Iain Banks - Dead Air

We were in a place of old, crooked kerb stones, peeling tarmac laid over ancient cobbles, windscreen glass that crunched under foot like gravel, burnt-out and abandoned cars with rusted panels and sagging plastic trim, and – framing it all on three sides – tilted lengths of desultorily graffitied corrugated iron topped by rusting angle iron strung with thin strands of barbed wire, jagged strands of sharp, spaced knots decorated by the greyed-out tatters of ruined black bin-liners, fluttering in a damp wind like the prayer flags of a half-hearted monochrome hell.

Some of the corrugated iron sections were crude gates, all strung with ancient padlocks and grimy chains.

I took a stirrup-step up – Craig made me take my shoe off, which would have made running away interesting – and looked over the corrugated iron walls. Concrete aprons in front of abandoned-looking light industrial units. Freight containers. Sheds. Puddles. Piles of wooden pallets. Waste ground. Weeds. More puddles. There was nobody about; not even any guard dogs came bounding out to greet me. The rain was coming on again.

‘I hate this place utterly,’ said Phil.

‘Seen enough?’ Craig asked me.

‘I can feel my life-force draining out through my soles,’ Phil muttered.

‘Nobody wears grey socks any more, Ken.’

‘Yeah, you’re right,’ I said, tutting and detaching one sleeve from a snag in the barbed wire. ‘Let us to fuck get.’

‘That’s you off the German beer until your grammar gets back to normal, pal.’

I tried calling Ceel at least twice a day from a variety of phone boxes throughout central London.

I now knew her number by heart.

She never answered.

Instead, on the Thursday, just after I’d finished my show, a package arrived, by courier. The package was slim and light, like Celia herself, but I didn’t dare hope. I signed for it, opened it, and there, glory be, was a key card.

My mobile rang. Something inside me melted and went south for the winter.

From the mobile’s tiny speaker, Ceel’s voice said, ‘One Aldwych. Dome suite.’

‘Are you-?’ I started to ask, but the line had clicked off. I let my head drop.

My phone burred again.

‘What?’ Ceel said.

‘Are you okay?’ I asked, almost choking.

‘Yes,’ she said, sounding puzzled. ‘Of course.’

I smiled into the middle distance. ‘I’ll see you soon.’

I couldn’t fuck. I just wanted to cuddle. Fully clothed. Ceel seemed more confused than annoyed, but also more confused than sympathetic.

‘No, I didn’t get the taxi’s number,’ I said. ‘Who ever does?’

‘I do.’

‘Oh yeah? What was the number of the last taxi you-?’

‘Four four one seven.’

‘Oh, Ceel, you’re kidding.’

‘No. I used always to leave gloves, scarves, bags, umbrellas and so on in taxis. Strangely, it was always easier to remember the taxi’s number than to-’

‘All right, all right,’ I breathed.

‘Kenneth, don’t you want to take your clothes off?’

‘Aah…’

‘Or mine?’

‘Well, ah…’

‘I think we need drugs,’ Ceel said decisively. ‘Luckily I have contacts.’

She was right.

‘Do you know what John does when he is not with me, or away on one of his trips overseas?’

‘No.’

‘Do you want to know?’

‘Not particularly.’

‘He goes caving.’

‘He does what?’

‘He goes caving. He spelunks. He descends into caverns under the ground. Mostly in England and Wales, but also abroad.’

‘That,’ I breathed, ‘is so not a gangster thing to do.’

We were lying on a giant circular table in one of the rooms in the Dome suite. The Dome itself, in fact, at the very top of the whole hotel. We had made it comfortable with sheets and pillows from the bedroom, two rooms away through the sitting area. The Dome room had numerous small, high windows that looked straight down Waterloo Bridge, part-way up the Aldwych and down most of Drury Lane. If we’d stood up we’d also have had a view to part of the Strand. There were twelve severe, formal-looking seats spaced round the giant table. Even all the soft accoutrements hadn’t made the solid surface all that comfortable. The bed would have been more forgiving, but this was how, and where, Ceel had wanted it.

‘Mobile phones do not work in caves,’ she said after a long time.

I thought. I thought twice, in fact. ‘Don’t suppose he goes scuba-diving, too, does he?’

‘Yes.’

I thought some more. ‘Why would he need that excuse?’

‘I don’t know. That is why I think perhaps it is not an excuse.’

There was silence for a while. Ceel cuddled up to me. She hadn’t quite managed to get the suite up to what she considered to be full operating temperature yet, so perhaps she was cold. I lay there, perspiring gently, and thought about what Craig had said, about love.

Some time passed, then she murmured into my shoulder, ‘You have my mobile number, don’t you?’

I closed my eyes. Holding her had never felt more precious. ‘Yes,’ I admitted.

She said nothing for a while, but I felt her give what might have been a small nod. ‘You have been careful,’ she said. ‘I appreciate that. I understand now why you were concerned. I’m touched. But please; be even more careful. You have the number committed to memory?’

‘I know it by heart.’

‘Remove it from your phone.’

‘All right.’

‘Thank you.’

‘This girl. Was she very beautiful?’

‘Very attractive, in a sort of obvious, blond way.’

Ceel was silent for a while. Then she said, ‘I feel jealous. I know I should not, but I do.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Me too.’

‘Well, I feel jealous of your husband.’

‘And yet there are times you and I meet up when the last person to make love to me was you.’

I thought. ‘I don’t know what’s the more pathetic,’ I said quietly. ‘The fact that that does actually make me feel a little better, or the fact that we are clutching at this straw in the first place. It’s not just about sex, Ceel. I mean that I’m jealous he gets to be with you more than I do, that you two can have something like a normal life together.’

‘It is not very normal. He is away so much.’

‘No, but you can walk across a street together, holding hands.’

Another pause. ‘He never holds my hand.’

‘You’re admitting you assaulted this woman, Mr McNutt?’

‘It was self-defence, but yes.’

‘I see.’

‘Oh, shit,’ I breathed.

There was no comeback. Nobody was going to press charges, after all, and, of course, as I’d expected, the cops did nothing. At least nothing they ever told me about. They couldn’t even test Phil’s jacket for traces of rohypnol; a visiting friend had assumed the jacket in the bag was to be taken to a dry cleaners, and done just that.

Never mind. I’d fulfilled my part of the bargain and reported the incident to the police like a good little citizen.

‘Well, maybe, like, we should leak it to the press. Yuh?’

The speaker was Nina Boysert, Mouth Corp Group PR chief and Special Adviser to Sir Jamie, whatever the fuck that was supposed to mean. She didn’t say ‘Ya’, like Raine – sorry, ‘Raine’; hers was more of a ‘Yuh’.

Meant the same thing.

We all looked at her. This was her office, an even more spacious one than Station Manager Debbie’s. Not high up, but wide and deep and airy and with a pleasant view over Soho Square. Also present were Debbie, Phil and the Group’s chief in-house legal mind, Guy Boulen.

‘Ah, the police did say not to,’ Boulen pointed out. We’d covered this point about a minute ago. Boulen was an oddly rugged man to be a lawyer; about my age, tall and fit-looking and with a face that appeared wind-burnt. Strapping, would be the word; looked like he belonged halfway up a fell in the rain and cloud, manfully scrutinising a compass and leading a bunch of deprived kids on a character-building hike. Softly spoken, though; Home Counties accent.