Iain Banks - Dead Air

‘Oh, yeah, and you won’t swear, will you?’

‘Phil, have I ever fucking sworn on air?’

Phil looked like a man with severe diarrhoea sitting in a Land Rover heading quickly down a bumpy jungle path towards extremely distant toilets. ‘Well, no,’ he admitted, ‘but I still don’t know how you do it. I mean, it doesn’t seem possible you’ve managed to avoid it all these years.’

‘Well, I have.’

‘What, even on Inverclyde Sound?’

‘StrathClyde Sound; the radio station where the creative’s typist missed the space bar rather than accidentally hit the exclamation mark key, and no, not even there. It’s because even though it might not sound like it, I do have a pretty accurate idea exactly what I’m going to say the instant before I say it, I never forget the context – am I in the pub or the studio? – and there’s just sufficient time for my on-board censor to step in and make the relevant – if not always perfectly elegant or sometimes even grammatical – amendments.’

‘Right. Well.’

‘Anyway, it’s late-night Channel Four, for Christ’s sake, not Blue Peter. If they can say “fuck” on Sex and the City I don’t see why I can’t. Christ, I heard a “cunt” on Larry Sanders once.’

Phil’s eyes went wide. ‘Oh, no, I really don’t think you should-’

‘Look, will you just calm down a bit?’ I told him. ‘I’m not going on intending to swear, okay?’

He said, ‘Okay,’ but he still looked worried.

Of course, what I wanted to add was, Dammit, man, I won’t have time to swear; it’ll probably all be over in about five seconds and I really wouldn’t worry your ugly big head about what I’m going to say.

Again, though, I didn’t.

I was plumbed in. I’d half expected it would be radio mikes (always attached to you with a warning not to visit the loo with them switched on, in case you want to cause the sound engineers, ooh, seconds of hilarity), but they were using hard wire instead. What appeared to be a clone of one of the attractive but awfully assistants slipped the wire beneath my jacket, under the button of my shirt just above the waistband of my trousers and then – once I’d worked it upwards – attached it between the top two buttons of my shirt. I was going for the relaxed, casual, open-necked look. Besides, they take your tie off you in the nick, along with your belt and laces.

The awfully assistant smiled as we were negotiating the cool black wire up between my chest and the fabric of the shirt, and I smiled back, but while we’d been doing this her bare arm had swung against my jacket and made the pocket clunk off the seat and I was secretly terrified she was going to see the sweat prickling up underneath my make-up and ask, ‘Hey, what’s that hard, heavy, metallic thing in your jacket pocket?’

Paranoia. The terrible thing about paranoia is you always have the sneaking suspicion that the moment it passes is when you’ll be at your most vulnerable.

They tested for sound and then the black microphone wire was taped to the arm of the plastic and chrome chair I was sitting in, below desk level and therefore out of sight for the cameras that would be trained on me. On the black-painted floor, the mike cable snaked away, almost invisible save for the lengths of silver gaffer tape securing it there.

I looked about the rest of the studio. Cavan would be in between us, a couple of metres away from me round the giant comma-shaped wooden desk; his seat was bigger and higher-backed than mine or the bad guy’s, which was another two metres past Cavan’s, round the curve. Lots of bright overhead lights kept the place very warm.

Somebody sat in the chair across the desk from mine and for a moment I wondered what was going on; it was one of the awfully assistants, not the scumbag Holocaust denier I was expecting. Then another assistant plonked herself in Cavan’s seat in the middle and I realised they were just sitting in for the real people while they got the cameras sorted out.

In front of Cavan’s position was a big camera with, on the front, the downward-angled hood and attached upward-facing monitor of an autocue; a little bearded guy looked almost lost behind the camera, minutely adjusting its position according to instructions through his headphones. There were two surprisingly small, unmanned cameras on heavy tripods, one for me and one for the bad guy, plus an umbilicalled handheld manned by a plump guy who at this point was muttering into his own head-mike as he crouched back and forth, rehearsing where he could go within the curve in front of the big desk without getting in shot from the other cameras.

Everybody was listening on their headphones and earpieces to the people in the production suite, and for a while it was actually very peaceful, sitting there in what was more or less silence, feeling pleasantly, politely ignored while everything else was sorted out. Somebody rolled a big monitor screen on a trolley to a position a couple of metres behind the cameras and turned it on; it showed a blue screen with a big white clock face on it and the programme ID. It sat, static, unchanging, in the midst of a semi-hush punctuated with murmurs.

I found myself thinking about Ceel. I remembered the feel of her body, the precise touch of her fingers, the satiny sensation of running my hand across her back, the deep, musky smell of her hair, the taste of her lips after a mouthful of champagne, the taste of her sweat from the hollow formed by her collar bone, and most of all the sound of her voice; that measured softness with the faint ghost of accent, a calmly sinuous stream of quiet amusement breaking into sudden rapids when she laughed.

The monitor flickered, the blue and white display replaced with a view of the assistant sitting in Cavan’s chair. Then the clock and ident display flicked on again.

I was missing her. It had been a month now since I’d seen her, and a long month at that. I supposed time seemed to stretch over the Xmas/New Year holidays for everybody, but I felt I’d been particularly busy, which made the interval seem longer. I’d spent an unhealthy amount of time over the holidays checking that there had been no crashes of Air France flights bound for or coming back from Martinique, or sudden unseasonal hurricanes or fresh volcanic eruptions in the Eastern Caribbean.

Things were falling apart around me and it felt like it was all because Ceel wasn’t here. There was no logic to this feeling whatsoever, and it wasn’t as though Ceel and I spent very much time in each other’s company when she was around – we saw each other for about half a day once a fortnight, so she shouldn’t really have felt like any great influence on my life – but nevertheless with her away I felt adrift and disconnected, my life tumbling chaotically.

There wasn’t even the promise, or at least the possibility, that we might meet up in a day or two, steadying me from a distance.

Coping with my break-up with Jo, with the ramifications of that touching Ed and Craig, with everything that had happened at the New Year party, with this continuing campaign of damage and threat some bastard was mounting against me – not to mention the chilly contemplation of what I was thinking of doing here – left me feeling dangerously exposed and at risk.

It was like trying to control a skid on a bike on a rainy street; that same feeling of cold, gut-clenching panic while wrestling desperately with something powerful but suddenly wild and out of control. I’d had a few skids like that in my courier days. I’d always managed to stay upright and I was proud of that, but I’d never kidded myself that on each occasion it had been anything other than luck, mostly, that had kept me out of the gutter or from under the wheels of a bus. At least those incidents were over in seconds; this was going on for weeks, months. Everything I might have hung onto for support seemed compromised. I needed Ceel. I needed to access her calmness, secure myself to that perverse rationality of hers.