Iain Banks - Dead Air

The aquarium was a slightly spooky place for a party, I thought. Especially a music industry party. Sharks in abundance; as above, so below. The light was kind of freaky too; apparently the fish wouldn’t take kindly to lots of flashing disco-stylee lights, strobes and shit, so all you had was this bluey-green wash of underwater luminescence, making everybody look slightly sick. The light slid off Jo’s facial metalwork, visual echoes of the green and blue diodes on Ed’s music gear the night before.

I’d asked her how she was and been told, Okay. I’d thought the better of asking her if she’d made any accidental phone calls twenty-four hours earlier, but now, with virtually no preamble, I was getting a ‘listen’.

‘Look,’ Jo said. People passed on either side, somebody said, Hi, and great, sleek, grey bodies moved sinuously behind and above her.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Now it’s “look”? We’re covering the senses one by one, are we? What’ll your next exhortation be? “Sniff”?’

Jo sucked her lips in and looked at me. ‘You don’t want to make this easy on either of us, do you?’

‘Make what easy, Jo? Why don’t you tell me?’

‘Ken, I think we should, ah, you know; split up.’ She said this and drew herself straight, putting her shoulders back and her head up, as though defiant. I thought of the night we met, and the way her stance had shown off her nipples through her T-shirt. Now she wore a big, ribbed yellow jumper with a roll neck. Black jeans. Only the DMs were the same.

I stared at her. Of course I’d known that this was the most likely thing she was going to say after ‘listen’, but somehow it still came as a shock, and I was left temporarily speechless for the second time in two days, and this time not in a good way. I’d thought that maybe she was going to say she knew what had happened with the phone and she was sorry, or that she was pregnant (always a good stand-by, that one, if unlikely as we always, but always, used a condom) or maybe something else entirely, like she was taking a job in LA or Kuala Lumpur or had decided to become a nun or something, but I’d known, at least since last night, in Ed’s studio, that maybe whatever it was we had had going was near the end.

Still, I found myself feeling kind of crushed, and surprised. I opened my mouth. She was still sucking in her lips, making her nose look longer. She had taken a sort of half-step away from me, almost bumping into people standing talking behind her, in front of the thick, distorting glass of the aquarium windows. I wondered if she thought I was going to hit her. I never had. I’d never hit any woman; never would. Oh, well, apart from ‘Raine’, of course, but I reckoned I could claim massively extenuating circumstances there.

‘Oh, well,’ I said. I looked down at my bottle of Pils. I supposed I could throw that in her face, like Jude had thrown her G &T in my face at Craig’s during the first hour of the New Year, but then Jude had had the forethought to arm herself with a nice wide tumbler; I had a narrow-necked bottle. To achieve a satisfactory soaking of my intended victim I’d have to ask Jo to wait a second or two while I jammed my thumb in the bottle and shook it up before emptying it in her face. That would be inelegant, somehow. Anyway, I didn’t really want to do it.

So she’d cheated on me. Probably not the first time, but, well, so what to that, too; I’d done more than my own fair share of cheating.

‘Is that all you can say?’ she said. ‘“Oh, well”? Is that it?’

‘I heard you fucking somebody last night, Jo,’ I told her. ‘On the phone. Your mobile; it did that thing again.’

She stood, blinking. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said. She nodded. ‘Found it on the floor this morning; batteries flat.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Woh.’ She looked down at the floor, nodding, then up to me. She spread her arms. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out that way.’

‘Well, I did.’

‘Were you going to say anything?’

‘Hadn’t decided. I thought in the meantime you might have realised what had happened and whose mobile yours had rung, and when, and you’d be all contrite, or come up with some embarrassingly unlikely explanation.’

‘Were you getting ready to dump me?’

‘Not particularly, Jo. It had occurred to me in the past that, well, all those foreign trips, the nights away, the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, drugs and drink and stuff; I kind of suspected you might have had the occasional adventure and so-’

‘And what about you?’ she asked, raising her head again, the underwater lights glinting on the studs and bars barnacling her face.

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘have I been playing away, too?’

‘Yes. Well?’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said, starting to feel angry now. ‘I’m being far too fucking reasonable here. I heard you fucking somebody else last night; you didn’t hear me. And now you’re dumping me and you’re looking for some sort of justification after the fact? Well, no fucking way. You have no fucking right to start asking me questions. Yes; yes, I was going to dump you as a matter of fact. Actually, in my heart, in my head, I’d already dumped you, before you dumped me.’

‘Don’t be so childish.’

‘Fuck off, Jo.’

‘Don’t you even want to know why I want out of this relationship? ’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care. Maybe your new guy’s got a bigger cock than I have; who fucking gives a damn?’

‘Oh, Ken, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Look, I hope you’re both very fucking happy, okay? Now just get the hell away from me. And get your stuff off the Belle, as well.’ This was more like it, I thought. This was taking the initiative. I deserved to, after all, dammit; I was the injured party here. ‘I’ll give you till Monday morning to clear your shit off my boat then it all goes over the side. Goodbye.’ I turned and walked away, the effect barely spoiled by bumping into somebody and accidentally spilling a little Pils over their sleeve and having to mumble an apology as I stalked off.

I half expected Jo to follow me and remonstrate – and by golly this seemed to me to be a situation where a person could reasonably employ a word like ‘remonstrate’ or even ‘inveigh’ rather than just ‘object’ or ‘argue’ or something. But she didn’t.

I spent the remainder of the party getting profoundly hammered on an exciting variety of alcoholic beverages and I didn’t see Jo for the rest of the evening. This was probably because she’d taken me at my word about chucking her stuff in the drink and didn’t trust me to wait as long as Monday morning, because when I did eventually roll home in the wee hours and poured myself out of the taxi and into the Temple Belle, she’d already been and gone; her clothes and bits and pieces had been cleared out and on the mat under the letter box lay her key.

I stared at it for a while, picked it up after only four or five attempts, took it out onto the deck and threw it wildly into the dark receding waters.

‘It was always going to happen. You weren’t right for each other.’

‘Craig, Christ almighty, you sound like my mother.’ We were sitting on a bench near the top of Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath, looking out over the city, submerged beneath the watery sun and drifting showers of a cool January afternoon. Craig had walked here. I’d taken the tube.

I was probably still too hungover/drunk to drive, but I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to, at least not in the Landy; somebody had slashed a couple of its tyres and smashed both headlights last night. I’d reported it to the police and they said, Yes, they knew; they’d been round during the night after the trembler alarm in the Landy noticed the list to one side and informed the Mouth Corp security centre, which in turn had alerted the cops. They’d tried my door for ten minutes and my phone for half an hour before they gave up and left me to snore the sleep of the truly drunk. The CCTV tapes would be studied. Probably kids, that’s all.