Authors: Iain Banks
‘What? At my age? Oh, lissen to you, you rogue man! Ha!’
‘I’d have to marry you; I’d be Ed’s father. He’d never forgive me.’
‘Stop! I’ll bust meself. Where’s me hanky? Oh, you surely are a terrible man. I’d get the boy himself to give you a serious talkin to but he’s in France or Rome or some damn place like that, honey, so you’ll have to call his mobile.’
‘No problem, Mrs C. Actually I knew he was away; I just wanted an excuse to hear your voice.’
‘There see now, you bein terrible again.’
‘I just can’t help myself. It’s the power you have over me.’
‘Terrible man, terrible, terrible rogue of a man.’
‘Okay, Mrs C. I’ll try Ed’s mobile. It was good talking to you. Oh … I did want to have a word with a friend of his, too. Ah … Robe? Yeah; Robe. Would you have his number there at all?’
‘Robe? What you want to talk to him for, hon?’
‘… Sorry, just blowing my nose there, Mrs C. Excuse me.’
‘You excused, hon. So, what’s this you wantin to talk to Robe for?’
‘Ah, yeah; I was talking to somebody. In a record company. Ice House? They’re pretty big. Apparently the company, the record label, it’s looking for security people; bodyguards, that sort of thing. For artists, rap artists, when they come over from the States. I just thought Robe could do that, maybe. I mean, these are often pretty serious people themselves, ex-gangsta, a lot of them; they wouldn’t have any respect for the average white kid with broad shoulders who’s used to turning people away from clubs because they’ve got the wrong footwear. Robe, however, they’d relate to. But it’s straight work, and well paid. I know he could do it. Could lead to, well, who knows?’
‘Be a lot more respectable than what he usually gets up to, what I hear. Robe is Yardie, Kennit. He dangerous. Too many guns. He’s not welcome in this house no more. Ed don’t see him that I know of.’
‘I realise that. Ed and I were talking about him, not long ago. That’s why I thought maybe this could be a way to get him out of that sort of life. I thought maybe if I could have a word with him …’
‘Well, I don’t tink I got his number here, but I can get it, I suppose.’
‘It’d be great if you could, Mrs C. Of course, I’d understand if you didn’t want to say anything to Ed. Nothing might come of this, we have to accept that. But, you know; nothing ventured, and all that.’
‘Well, you probably on a wild goose chase here, honey, but bless you for tinkin of it. I call you back, that okay?’
‘You are a saint
and
sexy. I adore you.’
‘Ah! Stop it now!’
I’d decided I might be developing a crush on my dentist. Of course I wasn’t and I knew I wasn’t, but the idea seemed nice; there was something oddly relaxing and carefree about it. Maybe it was some very mixed up Freudian thing, given that my dad was a dentist, maybe it was because Mary Fairley, BDS, was Scottish, from Nairn, and had the most wonderfully soft, burring accent I’d heard since I’d moved to London, maybe it was the whole thing about lying almost flat with my mouth open, entirely at this woman’s mercy while some gentle music played and she and her almost as attractive assistant spoke quietly, professionally to each other, but whatever it was, I had almost convinced myself I felt something for her. Mary was chunky of build but delicate of movement and touch; she had sandy hair, grey-green eyes, a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, and breasts that got ever so slightly in her way sometimes, necessitating a quick, twisting movement - the bodily equivalent of a hair-flick - while she was leaning over me.
I gazed up into her eyes, wishing we didn’t have to put these safety visor things on these days. Although, given that I seemed to have picked up Nikki’s cold, that was probably no bad thing; I had to raise my hand and stop the dental work a couple of times to have a good sneeze.
Amazing how safe I felt in a dentist’s surgery; always a little on edge, waiting for a twinge, but very safe. Mary was polite but not chatty, despite our Caledonian connection. Very professional. Having a crush on a disinterested dentist might appear frustrating and sad, but it also struck me as being innocent and pure, and even healthy. Certainly a lot healthier than falling hopelessly in love with a gangster’s wife and planning to go tooled up into a telly studio.
Mary drilled through an old filling into decay, and the air in my mouth filled with a smell like death.
‘Our client maintains strongly that he was not using his mobile at the time of the accident.’
‘Then your client is lying.’
‘Mr, ah, McNutt, with respect, you could only have gained the most fleeting of glimpses of our client’s car when—’
‘Tell you what … excuse … ah-choo!’
‘Bless you.’
‘Thank you. Excuse me. Yes, as I was saying; the young lady I was taking home made a phone call to report the accident to the police. That was about five, ten seconds, max, after the crash happened. Why don’t we talk to her mobile network and your client’s and compare the times when his call ended and hers began? Because, now I think about it, he was still holding the phone when he got out of the car, and I suspect he hadn’t hung up. Let’s see if that call and Ms Verrin’s overlap, shall we?’
The lawyer and her articled clerk looked at each other.
‘You lucky, lucky people. Not only has my cold gone into my throat so that I sound even huskier and sexier than ever, but we just played you the Hives, the White Stripes and the Strokes; three in a row with nary a syllable of nonsense to dilute the fun.
Damn
, we spoil you! Now then, Phil.’
‘Yeah; you can’t just leave an accusation hanging like that.’
‘You mean my broad hint that a fully functioning brain might be a liability in a footballer?’
‘Yes. So what are you saying; all football club changing rooms should have a sign saying, You don’t have to be stupid to work here but it helps?’
‘And how witty that would be if they did, Philip. But no.’
‘But you’re saying that footballers have to be stupid.’
‘No, I’m just saying that it might help.’
‘Why?’
‘Think about it. You’re playing tennis; what’s the one shot that looks easy that people get wrong all the time? The one that even the professionals make an embarrassing mess of every now and again. Happened at least once that I saw this Wimbledon.’
‘We may,’ Phil said, ‘have located the source of the footballer’s seeming stupidity, if they think they’re playing football but you’ve apparently changed sports to tennis.’
‘You can see how having a single net in the middle instead of one at each end would be confusing, but that’s not what I mean. Just stick with me here, Phil. In tennis, what looks like the easiest shot there could be, but people still get hopelessly wrong? Come on. Think. The good people of radio listener-land are depending on you.’
‘Ah,’ Phil said. ‘The overhead smash when the ball’s gone way up in the sky and you seem to spend about half an hour at the net waiting for it to come down.’
‘Correct. Now why do people get that shot so wrong when it looks so easy?’
‘They’re crap?’
‘We’ve already established that even the best players in the world do this, so, no, not that.’
Phil shrugged. I was making a one-handed waving motion at him across the desk, as though trying to waft the aroma of a dish towards my nose. Sometimes we sort of half rehearsed these things, sometimes we didn’t and I just landed stuff like this on him and trusted to luck and the fact we knew each other pretty well by now. Phil nodded. ‘They have too much time to think.’
‘Pre-flipping-cisely, Phil. Like most sports, tennis is a game of rapid movement, fast reactions, skilful hand-eye coordination - well, foot-eye coordination in the case of football, but you get the idea - and people often play their best when they’ve got no time to think. Think service returns against somebody like Sampras or Rusedski. Same in cricket; scientists reckon it shouldn’t be possible for a batsman to hit the ball because there just isn’t enough time between the ball leaving the hand of a good fast bowler and it getting to the bat. Of course, a decent batsman will have read the bowler’s body language. Same applies to a tennis player who’s good at returning against a big hitter; they can tell where the ball’s going before the server hits it. The point is that it all happens too quick for the cerebral bit of the brain to get involved; there’s no time to think, there’s only time to react. Right?’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Now, football.’
‘Oh good, we’re back.’
‘In football you often have quite a lot of time to think. Certainly often you don’t; a ball comes flying in, you raise your leg and first-time it and it’s away and you’re already running down the touchline doing the shirt-over-the-head bit with your arms outstretched. But, if you’re on a break-away, get the ball in midfield, there’s only one defender to beat and nobody up to support, you’ve got what will seem like a long, long time to run and think, and I’m certainly not accusing footballers of not being able to do both at the same time. So; you beat the defender, there’s only the goalie left, and now you’ve got time to think again. And this is where you see some guys, even at the very top, make a mess of it because they’ve had time to think. Their full frontal cortex or whatever it is has had time to go, Hmm, well, we could do it
this
way, or
this
way, or
that
way, or - but by that time it’s too late, because the goalie’s come out and you’ve hit it straight at him, or skied it to the ironic cheers of the opposing fans, or decided to go for a lob and hesitated and he’s had time to dive at your feet and grab the ball off you. This happens to perfectly good, highly paid professional footballers, and in a way it’s no disgrace, it’s just being human.
‘However. If you get a particularly thick footballer—’
‘You’re going to be horrible about that nice Gascoigne boy again, I can tell.’
‘Oh, come on; this is a man so daft he couldn’t even play air-flute without making a mess of it. But yes; Gazza is my best example. He is - well, was - a great, gifted footballer, but he was so intellectually challenged that even in all those seconds running in on the goalkeeper, he
still hasn’t had time to think
. Or if he is thinking, he’s thinking, Wuy-aye, that’s a fit-lookin bird behind the goal there, man. And that’s the difference; the longer you can go without really thinking, the better a footballer you’ll be.’
Phil opened his mouth to speak, but I added, ‘That’s also why golf and snooker are so profoundly different; they’re games of nerve and concentration, not reactive skill.’
Phil scratched his head. I hit the appropriate FX button. ‘Well, that was a compendium rant,’ he said. I’d already started the next track, playing the intro faded down. We had fifteen seconds to the vocals. ‘We started on football,’ Phil said, ‘diverted to tennis, then on to cricket and finally came back to the beautiful game … but then body-swerved into golf and snooker at the last minute there. All very confusing.’
‘Really?’ I glanced at the seconds ticking away.
‘Yes.’
‘You sound a bit stupid. Have you thought of becoming a professional footballer?’
‘So it’s definite?’ Debbie asked.
‘Yes,’ Phil said.
‘How definite?’
‘Well, definite,’ Phil said awkwardly.
‘Yes, but how definite is it? Is it fairly definite? Very definite? Totally one hundred per cent certainly definite?’
‘Well, no, it’s not that definite,’ Phil conceded.
‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, ‘I thought only films suffered from this on-off-stop-go-red-light/green-light/red-light bullshit. It’s only a fucking telly programme, not Lord of the Fucking Rings parts one to three.’
‘It’s delicate,’ Phil said.
‘So’s my head on a Saturday morning,’ I muttered. ‘I don’t make this fucking song and dance about it.’
Debbie’s new temporary office was almost as far down the light-well as ours. I gazed out at the white glazed bricks. It looked like it might be raining but it was hard to tell. This was Friday; the
Breaking News
thing was scheduled for Monday. Again. My great confrontation with the beastly Holocaust denier Larson Brogley, or whatever his name was, was back on again. In fact it had been on for over a month now without being cancelled, which was probably some sort of record. It might actually be going to happen. I felt nervous.
Of course I felt nervous, I thought, as Station Manager Debbie and Producer Phil argued the toss about how definite was definite like a pair of bishops trying to settle how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. It was okay for these guys; they thought the only danger was me making a fool of myself or bringing the station, or by extension Sir Jamie, into disrepute; they had no idea what I was planning to do (if they had, they would, of course, have been appalled and either tried to argue me out of it - and maybe warn the
Breaking News
production team - or just cancelled the whole deal and threatened me with the sack if I insisted on going ahead without their blessing. That’s what I’d do if I was ever in a situation like this … if, that is, the talent concerned had been daft enough to tell me what he was thinking of doing).
Fucking typical; usually these TV things came up and happened really quickly. If I’d had my brilliant but dangerous idea for any other appearance or even proposed appearance it would all have been over months ago and I’d long since have been dealing with the consequences, whatever they’d turned out to be. For various reasons, but especially 11 September, this one was running and running, and so I was being given plenty of time to stew.
‘… follow it up with a phone interview on the show?’
‘Hmm. I don’t think …’
Yeah, let the poor, deluded fools debate. They didn’t know how lucky they were, not knowing. Only I knew about my great idea, my great, risky, probably mad, certainly criminal idea. I hadn’t shared it with Jo, Craig, Ed; anybody. I’d started dreaming about it, though, and worried that I might say something in my sleep that Jo would hear. This was, certainly, better than dreaming about death squads raping Jo and leaving me dressed like a Nazi waiting to drown, but it still wasn’t much fun. I’d got used to having pretty mundane, even boring dreams over the years, and the last run of nightmares I’d suffered had been in the run-up to my last-year exams at school, so I wasn’t psychologically prepared for having bad dreams about Nazis in TV studios and being tied to a chair and people waving guns about.