Dead Air (31 page)

Authors: Iain Banks

‘And what about you?’ she asked, raising her head again, the underwater lights glinting on the studs and bars barnacling her face.

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘have I been playing away, too?’

‘Yes. Well?’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said, starting to feel angry now. ‘I’m being far too fucking reasonable here.
I
heard
you
fucking somebody else last night; you didn’t hear me. And now you’re dumping me and you’re looking for some sort of justification after the fact? Well, no fucking way. You have no fucking right to start asking me questions. Yes; yes, I was going to dump you as a matter of fact. Actually, in my heart, in my head, I’d already dumped you, before you dumped me.’

‘Don’t be so childish.’

‘Fuck off, Jo.’

‘Don’t you even want to know
why
I want out of this relationship? ’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care. Maybe your new guy’s got a bigger cock than I have; who fucking gives a damn?’

‘Oh, Ken, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Look, I hope you’re both very fucking happy, okay? Now just get the hell away from me. And get your stuff off the
Belle
, as well.’ This was more like it, I thought. This was taking the initiative. I deserved to, after all, dammit; I was the injured party here. ‘I’ll give you till Monday morning to clear your shit off my boat then it all goes over the side. Goodbye.’ I turned and walked away, the effect barely spoiled by bumping into somebody and accidentally spilling a little Pils over their sleeve and having to mumble an apology as I stalked off.

I half expected Jo to follow me and remonstrate - and by golly this seemed to me to be a situation where a person could reasonably employ a word like ‘remonstrate’ or even ‘inveigh’ rather than just ‘object’ or ‘argue’ or something. But she didn’t.

I spent the remainder of the party getting profoundly hammered on an exciting variety of alcoholic beverages and I didn’t see Jo for the rest of the evening. This was probably because she’d taken me at my word about chucking her stuff in the drink and didn’t trust me to wait as long as Monday morning, because when I did eventually roll home in the wee hours and poured myself out of the taxi and into the
Temple Belle
, she’d already been and gone; her clothes and bits and pieces had been cleared out and on the mat under the letter box lay her key.

I stared at it for a while, picked it up after only four or five attempts, took it out onto the deck and threw it wildly into the dark receding waters.

‘It was always going to happen. You weren’t right for each other.’

‘Craig, Christ almighty, you sound like my mother.’ We were sitting on a bench near the top of Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath, looking out over the city, submerged beneath the watery sun and drifting showers of a cool January afternoon. Craig had walked here. I’d taken the tube.

I was probably still too hungover/drunk to drive, but I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to, at least not in the Landy; somebody had slashed a couple of its tyres and smashed both headlights last night. I’d reported it to the police and they said, Yes, they knew; they’d been round during the night after the trembler alarm in the Landy noticed the list to one side and informed the Mouth Corp security centre, which in turn had alerted the cops. They’d tried my door for ten minutes and my phone for half an hour before they gave up and left me to snore the sleep of the truly drunk. The CCTV tapes would be studied. Probably kids, that’s all.

Yeah, right, I thought. Just when I’d been hoping that maybe whatever bad shit had been going on, it wasn’t any more. Oh well.

‘Aye,’ Craig said, in response to my accusation of sounding like my mother. ‘And what do mothers know? Best.’

I shook my head. ‘People always give you this You weren’t right for each other stuff
afterwards
.’

‘Course they do; if anybody ever tells anybody before, when it could do some good, they get accused of being jealous or something, and then when the relationship does break up, they get accused of causing it. You can’t win. Best just keep quiet until it’s over.’

‘Did you not like Jo?’

‘I didn’t dislike Jo. I thought she was all right. This wasn’t one of those occasions where you’re waiting for it to end so you can tell your friend what you thought of his or her ex. I just meant in theory. Jo was all right, but she was nearly as daft as you, and she’s more ambitious. You need somebody who’ll steady you a bit, not a fellow nutter you can fuck.’

‘I don’t think Jo was as crazy as you seem to think she was.’

Craig tipped his head once. ‘Well, she was pretty off the rails at times. I’m amazed you lasted as long as you did.’

I sighed. ‘Yeah, Kulwinder said he was surprised we’d lasted as long as we had at the nine-eleven party.’ I watched the slow procession of big jets angling in around the distant scape of clouds, settling onto the gentle, invisible slope that would slide them west into Heathrow.

‘She tried to get off with me you know, once,’ Craig said.

I looked at him. ‘You’re kidding.’ Now
this
could be awkward.

‘Na; it was one time she’d lost you or something; during the summer. You’d had an argument and you’d stormed off and left your mobile behind and she assumed you’d come to mine, so she turned up on the doorstep. I invited the lass in; impolite to do anything else, specially as she was in tears. Offered her a drink, did the agony aunt thing …’

‘… Agreed what a bastard I was.’

‘Excuse me; I trod the fine line between masculine solidarity and lending a sympathetic ear to a distressed female.’

‘So one thing led to another,’ I said.

Oh shit, what if he had fucked her? Even if he wasn’t going to admit to it here, what if he had? Think, Ken. Was I bothered? Well, was I?

Not particularly. I mean, I had no right to be jealous or upset, not with Craig, anyway, given what had happened with Emma, but that sort of logical, quid-pro-quo consideration wasn’t the kind of argument that carried much weight with the set of instincts and part-programmed reactions that constitute the human heart.

‘Well, no, not one thing leading to another,’ Craig said. ‘She just grabbed me. Out of the blue.’

‘Jesus.’

‘We’d had about a half-bottle each—’

‘Wine?’

‘Yeah, of course wine; I wasn’t feeding the girl whisky.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I’d got up to uncork another—’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yes; I was still being polite and supportive. Fuck off with the suspicion and innuendo, will you?’

‘Sorry, sorry.’

‘Just wrapped herself around me. I turned round - surprised, you know - and she slapped her mouth over mine and grabbed my balls.’

‘Fucking hell.’ I looked up at the clouds, then back at Craig. ‘You did the decent thing, though.’

‘No, Kenneth,’ he said, stretching his long legs out. He was wearing grey trackie bottoms under a jacket last fashionable ten years ago. ‘The decent thing would have been to have shown her how wonderful the act of love can be when you do it with a real man, but I didn’t do that.’

‘Bet you snogged her for a while, you bastard. She was a good kisser.’

Craig considered this. ‘Hmm. I’d been putting that down to shock, but you’re right.’

‘You didn’t fuck her, did you?’

‘No. I did the self-sacrificing, You’re beautiful and I’m flattered but if we do we’ll both regret it in the morning thing. God help us, we even agreed it wouldn’t be right to betray you; it was worth depriving ourselves of some pleasure for your sake.’

‘Oh, fuck.’

‘Now what?’

‘Just had a terrible thought.’

‘What? Who are you calling?’

‘She went looking for me at Ed’s once.’

‘Wuh-oh.’

‘Yeah.’

Craig made as if to get up off the bench. ‘Want me to … ?’

‘Na; if you’re going to see me humiliated we might as well get it over with now.’

‘You fucked her, didn’t you?’

‘No, I didn’t!’

‘Look, Ed, she told me she’d gone to yours, once. She went to Craig’s once, too, and she threw herself at
him
.’ (‘Hey!’ said Craig. ‘I resent the implication.’ I ignored him.) ‘You trying to tell me Jo didn’t try it on with you?’

‘Ah …’

‘Ah?
Ah
? Is that what you’re fucking giving me? Fucking “
Ah
”?’

‘Well …’

‘You
did
fuck her! You
shite
!’

‘She fuckin jumped me, man! It was practically rape!’

‘Fuck off, Ed.’

‘An anyway, she said she’d never done it wif a black guy; wot was I supposed to do? Deprive her?’

‘Don’t bring race into it, for fuck’s sake! And don’t give me this big black stud bullshit either!’

‘I didn’t bring race into it, man,
she
did!’

‘Aw, Ed, fuck off; how could you?’

‘I couldn’t help it, man.’

‘Well, fucking try learning, you overgrown adolescent!’

‘Look, man, I am sorry; I felt terrible the next day an it never appened again.’

‘Yeah, you’d had your fun, fucked your friend’s girl and added another notch to your fucking ceiling mirrors; why bother?’

‘Ken, listen; if I could go back in time an make it that it nevvir appened, believe me I would. I nevvir told you because I didn’t want to hurt you or do anyfin against you an Jo. I wish it just adn’t appened, I truly do. But it did, an I’m sorry, man. I really am sorry. I’m asking you to forgive me, right?’

‘Well - just - I’m not -’ I spluttered. ‘Just let me fucking be angry at you a bit longer!’ I said. ‘You bastard!’ I added, rather ineffectually.

‘Sorry, man.’

And I thought, Yeah. We’re all sorry. Everybody is so fucking sorry. It should be the fucking species’ middle name;
Homo S. Sapiens.
Maybe we could change it by misdeed poll.

‘… Listen,’ Ed said.

Something cold seemed to land in my guts. Oh, good grief. A ‘listen’ from Ed; now what?

‘What?’ I said.

‘You got this telly fing tomorrow, aven’t you?’

Oh fuck, he’d heard about Robe after all and worked out that I might want a gun to take into the studio. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Best of luck wif it, all right? Hope it goes well. You give this Nazi geezer wot-for, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘You can go back to bein mad at me now if you want, or you can wait till we meet up next weekend an shout at me then. If we’re still meetin up. We still meetin up?’

‘I suppose.’

‘I’m sorry, man.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Still bruvvers?’

‘Yeah, I suppose so. Still bruvvaz.’

Craig invited me to supper. I suspected it was a sympathy thing; Nikki was staying and Emma was coming round and I think what they really wanted was a quiet evening meal with just the three of them.

What I really wanted was to see Nikki again, just to be sure that we were okay, and that nothing had changed, at least not for the worse, after the New Year party, because that kiss - those two kisses - had left me worried. I’d let her kiss me, and I’d kissed her back, and the more I’d thought about this over the intervening period, the more ashamed I’d become, and I felt a terrible urge to tell her that it had changed nothing, and of course it would never happen again, and that I was sorry, too, for the time in the Land Rover in the rain, on the day of the crash, when I’d tried - in what now felt like a deeply sad and desperate way - to persuade her to have lunch with me, and that I’d always, always be a good friend and a good uncle for her, for the rest of her life … Though at the same time I also wanted not to have to say anything at all, and to have everything be just the same as it had always been between us, with no awkwardness or distance.

The trouble was that Emma would be there, too, and if Craig mentioned what had happened with Jo - I’d asked him not to say anything to Nikki or Emma, and especially not to mention Jo and Ed, but still - then it might get awkward, given the history I had with Emma. It was a very slim sliver of history, I kept on telling myself, but it was no less potentially lethal for my relationship with Craig for that.

I was in danger of losing one girlfriend, two best friends and - tomorrow - maybe my job, and liberty, all in one insane forty-eight-hour period.

Screw the nut, I thought. Batten down. Supper would have been nice, and I had such a bad hangover I’d probably not want to drink very much and so it would actually constitute quite a sensible, measured preparation for the big day tomorrow, but I decided to say no. Other plans.

‘Ken, hi.’

‘Amy, kid; how
are
you?’

‘Brilliant. You?’

‘Ah … kinda, you know.’

‘Darling, no, I don’t. What? Is there a problem?’

‘Jo and I are … over.’

‘Oh! I’m sorry to hear that. You seemed so close.’

‘Well,’ I said.
Did
we? I thought. I wouldn’t have said so, but then maybe that was just the sort of thing you said when somebody told you something like this. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s … it’s, ah, very finished with. Kind of saw it coming, but … hit me a little harder than I’d expected, must confess.’

‘Gosh. You poor thing.’

‘Yeah. Nearly two years.’

‘Really.’

‘Yeah. Feels like longer.’

‘Right.’

‘Felt quite a lot for her, I have to say.’

‘Well, of course.’

‘… All gone now.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘… Anyway.’

‘Hmm. Are you going to be all right?’

‘Amy … I’ll live.’