Dead Air (2 page)

‘Ken; Jo. How you two doing?’ Kulwinder joined us.

‘Fine, Kul,’ I told him. He was wearing a cool black suit with a white shirt and Nehru collar. Skin as rich and glistening as dark honey; big liquid eyes, currently shielded by some silver-framed Oakleys. Kulwinder was a gig promoter and one of those annoying people who was effortlessly stylish, never more so than when they went back to some old fashion people had half forgotten but which - when picked up again by somebody like Kulwinder - everybody suddenly realises actually looks pretty good. ‘Married life still suiting you?’

He smiled. ‘So far so good.’

‘Nice suit,’ Jo said, touching his sleeve.

‘Yeah,’ Kul said, holding out one arm and inspecting it. ‘Wedding present from Faye.’

Faye was a journalist/newsreader on the radio station I work for; she and Kul met at one of our after-show pub afternoons. I think I’m on record on air describing Faye as ‘comely’.

‘When do you head for NYC?’ I asked. They were honeymooning in the States; New York and Yosemite. Just for six days due to Kul’s gig work and the move to Shoreditch next week.

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Whereabouts are you staying?’

‘Plaza,’ Kul said. He shrugged. ‘Faye always wanted to stay there.’ He took a drink from the bottle of Hobec he was holding.

‘You going on Concorde?’ Jo asked. Kul liked to travel in style; drove a restored Citroën DS.

He shook his head. ‘No. Hasn’t started flying again yet.’

Jo looked at me accusingly. ‘Ken won’t take me to the States,’ she told Kul. He raised his eyebrows at me.

I shrugged. ‘I was thinking I might wait until democracy had been restored.’

Kulwinder snorted. ‘You really don’t like Dubya, do you?’

‘No, I don’t, but that’s not the point. I have this old-fashioned belief that if you lose the race you shouldn’t be given the prize. Getting it handed to you because of electoral roll manipulation, the police in your brother’s state stopping the black folks from voting, a right-wing mob storming a counting station and the Supreme Court being stuffed with Republican fucks is called … gosh, what’s the technical term? Oh, yeah; a coup d’état.’

Kul shook his head and looked at me with his big, dark eyes. ‘Oh, Ken,’ he said sadly. ‘Do you ever get down off that high horse?’

‘Got a whole stable full of them, Kul,’ I told him.

‘Shit,’ Jo said, staring at her mobile’s display. I hadn’t heard it ring; she usually had it set on vibrate (which about six months ago gave me the idea for one of the show’s more long-running and successful items. Well, long-running in the sense I still went back to it now and again, and successful by the perverse standards of me and my producer in that we’d had dozens of complaints about our crudity and obscenity rather than the more common handful). Jo thumbed a button, scowled heroically and said, with a totally insincere brightness, ‘Todd! How are you? What can I do for you?’

She shook her head and sneered down at the phone while Todd - one of her bosses at Ice House and allegedly deeply inadequate in every way - talked. She held the phone away from her and clenched her jaw for a moment, then turned and put the phone back to her ear. ‘I see. Can’t you deal with it?’ she said as she walked slowly along the broad terrace. ‘Right. No. I see. Yeah. Yeah. No, of course …’

‘So, what about you, Ken?’ Kul asked, leaning on the parapet and glancing at Jo, who was a few paces away now and giving the finger to her phone while still making noises into it. ‘Jo going to make an honest man of you?’

I looked at him. ‘Marriage?’ I asked softly, also glancing at Jo. ‘Are you talking about marriage?’ He just grinned. I leaned on the parapet too, looking down at the gradually browning flesh of the apple. ‘I don’t think so. Once was enough.’

‘How is Jude?’

‘All right, last I heard.’ My ex was currently shacked up with a cop in sunny Luton.

‘Still in touch?’ Kul asked.

‘Very occasionally.’ I shrugged. Slightly dodgy territory here, as Jude and I did meet up now and again and on a few of those occasions had - despite all the bitterness and recriminations and other usual failed-marriage stuff - ended up falling into bed. Not something I wanted Jo to know about, or Judith’s boy in blue. Not something I’d talked about with any of my friends in fact. Also not something that had happened for over half a year, so maybe that was over at last. Probably just as well.

‘You must have been seeing Jo since about when Faye and I met up,’ Kul said. Jo was on the other edge of the terrace, leaning on the parapet facing south, still on the phone and shaking her head.

‘That long?’

‘Yeah; about eighteen months.’ He drank again, looking past me at Jo. ‘I guessed you’d either be settling down or splitting up,’ he said quietly.

I showed the surprise I felt. ‘Why?’

‘Ken, your relationships rarely make it past the year-and-a-half mark. A year is probably the average.’

‘Jesus, Kul, do you keep notes on this sort of thing?’

He shook his head. ‘No, I just remember stuff, and I can see patterns.’

‘Well,’ I began, and would maybe have half admitted that perhaps Jo and I weren’t going anywhere, except she shut her phone and came marching over to us. ‘Trouble?’ I asked.

‘Yeah,’ she said, almost spitting. ‘Those fucking Addicta wankers again.’ Addicta were Ice House’s latest hot band. Happening; their time was very definitely now. I kind of liked their music - melodic English grunge with oases of surprising wistfulness - but had come to hate them in a vicarious, solidarity-inspired way because they were, according to the usually reliable source that was Jo, such total and complete arseholes to deal with. ‘That fucking useless
cunt
needs me to go and hold their fucking hands while some fucking precious snapper drapes them across a fucking Bentley or something. Supposed to happen yesterday but the fucking dickhead forgot to let me know.’ She kicked the parapet with one Doc Marten. ‘Cunt.’

‘You’re upset,’ I said. ‘I can tell.’

‘Oh, fuck off, Ken,’ she breathed, heading for the flat’s interior.

I watched her go. Chase after and try to smooth things, or let her go, not make a bad thing worse? I hesitated.

Jo stopped briefly to talk to Faye, who was heading in the opposite direction with some people, then she was gone. In a moment Faye was smiling at me and introducing these people and the possibility of pursuit and attempted mollification had gone.

‘Ken. Thought you were avoiding me.’

‘Emma. As if,’ I said, sitting beside her on one of the main space’s two chrome and black-suede couches. I chinked glasses. ‘You look great,’ I told her. Just jeans and a soft silk shirt, an Alice band in her hair, but she did look good. It’s a few drinks later here, but it definitely wasn’t the drink talking or looking. She just raised her eyebrows.

Emma was married to my best pal from school days in Glasgow, Craig Verrin; Craig and I were our own little two-guy gang for fifth and sixth year, before he left for University College London and within a year was settled down with Emma and a baby girl. Meanwhile I - viciously scapegoated by my teachers and examiners on some trumped-up charge of not having done the necessary work to pass my exams - left to make tea and score drugs for the more lazy and dissolute DJs on StrathClyde Sound.

Emma was smart and funny and attractive in a delicately blond way and I’d always loved her to bits, but things had become a little spoiled between us because we shared the guilty secret that, just the once, we’d slept together. She and Craig had been going through a bad patch when it had happened after Craig had strayed and been found out, and they were split-up again now - had been for a couple of years - so it somehow seemed not quite as bad as it could have been … but still. My best pal’s girl; what the hell had I been thinking of? The next morning had been probably the most embarrassing of my life; Emma and I had both been so ashamed it had been pointless trying to pretend to the other that what had happened had been anything other than a colossal mistake.

Well, it was just one of those things you wished you could delete from reality. I supposed we’d both done our best to forget about it, and just the passing of time made the guilt less sharp, but sometimes, when Emma and I looked each other in the eye, it was like it had been only yesterday, and we both just had to look away. I lived in intermittent terror that Craig would find out.

I suppose it was sort of similar to but different from when Jude and I fell into bed. And it was another relationship I couldn’t talk to anyone about. Come to think of it I couldn’t talk about most of my relationships/liaisons/whatever you wanted to call them, for one reason or another. I certainly couldn’t talk about the other big one; the one with Celia - Celia the svelte, Celia the sexy, Celia the slinky as a seal - either. Jeez, a shallow person could come away from a review of my private life with some sort of idea that I liked a frisson of danger in my dalliances, but that particular one was not just dangerous, that one could get me very seriously hurt, or worse.

In my darker moments it sometimes occurred to me that these entanglements - or one of them - would be the death of me.

‘Haven’t seen you for a while.’ Emma was leaning towards me, talking quietly, voice nearly lost in the party’s hubbub.

‘Things have been hectic.’

‘I bet. I saw Jo storming out.’

‘Well, no; that wasn’t quite a storm. It wasn’t a common walk, either, granted. Somewhere in between; more of a flounce.’

‘Something you said?’

‘Remarkably, no. No, that was a work-related flounce, or storm. Where’s Craig?’

‘Picking up Nikki.’ She glanced at her watch. ‘Should be here soon.’

‘And how is the gorgeous—?’

‘So,’ Emma broke in. ‘How’s your programme going?’

‘You have to ask?’ I pretended to be hurt. ‘Don’t you listen any more?’

‘You lost me when you were banging on about how only criminals should have guns.’

‘That’s not quite what we were saying.’

‘Maybe you should have been more clear. What were you saying?’

‘I can’t remember,’ I lied.

‘Yes you can. You were saying criminals should have guns.’

‘I was not! I was saying the idea that if you took hand-guns away from ordinary law-abiding people then only criminals would have guns was a crap argument for keeping guns.’

‘Because?’

‘Because it’s the ordinary law-abiding people who go crazy and walk into primary schools and open fire on a class of kids; compared to
that
, crims use guns responsibly. To them a gun’s just a tool, and something they tend to use on other crims, I might add, not a gym full of under-eights.’

‘You said criminals should have guns; that’s a quote. I heard you.’

‘Well, if I did, I was just exaggerating for comic effect.’

‘I don’t think it’s anything—’

‘You probably missed the way we developed that,’ I told her. ‘We decided only extroverts and nutters should get guns, crims or not. Because it’s always the quiet ones that go mad. Ever noticed that? The shocked neighbours always say the same things: he was very quiet, he always kept himself to himself … So; guns for nutters only. Makes sense.’

‘You’re not even consistent; you used to argue everybody should have guns.’

‘Emma, I’m a professional contrarian. That’s my job. Anyway, I changed my mind. I realised I was on the same side as people who argued that the States and Israel were havens of peace and security because everybody was tooled up.’

Emma snorted.

‘Well,’ I said, waggling the hand that wasn’t holding my drink, ‘the statistics aren’t that clear-cut. They have a lot of guns in Switzerland, too, and not much gun crime.’

Emma watched her drink as she swirled it in her glass. ‘You wouldn’t last in the States,’ she muttered.

‘What?’ I said, mystified.

‘Somebody would shoot you.’

‘What?’ I laughed. ‘Nobody’s shot Howard Stern.’

‘I was thinking more of jealous husbands, boyfriends, that sort of thing.’

‘Ah.’ I knocked back my Scotch. ‘Now that’s a different argument entirely.’ I stood up. ‘Can I get you another drink?’

In the long, gleaming gallery that was the kitchen, Faye was sweeping up a smashed glass from the slate floor. The caterers were unpacking more food from cool boxes. I squeezed through a group of people I vaguely knew via my pals in advertising, saying Hi and Hello and How are you?, smiling and patting, shaking offered hands.

Kul was leaning against the puce-coloured SMEG fridge while a suit with a flushed face and holding a slim briefcase tapped him on the chest.

‘… us have to go to work this afternoon you know,’ the suit was saying. ‘We have meetings.’

Kul shrugged. ‘I put on gigs, man. I work at weekends. This was the first day we could both manage.’

‘Well, okay, let you off this time,’ the flushed suit said, swaying. ‘But don’t let it happen again.’ He laughed loudly.

‘Ha ha,’ Kul said.

‘Yeah, don’t let it happen again,’ the suit repeated, heading for the front door. ‘Na; it was great. Great. Thanks. Thanks for the invite. Been brilliant. Hope you’re both very happy.’

‘Thanks for coming. Take care,’ Kul told him.

‘Yeah, thanks. Thanks.’ The suit bumped into somebody, spilling a drink. ‘Sorry, sorry.’ He lurched round to wave to Kul, who had already turned away and was headed for the loft’s main space. I poured myself some more Glen Generic then saw that somebody had brought a bottle of cask-strength Laphroaig, so abandoned my first glass and poured another of the Leapfrog and went to the fridge for some water.

‘Hey, Ken.’

I closed the fridge door and saw Craig, official best pal (Scottish). Usual faintly diffident grin and sloppy-looking, thrown-on clothes; wee round glasses beneath a shaven head. When Craig still had visible hair it was black like mine; maybe a little curlier. We’ve both always had the same medium-slim build and since third year in High School I’ve been a couple of inches taller. We used to get mistaken for brothers, which both of us thought unfairly flattered the other. Our eyes are different; his are brown and mine are blue. Alongside Craig was his daughter Nikki, balanced on a pair of crutches. A few seconds were required to take in this vision.