Dead Air

Two. DRESS-DOWN WEDNESDAY

‘Half Man Half Limp Bizkit there. Their Mission Impossible theme-ette. Hasn’t been on the play list for a while, Phil. You attempting to make some sort of point with that title?’

‘Not me, boss.’

‘You sure, Phil?’ I looked across the desk at him. We were in our usual studio at Capital Live!. I sat surrounded by screens, buttons and keyboards like some sort of commodities dealer, because that’s the way studios have gone, even in the relatively short time that I’ve been in the wonderful world of radio broadcasting; you had to search for the two CD players – in this studio, up to my right between the e-mail screen and the callers’ details screen – to reassure yourself that you weren’t some suit playing the futures market. Only the microphone, angle-poised out from the main console, gave the game away.

‘Positive,’ Phil said, blinking behind his glasses. Phil’s glasses had thick black frames, like Michael Caine as Harry Palmer, or Woody Allen as himself. Phil Ashby was a big, gentle, rumpled-looking guy with thick, unruly, prematurely salt-and-pepper hair (the grey entirely down to me, he said, though I had photographic evidence to the contrary) and a slight West-country burr to his voice; he had a relatively slow, drawly, almost sleepy delivery, which, though I’d never admit it to him, complemented my own voice. A running joke we’ve used is that he’s on permanent Valium while I’m forever speeding, and one day we’ll swap drugs and just both sound normal. Phil had been my producer for the last year here at Capital Live!. Another two months and I would have established a new on-air employment record. I rarely last more than a year before I get sacked for saying something that somebody somewhere thinks I shouldn’t have. ‘Lalo.’

‘What?’ It was my turn to blink.

‘Lalo,’ Phil repeated. I could only see his head above the various screens and electronic gear between us. Sometimes I couldn’t even see that if he’d got his head buried in a newspaper.

‘Isn’t that one of the Teletubbies? I only ask because I know you are an expert.’

‘No; Lalo Schifrin.’ He fell silent, shrugged.

‘Good radio shrug there, Phil.’ I had sound effects for many of the silent syllables that made up Phil’s fractured body language, but I was still working on one for a shrug.

He raised his eyebrows.

‘Right.’ I picked up an old-fashioned mechanical stopwatch from the green baize of the desk. I clicked it. ‘Okay, I’m putting the dead air stopwatch on you until you explain yourself, Ashby.’ I glanced up at the big studio clock above the door. Another ninety seconds and we were off air. Through the triple glazing, in the production suite where producers used to be decently confined, in the good old days, our assistants appeared to be conducting a low-level conflict, which consisted of throwing paper planes at each other. Bill the newsreader wandered in on them, waving his script and shouting.

‘Lalo Schifrin,’ Phil said patiently into the silence on our side of the glass. ‘He wrote the original theme for Mission Impossible.’

I clicked the stopwatch off. ‘Four seconds; you’re not even trying. So; Lalo. You mean for the TV series, I take it.’

‘Yes.’

‘Bully for him. And your point would be, caller?’

Phil knitted his brows. ‘Vaguely pop-related people with names that sound like they were given them by babies.’

I snorted. ‘Just people? So “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da”, by the Fabs, wouldn’t count? Or “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida”? Or “Gaba-Gaba Hey”?’

‘Hardly target audience, Ken.’

‘Is Lalo?’

‘Jay-Lo.’

‘Jay-Lo.’

‘Jennifer Lopez.’

‘I know who Jay-Lo is.’

‘P. Diddy, for that matter.’

‘Lulu? Kajagoogoo? Bubba without the Sparxx? Iio? Aaliyah?’

‘Gawd rest the poor girl’s soul.’

I shook my head. ‘It’s only Tuesday and we’re at the Friday bottom-of-the-barrel stage already?’

Phil scratched his head. I pressed a Function button on my FX keyboard; an exaggerated, wooden, head-scratching noise of dubious comedic value sounded in my headphones. It was either that or the dead air watch again, and you can over-do these things. Our listeners, whom we knew – thanks to some very expensive, pro-active and robust market research – to be statistically stoutly loyal and containing a major proportion of ad-agency prime-target As and Bs with a lofty disposable income profile, would be familiar with the array of assertedly wacky and indeed even zany sound effects I used to give them an idea of Phil’s silent on-air actions. They also knew about dead air, which is the terrifically technical term us radio boffins use for silence. I took a breath. ‘Can we talk about what we haven’t talked about yet?’

‘Must we?’ Phil looked pained.

‘Phil, I was held off the air for three days last week; we played the pop equivalent of martial music through the whole show yesterday-’

‘What, is that what you get from Marshall amps, yeah?’

‘-and yet we’re told the world changed for ever seven days ago. Shouldn’t a purportedly topical show reflect that?’

‘I didn’t even know you knew the word “purportedly”.’

I leaned closer to the mike, lowering my voice. Phil closed his eyes. ‘Thought for today, listener. For our American cousins…’ Phil groaned. ‘If you do find and kill Bin Laden, assuming he is the piece of scum behind this, or even if you just find his body…’ I paused, watching the hands on the studio clock flick silently towards the top of the hour. Phil had taken his glasses off. ‘Wrap him in pigskin and bury him under Fort Knox. I can even tell you how deep: thirteen hundred and fifty feet. That’s one hundred and ten storeys.’ Another pause. ‘Don’t worry about that noise, listeners, it’s just the sound of my producer’s head gently thumping on the desk. Oh, one last thing: as it stands, what happened last week wasn’t an attack on democracy; if it was they’d have crashed a plane into Al Gore’s house. That’s it for today. Talk to you tomorrow, if I’m still here. News next after these vital pieces of consumerist propaganda.’

‘I was in Bond Street this morning. DKNY had no normal stock that I could see at all. Do you know what they had instead, Kenneth?’

‘No, I don’t know, Ceel. Why don’t you tell me?’

‘They had five thousand red T-shirts with the twin towers on them. Five thousand. Red. That was all. In the whole shop. It was like an art gallery, not a shop. I thought, Hey, that’s really touching, really artistic. I also thought, They’ll never sell all those, but somehow it didn’t matter.’ She turned in the bed and looked at me. ‘Everything seems so quiet, so spooky, don’t you think?’ She turned back again.

I stroked away a rope of her long brown hair and licked at the valley between her shoulder blades. That hollow was the colour of milk chocolate and tasted of salt. I breathed in the warm scent of her skin, senses swimming, losing myself in the sweet, heady microclimate of her long, slim body.

‘It’s the planes,’ I said at last, smoothing a hand down her flank, over waist and hip to thigh. Her body, so light for somebody so definitely black, looked dark as old mahogany against the startling whiteness of the hotel sheets.

‘The planes?’ she asked, taking my hand and holding it in hers.

‘They’ve stopped them flying over the city on the way into Heathrow. So another Mr Atta can’t crash-dive into the Canary Wharf tower or the Houses of Parliament. Makes the whole place seem quieter.’

(That day, sitting in the ruins of the abandoned party at Faye and Kulwinder’s, while it slowly dawned on those two that they would not be going to NYC for their honeymoon, at least not the following day and probably for many days, we kept going out onto the terrace to look at the Canary Wharf towers, tall against the skyline less than a mile away, half expecting to see them hit by a plane and crumble with the same awful grandeur as the first tower. ‘It’s Pearl Harbor II,’ we said. ‘They’ll fucking nuke Baghdad.’ ‘I can’t believe this. I just can’t believe I’m seeing this.’ ‘Where’s Superman? Where’s Batman? Where’s Spiderman?’ ‘Where’s Bruce Willis, or Tom Cruise, or Arnie, or Stallone?’ ‘The barbarians have seized the narrative.’ ‘Fuck, the bad guys are re-writing the scripts…!’ ‘Challenger and Chernobyl were SF, Aum Shinrikyo and the Tokyo Underground was manga; this is a disaster movie directed by Satan.’

Switching channels, some man on the Beeb was saying that when people claimed they’d seen people jumping from the towers they were really only seeing cladding falling off. Then you switched back and saw the bits of cladding holding hands as they jumped together, skirts blowing up around their bodies. Then the second tower collapsed, and there was no more jumping or falling to be done, just the catching up with the additional fragments of atrocity popping up and ploughing in elsewhere in America.)

‘I see,’ Celia said softly, turning away again. ‘You’re right.’ She stroked my hand. ‘But I mean it’s really quieter, too, Kenneth.’ Ceel was the only person apart from my mother who ever called me Kenneth. (Well, also apart from Ed, who sometimes called me Kennif, and Ed’s mum, who’s been known to call me Kennit, but that doesn’t count.) ‘Less… fewer people. Especially in places like Mayfair and Knightsbridge, and Chelsea, too.’

‘Ah; the posh places; the hedonistic ’hoods. You reckon they’re quieter?’

‘Yes. I think they’re all staying in their places in the country.’

‘You’re probably right. So why are you still here?’

‘I hate Gladbrook.’

Gladbrook was Ceel’s place in the country, or rather her husband’s. Deepest Surrey. Disliked it the instant I heard of it, even before Ceel told me her husband only really used it for business meetings and impressing people. She said she could never feel at home there and hated staying so much as a single night. I mean, Gladbrook; it even sounded wrong, like the name of an off-the-shelf company some well-smarmy City type would buy to front a dodgy tax-shy scam. Never actually been there, but I saw the estate agent’s details for the place once; basically a coffee-table book, it should have had its own ISBN number. Ran to a good forty pages including all the glossy photographs, but all anyone needed to know was that the main house had a heated driveway. You know; for all those blizzards they get in Surrey.

‘Is that where Mr M is?’

‘No, John is in Amsterdam again.’

‘Hmm.’ John. Mr M. Mr Merrial. In the import-export business. Drugs, to begin with; people, largely, these days. Plus fingers in more pies than he has fingers. Some of Mr M’s business interests were even legal these days; impressive property portfolio, apparently. A man a little older than me; maybe about forty. A quiet, even diffident guy, by all accounts, with a half-posh, vaguely south-east accent, pale skin and black hair, usually dressed in an unshowy Savile Row suit and not at all the sort of chap who looks like a multi-millionaire crime lord who could have people much more important than me rubbed out as quietly and efficiently – or as painfully and messily – as he wants, any day of the week. And I’m screwing his wife. I must be fucking mad.

(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.’

She shrugged, looked almost embarrassed.

‘You’re absolutely certain you don’t want to celebrate your ascension to the dreaming spires with some slap-up nosh?’

She just looked at me.

I laughed, turning for the exit ramp. ‘Oh well. Come on then; let’s get you home.’ I swung the Land Rover out of the Mouth Corp car park; we went bouncing and rattling and squeaking into Dean Street. I looked over at her. ‘What’s so funny?’

Nikki laughed to herself for a moment, then glanced over at me through her long red hair. ‘I wasn’t expecting a Land Rover,’ she said. ‘I thought you’d have a Harley Davidson, or a limo, or maybe a Smart or one of those Audis that looks like a bar of soap or something.’

‘I was never into Harleys,’ I said. ‘Suzis and Kwaks were my kind of bikes, back in my courier days. But this old thing -’ I slapped the dark grey plastic fascia under the narrow slab of the Landy’s windscreen ‘- despite, I’ll grant, looking like the sort of transport that would be infinitely more at home hauling a brace of sodden sheep from one field to another on a failing hill farm in darkest Wales, is almost the ideal car for London.’

‘You reckon?’ Nikki sounded like she was humouring me.

‘Think about it,’ I said. ‘It’s old, slow and a bit battered, so nobody’s going to want to nick it. Even the wheels don’t fit anything else. Look; comedy wipers.’ I turned on the windscreen wipers. On a Land Rover of this vintage they’re about seven inches long and just sort of flop about in a disheartened kind of way, looking more like they’re waving at the rain to welcome it onto the glass than undertaking to do anything so strenuous as actually clear the drops off the windscreen. ‘Look at that; pathetic. No self-respecting vandal’s even going to bother bending those. Wouldn’t be sporting.’

‘They are a bit pathetic,’ Nikki agreed as I turned them off and let them slump with what looked like exhausted gratitude to the base of the screen again.

‘You’re high up – as you may have noticed clambering awkwardly in here with your gammy leg – so you can see over most other traffic, the better to take advantage of what overtaking opportunities do arise in the hurly-burly of metropolitan motoring. Then there is the fact this is a Series Three of the diesel persuasion, so when people hear you coming they think you’re a taxi and often mistakenly treat you with the respect due to your standard Hackney Carriage. The ancient design means that the vehicle is narrow as well as having a short wheel-base for squeezing through gaps and into restricted parking spaces, and, lastly, driving one of these, no kerb in London holds any terror for you whatsoever. If a brief expedition onto the pavement or over a minor traffic island is required to facilitate progress, you just happily bump onto and over it without a second thought. Now, thanks to the appalling noise levels and seats patently constructed from low-grade friable concrete it would, certainly, be utterly hellish on long journeys or at any speed above a brisk jog, but then when the hell do you get to do either of those in London?’ I glanced over at her. ‘So, for an agricultural device only one automotive chromosome removed from a tractor, this is a surprisingly suitable urban runabout. And I commend the vehicle to the house.’

I waggled my eyebrows at her as we inched along Old Compton Street. I’d been developing this Why-a-Landy’s-great-for-London speech, and variations thereof, for nearly a year and this was, IMHO, a particularly fine and well-delivered example of the breed, which I thought might have elicited a pained grin if nothing else from the lovely Nikki, but it drew only a woundingly blank Oh-yeah, ho-hum look across her glowing features.

‘Could do with power steering, couldn’t it?’ she suggested.

‘And a better turning circle. But glad you spotted that,’ I said. ‘The chance to maintain upper body strength through in-car exercise is a truly valuable no-cost option.’

‘Yeah, right,’ she said. She was silent for a few moments, then nodded at the radio. ‘That’s not your station playing, is it?’

‘Ah, no; that’ll be Mark and Lard on Radio One.’

‘Isn’t that disloyal?’

‘Deeply. Can I let you in on a terrible secret?’

‘What?’

‘I’m only half joking about it being secret,’ I said first. ‘The press haven’t heard this yet and on a quiet news day with a following wind it could just make it into print and conceivably cause me problems in a straw-that-breaks-the-camel’s-back kinda stylee.’

‘Guide’s honour,’ she said, saluting ironically.

‘Thanks. Okay; here it is… hold on…’ I’d been gradually nudging the Land Rover’s much-dented front further and further into the traffic stream for the past few vehicle-gaps, and somebody in a nice car had finally got the message. I waved cheerfully at the silver Merc that let us out of Old Compton Street, as we swung onto Wardour Street to start heading north in a vaguely Highgate-ish direction. I looked at Nikki. ‘Yeah. It’s this: I cannot fucking stand commercial radio.’ I nodded. ‘There; it’s out now and I feel better for it.’

‘Including the station you work for, obviously.’

‘Obviously.’

‘So you listen to Radio One.’

‘It’ll get turned off promptly at three, but for large parts of the day, yes. And I have a definite weakness for Mark and Lard. There; listen.’ In fact, all we were listening to was the Landy’s rattling engine and ambient outside traffic noises until the Boy Lard squeaked, ‘Carry on,’ and the programme resumed. ‘See?’ I said. ‘Dead air, there; silence. Used to be anathema for DJs and radio people in general. Nowdays, well, nobody’s much bothered about leaving pauses any more, but these guys have made it into a feature. Repeat until funny, as they’d say themselves. Genius.’ I glanced at Nikki, who was looking sceptically at me from beneath her mass of red hair. ‘But the point,’ I insisted, ‘is that the Beeb has minimal advertising. I mean, they carry trailers for their own shows and those can get wearing enough, but what they don’t have is relentless high-rotation drivel every fifteen minutes from fucking loan companies, ambulance-chasing shyster legal firms and Chipboard Warehouse’s owner shouting at you from too near the mike to come on down and feel the cut of his special offers. I hate adverts. I prefer the licence fee. That’s how I want to pay; up front, efficiently, then get to listen to what I want to listen to and nothing else, whether it’s pop-clones or Beethoven or the sort of crap all-day talk shows that taxi drivers listen to.’

‘I suppose that guy Phil points out that the adverts are what pay your wages.’

‘Phil?’ I laughed. ‘He’s a Radio Three and Four man. Hates adverts even more than I do.’ I glanced at her again as we troubled the usually little-used upper regions of the Landy’s gearbox in a miraculous void in the traffic, which gave us an almost clear run to the lights at Oxford Street. ‘Don’t get me wrong; he’s a good producer and he’s a real muso – goes to see a band practically every night, whether it’s at Wembley Arena or a pub in Hackney – but he can’t stand Capital Live! either. No, it’s our friendly local Station Manager to whom it falls to bring the realities of commercial radio regularly to our attention.’

We crossed Oxford Street and started to head up Cleveland Street, following a motorcycle courier on a Honda VFR. Perhaps, I thought, a little reminiscing about my days as a fearless gonzo courier – only a few years ago, after all – would impress Nikki. It started raining and I turned on the wipers, to hilarious effect. I looked at Nikki. ‘Well, do you listen to Capital Live!?’

‘Mmm… sometimes,’ she said, not looking at me.

‘Yeah, well, exactly. You’re eighteen; you should be part of our target audience. What do you listen to, anyway?’

‘Umm, well, they sort of come and go? But I think they’re all illegal black stations from south of the river.’

‘What? K-BLAK? X-Men? Chillharbour Lane?’

‘Yeah, and Rough House, Precinct 17.’

‘Radio Free Peckham… is that still going?’

‘No, it was closed down.’

‘Well, frankly, good for you for ignoring the usual commercial tat.’ I was snatching glances at Nikki to see if she was impressed that I knew all these cool illegal stations, but she didn’t seem to be. ‘Not,’ I added, ‘that many of them play much Radiohead, as I recall.’

‘Sadly, no.’

‘Never mind. Radiohead are local where you’re going; bound to get loads of air time in Oxford.’

‘Hmm.’ She sounded distracted and when I glanced over she was looking at a clothes shop window. I looked ahead again.

‘Shit!’

‘Oh-!’

A blue car swept out of a side street right into the path of the courier in front of us. I caught a brief glimpse of the car driver, looking the wrong way and talking on his mobile. The bike rider didn’t have time to bail or brake, just went whump into the BMW Compact’s wing; the bike stood on its front wheel then clattered back to the rain-greased street just in front of us, files spilling from one pannier and skidding papers over the street and into the gutter. The rider went sailing over the Beemer’s bonnet as it braked and skidded to a stop. He landed heavily on the road ahead, sliding on his back a metre to hit the kerb hard with his helmet.

‘Oh! Oh!’ Nikki was saying.

I’d pulled up. ‘He’ll probably be okay,’ I told her quickly. ‘You just stay here.’

She nodded. She cleared some hair from her face with a trembling hand and pulled a mobile from her jacket as I opened the door. ‘Should I phone for an ambulance?’ she asked.

‘Good idea.’ I jumped out and ran past the white-faced car driver, just getting out, still holding his mobile. It crossed my mind to tell him what a fuckwit he was, but I didn’t. A couple of people were already standing looking down at the black figure lying in the road. He wasn’t moving. Some kid in a puffa jacket was squatting by him, doing something to his helmet.

‘Just leave the helmet on, yeah?’ I said to the kid, kneeling on the courier’s other side and carefully lifting up his visor.

Behind me, somebody had the sense to turn off the fallen bike’s engine, which was more than I’d thought to do.

The courier was older than me; grey beard, glasses, face pinched by the helmet’s foam padding. He blinked. ‘Fuck,’ he said weakly.

‘How you doing there, pal?’ I asked him.

‘Bit sore,’ he croaked. The rain was making little spots on his glasses. He put his gloved hand up towards the helmet’s fastening. I held on to it.

‘Hold on, hold on,’ I said. ‘Can you feel everything? Waggle your toes and stuff?’

‘Ah… yeah, yeah, I think… yeah. I’m all right. I think I’m all right. Breathing’s a bit… What about the bike?’

‘Think you’re going to need new forks.’

‘Shit. Fuck. Ah, rats. You a biker too, eh?’

‘Yeah. Used to be.’

He looked away to one side, where I sensed more people standing, and somebody approaching. I turned round and saw the car driver. The biker coughed and said wheezily, ‘If this cunt says, “Sorry, mate, I didn’t see you,” deck him for me, will you?’

Nikki was beautifully bedraggled by the rain.

‘You didn’t need to get out, kid,’ I told her. She was trying to dry her hair with a small chamois leather. The Landy’s interior was trying to mist up.

‘The operator was asking me where the incident had taken place, and I couldn’t see the street names,’ she explained. ‘Then I thought I’d better stop the bike’s engine.’

‘Well, I think the guy’s going to be all right. We did good. We make a fine emergency team; triples all round.’

I’d left our details with the cops, and the biker had been persuaded to take the ambulance; he was still dazed and might have some broken ribs. Nikki had handed him the VFR’s keys, though the cops had taken them away again because they wanted them left with the machine.

She gave me back the chamois leather. ‘Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’ I used it on the windscreen. ‘Blimey. Welcome to London, eh? Oh; do just say if you need a stiff drink or anything.’

She shook her head. ‘No, thanks.’

‘Yeah, just straight home, I think.’ We continued north, through the rain, for Highgate.

‘This is about what I think it’s about, isn’t it?’

‘Think so.’

‘So, what do you think?’

‘That we’re going to get carpeted, old son.’

‘Cripes, Biffo. A rocket from the WingCo, eh what?’

‘Severe dressing down. After you.’

‘Tally-fucking-ho.’

‘“… Well here is an alternative fatwa: women of Islam, judge your men, and if they are bad, kill them. They oppress you and scorn you and yet they are frightened of you; why else would they keep you from power and the sight of other men? But you have power. You have the power to judge whether your man is good or not. Ask yourself this: would your husband kill another person just because they are Jewish or American or something else people are simply born to be? Allah has let people be born these things; would your man kill them for no other reason than the faith or the country they were born into, by the will of Allah? If he would then he is a bad person and deserves death, for he brings shame upon your faith and the name of Allah. When next he comes to you, have a kitchen knife concealed beneath your bedclothes, or a pair of scissors, or even a penknife or a carton-cutter, and slit his unworthy throat. If you have no knife, bite out his throat. If you wish only to mutilate him, use a knife or your teeth on his manhood.” But do we actually say-’

Debbie Cottee, our Station Manager, used the remote to click off the DAT machine on the other side of her light, airy office. She slid her glasses down her nose and looked at me with weary, bleary blue eyes. ‘Well?’

‘Hmm, I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Do you think we’re using too much compression on my voice?’

‘Ken…’

‘But nobody,’ Phil said, ‘was actually saying that. I mean, there was a bit just before that where Ken was saying that we didn’t force Muslim women in this country to wear mini-skirts or bikinis, whereas a Western woman going to Saudi has no choice but to conform to their dress-code. The whole point is about toleration and intolerance, and about public figures like religious leaders being allowed to pass what is in effect a death sentence, without any sort of trial or defence, on nationals of another country. That was the whole point of putting the bit at the start pointing out that nobody in a position of responsibility in the West would say something like that-’

‘Is fucking irrelevant, Phil,’ Debbie said, putting her glasses down on the surface of her desk, which covered about the same area as our whole office. Her view, from near the top of the Mouth Corp building, was out over the Square and the cluttered rooftops of Soho, towards the blunt, pitted blade of Centrepoint. Debbie was thirty but looked older; she was fit in a chunky sort of way, her hair was mousy brown and she had tired, puckered eyes.

‘I’m not sure I see it as irrelevant at all, really,’ Phil said with the air of an academic discussing some fine point of ancient Etruscan property law, or the historical basis of estimates for the Yellow River’s silt-deposition rate during the Hang dynasty. ‘The whole point is that you put a disclaimer at the beginning and the end. You’re not saying, “Go and kill these people.” You’re saying, “No one here is saying, ‘Go and kill these people.’”’

Debbie glared at him. ‘That’s just semantics.’

‘No, it’s… grammar,’ Phil said, appearing baffled that anybody could possibly think otherwise. He looked briefly at me. Of course it was semantics rather than grammar (I was almost positive), but Debbie, who was certainly one of the more human execs in the Mouth organisation in general and Capital Live! in particular, and not an ignoramus, wasn’t quite smart enough to feel confident arguing the toss over that. At such moments I loved my producer.

‘Phil!’ Debbie said, slapping the surface of her desk. Her flat-screen monitor wobbled. ‘What if somebody, what if a Muslim person switches on just after your so-called disclaimer at the start of this, this… diatribe, and then switches off, totally fucking incensed – as well they fucking might be, if they can even believe their ears – just before the end? What the fuck are they going to think they just heard?’

‘Oh, come on,’ Phil said. ‘That’s like asking what if somebody hears the word “country” but switches off before the “-ry” bit. I mean, it’s just one of those things.’ He held his hands out.

‘That’s one word; this is a whole speech.’

‘Yes, but it’s the principle,’ Phil insisted stubbornly.

Debbie switched from Phil to me. ‘Ken,’ she said, ‘even for you…’

‘Debbie,’ I said, holding up both hands as though in surrender. ‘We’re proving our own point here.’

‘What?’

‘About prejudice, about bigotry.’

‘How does insulting people do that? How does the Islamic Council of Churches screaming down the phone at me do anything to defeat bigotry? You’re just-’

‘Because we had the Head Rabbi screaming down the phone last month,’ I pointed out.

‘The Israel-as-a-rogue-state rant,’ Phil said, nodding.

‘So fucking what?’ Debbie said loudly. ‘Are you trying to claim that insulting two religions is somehow better than insulting one?’

‘It’s being even-handed,’ I agreed.

‘It’s being bigoted towards ethno-religious groupings!’ she shouted. ‘It is, arguably, inciting religious and even racial hatred towards Jews and Muslims!’

‘That’s not fair,’ I protested. ‘We insult Christians too whenever we possibly can. We did that whole week of Christ as Certifiable Nutter.’

‘But he was a Jew!’ Debbie yelled. ‘And sacred to Islam as well!’

‘One stone; three birds!’ I yelled back. ‘What’s the problem?’

‘All Abrahamic religions have been selectively targeted, over time, for trenchant, robust, but above all fair criticism,’ Phil put in. ‘I have the relevant records.’

Debbie looked from Phil to me. ‘This isn’t a fucking joke, guys. There are mosques, synagogues being fire-bombed-’

‘You sure?’ Phil said.

‘-people being attacked because they’re “Middle Eastern” in appearance-’

‘Yeah, I know,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Jesus; Sikhs have been attacked for being Islamic terrorist sympathisers.’ I spread my arms. ‘So proving the essential point here; bigots are fuckwits. ’

‘The point,’ Debbie said exasperatedly, ‘is that some nasty little dickhead from the National Front or the British National Party could listen in to a programme of yours where you lay into the Jewish people or the Muslims and fucking cheer you on, Ken.’ Debbie slapped the desk again, but softer this time. She put her glasses back on and fixed her gaze on me. ‘Now is that what you want?’

This was actually a pretty good point, and one that Phil and I had worried over ourselves. ‘That’s why we have to attack bigotry and stupidity everywhere!’ I blustered. ‘If we stop now they’ll be left thinking the last lot we went after were the definitive bad guys.’

‘What?’ Debbie said, looking over her glasses at me again. (Fair enough; this last assertion didn’t make much sense even to me.)

‘I think that is a fair point,’ Phil said, nodding.

‘Well, here are another two points, gentlemen,’ Debbie said, sticking her glasses back up her face and pulling herself closer in towards her desk. ‘There’s such a thing as this station’s licence and the Broadcasting Standards Authority. There are also such things as our advertisers. They pay all the fucking bills and they can pull their ads even faster than the BSA can pull our licence. Several already have.’

‘But they’ve been replaced,’ Phil said, looking just a little red in the face now. He took his glasses off.

‘For now, at lesser rates,’ Debbie said steelily.

‘Rates have been going down everywhere for the whole year!’ Phil protested. He started polishing his glasses with a clean hanky. ‘New ones are always going to be lower than old ones in the current climate! It’s-’

‘Some very important people, some very vital advertisers, have been having words with Sir Jamie,’ Debbie said through clenched teeth. (To our credit, I thought, at this point not one of the three of us even glanced towards the Dear Owner’s portrait on the wall.) ‘At cocktail parties. In his club. At board meetings. On the grouse moors. At charity events. Over his mobile and his home phone. He is not happy. He is not happy to the extent that he is seriously weighing up which he needs most: your show or his good name. Which do you think he will choose?’ She sat back, letting this sink in. ‘Guys, you run a reasonably successful programme for us, but in the end it’s only ten hours of air time per week out of one hundred and sixty-eight. Sir Jamie’s backed you until now, Ken, Phil, but he can’t let you jeopardise the station, let alone the reputation of the Mouth Corporation or the goodwill he’s built up from nothing over the last thirty years.’

Phil and I looked at each other.

‘Jesus Christ, Debs,’ Phil said shakily. ‘Are you telling us to tone it down, or are we sacked? I mean, what?’ He put his glasses back on.

‘You’re not sacked. But it’s not just tone it down, it’s make amends.’

‘Make amends?’ I squawked.

‘This attacking Islam and Judaism, in particular, has to be reversed.’

‘So we can attack Christianity?’ I suggested. Debbie glared at me. ‘What?’ I said, holding out both hands.

‘We’ve got the perfect thing,’ Phil announced, just like that.

I did probably the first genuine double-take I’d ever done in my entire life. ‘We have?’

Phil nodded. ‘Ken doesn’t know about this yet,’ he told Debbie.

‘I don’t?’

‘Suggestion came in just yesterday from the Breaking News people.’

(I just managed to prevent myself saying, ‘It did?’)

‘The new Channel Four thing?’ Debbie asked, eyes narrowed.

‘Yeah; their competitor for Newsnight,’ Phil said.

‘Weren’t they trying to poach Paxman for that?’

‘I think so, but he wasn’t having it. Last rumour I heard was their main presenters would be Cavan Lutton-James and Beth Laing.’

‘She’s on Sky, isn’t she?’

‘Contract coming up for renewal.’

‘Anyway,’ Debbie said, waving one hand.

‘Anyway,’ Phil said. ‘They’re still doing dummy programmes at the moment but they start for real on Monday and they want something hard-hitting and controversial; something that’ll get them headlines.’

‘I thought they just wanted me to practise on in one of these dummy programmes,’ I said. (Stupidly, I realised, as soon as I’d closed my mouth again; it was entirely possible Phil was winging it here.)

‘They did, at first,’ Phil said. ‘I persuaded them otherwise.’

‘They want Ken for the Monday programme?’ Debbie asked.

‘If we can get the terms right,’ Phil said.

Debbie could probably see the surprise on my face. ‘You’re not Ken’s fucking agent, Phil.’

(This was true, though he sometimes acted like one. My real agent, the long-suffering Paul, complained that thanks to my – to him incomprehensibly bizarre – political fastidiousness, what I needed was an anti-agent; somebody who would look for brilliantly remunerative work I could then cheerfully turn down. In fact, he said, aside from contract negotiation time at the station, all I really needed was an answering machine that shouted ‘No!’)

‘I mean the terms of control over content and the people involved,’ Phil explained patiently. ‘I didn’t want Ken going in there thinking he was about to do a short piece of light relief about mike technique or something and then being confronted with half a dozen swivel-eyed fanatics representing all the different brands of fundamentalists we’ve upset over the last year. That’s the sort of thing that can happen and I just wanted to make sure it wouldn’t.’

‘Why is Ken looking like… well, like that?’ She gestured at me. Like what? I thought. I tried to look business-like and unperturbed.

Phil glanced my way then said, ‘Look, this is something Ken and I talked about. We’ve had too many dodgy, manipulative offers for TV appearances for him in the past. Either they’re too trashy to be worth considering in the first place, or they sound really interesting and we get all fired up about it then it falls through, or they change their mind, or it turns out there was some hidden agenda. We agreed that I’d handle these proposals until there was something worth taking to Ken, then we’d talk about it.’ Phil glanced at his watch. ‘If it hadn’t been for this meeting we’d be doing just that right now,’ he said. (Happily he didn’t add ‘in the pub’.) He looked at me. ‘Sorry to land this on you like this, Ken.’ I waved a hand.

‘So…’ Debbie said, still sounding and looking suspicious. ‘What are you proposing?’

‘That we give them something hard-hitting and controversial, ’ Phil said.

Debbie still looked deeply dubious, but I could see she was interested. ‘Which would be what?’

‘One of their ideas is to get Ken to debate with a genuine Holocaust denier; a guy from the extreme-right Aryan Christian Movement who claims the Allies built the death camps after the War,’ Phil said. All three of us exchanged looks. ‘I wasn’t so sure about that,’ he added. ‘But, well, maybe – given what you’ve been saying about the perceived if mistaken bias against the Jewish and Muslim faiths – that would be the way to go after all.’ He turned from Debbie to me. ‘Obviously, only if you feel comfortable with the idea, Ken. I’m still not sure about it, frankly.’

‘Oh, I’m comfortable with it,’ I said. A fucking Holocaust denier? Somebody from the extreme Christian right prepared to put themselves up for a tongue-lashing? What self-respecting militant liberal wouldn’t want to get their teeth into one of those fucks?

Debbie’s eyes were so narrow they were almost closed. ‘Why do I feel that this might just be a good idea,’ she asked slowly, ‘and yet we seem to have come back to the original, totally facile and childish proposal that the way out of all this was to insult Christians some more?’

‘Oh, come on,’ Phil said with a laugh in his voice. ‘This guy’s Christian like Satan is Christian. The point is he’s wildly anti-Semitic and he’s mad. Articulate, but mad. Ken’ll be seen defending-’

‘You sure this guy’s mad?’ Debbie asked.

‘Well, he agrees with the idea currently gaining ground in sections of Arab society,’ Phil said, in the sort of slow, considered voice that told me he felt back in control here, ‘that the September eleventh attacks were organised by the International Zionist Conspiracy to discredit Islam and give Sharon carte blanche against the Palestinians. But it’s okay; he hates the Arabs too. This guy has a consistent belief system totally based around race, religion and sexuality; Nordic/Aryan/ Christian/straight equals good… everything else is just shades of evil.’

‘Who is he? What’s his name?’

‘His name is Lawson, umm… Briarley or something.’

I was only half listening. It was while Phil was talking about this that I thought of it; my big idea. I knew what I was going to do. If they did let me onto the show with that anti-Semitic fuck, I knew exactly what I was going to do to him.

It was perfect! Mad, bad and dangerous to contemplate and it probably meant I was a bit mad, too, but hey; fire with fire. My mouth went dry and my palms felt suddenly pin-pricked with sweat. Oh, fuck, I thought. What a sweet, beautiful, terrifying idea. Did I really dare?

‘Okay, I’m going to have to consult on this,’ Debbie announced.

I clicked back to reality. Debs was going to kick it upstairs. Sensible woman.

‘Fine by me,’ Phil said. He looked at me and I nodded. ‘But we need a decision by Friday at the very latest; tomorrow would be better.’

‘We’ll have one,’ Debbie said. She pushed back on her desk, her big, black, leather executive chair rolling over the wooden floor. We were excused, obviously.

‘Debbie?’ I said, getting up.

‘What?’

‘I want you to make it very clear to whoever else you talk to about this that I really want to do it. I mean, really want to do it. I think it’s important.’ Phil looked at me with a frown, then smiled at Debbie.

‘I’ll let you know,’ she said. ‘In the meantime, I think we’d all really appreciate it if you avoided offending any major ethnic or religious groups. Could you do that for us?’

‘We can certainly try,’ Phil said merrily.

‘Fuck.’

‘No, it’s okay,’ Phil said as we walked away down a broad corridor lined with framed plaques, discs, awards and letters of thanks and endorsement, none of which were mine. ‘This is a feature, not a bug.’

‘You weren’t making any of that up in there, were you?’

Phil grinned. ‘Course not, you silly sod.’ ‘Sod’, which I was under the impression had dropped off most people’s List Of Plausible Invective around about the early seventies, was Phil’s most powerful expletive. ‘I’ll call the Breaking News people before we hit the pub.’ He frowned at me as we stepped into the lift. ‘Didn’t realise you’d be quite so keen.’

I wasn’t going to tell him about my idea. Best if he didn’t know for his own sake, apart from anything else. ‘Yeah, well,’ I said. ‘Keen Ken; that’s what they call me.’

‘No they don’t.’