Iain Banks: Dead Air

‘Hi!’ she said, pulling on the helmet I had held out to her.

She had a small, friendly looking face, profoundly unkempt short, curly hair and crinkly eyes that were about as wide-set as they could be in such a thin face. Cheeky-looking, somehow. I was sure I recognised her. Come to think of it, the guy in the too-small dressing-gown had rung a bell or two as well.

‘Morning,’ I said, helping her with the buckle under her chin. This wasn’t as easy as it ought to have been because she was bouncing from one foot to the other all the time. ‘You’ll have to stop jumping up and down,’ I told her gently.

‘Sorry!’ She waggled her eyebrows. The helmet was a bit big for her, but I did the strap up as tight as I could.

I got the buckle fastened and she swung her leg over and jumped on behind me. ‘Broadcasting House! Langham Place!’ she yelled, helmet banging against mine. ‘Fast as you can! If that’s okay.’

I nodded and we set off. It was about ten to six. We didn’t quite make it in time but her producer filled for her and played a couple of records back to back and – parked up by a wee café on Cavendish Street and listening on my FM earpiece – I heard her start her show, and smiled when – breathless, giggling, apologising – she said thanks to the bike guy who’d helped her get there almost on time. ‘Sorry I forgot to ask your name,’ she said. ‘But if you’re listening, mate, well done. Right…’

Samantha Coghlan was something very close to being the nation’s darling at the time. Sam had presented various shows on children’s TV, been a big hit there, tried some more serious TV without any great success – one of those deals where they keep adding zeros to the money on offer until the talent has to say yes, then the execs stand around scratching their heads, wondering what exactly to do with the star they’ve bought – and then made the move to national radio in what at first looked like an act of desperation by both her and Radio One.

As it turned out, though, she was perfect for the Breakfast Show. Well, perfect apart from sleeping in all too often with her celeb film-star boyfriend after showbiz parties and general late nights with their famous friends. Breezy and pally, but sharp and funny too, Sam added a million and a half listeners to the show and reinvigorated a career that might just have been starting to stutter. Within a year she was winning awards, fronting a TV rock and pop show to even more acclaim and helping a couple of major retailers lift their profile with a generation of customers they’d been losing touch with.

I became Biker Ken, her preferred mode of transport for most of that summer. I’d made a decision right at the start to keep quiet about my own dormant radio career. Sam started to mention me on air more often, and over a couple of months I became one of the disparate cloud of friends, acquaintances, hangers-on and, well, parasites she would mention – always funnily, never bitterly – during the course of her show; a cast of characters she built up apparently without thinking about it until we became part of a sort of real-life soap opera the listening public followed avidly five mornings out of seven.

After a while – once the bike hire company equipped us with two-way intercoms so that we could, if the client wanted to, communicate with each other – she started asking me, en route, about what I’d done before I’d become a bike chauffeur. Finally I couldn’t keep my old career quiet without either being rude or lying, so I confessed all.

‘Brilliant! Really?’

‘Really.’

‘Great! Come on the show!’

‘Look,’ I told her, ‘I’m not going to say no, Sam, but you may want to recon-’

‘Na; come on! It’ll be fun!’

So I did. And found I hadn’t lost my radio voice or my touch, and was suitably, humbly funny for a five-minute spot with her one morning when I was off duty. That afternoon, I got a call from one of the stations I’d sent a demo tape to a year earlier; would I like to come in and do an audition? So, Sam gave me my big break.

The lovely Samantha parted company with her listeners one tearful morning that autumn, leaving to go off and have babies in LA with her actor fiancé, whose career had taken off in serious style. We all missed her, but by then I had my own late-night show on a new commercial London station called M25. I sent her flowers; she sent a gracious, funny, affectionate note that I still had. She was a happily married mother of twin girls and a big hit on the Hollywood social scene, last I’d heard, but what I remembered most was not her leaving, or those five generous minutes on her show that kick-started my own stalled career, or even that morning when I first met her; what I remembered most, what I remembered now, was charging down the sleepy streets in the light of a new summer’s morning, heading south for Langham Place through the sparse five-thirty traffic with the big bike humming beneath us. She held onto the grab handles at first, then, after a couple of weeks, asked if it would be okay to put her arms round my waist.

I’d said, Of course, and so, about three mornings out of five, and usually by the time we got to Caledonian Road, she’d clasp her gloved hands in front of my belly and put her helmet against mine and then fall comfortably asleep for the rest of the journey.

When we started wearing the intercom units, I could hear her snoring sometimes, ever so gently, as we thrummed smoothly down the quiet, side-lit streets towards the heart of the slowly waking city.

In all my life to that point, I had never been happier.

Since then, only when I’d been with Ceel.

And I’m thinking about her now, because now I’m in a box, all trussed, bound up, blind in the darkness and petrified that something gruesome is going to happen to me, because all that I did earlier, all the business with the getting into and getting out of Merrial’s house was somehow not enough, and the bad men have come for me and taken me away and I’m terrified for myself and for Celia, because I have the awful, gut-churning, bowel-chilling feeling that when they take me out of here I’m going to see her and she’ll be in just as much trouble as I am.

They came in the depths of night and the bottom of the tide, when the whole ship was tilted, out of true and out of kilter, sloping away to one side on the dark slope of ancient mud where the smell of cold death rises from.

I woke up panicking again, but this time because I thought I’d heard something. I lay there across the bed in the darkness, not daring to move. Had I heard something? Sometimes I used to be sure I heard a great banging noise the instant before I woke, but Jo would always say that I must have been dreaming. Had that happened this time? I heard another noise, somewhere above me. I started to move my hand towards the head of the bed, where the big black Mag-Lite torch/club lay. Maybe I was dreaming. Or maybe it was Jo come back, shame-faced, unable to live without me. Maybe, better, it was Ceel; I’d left the door unlocked or she’d learned how to pick a lock from her husband’s crim pals.

Another noise. Oh, sweet Jesus. Forget the Mag-Lite. Activate the fucking Breitling’s emergency satellite signalling gizmo, dickhead. I started to bring my hands together.

The light clicked on. My eyes hurt. I spun round, turning over in the bed in time to see a tall, well-built white guy I didn’t recognise standing above me; another big guy stood at the door to the bedroom, some sort of large box just behind him. They looked like I had; overalls and baseball caps. My right hand moved to my left wrist, where the big Breitling was, but it was all happening too slowly. The first guy punched me hard in the belly and the wind whooshed out of my lungs. He grabbed my wrist and tore the watch off my hand.