Iain Banks - Dead Air

The trouble was that Emma would be there, too, and if Craig mentioned what had happened with Jo – I’d asked him not to say anything to Nikki or Emma, and especially not to mention Jo and Ed, but still – then it might get awkward, given the history I had with Emma. It was a very slim sliver of history, I kept on telling myself, but it was no less potentially lethal for my relationship with Craig for that.

I was in danger of losing one girlfriend, two best friends and – tomorrow – maybe my job, and liberty, all in one insane forty-eight-hour period.

Screw the nut, I thought. Batten down. Supper would have been nice, and I had such a bad hangover I’d probably not want to drink very much and so it would actually constitute quite a sensible, measured preparation for the big day tomorrow, but I decided to say no. Other plans.

‘Ken, hi.’

‘Amy, kid; how are you?’

‘Brilliant. You?’

‘Ah… kinda, you know.’

‘Darling, no, I don’t. What? Is there a problem?’

‘Jo and I are… over.’

‘Oh! I’m sorry to hear that. You seemed so close.’

‘Well,’ I said. Did we? I thought. I wouldn’t have said so, but then maybe that was just the sort of thing you said when somebody told you something like this. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s… it’s, ah, very finished with. Kind of saw it coming, but… hit me a little harder than I’d expected, must confess.’

‘Gosh. You poor thing.’

‘Yeah. Nearly two years.’

‘Really.’

‘Yeah. Feels like longer.’

‘Right.’

‘Felt quite a lot for her, I have to say.’

‘Well, of course.’

‘… All gone now.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘… Anyway.’

‘Hmm. Are you going to be all right?’

‘Amy… I’ll live.’

‘Oh, dear; you sound so sad!’

‘Ah, I’ll get over it. One day.’

‘Oh! Is there anything I can do?’

‘Well, I suppose…You could let me take you out to dinner. Tonight, even. How does that sound?’

‘That sounds like a totally bloody marvellous idea, Ken. I was at a bit of a loose end myself, actually.’

I looked at the mobile, thinking, Well, you might have got on-message a bit earlier there, woman.

‘Amy, for goodness’ sake. There are two lies here: one is that private management is automatically better than public-’

‘But it is! Have you ever dealt with a local authority, Ken? Those useless bloody people wouldn’t last two minutes in the real world!’

‘Neither did Railtrack once the government subsidy was whipped away.’

‘Ha! I bet they got their people from local government.’

‘Oh, don’t be… look. The other great lie is that private can be cheaper; it brings in extra money. But that’s bullshit! Just Treasury accounting rules. Infrastructure costs no matter who builds it. You have to invest in it, so invest as cheaply as possible; pay the least you can in interest payments. And that’s even before you factor in the profits a private investor expects, too; that comes on top. So, ask yourself: who or what can borrow money cheaper than any commercial concern? Answer: the state.’

‘I think you’ll find that depends on which state, actually, Ken.’

‘Okay, the British state can borrow money cheaper, for a smaller interest rate, than any commercial concern.’

‘Yes, because it doesn’t go wasting it on things the private sector can do better.’

‘Amy, that’s ridiculous!’

‘No, it isn’t. And what about risk?’

‘What risk? If it all goes wrong the poor bloody taxpayer ends up paying.’

‘There’s always a risk, Ken,’ Amy said, smiling thinly at me. ‘Life is full of risk.’

I sat back in my seat. We were in La Eateria, an achingly trendy new restaurant in Islington. Wooden garden furniture for tables and chairs, and walls lined with that perforated orange plastic stuff builders use to create instant fences. Menu pretentious, food barely adequate, staff surly. I was amazed it wasn’t busier. Still, it was a Sunday night.

Amy looked great, with her fine, now straight blond hair glowing in the light of what looked like car headlights dangling from the ceiling. She was dressed in black tights and skirt, and a clingy black long-sleeved top with a gold chain lying on the tanned skin revealed by a square, low neck.

So she looked superb and she’d dressed up – if she’d appeared in paint-speckled jeans and an unironed T-shirt I’d have known there was no way anything was going to happen – and yet, suddenly, for the first time in all the times we’d met to eat, she’d turned into Little Miss Capitalist Lobby Girl.

Until now all our lunch and dinner dates-that-were-not-really-dates had consisted of eating, drinking and flirting. Dammit; they’d been great fun! Certainly no arguments about fucking PFI and PPPs. I mean, I knew that the lobbying firm she worked for was involved in promoting that sort of crap, but, Jeez, she’d never started pushing it at me. I’d made one off-hand remark about Railtrack and the forthcoming attractions of Postrack and Tubetrack, and she’d jumped down my throat feet first.

‘You know what really gets me?’ I said, putting my fork down. I hadn’t eaten much of my main course. The chef here seemed obsessed with height and apparently chose his ingredients and cooking methods to ensure the maximum altitude and stability of the towers of material the kitchen created, with edibility and taste coming way down the list of priorities. Probably somewhere between the grid of soggy rosti and the layer of glue-like mustard mash acting as a hold-fast.

‘No, I don’t know what really gets you, Ken,’ Amy said, levering a forkful of her lamb and figs towards her mouth, ‘but I have the awful feeling you’re just dying to tell me.’

Dying to. Shit, I hadn’t even told her about the whole ‘Raine’ thing, my inadvertent trip to the East End, the threatening phone call and the slashed tyres on the Landy yet. I’d told Craig, Ed and Jo, and sworn them all to secrecy, but with Amy I’d been holding it in reserve for later in the evening. Now I was starting to think there was no point.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What I want to know is, why put what is basically greed above the urge to serve? What’s wrong with wanting to help people? Isn’t that what politicians say they want to do? They say they just want to serve society, they tell us that’s why they became politicians in the first fucking place, so why don’t they side with the nurses and the teachers and the fire brigade and the police and all the other people who really do serve?’

‘They do side with the police, Kenneth.’

‘Oh, so they do. But what about everybody else? So are they lying about wanting to serve, and just want power, or have they just not made the connection yet?’

Amy sat back too, breathing deeply and flexing her shoulders. I tried to keep eye contact and appreciate her breasts by peripheral vision only, but it was almost an insult to them. On the other hand, maybe I should make the most of the view, because it looked like what I was seeing now was all I was ever going to see. Amy shook her head and said, ‘You really are quite naïve, aren’t you, Ken?’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. You seem so clued-up and clever but really you just scratch the surface of everything, don’t you?’

‘If you say so, Amy.’

She looked at me for a bit. Her eyes were greeny-blue and her irises had that over-defined look you get with contacts sometimes. She was still breathing fairly deeply and I just let my gaze fall to her chest, which was pleasant in a regretful sort of way. ‘You’re just Sir Jamie’s little performing monkey, but you think you’re some sort of cool radical type, isn’t that right, Ken?’