Iain Banks: Dead Air

‘Good, your brain and tongue are still working. Debbie wants to see us after the show and the first record up is Addicta’s new one with Jo on joint lead vocals… Na, looking for sympathy doesn’t get any more efficient with a black eye. Good try, though.’

‘Oh, my good Lord almighty, get yourself in here, Kennit, you need tendin to.’

‘Fackin ell, man, you white guys go brilliant colours!’

Anonymous. ‘Yes?’

‘Don’t forget to wipe your phone’s Last Calls Made and Received memories, just in case. I’ve tidied everything at this end.’

‘Already done.’ I’d destroyed the calling card with the incriminating code number on it, too. ‘Though now I’ll have to do this one, of course. Celia?’

‘What, Kenneth?’

‘Thank you. You were brilliant. You saved my miserable life.’

‘It was my pleasure.’

‘I love you.’

‘Still? Are you sure?’

‘I do. I mean it.’

‘Well. Thank you, Kenneth.’

‘… What happens now?’

‘I have to pay the woman who was our maid some money to compensate her for her dismissal.’

‘That’s not what I meant.’

‘I know.’

‘So.’

‘So. Well, wait.’

‘For what?’

‘For a package, and a phone call?’

‘So I’ll see you again.’

‘I can hear you are smiling as you say that. Yes.’

‘Ditto, kid. And will I see you again, after this next time?’

‘I would hope so. You know it will not be the same, though, don’t you? It can never be the same again.’

‘I know. But maybe it can be better.’

‘John has started divorce proceedings. He is in Amsterdam most of the time now.’

‘So can we meet up soon?’

‘I need to be very careful, still, but I hope so, soon. I must go.’

‘I’m sorry, Ceel. About getting us both into that mess.’

‘Good came of it. Never do its like again.’

‘I pro-’

‘I must go, my love.’

‘-mise. Hey, wait; did you say-?’

‘…’

There is this verdict, which is unique, as far as I know, to the Scottish legal system, and remained distinct from the English one even for the three centuries of the full Union with the rest of the UK. It’s called Not Proven.

It means that the jury isn’t going to go as far as pronouncing the defendant Not Guilty, but that the prosecuting authorities simply have not proved their case. It’s a funny verdict, because you still leave the court a free man or woman, with no criminal record (well, unless you had one before, of course), though people – friends and family, the community at large – may remember, and the implications of that neither-one-thing-nor-the-other verdict might well live with you for the rest of your life.

There have been moves to get rid of it, to adopt the binary choice of Guilty or Not Guilty, but I think that’s a mistake. If I was on a jury I would never agree to a Not Proven verdict for somebody I basically thought was Guilty, but I would go as far as Not Proven for somebody I would otherwise have found just plain Not Guilty and who I thought ought not to be punished beyond the implications of that debatable verdict itself. Because that’s what it is: a semi-punishment, a sort of warning, a conditional discharge that is, remarkably, in the gift of the jury, not the judge. I think it’s worth keeping for that alone.

I’ve wondered for many months now if that was the judgement John Merrial recorded in the personal courtroom he kept in his head, if he still suspected there was something more going on somewhere, just with me, or even between me and Celia.

I don’t know. I can’t decide.

Not Proven. It would do.

It’s one of those odd concepts that, the more you think about it, the more it seems applicable within all sorts of other contexts besides the one it originated in. My whole radio career, for example, feels like it has been Not Proven (actually it’s been Guilty loads of times, whenever I got fired again, but – overall – I’m still claiming the Not Proven thing). Scotland; the UK, devolution. More British? More European? Not Proven.

And Celia and me. Not Proven.

I never did get that package and that phone call. Instead she decided we ought to start meeting in public. She suggested the British Museum, the first time; the room that held the Pergamum Altar. This was in March. In front of that vast, white, towering edifice of Imperial plunder, we met, nodded, shook hands, then went for coffee in the museum’s café. She asked how I was and I said I was recovering. She apologised for her husband’s behaviour, hurting me as he had, and I apologised for mine, entering her home without permission. We talked as though playing parts, then parted with another handshake. I slipped the folded piece of paper she’d passed during the handshake into my pocket and met her in the Sanderson the next afternoon. The sex hurt. Me; not her, obviously. But it was still great.

We started to meet up more often, through the spring and into the summer, while Mr M set up his operating base in Amsterdam and the divorce proceedings slid smoothly along and his new fiancée blossomed.

We met in public as friends. In private, less often, as the lovers we had always been.

One day in June she kissed me on the cheek as she left the bar, and the following week brushed her lips with mine as she got out of the taxi, after dinner. A fortnight later we went to Clout, dancing, and kissed on the dance floor and later in a shady booth in the Retox bar. It was late July before she came to the Temple Belle and stayed overnight, so that I finally got to spend a whole night with her, and wake up with her. We never did discover if anybody had been watching. But the risk had not been worth taking.

I still worry that one day Merrial will wake up and just somehow know that of course Celia and I had been lovers back then, when it seemed he had suspected we might be, and still take his revenge, but Ceel seems quite sanguine about this.

‘John thinks I am too proper and too concerned with fairness, ’ she told me. ‘Paying off Maria and meeting you to apologise for all that happened appear like symptoms of an amusing obsession to him. He thinks that I am going out with you to spite him, that I am deliberately or subconsciously taking what he suspected wrongly and making it true, just to punish him. So he believes that what you and I have together is about him, not us, which pleases his ego, and he thinks that I am deceiving myself over my motives in seeing you in the first place, which he also finds a comfort.’

I frowned. ‘You sure about this?’

‘But of course. I can see what he thinks, and I know how to make him think certain things.’

I thought about this, and an appalling thought occurred to me. ‘You can’t do the same with me, can you?’

Celia laughed lightly, squeezed my hand and said, ‘What could possibly make you think that?’

I had no real answer.

So, anyway, I think we’re safe, but still; Not Proven.

Another of my worries was that what we had between us would all have changed too much, that we had only ever existed as the fervently coupled entity we had been as a sort of two-person sexual freak; exquisite and fine in the rarefied, hot-house atmosphere of those episodically connected, lily-scented hotel rooms, but utterly unsuited to the rest of life, to the day-to-dayness of mundane existence, where such a delicate bloom would shrivel and die in the light of the commonplace. Maybe we had nothing more to say to each other than what we had already said, with our minds and our bodies, in those intense darknesses. Perhaps we both had habits, idiosyncrasies, that the other had never experienced because until then – in the erratically dispersed and limited intervals we’d been able to claim, inside those tropically lush, reality-divorced suites – we’d been too busy having sex to exhibit any other behaviours.