Authors: Iain Banks
‘I wish you could take me out,’ she said, smiling at the thought of it. ‘I would love to sit in a café with you, watching people go by. Go to lunch with you, sitting on a terrace by a river, in the sunlight. Be taken to a play or a film or to dance. Sit on a beach with you, under a palm tree, perhaps. Just the two of us crossing a street, holding hands. I find myself dreaming of these things sometimes, when I am low.’ She looked away, then back. ‘Then I think of this. The next time we shall meet. That makes everything well.’
I gazed into her eyes again, lost for a thing to say.
She smiled, winked. ‘It will get cold. Eat up.’
In the Lanesborough we spent hours in a cavernous bath, experimenting with various lotions and creams; she emptied a bottle of No. 5 into the oiled foam and I smelled of it for three days.
‘What do you
do
, Ceel?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How do you pass your days? What is your life like?’
‘I’m not sure I should tell you. This is supposed to be separate, not attached to our real lives, don’t you remember?’
‘I remember, but telling me what a more normal day is like isn’t going to make that big a difference.’
‘I do what the women of rich men are supposed to do; I shop and lunch.’
‘Friends?’
‘Some. Different friends for different things. Some for shopping and lunching, some at my health club, some for ice skating—’
‘You skate?’
‘A little. Not well. There are a couple of friends I have from my modelling days who are also married now, or settled down, with rich men. Just two who live in London. I visit Paris to see friends there, and one of my brothers. It is so easy now, with the train.’
‘You go to Paris a lot?’
‘A few times a year. Sometimes I go there with John. Usually he travels alone. He’s away often; Europe, South America. I go to Paris more than anywhere else. John doesn’t like me to spend nights away unless he knows the people I stay with well. In Paris it’s all right because I stay with my brother, who works for John and lives in a company apartment.’
‘What does your brother do?’
She looked at me. It was one of the few occasions she’d ever looked even slightly angry. ‘Nothing bad,’ she said sharply.
‘Okay.’ I held up my hands. ‘Do you have any really close friends?’
She turned away. ‘Most of the women my age have children, and that separates us.’ She shrugged. ‘I spend time on the phone each day, calling my family back on the island. And they come to visit sometimes.’ She paused. ‘Not as often as I’d like.’
(Later, while she was in the bathroom, I noticed her Bridge shoulder bag lying on a chair, and her mobile phone inside its little brown leather cave, a green light blinking slowly. She usually switched her phone off while we were together. This must be the phone my mobile knew only as Anonymous. I watched the faint green light for a few more beats of its tiny silicon heart.
Looking straight at it, it almost disappeared. I could see it better from the corner of my eye.
I swallowed a little pride, not to mention some principles, and quickly rolled over and dug the dainty Nokia out. I’d had a similar, if chunkier, model to this, two mobiles back, and knew how to access the phone’s own number. I scribbled it on a piece of hotel paper and stuffed the note in a jacket pocket after I’d returned the phone to her bag, long before she reappeared. This was a safety precaution, I told myself. In case I ever needed to warn her of something; like a terrorist threat we’d heard about via the newsroom but couldn’t broadcast because it would cause mass panic … Yes, something like that, say.)
In the Berkeley she had brought drugs and we had time to have frenetic coked-up sex and make slow, stoned love.
‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
‘
Mais non!
But I don’t!’ she giggled, coughing.
A little later, lying there in a stunned haze of drugged satiation, limbs spread where they’d fallen on our uncoupling, I watched a small patch of sunlight - the product of a sunbeam penetrating the tall sweep of the drawn-over curtains from the very centre of their summit - move slowly across the white sheets towards her left arm. Half asleep, I kept staring at the molten coin of yellow as Ceel drifted into a quiet, smiling doze. The egg-sized blob of buttery light slid gently up her coffee skin, slow as the hour hand on a clock, and revealed the tiny, years-old scars spattered on the flesh above the veins on her upper arm and the inside of her elbow.
A flurry of them, like pale, minutely puckered tear-shaped freckles on that smooth surface of golden brown.
I gazed at her face, lying half averted on the pillow, her blissful smile directed into the darkness of the suite, and then I looked down again at her arm. I thought about her time in Paris, and about Merrial and the bad situation he’d helped her out of. I decided I would never say anything, if she didn’t.
Beneath the light, beneath the skin, her blood pulsed slow and strong, and I imagined it, minutely warmed by that small fall of light, coursing through her body while she stared, unconscious and blind, back to the memory of a poisoned chemical rapture.
A few times I tried to follow her, to see where she lived, or just what she did next after one of these trysts. There was a bar in the Landmark with a view of reception. I sat there pretending to read. I’d peeked in her bag earlier to check which wig she was wearing that day, and in the wardrobe to see what clothes she’d arrived in; it was a grey suit, hanging neatly above some Harvey Nics’ bags. I sat there and I watched really carefully but I still didn’t see her. I don’t know if she had more than one wig, or if I just glanced down at the wrong moment and she’d walked quickly through, the bill already paid, or what, but I sat there for an hour and a half, drinking whisky and nibbling rice crackers until my bladder drove me from my look-out post.
A month later I tried again, sitting in a café across from the Connaught. Again, I didn’t see her, but after about an hour I got a call on my mobile.
Anonymous, said the screen. Oh-oh.
‘Hello?’
‘I live in Belgravia. Usually I go straight home. Sometimes I do a little more shopping. Bookshops, often … Are you still there?’
‘Yup. Still here,’ I said. I took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘You would make a very poor spy.’
‘Yeah.’ I sighed. ‘It’s not …’
‘It’s not what?’
‘It’s not some weird, obsessive thing. I mean, it’s not something to worry about. It’s not like I’m stalking you or anything like that. I’m interested. You intrigue me. We’re so … intimate and yet, you know, so … strange to each other. Strangers, still.’
‘I’m sorry it has to be that way. But it does. You do accept that?’
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You won’t do this again, will you? Please.’
‘No, I won’t. You’re not angry with me?’
‘More flattered than angry. But more alarmed than either. It’s not worth the risk.’
‘It won’t happen again. But …’
‘What?’
‘It was worth it for this phone call.’
She was silent for a moment. ‘You are very sweet,’ she said. ‘I have to go now.’
In the Ritz, I’d brought some E. We knocked the pills back with champagne, listened to some white-label chill-out sounds I’d been given by one of Ed’s DJ pals, and drifted into some sublimely blissful, loved-up fucking until my balls ached with the emptying.
‘You never ask me about John.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Do you hate him?’
‘No. I don’t know him. I don’t hate him just because he’s your husband. If he’s some sort of crime boss, I suppose I ought to hate him on principle for being what he is, but I can’t work up any enthusiasm for the subject. Maybe I’ve taken to heart your idea of keeping this compartmentalised from real life. Or maybe I just don’t want to think about your husband in the first place.’
‘Do you ever hate me?’
‘Hate
you
? Are you mad?’
‘I stay with him. I married him.’
‘I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt there, I think.’
That was the time I swallowed more pride and checked her purse. I think I was half expecting to find a fat roll of bank notes, but there was barely a hundred in there. It had occurred to me that she would not want to pay all these hotel bills by credit card, not if she was trying to keep all this as secret as possible. Finding no thick Swiss-roll of grubby twenties kind of stumped me. It was only later I thought that maybe she paid in cash all right, but before rather than after.
(That was the longest interval, after the Ritz. Her husband was taking her to Oz and New Zealand on a month-long holiday, and there was a week-long overlap while Jo and I spent a fortnight doing the tombs on the Nile and snorkelling in the Red Sea. While she was away I made the mistake of going to see a film called
Intimacy
about a couple who meet up every now and again in a filthy flat for sex, and remain strangers to each other. It was probably a good film in a British art-house kind of way but I hated it and walked out halfway through, something I’d never done in my life. Sometimes I’d take out my mobile and cursor through to Ceel’s number, and just sit and stare at it for a few moments, until the phone’s backlighting clicked off. Infected by Celia’s caution, I hadn’t even entered her name in the mobile’s own memory, or the SIM card’s, just put the number in by itself. As far as my phone was concerned, she was just Location 96.)
In the Savoy one night, amongst mirrors and acres of cream and gilt, in a suite looking out across the dark river to the floodlit bulk of the Festival Hall, she had turned off all the lights and drawn the curtains right back. She placed a small seat in front of the tall, open windows. She had me sit there, bollocks to the chintz, already licked sweetly, achingly erect, then she straddled me, facing the same way, both of us gazing out to the light-browned clouds and the few bright stars between, while the sounds and smells of the summer city rolled in through the opened doors of glass.
‘Like this,’ she said, placing my hands just so, so that I was, in effect, holding her in a head lock. ‘Ah, yes.’
‘Lordy fucking mama.’
‘So what’s the problem? Basically you’re having the perfect affair. Perfect sex.’
‘I don’t know. Well, the actual sex … fuck, yeah. But … I don’t know.’
Craig and I were sitting in his lounge, watching football on the telly. It was half-time; time for Men To Talk. After peeing, anyway. Nikki was in her room, two floors up, listening to music and reading. I’d told Craig the absolute minimum about my very occasional affair with Celia.
Normally I might have shared this sort of thing with Ed, who possessed the merit of pursuing - with extravagant success - a lifestyle that made mine look restrained to the point of celibacy in comparison, but the trouble was I’d asked him about Mr Merrial that day in the Hummer, and I wasn’t absolutely sure that I hadn’t mentioned seeing Mr M’s wife at the time, too, and - paranoid though I knew it was really - I felt it would be just possible that Ed would put two and two together and, well, faint, probably.
Maybe Celia guessing about the fact Jude and I still fell into bed together every now and again had spooked me a little.
‘Look at it objectively,’ Craig said. ‘You meet up with this mystery female whom you describe as the most beautiful woman you’ve ever slept with. You always meet in circumstances, surroundings, that you describe as somewhere between “very nice” and “sybaritic”, where you proceed to fuck the arse off her and …’
‘Yeah, but the fact remains I’m in a relationship where the
best
thing that can happen is that it just fizzles slowly, sadly out … What?’
‘Oh fuck.’
‘What?’
‘Just there.’
‘
What
?’
‘When I said “you fuck the arse off her”, right?’
‘… Yeah.’
‘You winced. Well, your cheek winced. Like a facial tic.’
‘Never … Did I? Really? Oh. Okay. Right. So?’
‘That means you’re falling in love with her.
Now
you have a problem.’
The big
Breaking News
thing was stuttering. It got all rather hyper and frenetic over the next day or two after our meeting with Debbie the Station Manager, the way sometimes these relatively trivial things tend to, with urgent, all-hours, weekend-long phone calls, texts and voice mails flying back and forth between Channel Four, Capital Live!, the production company, Winsome, assorted producers, assistants, secretaries, PAs, agents, lawyers and people whose job it seemed to be purely to ring up and say they needed to speak to somebody urgently, all tying up a significant proportion of the capital’s mobile and fixed-line telephony capacity trying to get this incredibly vital piece of exciting, epoch-making, edgy, challenging, confrontational television arranged for the Monday evening. Even Sir Jamie himself got involved, because according to my contract he needed to give personal permission for me to appear on another not pre-agreed media outlet. This turned out not to be a problem as he was a good friend of the owner of Winsome Productions, and even had shares in the company.
Then, of course, just as everybody concerned had whipped themselves up into a high, teetering, effervescent froth of wild-eyed expectation and teeth-chattering frenzy, it all fell apart.
Even I’d got myself all worked up, and I’m Joe Totally Cynical about these things after years of people telling me they have this great project for getting me on telly and how they’re really excited about bringing a new dimension to my work, and then nothing happening.
‘You’re telling me it’s not fucking going ahead.’
‘It’s being postponed,’ Phil said tiredly, putting his mobile down on the scratched wooden table. We were in the Capital Live! canteen on the floor beneath Debbie’s office, having an early breakfast. It was just after seven o’clock. We’d come in early to do a special recorded edition of the show so that I could get to the Channel Four studios in time for the recording of
Breaking News
(they’d backed off the original idea of doing it live).
My mobile vibrated on my belt. I checked the display. My agent. ‘Yes, Paul?’ I said. Then, ‘Yes, I just heard.’ Then, ‘Yeah, I know. Me too. Par for the fucking course. Yeah … yada and then yada, raised to the power of yada. Yeah, when I see it. In fact probably not until I see it when it’s number thirty-seven on TV’s One Hundred Most Embarrassing Moments. Yeah, we’ll see. Okay. You too. Bye.’