Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  ‘Yeah. Exactly. What?’

  ‘Students.’

  ‘Students?’

  ‘Yeah, it seems to be fashionable to be horrible about the little fuckers, but I think they’re okay. If anything they’re a bit too studious these days, not rebellious enough, but basically they’re all right.’

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Cricket. I honestly believe cricket may well be the greatest game in the world. It is total heresy for a Scotsman to admit to this, and I entirely see the point of the American who said that only the English could invent a game that lasts for five days and can still end in a draw, but I just can’t help it; I love it. I don’t completely understand it and I still don’t know all the rules, but there’s something about its bizarrely erratic pace, its sheer complexity, its… psychology that just lifts it above any other sport. Even including golf, which is full of grotesquely over-paid reactionary bastards but is still a thing of skill and craft and beauty, and was, of course, invented in Scotland, like so much other truly neat stuff.’

  ‘That’s still only two things.’

  I clicked my fingers. ‘Liberals. The chattering classes. Political correctness. Basically I’m for ’em. Again, they get a bad press from veracity-challenged moral midgets employed by greedy zillionaires to wank-off bigots, but not me; I stand right by them. They’re my kind of people. Liberals want niceness. What the hell is wrong with that? And, bless them, they do it in the teeth of such adversity! The world, people, are disappointing them all the time, constantly throwing up examples of what total shites human beings can be, but liberals just take it all, they hunker down, they grit their sandals and they keep on going; thinking well of people, reading the Guardian, sending cheques to good causes, turning up at marches, getting politely embarrassed by working-class oafism and just generally getting all hot under the collar when they see people being treated badly. That’s the great thing about liberals; they care for people, not institutions, not nations, not religions, not classes, just people. A good liberal doesn’t care whether it’s their own nation or their own religion or their own class or their own anything that’s being beastly to some other bunch of people; it’s still wrong and they’ll protest about it. I’m telling you, it’s a sick, sick nation that turned the word “liberal” into an expletive. But there you are; the Yanks think basketball is a sport and that there’s nothing cruel and unusual about taking four minutes to kill a man by putting thirty thousand volts through him.’

  ‘Did you say you liked political correctness? News to me.’

  ‘Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls Being polite, or what everybody else calls Not being a right-wing bigot.’

  Jo looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘I bet I could find tapes of you banging on about how political correctness was something else to hate.’

  ‘Like everybody else, I have my own definitions of what is what, and I would never seek to deny that a few stupid people can take a perfectly good idea too far, but I stand by my contention that political correctness is more sinned against than sinning. Besides, a chap can change his mind. Oh, and journalists. I like them.’

  ‘What?’ Jo said, incredulous. ‘You hate journalists!’

  ‘No I don’t, I just hate the ones who make up quotes, subsidise criminals, hound the innocent, collude with the truly talentless and otherwise squander their undoubted gifts on tat. A disgrace they assuredly are. But a journalist determined to get to the truth of a story, expose lies and corruption, to tell people what’s really going on, to make one lot of humanity care for another lot, or even just start thinking about them? Weight-in-gold, they are. In fact, weight-in-microchips. Guardians of liberty. Mean more to democracy than most politicians. Fucking secular saints. Course, it helps if they’re liberal, too. Don’t shake your head at me, young lady. I’m being serious.’

  ‘Now I know you’re taking the piss.’

  ‘I swear, I’m not!’ I said, waving my arms. ‘And I just thought of something else I like.’

  ‘Yeah? What?’

  I nodded. ‘This city.’

  ‘London?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘But you’re always going on about how the tube is dirty, smelly and dangerous, and the traffic is awful, and the air stinks, and the people aren’t as friendly as they are in Glasgow, and the drinks are too small and expensive, and it’s not as exciting as New York or as civilised as Paris or as clean as Stockholm or as cool as Amsterdam or as groovy as San Francisco or-’

  ‘Yeah yeah yeah, but just turn and look behind you. Look.’

  Jo turned round and looked at the shop window she’d had her back to while we’d being going through all this stuff. We’d included Bond Street in our Sunday after-lunch stroll because I’d wanted to look in some posh jewellers and see if they had my excessive new watch. The shop we’d happened to stop outside was a jewellers. And its window was full of fish slices, suspended in the space behind the glass like a surreal hail of twinkling trowels. It was The Rabinovich Collection of Antique and Modern Silver Fish Slices, to quote the elegant sign in the window (we were a few doors down from a shop called Zilli, which seemed somehow appropriate). ‘How the fuck,’ I asked, ‘can you not love a city that throws up stuff like that?’

  Jo was shaking her head. She was blond again, and had taken to teasing her short hair into little meringue-like spikes. She stuck her arm through mine. She was wearing a silver puffa jacket. I wore an old RAF greatcoat an uncle had given me when I was seventeen. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’m getting cold.’ We started walking again, heading south, back towards the river.

  ‘And music, of course,’ I said. ‘I love music.’

  ‘But you just said you hated the stuff you have to play.’

  ‘Yeah, because it’s commercial effluent. It’s the sonic equivalent of a Coke or a McDonald’s; it fills you up but it’s just production-line shit and there’s precious little in there that’s really any good for you. The music I love is the music people make because they have to, because they need to, from their souls, not their wallets.’

  ‘You don’t believe in souls.’

  ‘I don’t believe in immortal souls. I just mean the kernel of who you are, not anything superstitious.’

  ‘Yeah, well, be thankful you just have to play the stuff and don’t need to get involved in the process of making it.’

  ‘You make it sound like pies.’

  ‘Pies?’

  ‘Yeah. You know; that thing about it being a good idea – if you like eating pies – never, ever to see how they were made and what goes into them.’

  ‘Yeah, well,’ Jo said, hoisting one steel-studded eyebrow, ‘believe me; there are a lot of pie bands out there.’

  ‘I believe the same applies to sausages.’

  ‘Ditto.’

  I looked over to the far side of the street, at the DKNY shop. I remembered Ceel telling me about its five thousand red twin-towers T-shirts, nearly three months ago. In the December cold I shivered for the dark, baking heat of that hotel room. That had been another, solitary feature of today’s walk, one I couldn’t share with Jo. Our route had taken us past a few of the hotels I’d been in with Ceel. We had passed Claridge’s just ten minutes earlier, and I’d almost suggested that we went in for a drink, or a pot of tea, or just the chance to pretend we were guests and get to ride in a lift that actually had a uniformed lift-operator, but in the end some prophylactic instinct, some grudgingly acknowledged requirement to obey Celia’s stricture about keeping our affair as separate as possible from the rest of our lives, prevented me.

  ‘Is that your watch?’ Jo said, stopping at another jewellers’ window and nodding at a display of chunkily sparkling Breitlings on a background of piled yellow cloth.

  I glanced at the arm-lengthening bracelet of heavy metalwork on my left wrist. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not nearly expensive or complicated enough.’

  Jo looked at my new watch and shook her head as we walked on. ‘Tha
t thing makes you look ten years older, you know.’

  ‘Don’t diss my timepiece, ho.’

  ‘It makes you look like you should be driving a Roller and shopping for – fucking hell; those.’

  We both stared at and then walked quickly past a window containing two large thrones – mere chairs they were not – made of cut crystal and red velour.

  ‘Holy shit.’

  ‘Did we really see those?’

  ‘I feel ill.’

  We walked to the Embankment via St James’s Park, through similarly sauntering locals and clumps of tourists, amongst coots, storks, black swans and panhandling squirrels. Ahead, the top of the London Eye stood out against sky, revolving almost imperceptibly over the departmental buildings of Whitehall like an ironic, skeletal halo.

  ‘Hey! Skating. Cool.’

  ‘Almost by definition,’ I muttered. ‘Look, can we head back after this? My feet are sore.’

  ‘Yeah, okay.’

  Jo guided me into the great courtyard of Somerset House, where a temporary ice rink had been set up for the winter holidays. Strings of lights articulated the wide quad. Tall windows, columns, arches and chimneys looked down upon the scene, where hundreds of people ambled about, sat swaddled in thick clothes outside little cafés, or stood watching the skaters, who circulated above the inscribed white ice like a slow, flat sweep of leaves caught in a stirring wind. I could smell coffee, fried onions and mulled wine.

  Above us was a water-colour sky, hues bleeding and feeding and fading into each other as the light started to wane above the skeins of slowly drifting cloud.

  On the ice, people laughed and shrieked, holding on to each other or the sides of the rink, doubled over, feet skidding. Squeals echoed off the courtyard’s imposing architecture as people fell thumping to the cold, scarred surface of the rink. A gap opened in the crowds on the ice, there was a blur of rising blue as somebody jumped, and that was when I saw it was Celia.

  She was dressed in a powder-blue skating outfit: tights, a short, flared skirt and a sort of tight tunic with a high neck and long sleeves. She wore brown gloves and white skates. Her hair was gathered up. Rising to the top of the jump that had first caught my attention, she twisted sleekly in the air, spinning once, then landed square on her right blade, knee bent, her left leg held out straight behind her. The quiet smack of her blade landing sounded across the ice between the circulating bodies; she sliced away, arms out to balance herself, sizzing across the ice in a wide, slowly tightening spiral. She skilfully avoided a couple of other skaters and then, with an elegant little skip, turned to skate backwards into a clearing space near the centre of the rink, stooping and tensing her body for another jump.

  People got in the way, and I lost sight of her. I moved to the metal fencing describing the edges of the rink, putting my hands on the cold tube of rail, trying to see her again. Lengths of blue plasticised canvas were tied to the fencing and I could feel one of the plastic ties under my left hand. My mouth felt cold and dry and a swirl of wind made me feel the tears in the corners of my eyes. I saw her once more as the crowds on the ice parted again and her skimming, sinuous course brought her gliding on a metal hiss towards me like a fabulously exotic alien creature fallen into our mundane world from a higher reality.

  I suddenly realised two things. The first was that I had never really seen this woman in daylight before. The second was that she was the most beautiful thing I had ever beheld.

  She swivelled, poised, jumped and landed, and then swung into a neat spin, perfectly centred, not ten metres away. She brought her arms in and raised them above her head. The spin speeded up and her slim body became a tall blurred pillar of light blue above a spray of white, reflected light strobing off the glittering blades of her boots. She came out of it and pushed away again, edges aslant across the rasping surface. A smattering of applause from people on and off the ice followed her, and she smiled but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the acclaim or look anybody in the eye. She passed only a couple of metres away from me and I swivelled to watch her. Her expression was diffident, almost embarrassed. A blush of rose glowed beneath the light-brown skin of her face.

  A body leaned alongside me, rubbing against my side. ‘She’s good,’ Jo said, putting her arm through mine again.

  ‘Yes,’ was all I could find to say. Celia went with the circulating people for a while, serene and smooth and steady.

  ‘Huh. Got all the gear, too,’ Jo said. ‘Looks okay on her.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Fancy a glühwein?’

  ‘Hmm?’ I said. ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good idea.’

  ‘My round. You going to stay here?’

  ‘Ah… yeah, okay.’

  ‘Back in a mo.’

  When she came round the next time Celia was looking at the spectators, as if watching out for somebody. She saw me and did a brief double-take, but her expression barely wavered. She skated past me, not looking at me, scanning the crowds further round the boundary, then waved to somebody there and came to a stop at the edge of the ice about twenty metres away round the perimeter.

  Mr Merrial was standing there.

  The giant blond guy I’d assumed was his bodyguard when I’d seen them leaving Sir Jamie’s party back in April stood at his side. I was amazed I hadn’t noticed him.

  Mr Merrial was talking to his wife. He looked right at me for a moment and nodded, though not in a way that meant Hello. I felt like an ice sculpture; frozen, fragile, ultimately doomed. Celia took the briefest of looks in my direction. My mouth had gone very dry, as if the saliva had frozen to my gums and teeth. The ground, the whole huge courtyard, seemed to tip beneath my feet. I gripped the metal rail tighter. In front of me a girl, almost doubled-over on the ice, felt her way past me, laughing, creasing the plastic canvas as she pulled herself along.

  Mr Merrial was still looking at me, his pale, pinched face looking very white above the thick black coat he wore. His face was all there was to see; he wore gloves, a thick scarf and a Politburo hat. Celia was shaking her head. The big blond guy was looking at me too, now.

  Oh shit. I looked away, trying to appear relaxed. I watched the other skaters. Some other people were quite good, too, doing jumps and spins where they could find the space. I brought my right elbow in, just reassuring myself that my mobile was still on my belt. Had I turned it on this morning? I didn’t always, on a Sunday. I couldn’t remember for sure. I suspected I hadn’t.

  I shook my left wrist, feeling the suddenly reassuring weight of the big watch.

  I risked a sideways glance. Celia was still shaking her head, looking, from her body language, as if she was arguing or pleading with her husband. He was nodding, then shaking his head. Celia spread her arms in what looked like a gesture of defeat, tipped her head to one side, was greeted with a nod, and then skated quickly away, pushing towards the far side of the rink.

  I quickly looked back at the other skaters. Oh fuck, we hadn’t been discovered, had we? He didn’t know, did he? Oh fuck, why did we have to come here? Why couldn’t we have caught a bus or a taxi back home from the Embankment? Why hadn’t I thought that of course Celia skated, so she might be here, I might see her, and of course if she was here she would probably be with her husband? Why hadn’t I just slunk away the instant I’d noticed her? Why did I have to stand like a love-struck adolescent staring at her? Why did she have to see me and do that tiny, fatal double-take? Why did Merrial have to be so fucking observant? Oh shit, why the fuck wasn’t life a computer game where you could go back and re-live the last few minutes and make a different choice?

  I looked back again. The big blond guy had disappeared. I looked round as frantically as anyone can without actually moving their head. I couldn’t see him anywhere. How the hell could I miss him? Jesus, they wouldn’t try anything here, would they? Too many people. And there were cops around; I’d seen two lots at least. Merrial had gone, too. He-

  ‘Mr Nott?’ said a voice at my back.

  I froze, staring
down at the ice. A pale flash of blue, somewhere out there. I turned.

  ‘John Merrial.’ The man put his hand out. I shook it.

  His face was slim, almost delicate, close up. He looked slightly sad and infinitely wise. His eyebrows were thin and very black, lips thin and very pale. Eyes bright blue. Contained by the coat, the scarf and the fur hat, his face looked unreal somehow, like something two-dimensional seen upon a screen.

  ‘Hello,’ I said. My voice sounded very small.

  ‘That was my wife there; in blue,’ he said. His voice was quiet. Almost accentless. I saw a massive blond head over the crowds behind him.

  ‘Very good,’ I said, gulping the words. ‘Isn’t she?’

  ‘Thank you, yes, she is.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘I think we were both at a party Jamie Werthamley threw, weren’t we? Back in the spring. Limehouse Tower. We were never introduced, but I think I saw you, now you’ve been pointed out to me.’

  ‘I believe we were,’ I said. I’m fucking your wife, I’m fucking your wife, I’m fucking your wife, I kept thinking, some suicidally insane bit of my brain wanting to blurt it out, to just say it, to get this over with, to make the worst that could happen actually happen and not have to keep imagining it.

  ‘How is Jamie?’ He smiled.

  ‘Fine. Last time I saw him.’ Which was at that same party, come to think of it; the party where I met your wife and snogged her and felt her up and agreed to this patently suicidal affair in the first place.

  ‘Good. Pass on my regards, will you?’

  Oh, you mean you’re not going to kill me right now? ‘Ah, happily. Certainly. Yes.’

  He looked past me, out to the ice. ‘My wife listens to you on the radio,’ he said.

  Yes. And that hand you just shook has been inside her sweet cunt. See this tongue, these lips? Think of her ears, her nipples, her clitoris. ‘Really? I’m, I’m very flattered.’

  He gave a thin smile. ‘She doesn’t want me to ask you this, but I know she’d be very happy if you played a request for her sometime.’