Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  In the Savoy one night, amongst mirrors and acres of cream and gilt, in a suite looking out across the dark river to the floodlit bulk of the Festival Hall, she had turned off all the lights and drawn the curtains right back. She placed a small seat in front of the tall, open windows. She had me sit there, bollocks to the chintz, already licked sweetly, achingly erect, then she straddled me, facing the same way, both of us gazing out to the light-browned clouds and the few bright stars between, while the sounds and smells of the summer city rolled in through the opened doors of glass.

  ‘Like this,’ she said, placing my hands just so, so that I was, in effect, holding her in a head lock. ‘Ah, yes.’

  ‘Lordy fucking mama.’

  ‘So what’s the problem? Basically you’re having the perfect affair. Perfect sex.’

  ‘I don’t know. Well, the actual sex… fuck, yeah. But… I don’t know.’

  Craig and I were sitting in his lounge, watching football on the telly. It was half-time; time for Men To Talk. After peeing, anyway. Nikki was in her room, two floors up, listening to music and reading. I’d told Craig the absolute minimum about my very occasional affair with Celia.

  Normally I might have shared this sort of thing with Ed, who possessed the merit of pursuing – with extravagant success – a lifestyle that made mine look restrained to the point of celibacy in comparison, but the trouble was I’d asked him about Mr Merrial that day in the Hummer, and I wasn’t absolutely sure that I hadn’t mentioned seeing Mr M’s wife at the time, too, and – paranoid though I knew it was really – I felt it would be just possible that Ed would put two and two together and, well, faint, probably.

  Maybe Celia guessing about the fact Jude and I still fell into bed together every now and again had spooked me a little.

  ‘Look at it objectively,’ Craig said. ‘You meet up with this mystery female whom you describe as the most beautiful woman you’ve ever slept with. You always meet in circumstances, surroundings, that you describe as somewhere between “very nice” and “sybaritic”, where you proceed to fuck the arse off her and…’

  ‘Yeah, but the fact remains I’m in a relationship where the best thing that can happen is that it just fizzles slowly, sadly out… What?’

  ‘Oh fuck.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just there.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘When I said “you fuck the arse off her”, right?’

  ‘… Yeah.’

  ‘You winced. Well, your cheek winced. Like a facial tic.’

  ‘Never… Did I? Really? Oh. Okay. Right. So?’

  ‘That means you’re falling in love with her. Now you have a problem.’

  The big Breaking News thing was stuttering. It got all rather hyper and frenetic over the next day or two after our meeting with Debbie the Station Manager, the way sometimes these relatively trivial things tend to, with urgent, all-hours, weekend-long phone calls, texts and voice mails flying back and forth between Channel Four, Capital Live!, the production company, Winsome, assorted producers, assistants, secretaries, PAs, agents, lawyers and people whose job it seemed to be purely to ring up and say they needed to speak to somebody urgently, all tying up a significant proportion of the capital’s mobile and fixed-line telephony capacity trying to get this incredibly vital piece of exciting, epoch-making, edgy, challenging, confrontational television arranged for the Monday evening. Even Sir Jamie himself got involved, because according to my contract he needed to give personal permission for me to appear on another not pre-agreed media outlet. This turned out not to be a problem as he was a good friend of the owner of Winsome Productions, and even had shares in the company.

  Then, of course, just as everybody concerned had whipped themselves up into a high, teetering, effervescent froth of wild-eyed expectation and teeth-chattering frenzy, it all fell apart.

  Even I’d got myself all worked up, and I’m Joe Totally Cynical about these things after years of people telling me they have this great project for getting me on telly and how they’re really excited about bringing a new dimension to my work, and then nothing happening.

  ‘You’re telling me it’s not fucking going ahead.’

  ‘It’s being postponed,’ Phil said tiredly, putting his mobile down on the scratched wooden table. We were in the Capital Live! canteen on the floor beneath Debbie’s office, having an early breakfast. It was just after seven o’clock. We’d come in early to do a special recorded edition of the show so that I could get to the Channel Four studios in time for the recording of Breaking News (they’d backed off the original idea of doing it live).

  My mobile vibrated on my belt. I checked the display. My agent. ‘Yes, Paul?’ I said. Then, ‘Yes, I just heard.’ Then, ‘Yeah, I know. Me too. Par for the fucking course. Yeah… yada and then yada, raised to the power of yada. Yeah, when I see it. In fact probably not until I see it when it’s number thirty-seven on TV’s One Hundred Most Embarrassing Moments. Yeah, we’ll see. Okay. You too. Bye.’

  I sat back in the creaking flexibility of the brown plastic seat and drummed my fingers on the table top, looking at my toast and marmalade and my cup of milky tea.

  ‘Look on the bright side,’ Phil said. ‘They’d just have wanted you there about four hours early, and then they’d have wanted to do another of those pre-interview interviews where some breathless researcher with a famous name just out of chalet school asks you lots of questions so they can find out which ones are the good ones and you give really good, fresh answers and then they ask you those same questions in the actual programme and you sound all stale and talked out because you’ve already answered them once and got bored with them, and during the recording you’ll have to answer the same questions a third or a fourth time because somebody knocks over a bit of the set and they have to start again from the top, so you’ll sound even more stale and talked out, then they’ll record more than three hours and use less than two minutes and you’ll forget to take your make-up off and workmen will give you funny looks in the street and afterwards people whose opinion you respect will say they missed it, or go all cagey when you ask them what they thought, and people you don’t like will call up and tell you they loved it and the papers you hate will either dismiss it or say how you should stick to what you’re good at, not that you’re very good at that either, and you’ll be all depressed and grumpy for weeks.’

  Probably Phil’s longest diatribe; it was too laid-back to be called a rant. I looked at him. ‘So, when did they tell you it might happen now?’

  ‘Oh, tomorrow,’ he grinned.

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘Na,’ he said, leaning back too and stretching and yawning. ‘Lucky to be this year, now, according to my new close friend at Winsome, Moselle. Major rethink on format after the events of September the eleventh.’ He scratched his head. ‘What a brilliant excuse that’s turned out to be, for so many things.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I breathed. I toyed with my toast and stirred my already well-stirred tea. Part of me was deeply relieved. I’d come up with this great idea for what I was going to do on the programme if they put me on with the Holocaust denier guy, and it still excited me and scared me in equally intense proportions. Now I wouldn’t have to either do it and let fuck knows what happen, or chicken out and not do it and curse myself for evermore for being a sad, pathetic, hypocritical, lily-livered crap-out merchant. In fact, just the sort of sad, pathetic (etc.) who would feel as relieved as I now did that I wouldn’t have to make that choice, at least not for a while and maybe, the way I knew these things tended to work, ever.

  I threw the teaspoon down and stood up. ‘Ah, come on, let’s go and do the fucking show.’

  Phil glanced at his watch. ‘We can’t. Judy T’s using the studio till half past.’

  I sat back down again, heavily. ‘Fuck,’ I said eloquently, putting my head in my hands. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.’

  Five. MISSION STATEMENT

  “Yeah, I’d just like to say that don’t you think these
Eurosceptic people should be called Europhobes, yeah?’

  Phil and I rolled our eyes. I leaned right up to the microphone. This has the pretty universally automatic effect of making people lower their voices, and I was no exception. It should sound like I was talking personally just to the caller. ‘Actually, Steve, we went through all this two years ago, on the evening show, and, if you recall, we did a sort of rolling Greatest Hits of the Evening Show for the first week of the daytime slot when that very point came up, oh, a few times. Kind of guessing here you’re new to the programme, Steve.’

  ‘Oh. Sorry. Yeah.’ Steve seized up, audibly. ‘It’s great,’ he managed. ‘Keep it up.’

  ‘Practically my personal motto, Steve,’ I said with a smile, sitting back again. ‘Thanks for calling.’ I clicked on to the next caller, which the screen said was a Mr Willis, from Barnet. Subject: Eurp & poound (Kayla may have put the ass in assistant, but her typing owed more to the carpet-bombing approach than any concept of precision targeting).

  Mr Willis. Not a first name. That told you something immediately, without even saying Hello to the guy.

  ‘Mr Willis,’ I said crisply. ‘Mr Nott. Your point, sir.’

  ‘Yes, I just wondered why an apparently intelligent fellow like yourself was in such a hurry to get rid of the pound and throw in our lot with a currency that’s dropped so much value since it was launched.’

  ‘I’m not in a hurry, Mr Willis. Like most people in Britain I think it’s going to happen sooner or later, so it becomes a question of which is best, when is best, but I don’t claim to know. My point is that it’s all about economics and politics, and it shouldn’t be about sentiment, because the pound sterling is just money, like any currency. If the Germans can give up the Deutschmark, we can surely stop using bits of paper with the monarch’s head on them.’

  ‘But, Mr Nott, why should we? A lot of us happen to think the pound is important. We love the pound.’

  ‘Look, Mr Willis, you lost the pound… whatever it was, thirty years ago. I can just about remember this; the pound – the real pound – had two hundred and forty pennies; a third of a pound was six and eightpence-’

  ‘Yes, but-’

  ‘-there were thrupenny bits, sixpences, shillings, florins, half-crowns, half-pennies, ten-bob notes, and-’

  ‘I know-’

  ‘-if you were being fancy, guineas. That all went in the sixties and that was the end of the pound. What you’ve got now is a British dollar, basically, so why all the belly-aching about it?’

  ‘It’s not belly-aching to wish to preserve a vital part of our proud British culture. I am a member of an organisation-’

  I looked at Phil on the other side of the desk and spread my hands. He did the throat-cutting thing. I nodded. ‘Mr Willis,’ I said, fading his voice down, ‘here’s a handy hint; attack the Euro via the interest rate. A single interest rate barely makes sense throughout the UK, let alone all twenty-five members of an expanded EU, unless you want – in fact to impose – absurd levels of worker mobility or a vastly increased centralised regional compensation fund.’

  ‘Look, we didn’t fight and win the Second World War-’

  ‘It’s been interesting talking to you, Mr Willis. Goodbye.’ I looked at Phil as I cut Mr Willis off. ‘We getting crossed lines with the Daily Mail letters page or something?’

  ‘I think it’s encouraging that we have a spread of listeners of various ages, views and ethnic and cultural backgrounds, Ken,’ Phil said, leaning towards his mike.

  ‘Phil Ashby, listeners. Voice of Reason. Singing in harmony from the hymnal of Corporate Mission Statements.’

  ‘That’ll be me, then. Hi,’ Phil said, right up to the mike. ‘Who’s our next caller?’

  ‘It’s another Steve, from Streatham.’ According to the screen he wanted to talk about Scotz & & Erop & U.

  ‘Streatham Steve, hello.’

  ‘Awright, Ken? Ma man!’ a deep voice shouted. I looked at Phil and crossed my eyes.

  ‘Steve, you’re doing some violence to the mike on that mobile. I’m sure if you return it promptly to its owner they may not press charges.’

  ‘Wot? Agh, ha-ha-ha! Na, mate, it’s mine.’

  ‘Well, bully for you. And the exact flavour of your beef would be what?’

  ‘Wot?’

  ‘What is it you want to say, Steve?’

  ‘Yeah, I don’t want to be a European!’

  ‘You don’t? Right. Which continent should we tow the British Isles to lie off then?’

  ‘Na, you know what I mean.’

  ‘Indeed I do. Well, so vote against it whenever you have the chance.’

  ‘Yeah, but it’s still gonna happen, innit?’

  ‘Fraid so. It’s called democracy.’ I hit the FX for Hollow Laughter.

  ‘Yeah, but the fing is, I blame you Scots, don’t I?’

  ‘Ah-hah,’ I said. ‘Any particular reason, Steve, or is this just some generalised anti-Caledonian prejudice?’

  ‘Yeah, the government’s all Scotch, innit? The Labour Party. They’re all Jocks, aren’t they?’

  ‘Very high proportion of the top jobs, yes, Steve. The Dear Leader himself, our prudent Chancellor is a Scot-’

  ‘Worse, he’s a Fifer,’ Phil cut in.

  ‘Na, Phil, sorry,’ I said.

  ‘What?’ Phil asked.

  ‘Yeah,’ Steve said, ‘That’s what-’

  ‘Hold on, Steve, pal,’ I said. ‘Come back to you in two seconds, but I just need to straighten something out with Producer Phil. Okay?’

  ‘Ah,’ Steve said. ‘Yeah…’

  ‘What?’ Phil repeated innocently, blinking behind his glasses.

  ‘Sorry, Phil, pal,’ I said. ‘But you can’t do that.’

  ‘Can’t do what?’

  ‘Bring up divisions or petty squabbles between different bits of Scotland. Our internal prejudices and micro-management bigotries are our own affair. We’re allowed to indulge in that but you’re not. It’s like black people can call each other nigger but us white folks can’t. And rightly so, I might add.’

  Phil nodded. ‘Things don’t mean what the sayer says, they mean what the listener hears.’

  I hit the FX key for a quiet, minute-long sample of the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’, and over it said, voice raised, ‘Still our most elegant formulation of what really would be one of our mission statements if we didn’t spit on such foul aberrations from a great height and grind the ordure-jammed cleats of our Jockboots into their snivelling faces.’

  ‘Along with,’ Phil said, ‘If you don’t give people justice, they’ll take revenge.’

  ‘And, Never underestimate the greed of the rich.’

  ‘Not forgetting, Ditto the ability of people to take exactly the wrong lesson from a disaster.’

  ‘NMD? Come on down!’ I was laughing again. ‘Or our emission statement: I’m coming! I’m coming!’

  ‘Or the posh version: I’m arriving! I’m arriving!’

  ‘Indeed.’ I un-clicked the sample.

  ‘But anyway,’ Phil said, still grinning.

  ‘But anyway indeed, Philip.’

  ‘What it boils down to is,’ he said slowly, ‘that I can’t say the things about the Scots that you say all the time.’

  ‘Of course not! You’re English. A few of us clever Jocks still blame you for the whole Glasgow-Edinburgh antipathy thing. The good citizens of each very-much-equally-worthy conurbation just loved each other to bits until you guys came along. And frankly the utterly preposterous idea that if we hadn’t had the English to unite us in hate we’d still be a bunch of bare-arsed hill tribes marrying our sisters and murdering each other in caves holds no water with us whatsoever, no sirree. We reckon you were just dividing and conquering. So, like I say, just don’t start, okay?’

  ‘It’s a good job you’ve got us to blame,’ Phil said.

  ‘It most certainly is,’ I agreed emphatically. ‘Just don’t for a nanosecond expect the least scintilla of gratitude.’<
br />
  ‘As if,’ Phil said, smiling. ‘As apparently the young folk say, these days.’

  ‘Yeah, you’ll prise that copy of Clueless out of the video one day, Phil.’ Phil laughed silently and I went back to Steve. ‘Steve. Yeah. All these Scots in Westminster? Hear what you’re saying, but don’t forget: if you think the Scots are crap, and they’re the ones who’ve clawed their way to the top of this particular greasy pole, what does that say about the English politicians?’

  ‘I fink it’s a conspiracy, mate.’

  ‘Brilliant! Phil; a conspiracy form.’ I picked the paper copy of the running order from the desk in front of me and rustled it near the mike. ‘Thank you. Steve? Ready; shoot.’

  ‘Cos, like, you want to get us into Europe, don’t you?’

  ‘We do?’ I smiled widely at Phil. ‘Yeah! We do! You’re right. Steve, I think you’re on to something here. Possibly a rehab programme. But listen, this makes sense. It’s a Scottish conspiracy to get revenge for three hundred years of oppression, which we secretly feel we never did resist strongly enough.’

  ‘I fink it’s cos you’re jealous.’

  ‘Of course we are. Our invasions of you lot never worked. Same with yours of us, though obviously our impression is very much that you were always much better at killing lots of us than we were at killing lots of you. Then you guys realised where our weak spot is and just bought us. That was smart. Except we’ve never forgiven you for being cleverer than us; we’re supposed to be the canny ones in this relationship.’

  ‘Yeah, cos you lot do want to be in Europe, dontcha?’

  ‘Naturally. Scots’ll make great Europeans. When we hear the English say, We don’t want to be ruled from a distant capital where they speak differently from us and impose an alien currency on us, we think: hold on, we’ve had that for three centuries. We’ve been there, we’ve had the conditioning, we’ve done the apprenticeship. London, Brussels, what’s to choose? Better to be wee and ignored in a potential superpower than wee and ignored in a post-imperial backwater where the only things that arrive on time are the corporate bonuses.’