Authors: Iain Banks
(But then when we fuck, and I am lost in her, surrendered to those depths beyond mere flesh, nothing could be better, nothing ever has been better, nothing ever will be better. There is no one like her, no one so calm and studied and child-like and innocent and wanton and wise all at once. She thinks I am mad, too, but only for wanting her so much in the first place, not for risking whatever her husband would do to me if he ever found out about us.
For herself she says she has no fear because she feels she is half dead already. I have to try to explain this. She doesn’t mean half dead in any trivial sense of being tired-out or tired of life or anything like that, but half dead in a way unique to - and only capable of definition by - her own bizarre, self-made religion, a belief system without name, ceremony or teachings, which she cleaves to with the airy casualness of the truly convinced, not the fundamentalist intensity of those who secretly guess they may well be wrong. It’s a mad, bastard concoction of Voodoo spirituality and cosmologically intense physics, like something Stephen Hawking might have dreamed up on a really bad acid trip.
Me, I was a Humanist, an Evangelical Atheist, a fucking card-carrying member of the Rationalist Inquisition, and Ceel’s totally barking but utterly unrufflable beliefs just drove me crazy, but the truth was neither of us really cared and the only time we discussed stuff like that was in bed; she enjoyed being told she was nuts and she loved the way it got me worked up.
What it boiled down to was Ceel sincerely believed herself to be half dead in the sense of existing in this world while in a deeply soul-entangled state with a twin Ceel in another reality who was dead, a Ceel who died almost exactly half her life ago, when she was fourteen.
It’s all to do with lightning, with the lightning … We’ll come back to this.)
‘And have you seen, Kenneth, how everybody’s become so suspicious?’
‘Suspicious?’
‘Yes; looking at each other like everybody they meet might be a terrorist.’
‘You want to take the Underground, kid. People have started eyeing each other; especially anybody carrying anything that might be big enough to be a bomb, even more so if they put it down on the floor and could even conceivably leave it there when they get off.’
‘I get claustrophobic on the Underground.’
‘I know.’
‘I take buses sometimes,’ she said in a small voice, as though to apologise for having a chauffeur-driven Bentley on call and an unlimited taxi account.
‘So you’ve told me. And may I express, on behalf of the struggling masses, our gratitude that you deign to descend amongst us and grace our mean and surly lives with your radiant presence, ma’am.’
She slapped my hand gently and made a tutting sound. I took my hand away and brought it down over her flat belly, through the soft spring of curls and dipping to the cleft beneath.
Her upper thighs tensed, closing fractionally. ‘I’m a little sore there, from before,’ she said, taking my hand again. She held it as she rolled over on the snow-white sheets and settled on her front.
(On her left side there is a strange patterning of dark shadows, exactly as though somebody had traced a henna tattoo of forest ferns upon her light-brown skin. It stretches from one shoulder, skirting her breast, and continuing down to the honeyed swell of her hip. This is from the lightning.
‘What
is
that?’ I remembered breathing, on the night of the day that I first saw it, nearly four months ago in the alloyed sheen of golden street and silver moon light, in another room across the city. It was like something from an iffy Science Fiction series, from budget
Star Trek
or
Alien Nation
or something; thinking it really was some sort of weird fern/henna tattoo I even tried to lick and rub it off. She just lay there, watching me, great dark eyes unblinking.
‘That is from when I half died,’ she said matter-of-factly.
‘What?’
‘From the lightning, Kenneth.’
‘
Lightning
?’
‘Yes, lightning.’
‘Lightning as in thunder and—?’
‘Yes.’
She had stood on a cliff in Martinique once, when she was barely more than a child, watching a storm, and had been hit by lightning.
Her heart stopped. She could feel it had stopped, and when she fell down it was pure luck that she fell back into the grass and not forward off the cliff towards the rocks thirty metres below. She had felt very calm and had known as she lay there - waiting for her heart to start again and the smell of burning hair to disappear - that she was most definitely going to live, but she was also absolutely certain that the world had gone in two different directions at exactly the point when the lightning bolt struck her, and that in another world, right alongside this one and identical until that point in every respect, she had died, either killed by the bolt itself or fallen to her death on the rocks below.
‘There is still a small mark on my head, too,’ she’d told me, in the dark-brown heat of that first remembered room. She’d smoothed back her hair above her forehead, revealing a thin, wavy brown line that ran, barely more than the thickness of a single hair itself, from the edge of her scalp back into the tangled wilds of her long, light-dark hair.
I stared at it for a while. ‘Jesus Christ. I’m fucking Harry Potter.’ She’d smiled.)
I traced the frond-lines with my gaze as she guided my hand down to the cheeks of her perfect behind. ‘If you like,’ she said, ‘perhaps, you may go here, instead?’
‘I’m on it, babe.’
‘… Ah yes, so you are. Gently, now.’
Somewhere beyond and beneath the layers of thick, dark curtains, London growled quietly to itself.
‘What’s that?’
‘Ah.’ I sighed happily, staring at the framed note. ‘Yes; my very first complaint letter. I was sort of locum DJ at StrathClyde Sound, sitting in on the nightly
Rock Show
while our resident Tommy Vance wannabe was attending to his customary mid-January drying-out regime.’
‘I can’t read it.’
‘Yeah; I used to think the smudges were the result of tears, but then I realised it was probably just drool. Least it’s not written in green ink.’
‘What did you do?’
‘Suggested Lynyrd Skynyrd and Mountain should appear on a double bill.’
Nikki looked at me blankly.
‘Well, you had to be there,’ I sighed. ‘Before your time anyway, child.’
‘Lynyrd Skynyrd were a band from the States whose plane flew into a hillside,’ Phil supplied, looking up briefly from his
Guardian
. ‘They wrote a song called “Sweet Home Alabama”, seen as a Confederate reply to Neil Young’s “Southern Man”, which was an indictment of Southern racism.’
‘Ah-hah,’ Nikki said. I had the strong impression we might as well have been talking about ancient Greece.
‘Phil has all the annoying attributes of Encarta without the ease-of-turning-off facility,’ I told her.
‘Start talking about your sex life, Ken; that usually does the trick,’ Phil said, reaching for another piece of chewing gum.
‘Oh yeah, and he smokes,’ I said. ‘Phil, isn’t it time for your next nicotine patch?’
He glanced at his watch. ‘Nope. Eighteen minutes, forty seconds to go. Not that I’m counting.’
We were in the show’s office in the Soho Square Headquarters of Capital Live!, part of The Fabulous Mouth Corporation complex in what used to be the United Film Producers building. Afternoon; Phil - who trawls the press assiduously for material before the show - then goes on to read the broadsheets afterwards. Unforgivable.
Assistant Kayla - a droopy-eyed über-fem-geek forever in graded shades and camo baggies - was on standard afternoon perpetual phone duty, hitting and hitted, scribbling notes and talking in a quietly intense monotone.
Nikki shook her head and hobbled towards the next frame on the office wall. She was down to one crutch now, but still lame. Her plaster had been covered in a variety of multi-coloured messages. She was here because I knew she was a Radiohead fan and Thom Yorke had been coming in to talk on our lunchtime show. Only now, we’d just heard, he wasn’t, so the best I could offer the girl was a tour round the place, culminating here in the narrow, much partitioned and generally broken-up space where Phil, myself, our two assistants and the occasional back-up researcher put the show together each day. From here we had a fine view of the rain-stained, white-glazed bricks of the light-well, though if you squatted down by the windows and looked up, you could see the sky.
The office walls were mostly covered in posters for Indie bands I had never heard of - I suspected Phil only hired assistants who heartily despised all the music we played; it was one of his little rebellions against the system - however, we did have (as well as the office-equipment mandatory portrait of our Dear Owner, Sir Jamie) a few Sony awards, donated gold and platinum discs from artists and bands who’d been cruelly deceived by their record companies into thinking we’d helped them with their careers, and - what I was genuinely by far the most proud of - a modest but high-quality collection of framed landmark hate mail.
‘This one’s a lawyer’s letter,’ Nikki said, frowning.
‘Just a sample,’ muttered Phil.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’d suggested that if you speeded up “You Are The Sunshine of My Life” by Stevie Wonder, you got the main riff from “Layla” by your man Clapton. There was talk of legal action, but it passed.’
‘Duane Allman,’ Phil said.
‘What?’ I asked him.
‘Came up with the riff; not Clapton. Allegedly.’
‘You know, the lips are particularly rich in blood vessels, Philip; you could usefully stick that nicotine patch there.’
Nikki nudged me hard with one elbow and nodded at the next Frame of Shame. ‘That one?’
‘Ah, my first death threat,’ I said with what I hoped sounded like undue modesty. ‘A particularly proud moment.’
‘
Death
threat?’ Nikki asked, wide eyes twinkling.
‘Yes, my dear, from funny, sleepy old Northern Ireland, where time stands still. I’d said
let
the Orangemen walk through Catholic areas, but for every march they got to take part in, a similar-size one had to be allowed through Loyalist areas, with tricolours, posters of Bobby Sands—’
‘Seventies hunger-striker and Republican martyr,’ Phil squeezed in.
‘—lots of hearty singing of Republican songs; that sort of thing,’ I continued. ‘Which sort of developed into my patent three-word solution for the Troubles: “United, federal, secular. Now get on with it.”’
‘That’s eight words,’ Phil mumbled.
‘I was allowing for subsequent editing,’ I said, looking brightly at Nikki. ‘Anyway, exception was duly taken; they’re awfully touchy over there.’
Phil cleared his throat. ‘I think your humorous observation about the Red Hand of Ulster being a symbol of a land won by a loser prepared to mutilate himself to claim a scraggy patch of rain-lashed bog may have contributed to your healthy fan-base in the Shankhill, too.’
‘See? You try to bring out the local colour in some quaint little part of the Provinces and these silly people insist on taking it all the wrong way.’
‘I’m sure your Nobel Peace Prize is in the post, Uncle Ken,’ Nikki said. ‘This one?’
‘First international death threat,’ I said. ‘All due to our then spanking-new web-feed. Back to the old gun control debate again. I was arguing for, if memory serves. But I was making the point that in the US it was all too late; they’d made their bed and they damn well had to lie in it. In the States I was for no gun control laws at all. In fact in the States I reckoned guns should be made
compulsory
for all teenagers. Might produce a grand kill-off, of course, but who’s to say that was such a bad thing in the end? That way there’d be less of the little bastards to bother the rest of the world. And why stop at just hand-guns and automatic weapons? Let’s get with grenade launchers, pull down some mortar and mines action, get jiggy with some surface to air ordnance and serious-calibre heavy weaponry. Chemical and biological weapons, too; they’re kind of the green option, in a wacky sort of way. Long-range missiles. Nukes too. And if some dickhead with a grudge decides to waste Manhattan or Washington with one of these, well, too bad. That’s the price you pay for freedom.’
Nikki looked at me. ‘And they pay you for this, Ken?’
‘Young lady, for this they don’t just pay me, they compete for me.’
‘He’s a hot DJ,’ Phil said.
‘There you are,’ I told her.
‘Yup, hot like a potato,’ Phil said.
I smiled at Nikki. ‘He’s going to say, “Always getting dropped …”’
‘Always getting dropped.’
‘… Told you.’
‘Now, Nikki. Are you sure I can’t take you for lunch?’
‘Yeah, I’m fine, thanks.’
‘But you must be hungry.’
‘No, I’d better get back. Books to order, stuff to read, you know.’
‘Flying start at the Chinese course.’
‘That’s the idea.’
We were sitting in my ancient Land Rover in the office’s underground car park, waiting for the engine’s plugs to warm up.
‘Are you
sure
I can’t take you for something to eat? Come on; it’ll make up for not meeting Lord Thom of Yorke. I was all set to deliver this great treat and then I was thwarted. I really feel I need closure here. Seriously; I know some great places. We may well see some celebs.’
‘No, thanks.’
‘Is that your final answer?’
‘Yep.’
‘Would you like to call a friend?’
‘No, really. Look, you don’t have to drive me back to Craig’s, Ken. I can jump in a taxi.’
‘Jump?’
‘Well; hobble, fall in. Honest. I don’t mind.’
‘Not at all. I promised your dad I’d get you home safely.’
‘I can look after myself, you know, Ken,’ Nikki said, smiling indulgently at me.
‘Never doubted it. But taking you back is the least I can do. Rain check on lunch? Some other time? Say yes.’
‘Some other time,’ she agreed, sighing.
‘Brilliant.’ The little coil-warming lamp on the fascia went out; I started the engine and it settled down into an alarming percussive rattle. ‘Hey,’ I said, heaving on the bus-sized wheel to pull us out of the parking bay, ‘I don’t know if I’ve said, but I think it’s really cool you getting into Oxford.’