Iain Banks - Dead Air

‘Yes, I do. My God, your aberrant personal belief system is actually contagious. I suppose they all are.’ I sat up in the bed. ‘You mean that on the day of your twenty-eighth birthday, in April next year…’

‘The fifth.’

‘… What?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps I die. Perhaps the other one of me dies.’

‘And if the other one dies?’

‘I will become fully alive.’

‘Which will manifest itself…?’

She smiled. ‘Well, perhaps I will decide that I love you.’

I stared into those amber eyes. It seemed to me then that she had the most direct, clearly honest gaze of anybody I had ever met. No humour there just now, no irony. Not even doubt. Puzzlement, perhaps, but no doubt. She really believed all this.

‘There,’ I said, ‘is that big little word that neither of us have spoken until now.’

‘Why should we speak it?’

I wondered what that meant. I might have pursued the matter, but then she shrugged again, and her immaculate breasts moved in just such a way that in this world and surely any other all I could say was, ‘Oh, come here.’

In the Meridien Piccadilly, finding she had a suite with a kitchen attached, she had already been across to Fortnum and Mason and bought the ingredients to make an omelette, flavoured with saffron. She was trying out different types of underwear on that occasion, so that I came, bizarrely, to associate the smell of eggs cooking in olive oil with a basque and stockings.

I laughed as she presented the tray to me in bed.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘You spoil me,’ I said as she jumped up onto the bed, her stockinged legs folded neatly beneath her. She took up a fork. I gestured at the food, at her. ‘This is… pretty much most guys’ fantasy.’

‘Good,’ she said. She looked round the dark bedroom, then at me, and smiled. ‘No complaints here, either.’

‘Think you might let me pay for one of these conjugal visits one day? Or even take you away for a weekend?’

She shook her head quickly. ‘It’s better this way.’ She put the fork down. ‘This has to be outside of real life, Kenneth. That way we can get away with it. We expose ourselves less. Less of a risk is taken. And, because this happens outside of our normal lives, it feels less connected to what we might talk about to other people. It is like a dream, no? So we are both less likely to say something that might give us away. Do you understand?’

‘Yeah, sure. Just a residual scrap of old-school male pride, wishing to pay for something. But it’s all right; being an intermittently kept man rather appeals to me.’

‘I wish you could take me out,’ she said, smiling at the thought of it. ‘I would love to sit in a café with you, watching people go by. Go to lunch with you, sitting on a terrace by a river, in the sunlight. Be taken to a play or a film or to dance. Sit on a beach with you, under a palm tree, perhaps. Just the two of us crossing a street, holding hands. I find myself dreaming of these things sometimes, when I am low.’ She looked away, then back. ‘Then I think of this. The next time we shall meet. That makes everything well.’

I gazed into her eyes again, lost for a thing to say.

She smiled, winked. ‘It will get cold. Eat up.’

In the Lanesborough we spent hours in a cavernous bath, experimenting with various lotions and creams; she emptied a bottle of No. 5 into the oiled foam and I smelled of it for three days.

‘What do you do, Ceel?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How do you pass your days? What is your life like?’

‘I’m not sure I should tell you. This is supposed to be separate, not attached to our real lives, don’t you remember?’

‘I remember, but telling me what a more normal day is like isn’t going to make that big a difference.’

‘I do what the women of rich men are supposed to do; I shop and lunch.’

‘Friends?’

‘Some. Different friends for different things. Some for shopping and lunching, some at my health club, some for ice skating-’

‘You skate?’

‘A little. Not well. There are a couple of friends I have from my modelling days who are also married now, or settled down, with rich men. Just two who live in London. I visit Paris to see friends there, and one of my brothers. It is so easy now, with the train.’

‘You go to Paris a lot?’

‘A few times a year. Sometimes I go there with John. Usually he travels alone. He’s away often; Europe, South America. I go to Paris more than anywhere else. John doesn’t like me to spend nights away unless he knows the people I stay with well. In Paris it’s all right because I stay with my brother, who works for John and lives in a company apartment.’

‘What does your brother do?’

She looked at me. It was one of the few occasions she’d ever looked even slightly angry. ‘Nothing bad,’ she said sharply.

‘Okay.’ I held up my hands. ‘Do you have any really close friends?’

She turned away. ‘Most of the women my age have children, and that separates us.’ She shrugged. ‘I spend time on the phone each day, calling my family back on the island. And they come to visit sometimes.’ She paused. ‘Not as often as I’d like.’

(Later, while she was in the bathroom, I noticed her Bridge shoulder bag lying on a chair, and her mobile phone inside its little brown leather cave, a green light blinking slowly. She usually switched her phone off while we were together. This must be the phone my mobile knew only as Anonymous. I watched the faint green light for a few more beats of its tiny silicon heart.

Looking straight at it, it almost disappeared. I could see it better from the corner of my eye.

I swallowed a little pride, not to mention some principles, and quickly rolled over and dug the dainty Nokia out. I’d had a similar, if chunkier, model to this, two mobiles back, and knew how to access the phone’s own number. I scribbled it on a piece of hotel paper and stuffed the note in a jacket pocket after I’d returned the phone to her bag, long before she reappeared. This was a safety precaution, I told myself. In case I ever needed to warn her of something; like a terrorist threat we’d heard about via the newsroom but couldn’t broadcast because it would cause mass panic… Yes, something like that, say.)

In the Berkeley she had brought drugs and we had time to have frenetic coked-up sex and make slow, stoned love.

‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

‘Mais non! But I don’t!’ she giggled, coughing.

A little later, lying there in a stunned haze of drugged satiation, limbs spread where they’d fallen on our uncoupling, I watched a small patch of sunlight – the product of a sunbeam penetrating the tall sweep of the drawn-over curtains from the very centre of their summit – move slowly across the white sheets towards her left arm. Half asleep, I kept staring at the molten coin of yellow as Ceel drifted into a quiet, smiling doze. The egg-sized blob of buttery light slid gently up her coffee skin, slow as the hour hand on a clock, and revealed the tiny, years-old scars spattered on the flesh above the veins on her upper arm and the inside of her elbow.

A flurry of them, like pale, minutely puckered tear-shaped freckles on that smooth surface of golden brown.

I gazed at her face, lying half averted on the pillow, her blissful smile directed into the darkness of the suite, and then I looked down again at her arm. I thought about her time in Paris, and about Merrial and the bad situation he’d helped her out of. I decided I would never say anything, if she didn’t.

Beneath the light, beneath the skin, her blood pulsed slow and strong, and I imagined it, minutely warmed by that small fall of light, coursing through her body while she stared, unconscious and blind, back to the memory of a poisoned chemical rapture.