Iain Banks - Dead Air

Wherever it was I met Ceel, she was always there, always waiting, almost always reading a book – usually something recent I’d heard of: White Teeth, Man and Boy, Bridget Jones’s Diary. Once it was The Prince, once Madame Bovary, and once the Kama Sutra, which she was reading for ideas we didn’t really need. Twice it was A Brief History of Time. The room – suite – was always dark, always hot. There would be something light to eat if we wanted, and vintage champagne. It was a while before I realised the glasses we drank from were always the same ones, and that there would always be a different, spare glass present. She brought the crystal flutes herself; they belonged to her. She seemed pleased that I’d noticed.

‘You were a model, you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘What, like, clothes?’

She gave a one-breath laugh into the warm dark. ‘Those are what one usually models, Kenneth.’

‘Swim-wear, lingerie?’

‘Sometimes. I began in swim-wear, when a magazine came to the island to shoot a feature and two of their models were hurt in a car crash. That’s how I got my break.’

‘What about them?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Did they break anything?’ I shook my head, already feeling foolish. ‘Sorry, I-’

‘The two models? Yes, one broke an arm and both had facial injuries. I don’t think either ever worked as a model again. It was very upsetting. Not how I’d have chosen to get into such a career.’

‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘Did you appear mostly in French magazines?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid I have no portfolio to show you.’

‘What was your modelling name?’

‘Celia McFadden.’

‘McFadden?’ I said, laughing. ‘What possessed you to take a Scottish name?’

‘It was my maiden name,’ she said, sounding surprised.

‘You’re a McFadden, from Martinique?’

‘My great-great-grandfather was a slave on Barbados. He was given the name of his slave master, who may have been his biological father. He escaped, and ended up in Martinique.’

‘Woh. Sorry.’

‘That’s all right,’ Celia said, shrugging. ‘You changed your name, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah. Not officially, just for the radio. It still says McNutt on my passport.’

‘McNutt?’ She smiled.

‘Yes, with two “t”s. So, this,’ I said, changing the subject and stroking the lightning scar, ‘has appeared in public, has it? It wasn’t a problem?’

‘Perhaps it was a small problem. I always had enough work but I’m sure I lost some jobs because of it. But no, I don’t think it ever appeared.’

‘What did they do, cover it with make-up?’

‘No. They shot from the other side.’

‘So all your model shots are from the right?’

‘Mostly. Though they don’t all appear so once they’re printed. You just reverse the neg.’

‘Oh, right. Of course.’

‘Sometimes, when the light or the background meant we had to, they would shoot from my left side and I would hold my arm in a certain way and if there was anything of the scar visible it would be air-brushed out later. It is not a problem.’ She shrugged. ‘Covering things up is easy.’

The latest she ever stayed was ten p.m. I was welcome to stay longer if I wanted, but I never did, and I knew she preferred me to leave first. She would arrive and depart with her hair tightly compressed under a wig – usually blond – and wore large dark glasses and baggy, undistinguished clothes.

In Claridge’s, she’d stripped the bed to its bottom sheet and covered the surface and a dozen extra pillows in red rose petals. The lights mostly stayed on for that one. This was where she finally explained her insane theory about having half died when the lightning struck her.

‘What?’

‘There are two mes. Two of me. In different, parallel worlds.’

‘Hold on. I think I know this theory. Simple idea but the complexities are hideous.’

‘Mine is quite simple.’

‘Yeah, but the real one is confusing to a bonkers degree; according to it there are an infinity of yous. A pleasing prospect, I might add, except there is also, are also… anyway, an infinity of mes, too, and your husband. Husbands. Whatever. See how confusing it is?’

‘Yes, well,’ she said, waving one dismissive hand. ‘But for me it is very simple. I half died then, when the lightning struck me. In that other world I am half dead, too.’

‘But also half alive.’

‘Just as in this one.’

‘So did you fall off this cliff in the other world, or not?’ I asked, deciding to humour this matter-of-fact madness of hers.

‘Yes and no. I did, but I also fell back onto the grass, just as I did here.’

‘So in this world, here, you fell off the cliff too?’

‘Yes.’

‘And yet you woke up on the grass.’

‘That part of me did. This part of me did.’

‘So in the other world? What? If you woke up on the grass in this one, she must have not woken up, because she was lying dead at the bottom of the cliff.’

‘No, she woke up too, on the grass.’

‘So who the hell fell off the bleedin cliff?’

‘I did.’

‘You did? But-’

‘Both of I.’

‘I and I? What, now you’re a Rastafarian?’

She laughed. ‘We both fell off the cliff. I remember it happening. I remember seeing myself fall, and the noise the air made, and how my legs made a useless running motion and how I could not scream because the air had been knocked out of my lungs and how the rocks looked as I fell towards them.’

‘So did the lightning kill… half kill you, or was it the fall?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘I don’t know. Does it?’

‘Perhaps both did. Or half did.’

‘I think we’ve gone on to quarters by this stage.’

‘Perhaps either would have been enough. All that matters is that it happened.’

‘It would be useless to suggest, I suppose, that this might all really only have happened in your head, the result of having ninety thousand volts zapped through your brain pan and down your body?’

‘But of course it is not useless to suggest it! If that is what you need to believe to make sense of what happened to me by your way of thinking, then of course that is what you must believe.’

‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

‘Yes, I know. But, you see, when it happened, I was there, and you, my dear, were not.’

I let out a long breath. ‘Right. So… so what are the symptoms of you being only half alive in this world… and the other one? You do seem wholly and, I would risk saying, even vibrantly alive in this world, to me. Especially about ten minutes ago. Oh, though there is that thing about the French calling it the little death, of course. Though that’s not what you’re talking about, is it? But back to the symptoms. What makes you feel this?’

‘That I feel it.’

‘Right. No, no, not right. I’m not getting it.’

‘It feels obvious to me. In a way I always knew it. Reading about parallel universes simply made sense of that feeling. I didn’t feel any more certain of what I felt, and it did not really alter what I felt, or what I believed, but it made it more possible for me to explain it to others.’

I laughed. ‘So all we’ve been talking about in the last five minutes is after it became easier to explain?’

‘Yes. Easier. Not easy. Perhaps “less difficult” would be a better formulation.’

‘Right.’

‘I think it might all change on my next birthday,’ she said, nodding seriously.

‘Why?’

‘Because the lightning hit me on the day of my fourteenth birthday, and on my next birthday I will be twenty-eight. You see?’