Iain Banks: Dead Air

I screamed, loud and high and shrill, then sucked and wheezed and gasped in the slowly, slowly ebbing aftermath.

Merrial had gone back to the Bentley.

‘How fucking dare you,’ Celia said. Her voice sounded more menacing and cold than Merrial’s had at any point so far. I blinked through the tears and looked at her. She was looking levelly, gravely at Merrial.

Merrial looked back. ‘Yes, dear?’ he said. But it already sounded weak. Something in the way Ceel had spoken had given her the initiative here.

‘How fucking dare you do that to him and make me watch it,’ she breathed. She walked across the pallets towards Merrial. Kaj followed a step behind, looking wary. Celia stopped a metre from her husband. ‘You have no right to do that,’ she said. Her voice was shaking with controlled fury. ‘You have no right to make me witness it, no right to make me part of it, no right to make yourself the law and me no better than one of your fucking thugs.’ She spat the last word out like a broken tooth.

Merrial looked down briefly. ‘You know I don’t like you using that sort of language, Celia,’ he said calmly.

‘I am not one of your fucking gang!’ she shouted at him.

He looked up, blinking. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake!’ he yelled back. ‘What do you think buys your jewellery, your dresses, the holidays?’

‘I’m not stupid!’ Celia exploded. ‘I’m not a fool! I know damn well! Mon dieu! I thought, I stupidly thought until tonight that I didn’t get involved in this sort of thing -’ she gestured behind, towards me ‘- in return for me staying with you, even though I know what you do, what you’ve become!’

Merrial shook his head and pulled down his cuffs, looking awkward but recovering his composure. ‘It was always like this, Ceel.’

(And, as some further little part of me died along with hope, I thought, Oh, no. Oh, no; he calls her Ceel, he uses the same name for her that I do.)

She clenched her fists in front of her, shaking her head. ‘I did not marry this!’ she said, a sort of tumultuous control infecting her voice. ‘I married you. I married a man who took me from a bad place and bad people and a bad thing inside myself, a man who made me feel protected as well as desired.’ She stood back and straightened up. She looked down at him. ‘I will not stand for this, John.’

He looked down again. ‘You’ve been having an affair,’ he told her quietly.

‘What?’ she said, and, with that one word, somehow, and for only about the third or fourth time since I’d met her, sounded like a French-speaker speaking English.

‘We have photographs, more video,’ he said, looking down again. He glanced to me, then Kaj.

She stared at him. She shook her head slowly. ‘You have nothing,’ she said quietly. A silence followed. I realised that somewhere in the black, hollow distance, somewhere through the ambient smell of decay, there was a slow drip-drip-drip noise. ‘Nothing,’ she repeated. ‘Except paranoia.’

He looked up at her. She shook her head again. ‘My girlfriends, ’ she said slowly, ‘have boyfriends, husbands, brothers; sometimes when we meet up one of them will get there just before or just after me, before the others do. Don’t think that a photograph of me sitting in Harvey Nics with a man you don’t know constitutes an affair. Leave those people out of your sordid imaginings.’

Merrial looked from her to me.

Celia frowned, then glanced back at me. ‘With him?’ she said, and laughed. She turned to look at me, and stopped laughing, looked serious. ‘Mr Nott; no offence, but I could do better.’

‘None taken,’ I managed to wheeze round the pain.

Celia whirled round to face her husband again. ‘Show me, then. Show me what this evidence is!’

Merrial just smiled at her, but the smile was strained, and by then even I could see what she’d sensed instantly; he really didn’t have any evidence on her, he’d been hoping to force a confession out of her with the accusation alone, if a confession had been due.

Celia fixed her gaze upon her husband then and took on a frosty look. Actually, frosty didn’t even start to cover it; it was more of a shaving-of-a-degree-above-absolute-zero look. It put the fear of God into me and I was only caught in the backwash of its baleful focus. Merrial withstood it somehow – must have built up some sort of immunity over the years they’d been married, I supposed – but you could see he was affected. Some fuckwit part of me, patently not in any way connected to my horribly bruised and still jangling testes, almost felt sorry for the bastard.

‘I have been a faithful wife to you,’ Celia said in a measured, contained, utterly sure and certain voice. ‘I have always been faithful to you!’ she said, her voice breaking.

And sitting there, right then, goddammit, even I believed her. I’d have stood up in court or on any field of honour to insist with my last breath that this woman had been an utterly faithful wife and was being sorely, grievously wronged and defamed by being accused of being anything else.

Part of me found the time to wonder how the hell she was doing this, and that was when it occurred to me that – just possibly – Ceel’s patently lunatic ideas about entanglement were making a real and crucial difference here. Maybe at this moment she genuinely believed that she had been a faithful wife, because, in that other reality she claimed to be linked to, she actually was. She was speaking not so much for herself but for the Celia on the other side of that divide; the Celia who was a perfectly, unimpeachably good wife who had never cheated; the Celia who could rightly claim, as she just had, that she had always been faithful to her husband.

‘Can you say the same to me, John?’ Her voice was hollow as a vast canyon, and as sad as the sound of earth hitting a tiny coffin.

Merrial met her gaze.

Drip, drip, drip, in the distance. I was breathing hard, swallowing on a dry, parched throat. The smell of death and shit didn’t seem quite so bad in the air around us now, but maybe it was just something you got used to. Eventually Merrial said, ‘Of course I can say it, Celia.’

That last shaving above Zero Kelvin vanished with a whimper into the darkness surrounding us.

‘Do not treat me like a fool, John,’ Celia said, and her voice was like the voice a glacier would have if it could speak, the voice of the oldest, steepest, widest, most powerful mountain-grinding-up glacier in all the fucking world, after it had thought good and hard in glacier terms about precisely what it wanted to articulate.

Merrial cleared his throat. I didn’t realise he must have looked away until he brought his gaze up to meet hers again with what looked like an appalling, abysmally draining amount of effort. ‘You-’

‘I want a divorce, John,’ she said.

Fucking bombshell. Just like that. Merrial blinked. The two of them stayed that way for a few moments, him swinging one foot without realising it, thunking against the trailing edge of the Bentley’s wheel arch, her glaring down at him, perfectly, savagely still.

Merrial glanced at Kaj, me and the other two guys before looking back to her. ‘I don’t think here is really-’

‘We talk about it here, now,’ Celia said quickly. ‘You brought me here to see this, you changed our rules. You put cameras in my home.’ Her voice almost broke, and she took a quick, controlling breath. ‘So business and marriage are the same, now,’ she told him. ‘They are in the same arena. I said: I want a divorce.’

Merrial ground his teeth. ‘No,’ he said.

She didn’t react. Dear God, this woman had perfected threatening stillness to a high art indeed. Merrial might be good, but Ceel would have made a brilliant crime boss.