Authors: Iain Banks
‘Oh-kay,’ Debbie said slowly. ‘But any more calls like that and we pull the phone lines. Agreed?’
We all looked around, nodding.
‘Maybe you should get another job,’ Jo suggested.
‘Why? I love my job!’ I protested.
‘Do you?’ Jo stopped and turned to me. We were walking down Bond Street on the second Sunday in December. ‘Ken, you hate most of what you do and what you’re involved in.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘Think about it. Would you listen to Capital Live! if you didn’t have to?’
‘Are you mad? Of course not!’
‘The music you play; like that?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous! It’s almost all shite during the day. Fucking Westlife and Hear’say. Things have come to a pretty grisly pass when you play Jamiroquai and they sound like a breath of fresh air.’
‘What about the people who phone in?’
‘With a few honourable exceptions, they’re dullards, dead-beats, opinionated dingbats and bigoted fuckwits.’
‘The adverts?’
‘Don’t even get me started on the fucking ads.’
‘Fellow DJs?’
‘Vapid cretins. Offer them a straight choice between opening another supermarket for a fat fee and sucking Sir Jamie’s cock for nothing and their single brain cell would fuse.’
‘The Tories? New Labour? American Republicans? The CIA? The IMF? The WTO? Rupert Murdoch? Conrad Black? The Barclay Brothers? What-d’you-call-him Berlusconi? George Dubya Bush? Ariel Sharon? Saddam Hussein? Thingy Farrakhan? Osama Bin Laden? The entire Saudi royal family? Muslim fundamentalists? The Christian Right? Zionist settlers? The UVF? Continuity IRA? Exxon? Enron? Microsoft? Tobacco companies? Private Finance Initiatives? The War Against Drugs? The Cult of the Shareholder?’
She only stopped, I assumed, because she ran out of breath. I stared at her for a moment, then shook my head. ‘How
could
you leave out Thatcher?’
She spread her arms. ‘There is just so much you hate, Ken. Your life, your working life; it’s, like, full of stuff and people and things and organisations you just can’t stand.’
‘You’re trying to make some sort of point here, aren’t you?’
‘In fact, forget your working life; your leisure life, too. Can we go to the States on holiday?’
‘I’ve told you; not until—’
‘Democracy is restored. Okay. Venice? Rome?’
‘With that corrupt fuck in charge, surrounded by his fascist—’
‘Australia?’
‘With
their
racist immigration policy? No fucking—’
‘China?’
‘Not while the butchers of Tiananmen Square are still—’
‘I rest my case. Is there anywhere—?’
‘Iceland.’
‘Iceland?’
‘I’d love to go to Iceland, so long as they don’t start whaling, obviously. Plus we have been to Egypt, and then there’s France. I feel cool about going to France. I’ve finally more or less forgiven them for sinking the
Rainbow Warrior
. I’ve even started buying French wine again.’
‘You’ve always bought French wine.’
‘No, I haven’t. It was embargoed; I had personal sanctions against it until about six months ago.’
‘So what the hell is champagne?’
‘Ah. Champagne is different. Though admittedly I ought to despise it on principle as a sort of geographical closed-shop. I look forward to the day when a workers’ cooperative in New Zealand can produce the equivalent of a ’75 Krug.’
‘Jesus. Is there
anything
you really like, without qualification? ’
‘There’s loads of things I like!’
‘Like what?’
‘Apart from the usual suspects?’
‘I’m not talking about films.’
I laughed. ‘Me neither. I mean apart from friends and family and world peace and little babies and Nelson bleedin Mandela.’
‘Yeah. Exactly. What?’
‘Students.’
‘Students?’
‘Yeah, it seems to be fashionable to be horrible about the little fuckers, but I think they’re okay. If anything they’re a bit too studious these days, not rebellious enough, but basically they’re all right.’
‘What else?’
‘Cricket. I honestly believe cricket may well be the greatest game in the world. It is total heresy for a Scotsman to admit to this, and I entirely see the point of the American who said that only the English could invent a game that lasts for five days and can still end in a draw, but I just can’t help it; I love it. I don’t completely understand it and I still don’t know all the rules, but there’s something about its bizarrely erratic pace, its sheer complexity, its … psychology that just lifts it above any other sport. Even including golf, which is full of grotesquely over-paid reactionary bastards but is still a thing of skill and craft and beauty, and was, of course, invented in Scotland, like so much other truly neat stuff.’
‘That’s still only two things.’
I clicked my fingers. ‘Liberals. The chattering classes. Political correctness. Basically I’m for ’em. Again, they get a bad press from veracity-challenged moral midgets employed by greedy zillionaires to wank-off bigots, but not me; I stand right by them. They’re my kind of people. Liberals want niceness. What the hell is wrong with that? And, bless them, they do it in the teeth of such adversity! The world, people, are disappointing them all the time, constantly throwing up examples of what total shites human beings can be, but liberals just take it all, they hunker down, they grit their sandals and they keep on going; thinking well of people, reading the
Guardian
, sending cheques to good causes, turning up at marches, getting politely embarrassed by working-class oafism and just generally getting all hot under the collar when they see people being treated badly. That’s the great thing about liberals; they care for people, not institutions, not nations, not religions, not classes, just people. A good liberal doesn’t care whether it’s their own nation or their own religion or their own class or their own anything that’s being beastly to some other bunch of people; it’s still wrong and they’ll protest about it. I’m telling you, it’s a sick, sick nation that turned the word “liberal” into an expletive. But there you are; the Yanks think basketball is a sport and that there’s nothing cruel and unusual about taking four minutes to kill a man by putting thirty thousand volts through him.’
‘Did you say you liked political correctness? News to me.’
‘Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls Being polite, or what everybody else calls Not being a right-wing bigot.’
Jo looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘I bet I could find tapes of you banging on about how political correctness was something else to hate.’
‘Like everybody else, I have my own definitions of what is what, and I would never seek to deny that a few stupid people can take a perfectly good idea too far, but I stand by my contention that political correctness is more sinned against than sinning. Besides, a chap can change his mind. Oh, and journalists. I like them.’
‘
What
?’ Jo said, incredulous. ‘You
hate
journalists!’
‘No I don’t, I just hate the ones who make up quotes, subsidise criminals, hound the innocent, collude with the truly talentless and otherwise squander their undoubted gifts on tat. A disgrace they assuredly are. But a journalist determined to get to the truth of a story, expose lies and corruption, to tell people what’s really going on, to make one lot of humanity care for another lot, or even just start thinking about them? Weight-in-gold, they are. In fact, weight-in-microchips. Guardians of liberty. Mean more to democracy than most politicians. Fucking secular saints. Course, it helps if they’re liberal, too. Don’t shake your head at me, young lady. I’m being serious.’
‘Now I know you’re taking the piss.’
‘I swear, I’m not!’ I said, waving my arms. ‘And I just thought of something else I like.’
‘Yeah? What?’
I nodded. ‘This city.’
‘London?’
‘Yep.’
‘But you’re always going on about how the tube is dirty, smelly and dangerous, and the traffic is awful, and the air stinks, and the people aren’t as friendly as they are in Glasgow, and the drinks are too small and expensive, and it’s not as exciting as New York or as civilised as Paris or as clean as Stockholm or as cool as Amsterdam or as groovy as San Francisco or—’
‘Yeah yeah yeah, but just turn and look behind you. Look.’
Jo turned round and looked at the shop window she’d had her back to while we’d being going through all this stuff. We’d included Bond Street in our Sunday after-lunch stroll because I’d wanted to look in some posh jewellers and see if they had my excessive new watch. The shop we’d happened to stop outside was a jewellers. And its window was full of fish slices, suspended in the space behind the glass like a surreal hail of twinkling trowels. It was The Rabinovich Collection of Antique and Modern Silver Fish Slices, to quote the elegant sign in the window (we were a few doors down from a shop called Zilli, which seemed somehow appropriate). ‘How the fuck,’ I asked, ‘can you not love a city that throws up stuff like that?’
Jo was shaking her head. She was blond again, and had taken to teasing her short hair into little meringue-like spikes. She stuck her arm through mine. She was wearing a silver puffa jacket. I wore an old RAF greatcoat an uncle had given me when I was seventeen. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’m getting cold.’ We started walking again, heading south, back towards the river.
‘And music, of course,’ I said. ‘I love music.’
‘But you just said you hated the stuff you have to play.’
‘Yeah, because it’s commercial effluent. It’s the sonic equivalent of a Coke or a McDonald’s; it fills you up but it’s just production-line shit and there’s precious little in there that’s really any good for you. The music I love is the music people make because they have to, because they need to, from their souls, not their wallets.’
‘You don’t believe in souls.’
‘I don’t believe in immortal souls. I just mean the kernel of who you are, not anything superstitious.’
‘Yeah, well, be thankful you just have to play the stuff and don’t need to get involved in the process of making it.’
‘You make it sound like pies.’
‘Pies?’
‘Yeah. You know; that thing about it being a good idea - if you like eating pies - never, ever to see how they were made and what goes into them.’
‘Yeah, well,’ Jo said, hoisting one steel-studded eyebrow, ‘believe me; there are a lot of pie bands out there.’
‘I believe the same applies to sausages.’
‘Ditto.’
I looked over to the far side of the street, at the DKNY shop. I remembered Ceel telling me about its five thousand red twin-towers T-shirts, nearly three months ago. In the December cold I shivered for the dark, baking heat of that hotel room. That had been another, solitary feature of today’s walk, one I couldn’t share with Jo. Our route had taken us past a few of the hotels I’d been in with Ceel. We had passed Claridge’s just ten minutes earlier, and I’d almost suggested that we went in for a drink, or a pot of tea, or just the chance to pretend we were guests and get to ride in a lift that actually had a uniformed lift-operator, but in the end some prophylactic instinct, some grudgingly acknowledged requirement to obey Celia’s stricture about keeping our affair as separate as possible from the rest of our lives, prevented me.
‘Is
that
your watch?’ Jo said, stopping at another jewellers’ window and nodding at a display of chunkily sparkling Breitlings on a background of piled yellow cloth.
I glanced at the arm-lengthening bracelet of heavy metalwork on my left wrist. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not nearly expensive or complicated enough.’
Jo looked at my new watch and shook her head as we walked on. ‘That thing makes you look ten years older, you know.’
‘Don’t diss my timepiece, ho.’
‘It makes you look like you should be driving a Roller and shopping for - fucking hell; those.’
We both stared at and then walked quickly past a window containing two large thrones - mere chairs they were not - made of cut crystal and red velour.
‘Holy shit.’
‘Did we really see those?’
‘I feel ill.’
We walked to the Embankment via St James’s Park, through similarly sauntering locals and clumps of tourists, amongst coots, storks, black swans and panhandling squirrels. Ahead, the top of the London Eye stood out against sky, revolving almost imperceptibly over the departmental buildings of Whitehall like an ironic, skeletal halo.
‘Hey! Skating. Cool.’
‘Almost by definition,’ I muttered. ‘Look, can we head back after this? My feet are sore.’
‘Yeah, okay.’
Jo guided me into the great courtyard of Somerset House, where a temporary ice rink had been set up for the winter holidays. Strings of lights articulated the wide quad. Tall windows, columns, arches and chimneys looked down upon the scene, where hundreds of people ambled about, sat swaddled in thick clothes outside little cafés, or stood watching the skaters, who circulated above the inscribed white ice like a slow, flat sweep of leaves caught in a stirring wind. I could smell coffee, fried onions and mulled wine.
Above us was a water-colour sky, hues bleeding and feeding and fading into each other as the light started to wane above the skeins of slowly drifting cloud.
On the ice, people laughed and shrieked, holding on to each other or the sides of the rink, doubled over, feet skidding. Squeals echoed off the courtyard’s imposing architecture as people fell thumping to the cold, scarred surface of the rink. A gap opened in the crowds on the ice, there was a blur of rising blue as somebody jumped, and that was when I saw it was Celia.
She was dressed in a powder-blue skating outfit: tights, a short, flared skirt and a sort of tight tunic with a high neck and long sleeves. She wore brown gloves and white skates. Her hair was gathered up. Rising to the top of the jump that had first caught my attention, she twisted sleekly in the air, spinning once, then landed square on her right blade, knee bent, her left leg held out straight behind her. The quiet smack of her blade landing sounded across the ice between the circulating bodies; she sliced away, arms out to balance herself, sizzing across the ice in a wide, slowly tightening spiral. She skilfully avoided a couple of other skaters and then, with an elegant little skip, turned to skate backwards into a clearing space near the centre of the rink, stooping and tensing her body for another jump.