Dead Air

Three. DOWNRIVER, UPTOWN

‘‘What I said was, these namby-pamby Holocaust revision people didn’t go remotely far enough. It wasn’t just the Holocaust that didn’t happen, it wasn’t just the death camps that were faked; the whole of the Second World War is a myth. Occupation of Paris? Battle of Britain? North African Campaign? Convoys and U-Boats? Barbarossa? Stalingrad? Kursk? Thousand-bomber raids? D-Day? Fall of Berlin? Singapore? Pearl Harbor? Midway? Hiroshima and Nagasaki? None of it happened! All special effects and lying. Guys of a certain age; you remember thinking how close those Airfix Spitfires and Lancasters looked to the real thing you saw in the film footage? That’s because they were just models too! All the old airfields, the concrete tank traps, a few so-called bomb-sites; they were built after the war.’

The girl looked uncertain, then she laughed. ‘That’s insane.’

I clinked her glass. ‘That’s the point. And besides, I said, what sort of chicken-shit Neo-Nazis are these people anyway? They should be saying, “Sure we killed six million; wish it had been more”, not splitting hairs about whether it was one million or two million and whining about the fucking Führer being misunderstood.’

‘You don’t actually believe any of this, do you, though?’

‘Are you mad?’ I cackled. ‘Of course not! I’m taking the piss out of fascist fuckwits!’

‘So is this what this TV thing’s about?’

‘Yeah. They’re going to get one of these nutters for me to “debate” with.’

‘Should people like that really be allowed to say that sort of stuff on national TV, though?’

‘Ask Channel Four that, not me,’ I said, drinking up. ‘But, yes, I think they should. You can’t hide that poisonous shit away for ever; it’ll come out somewhere. Better to face it and squash it. I want it out in the open. I want to know who these people are, I want to know where they live.’ I finished my drink. ‘That’s why these cowardly little shits love the Internet. They can post any sort of hate-filled drivel they want with no comeback because on-line they can hide. It’s the perfect medium for bullies, liars and cowards.’

We were in the Golden Bough, our usual after-show drinking hole, in Hollen Street. The Bough was a basic central London pub; one of those places neither flattered nor insulted to be called a boozer. Not fashionable, rarely crowded to the point of standing-room only (save on a Friday evening and Saturday night), reasonable juke box, basic, unpretentious food, only one gaming machine – tucked out of the way under the stairs to the small first-floor function bar – and a solid, unadventurous choice of drink.

There was no particular crowd associated with the place. Instead you got a smattering of all sorts in the Bough: workmen in dusty boots and paint-specked overalls, advertising creatives, theatre types, tourists, office workers, music people, film people, homeless guys nursing a half and keeping warm, waiting staff from restaurants and posher bars, one or two girls from the sex shows, and us. There was one dealer who used the place, though for a quiet drink, not for dealing. A couple of cops stuck their heads round the door about once a month or so.

The manageress was Clara, a brusquely rotund, no-nonsense, half-Portuguese grandmother with a dry, wheezy laugh and sixty-a-day habit. Nobody we know has ever seen her without one of two turban-like things on her head – one green, one yellow – and there was a long-standing, variable-odds pot-bet, which has allegedly been running with a rolling roster of regulars for over twenty years concerning whether she was bald underneath there or not. Last time I’d checked it had been 65/35 for slap-headedness and I’d stood to make a fiver if it turned out she wasn’t.

‘Can I get you a drink? What’ll it be?’

‘Oh, thanks. WKD blue. Cheers.’

‘I haven’t asked you your name,’ I said to the girl as I signalled to Clara.

‘Tanya.’ She stuck her hand out.

‘Ken. Pleased to meet you, Tanya.’

Tanya had overheard Phil and me talking about the Breaking News thing earlier. I’d seen her staring, brows pinched, at us and she hadn’t looked away when I’d stared back. I’d guessed she’d picked up an alarming selection of race-hate-associated buzzwords and was thinking about either walking out or throwing her drink at us and then running.

‘It’s okay,’ I’d said to her, past Phil’s shoulder. ‘We’re both nice liberals really and this is genuinely one of those rare occasions when it honestly isn’t as bad as it sounds.’

Tanya was quarter Jewish, which was one reason she had been taking offence at what she’d thought she’d been overhearing. She worked for a film company in Wardour Street. I could be pretty sure of this because Phil had grilled her about the film industry, albeit subtly, for a few minutes. Phil had this paranoid theory that unscrupulous tabloid journalists had realised we drank in the Bough, that they thought we were worth exposing in some way and were likely to send somebody here to coax me into saying something I might regret, thinking I was talking off the record to a civilian when in fact it was an undercover journo and I was very much on the record.

Given what I say when I know I’m on record and on air, this seems a fairly bizarre fear, but there you are.

Anyway, Tanya seemed to pass Phil’s hostile-journo filter and he lost interest in her when our production team and assistant gaggle walked in.

Tanya was short and slim and dark and always moving; sort of half dancing, swaying to and fro, seemingly without really knowing she was doing it, rhythmic and slow like an underwater plant in a meandering river’s languorous undercurrent. I’d seen girls doing this before in situations like this and it often meant they were loved up, but I didn’t think she was. She had wide grey-green eyes and hair in little black spikes.

We ended up with the others from our show and a couple of people from Timmy Mann’s, the one after ours, though not the boy Mann himself. It turned into a moderately serious drinking session, all sat round our favourite circular table in one end corner of the Bough. I was getting on, I thought, awfully well with Tanya, who laughed at all my jokes and touched me on the forearm a couple of times.

I’d been supposed to meet up with Jo that night and take in a film but Jo had to cancel – yet another Addicta crisis – and I’d started thinking that maybe I should see how things progressed with Tanya instead.

Tanya was drinking her blue WKDs very slowly and I had moved on to whiskies after a couple of pints of Fuller’s, but for the past two Scotches I’d been cheating. When nobody was looking I’d lower the short glass towards the floor and upend it, letting the drink fall onto the ancient and already pretty tacky carpet underneath. Jeez; they were single twenty-five mill measures with no water; probably evaporated before they made it to the floor, but the point was they weren’t getting me drunk. If anything did develop with the lovely Tanya, I’d be in a fit state to appreciate it.

All in vain; Tanya had to go at six to meet some friends, and would not be dissuaded. I even followed her to the door of the pub and out onto the street. She gave me her mobile number and disappeared into the twilight, heading for Tottenham Court Road Underground station. I sighed as I watched her go, looking at the display on my Motorola where her number still glowed.

The phone’s screen went dark and I went back inside.

Our drinking party started to break up as people went off to catch trains, tubes and buses. Phil and I decided on takeaways from the Taj, our local curry house round the corner from the Bough, then went our separate ways. I felt sober enough to drive, but I knew I wasn’t, so I left the Landy in the Mouth Corp car park and got a mini-cab home, suffering a lecture on the superior qualities of wholesome Caribbean soul food compared to this highly suspect Indo-Pakistani fare from Geoff, the Jamaican driver I always seemed to end up with whenever I was clutching a carrier bag full of curry or a leaking parcel stuffed with doner kebab.

‘Me car gonna stink now, mon!’

‘Here’s an extra fiver, my good fellow; wave it around and it should help disperse the ghastly sub-continental pong.’

Geoff thought this was so funny he lit a big spliff as he drove off down Lots Road, cackling and trailing clouds of ganja smoke.

Sometimes I told people I lived in a tied cottage. The houseboat at Chelsea Wharf used to be one of Sir Jamie’s pads in the city, back when he was basically trying to be Richard Branson (Sir Jamie even had a supposedly trademark beard back then, too, though he switched to a pony-tail and earring shortly afterwards, surrendering the high ground of facial fuzz to the Bearded One). The Temple Belle was an old and much-converted coaster. It still belonged to Mouth Corp but it was rented to me at an extremely reasonable rate. I was on a pretty good contract since I’d shifted to the late-morning show and I could probably have afforded the rent or mortgage if I’d had to pay the market rate for the tub, but getting it cheap certainly made an appreciable and very pleasant difference, though it did, as Phil had been the first to point out, give Sir Jamie an extra hold over me; if I lost the day job I lost the cool houseboat and Chelsea address too.

The Temple Belle was riding high on the flood tide as I walked down the jetty past the other houseboats; music and light came from a couple of them. Upriver, where the breeze was coming from, seeded with light rain, a train grumbled across Battersea railway bridge. Nearer, the towering façade of the Chelsea Reach development glittered with a cheesy opulence. The river was silent and traffic pretty much inaudible. The high tide meant there was no awful smell; the main drawback of living on the boat was that at low tide, especially on a hot summer’s day, the revealed mud smelled of ancient shit and things long dead. Probably because that was exactly what it was.

Despite the rain and my empty belly, I hesitated by the old wheelhouse with the door keys in one hand and the slowly cooling curry in the other, looking out at the dark water for what turned into a minute or two, feeling a little lonely all of a sudden, and then – in my defence, almost immediately – a bit ashamed for feeling sorry for myself. The gentle background roar of the unsleeping city filled the sodium-stained skies and I stood listening for the river’s dark, liquidic music in vain.

From my parents’ house, in Helensburgh, thirty kilometres down the north bank of the Clyde from Glasgow, I could see the river from my bedroom. I grew up watching the distant cranes of Greenock gradually disappear as the shipyards closed, to be replaced, later, by offices, shops, housing developments and leisure facilities. By then we’d moved to Glasgow itself to be near my father’s new dental practice in the city centre. Our first-floor flat in the leafy South Side was big – my brother Iain and I had rooms easily twice the size of those we’d had in the bungalow in Helensburgh – but the outlook was to the broad, tree-lined street, the parked cars and the tall red sandstone tenements like ours on the far side. I missed the view of river and hill more than I’d expected.

I met Jo on a river cruise one sticky summer night, Ceel in Sir Jamie’s glittering new penthouse at Limehouse Tower, during a storm.

‘You’re the guy did that Cat Stevens cover. Didn’t you get sued?’

Late summer, 2000. I was still doing the Capital Live! pre-midnight programme at the time and had been talking to my then producer near the stern of the little river cruise boat. We had been watching the metallic shells of the Thames Barrier pass – each one like a sinking ship, up-ended, the last of the sunset’s ruby light flaring from their summits – when this crop-haired, blond semi-goth with lots of facial metalwork barged in between us.

Producer Vic stepped back to give her room, looked the girl up and down, decided I probably didn’t mind being interrupted by her, raised his eyebrows at me and wandered off.

I did a bit of entirely justifiable sizing-up myself – the girl was all in black: DMs, jeans, scoop-necked vest, battered-looking biker’s jacket off one shoulder. About mid-twenties. ‘I wasn’t exactly sued,’ I said warily, wondering if I was talking to a journalist. ‘There was an exchange of lawyers’ letters that seemed to cost as much as serious litigation, but we managed to avoid an actual writ.’

‘Right.’ The girl nodded vigorously. ‘Oh. Jo LePage,’ she said, holding out a hand to shake while nodding back towards the glass superstructure of the boat, where music thudded and impressive-ten-years-ago disco lights flashed. ‘I’m with Ice House,’ she explained. ‘The record company. You’re Ken Nott, the DJ, right?’

‘Right.’ I shook her hand.

‘Right. What was that song? “Rushdie and Son”?’

‘Uh-huh. But the tune was mostly “Moonshadow”.’

‘Ha. Right. What was it? “I’m being shadowed by a fundamentalist…?”’ she sang, huskily but in tune.

‘Nearly,’ I said. ‘It was, “I’m being stalked by a fundamentalist. I think I’m being shadowed.”’ I spoke rather than sang the lyrics. I was still feeling wary of the girl. Just because she said she was from the record company didn’t mean she really was. I had already given at least one interview without knowing it, one drunken, loved-up night to a girl in a club who turned out to be a reporter for a tabloid with a dreadfully unreconstructed attitude to drugs and drug-taking. The resulting interview had nearly got me fired and started an argument between Capital Live! and the paper about whether she’d told me she was a reporter at the start of our conversation or not. I’d claimed she hadn’t but it was just possible she had and I’d not been listening because I was too busy grinding my teeth and staring at her tits.

Jo had rather impressive breasts, too; not large, but high and bra-less beneath her top. The deck lights strung above us showed her nipples as little sharply defined bumps raising the thin black cotton.

‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘I heard it at a party once. Never did get hold of a copy.’

‘Well, I’d love to, ah, provide you with one,’ I said, grinning, ‘but I don’t even have a copy myself any more.’

‘Sorry,’ she said, smiling. ‘I wasn’t trying to blag one.’ She pushed her hand through her spiky blond hair, exposing ink-dark roots in an unselfconsciously endearing gesture and looked back briefly at the main party.

‘What do you do at Ice House?’ I asked her.

She shrugged. ‘Bit of A &R, bit of what my boss calls asset management. Looking after bands.’

‘Anyone I might have heard of?’

‘Hope so. Addicta? Heard of them?’

‘Yeah. Heard the hype, certainly.’

She shook her head emphatically. ‘Not hype. They are really good.’

‘Right. I saw an interview with them. The lead singer seemed a bit full of himself.’

She grinned. ‘And your point would be?’

I smiled. ‘Yeah, I guess it kind of comes with the territory.’

‘They’re okay,’ she said. ‘The band. Brad can sound arrogant but he’s just being honest in a way; he’s good and he knows it and he isn’t into false modesty.’

‘Woh-no,’ I agreed. ‘I don’t think he’ll ever be accused of that.’

She looked around. ‘So. Enjoying the cruise?’

‘No.’ I sighed. ‘I hate these things,’ I said to her quizzical expression. ‘Well, apart from what happened to the Marchioness… I always feel trapped. You can’t get off. A normal party or gig or do, you can always bale out and head for the door. One of these things, you’re along for the whole ride, whether you’re totally bored or… well, the opposite of bored. A couple of times I’ve met somebody and, ah, you know, been getting on exceptionally well with them-’

‘Ah. A female somebody.’

‘A female somebody of the complementary gender of choice, indeed, and we’ve suddenly found ourselves in an ungregarious mood and wanted to be somewhere together, just the two of us, and… well, we’ve had a very frustrating wait for the end of the cruise.’

She smiled widely and took a bottle of beer from one jacket pocket. ‘You make a habit of picking up women on these cruises?’

‘Just twice so far.’

‘Of course you could always have joined the metre-under club, or whatever you’d call it, fucking in the loos in the boat.’

‘You know,’ I said, frowning as though this had just occurred to me, ‘I’ve never known a relationship that started in a toilet last very long. Odd that. Hmm.’

‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘Beg your pardon. Counting your piercings.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Uh-huh. Seven, that I can see.’

‘Ha,’ she said, and hoisted her T-shirt to show a belly button neatly cinched with a little bone-shaped metal rod.

‘Eight,’ I said.

She drank and wiped her lips with the back of one hand, left her mouth hanging open, her tongue running along the inside of her lower teeth as she nodded and made an obvious job of measuring me up. ‘Nine, altogether,’ she said, and performed a little movement that made me think at first she was taking a bow, then I realised she was making as though to look down at herself.

‘My,’ I said. ‘Must be fun going through airport metal detectors. ’

Her brows furled a little. ‘Everybody says that.’ She shrugged. ‘Not a problem.’

‘Well, that’s airport security’s loss.’

‘You’re not into piercings?’

‘What can I say? I’m a fully paid-up hetero male.’ I grinned.

A hoisted eyebrow made it look like she took the second meaning. She glanced back at the lights of the boat again, her facial metalwork glinting. ‘Hey,’ she said, ‘you want to dance?’

‘Gee, I thought you’d never ask.’

We didn’t join the metre-under club, or whatever she’d called it. We waited a whole extra hour and had boisterous, energetic sex back on another boat, my new home, the Temple Belle. I found the ninth piercing.

‘Whoo! Rock the fucking boat, man.’

I woke in the depths of the night, my arm gone to sleep beneath her. The Temple Belle rested on some not-quite-perfectly-level mud at the bottom of the tide, so that you could, to that minimal extent, tell what the state of the tide was even at night, down in the main bedroom with the skylight curtains closed, by the presence or absence of a faint sensation of being tipped towards the head of the bed. I had that feeling now. I took a deep breath, testing for the smell of decay that sometimes infected the air on summer nights like this, born of the mud and capable, on really warm, still nights like this, of insinuating its way even down here. Nothing. Just her perfume.

The girl slept on, sprawled half across me, muttering quietly in her sleep. She liked to talk during sex, too, and she liked being bitten. Well, nipped, really, but fairly hard. She professed herself amazed that I didn’t share this predilection. She made a strange little exhaling noise in her sleep, like an exasperated sigh, then snuggled up closer to me and fell still and silent, breathing slowly and regularly.

Just visible in the glow from the radio alarm, a little plastic canister rested on the bedside table; her party contacts. Jo wore fashion contact lenses that made her eyes seem to fluoresce under ultraviolet light. Dancing with her on the cruise boat with its dated lighting rig had been… interesting.

Looking carefully at her face, I could just make out the soft reflections from some of the surgical steel piercings that punctuated her skin. I didn’t mind in the least if people wanted to get tattoos or prick their bodies with bits of metal – was it better, worse, or no different from having a face-lift, or collagen implants, or liposuction, or Botox injections? I didn’t know. But the more you thought about it, the more shoving lumps of metal through your skin did seem a slightly odd thing to do. The lengths we go to to differentiate ourselves, I thought. But then people had earrings and metal fillings in their teeth, and there were much weirder things, like the tribe that put more and more rings round the girls’ necks as they grew, until they were extended to such a length that if the rings were taken off, their necks just collapsed, and they died.

Jo was fun, UV contacts and all. We’d already established we were both between serious relationships (which kind of implied we were both ready to start a new one).

We’d see.

‘-guest in your country, sir, and I could not believe that which I was hearing here in the city of London was not really coming out of Kabul, or Baghdad. I could not believe my ears. I had to look around and reassure myself I was in a London cab, not-’

‘Mr Hecht-’

‘Where the hell do you people get off? Dear God, man, we lost four thousand people in a morning. Every one of them innocent civilians. This is war. Don’t you understand that? It’s time to wake up. It’s time to choose sides. When the President said that you’re either for us or against us, he spoke for all decent Americans. Your Mr Blair’s chosen which side he’s on and we’d like to think he speaks for all decent English people, but I don’t know what side you think you’re on. It sure doesn’t sound like ours.’

‘Mr Hecht, if the choice is between American democracy and murderous misogynists and a state governed by diktat and sharia, believe me I am on your side. I’d shop – I’d turn in my own brother if I knew he’d had anything to do with the attacks on September the eleventh. Mr Hecht, I know it doesn’t sound like it usually, and I’m sure it didn’t sound like it to you when you heard me yesterday, but there’s a lot about America I love. I love its freedoms, its celebration of free speech, its love of… betterment. It is still the land of opportunity, I know that; there’s no greater place on Earth to be young and smart and healthy and ambitious. A lot of us Brits affect to be appalled so few Americans have passports, but I’ve been to the States, I’ve travelled all over it and I know why they don’t; America is a world in itself. The states are like countries, the sheer scale of the place, its variety of climate and landscape; it’s stunning, it is truly beautiful. And is there any nation and ethnic group in the world not represented in the States? Americans don’t have to go out into the world; the world’s already come to them, and you can understand why.

‘I still have a lot of issues – I have a problem with anybody who voted for the man claiming to be your president, for example… but then as not all Americans are eligible to vote, and half of those who were eligible to vote didn’t bother to vote, and less than half of those who did vote voted for Dubya, that means I guess I’m probably only appalled by about twenty per cent or less of the population, which is not so terrible. But these are like the issues you have with a family member you love; they only matter so much because you’re so close to them in the first place. My point is that in your anger and your pain, you’re – your government is making a series of awful mistakes, mistakes that will damage America, damage all of us in the future. And I do not want to see that.’

‘Well, this is like listening to two different people, sir, I don’t know how you square what you’re saying now with what you said yesterday.’

‘Mr Hecht, I’m saying that there’s a kind of madness built up about this already, a denial that benefits nobody. No, that’s not true; it will benefit the sort of people who did this. Your denial will benefit your enemies. If you don’t understand this, if you don’t understand them, you’ll never defeat them. So believing that America was attacked out of jealousy is not just ludicrous and self-deluding, it’s self-defeating as well. This was not an act of grossly over-developed petulance, for God’s sake. Twenty highly motivated men do not train for months to kill themselves in a meticulously planned and executed operation that the biggest, best-funded security services in the world don’t get the faintest whiff of – even though it’s happening right under their noses – because you’ve got more domestic appliances than they do. What was the phrase? “It’s the economy, stupid”? Well, in this case, it’s the foreign policy. It’s that damn simple.

‘It doesn’t even matter if you or I don’t see it this way, Mr Hecht, but to them it’s every corrupt, undemocratic regime the United States has poured money and arms into since the last world war, propping up dictators because they’re sitting on a desert full of oil and helping them crush dissent; it’s the infidel occupying their holy places, and it’s the unending oppression of the Palestinian people by America’s fifty-first state. That’s the way they see it. You can argue with their analysis, but don’t kid yourself any of this happened because they’re just jealous of your shopping malls.’

‘Damn right I’d argue with their analysis. So are you now trying to say you are on our side?’

‘May I refer my honourable friend to the answer given above?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘No, I’m sorry, Mr Hecht; a piece of British Parliamentary phraseology we use on the show sometimes. Look, Mr Hecht. Do I think you should invade Afghanistan? For what it’s worth – and it’s worth almost nothing, I realise that – no. But, when you do, it couldn’t happen to a nicer regime. I’ve been banging on about the Taliban for years. But don’t forget you helped put them there; you funded the Mujahidin and you armed Bin Laden and supported the Pakistani security service, like you once supported the dictator Saddam Hussein because you needed him and like you’re supporting the dictator General Musharraf and the grotesque mediaeval despotism of the Saudis now, because you need them… Meanwhile, New Missile Defense, which destroys arms limitation treaties with pinpoint precision but is utterly guaranteed to have no discernible effect on any enemy missile whatsoever, which needs a homing beacon in the nose of its target to miss it in the same hemisphere, and which, after September the eleventh, has been proved to be an even more wilful and irrelevant waste of money, is a hundred per cent certain to happen. I mean… this is madness, Mr Hecht. It’s national psychosis.’

‘We have a right to defend ourselves, sir. We had that right before nine-eleven. Now we have the right to demand it. And we’re going to have it whether it suits people like you or not. If you want to be part of it, fine. But if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.’

‘You know something, Mr Hecht? Back when I was a teenager, just starting to think for myself, I came up with a very basic formulation. I decided that whenever somebody says, You’re either for us or against us, you had to be against them. Because only moral simpletons and outright conniving rogues see, or even claim to see, the world in such preposterously black and white terms. I am deeply dubious about being on the same side as anybody that stupid or that disingenuous, and certainly will not be led by them. Evil always starts with a good excuse, Mr Hecht. George W. Bush may be, in effect, President by acclaim now, and, compared to the people who attacked America, he’s personally almost blameless, but the fact remains he got where he is by chicanery and deceit and – not even very deep down – he’s a sad, inadequate little man.’

‘Go to hell, sir, as you surely will.’ Mr Hecht hung up.

‘Think we lost him, Notty.’

I took a deep breath. ‘That is your single deployment of that word for this year… Philly-Willy.’

‘US Embassy on line one!’

‘Oh, stop it, you’re killing me.’

‘Ken, great to meet you. Come in, come in. Ah, yes, let this delightful young lady take your coat…’

‘Nice to meet you, ah…’

‘Jamie. Call me Jamie. No standing on ceremony here. Come on in to the body of the kirk, as they say. I have Scotch blood too, you know. Us Heelanders have to stick together against these Sassenachs, eh? Listen, we’re all really excited about you joining us at Capital Live!. I hear you’re doing incredibly well. Caught you a few times myself; wish it was more. Schedules, meetings, business; you know, but I’ve heard you. I have heard you. Very good, very good. Very near the bone, very near the bone, but I like that. That’s my style, too. Edge work. Nothing like it, is there? The danger, the risk. Risk-taking; that’s what it’s all about, isn’t it? Don’t you think? So, how are you settling into the old Temple Belle?’

‘Ah, very nicely,’ I said. I hesitated, wondering whether to point out that I’d been settled in there for over a year.

‘Brill. Superb, superb! Ah. Helena. Like you to meet Ken. Ken Nott. Ken; this is my wife, the lovely Helena. Ah; drinks. Excellent, excellent. Ken. Champagne?’

‘Lady Werthamley,’ I said, nodding to her. ‘Thank you.’

Sir Jamie Werthamley, our Dear Owner, had a penthouse in the top two storeys of his own newest office building, Limehouse Tower, overlooking the river at Limehouse Reach. This was April 2001 and I’d been working for him for nearly a year by then – three months of that on the relatively prestigious late-morning show – but this, one of his birthday parties, was my first chance to meet him (strictly no presents, the invitation had said, which might have seemed superfluous for a man who owned several gold mines, a bank, a Caribbean archipelago and his own airline. Anyway, I’d happily complied).

Sir Jamie was a young-looking fifty; ginger going grey. The trademark pony-tail was long gone but the single diamond stud in his ear was still there. He was dressed casually in designer jeans, a white T-shirt and a blue jacket that looked glossily fine and very expensive. I’d dressed in my best smart-but-casual but I felt like a tyke next to him.

There were maybe a hundred people in the sunken space of the main room, which, famously, had been fashioned by a film-set designer. The room held the crowd easily. I had my coat whisked away by what looked like one supermodel and a glass of dark gold champagne slipped into my fist by another before I’d really had a chance to draw breath. Sir Jamie was the touchy-feely sort; taking your hand, cradling your elbow, patting your back, gentle-punching upper arm, all that stuff. And all the time talking in that intense, breathily enthusiastic manner, words only just getting out of each other’s way in time. In that respect he was exactly the same as when he was interviewed on TV.

His wife sat, upright and poised, in a tall, high-tech wheelchair. Lady W had suffered a bad fall horse-riding ten years earlier, not long after they were married. She wore something blue and gauzy, and a few shimmering pieces of diamond and platinum jewellery. She was maybe ten years younger than her husband and had raven black hair and violet eyes.

‘Call me Helena, please,’ she said, letting go of my hand.

‘Thank you, Helena.’

She turned the wheelchair round using a little joystick at her right hand and moved it towards the steps down into the sunken part of the room. ‘I listen to your show, Ken,’ she said over her shoulder as I walked after her.

‘Thank you.’

‘You are terribly outspoken, aren’t you?’

‘That’s my job, Helena,’ I said as Lady W’s chair got to the top of the steps and stopped.

‘You do upset a lot of people.’

‘I’m afraid I do.’

‘A lot of important people, in fact.’

‘Guilty as charged, ma’am,’ I agreed.

‘I know quite a lot of those people.’

‘I… I’d be surprised if you didn’t,’ I said evenly.

She snorted in a very English public schoolgirl way and looked up at me, winking. ‘Yes, well, keep up the good work. Now, who shall we find for you to talk to?’ She surveyed the room. I did, too. The space itself was very swoopy and primary coloured. It did look like a film set; actually it looked like the bad guy’s lair in an Austin Powers film, which was a funny thing to spend a couple of million quid on, but there you were. The windows, facing south and west, were three metres tall and easily fifteen long; great slabs of darkness sprinkled with the lights of London.

There were a lot of famous faces, from, I guessed at the time, pretty much every walk of life that led to people getting their faces into the papers or onto TV apart from crime. (Actually I was wrong about the crime bit.) I imagined that the people I didn’t recognise were just plain rich, or powerful in a low-profile way, or both, and realised there was a decent chance that I was the least important person in the whole apartment, with the not-a-given exception of the supermodel-resembling serving staff.

‘Ah,’ said Mrs W decisively. ‘You might be interested to meet Ann and David Schuyler. She teaches Political Philosophy at the LSE and he’s a Tribune Group stalwart. Come on.’ The wheelchair lurched forward and – using a rotating three-wheel set-up at each corner – descended slowly, motors whirring, to the dark red carpet below.

The Schuylers were charming and fascinating and interesting to talk to and I chatted to various other people who were all or most of those things during the course of the evening and passed some pleasant time with a Formula One driver, a Junior Minister who was about fifteen years older than me but still amazingly attractive (and who had an even more amazing, eye-watering contempt for her Minister) and a beautiful young actress whose name I could still recall weeks later but whose personality entirely escaped me. I drank the champagne and sampled some of the melt-in-the-mouth food circulating on silver salvers borne high by the catwalk-grade serving staff.

And fascinating as all this felt at the time, the only thing that came to mean anything, eventually, was meeting Celia, later.

I had already seen her, as I made my way back from the loo (‘Head for the Monet and then hang a right at the Picasso,’ as Sir Jamie himself had instructed me). She was standing with a smallish, pale man who was dressed in a severely tailored black suit, listening while he talked quietly to a rotund Lord who owned a national daily and a few regional titles.

She wore short heels that brought her nearly up to his height of about 170 centimetres, and a long, black, high-necked dress. A single string of large grey-black pearls; skin like milky coffee. She looked mixed-race, a combination of white and black and maybe South-East Asian too. Pushed, I’d have guessed she was in her mid-twenties, but her face was extraordinary; it gave the impression that it belonged to either a teenager who had seen some terrible things in her short existence or a sixty-year-old who’d never had a day’s trauma or a single ageing event in her entire life. There was a sort of intense calmness to her features, an almost wilful innocence that I couldn’t recall ever having seen before. It seemed almost identical to the poised serenity of a secure, untroubled child, and yet profoundly different; something struggled for and arrived at rather than inherited, rather than bestowed. Her eyes were amber beneath fine sculpts of dark brows and a forehead like a smooth and perfect bowl, and there was a roundness to her mouth and eyes that swept into elongated lines at the outside edges, contributing to that expression of thousand-yard tranquillity. Her hair was gathered up, full and shining, immaculate. It was the colour of heroin.

Her gaze slid straight over me as I passed a few metres away, in pursuit of some more of that very pleasant champagne. I didn’t recognise her or the man at her side – who looked a bit like Bernie Ecclestone with no glasses and better hair – though I did see him leaving, an hour later, without her, but with a blond guy so wide and tall he just had to be a bodyguard.

A storm had been advancing on London from the west since the vividly bloody sunset hours earlier. The party was in full swing by the time it hit but aside from a distant roar if you stood near the windows, and the swirling patterns of rain whirling over the west-facing glass, it was easy to miss.

I headed towards the Monet again, ready to turn right at the Picasso, but there was already somebody in the bathroom. Sir Jamie, clutching a thin-necked bottle of Krug and in the company of a pair of giggling young soap stars, stopped and said, ‘Ken! Queue? Walk this way; show you another pissoir. Mi casa, and all that. Oh! Fancy a game of snooker afterwards? We’re missing – oh, I tell a lie, no, we’re not,’ he said as a sort of vapidly handsome young man I recognised from a boy band came clumsily down some spiral stairs to our right. ‘Beg your pardon, Ken; offer suddenly and embarrassingly withdrawn. Hiya, Sammy,’ Sir Jamie said, grinning, and slapped the young man on the arm. He turned to me and nodded to the spiral stairs. ‘Ken; up there. Or there’s a lift, of course. Either way, follow your nose. Ha ha! See you later. Have fun.’ Then to the girls and the young man, ‘Right!’ And off they went.

I walked up the stairs then along a broad, deeply carpeted corridor lined with Art. Windows at the far end gave out onto a view east to the Millennium Dome, crowned with a circlet of red high-building lights. I couldn’t find any open doors, so I shrugged and chose, adventurously, the one double-set I could see. A suitably large bedroom the size of a tennis court presented itself and I crossed to where I guessed the en suite might be. It was a gym, but far away, on the other side of the room, was the bathroom. It really did have a little lidded ceramic pissoir fastened to the wall, as well as an ordinary loo, two sinks the size of small baths, a vast sunken bath studded with nozzles, lights and underwater speakers, a colossal shower cabinet with marginally more nozzles than the bath, and a sauna the size of a log cabin.

It felt slightly pathetic only to do a pee in this palace of evacuation, exfoliation and immersion, like using a McLaren F1 as a golf cart. I stood there looking around and realised that this was probably just Sir Jamie’s bathroom; there was no special facility to help a disabled person use the place. It was all immaculate save for a poorly wiped-clean area on a glass shelf where a few tiny white crystals lay scattered. I lifted some to my tongue with a fingertip and tasted cocaine. Moderately heavily cut, so surely not Sir Jamie’s. Probably Sammy, the clumsy boy bandee.

About to quit the bedroom, I saw the curtains that filled one wall move at the edge, and felt a hint of a draught brush my face. I hesitated, then tentatively pulled the curtains back.

The view was to the north-east over a terrace cut diagonally across the tower’s summit. Shrubs and small trees in giant pots swayed in the wind and the surfaces of ornamental pools ruffled as the gusts stroked and struck them. The sliding pane at this edge of the giant window had been left open a finger-width. I wondered if I ought to close it. If the wind changed… but so what? Sir Jamie probably had a butler or a major-domo or whatever the hell to do this sort of stuff. I was going to let the curtain fall back and just leave things as they were when I caught a glimpse of a figure in the shadows near one edge of the terrace where thin, straight railings segmented the view.

Lightning. Much later I thought it ought to have been lightning that lit the scene, that it had been that sort of storm and when I first saw her standing there it was courtesy of a flash of lightning, which lit up the Mysterious Figure in the Shadows. But it wasn’t. Just the lights of the storm-pressed city. Sometimes reality isn’t Gothic enough.

I could see it was a woman, standing about four metres away in the lee of the building under a roof projecting over part of the garden. The shelter was only partial; I could see her being buffeted by the swirling gusts. She looked thin and frail and dark. Her arms were crossed under her breasts. The wind tugged at the hem of her long dress and as my eyes adjusted I could see little strands of her hair whipping about her face and flickering up about her head like quick, attenuated flames.

I realised she was probably aware that somebody was watching her – a sliver of light had fallen across the paving stones at her feet when I’d pulled the curtains back – just as she turned her head to look straight at me. She stood like that for a moment, then her head tipped to one side. I recognised the woman in the narrow black dress with the extraordinary face. I couldn’t see her eyes.

Even then, in theory, I could just have let the drapes fall back and toddled off downstairs, tipsily descending to the party. But, you come upon opportunities, little chance set-ups like this, too seldom. Even without having read about scenes like this, or watched them in films and on TV, even if you’d never read anything or watched anything in your life, there would be a kind of imperative of the moment that required you to behave in a certain way, take advantage of the presented chance, because to do anything else was just to declare yourself terminally sad. Or maybe I had swallowed Sir Jamie’s chummy bullshit about being a fellow risk-taker. In any event, what I did was slide my hand into the gap between the windows and their frames and push the heavy glass panel aside.

‘Hello?’ she said, her voice barely audible over the roar of the wind.

‘You’ll catch your death, you know.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

I raised my voice. ‘Your death,’ I said, almost shouting. I was already feeling foolish, the grand gesture of the occasion evaporating, shredded by the noise and force of the wind. ‘You’ll catch it.’

‘Yes?’ she said, as though this was new and important information I’d presented her with.

Gawd, I thought, she’s some sort of simpleton. ‘Look,’ I said, ‘will I just…?’ I gestured back into the bedroom, meaning to suggest I’d leave her to whatever solitary communing with rooftop nature she’d been indulging in.

She tipped and lowered her head, holding one hand to an ear. She shook her head.

‘Shit,’ I said under my breath, and stepped out onto the stones. Well, what else was I going to do? She was beautiful, the guy she’d been with had left the hoo-ha without her, I was thirty-five and starting to watch my weight and check my hair for grey each morning, and I wasn’t so entangled elsewhere that I couldn’t handle the potential extra complication of getting tangled up with a woman who looked as good as she did. Providing she wasn’t simple, and unlikely as it probably was anyway. Rain sprinkled itself across my face and the wind uncombed my hair.

‘Ken Nott. Pleased to meet you.’ I held out my hand.

She looked at it for a moment, then took it in hers. ‘Celia. Merrial,’ she said. ‘How do you do.’

Her voice was soft, with a faint accent that was probably French.

‘You okay out here?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Is it all right?’

‘Sorry?’

‘For me to be here? Is it all right? It is permitted?’

With a sinking feeling, I realised that she hadn’t recognised me from earlier, down in the party. It sounded like she thought I was a security guard for Mouth Corp come to shoo her back to the properly appointed fun-having territory down below.

‘Haven’t the faintest idea,’ I admitted. ‘Civilian here myself.’ This wasn’t leading anywhere. Make excuses and leave. This was preposterously early to be baling out of a potential situation, but some sort of instinct I would usually ignore was telling me to forget it. ‘Listen,’ I said. ‘If you’re okay, I’ll just leave you to it. I just… you know, I saw you out here and…’ I wasn’t even handling my withdrawal gracefully.

She ignored this. Her head was canted to one side again, quizzical. She frowned and said, ‘Ah. I know your name.’

‘Do you now?’

‘You are on the radio,’ she said, brushing away a strand of hair sticking to her mouth. She had a small mouth and full lips. ‘Someone said you would be here.’ Her teeth were very white as she gave a little, tentative smile. ‘I listen to you.’

That was me hooked. As far as my ego was concerned she might as well have claimed to be my biggest fan. At the same time, a tiny crease of disappointment ruffled my contentment. Intelligent, rich, over-achieving and wildly influential though I naturally assumed all my listeners to be, there was something insufficiently exotic for a woman like this to be listening to my pop-raddled, commercial-choked show on daytime radio. Between the hours of ten and midday this woman ought to be perfecting her technique playing Bach fugues on her grand piano, or wandering the galleries clutching a draft of her thesis, standing in front of vast canvases, nodding wisely. She should be a Radio Three type, I told myself; certainly not listening to any radio station with an exclamation mark in its title.

I’m sorry, you fall beneath the acceptable standards of intriguingness that my over-heated and deeply wretched romantic sensibilities demand. Very Groucho altogether. Sad git.

‘I’m very flattered,’ I told her.

‘Are you? Why?’

I gave a small laugh. A gust of wind thudded into us, showering us with rain and making us sway together, as if dancing to the pummelling music of the storm. ‘Oh, I’m just always flattered when I meet somebody who admits to listening to my terminally facile and disposable show. And you-’

‘Is it really so?’ she said. ‘Do you really think it is facile and disposable?’

I had been going to say something on the lines of, And you are the most stunningly beautiful creature at this party largely composed of stunningly beautiful creatures, which makes your interest in me especially gratifying… but instead she was having the temerity to interrupt a professional talker, and taking my small talk seriously. Didn’t know which was worse.

‘Well, it can certainly be facile,’ I said. ‘And when it comes down to it, it is just local radio, even if it’s local radio for London. Noam Chomsky it ain’t.’

‘You admire Noam Chomsky,’ she said, nodding and stroking away another strand of hair from her mouth. The wind was howling round the building, scattering rain drops over the two of us. It was April, and not too cold, but there was still a fair amount of wind-chill factor happening here. ‘You have mentioned him a few times, I think.’

I held up my hands. ‘Closest thing to a hero I have.’ I folded my arms. ‘You really do listen to the show, don’t you?’

‘Sometimes. You say such things. I am always amazed that you get away with what you do. So often I think, They won’t let him get away with that, and yet, next time I switch on, there you are.’

‘We do call the studio the-’

‘Departure Lounge,’ she said, smiling. ‘I know.’ She nodded. The wind hit her in the back, making her take a step forwards, towards me. I put a hand out but she adjusted her stance, straightening again. She didn’t seem to notice the gale blowing round her. ‘You must make many enemies.’

‘The more the better,’ I agreed airily. ‘There are so many people deserving of utter contempt, don’t you think?’

‘You really don’t care?’

‘That I might make enemies of my elders and betters?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not enough to stop.’

‘You really don’t worry that somebody might take such offence at what you say they try to harm you?’

‘I refuse to worry,’ I told her. ‘I wouldn’t hand people like that even the partial victory of knowing I was concerned.’

‘So, then, are you brave?’ she asked with a small smile.

‘No, I’m not brave. I just don’t give a fuck.’

She seemed to find this amusing, lowering her head and smiling at the paving stones.

I sighed. ‘Life’s too short to spend it worrying, Celia. Carpe diem.’

‘Yes, life is short,’ she agreed, not looking at me. Then she did. ‘But you might risk making it shorter.’

I held her gaze. I said, ‘I don’t care,’ and, just then, there on the roof in the loud midst of the storm, I meant it.

She lifted her face up a little, as another gust shook her and me in sudden succession. I really wanted to take hold of that perfect little chin and kiss her.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘apart from anything else, like I say, it’s just radio. And it’s a reputation I have, that I’ve developed. Mostly by getting sacked from other radio stations, admittedly, but it’s what I’m known for. I kind of get a special discount because of that. People know I’m paid to be controversial, or just plain rude. I’m a shock jock. The Shock Jock, Jock the Shock, if you prefer your definitions in tabloid form. If Jimmy Young or one of the Radio One DJs or even Nicky Campbell said the things I do there’d be some sort of outcry, but because it’s me people just dismiss it. To really make an impression these days I’d have to say something actually slanderous, and that would get me fired. Though that’ll probably happen soon enough anyway.’

‘Still, it seems strange to approach what you do the way you do. Most people want to be liked. Or even loved.’ She presented this as though it was something that might not have occurred to my sorry, cynical ass before.

‘Oh, I’m always ready for my fair share of both,’ I told her.

‘But you insult people, and their ideas. Even their faiths. The things they love.’

‘People don’t have to listen.’ I sighed. ‘But, yes, I do insult things people hold dear. This is what I do.’ She was frowning. I put my hands to my cheeks. ‘Look, I don’t mean I insult people or their beliefs because I want to hurt those people, because I get some sort of sadistic kick out of it, I mean that what I find I need and want to say – and which is what I do, sincerely believe, which is what I think is the truth as exactly as I can tell it – is stuff that happens to hurt other people. Does that make sense?’

‘Yes, I think so,’ she said in a measured, sceptical tone.

‘What I’m trying to say is, I have my own beliefs. I… oh, shit, this is like so not post-ironic or post-modern and so insufficiently cynical for our knowing, you know… cynical… sorry, repetition of cynical… Jeez.’ I took a deep breath of the storm’s air. ‘I believe in truth,’ I told her. She was smiling a little now. I was making a complete idiot of myself but I didn’t care any more. ‘There; I said it. I believe there is something pretty damn close to objective truth more or less all the time and I’m not accepting this shite about everybody having their own truths or respecting somebody’s opinions just because they’re sincerely held. The Nazis sincerely hated the Jews; they weren’t just kidding. I’m not respecting their fucking ideas just because they were deeply held. I believe in science, in the scientific method, in doubt, in questioning, in facing truths, not hiding from them. I don’t believe in God but I admit I could be wrong. I don’t believe in faith at all because faith is belief without reason, and reason is the only thing we have, the only thing I do believe in. I think people have every right to believe in anything they want, no matter how ridiculous it might be, but I don’t accept their right to coerce others into the same views. And I certainly don’t accept any right they might think they have not to have their views challenged just because they’re going to feel peeved in the process.’

‘You have faith in reason,’ she said calmly, tucking some strands of hair back into place. ‘Don’t you?’

I laughed out loud, waving my arms about. ‘This is crazy!’ I yelled. ‘We’re standing here on top of a tower block in the middle of a fucking hurricane getting soaked to the skin and we’re talking about philosophy?’ I left my arms spread. ‘Does the essential absurdity of this situation not strike you, too? Celia?’ (I added, in case she thought I’d forgotten her name).

She put her head to one side again. Another staggering gust of wind, another adjustment of stance. ‘I’m sorry. Are you cold?’ she asked, sounding concerned. ‘We could go in.’

‘No, no,’ I told her. ‘I’m fine out here if you are. I’m a Scotsman; we’re legally and morally bound not to admit to feeling cold, certainly not in the presence of thinly clad females and especially not heart-stoppingly beautiful thinly clad females we might legitimately assume are used to balmier climes. The penalties are actually quite severe. They endorse your passport and-’

She was nodding, a tiny frown creasing her brows. ‘Yes. You only become inarticulate when you are being especially sincere, ’ she said, concluding.

That took the wind out of my sails. My hands dropped; I’d been talking with them as well. ‘What are you?’ I demanded. ‘Celia, come clean; are you some sort of flying squad critic-come-philosophical psychoanalyst?’

‘I am a married woman, a housewife, a listener.’

‘Married?’

‘Married.’

‘Do you give your husband this hard a time?’

‘I would not dare.’ She looked quite serious. Then she shook her head. ‘Well, I might, but he would not understand.’

Fuck this; I was getting cold. This was the most interesting, even unusual woman I’d met in a long, long time, but there comes a point.

I held her gaze and, after a breath, said, ‘And are you a faithful wife, Celia?’

She didn’t say anything for a while. We just stood there looking at each other. I could see little drops of rain on her face like sweat or tears and her hair was coming undone in the tearing wind. She shook in those gusts, as though shivering.

‘I have been,’ she said eventually.

‘Well, I-’

She stopped me, holding up one hand towards my mouth, shaking her head. She glanced behind me, to the still open window.

‘My husband is…’ she began, then stopped. She tutted, looked down and to one side, and pinched her lower lip briefly with the fingers of her right hand. She looked up at me. ‘Once,’ she said, ‘I thought that if I really, really hated somebody, I would make love to them, and have my husband find out. But only if I really hated the person, and wanted them dead, or perhaps thought that they wished they were dead.’

I let my eyebrows rise. ‘Holy shit,’ I said, reasonably. She did not look like she was joking. ‘He is, ah, of the jealous persuasion, then.’

‘You do not know his name.’

‘Ah,’ I said, embarrassed. I tapped my temple. ‘Was it Merry-?’

‘Merrial,’ she said. ‘He is John Merrial.’

I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘Not ringing any bells.’

‘It should, perhaps, I think.’

‘Well, you have the advantage over me,’ I said.

She nodded slowly, solemnly. She said, ‘I would like to see you again, if you would like.’ Her voice was nearly drowned by the wind.

‘Yes, I’d like,’ I said. I was thinking, I haven’t touched her, kissed her, anything, yet. Nothing.

‘However you must know that if I were to see you,’ she said, ‘it would have to be seldom, and secretly. It might seem, sound… casual,’ she said, frowning again, as though she wasn’t putting this just as she would like. ‘But it would not be. It could not be. It would be…’ she shook her head ‘… of significance. Not something to be entered into lightly.’ She smiled. ‘I make it sound all very formal, do I not?’

‘I’ve suffered more romantic propositions.’

I moved slowly forwards and reached for her. She came up on her toes, raising her head and tipping it, bringing her hands to either side of my face and opening her mouth to mine, while the wind tugged and pushed and jostled us and the rain sowed the gusts like a soft, cold shrapnel of the storm.

Jo had been at a big Ice House bash that night. She rolled in drunk half an hour after me, staggering down the steps into the Temple Belle, grinning and smelling of smoke. She laughed and started tickling me, then kissing me, then we fell into bed.

She had a way she preferred to be fucked sometimes when she was drunk like this; on her back, naked but for her T-shirt lifted up over her head and caught round her neck with her arms folded up inside it, making a sort of square around her head, her face hidden in the black cotton as she yelled and whooped, a horny, swearing wild-child in the carnal negative of a burka.

‘John Merrial? Mr Merrial?’ Ed said. ‘He’s a gangsta, mate.’

‘He’s what?’

‘He’s a fuckin gangsta, I’m telling you. Crime boss. Whatever you want to call it. Yeah; boss is better. Mind you, I’m saying that, but could be he’s not much involved in actual villainy these days. Gone legit, inne? Like in The Godfather Part Two, when they talk about in a while they’ll be totally legit by the end of the year or whatever it is, you know? That sorta fing. Course, on the uvver uvver hand, there’s better profits in stuff like drugs and refugees an cars an computah crime an stuff.’

‘Computah crime?’

‘Yeah. You know; fraud. Must be hard to give up on that sorta action an let uvvers in. Pride involved, even, I should fink. Plob’ly. Why?’ Ed’s eyes went wide. ‘Fuckin ell, Ken, you ain’t finking of sayin sumfink orrible about him, are you? Fuckin say it ain’t true. I’m serious, mate. Fuckin bargepole, know what I’m sayin?’

‘I wasn’t thinking of saying anything about him,’ I said truthfully. ‘I just saw him at a party the other night and somebody said who he was but not what he was and I thought I’d ask. I had no idea he was a cross between the Kray brothers and Al fucking Capone.’

‘Well, he is. Leave well alone, know what I mean?’

‘I am leaving him well alone.’

We were in Ed’s then new car; a black Hummer with darkened windows. It made my Land Rover feel like a 2CV. We were driving through the streets of south London on the way to a gig in an old cinema in Beckenham. Ed was determined to make me some sort of club DJ, or at least teach me the intricacies of getting two bits of plastic to revolve at different rates so that the tunes contained sounded like they had the same bpm.

‘Wot sort of party was this you was boaf at, anyway?’

‘The Dear Owner’s. Sir Jamie. One of his birthday parties.’

‘What? Does he have more than one, like the Queen? An official birthday and a real one? What’s that about, then?’

‘Just the one birthday, but several parties. I think I was at the second most exclusive soirée.’ We drew up, obstructed by a bus loading people at a stop on one side, and the oncoming stream of traffic on the other. There was, in fact, a sizable gap between the two, one you could have got any normal car, or even a Transit van, through quite comfortably (the Landy could have made it with both doors wide open), but Ed was probably right in erring on the side of caution, especially as the machine was left-hand drive. Behind us, a horn sounded. ‘Jesus Christ, Ed,’ I said, looking at the rear end of the bus to our left, and the Hummer’s expanse of bonnet, ‘I do believe this thing is literally wider than a London bus.’

‘Yeah, it’s rough, innit?’ Ed grinned, teeth like a snow field.

‘Rough?’

‘Yeah; wicked, innit?’

I slapped the transmission tunnel. This was a tall, black-fur-lined box between Ed and me about the size of a big fridge-freezer combo; you could have believed the thing had a spare Mini hidden underneath. If Ed had been any shorter I’d have had to rise out of my seat to make sure he was really there. ‘What the fuck is it with this fucking black patois shit?’

‘What?’ Ed said innocently. We still weren’t going anywhere. The horn from behind sounded again. I didn’t know who was leaning on it, but they were brave. If I’d been stuck behind a blacked-out Hummer I wouldn’t have done that; I’d have been too scared the fucker would get slung into reverse and just roll right over me.

‘Rough means good,’ I said indignantly, ‘wicked means good, fucking hell, bad means good. I mean, I realise there are issues about slavery and centuries of oppression here, but do you have to take it out on the language?’

‘Na, mate,’ Ed said, finally making slow forward progress as the bus rolled off ahead of us. ‘It’s like you go so far into the concept, right, the meaning, that you come out the far side. Know what I mean?’

I looked at him.

‘What?’ he asked.

‘My mistake,’ I said, waving one hand and looking away. ‘Silly old me. I didn’t even realise that meanings had sides you could come out of. Serves me right for passing up a university education. That’ll learn me. Or not, as is in fact the case.’

‘It’s what language is about, innit? Communication.’

‘You don’t say. But if people make words mean the opposite of-’

‘But everybody knows what they really mean, don’t they?’

‘Do they?’

‘Course they do. It’s about context, innit?’

‘But hold on, the first time somebody said bad when they meant good, how did anybody know what the hell they really meant?’

Ed thought about this. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Way I see it, it was like this. Some bloke was trying to cop off wif this bird, right? An she was a bit coy, right, a bit not wantin to seem too eager, but still wantin it, yeah? An she says, Oh, you wicked man. Or somefing. Like, maybe he’d been telling her all the fings what he wanted to do wif her and she was pretendin to be modest but actually she was gettin really wet, right? He was gettin her juices flowin. But she calls him wicked, an smiles, an they boaf know what she means, see? So that’s the first time that somebody says wicked an means good, brilliant, bring it on. So then, like, by extension, know what I mean, people start using uvver words what are the opposite of what they seem to mean, like rough for cool and bad for good, cause it’s not, like, really much of a leap from usin wicked that first time, an the reason that all this is happenin in the black community, right, here or in the States, is precisely because the bruvvers haven’t got much else that is theirs. We could be boxers or musicians an that, but all these uvver, like, modes of expression is closed off to us artistically, and so we fuck wif your language. An that’s what I fink happened. Plob’ly.’

I stared at him. ‘There could actually be a grain of truth in that silo of gibberish,’ I said. (Ed went, ‘Hee hee hee’, in a wheezy voice.) ‘But this still doesn’t explain how you can come out the other side of an accepted lexicological meaning for a perfectly clear and unambiguous term such as “bad”.’

‘It’s like Klein bottles, innit?’

‘It’s like what?’

‘Klein bottles. They’re like four-dimensional bottles what can only exist in fuckin hyperspace, man.’

‘What the fuck has that got to do with anything?’

‘My old mum knitted me a Klein bottle hat when I was a nipper.’

‘Are you on drugs?’

‘Hee hee hee. Na, but listen, like, the spout of a Klein bottle sorta curves round and goes back into the bottle, doesn’t it?’

‘It may astonish you to know – and it certainly appals me to admit – that I do sort of know what you’re talking about.’

‘So that’s like the meaning I was talking about earlier, innit? Goin out beyond itself an then coming back in. Bleedin obvious, I should fink. Fuckin pay attention, Ken.’

I was actually lost for words. Eventually I recovered enough to say, ‘And you seriously had a hat that resembled a Klein bottle, you mad fuck? Or was that the bit I hallucinated?’

‘Me mum was doing this Open University course, wasn’t she? Geometry an that. So she decided to knit a Klein bottle, and then it sorta turned into a Bob Marley hat. Fuckin orrible it was. She made me wear it to school once, too, cos she was so proud of it; came to the school gates wif me an everyfin so I couldn’t accidentally lose it.’

‘I do trust that your pals did the decent thing and kicked the living shit out of you.’

‘Ha! They did, too.’ Ed shook his head, a happy, nostalgic expression on his face. ‘Never liked mafs, ever since.’

We were silent for a minute or so. Then I said, ‘Hey, we just went past a cop car without you getting pulled over.’

‘That’s cause they fink you’re driving the fucker.’

‘Of course; white man in the right-hand seat. Easily enough to confuse the average plod, I’ll grant you.’

‘Zactly. Why else do you fink I offered you a lift?’

‘You fuck! You’re exploiting me!’

‘Hee hee hee.’