Iain Banks: Dead Air

‘Are you sure I can’t take you for something to eat? Come on; it’ll make up for not meeting Lord Thom of Yorke. I was all set to deliver this great treat and then I was thwarted. I really feel I need closure here. Seriously; I know some great places. We may well see some celebs.’

‘No, thanks.’

‘Is that your final answer?’

‘Yep.’

‘Would you like to call a friend?’

‘No, really. Look, you don’t have to drive me back to Craig’s, Ken. I can jump in a taxi.’

‘Jump?’

‘Well; hobble, fall in. Honest. I don’t mind.’

‘Not at all. I promised your dad I’d get you home safely.’

‘I can look after myself, you know, Ken,’ Nikki said, smiling indulgently at me.

‘Never doubted it. But taking you back is the least I can do. Rain check on lunch? Some other time? Say yes.’

‘Some other time,’ she agreed, sighing.

‘Brilliant.’ The little coil-warming lamp on the fascia went out; I started the engine and it settled down into an alarming percussive rattle. ‘Hey,’ I said, heaving on the bus-sized wheel to pull us out of the parking bay, ‘I don’t know if I’ve said, but I think it’s really cool you getting into Oxford.’

She shrugged, looked almost embarrassed.

‘You’re absolutely certain you don’t want to celebrate your ascension to the dreaming spires with some slap-up nosh?’

She just looked at me.

I laughed, turning for the exit ramp. ‘Oh well. Come on then; let’s get you home.’ I swung the Land Rover out of the Mouth Corp car park; we went bouncing and rattling and squeaking into Dean Street. I looked over at her. ‘What’s so funny?’

Nikki laughed to herself for a moment, then glanced over at me through her long red hair. ‘I wasn’t expecting a Land Rover,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d have a Harley Davidson, or a limo, or maybe a Smart or one of those Audis that looks like a bar of soap or something.’

‘I was never into Harleys,’ I said. ‘Suzis and Kwaks were my kind of bikes, back in my courier days. But this old thing -’ I slapped the dark grey plastic fascia under the narrow slab of the Landy’s windscreen ‘- despite, I’ll grant, looking like the sort of transport that would be infinitely more at home hauling a brace of sodden sheep from one field to another on a failing hill farm in darkest Wales, is almost the ideal car for London.’

‘You reckon?’ Nikki sounded like she was humouring me.

‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘It’s old, slow and a bit battered, so nobody’s going to want to nick it. Even the wheels don’t fit anything else. Look; comedy wipers.’ I turned on the windscreen wipers. On a Land Rover of this vintage they’re about seven inches long and just sort of flop about in a disheartened kind of way, looking more like they’re waving at the rain to welcome it onto the glass than undertaking to do anything so strenuous as actually clear the drops off the windscreen. ‘Look at that; pathetic. No self-respecting vandal’s even going to bother bending those. Wouldn’t be sporting.’

‘They are a bit pathetic,’ Nikki agreed as I turned them off and let them slump with what looked like exhausted gratitude to the base of the screen again.

‘You’re high up – as you may have noticed clambering awkwardly in here with your gammy leg – so you can see over most other traffic, the better to take advantage of what overtaking opportunities do arise in the hurly-burly of metropolitan motoring. Then there is the fact this is a Series Three of the diesel persuasion, so when people hear you coming they think you’re a taxi and often mistakenly treat you with the respect due to your standard Hackney Carriage. The ancient design means that the vehicle is narrow as well as having a short wheel-base for squeezing through gaps and into restricted parking spaces, and, lastly, driving one of these, no kerb in London holds any terror for you whatsoever. If a brief expedition onto the pavement or over a minor traffic island is required to facilitate progress, you just happily bump onto and over it without a second thought. Now, thanks to the appalling noise levels and seats patently constructed from low-grade friable concrete it would, certainly, be utterly hellish on long journeys or at any speed above a brisk jog, but then when the hell do you get to do either of those in London?’ I glanced over at her. ‘So, for an agricultural device only one automotive chromosome removed from a tractor, this is a surprisingly suitable urban runabout. And I commend the vehicle to the house.’

I waggled my eyebrows at her as we inched along Old Compton Street. I’d been developing this Why-a-Landy’s-great-for-London speech, and variations thereof, for nearly a year and this was, IMHO, a particularly fine and well-delivered example of the breed, which I thought might have elicited a pained grin if nothing else from the lovely Nikki, but it drew only a woundingly blank Oh-yeah, ho-hum look across her glowing features.

‘Could do with power steering, couldn’t it?’ she suggested.

‘And a better turning circle. But glad you spotted that,’ I said. ‘The chance to maintain upper body strength through in-car exercise is a truly valuable no-cost option.’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said. She was silent for a few moments, then nodded at the radio. ‘That’s not your station playing, is it?’

‘Ah, no; that’ll be Mark and Lard on Radio One.’

‘Isn’t that disloyal?’

‘Deeply. Can I let you in on a terrible secret?’

‘What?’

‘I’m only half joking about it being secret,’ I said first. ‘The press haven’t heard this yet and on a quiet news day with a following wind it could just make it into print and conceivably cause me problems in a straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back kinda stylee.’

‘Guide’s honour,’ she said, saluting ironically.

‘Thanks. Okay; here it is… hold on…’ I’d been gradually nudging the Land Rover’s much-dented front further and further into the traffic stream for the past few vehicle-gaps, and somebody in a nice car had finally got the message. I waved cheerfully at the silver Merc that let us out of Old Compton Street, as we swung onto Wardour Street to start heading north in a vaguely Highgate-ish direction. I looked at Nikki. ‘Yeah. It’s this: I cannot fucking stand commercial radio.’ I nodded. ‘There; it’s out now and I feel better for it.’

‘Including the station you work for, obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

‘So you listen to Radio One.’

‘It’ll get turned off promptly at three, but for large parts of the day, yes. And I have a definite weakness for Mark and Lard. There; listen.’ In fact, all we were listening to was the Landy’s rattling engine and ambient outside traffic noises until the Boy Lard squeaked, ‘Carry on,’ and the programme resumed. ‘See?’ I said. ‘Dead air, there; silence. Used to be anathema for DJs and radio people in general. Nowdays, well, nobody’s much bothered about leaving pauses any more, but these guys have made it into a feature. Repeat until funny, as they’d say themselves. Genius.’ I glanced at Nikki, who was looking sceptically at me from beneath her mass of red hair. ‘But the point,’ I insisted, ‘is that the Beeb has minimal advertising. I mean, they carry trailers for their own shows and those can get wearing enough, but what they don’t have is relentless high-rotation drivel every fifteen minutes from fucking loan companies, ambulance-chasing shyster legal firms and Chipboard Warehouse’s owner shouting at you from too near the mike to come on down and feel the cut of his special offers. I hate adverts. I prefer the licence fee. That’s how I want to pay; up front, efficiently, then get to listen to what I want to listen to and nothing else, whether it’s pop-clones or Beethoven or the sort of crap all-day talk shows that taxi drivers listen to.’