Iain Banks - Dead Air

‘The music you play; like that?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! It’s almost all shite during the day. Fucking Westlife and Hear’say. Things have come to a pretty grisly pass when you play Jamiroquai and they sound like a breath of fresh air.’

‘What about the people who phone in?’

‘With a few honourable exceptions, they’re dullards, dead-beats, opinionated dingbats and bigoted fuckwits.’

‘The adverts?’

‘Don’t even get me started on the fucking ads.’

‘Fellow DJs?’

‘Vapid cretins. Offer them a straight choice between opening another supermarket for a fat fee and sucking Sir Jamie’s cock for nothing and their single brain cell would fuse.’

‘The Tories? New Labour? American Republicans? The CIA? The IMF? The WTO? Rupert Murdoch? Conrad Black? The Barclay Brothers? What-d’you-call-him Berlusconi? George Dubya Bush? Ariel Sharon? Saddam Hussein? Thingy Farrakhan? Osama Bin Laden? The entire Saudi royal family? Muslim fundamentalists? The Christian Right? Zionist settlers? The UVF? Continuity IRA? Exxon? Enron? Microsoft? Tobacco companies? Private Finance Initiatives? The War Against Drugs? The Cult of the Shareholder?’

She only stopped, I assumed, because she ran out of breath. I stared at her for a moment, then shook my head. ‘How could you leave out Thatcher?’

She spread her arms. ‘There is just so much you hate, Ken. Your life, your working life; it’s, like, full of stuff and people and things and organisations you just can’t stand.’

‘You’re trying to make some sort of point here, aren’t you?’

‘In fact, forget your working life; your leisure life, too. Can we go to the States on holiday?’

‘I’ve told you; not until-’

‘Democracy is restored. Okay. Venice? Rome?’

‘With that corrupt fuck in charge, surrounded by his fascist-’

‘Australia?’

‘With their racist immigration policy? No fucking-’

‘China?’

‘Not while the butchers of Tiananmen Square are still-’

‘I rest my case. Is there anywhere-?’

‘Iceland.’

‘Iceland?’

‘I’d love to go to Iceland, so long as they don’t start whaling, obviously. Plus we have been to Egypt, and then there’s France. I feel cool about going to France. I’ve finally more or less forgiven them for sinking the Rainbow Warrior. I’ve even started buying French wine again.’

‘You’ve always bought French wine.’

‘No, I haven’t. It was embargoed; I had personal sanctions against it until about six months ago.’

‘So what the hell is champagne?’

‘Ah. Champagne is different. Though admittedly I ought to despise it on principle as a sort of geographical closed-shop. I look forward to the day when a workers’ cooperative in New Zealand can produce the equivalent of a ’75 Krug.’

‘Jesus. Is there anything you really like, without qualification? ’

‘There’s loads of things I like!’

‘Like what?’

‘Apart from the usual suspects?’

‘I’m not talking about films.’

I laughed. ‘Me neither. I mean apart from friends and family and world peace and little babies and Nelson bleedin Mandela.’

‘Yeah. Exactly. What?’

‘Students.’

‘Students?’

‘Yeah, it seems to be fashionable to be horrible about the little fuckers, but I think they’re okay. If anything they’re a bit too studious these days, not rebellious enough, but basically they’re all right.’

‘What else?’

‘Cricket. I honestly believe cricket may well be the greatest game in the world. It is total heresy for a Scotsman to admit to this, and I entirely see the point of the American who said that only the English could invent a game that lasts for five days and can still end in a draw, but I just can’t help it; I love it. I don’t completely understand it and I still don’t know all the rules, but there’s something about its bizarrely erratic pace, its sheer complexity, its… psychology that just lifts it above any other sport. Even including golf, which is full of grotesquely over-paid reactionary bastards but is still a thing of skill and craft and beauty, and was, of course, invented in Scotland, like so much other truly neat stuff.’

‘That’s still only two things.’

I clicked my fingers. ‘Liberals. The chattering classes. Political correctness. Basically I’m for ’em. Again, they get a bad press from veracity-challenged moral midgets employed by greedy zillionaires to wank-off bigots, but not me; I stand right by them. They’re my kind of people. Liberals want niceness. What the hell is wrong with that? And, bless them, they do it in the teeth of such adversity! The world, people, are disappointing them all the time, constantly throwing up examples of what total shites human beings can be, but liberals just take it all, they hunker down, they grit their sandals and they keep on going; thinking well of people, reading the Guardian, sending cheques to good causes, turning up at marches, getting politely embarrassed by working-class oafism and just generally getting all hot under the collar when they see people being treated badly. That’s the great thing about liberals; they care for people, not institutions, not nations, not religions, not classes, just people. A good liberal doesn’t care whether it’s their own nation or their own religion or their own class or their own anything that’s being beastly to some other bunch of people; it’s still wrong and they’ll protest about it. I’m telling you, it’s a sick, sick nation that turned the word “liberal” into an expletive. But there you are; the Yanks think basketball is a sport and that there’s nothing cruel and unusual about taking four minutes to kill a man by putting thirty thousand volts through him.’

‘Did you say you liked political correctness? News to me.’

‘Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls Being polite, or what everybody else calls Not being a right-wing bigot.’

Jo looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘I bet I could find tapes of you banging on about how political correctness was something else to hate.’

‘Like everybody else, I have my own definitions of what is what, and I would never seek to deny that a few stupid people can take a perfectly good idea too far, but I stand by my contention that political correctness is more sinned against than sinning. Besides, a chap can change his mind. Oh, and journalists. I like them.’

‘What?’ Jo said, incredulous. ‘You hate journalists!’

‘No I don’t, I just hate the ones who make up quotes, subsidise criminals, hound the innocent, collude with the truly talentless and otherwise squander their undoubted gifts on tat. A disgrace they assuredly are. But a journalist determined to get to the truth of a story, expose lies and corruption, to tell people what’s really going on, to make one lot of humanity care for another lot, or even just start thinking about them? Weight-in-gold, they are. In fact, weight-in-microchips. Guardians of liberty. Mean more to democracy than most politicians. Fucking secular saints. Course, it helps if they’re liberal, too. Don’t shake your head at me, young lady. I’m being serious.’

‘Now I know you’re taking the piss.’

‘I swear, I’m not!’ I said, waving my arms. ‘And I just thought of something else I like.’

‘Yeah? What?’

I nodded. ‘This city.’

‘London?’

‘Yep.’

‘But you’re always going on about how the tube is dirty, smelly and dangerous, and the traffic is awful, and the air stinks, and the people aren’t as friendly as they are in Glasgow, and the drinks are too small and expensive, and it’s not as exciting as New York or as civilised as Paris or as clean as Stockholm or as cool as Amsterdam or as groovy as San Francisco or-’