Iain Banks: Dead Air

Okay. Signal to go. I put my hand on the door handle. But what if Merrial had started the shower going as a ruse, and was – no, no, no, fuck it; just fucking well fucking go for fuck’s sake, you over-cautious fuck.

I went quickly but quietly out into the hall, gently closed the door and went along to the stairwell, treading on the sides of the steps as I descended to keep down any creaking noises. I did the same on the next set of stairs. I was right at the bottom stair, facing the front door and about to make the turn to head back along the long hall to the kitchen and the rear door, when I heard the sound of a key in the front door’s lock.

I didn’t freeze. I didn’t even start to think that, Hey, maybe I can brazen it out, dressed in my incredibly convincing overalls. There was no time to dash back upstairs or get to the kitchen. There was maybe just enough time to get to the door to the right of the main door. I lunged for it, leaping from the bottom stair, grabbing the handle and pulling the door open to fall into a cloakroom as I hauled the door closed behind me, managing to damp its closing just enough to stop it slamming an instant before I heard the front door open.

Oh no, I was going to sneeze. I was panting, close to wheezing, worried that I was going to make so much noise that whoever it was – Kaj, probably – would hear me anyway, but now I felt the tingle in my nose that meant I was going to sneeze. I shoved my tongue up into the top of my mouth and forced the edge of a finger up into the base of my septum, under my nose. The urge to sneeze faded. I tried to work my way back into the coats and jackets – the smell of waxed material always did make me want to sneeze for some reason – and hoped that Kaj didn’t need to put a coat in here. The front door closed.

‘Boss?’ a deep, male voice boomed. ‘John?’

Then silence. I crouched down, behind and underneath the thickest clump of coats. It was winter; not exactly freezing but not exactly warm either, so there was every chance Kaj would have a coat he wanted to deposit in here. Oh no, don’t. Oh no, please don’t. Please be a really hard Swedish guy who just totally scorns the very idea of coats and jackets until the temperature is a good ten below and the wind chill doubles that.

The door opened.

Oh God, this is it. This must be. I didn’t think I could be seen but my luck just had to run out sometime and I suspected it was long overdue for departure. All I could see, as I was buried under and behind the coats, were two very large Timberland boots and the broad shins of a pair of jeans. Could he see anything of me? There was a swishing noise, the sound of fabric on fabric, then the door closed.

I stayed where I was. Give the big blond bastard time to do a double-take; Yoost a meenoot, whose were those shoes that I saw yust there?

Then I heard heavy footsteps going rapidly upstairs.

My mouth had gone all dry once more. When I tried to stand up my legs collapsed under me and I had to sit down, breathing heavily. I levered myself up. I put my ear to the door. I was a metre from escape. I’d use the front door and the hell with getting out the way I came in. Thank fuck I’d replaced the key inside the stone earlier.

Silence. No keyhole here either. I risked cracking the door and looked out. Nobody about. The door opened and closed almost silently. Upstairs, I could still just hear the sound of the shower pump. A door closed up there, sounding faint. I turned to the wide front door. Please don’t let there be a returning maid or an investigating copper standing outside. The front door was heavy but it too swung open without a sound and I went out. The fresh, cool air of a bright winter’s afternoon hit my face as I skipped down the steps to the square, breathing deeply. It tasted like freedom.

Two left turns and I was in the mews. There was nobody at the Land Rover. I got in and reversed out. I whooped and hollered most of the way back to the Temple Belle. I parked on a double yellow by a phone box on Buckingham Palace Road to phone Ceel’s mobile. Message service. I licked my lips, trying to think what to say.

‘It’s all okay,’ I said.

I blew a kiss at a parking warden already starting to take the Landy’s details.

Then when I got back to Chelsea Creek I could hardly move once I reached the car park. It felt like the front wheels were ploughing through half-melted tarmac, and my legs almost buckled underneath me as I got out. I had to support myself with both hands as I went down the narrow gangway to the boat. I got the door closed, half fell down the steps and – for the second time in twelve hours, and, in the overalls, even more fully clothed – collapsed onto the bed like a dead weight. I was asleep before the second bounce.

There’s this thing called the Dead Cat Bounce. It’s a stock market term, I believe. What it’s talking about is the fact that even a stock that is essentially worthless and really going nowhere but down for ever can register a slight upward movement, just for a bit, because there is generally a floor for almost everything. The comparison rests on the fact that even when a cat hits the pavement from forty storeys high and dies instantly, it’ll still bounce back up a little.

Now may be a good time to think of something happy, inside here.

When I first came to London in ’94 it wasn’t as a DJ. I’d lost my job with StrathClyde Sound after a series of disputes (the last straw, absurdly, had been a campaign I’d called Don’t Rubbish Our Stations, to bring back litter bins to Scottish railway stations, because the IRA had never carried out any terrorist attacks anywhere in Scotland and so there was no need to ape the English safety precaution of removing bins because they were potential places to leave a bomb). So I decided to make the move down south to the big smoke, like generations of Scots before me. In London, I’d got nowhere with the few contacts I had and the dozens of demo tapes I’d sent off, so I got a job as a bike courier, whizzing through the crowded streets on an already well-used Bandit that had cost me the last of my savings, weaving in and out between the cars and trucks and buses and going the wrong way round the occasional traffic island to get documents and disks and drawings from one office to another as quickly as possible.

Then I got a job with a firm of Motorcycle Chauffeurs, somehow convincing the manager that I was a good, responsible, and above all smooth driver (miraculously, I’d held on to a clean licence in all the mayhem of London dispatch biking, though I had been knocked down twice). The idea was that the London traffic had become so congested there was an almost literal gap in the market for getting people from one bit of the capital to the other quicker than a taxi or a limo could. A big bike was the answer; a Honda Pan European or a 1200 BMW tourer, complete with panniers to carry an extra helmet and an over-suit for the client and a tall enough screen so that the worst of any weather was kept off them (providing you were moving, though of course being on a bike, you should be able to, even in a serious jam).

The company did well enough but then ran into cashflow problems and was taken over by a limo firm; they lost half the drivers but I was one of the lucky ones.

One late spring morning, at the start of an early shift, I was called to an emergency job taking somebody from Islington to Langham Place. A car hadn’t shown and I was nearest. I pulled up at a nice, semi-posh terraced house in Cloudesley Square, one of the district’s leafier bits, and this elfin blonde in jeans and a rumpled T-shirt appeared, running down the steps pulling on a pretend biker’s jacket and waving goodbye to a sleepy-looking guy standing in the doorway, wearing what looked like a very small woman’s dressing-gown.