing. I mean, it’s not something to worry about. It’s not like I’m stalking you or anything like that. I’m interested. You intrigue me. We’re so… intimate and yet, you know, so… strange to each other. Strangers, still.’

  ‘I’m sorry it has to be that way. But it does. You do accept that?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  ‘You won’t do this again, will you? Please.’

  ‘No, I won’t. You’re not angry with me?’

  ‘More flattered than angry. But more alarmed than either. It’s not worth the risk.’

  ‘It won’t happen again. But…’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was worth it for this phone call.’

  She was sil
ent for a moment. ‘You are very sweet,’ she said. ‘I have to go now.’

  In the Ritz, I’d brought some E. We knocked the pills back with champagne, listened to some white-label chill-out sounds I’d been given by one of Ed’s DJ pals, and drifted into some sublimely blissful, loved-up fucking until my balls ached with the emptying.

  ‘You never ask me about John.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Do you hate him?’

  ‘No. I don’t know him. I don’t hate him just because he’s your husband. If he’s some sort of crime boss, I suppose I ought to hate him on principle for being what he is, but I can’t work up any enthusiasm for the subject. Maybe I’ve taken to heart your idea of keeping this compartmentalised from real life. Or maybe I just don’t want to think about your husband in the first place.’

  ‘Do you ever hate me?’

  ‘Hate you? Are you mad?’

  ‘I stay with him. I married him.’

  ‘I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt there, I think.’

  That was the time I swallowed more pride and checked her purse. I think I was half expecting to find a fat roll of bank notes, but there was barely a hundred in there. It had occurred to me that she would not want to pay all these hotel bills by credit card, not if she was trying to keep all this as secret as possible. Finding no thick Swiss-roll of grubby twenties kind of stumped me. It was only later I thought that maybe she paid in cash all right, but before rather than after.

  (That was the longest interval, after the Ritz. Her husband was taking her to Oz and New Zealand on a month-long holiday, and there was a week-long overlap while Jo and I spent a fortnight doing the tombs on the Nile and snorkelling in the Red Sea. While she was away I made the mistake of going to see a film called Intimacy about a couple who meet up every now and again in a filthy flat for sex, and remain strangers to each other. It was probably a good film in a British art-house kind of way but I hated it and walked out halfway through, something I’d never done in my life. Sometimes I’d take out my mobile and cursor through to Ceel’s number, and just sit and stare at it for a few moments, until the phone’s backlighting clicked off. Infected by Celia’s caution, I hadn’t even entered her name in the mobile’s own memory, or the SIM card’s, just put the number in by itself. As far as my phone was concerned, she was just Location 96.)