Iain Banks - Dead Air

I screamed at it. No words, just a scream. Yes, scream, I thought. Get in some practice for later, because you’re probably going to be doing quite a lot of screaming in the very near future. Scream when you see the two chairs drawn up just a leg-length apart, when you see the big blond guy smiling at you and bouncing up and down on his toes, scream when they tie you in, scream when they bring out the knives or the pliers or the blow torch. Yes, screaming now was a very good idea. Might even energise the phone in some spooky way, jar its battery into life. Because I had to check; I needed the fucking useless silvery little piece of shit on and working so I could hit the Last Calls Made list and find that – hey – of course I hadn’t called Ceel (even though I could still hear her voice, still remember standing on the deck in the darkness and listening to her beautiful voice); no, I’d called somebody else. Any-fucking-body else.

Ceel. I had to phone her. I ran out, put the phone into the recharging unit on the living-room desk, and lifted the boat’s own land-line phone.

Nothing. Oh, Jesus! They’d cut the phone line! They were – the dialling tone sounded. I hesitated. Right thing? Was I doing the right thing? Yes, of course. Right to check, just in case this was somehow as stupid as what I’d done last night, but the right thing. Definitely the right thing. I called her mobile number, the number I knew by heart. Oh please be there, please have it switched on. No; please don’t be there at your house, please be somewhere else, anywhere else, somewhere you can run, hide, get away from him.

Oh sweet Jesus Christ, answer, Ceel, answer. Please, please answer.

‘Hello?’

Oh, Christ, yes!

‘Celia. Hi. It’s Ken. Kenneth. Ken Nott.’ Oh God, I was going to have to tell her, going to have to admit I was an imbecile, that I’d put her in the most fucking awful danger, all through my sheer drunken stupidity.

‘Yes?’

‘Listen, I’ve done something really, unbelievably stupid. You need to get away, you need to run.’

‘Yes,’ she said calmly. ‘I’m in Scotland.’ Behind her voice I could hear what sounded like a car engine.

‘ Scotland?’ I yelped. But then that was good. Anywhere away from London was good. Unless she was with him, unless she was with him and he was going to access their answering machine remotely, from wherever they were in Scotland. Oh, shit.

‘Oh, you’re breaking up, I’m afraid,’ she lied. ‘I’ll call you back when I’ve got a clear… oh, no; gone. Well,’ I heard her say to somebody else, ‘that was unusua-’

And she was gone.

I picked up the mobile, hoping it had recharged sufficiently. No.

I sat down, shaking. Ceel was alive. In Scotland. She’d had a warning of sorts and she was going to call back when she wasn’t with whomever she was with.

If I had done what I feared I had – and I had to accept I probably had because I could remember her voice and something of the words she’d used on the answering machine message – then what could I do? I looked at my watch. The massive Breitling said it was – shit – half ten. Had to give it back, I thought; go back to my more elegant Spoon… what was I thinking of? Fuck the watch, fucking thinking about the watch or anything else apart from the fucking suicidal, murderous position I’d put myself and Celia in. Think; maybe Merrial was with her. Maybe – probably – they were away for the whole weekend. That gave me a day and a half to do something.

What could I do? Burn their house down? Break in? Hope there was a maid or a butler or somebody (but then why the answering machine?) and try to impersonate a… I didn’t know. Gas man? Cop? Jehovah’s fucking Witness?

Could I access the tape or the chip from outside somehow? What if I rang again and just left an immensely long message, would it overwrite the one from last night? No. Of course not. No answering machine I’d ever encountered would do that. Nobody would design one like that. Well, nobody with any sense; a fuckwit like me would, obviously.

Set fire to the fucking place. Heave a petrol bomb through a window, pour lighter fluid through the letter box; when the fire brigade came – ring them first, ring them just beforehand, but not the police – let them break down the door and then go in with them, pretend to be a plain-clothes cop, or from special branch, or find a fancy dress shop and hire a police uniform…

Oh, please let it still not have happened. Please let it be a really vivid false memory syndrome thing. I’d imagined her voice on the answering machine message. It hadn’t been her. I’d put the wrong number in from Merrial’s card, misplaced a digit and it had been there all the time and the first time I used it I got some female who happened to live at the house that had the phone with the one-digit difference from the Merrials’ and so I’d left this filthy, sexually abusive message on the answering machine of a total stranger. Oh, God, it had to be that. It had to be.

But if it wasn’t, if I really had done it, what could I do?

I felt sick. I felt really sick. My head was spinning, I was getting the tunnel vision thing. Roaring in ears. I got up and stumbled to the loo.

Ten minutes later, still getting the occasional dry heave, my throat raw, my mouth vile despite the mouthwash, my teeth with that stripped stickiness that comes from having recently been bathed in stomach acid, I sat back at the living-room desk and tried the mobile again. My face had still been white in the mirror. My hands were shaking uncontrollably. I had to rest the mobile on my lap so that I could hit the right buttons. I started crying with the awkwardness and the hopelessness of it all.

The little phone buzzed awake on my thigh. It only had a single bar of battery capacity showing but that was all I’d need. Just keep going for a minute or two, you little piece of shit; you could have fucking died on me last night before I made the call that might get me tortured and killed and my beloved too, you silvery be-buttoned turd. Yes, I know you’re fucking Searching… Just fucking stop it and get on with it. Menu; Phone Book, OK, Voice Dialling, Personal Numbers, Last Ten Calls. My mouth went dry. OK. Last Calls Made. Select? OK.

Here we go.

I stared at the number. I jumped up and got my wallet, where Merrial’s card still was. I checked one number against the other. I checked again and again, willing one, just one, just one lousy single fucking little digit to be different. For fuck’s sake, it wouldn’t have been difficult to make a mistake; I made mistakes all the time. Even when I’m sober. Constantly. Just this one time let this be a mistake.

Call? said the little bit of script at the bottom of the screen. No. No, I don’t fucking want to call it again, you worthless stupid piece of crap. I want to Undo. I want to press F1 or go to the relevant menu with a mouse arrow and Undo, totally fucking Undo what I did last night, rewind the tape, oh yes, wipe the chip, reformat the disk, rewind that fucking little deadly tape or whatever the hell it was sitting in a house less than a mile away from here, rewind and erase. Better still, take it out and fucking burn it and mash the ashes into a fine paste and flush it all down a waste disposal unit somewhere in Outer fucking Mongolia.

I read the numbers out from the phone’s screen, comparing them to the numbers on Merrial’s card. They were identical. They weren’t going to change now. I closed the phone.

Maybe he wouldn’t guess who it was. I’d said it was Ken, I remembered that – I thought – but maybe he wouldn’t think to link that drunken Ken with the guy he’d met once in the courtyard of Somerset House… Oh, shit, what was I thinking of? I’d said Naughty Ken or something equally pathetic and incriminating, hadn’t I? Or had I?