Iain Banks - Dead Air

‘My,’ I said. ‘Must be fun going through airport metal detectors. ’

Her brows furled a little. ‘Everybody says that.’ She shrugged. ‘Not a problem.’

‘Well, that’s airport security’s loss.’

‘You’re not into piercings?’

‘What can I say? I’m a fully paid-up hetero male.’ I grinned.

A hoisted eyebrow made it look like she took the second meaning. She glanced back at the lights of the boat again, her facial metalwork glinting. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you want to dance?’

‘Gee, I thought you’d never ask.’

We didn’t join the metre-under club, or whatever she’d called it. We waited a whole extra hour and had boisterous, energetic sex back on another boat, my new home, the Temple Belle. I found the ninth piercing.

‘Whoo! Rock the fucking boat, man.’

I woke in the depths of the night, my arm gone to sleep beneath her. The Temple Belle rested on some not-quite-perfectly-level mud at the bottom of the tide, so that you could, to that minimal extent, tell what the state of the tide was even at night, down in the main bedroom with the skylight curtains closed, by the presence or absence of a faint sensation of being tipped towards the head of the bed. I had that feeling now. I took a deep breath, testing for the smell of decay that sometimes infected the air on summer nights like this, born of the mud and capable, on really warm, still nights like this, of insinuating its way even down here. Nothing. Just her perfume.

The girl slept on, sprawled half across me, muttering quietly in her sleep. She liked to talk during sex, too, and she liked being bitten. Well, nipped, really, but fairly hard. She professed herself amazed that I didn’t share this predilection. She made a strange little exhaling noise in her sleep, like an exasperated sigh, then snuggled up closer to me and fell still and silent, breathing slowly and regularly.

Just visible in the glow from the radio alarm, a little plastic canister rested on the bedside table; her party contacts. Jo wore fashion contact lenses that made her eyes seem to fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Dancing with her on the cruise boat with its dated lighting rig had been… interesting.

Looking carefully at her face, I could just make out the soft reflections from some of the surgical steel piercings that punctuated her skin. I didn’t mind in the least if people wanted to get tattoos or prick their bodies with bits of metal – was it better, worse, or no different from having a face-lift, or collagen implants, or liposuction, or Botox injections? I didn’t know. But the more you thought about it, the more shoving lumps of metal through your skin did seem a slightly odd thing to do. The lengths we go to to differentiate ourselves, I thought. But then people had earrings and metal fillings in their teeth, and there were much weirder things, like the tribe that put more and more rings round the girls’ necks as they grew, until they were extended to such a length that if the rings were taken off, their necks just collapsed, and they died.

Jo was fun, UV contacts and all. We’d already established we were both between serious relationships (which kind of implied we were both ready to start a new one).

We’d see.

‘-guest in your country, sir, and I could not believe that which I was hearing here in the city of London was not really coming out of Kabul, or Baghdad. I could not believe my ears. I had to look around and reassure myself I was in a London cab, not-’

‘Mr Hecht-’

‘Where the hell do you people get off? Dear God, man, we lost four thousand people in a morning. Every one of them innocent civilians. This is war. Don’t you understand that? It’s time to wake up. It’s time to choose sides. When the President said that you’re either for us or against us, he spoke for all decent Americans. Your Mr Blair’s chosen which side he’s on and we’d like to think he speaks for all decent English people, but I don’t know what side you think you’re on. It sure doesn’t sound like ours.’

‘Mr Hecht, if the choice is between American democracy and murderous misogynists and a state governed by diktat and sharia, believe me I am on your side. I’d shop – I’d turn in my own brother if I knew he’d had anything to do with the attacks on September the eleventh. Mr Hecht, I know it doesn’t sound like it usually, and I’m sure it didn’t sound like it to you when you heard me yesterday, but there’s a lot about America I love. I love its freedoms, its celebration of free speech, its love of… betterment. It is still the land of opportunity, I know that; there’s no greater place on Earth to be young and smart and healthy and ambitious. A lot of us Brits affect to be appalled so few Americans have passports, but I’ve been to the States, I’ve travelled all over it and I know why they don’t; America is a world in itself. The states are like countries, the sheer scale of the place, its variety of climate and landscape; it’s stunning, it is truly beautiful. And is there any nation and ethnic group in the world not represented in the States? Americans don’t have to go out into the world; the world’s already come to them, and you can understand why.

‘I still have a lot of issues – I have a problem with anybody who voted for the man claiming to be your president, for example… but then as not all Americans are eligible to vote, and half of those who were eligible to vote didn’t bother to vote, and less than half of those who did vote voted for Dubya, that means I guess I’m probably only appalled by about twenty per cent or less of the population, which is not so terrible. But these are like the issues you have with a family member you love; they only matter so much because you’re so close to them in the first place. My point is that in your anger and your pain, you’re – your government is making a series of awful mistakes, mistakes that will damage America, damage all of us in the future. And I do not want to see that.’

‘Well, this is like listening to two different people, sir, I don’t know how you square what you’re saying now with what you said yesterday.’

‘Mr Hecht, I’m saying that there’s a kind of madness built up about this already, a denial that benefits nobody. No, that’s not true; it will benefit the sort of people who did this. Your denial will benefit your enemies. If you don’t understand this, if you don’t understand them, you’ll never defeat them. So believing that America was attacked out of jealousy is not just ludicrous and self-deluding, it’s self-defeating as well. This was not an act of grossly over-developed petulance, for God’s sake. Twenty highly motivated men do not train for months to kill themselves in a meticulously planned and executed operation that the biggest, best-funded security services in the world don’t get the faintest whiff of – even though it’s happening right under their noses – because you’ve got more domestic appliances than they do. What was the phrase? “It’s the economy, stupid”? Well, in this case, it’s the foreign policy. It’s that damn simple.

‘It doesn’t even matter if you or I don’t see it this way, Mr Hecht, but to them it’s every corrupt, undemocratic regime the United States has poured money and arms into since the last world war, propping up dictators because they’re sitting on a desert full of oil and helping them crush dissent; it’s the infidel occupying their holy places, and it’s the unending oppression of the Palestinian people by America’s fifty-first state. That’s the way they see it. You can argue with their analysis, but don’t kid yourself any of this happened because they’re just jealous of your shopping malls.’

‘Damn right I’d argue with their analysis. So are you now trying to say you are on our side?’