Iain Banks - Dead Air

The Schuylers were charming and fascinating and interesting to talk to and I chatted to various other people who were all or most of those things during the course of the evening and passed some pleasant time with a Formula One driver, a Junior Minister who was about fifteen years older than me but still amazingly attractive (and who had an even more amazing, eye-watering contempt for her Minister) and a beautiful young actress whose name I could still recall weeks later but whose personality entirely escaped me. I drank the champagne and sampled some of the melt-in-the-mouth food circulating on silver salvers borne high by the catwalk-grade serving staff.

And fascinating as all this felt at the time, the only thing that came to mean anything, eventually, was meeting Celia, later.

I had already seen her, as I made my way back from the loo (‘Head for the Monet and then hang a right at the Picasso,’ as Sir Jamie himself had instructed me). She was standing with a smallish, pale man who was dressed in a severely tailored black suit, listening while he talked quietly to a rotund Lord who owned a national daily and a few regional titles.

She wore short heels that brought her nearly up to his height of about 170 centimetres, and a long, black, high-necked dress. A single string of large grey-black pearls; skin like milky coffee. She looked mixed-race, a combination of white and black and maybe South-East Asian too. Pushed, I’d have guessed she was in her mid-twenties, but her face was extraordinary; it gave the impression that it belonged to either a teenager who had seen some terrible things in her short existence or a sixty-year-old who’d never had a day’s trauma or a single ageing event in her entire life. There was a sort of intense calmness to her features, an almost wilful innocence that I couldn’t recall ever having seen before. It seemed almost identical to the poised serenity of a secure, untroubled child, and yet profoundly different; something struggled for and arrived at rather than inherited, rather than bestowed. Her eyes were amber beneath fine sculpts of dark brows and a forehead like a smooth and perfect bowl, and there was a roundness to her mouth and eyes that swept into elongated lines at the outside edges, contributing to that expression of thousand-yard tranquillity. Her hair was gathered up, full and shining, immaculate. It was the colour of heroin.

Her gaze slid straight over me as I passed a few metres away, in pursuit of some more of that very pleasant champagne. I didn’t recognise her or the man at her side – who looked a bit like Bernie Ecclestone with no glasses and better hair – though I did see him leaving, an hour later, without her, but with a blond guy so wide and tall he just had to be a bodyguard.

A storm had been advancing on London from the west since the vividly bloody sunset hours earlier. The party was in full swing by the time it hit but aside from a distant roar if you stood near the windows, and the swirling patterns of rain whirling over the west-facing glass, it was easy to miss.

I headed towards the Monet again, ready to turn right at the Picasso, but there was already somebody in the bathroom. Sir Jamie, clutching a thin-necked bottle of Krug and in the company of a pair of giggling young soap stars, stopped and said, ‘Ken! Queue? Walk this way; show you another pissoir. Mi casa, and all that. Oh! Fancy a game of snooker afterwards? We’re missing – oh, I tell a lie, no, we’re not,’ he said as a sort of vapidly handsome young man I recognised from a boy band came clumsily down some spiral stairs to our right. ‘Beg your pardon, Ken; offer suddenly and embarrassingly withdrawn. Hiya, Sammy,’ Sir Jamie said, grinning, and slapped the young man on the arm. He turned to me and nodded to the spiral stairs. ‘Ken; up there. Or there’s a lift, of course. Either way, follow your nose. Ha ha! See you later. Have fun.’ Then to the girls and the young man, ‘Right!’ And off they went.

I walked up the stairs then along a broad, deeply carpeted corridor lined with Art. Windows at the far end gave out onto a view east to the Millennium Dome, crowned with a circlet of red high-building lights. I couldn’t find any open doors, so I shrugged and chose, adventurously, the one double-set I could see. A suitably large bedroom the size of a tennis court presented itself and I crossed to where I guessed the en suite might be. It was a gym, but far away, on the other side of the room, was the bathroom. It really did have a little lidded ceramic pissoir fastened to the wall, as well as an ordinary loo, two sinks the size of small baths, a vast sunken bath studded with nozzles, lights and underwater speakers, a colossal shower cabinet with marginally more nozzles than the bath, and a sauna the size of a log cabin.

It felt slightly pathetic only to do a pee in this palace of evacuation, exfoliation and immersion, like using a McLaren F1 as a golf cart. I stood there looking around and realised that this was probably just Sir Jamie’s bathroom; there was no special facility to help a disabled person use the place. It was all immaculate save for a poorly wiped-clean area on a glass shelf where a few tiny white crystals lay scattered. I lifted some to my tongue with a fingertip and tasted cocaine. Moderately heavily cut, so surely not Sir Jamie’s. Probably Sammy, the clumsy boy bandee.

About to quit the bedroom, I saw the curtains that filled one wall move at the edge, and felt a hint of a draught brush my face. I hesitated, then tentatively pulled the curtains back.

The view was to the north-east over a terrace cut diagonally across the tower’s summit. Shrubs and small trees in giant pots swayed in the wind and the surfaces of ornamental pools ruffled as the gusts stroked and struck them. The sliding pane at this edge of the giant window had been left open a finger-width. I wondered if I ought to close it. If the wind changed… but so what? Sir Jamie probably had a butler or a major-domo or whatever the hell to do this sort of stuff. I was going to let the curtain fall back and just leave things as they were when I caught a glimpse of a figure in the shadows near one edge of the terrace where thin, straight railings segmented the view.

Lightning. Much later I thought it ought to have been lightning that lit the scene, that it had been that sort of storm and when I first saw her standing there it was courtesy of a flash of lightning, which lit up the Mysterious Figure in the Shadows. But it wasn’t. Just the lights of the storm-pressed city. Sometimes reality isn’t Gothic enough.

I could see it was a woman, standing about four metres away in the lee of the building under a roof projecting over part of the garden. The shelter was only partial; I could see her being buffeted by the swirling gusts. She looked thin and frail and dark. Her arms were crossed under her breasts. The wind tugged at the hem of her long dress and as my eyes adjusted I could see little strands of her hair whipping about her face and flickering up about her head like quick, attenuated flames.

I realised she was probably aware that somebody was watching her – a sliver of light had fallen across the paving stones at her feet when I’d pulled the curtains back – just as she turned her head to look straight at me. She stood like that for a moment, then her head tipped to one side. I recognised the woman in the narrow black dress with the extraordinary face. I couldn’t see her eyes.

Even then, in theory, I could just have let the drapes fall back and toddled off downstairs, tipsily descending to the party. But, you come upon opportunities, little chance set-ups like this, too seldom. Even without having read about scenes like this, or watched them in films and on TV, even if you’d never read anything or watched anything in your life, there would be a kind of imperative of the moment that required you to behave in a certain way, take advantage of the presented chance, because to do anything else was just to declare yourself terminally sad. Or maybe I had swallowed Sir Jamie’s chummy bullshit about being a fellow risk-taker. In any event, what I did was slide my hand into the gap between the windows and their frames and push the heavy glass panel aside.