Dead Air (26 page)

‘I’ll see you.’

‘Yeah; you take care. Strenf, bruvver. Bye.’

I didn’t look properly at Mr Merrial’s card until the following morning, just before doing my under-vehicle bomb-check and heading for work. The Merrials lived in Ascot Square, Belgravia. I stopped at the side of the Landy and wondered about putting their home number into my phone, then decided I ought to. I placed it in Location 96, overwriting Celia’s mobile number. I never had got round to removing it - I still liked scrolling through to look at it sometimes - but entering her home phone there seemed fitting somehow.

I’d barely finished doing this when the phone buzzed in my hand; Phil, at the office. It was another dull December day and the rain had just started. I de-alarmed and unlocked the Landy and climbed in out of the rain as I said, ‘Yup?’

‘
Breaking News
.’

I put the keys in the ignition. ‘What about it?’

‘It’s starting on Jan fourteenth.’

‘What,
next
year? Kind of rushing things a bit, aren’t they?’

‘It’s a month away. But it’s definite, this time.’

‘Of course it is, Philip.’

‘No, it’s firmly scheduled. And you’re in it.’

‘Not the world’s most reassuring phraseology.’

‘They’ve started doing publicity and everything.’

‘Everything. Well.’

‘The PR people are mentioning your name. There’s a buzz.’

‘A sound so often associated with dead, decaying things, don’t you find?’

‘Will you stop being so sodding cynical?’

‘Probably shortly after I stop being so damn alive.’

‘I thought you’d want to know.’

‘You’re right. It was the uncertainty that was killing me.’

‘If all you can do is be sarcastic—’

‘Then it should be a good show today.’

I heard him laugh. I went to start the Landy, then sat back again and waved my hands even though Phil couldn’t see me. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake,’ I said. ‘Why do TV people have to make such a big deal about everything? It’s one fucking item on a minority interest telly show, not an unknown play by Shakespeare written on the back of the missing bit from the “Unfinished Symphony”.’ I put my hand on the keys again.

Phil said, ‘You on your way in?’

‘Better than being on the way out.’

‘Save it for the show. Safe journey.’

‘It’s Chelsea to Soho, Phil, not the Paris-Dakar rally.’

‘So we’ll see you soon. Take care.’

‘Yeah, bye.’

I put the phone away. I looked at my hand, resting on the Landy’s keys, dangling from the ignition. People kept telling me to take care. I looked out across the Landy’s battered bonnet, still not twisting the key in the ignition. It was raining quite hard now. I sighed, then got out and did the checking-for-bombs-under-the-vehicle bit. Nothing there.

‘I’m all for globalism. I mean, if you’re talking about the sort of globalisation that says, Stuff whatever you people voted for, you’ll let us privatise your water and hike the prices five hundred per cent or else, then, no. Exclude me in. What I’m for is the globalism of the United Nations, imperfect though it may be, the globalism of arms treaties, the globalism of the Geneva Convention - possibly the next suspect piece of internationalism Dubya and his chums will want to withdraw from - the globalism of the International Court of Justice the US refuses to sign up for, the globalism of anti-pollution measures, and d’you know why, Phil? Because the winds know no boundaries. The globalism of the—’

‘The ground.’

‘What?’

‘The ground, and the sea, and space. Those are boundaries, for the wind.’

I hit the FX of a lonely desert wind blowing through a long-abandoned ghost town, tumbleweed rolling across the dust between the creaking wooden ruins.

‘What, like that?’ I said, glaring at him.

‘Possibly.’ He was grinning back at me over his
Wall Street Journal
.

‘I was, just possibly, on a roll there.’

‘I’ve interrupted your flow, haven’t I?’

‘You are a veritable stopcock, Philip.’

‘U-bend.’

‘Beg pardon?’

‘I thought I’d get that in before you did.’

‘You’re just a trust fund of straight lines this morning, aren’t you?’

‘It’s a living.’

‘Listen, Phil, if I may be allowed to put on my Serious Voice for a moment.’

‘Oh no, not another Charity Announcement.’

‘No. But, Philip, as you know, we don’t tend to do requests.’

Phil looked surprised. ‘Well, we can’t; most of those you receive are anatomically impossible anyway.’

‘I think you’ll find there’s a small private clinic in Tangier that would happily prove you wrong, for a price, Philsy-Willsy, but that’s as maybe.’

‘Keep going.’

‘Na, yesterday I bumped into somebody I met at a party once and I said I’d play a request for his wife.’

Phil blinked at me. I raised the dead air stopwatch threateningly. ‘Is that it?’ he said.

‘Sometimes, Phil, it’s just banality all the way down.’

‘Is this a new spot on the show? Guess The Relevance?’

‘Nope. So, for the lovely Celia Jane, here’s “Have a Nice Day”, from the Stereophonics.’

I hit Play and swept the faders.

Phil looked nonplussed. He looked at the faders and listened to the song play in his headphones. ‘You’re not even talking up to the vocals,’ he said, more to himself. He spread his arms. ‘What’s all this about?’

I eased my cans down round my neck to give my ears a rest. ‘What you hear is what you get,’ I told him. I nodded at the unit spinning the CD. ‘We were going to play it anyway. No extra paperwork involved.’

The skin around his eyes crinkled. ‘You trying to get into this woman’s knickers?’

‘Phil! I told you; she’s married.’

Phil laughed loudly. ‘Since when has that ever stopped you?’

‘You can be so cynical sometimes, Philip. You want to watch it; the wind’ll change and you’ll stay that way.’

‘It’s protective coloration around you, chum.’

‘What’s wrong with playing a request?’

‘We never do it.’

‘So it’s a change.’

‘There has to be an ulterior motive somewhere.’

‘Will you just leave it? There’s nothing going on.’

‘I know the way your mind works, Ken. There has to be. You’re more a creature of habit and ritual than you think you are.’

I shook my head. ‘Okay, I confess I was put in a slightly awkward situation by a … a friend of Sir Jamie’s,’ I said, glancing at the track’s run time on the play list and then at the studio clock.

‘Ah-
hah
!’

‘There’s no bleedin Ah-hah! to it. Look; the guy’s some sort of big shot, he knows the Dear Owner, we met unexpectedly yesterday and I sort of stumbled into promising I’d play a song for his missus.’

‘Who is a looker, I bet,’ Phil said.

‘He’s a big shot, like I say. They usually are. See people like that with a plain or ordinary-looking woman and you know it must be love. Will you
stop
looking at me like that?’

‘Well, this was unexpected.’

‘I wanted to say thank you.’

‘Jesus, what sort of Christmas box do you tip your postman?’

Ceel smiled. ‘Also, I won’t be able to see you again until after the New Year. I’m sorry.’

‘Ah well.’

‘You had something planned this afternoon, didn’t you?’

I shook my head. ‘Nothing; appointment with some lawyers. They can wait.’

‘You’re not in trouble, are you?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It’s not my own lawyers. Just a statement about an accident I witnessed a month or two back. So, what are you doing over the holidays?’

‘Going home.’

‘To the island?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr M too?’

‘Yes. And what about you?’

‘Staying here in London.’ Almost a year earlier it had been agreed I’d spend Xmas with Jo and her family in Manchester, but now Jo would be abroad over Christmas and New Year, dutifully helping Addicta strike while the iron of fame was hot. I couldn’t even go back to see my own parents; they’d decided long ago they were fed up with Scottish winters and the whole seasonal rigmarole, and had spent the last few holidays - and would be spending the one up-coming - in Tenerife. ‘Anyway, I’m glad we could meet up now.’

‘It was just luck that John had to leave this morning. Amsterdam, again.’ She looked at her watch, which was all she was wearing. A flicker of a frown had passed across her face as she’d pronounced the word ‘Amsterdam’. ‘However, we only have until two thirty.’

I levered myself up on one elbow and looked at her in the soft light spilling from the bathroom and a reading light above the scroll-top desk. She lay luxuriantly, legs spread, brown-gold hair strewn across the white sheets and one plump pillow like a fabulously braided river delta, one arm drawn up underneath her head, the fern-print of the long-ago lightning a fabulous marquetry on her dark honey skin. ‘I had no idea you’d be there yesterday,’ I told her. I shook my head. ‘You looked so, so beautiful. I should have ducked away but I couldn’t take my eyes off you.’

She stroked my arm. ‘It’s all right. I was worried, when I realised he’d seen me recognise you, but he thought he knew you already, from the party, or perhaps a photograph in the papers. He has a very good memory.’

‘So he left early this morning and didn’t hear me play your record?’

‘Yes. But I heard it.’

I looked around. ‘And decided on here.’

We were back at the Dorchester where our affair had begun. The big tree outside, the one we’d stared at from the suite a couple of floors above, in the mix of moon and flood light back in May, was leafless now. No silence this time. I said, ‘I confess I had been wondering what you’d do when you ran out of posh hotels we hadn’t already been to. One scenario I imagined had us going steadily down-market until we ended up sharing a bottom bunk in a dormitory in a back-packers’ hostel in Earl’s Court.’

She gave a small laugh. ‘That would be an awful lot of assignations, even restricting ourselves to central London.’

‘I’m an optimist. So, what did make you decide to come back here?’

‘Well, I had thought to return on our first anniversary …’

‘Really?’ I said, smiling broadly. ‘There
is
romance in your trim little soul after all, Celia Jane.’

She pinched my arm, making me yelp and have to rub the site. There might be a bruise. This was especially mean, of course, because I was not allowed to leave a mark on her.

‘Ah,’ she said, holding up one finger. ‘But then I thought that that would be a kind of a pattern in itself, and so dangerous.’

‘You would have made such a great spy.’

‘And also it felt like something had changed, now that our different worlds have become entangled again.’

‘A wee, cowering, terrified part of me imagined that it had changed utterly, and you would never want to see me again,’ I confessed. ‘Spell broken. You know.’

‘Did you really imagine that?’

‘Oh yes. I’m thankful I only had one night to lose sleep over it, but yes, I did. You have this thing about separation and entanglement, and a set of beliefs I find perfectly bizarre and that I can’t comprehend or anticipate the results of … For all I knew, to you, yesterday was some sort of sign, a bolt from the heavens that absolutely meant - without argument or appeal, and according to a kind of faith I don’t even begin to understand - we were over.’

She looked almost sleepy as she said, ‘You think I’m irrational, don’t you?’

‘I think you behave like the most rational person I’ve ever met, but you claim to have this completely crackpot belief in your own half life/half death and a spookily entangled twin in another universe. Maybe that is profoundly rational in some deep sense that has eluded me until now, but I don’t feel any nearer seeing it than I was when you sprang this frankly wacko ideology on me in the first place.’

She was silent for a moment. Those almond amber eyes gazed up at me, steady flames in a deep well. ‘You are a globalist, aren’t you?’

‘Hey, you
were
listening.’

She smoothed her fingers through my chest hair, then gently took a fist of it and let her hand hang there, caught up. ‘You make such a big thing,’ she said, ‘of developed countries, rich countries, not being allowed to impose their ways of life and their way of thinking and of doing business on smaller or poorer countries, and that extending to religions and customs and the like, and yet you want to make everybody think the same way. You’re like most people who have to … fulminate about things; you want everybody to think the same way you do.’

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

‘But it is true, isn’t it? You want the one way of thinking spread everywhere, throughout the world, replacing all the different ways of thinking that have grown up in all the different places and peoples and cultures. You are a colonialist of the mind. You believe in the justified imperialism of Western thought. Pax logica; that is what you believe in. You wish to see the flag of your rationalism planted firmly in every brain on the planet. You say you don’t care what people believe in, that you respect their right to worship as they wish, but you don’t really respect the people or their beliefs at all. You think that they are fools and what they believe in is worse than useless.’

I flopped onto my back. I let out a deep breath. ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Do I want people to think the way I do? I suppose I do. But I know it’s never going to happen. Do I respect other people’s beliefs? Shit, Ceel, I don’t know. There’s this saying about how you should respect a man’s religious beliefs the same way you respect his belief that his wife is the most beautiful woman in the world. Casual - and hopefully non-malicious - sexism aside, I can see that. I do accept I could be wrong. Maybe the … the Abrahamists are right. Maybe their cruel, woman-hating, woman-fearing unholy trinity of mega-cultism is spot-on after all.

‘Maybe, even, some tiny, tiny little strand of it, like, for example, the Wee Frees, who are part of the Presbyterian movement in Scotland, which is itself part of the Protestant franchise, which is part of the Christian faith, which is part of the Abrahamic belief-set, which is one of the monotheistic religions … maybe they and only they - all few thousand of them - are absolutely bang on the money in what they believe and how they worship, and everybody else has been wrong-diddly-wrong-wrong all these centuries. Or maybe the One True Way has only ever been revealed to a one-man cult within the outer fringes of Guatemalan Highland Sufism, reformed. All I can say is, I’ve tried to prepare myself for being wrong, for waking up after I’ve died and finding that - uh-oh - my atheism was actually, like, a Really Big Mistake.’