Iain Banks - Dead Air

‘The ground.’

‘What?’

‘The ground, and the sea, and space. Those are boundaries, for the wind.’

I hit the FX of a lonely desert wind blowing through a long-abandoned ghost town, tumbleweed rolling across the dust between the creaking wooden ruins.

‘What, like that?’ I said, glaring at him.

‘Possibly.’ He was grinning back at me over his Wall Street Journal.

‘I was, just possibly, on a roll there.’

‘I’ve interrupted your flow, haven’t I?’

‘You are a veritable stopcock, Philip.’

‘U-bend.’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘I thought I’d get that in before you did.’

‘You’re just a trust fund of straight lines this morning, aren’t you?’

‘It’s a living.’

‘Listen, Phil, if I may be allowed to put on my Serious Voice for a moment.’

‘Oh no, not another Charity Announcement.’

‘No. But, Philip, as you know, we don’t tend to do requests.’

Phil looked surprised. ‘Well, we can’t; most of those you receive are anatomically impossible anyway.’

‘I think you’ll find there’s a small private clinic in Tangier that would happily prove you wrong, for a price, Philsy-Willsy, but that’s as maybe.’

‘Keep going.’

‘Na, yesterday I bumped into somebody I met at a party once and I said I’d play a request for his wife.’

Phil blinked at me. I raised the dead air stopwatch threateningly. ‘Is that it?’ he said.

‘Sometimes, Phil, it’s just banality all the way down.’

‘Is this a new spot on the show? Guess The Relevance?’

‘Nope. So, for the lovely Celia Jane, here’s “Have a Nice Day”, from the Stereophonics.’

I hit Play and swept the faders.

Phil looked nonplussed. He looked at the faders and listened to the song play in his headphones. ‘You’re not even talking up to the vocals,’ he said, more to himself. He spread his arms. ‘What’s all this about?’

I eased my cans down round my neck to give my ears a rest. ‘What you hear is what you get,’ I told him. I nodded at the unit spinning the CD. ‘We were going to play it anyway. No extra paperwork involved.’

The skin around his eyes crinkled. ‘You trying to get into this woman’s knickers?’

‘Phil! I told you; she’s married.’

Phil laughed loudly. ‘Since when has that ever stopped you?’

‘You can be so cynical sometimes, Philip. You want to watch it; the wind’ll change and you’ll stay that way.’

‘It’s protective coloration around you, chum.’

‘What’s wrong with playing a request?’

‘We never do it.’

‘So it’s a change.’

‘There has to be an ulterior motive somewhere.’

‘Will you just leave it? There’s nothing going on.’

‘I know the way your mind works, Ken. There has to be. You’re more a creature of habit and ritual than you think you are.’

I shook my head. ‘Okay, I confess I was put in a slightly awkward situation by a… a friend of Sir Jamie’s,’ I said, glancing at the track’s run time on the play list and then at the studio clock.

‘Ah-hah!’

‘There’s no bleedin Ah-hah! to it. Look; the guy’s some sort of big shot, he knows the Dear Owner, we met unexpectedly yesterday and I sort of stumbled into promising I’d play a song for his missus.’

‘Who is a looker, I bet,’ Phil said.

‘He’s a big shot, like I say. They usually are. See people like that with a plain or ordinary-looking woman and you know it must be love. Will you stop looking at me like that?’

‘Well, this was unexpected.’

‘I wanted to say thank you.’

‘Jesus, what sort of Christmas box do you tip your postman?’

Ceel smiled. ‘Also, I won’t be able to see you again until after the New Year. I’m sorry.’

‘Ah well.’

‘You had something planned this afternoon, didn’t you?’

I shook my head. ‘Nothing; appointment with some lawyers. They can wait.’

‘You’re not in trouble, are you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not my own lawyers. Just a statement about an accident I witnessed a month or two back. So, what are you doing over the holidays?’

‘Going home.’

‘To the island?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr M too?’

‘Yes. And what about you?’

‘Staying here in London.’ Almost a year earlier it had been agreed I’d spend Xmas with Jo and her family in Manchester, but now Jo would be abroad over Christmas and New Year, dutifully helping Addicta strike while the iron of fame was hot. I couldn’t even go back to see my own parents; they’d decided long ago they were fed up with Scottish winters and the whole seasonal rigmarole, and had spent the last few holidays – and would be spending the one up-coming – in Tenerife. ‘Anyway, I’m glad we could meet up now.’

‘It was just luck that John had to leave this morning. Amsterdam, again.’ She looked at her watch, which was all she was wearing. A flicker of a frown had passed across her face as she’d pronounced the word ‘Amsterdam’. ‘However, we only have until two thirty.’

I levered myself up on one elbow and looked at her in the soft light spilling from the bathroom and a reading light above the scroll-top desk. She lay luxuriantly, legs spread, brown-gold hair strewn across the white sheets and one plump pillow like a fabulously braided river delta, one arm drawn up underneath her head, the fern-print of the long-ago lightning a fabulous marquetry on her dark honey skin. ‘I had no idea you’d be there yesterday,’ I told her. I shook my head. ‘You looked so, so beautiful. I should have ducked away but I couldn’t take my eyes off you.’

She stroked my arm. ‘It’s all right. I was worried, when I realised he’d seen me recognise you, but he thought he knew you already, from the party, or perhaps a photograph in the papers. He has a very good memory.’

‘So he left early this morning and didn’t hear me play your record?’

‘Yes. But I heard it.’

I looked around. ‘And decided on here.’

We were back at the Dorchester where our affair had begun. The big tree outside, the one we’d stared at from the suite a couple of floors above, in the mix of moon and flood light back in May, was leafless now. No silence this time. I said, ‘I confess I had been wondering what you’d do when you ran out of posh hotels we hadn’t already been to. One scenario I imagined had us going steadily down-market until we ended up sharing a bottom bunk in a dormitory in a back-packers’ hostel in Earl’s Court.’

She gave a small laugh. ‘That would be an awful lot of assignations, even restricting ourselves to central London.’

‘I’m an optimist. So, what did make you decide to come back here?’

‘Well, I had thought to return on our first anniversary…’

‘Really?’ I said, smiling broadly. ‘There is romance in your trim little soul after all, Celia Jane.’

She pinched my arm, making me yelp and have to rub the site. There might be a bruise. This was especially mean, of course, because I was not allowed to leave a mark on her.

‘Ah,’ she said, holding up one finger. ‘But then I thought that that would be a kind of a pattern in itself, and so dangerous.’

‘You would have made such a great spy.’

‘And also it felt like something had changed, now that our different worlds have become entangled again.’

‘A wee, cowering, terrified part of me imagined that it had changed utterly, and you would never want to see me again,’ I confessed. ‘Spell broken. You know.’

‘Did you really imagine that?’

‘Oh yes. I’m thankful I only had one night to lose sleep over it, but yes, I did. You have this thing about separation and entanglement, and a set of beliefs I find perfectly bizarre and that I can’t comprehend or anticipate the results of… For all I knew, to you, yesterday was some sort of sign, a bolt from the heavens that absolutely meant – without argument or appeal, and according to a kind of faith I don’t even begin to understand – we were over.’