Iain Banks - Dead Air

‘Oh, I’m always ready for my fair share of both,’ I told her.

‘But you insult people, and their ideas. Even their faiths. The things they love.’

‘People don’t have to listen.’ I sighed. ‘But, yes, I do insult things people hold dear. This is what I do.’ She was frowning. I put my hands to my cheeks. ‘Look, I don’t mean I insult people or their beliefs because I want to hurt those people, because I get some sort of sadistic kick out of it, I mean that what I find I need and want to say – and which is what I do, sincerely believe, which is what I think is the truth as exactly as I can tell it – is stuff that happens to hurt other people. Does that make sense?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ she said in a measured, sceptical tone.

‘What I’m trying to say is, I have my own beliefs. I… oh, shit, this is like so not post-ironic or post-modern and so insufficiently cynical for our knowing, you know… cynical… sorry, repetition of cynical… Jeez.’ I took a deep breath of the storm’s air. ‘I believe in truth,’ I told her. She was smiling a little now. I was making a complete idiot of myself but I didn’t care any more. ‘There; I said it. I believe there is something pretty damn close to objective truth more or less all the time and I’m not accepting this shite about everybody having their own truths or respecting somebody’s opinions just because they’re sincerely held. The Nazis sincerely hated the Jews; they weren’t just kidding. I’m not respecting their fucking ideas just because they were deeply held. I believe in science, in the scientific method, in doubt, in questioning, in facing truths, not hiding from them. I don’t believe in God but I admit I could be wrong. I don’t believe in faith at all because faith is belief without reason, and reason is the only thing we have, the only thing I do believe in. I think people have every right to believe in anything they want, no matter how ridiculous it might be, but I don’t accept their right to coerce others into the same views. And I certainly don’t accept any right they might think they have not to have their views challenged just because they’re going to feel peeved in the process.’

‘You have faith in reason,’ she said calmly, tucking some strands of hair back into place. ‘Don’t you?’

I laughed out loud, waving my arms about. ‘This is crazy!’ I yelled. ‘We’re standing here on top of a tower block in the middle of a fucking hurricane getting soaked to the skin and we’re talking about philosophy?’ I left my arms spread. ‘Does the essential absurdity of this situation not strike you, too? Celia?’ (I added, in case she thought I’d forgotten her name).

She put her head to one side again. Another staggering gust of wind, another adjustment of stance. ‘I’m sorry. Are you cold?’ she asked, sounding concerned. ‘We could go in.’

‘No, no,’ I told her. ‘I’m fine out here if you are. I’m a Scotsman; we’re legally and morally bound not to admit to feeling cold, certainly not in the presence of thinly clad females and especially not heart-stoppingly beautiful thinly clad females we might legitimately assume are used to balmier climes. The penalties are actually quite severe. They endorse your passport and-’

She was nodding, a tiny frown creasing her brows. ‘Yes. You only become inarticulate when you are being especially sincere, ’ she said, concluding.

That took the wind out of my sails. My hands dropped; I’d been talking with them as well. ‘What are you?’ I demanded. ‘Celia, come clean; are you some sort of flying squad critic-come-philosophical psychoanalyst?’

‘I am a married woman, a housewife, a listener.’

‘Married?’

‘Married.’

‘Do you give your husband this hard a time?’

‘I would not dare.’ She looked quite serious. Then she shook her head. ‘Well, I might, but he would not understand.’

Fuck this; I was getting cold. This was the most interesting, even unusual woman I’d met in a long, long time, but there comes a point.

I held her gaze and, after a breath, said, ‘And are you a faithful wife, Celia?’

She didn’t say anything for a while. We just stood there looking at each other. I could see little drops of rain on her face like sweat or tears and her hair was coming undone in the tearing wind. She shook in those gusts, as though shivering.

‘I have been,’ she said eventually.

‘Well, I-’

She stopped me, holding up one hand towards my mouth, shaking her head. She glanced behind me, to the still open window.

‘My husband is…’ she began, then stopped. She tutted, looked down and to one side, and pinched her lower lip briefly with the fingers of her right hand. She looked up at me. ‘Once,’ she said, ‘I thought that if I really, really hated somebody, I would make love to them, and have my husband find out. But only if I really hated the person, and wanted them dead, or perhaps thought that they wished they were dead.’

I let my eyebrows rise. ‘Holy shit,’ I said, reasonably. She did not look like she was joking. ‘He is, ah, of the jealous persuasion, then.’

‘You do not know his name.’

‘Ah,’ I said, embarrassed. I tapped my temple. ‘Was it Merry-?’

‘Merrial,’ she said. ‘He is John Merrial.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Not ringing any bells.’

‘It should, perhaps, I think.’

‘Well, you have the advantage over me,’ I said.

She nodded slowly, solemnly. She said, ‘I would like to see you again, if you would like.’ Her voice was nearly drowned by the wind.

‘Yes, I’d like,’ I said. I was thinking, I haven’t touched her, kissed her, anything, yet. Nothing.

‘However you must know that if I were to see you,’ she said, ‘it would have to be seldom, and secretly. It might seem, sound… casual,’ she said, frowning again, as though she wasn’t putting this just as she would like. ‘But it would not be. It could not be. It would be…’ she shook her head ‘… of significance. Not something to be entered into lightly.’ She smiled. ‘I make it sound all very formal, do I not?’

‘I’ve suffered more romantic propositions.’

I moved slowly forwards and reached for her. She came up on her toes, raising her head and tipping it, bringing her hands to either side of my face and opening her mouth to mine, while the wind tugged and pushed and jostled us and the rain sowed the gusts like a soft, cold shrapnel of the storm.

Jo had been at a big Ice House bash that night. She rolled in drunk half an hour after me, staggering down the steps into the Temple Belle, grinning and smelling of smoke. She laughed and started tickling me, then kissing me, then we fell into bed.

She had a way she preferred to be fucked sometimes when she was drunk like this; on her back, naked but for her T-shirt lifted up over her head and caught round her neck with her arms folded up inside it, making a sort of square around her head, her face hidden in the black cotton as she yelled and whooped, a horny, swearing wild-child in the carnal negative of a burka.

‘John Merrial? Mr Merrial?’ Ed said. ‘He’s a gangsta, mate.’

‘He’s what?’

‘He’s a fuckin gangsta, I’m telling you. Crime boss. Whatever you want to call it. Yeah; boss is better. Mind you, I’m saying that, but could be he’s not much involved in actual villainy these days. Gone legit, inne? Like in The Godfather Part Two, when they talk about in a while they’ll be totally legit by the end of the year or whatever it is, you know? That sorta fing. Course, on the uvver uvver hand, there’s better profits in stuff like drugs and refugees an cars an computah crime an stuff.’

‘Computah crime?’