Iain Banks - Dead Air

I glanced at the callers’ screen. The girls were doing their best to weed out journalists – the system was flagging numbers of newspapers and if Kayla or Andi were suspicious, they asterisked the name (though in Kayla’s case, as well as * it could equally well be &, [, 7, 8, 9, U or I). One name and subject snagged my gaze instantly. Oh-oh.

Name: Ed. Subject: Robe.

‘Ah… Toby; you’ve a beef about airport security.’

‘Yeah. Hi, Ken. It’s about glasses.’

‘Glasses?’

‘You can’t take nail clippers onto a plane nowadays, not even little ones, but people wearing glasses; no probs.’

‘Your point being?’

‘Glass-lensed glasses, right? Not plastic, right? Break a glass lens and you’ve got two perfect blades, right? Really sharp. Take them on? No probs. But nail clippers? I mean, nail clippers? No way. What’s all that about then?’

I saw Ed’s entry on the screen disappear; he’d rung off. Point made, I guessed.

‘What a fine point, Tobias,’ I said. ‘There should be a sin-bin for spectacles and a choice of soft contact lenses for these astigmatic miscreants at every airport security scanner.’

‘Ed.’

‘Wot. The fuck. Were you doin. Tryin to get old of Robe?’

‘Oh, come on. Guess.’

‘I told you not to. I told you to leave it.’

‘I was desperate. But, listen; it’s all right now.’

‘It’s not all right.’

‘It is; he wouldn’t sell me a… you know. Wouldn’t even meet up. And-’

‘Fot you were a cop, didn’t he? Fot you was filf tryin to set im up.’

‘I did kind of get that impression. But-’

‘Now he’s givin me grief cos you got is number froo me. Froo me mum, Kennif; froo me mum. I am not amused.’

‘Ed, I’m sorry.’ I was trying to hold off from saying something like, Come on, Ed it’s not as bad as fucking your pal’s girl. ‘I was scared and I panicked, but I really am sorry.’

‘So you should be.’

‘But I don’t need the… article in question any more. That’s the good news.’

‘You don’t? Why not?’

‘It turns out it was something of a misunderstanding. I met with somebody who’s in the process of resolving the matter.’

‘You’re soundin like an accountant. As somebody got a gun to your ead now?’

‘I think it’s going to be all right. Almost certainly.’

‘Right. So now you only got to worry about fascist boot boys comin round in the middle of the night an kickin your ead in in retaliation for fumpin this Holocaust geezer on telly.’

‘Oh, you’ve heard.’

It had taken me most of the afternoon to get hold of Ed; his phone had been either off or engaged, and I hadn’t wanted to leave a message. I’d started trying as soon as the show ended. We’d had yet another meeting with Debbie and Guy Boulen, got some sandwiches sent down from the canteen for lunch in the office and then got round to some routine but necessary work for the middle part of the afternoon.

When we were ready to leave Phil had walked round to a corridor with the appropriate view and seen that there were still some press waiting outside, so we’d called a taxi and a mini-cab to the underground car park; Phil, Kayla and Andi took the cab; they piled their coats and bags on the floor in a big mound that might just about have been big enough to hide a person and were duly followed. I left in the mini-cab’s boot ten minutes later. I’d already cleared it with Craig to stay with him for a day or two until all the worst of the fuss died down. The mini-cab stopped as arranged on Park Road and I got out of the boot and into the front seat.

I finally got through to Ed after I’d settled in at Craig’s.

‘Course I’ve eard. You’re in the Standard, mate.’

‘Really, which page?’

‘Wot, you aven’t got one?’

‘Not yet. I’ll get one, I’ll get one. Which page? Which page?’

‘Um, five.’

‘Above the fold or below?’

‘The what?’

‘The middle of the page. It doesn’t matter so much on a tabloid, but-’

‘You’ve got the whole page, mate. Well, part from a advert for cheap flights.’

‘The whole page? Wow.’

‘Says they reckon you did it cos you was under such stress from avin a def fret made against you an bein kidnapped an stuff.’

‘What?’

Well, yuh.

I shook my head. ‘Ridley Scott has a lot to answer for.’

‘What?’ asked Craig. ‘Making Black Hawk Down?’

‘Hell’s teeth, yeah, but no; I was thinking more of introducing the concept of Gratuitous Steam.’

Craig glanced over at me. We were a bit drunk and a bit stoned, watching Alien on DVD after an early meal of a home-delivered pizza. We’d eaten it while watching the London local news programmes on the TV, in case I was mentioned, but I wasn’t. I wondered who the camera team had been this morning outside the office in that case, then decided that probably they had been from one of the TV stations but they hadn’t got enough good footage (maybe I should have got out, said something), or the story just hadn’t been judged important enough by the TV news editors.

Craig was significantly less drunk and stoned than I was, plus he’d only eaten one slice of the pizza; he had a mystery date he wouldn’t tell me about, at nine. In the meantime: Alien. Craig was exactly the sort of guy who would gradually replace all his treasured videos with DVDs. He was also exactly the sort of guy who’d ration himself, buying one old film on DVD whenever he bought a new one being released for the first time. Alien was the latest oldie.

Craig looked at me. ‘Gratuitous Steam?’

‘Yeah,’ I said, gesturing at the screen. ‘Look how fucking steamy it is in the old Nostromo there. Who the hell decreed space-ships dozens of generations after the shuttle – the Model-T of spacefaring craft as it will doubtless prove to be and not itself notoriously water-vapour-prone – would be so full of steam? I mean, why? And it’s been grotesquely over-used in practically every SF film and no-brain thriller ever since.’

Craig sat and watched the film for a while. ‘Designer.’

‘What?’

‘Set designer,’ he said authoritatively. ‘Because it looks good. Makes the place look lived in and industrial. And hides stuff, menacingly. Which is what you want in a horror movie, or a thriller. Plus it gives people like you something to complain about, which is patently an added bonus.’

‘Do I complain a lot?’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘Yeah, but, come on; that’s the implication. Do I?’

‘You have all these problems with films, Ken.’

‘I do?’

‘Take Science Fiction. What, according to you, is the only technically credible SF film?’

‘2001.’

Craig sighed. ‘Why?’

‘Because Kubrick doesn’t allow noises in space. And because he was a genius, he knew how to use the no-sound thing, so you get the brilliant bit where what’s-his-name blows himself out of the wee excursion pod thing and into the airlock and bounces around inside the open airlock until he hits the door-close and air-in controls and it’s only then you get the sound feeding in; magnificent.’

‘And every other space movie-’

‘Is that bit less credible because you see an explosion in space and next thing you know there’s a fucking teeth-rattling sound effect.’

‘So-’

‘Though it has to be said, virtually every movie with an explosion in it gets the time-delay thing wrong, anyway. Not only do film directors seem not to understand that sound doesn’t travel in a vacuum, they also seem not to understand how it does travel in an atmosphere. You see an explosion half a fucking klick away, but the sound always happens at exactly the same time, not a second and a bit later, when you should hear it.’