Authors: Iain Banks
‘And is he?’
She was silent for a while. ‘He treats me well. He has never struck me. He became cold towards me about the time when it was found I could not have children.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘The point is more that it does not matter that he is a good husband to me; what matters is that he is a bad man to others. He would say they always deserved it, but …’
‘Did you know he was like that when you married him?’
She was silent for a moment. ‘Yes and no. I knew a little. I did not want to know it all. I should have.’
‘Do you mean to stay with him?’
‘I would be afraid to tell him I was leaving him. Also, practically my whole family works for one of his businesses now, on the island.’
‘Ah.’
‘Ah, indeed. What about you, Kenneth?’
‘What don’t you know from my many exciting and unfailingly accurate profiles in top media outlets?’
‘Your marriage? Your wife?’
‘I married a nurse called Jude. Judith. Met in a club when I was between jobs, not long after I moved down to London. Great sex, similar interests, robust cross-platform political beliefs with only a few troublesome legacy systems - she believed in astrology - compatible groups of friends … and we certainly thought we were in love. She didn’t really want to get married but I insisted. I knew what I was like; I knew I was very likely to stray, or certainly to want to stray, to be unfaithful, and I came up with this bizarre concept that if I got married then the fact I’d made a solemn promise to her to forsake all others, made a legally binding commitment, would stop me.’ I paused. ‘Probably the single most barmy idea I’ve ever entertained in my entire adult life, and that when, by common assent, the field of other contenders is both wide and deep.’ I shrugged gently, so as not to jar her head where it lay against my shoulder and chest. ‘However. I cheated, she found out, confronted me with it, and I swore it wouldn’t happen again. I meant it, too. I always meant it. Repeat until no longer funny.’ I breathed deeply. ‘She’s okay now; in a stable relationship. I still see her now and again.’
‘Do you still love her?’
‘No, ma’am.’
‘You still sleep with her.’
I felt my body jerk. She must have felt it too. ‘You guessing, Celia?’ I asked. ‘Or are we in some creepy
Play Misty For Me
vibe here?’
‘Guessing, you would call it. I am good at it.’
‘Well, as you guessed.’ I shrugged again. ‘We never mean to, it just happens … Old times’ sake, I suppose. Lame, but true. But anyway not for a while.’
‘And you have a regular girlfriend?’
‘Yes. Nice girl. Bit mad. Works for a record company.’
‘She doesn’t know, I hope. About you and me. I hope nobody does.’
‘Nobody.’
‘You don’t mind? Some men like to boast.’
‘Not me. And no, I don’t mind.’
Usually we met on a Friday, but not every time. Never at the weekends. She said this was because she liked to listen to me on the radio beforehand. Soon, with every show I did, I’d start to wonder, was she listening? More to the point, was she listening in an eight-hundred-quid-a-night suite, slowly undressing in the darkness while a cranked-up heating system wound round to maximum gradually toasted every molecule of air in the place?
On several occasions, especially on Fridays, I had to stand people up. Jo, a couple of times. I claimed a commiserating, men-only drinking party with a just-dumped colleague on the first occasion, and plain alcohol-induced forgetfulness in a mobile-reception-free dive bar the second time. Jo shouted at me on both occasions, then wanted to have sex, which was awkward. I just about managed it the first time, though I felt a) sore, and b) guilty that I was still thinking about Ceel. The second time I faked incapability through drunkenness. I began to make Friday night engagements tentative rather than firm.
Wherever it was I met Ceel, she was always there, always waiting, almost always reading a book - usually something recent I’d heard of:
White Teeth
,
Man and Boy
,
Bridget Jones’s Diary
. Once it was
The Prince
, once
Madame Bovary
, and once the
Kama Sutra
, which she was reading for ideas we didn’t really need. Twice it was
A Brief History of Time
. The room - suite - was always dark, always hot. There would be something light to eat if we wanted, and vintage champagne. It was a while before I realised the glasses we drank from were always the same ones, and that there would always be a different, spare glass present. She brought the crystal flutes herself; they belonged to her. She seemed pleased that I’d noticed.
‘You were a model, you said?’
‘Yes.’
‘What, like, clothes?’
She gave a one-breath laugh into the warm dark. ‘Those are what one usually models, Kenneth.’
‘Swim-wear, lingerie?’
‘Sometimes. I began in swim-wear, when a magazine came to the island to shoot a feature and two of their models were hurt in a car crash. That’s how I got my break.’
‘What about them?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Did they break anything?’ I shook my head, already feeling foolish. ‘Sorry, I—’
‘The two models? Yes, one broke an arm and both had facial injuries. I don’t think either ever worked as a model again. It was very upsetting. Not how I’d have chosen to get into such a career.’
‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘That’s all right.’
‘Did you appear mostly in French magazines?’
‘Yes. I’m afraid I have no portfolio to show you.’
‘What was your modelling name?’
‘Celia McFadden.’
‘McFadden?’ I said, laughing. ‘What possessed you to take a Scottish name?’
‘It was my maiden name,’ she said, sounding surprised.
‘You’re a McFadden, from Martinique?’
‘My great-great-grandfather was a slave on Barbados. He was given the name of his slave master, who may have been his biological father. He escaped, and ended up in Martinique.’
‘Woh. Sorry.’
‘That’s all right,’ Celia said, shrugging. ‘You changed your name, didn’t you?’
‘Yeah. Not officially, just for the radio. It still says McNutt on my passport.’
‘McNutt?’ She smiled.
‘Yes, with two “t”s. So, this,’ I said, changing the subject and stroking the lightning scar, ‘has appeared in public, has it? It wasn’t a problem?’
‘Perhaps it was a small problem. I always had enough work but I’m sure I lost some jobs because of it. But no, I don’t think it ever appeared.’
‘What did they do, cover it with make-up?’
‘No. They shot from the other side.’
‘So all your model shots are from the right?’
‘Mostly. Though they don’t all appear so once they’re printed. You just reverse the neg.’
‘Oh, right. Of course.’
‘Sometimes, when the light or the background meant we had to, they would shoot from my left side and I would hold my arm in a certain way and if there was anything of the scar visible it would be air-brushed out later. It is not a problem.’ She shrugged. ‘Covering things up is easy.’
The latest she ever stayed was ten p.m. I was welcome to stay longer if I wanted, but I never did, and I knew she preferred me to leave first. She would arrive and depart with her hair tightly compressed under a wig - usually blond - and wore large dark glasses and baggy, undistinguished clothes.
In Claridge’s, she’d stripped the bed to its bottom sheet and covered the surface and a dozen extra pillows in red rose petals. The lights mostly stayed on for that one. This was where she finally explained her insane theory about having half died when the lightning struck her.
‘
What?
’
‘There are two mes. Two of me. In different, parallel worlds.’
‘Hold on. I think I know this theory. Simple idea but the complexities are hideous.’
‘Mine is quite simple.’
‘Yeah, but the real one is confusing to a bonkers degree; according to it there are an infinity of yous. A pleasing prospect, I might add, except there is also, are also … anyway, an infinity of mes, too, and your husband. Husbands. Whatever. See how confusing it is?’
‘Yes, well,’ she said, waving one dismissive hand. ‘But for me it is very simple. I half died then, when the lightning struck me. In that other world I am half dead, too.’
‘But also half alive.’
‘Just as in this one.’
‘So did you fall off this cliff in the other world, or not?’ I asked, deciding to humour this matter-of-fact madness of hers.
‘Yes and no. I did, but I also fell back onto the grass, just as I did here.’
‘So in this world, here, you fell off the cliff too?’
‘Yes.’
‘And yet you woke up on the grass.’
‘That part of me did. This part of me did.’
‘So in the other world? What? If you woke up on the grass in this one, she must have not woken up, because she was lying dead at the bottom of the cliff.’
‘No, she woke up too, on the grass.’
‘So who the hell fell off the bleedin cliff?’
‘I did.’
‘You did? But—’
‘Both of I.’
‘I and I? What, now you’re a Rastafarian?’
She laughed. ‘We both fell off the cliff. I remember it happening. I remember seeing myself fall, and the noise the air made, and how my legs made a useless running motion and how I could not scream because the air had been knocked out of my lungs and how the rocks looked as I fell towards them.’
‘So did the lightning kill … half kill you, or was it the fall?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘I don’t know. Does it?’
‘Perhaps both did. Or half did.’
‘I think we’ve gone on to quarters by this stage.’
‘Perhaps either would have been enough. All that matters is that it happened.’
‘It would be useless to suggest, I suppose, that this might all really only have happened in your head, the result of having ninety thousand volts zapped through your brain pan and down your body?’
‘But of course it is not useless to suggest it! If that is what you need to believe to make sense of what happened to me by your way of thinking, then of course that is what you must believe.’
‘That’s not quite what I meant.’
‘Yes, I know. But, you see, when it happened, I was there, and you, my dear, were not.’
I let out a long breath. ‘Right. So … so what are the symptoms of you being only half alive in this world … and the other one? You do seem wholly and, I would risk saying, even vibrantly alive in this world, to me. Especially about ten minutes ago. Oh, though there is that thing about the French calling it the little death, of course. Though that’s not what you’re talking about, is it? But back to the symptoms. What makes you feel this?’
‘That I feel it.’
‘Right. No, no, not right. I’m not getting it.’
‘It feels obvious to me. In a way I always knew it. Reading about parallel universes simply made sense of that feeling. I didn’t feel any more certain of what I felt, and it did not really alter what I felt, or what I believed, but it made it more possible for me to explain it to others.’
I laughed. ‘So all we’ve been talking about in the last five minutes is
after
it became easier to explain?’
‘Yes. Easier. Not easy. Perhaps “less difficult” would be a better formulation.’
‘Right.’
‘I think it might all change on my next birthday,’ she said, nodding seriously.
‘Why?’
‘Because the lightning hit me on the day of my fourteenth birthday, and on my next birthday I will be twenty-eight. You see?’
‘Yes, I do. My God, your aberrant personal belief system is actually contagious. I suppose they all are.’ I sat up in the bed. ‘You mean that on the day of your twenty-eighth birthday, in April next year …’
‘The fifth.’
‘… What?’
She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps I die. Perhaps the other one of me dies.’
‘And if the other one dies?’
‘I will become fully alive.’
‘Which will manifest itself … ?’
She smiled. ‘Well, perhaps I will decide that I love you.’
I stared into those amber eyes. It seemed to me then that she had the most direct, clearly honest gaze of anybody I had ever met. No humour there just now, no irony. Not even doubt. Puzzlement, perhaps, but no doubt. She really believed all this.
‘There,’ I said, ‘is that big little word that neither of us have spoken until now.’
‘Why should we speak it?’
I wondered what
that
meant. I might have pursued the matter, but then she shrugged again, and her immaculate breasts moved in just such a way that in this world and surely any other all I could say was, ‘Oh, come here.’
In the Meridien Piccadilly, finding she had a suite with a kitchen attached, she had already been across to Fortnum and Mason and bought the ingredients to make an omelette, flavoured with saffron. She was trying out different types of underwear on that occasion, so that I came, bizarrely, to associate the smell of eggs cooking in olive oil with a basque and stockings.
I laughed as she presented the tray to me in bed.
‘What?’ she asked.
‘You spoil me,’ I said as she jumped up onto the bed, her stockinged legs folded neatly beneath her. She took up a fork. I gestured at the food, at her. ‘This is … pretty much most guys’ fantasy.’
‘Good,’ she said. She looked round the dark bedroom, then at me, and smiled. ‘No complaints here, either.’
‘Think you might let me pay for one of these conjugal visits one day? Or even take you away for a weekend?’
She shook her head quickly. ‘It’s better this way.’ She put the fork down. ‘This has to be outside of real life, Kenneth. That way we can get away with it. We expose ourselves less. Less of a risk is taken. And, because this happens outside of our normal lives, it feels less connected to what we might talk about to other people. It is like a dream, no? So we are both less likely to say something that might give us away. Do you understand?’
‘Yeah, sure. Just a residual scrap of old-school male pride, wishing to pay for something. But it’s all right; being an intermittently kept man rather appeals to me.’