Iain Banks: Dead Air

So she discovered that I snored if I’d been drinking and then slept on my back (I’m sure there’s a lot more, but I trust her to tell me). What I found was that, try as she might, she could not resist slipping into rapid-fire Martinique-style French patois whenever she was with her relations or talked to them over the phone. Oh, and when she had a cold once, she was a rotten patient; she whined and over-dramatised like a man. She claims this is because she practically never gets ill and so has had no practice. That’s about it. Well, that and the craziness about being entangled. Her twenty-eighth birthday had come and gone without incident or appreciable change, and she had seemed vaguely, distractedly disappointed for a day or so, then had shrugged it off and got on with things.

‘How can you just give up on all that?’ I’d protested. ‘How can you just let it drop? I thought you really believed in all that crap!’

Ceel had shrugged. ‘I think perhaps that the cross-over point came earlier than it was meant to,’ she’d said, frowning. ‘In that underground car park. It was meant to happen on my birthday, but it happened then instead. That was a strong event. It pulled matters towards it, distorting things sufficiently.’ She’d nodded, as if coming to a decision, and smiled at me, radiantly. ‘Yes.’

I’d shaken my head.

The ironic thing was that now sometimes I had dreams and nightmares in which I was the entangled one, and caught terrifying glimpses into another reality where I hobbled round on crutches, a broken man, and never saw Celia again; or I’d wake panting from images of my own decaying body, a space of rotting flesh curled fetal within a concrete mould inside a water-logged packing case resting on the bottom of the Thames, downstream.

And in any case Celia still thought she was entangled, provisional. So: one of us? Both of us? Neither?

Me, I’d tick Option C there, but who the hell really knew?

Not Proven, if you liked.

I never went back to the house in Ascot Square. Celia slept aboard the Temple Belle maybe once a week. Craig and I became friends again, though we were kind of starting from scratch. Emma was probably the most okay about it. Nikki found out about me and her mum and gave me a glare I will remember to the end of my days. ‘Ken,’ she said, relenting and shaking her head ruefully. ‘What are you like?’

They all think Ceel’s wonderful. Ed does too. The first time he laid eyes on her he immediately said, ‘Leave im. Be mine. I’ll give up all the uvvers. An I mean for ever. Plob’ly.’

Celia smiled and said, ‘You must be Edward. How do you do?’

Later that evening, when she was out of earshot, I asked him, ‘You like her, then? Think I should stick with this one?’

I was trying to be funny but he looked at me pityingly and said, ‘Mate, I don’t fink it’s a question of you decidin to stick wif er.’ Even now sometimes he’ll just stare at the two of us and shake his head and look at me and say, ‘Ow?’

I suppose he’s right.

I don’t make a big thing of it, but I have told Ceel I love her, while she doesn’t so much tell me as let it slip, rarely. About the only time I ever see her get flustered or embarrassed is when she says something like she said that first time over the phone, and calls me ‘my love’, or something similar. I asked her about this one night when we were particularly relaxed and easy with things, and she just smiled and suggested that love was a word that had become cheapened. ‘Where love is concerned,’ she told me, ‘you must be a behaviourist.’ I thought about this and decided, Well, I feel loved.

So, Not Proven. Maybe no relationship that is not over is ever really proven, one way or the other. Perhaps that’s all we can ever hope for, in this fractured, fallen world we’ve constructed for ourselves, and our heirs.

Addicta became very big indeed and Jo’s face seemed to be everywhere, but thankfully then they or their management decided they had to crack the States, and they did the rising-without-trace thing and effectively disappeared off most people’s near-space radar screens.

I kept my job, amazingly.

The month before we were due to go to Martinique, we flew to Glasgow. All Celia had really seen of Scotland was this fucking bleak estate and draughty castle near Inverness and close-ups of the heads of stags and hinds through a telescope before some other bugger shot them, and I wanted to start showing her the rest of the place, in all its late-summer glory. We had a week, would hire a car, stay in B &Bs. We spent some time shopping and wandering around Glasgow during that first day, before we went back to my parents’ place for dinner, and – in a sudden shower, dodging traffic – we ran across Renfield Street, holding hands.