Dead Air

by Iain Banks

  Paranoia. The terrible thing about paranoia is you always have the sneaking suspicion that the moment it passes is when you’ll be at your most vulnerable.

  They tested for sound and then the black microphone wire was taped to the arm of the plastic and chrome chair I was sitting in, below desk level and therefore out of sight for the cameras that would be trained on me. On the black-painted floor, the mike cable snaked away, almost invisible save for the lengths of silver gaffer tape securing it there.

  I looked about the rest of the studio. Cavan would be in between us, a couple of metres away from me round the giant comma-shaped wooden desk; his seat was bigger and higher-backed than mine or the bad guy’s, which was another two metres past Cavan’s, round the curve. Lots of bright overhead lights kept the place very warm.

  Somebody sat in the chair across the desk from mine and for a moment I wondered what was going on; it was one of the awfully assistants, not the scumbag Holocaust denier I was expecting. Then another assistant plonked herself in Cavan’s seat in the middle and I realised they were just sitting in for the real people while they got the cameras sorted out.

  In front of Cavan’s position was a big camera with, on the front, the downward-angled hood and attached upward-facing monitor of an autocue; a little bearded guy looked almost lost behind the camera, minutely adjusting its position according to instructions through his headphones. There were two surprisingly small, unmanned cameras on heavy tripods, one for me and one for the bad guy, plus an umbilicalled handheld manned by a plump guy who at this point was muttering into his own head-mike as he crouched back and forth, rehearsing where he could go within the curve in front of the big desk without getting in shot from the other cameras.

  Everybody was listening on their headphones and earpieces to the people in the production suite, and for a while it was actually very peaceful, sitting there in what was more or less silence, feeling pleasantly, politely ignored while everything else was sorted out. Somebody rolled a big monitor screen on a trolley to a position a couple of metres behind the cameras and turned it on; it showed a blue screen with a big white clock face on it and the programme ID. It sat, static, unchanging, in the midst of a semi-hush punctuated with murmurs.

  I found myself thinking about Ceel. I remembered the feel of her body, the precise touch of her fingers, the satiny sensation of running my hand across her back, the deep, musky smell of her hair, the taste of her lips after a mouthful of champagne, the taste of her sweat from the hollow formed by her collar bone, and most of all the sound of her voice; that measured softness with the faint ghost of accent, a calmly sinuous stream of quiet amusement breaking into sudden rapids when she laughed.

  The monitor flickered, the blue and white display replaced with a view of the assistant sitting in Cavan’s chair. Then the clock and ident display flicked on again.

  I was missing her. It had been a month now since I’d seen her, and a long month at that. I supposed time seemed to stretch over the Xmas/New Year holidays for everybody, but I felt I’d been particularly busy, which made the interval seem longer. I’d spent an unhealthy amount of time over the holidays checking that there had been no crashes of Air France flights bound for or coming back from Martinique, or sudden unseasonal hurricanes or fresh volcanic eruptions in the Eastern Caribbean.

  Things were falling apart around me and it felt like it was all because Ceel wasn’t here. There was no logic to this feeling whatsoever, and it wasn’t as though Ceel and I spent very much time in each other’s company when she was around – we saw each other for about half a day once a fortnight, so she shouldn’t really have felt like any great influence on my life – but nevertheless with her away I felt adrift and disconnected, my life tumbling chaotically.

  There wasn’t even the promise, or at least the possibility, that we might meet up in a day or two, steadying me from a distance.

  Coping with my break-up with Jo, with the ramifications of that touching Ed and Craig, with everything that had happened at the New Year party, with this continuing campaign of damage and threat some bastard was mounting against me – not to mention the chilly contemplation of what I was thinking of doing here – left me feeling dangerously exposed and at risk.

  It was like trying to control a skid on a bike on a rainy street; that same feeling of cold, gut-clenching panic while wrestling desperately with something powerful but suddenly wild and out of control. I’d had a few skids like that in my courier days. I’d always managed to stay upright and I was proud of that, but I’d never kidded myself that on each occasion it had been anything other than luck, mostly, that had kept me out of the gutter or from under the wheels of a bus. At least those incidents were over in seconds; this was going on for weeks, months. Everything I might have hung onto for support seemed compromised. I needed Ceel. I needed to access her calmness, secure myself to that perverse rationality of hers.

  I looked at the seat straight across from me, where the bad guy would be sitting. I glanced at my watch. I hated the way they kept you hanging around for TV.

  I just wasn’t cut out for this medium. Paul, my agent, despaired of me because I’d been offered TV stuff in the past plenty of times but the proposals always read like shit and I’d turned them down. They all seemed gimmicky, strained and overly elaborated, but that was almost not the point. On radio, you just go in and do it. You can talk about stuff in the pub or the office beforehand, effectively rehearsing bits, and you can script little exchanges and sketches, and there’re always trailers and pre-recorded stuff to work painstakingly over until it’s note perfect… but most of it, the best of it, I think, is just stuff that happens, words that come out of your mouth almost as you think (allowing for the on-board censor, which I was not bullshitting Phil about).

  On radio, that fresh stuff is the norm. On TV it’s very much the exception, and most of it’s recorded, re-heated. So you sit there and make some really funny or cutting point and then discover there was a glitch on a camera feed, or somebody backed into a bit of the set and knocked it over, and they have to start again, and you have to either try to say something about the same thing, which is totally different but just as witty, or say the same again and pretend it’s spontaneous. I hated that shit. Come to think of it, some of that had been the gist of Phil’s little laid-back rant in the Capital Live! canteen a month or so earlier. I seemed to have appropriated it. Oh well, that wouldn’t be the first time.

  My mouth was dry. There was a very small plastic cup of still water in front of me, which I drained. I looked around, holding it out, and one of the awfully assistants came and topped it up with Evian. I wanted to sink the lot right there, but I put it back on the desk. I suspected they’d take it away before we started recording.

  ‘Ken?’ a very smooth Irish voice said from behind me. ‘Nice to – ah, now, no; don’t you get up. Cavan. Good to meet you.’

  I couldn’t have got up anyway, not with the mike wire securing me to the chair. I shook hands from a seated position. ‘Cavan; hi.’ I smoothed down the flap over my right jacket pocket, making sure he couldn’t see into it.

  Cavan perched one fawn, Armani-clad buttock on the desk between my seat and his. He looked tanned underneath the make-up and there was a hint of shadow where his beard would have been that probably no amount of shaving would remove. His blue eyes were deep set, brows dark and full and shaped. A sharp ledge of black hair sat over his forehead. ‘It’s very good of you to come in.’

  ‘My pleasure, Cavan.’ A translucent wire coiled up from inside the rear collar of his jacket and ended in a discreet flesh-coloured earphone in his right ear. Where his soft beige jacket fell open against his hip, I could see the radio transmitter clipped to his belt. No hard-wiring for Cavan.

  ‘You’ve been booked in for a while, Ken, is that right?’

  ‘For what has on occasion felt like a significant part of my life, Cavan, yes.’

  He laughed soundlessly. ‘Yes, well, sorry about that.’ He sighed and looked
off into the shadows. ‘We’ve all been kept hanging around while Winsome have been getting themselves sorted out.’

  ‘I’m sure it’s been a lot worse for you than it was for me.’

  ‘Ah, yes. It’s been a frustrating old time to have a current affairs show waiting in the wings while all this history’s been happening, but hopefully we’ll be making up for – ah. Excuse me, will you?’

  ‘Sure.’

  Lawson Brierley. That was the name of the man who walked out of the darkness, blinking in the light. My age. Green cords, fogey jacket, yellow waistcoat, farm manager’s shirt and a cravat. I almost smiled. Tall, medium-heavy build, verging on beefy; hair like grey sand. Not a bad-looking face in a bland sort of way, except his nose was a little bulbous and he had the peering, scrunched look of a vain man on a date trying to do without his glasses. Ex-Federation of Conservative Students (one of the Hang Nelson Mandela brigade; later thrown out for being too right-wing), ex-National Front (quit when they moved too far to the left), and ex a few other extreme-right groups and parties. Claimed to be a libertarian racist now. I knew one or two people who’d come to libertarianism from the left, and people like Lawson Brierley had them spitting blood.

  Monetarist fundamentalist might be a more accurate description of his views, with the racist bit never very far away. According to Lawson, evolution was the ultimate free market in which the white races were proving their innate superiority through money, science and arms, threatened only by the perfidious guile of the Jews and the hordes of dark and dirty Untermenschen breeding like flies thanks to the misguided beneficence of the West.

  We’d got all this off the man’s own website; he ran – he basically was – something called the Freedom Research Institute.

  Lawson genuinely didn’t approve of democracy. He believed in getting rid of the state, and – in reply to the point that doing so would leave companies, corporations, multi-nationals (or whatever you would call multi-nationals when there were no more nations) in complete control of the world – he would have said, Yes, so? These corporations would be owned by shareholders, and money was the fairest way to exercise power, because as a rule stupid people would have less of it, and therefore less influence, than more intelligent people, and it was the more intelligent and successful people you wanted controlling things, not the great unwashed.

  I’d decided my considered reply to all this would have been something on the lines of, Fuck the fucking shareholders, you ghastly fascist cunt.

  I watched him sit down and get miked up. He was being wired in, taped to the seat like I’d been. Good. I couldn’t make out what he was saying to the production assistant and the sound engineer as they helped him get settled in. He didn’t look over at me. Cavan had spoken a few words to him and then nodded and gone to sit in his own big seat in the middle, getting its position just so, clearing his throat a few times, patting his tie down and running a hand over the air above his hair.

  My heart was beating hard, now. Somebody came to take away the little cup of water, but I had them wait a moment while I drained it, my hand trembling. My bladder seemed to think I needed to pee but I knew I didn’t really. It felt like I was listing to the right with the weight in my jacket pocket. To the right; how very, very inappropriate, I thought.

  The monitor behind the cameras flicked to the head-on waist-up shot of Cavan coming from the big camera with the autocue.

  The floor manager announced we were doing a taped rehearsal of the intro. Cavan cleared his throat a few more times.

  ‘Okay; quiet in the studio,’ the floor manager said, then, ‘Turning over.’ She did the ‘Five, four, three…’ thing, with the two and the one shown only on her fingers.

  Cavan took a breath and said, ‘The vexed issue of race, now, and the provenance – or not – of the Holocaust, in the first of a series of Breaking News special features pitching two people with profoundly different views against each other. I’m joined tonight by Lawson Brierley, a self-labelled libertarian racist from the Free Research Institute, and Ken Nott, from London’s Capital Live!, doyen of the so-called… Sorry.’

  ‘No problem,’ the floor manager said. She was a tall gangly girl with close-cut brown hair; she wore big headphones and held a clipboard and a stopwatch. She listened to her phones again. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘You all right, Cavan?’

  Cavan was squinting towards the camera ahead of him, shading his eyes from the overhead lights. ‘Ah… Could you just move the autocue up a tiny little bit?’ he asked.

  The man with the big camera adjusted it fractionally.

  Was I really a doyen? I wondered. That meant ‘old’, didn’t it? More ‘senior’ rather than ‘ancient’, if I recalled the dictionary definition correctly, but still. I was sweating badly now. They’d probably notice and have to stop and bring one of the make-up girls in to touch up my face. I felt a pain in my guts and wondered if I was giving myself an ulcer.

  Cavan nodded. ‘Fine now.’ He cleared his throat again.

  ‘Okay,’ said the floor manager. ‘Everybody okay?’ She looked around at us. Everybody seemed to be okay. I wasn’t going to say anything about sweating. Lawson Brierley sat, blinking, looking from Cavan to the monitor, still avoiding my gaze. The little bearded guy with the big camera adjusted it back to where it had been before, but Cavan didn’t notice. ‘We’re going again, quiet in the studio. Turning over,’ said the floor manager. ‘And: Five, four, three…’

  ‘The vexed issue of race, now, and the provenance – or not – of the Holocaust, in the first of a series of Breaking News special features pitching two people with profoundly different views against each other. I’m joined tonight by Lawson Brierley, a self-labelled libertarian racist from the Freedom Research Institute, and Ken Nott, from London’s Capital Live!, doyen of the so-called Shock Jocks and – as he’s described himself – unrepentant post-lefty.’ Cavan raised his eyebrows for effect. ‘First, though, this report by Mara Engless, on the undeniable existence of deniers.’

  I looked over to Lawson Brierley. He was smiling at Cavan.

  ‘Good,’ the floor manager said, nodding. ‘Good. Perfect, Cavan.’ (Cavan nodded gravely.) ‘Okay, we’re going for-’

  ‘How long’s the video bit?’ Cavan asked.

  The floor manager looked away for a moment, then said, ‘Three twenty, Cavan.’

  ‘Right, right. And we’re just going straight into the interviews, the ah, discussion bit, now, right?’

  ‘That’s right, Cavan.’

  ‘Fine. Fine.’ Cavan cleared his throat a few more times. I found myself wanting to clear my own throat, too, as though in sympathy.

  ‘Everybody ready to go?’

  It looked like we were all ready to go.

  ‘Okay. Quiet in the studio.’

  I put my hand in my pocket.

  ‘Turning over.’

  In my pocket, the plastic coating the metal felt cold and slick in my right hand.

  ‘And: Five, four, three…’

  I leaned forward slightly, to hide my hand coming out of my pocket.

  Two.

  My other hand was at my belly, holding, steadying.

  One.

  Click.

  Cavan took a breath and turned to me. ‘Ken Nott, if I can turn to you first. You’re on record as-’

  I’d snipped the mike cable with the pliers.

  I had tried to think all this through, weeks and weeks earlier, and I’d guessed they might wire us up; that was why I’d brought the pliers in my jacket pocket.

  But that wasn’t the clever bit.

  I let the pliers fall as I kicked the seat back and jumped up on the big desk. I’d have settled for three seats in an arc, but the desk was better; I’d reckoned as long as I didn’t take too long getting myself up there it would provide a highway. So far, so good; seat falling backwards out of the way and a clean leap up onto the wooden surface.

  Though that wasn’t the clever bit either.

  Cavan had time to shut hi
s mouth and jerk back. Lawson Brierley’s eyes were going wide. I ran at him across the desk. I’d worn a pair of black trainers, for purchase, so I wouldn’t slip, just for this.

  That, too, was not the clever bit.

  Lawson had his hands on the desk edge, tensing to push himself backwards. Cavan was falling off his seat as I passed him. From the corner of my other eye I thought I saw the big camera and the guy with the handheld both tracking me. From the shadows behind Cavan, somebody threw themself forward and grabbed at my feet, but missed. I threw myself down, too, my left hand out to grab Brierley’s cravat if I could, my right hand coming back in a fist.

  Lawson was moving backwards but he hadn’t started pushing away in time, plus the mike wire would be slowing him down. I hit the desk on my belly and slid; my left hand missed his cravat, catching him by the padding in the left shoulder of his hacking jacket instead, but my right fist smacked satisfactorily – and painfully, for my fingers – into his left cheek, just below the eye.

  My momentum, and his push, carried us both back over his seat, falling in a flailing tangle to the floor behind, where I landed another couple of lighter blows and he managed to thump me once on the side of the ribs and once on the back of the head with weak, painless punches before we were pulled apart by security guards and production people.

  That, obviously, wasn’t the clever bit either.

  Brierley was ushered away shouting about communist violence and intimidation, surrounded by headphoned staff, while I was held, the backs of my thighs against the desk, by two uniformed security guards. I was smiling at Lawson, and not struggling at all. I was highly gratified to see that Lawson already looked like he was developing what we used to call, back where I came from, a keeker; a nice black eye. A door closed softly in the darkness and Brierley’s shouts were silenced.

  ‘It’s okay, guys,’ I told the security guards. ‘Promise I won’t run after him.’

  They kept holding me, but their grip might have relaxed a little. I looked around. Cavan seemed to have disappeared as well. I grinned at each of the two security guards as the floor manager came over. She looked professional and unruffled. ‘Ken; Mr Nott? Would you like to go back to the Green Room?’