Dead Air

Four. LACKING THAT SMALL MATCH TEMPERAMENT

“No, no, I’m for lots more CCTV cameras. I think they should be everywhere, and especially in police stations.’

Craig, rolling a joint on the kitchen table, sniggered.

‘I’m serious,’ I told him. ‘Canteen culture? Sounds interesting. Let’s see it. Total coverage; even the toilets. No more of these black or Asian guys beating themselves up, throttling themselves and stamping on their own heads, and then blaming our stout-hearted defenders of decency!’

‘The stairs,’ Craig suggested. ‘Don’t forget the stairs.’

‘Oh, Christ, yeah, the stairs; you’d want serious Sky Premier League coverage on the stairs; top and bottom at the very least. With the important Player Cam option, naturally.’

‘Prisoner Cam.’

‘Sus Cam. Con Cam.’ I nodded vigorously, with the intense concentration on total trivia of the truly stoned. ‘Crim Cam.’

‘Shplim shplam bim bam,’ Craig wheezed, laughing.

‘What?’ I said.

‘You still not got Sky yet?’ Craig said, raising the joint to lick the Rizlas.

‘Did you really say…? But, moving on. What, Sky? No fucking way,’ I said vehemently. ‘I’m not giving that shite Murdoch any of my… soft-earned dosh.’ I’d moved into the Temple Belle a year earlier. It hadn’t been lived in for many years so it only had terrestrial; Craig had been trying to persuade me to have Sky fitted ever since.

‘Mind you,’ Craig mused, ‘for a Clydebank supporter, what’s the point? I suppose.’

‘Fuck off. Hun.’

Craig and I had this unpleasant though also comforting habit of reverting to our West Coast Male Scottish cultural stereotype when we met up, talking about football. Craig was a bluenose, a Rangers supporter. Almost his only failing, really, unless you were going to count his part in a long-term-struggling marriage (and in a spirit of male solidarity and the above-mentioned cultural stereotype, I was duty-bound to blame that mostly on Emma, regardless of anything else).

It was early May 2001, a couple of weeks after the party at Sir Jamie’s groovy pad at the top of Limehouse Tower. We were sitting in the kitchen of the family home in Highgate, an elegant three-storey terraced house with a large conservatory and lots of decking in the garden. Emma had her own place these days, a garden flat a couple of streets away. Nikki lived with Craig but spent occasional nights at Emma’s. Those tended to be the nights I came along and Craig and I got the chance to relive an adolescence that he – a father and effectively a husband at eighteen – had quit maybe too abruptly and I – arguably dissolute, still alone but variously entangled at thirty-five – had never quite shaken off.

So we listened to some music, smoked joints, drank beer – or wine, more often these days – and talked about women and, of course, fitba. It was my misfortune to be, nominally at least, a Clydebank supporter (could have been worse; I might have decided to support Dumbarton). Clydebank were the closest team of any note to where I grew up, in the prim grid of sunny, south-aspected Helensburgh, a town far too middle class to have anything as proletarian as a decent football team of its own. The Rugby Club, on the other hand, was a social centre almost on a par with the Golf Club. Clydebank is one of those teams at least one level beneath the big Scottish clubs that are themselves a level beneath the big two, the Old Firm of Celtic and Rangers. Craig had inherited his Rangers scarf from his dad. They were posh Hun; not bigoted or anti-Catholic, but unswervingly committed to the team.

‘Supporting a team like Clydebank has its compensations,’ I told Craig as he lit the spliff, blowing smoke into the darkened kitchen. I had a sudden vision of Nikki the next day, sniffing the air and flying round opening windows here and in the adjoining conservatory. ‘Da-ad!’ Though actually these days she would say, ‘Crai-aig!’

‘Compensations?’ Craig said, cupping his free hand to his ear. ‘Hark! Do I hear the sound of a straw being grasped at? Why, I do believe I can!’ I just looked at him. In fact what he could hear was Moby sounding soulful and interesting on the kitchen mini system. ‘What compensations?’ he demanded. ‘Having to travel to Cappielow for your home games, or visiting East Fife?’

‘No,’ I said, ignoring the insults. ‘I mean that it prepares you more comprehensively for life as a supporter of the national team.’

‘You what?’ Craig said, sounding very London for a moment.

‘Think about it,’ I told him, accepting the joint. ‘Ta. If you support a team like Clydebank you get used to disappointment…’ I paused to pull on the number, then talked out through the smoke. ‘The grossly truncated cup run, the good players – the very rare good players – sold on before they have a chance to do much for the club beyond show up the rest of the team for the sorry plodders they really are, the mid-season nervousness as they sink towards the lower reaches of the league, even, in the long term, the occasional promotion you know will probably end in demotion the following year; the just plain boring, inept displays of football where you sit in the cold for two hours realising you’ve doled out twenty quid to watch two gangs of intellectually challenged bampots running around a muddy field hacking away at each other’s legs and seemingly competing to see who can punt the ball the furthest up the park, while your fellow men around you hurl abuse and insults at their own team and the other supporters.’ I took another deep toke and handed the J back.

‘Ah, the beautiful game,’ Craig said, affecting misty-eyedness.

‘And so,’ I said, ‘when it comes to supporting Scotland as a national team, you’re fully prepared for the resulting failures, disillusion, frustrations, let-downs and general all-encompassing despair, which is the natural result of following our plucky but generally rather undistinguished Bravehearts. You’ve been inoculated against such disenchantment throughout your supporting life; this is the sort of rubbish you’re used to watching and coping with every week or every fortnight of the three seasons where it rains. You just scale up your already pre-battered, ready-deflated expectations a little and you’re there. You, on the other hand,’ I said, taking the number back. ‘You,’ I repeated after a deep pull, ‘with your fancy nine league championships in a row and your players with Ferraris and your forty-five thousand fans through the turnstiles every home game and your European experience… you get used to success. You feel cheated if there’s no new silverware in the trophy… yeah, you have a trophy room; we have a trophy cabinet.’

‘Currently empty, if memory serves. Thanks.’

‘Fuck off. You start whining when you don’t finish top of something at the end of the season. We’re just glad our teams still exist and some fucker hasn’t sold the ground out from under us for a new B &Q. The point is that you get totally conditioned to winning, to victory, so when you support Bonnie Scotland, as you’re genetically programmed and constitutionally bound to, you can’t cope with the fact we’re basically crap.’

‘We’re not crap,’ Craig said defensively.

‘Well, not total crap, but just not much better than a team from a country of only six million people ought to be. So suddenly you’re in a position of inferiority, of having to deal with-’

‘All right, all right,’ Craig said, kicking off his moccasins and putting his feet up on the farmhouse table. ‘I take the fucking point. You end up taking refuge in peripheral stuff, like having nice supporters.’

‘Nicer than those nasty, yobbish, xenophobic English supporters, certainly, which is the unspoken subtext of this aren’t-we-great Caledonian self-congratulation.’

‘Drunk but amiable.’

‘Harmless.’

‘Pretty much like the team.’

‘Exactly.’

‘Just going for the spectacle,’ Craig said with a trace of sadness, stretching to hand me back the spliff.

‘It’s the national equivalent of the straws you clutch at league level with teams like Clydebank: people around you applauding sportsman-like behaviour, the fleeting glimpse of skill when somebody on the park accidentally does what they meant to do, the combined pride and resentment when a player sold to the big boys three seasons ago scores a hat-trick in the English Premier.’

I pulled on the J until it was finished and then mashed it into the ashtray with the one we’d had before Craig’s homemade chilli. I reached for my wine.

‘Yeah, but when you do win…’ Craig said, leaning back in his seat and putting his hands behind his neck. ‘It’s worth it. Even as a supporter of the Bankies you must have at least heard of this, you know, from supporters of other teams.’

I ignored this too. ‘Is it? I’m starting to question that, frankly.’ Behind his Trotsky glasses, he blinked. ‘What? Winning isn’t fun?’

‘Na, I mean I’m getting fed up with football in general.’

Craig gave a stagy gasp and said, ‘Wash your mouth out with half-time Bovril, you blasphemous bastard.’

‘Do you not think so?’ I asked. ‘Seriously. I’m just getting super-saturated with the damn game, and that’s without having fucking Sky. There’s too much football.’

Craig put his hands over his ears. ‘Now you’re starting to scare me. I’m going to pretend you’re not here until you stop saying bad, scary things.’

‘I had this idea.’

‘Can’t hear you.’

‘World Cup.’

Craig started to hum. I raised my voice above this and Moby, still being moody somewhere inside the Sony system’s jewel-like mechanisms.

‘World Cup,’ I repeated. ‘Takes far too long,’ I shouted. ‘My idea would get the whole overblown rigmarole over with in one day. Same with any cup competition, actually.’

‘La, la, la-la-la.’

‘What’s the best, most exciting, most intense and nail-biting part of many a final?’ I yelled. I spread my arms. ‘The penalty shoot-out!’

Craig looked incensed. He took his hands down from his ears and said, ‘You’re not suggesting-’

‘Yes! Scrap the ninety minutes of the actual game, ditch the half-hour of extra time and go straight for the penalty shoot-out without all the running around and panting and diving beforehand. Total intensity from the first whistle of the first game through to the last fall-on-your-knees-with-your-face-in-your-hands, goalie-jumping-up-and-air-punching moment that sends the Jules Rimet trophy back to Luxembourg where it belongs!’

‘You are such a fucking heathen even to have thought of that.’

‘The Yanks would love it,’ I told him. ‘The networks would finally have a soccer format they could get ads into every three or four minutes. The attention span of your average Peorian would not be taxed.’

‘The penalty shoot-out is a disgraceful travesty of the world’s best game,’ Craig said solemnly. ‘Tossing a coin is more honourable; at least it’s admitting it’s just luck.’

‘Spoken like a member of the SFA. I’m talking about the future, you reactionary bluenose bastard. Get with the programme or start following shinty, Luddite.’

Craig did a very good impression of not listening. He was gazing, frowning at the mini system, where Moby’s Play was about to Stop.

‘Moby,’ he said, looking at me.

‘What about him?’

‘D’you not think he looks a bit like Fabien Barthes?’

Later in the lounge, sitting side by side on the couch, waiting for my taxi to arrive, sharing one last joint and a final couple of glasses of Bin 128: ‘Emma says we never talk about important stuff.’

‘Oh?’ I said.

‘Yeah. It’s about number three hundred and seven on her list of Reasons Why Craig’s Crap.’

‘Well, if she wants to talk to you about so-called important things-’

‘No no no, not her and me; you and me. You and I.’

I looked at him. ‘What’s she talking about?’

‘I think she means we don’t gossip.’

‘Oh, you mean we talk about things that we think are important, like football, sex and politics, not, like, relationships?’

‘Something like that,’ Craig said, scratching his head. ‘Whenever I’ve seen you she asks after your mum and dad and your brother and Jo, and I end up shrugging and saying, I don’t know.’

‘Ah, right.’

‘So, how are your mum and dad and your brother Iain and girlfriend Jo then, Ken?’

‘They are all fine, thank you, Craig.’

‘Thank you. I shall inform my currently estranged first wife when next I encounter her.’

‘How is Em, anyway? How are you two these days?’

Why did I feel so guilty whenever I asked after Emma? She was a friend, she’d always meant a lot to Craig and no doubt always would, and we’d only spent one drunken night together, which we both severely regretted and wished hadn’t happened, so why did I feel so like a traitor when I mentioned her to Craig?

‘Ah, we’re bumping along,’ Craig sighed. ‘The bottom, I think, but bumping along. Yourself? Still seeing Jo?’

‘Yup.’

‘Anybody else?’

‘Not really. Well…’ I grimaced.

‘So, still playing the field, then?’ Craig said, with an easy smile.

I squirmed a little, acknowledging awkwardness. ‘Not so much actually playing the field; more darting out from under the cover of the hedgerows every now and again, to-’

‘Retrieve your ball.’

‘I was thinking more of ploughing and seed-scattering analogies, but you could put it that way,’ I conceded.

Craig looked away, thoughtful. ‘I think I should have done more of that.’

‘Jeez, man, you’re thirty-five. You’re in your prime. You’re not at the baffies and pipe stage yet, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Yeah, but I have friends who’re mostly married. And I work from home; no flirting over the coffee point or the photocopier for me.’

‘How’s your work going?’ I asked him. ‘Designed any good webs recently?’

He groaned. ‘Don’t ask. Spent the whole day flushing out the PCs with Anti-Virus. Probably some little shit from Outer Khazaktavia with a fucking Sinclair Spectrum. What about you?’

‘You’re not supposed to ask a radio DJ how things are going,’ I told him tiredly. ‘You’re supposed to tell me how each successive show of mine that you listen to every day is even better than the one before.’ I looked at him. ‘You’re not really totally up to speed with this “friendship” thing yet, are you?’

‘What the hell do I want to listen to you for?’ Craig demanded. Ruby light from a second-generation, post-ironic lava lamp on a shelf behind him reflected off his glasses and his shaven head. ‘If I was desperate enough to listen to you tomorrow-’

‘What do you mean “if”, you disloyal ex-so-called best friend brackets Scottish close brackets?’

‘-all I’d hear,’ Craig went on, ‘would be what I just heard tonight.’

‘What?’ I screeched.

‘Look me in the eye, you devious, lying toe-rag, and tell me you won’t be regurgitating that drivel about supporting rubbish league teams being a better preparation for supporting rubbish national teams than supporting successful ones, or that gob-shite nonsense about the World Cup composed entirely of a series of penalty shoot-outs, you shocking, shocking man.’

I stared at him for a while. ‘It’s a fair cop,’ I said huskily.

‘I should demand royalties,’ Craig said. ‘A wage.’

‘Do you really never listen to me?’

Craig guffawed. ‘Course I do. Until the adverts drive me nuts. But you do recycle stuff we’ve been talking about.’

‘I know. Should I start mentioning you? Crediting you? Enrol you in the Crapital Live! BUPA scheme?’

‘I told you; a regular cheque would suffice.’

‘Fuck off.’

He sighed. ‘Anyway.’

‘Anyway, don’t fucking sit here feeling sorry for yourself; get-’

‘I’m not feeling sorry for myself.’

‘Neither you should. You’ve got a good, satisfying, successful career, you’ve helped raise a smart, beautiful daughter, and you’re the lucky friend of at least one really great dead famous person; me. I mean, what more can you ask for?’

‘More sex?’

‘Would have been nice. Look, get out there and start socialising. Meet some women. Come out with me. We’ll go clubbing. ’

‘Yeah, maybe.’

‘No, not maybe; definitely. Let’s do it.’

‘Call me. Persuade me when I’m sober and not morose.’

‘Are you morose now?’

‘A little. I do love my job, but sometimes I think it’s just electronic wallpaper and what’s the point in it all? And Nikki is totally brilliant but then I think she’s probably going to get hurt by some worthless bastard… I mean, I know it’s caveman stuff, but I don’t even like to think of her having sex.’

‘You don’t? Shit, I do.’

‘Oh, Ken,’ Craig said, shaking his head. ‘Even for you…’

‘Sorry, sorry,’ I said, sincerely.

The doorbell chimed.

‘Good,’ Craig said. ‘Now get tae fuck out of my house, you vemonous-’

‘Vemonous?’

‘-you venomous cake of shite that you are.’

‘Okey-dokey,’ I said, jumping up and slapping him on one knee. ‘Same time next week?’

‘Probably. Safe journey back to the gin palace.’

On the doorstep, I stopped, clicked my fingers and said, ‘Oh; I didn’t mention.’

‘What?’ Craig said warily.

‘About my torrid homosexual affair with Lachlan Murdoch.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Yeah, and funnily enough I’ve started writing for one of his dad’s tabloids, too.’

Craig closed his eyes. ‘Let’s just get it over with, okay?’ he sighed.

‘Just thought you should know; I’ve got a column in the Son.’

‘Oh, fuck.’

‘See ya!’

‘Yeah, try telling that on the fucking radio, Mr Funny.’

‘That was just for you, baby. Til next week.’

‘Yeah, yeah…’

When I first kissed Celia, on the night of the storm, that was as far as it went. It was a fabulous kiss, with her warm, taut body against mine and her soft mouth and hard little tongue flickering inside my mouth like a tiny flame of moist muscle, but that was all. She wouldn’t even give me her address or phone number or mobile or anything. At the time, of course, I still didn’t know who her husband was, just that he sounded somewhat on the psycho side (which, goodness knows, should have been enough). I worried that, despite all the solemnity a few moments earlier, she was kidding me on, that this was all just a bizarrely serious tease. But she would be in touch, she said. Now she had to get back to the party, for soon a car would be coming for her to take her away.

Another long, unbearably sexy kiss, when she let me run my hands all over her, then she slipped inside the bedroom. I stood there in the wind and rain, hard-on like a giant redwood, waiting for a decent interval and wishing, for once, that I smoked, because now felt like the right sort of time to do just that. Then – via the mega-bathroom again, to dry my face and comb my hair – I went back down to the party.

Celia had already left.

Nothing, for weeks. Life went on, all the usual nonsense happened (dental appointments, run-ins with management, a couple of boozy, flirtatious lunches with the lovely Amy, a gig in Brighton with Ed, which ended in some chilly dawn skinny dipping with a couple of girls from Argentina). Jo and I went out to parties and films, got loved up and went clubbing, had good, fun sex every now and again, and I decided that Celia was just one of those never-quite things; a little oasis of high-grade strangeness, charm and drama in an existence not normally all that short of them in the first place. Anyway, the woman was a gangster’s moll. Worse; his wife, for God’s sake. Edge work and risk-taking and all that crap was all very well, and I hadn’t been entirely lying when I’d told her I didn’t give a fuck, but I wasn’t actually suicidal. Life was too short not to seize the day but she’d been right about behaviour that might shorten that life, dramatically.

Then, one overcast Wednesday in mid-May, over a month later, a courier arrived with a slim, padded envelope, immediately after I’d finished the show. The envelope was light, so light it felt empty. There was a grey plastic hotel key card inside. I was in the corridor from the studio to our office at the time; I looked inside the envelope but there was nothing else in there; I tipped it up and tapped it but still nada. I looked back down the corridor as I walked, in case I’d missed something else inside falling out. Nothing there, either. The key card didn’t say what room it was for, or what hotel. They never do. I put it in my pocket and inspected the envelope, looking for a sender’s name, wondering if I could trace it back to whomever had sent it.

My mobile sounded as soon as I switched it back on. The phone’s display said Anonymous.

‘Hello?’ I answered.

‘Is that Kenneth?’ said a female voice.

‘Ken Nott, yes.’

‘May we talk?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I stopped by the office door. Inside, I could hear Phil and Andi, his assistant, talking and laughing. ‘Who is this?’

‘We met on the roof, about five weeks ago, do you remember? Please don’t say my name, but do you remember me?’

‘Ah. Well, ah, yes. Yes, of course I do. How are you?’

‘Do you still… I am not sure what to say. Wish to proceed? This is very unromantic, I am sorry.’

‘Ah,’ I said, staring at the carpet beneath my feet. ‘I found out who, ah, who your other half is.’

‘So you do not. I see. I’m sorry. I have been stupid. Please dispose of-’

‘Well, no, hold on.’

‘You received what I sent?’

‘Size of a credit card? Nothing else?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Yes. Where is it for?’

‘The Dorchester. Six zero seven. It’s just that… I would have liked to have seen you again.’

I don’t know. It was just something about the way she said it. I swallowed and asked, ‘You there now?’

‘Yes.’

I glanced at my watch. ‘I have a few things to tidy up here. Half an hour?’

‘We have all afternoon, until about six.’

‘So, I’ll see you.’

‘Two things.’

‘What?’

‘You must not leave any mark on me. Nothing.’

‘Of course, I understand.’

‘Also…’

‘What?’

‘Just this time, would you be silent?’

‘Silent?’

‘Completely. From when you arrive to when you go.’

‘That’s a little weird.’

‘It is a private… superstition, you would probably say. I know it makes no sense to you. But I would like you to indulge me in this.’

‘Hold on,’ I said, nearly laughing, ‘is this place bugged?’

‘No.’ I could hear her smile. A pause. ‘Will you do this for me? Just this one time?’

‘What if I say no?’

‘Then I will not have been indulged, and because of that, if we go ahead, I will believe that this will end badly for us. I do not know what you will believe, Kenneth.’

I thought about this. ‘All right.’

‘Half an hour, then. I will wait for you.’

‘See you soon.’

‘Yes.’

The phone clicked off.

At the Dorchester, number 607 was a suite. I hesitated at the door. I was sweating. Mostly this was because I had walked from Capital Live!. The stuff I thought I might have to tidy up had proved utterly trivial or just entirely fit for putting off until tomorrow or later, and so I’d made my excuses – the following day’s show was pretty much prepared already – and left. I’d walked the streets under the low grey sky. It was warm and the air felt thick and humid for May.

Walking gave me time to think. Was I doing the sensible thing here? Well, that was hardly worth answering. Objectively, knowing whose wife I was, hopefully, about to fuck, I was behaving like a masochist with a death wish. Or not, of course; maybe she’d been exaggerating that night on the terrace outside Sir Jamie’s bedroom. Perhaps she’d been dramatising the whole thing because doing so fulfilled some appetite for mystery, and her husband didn’t give a damn what she did or who she did it with.

I fingered the little sliver of plastic in my pocket. The whole cloak-and-dagger set-up with the key card was either faintly amusing and reassuring, or deeply worrying. What was I doing? He’s a gangsta, mate. We reassure ourselves that we’re all special, but was anybody that special, was anybody so extraordinary they were worth taking the sort of risk I might be taking?

Of course, people had been taking mad risks for sex, lust, love, for as long as we’d been people. Wars had been fought for what you could, if you were being uncharitable, characterise as basically a bit of slap and tickle. Holy books had been rewritten, the laws of God changed to facilitate the having of some desperately yearned-for piece of ass. Desire was the back-handed compliment humanity had no choice but to pay itself. It was just the way we were, it was what we did. We couldn’t help ourselves.

Seen one, seen ’em all, I reminded myself. But then that, of course, was such shit. Sexists said that the way racists claimed, They all look the same to me. Both were confessions of personal inadequacy, of the inability to really see.

I used the key card and stepped into a dark hallway, illuminated only, once I’d closed the door, by light spilling from a small loo on the other side of the hall. The air was very warm; I had to take my jacket off. On a small table opposite, a huge display of flowers filled the air with a thick, sweet scent. There were two large doors, left and right, both ajar, both rooms dark beyond. Just ambient sound of the city in both directions, heavily muffled. The first door led to a sitting-room, darkly curtained, the afternoon sunshine held at bay by drapes thick as carpets, tall as the distant ceiling. All a bit Edwardian, but suitably sumptuous. The other door led to the bedroom.

There had been a light on in here all the time. Celia was sitting at a roll-top desk on the far side of the room, reading by a desk lamp. She was wrapped in a white robe that was too big for her. Her golden brown hair was down, spreading and reaching almost to the seat of the chair. She turned round when she heard the door open. She wore little round glasses. It felt even warmer in the bedroom; a vent thundered quietly overhead, producing a draught of tropical heat that was already drying the sweat on the back of my neck and uncombing my hair.

She raised one finger to her lips. My heart was thudding; I was half expecting muscled goons with eighteen-inch collars to burst out of the wardrobe, whack me on the back of the head, gaffer-tape my mouth and zip me into a body-bag… though, from the impression I had of the room from the desk lamp’s weak light, this place was too posh for wardrobes; it had a dressing-room, instead. I stood there in the heat, wondering how much initiative she wanted me to take; how much, indeed, I wanted me to take. This whole silent running deal – or at least me agreeing to it – had put that ball pretty firmly in her court. The dome of an elegantly gleaming trolley sat in one shadowy corner of the bedroom. A champagne bucket and two glasses sat on a low table in front of a towering display of lilies. The flowers’ scent saturated the blood-warm air.

Celia closed her hardback, took off her glasses, got up and walked over to me, raising herself on her toes with her last step and kissing me just as she had on the night of the storm. She smelled of musk and roses. I used both hands to undo the rope-thick belt, then pulled her robe open. Her skin was smooth and warm, warmer even than the over-heated air of the room. I held her away a little to look at her. She let the white robe fall.

My eyes went wide and I breathed in, seeing the strange, curled imprint of her lightning scar for the first time. I was about, I think, to say, ‘Good God,’ but she anticipated me, and gently put her cupped hand over my mouth, silencing me as I stared at the tracery of dark brown lines. She stood still in the glowing white whorl of the fallen robe, letting me inspect the fern-mark, raising her arms and gathering up her hair to let me see better, displaying herself quietly.

On, not in, a vast bed beneath a swooping canopy, we fell to our shared cause. I let her undress me, an urgency in her hands and expression I could not comment on. I stroked her hair while she did this, ploughing its rich thickness with my fingers. Her body was the most sensuous thing I had ever seen in my life, limbs slim but muscled enough to curve, waist tiny. Her areolae and nipples were unexpectedly pink for her caramel skin, whose tone – save for the lightning-intaglioed print descending her left flank – didn’t vary anywhere except faintly on the palms of her hands and the soles of her feet. Her pubic hair was darker than that on her head, surprisingly soft but tightly curled. She skinned my jeans off. The head of my cock was already protruding out the top of my Calvins, purple and positively polished-looking between the grey cotton and the pasty flesh of my irredeemably pale Scots skin. I had always thought this looked a bit gross – erections usually did, regardless of the circumstances – but she smiled when she saw it, as though it was already an old friend, and peeled off my briefs.

I mimed putting on a condom and pointed at my jacket, which she’d hung over a chair. She shook her head. I raised my eyebrows and shook my head slightly in what I hoped looked like a suitable translation of, You sure? She nodded emphatically.

Well, okay, I thought, as she kissed me again.

I wanted her so much, so immediately, but I decided to take charge a bit, and got her down on her back. I wanted to see her, to experience every part of her with as many senses as I could bring to bear. I knelt between her legs, clutching her perfect little buttocks in my hands and lifting her up. Her vagina was pink as her nipples, parenthesised by the full, rosy-grey folds of her labia, fronded and frilled and rising to the little puckered lip of hood hiding the glistening stubby button of her clitoris. Her cunt smelled of talc, tasted of sweetened salt. I buried tongue and lips in her, pressing and nosing her like some truffling hound while rubbing and pressing the tiny rosette of her anus with one thumb, listening to her breath quicken, feeling as though my mouth would burn with the engulfing heat of her.

Entering her was a slow, gradual, almost tentative process, just the opposite of what I think we’d both expected. I found myself quivering, shaking like some adolescent getting laid for the first time, my mouth suddenly dry, tears – tears! – welling in my eyes. She lay on her hair, head to one side, facing the darkness, the tendon on the side of her neck a taut, deeply shadowed column, her arms thrown out across the bed, fingers clutching, caging fistfuls of plump white pillows, her legs in a tensed V, toes pointing, then, finally, when at last I was fully in her, she gasped and threw herself around me, arms and legs wrapping and squeezing me with an astonishing power, as though my whole body was one huge cock and her body a hand, limbs fingers.

I even managed to come quietly, but then, afterwards, lying there, chests heaving, limbs trembling, she rolled over to me, slick with sweat, and put two fingers delicately to my lips. ‘It’s all right,’ she said softly. These were the first articulate sounds she had made. ‘We can talk now, Kenneth.’

It did cross my mind to shake my head, or just ignore her, or pretend to fall asleep; in other words, or their lack, tease her, but instead I said, ‘You’ve changed your mind?’ She had said to remain silent throughout.

She nodded slowly. Her long, thick hair fell spooled, tangled, heavy on my chest. ‘Just the beginning was enough. And that you were prepared to.’

‘Uh-huh?’

‘Uh-huh?’ she said, mimicking me.

I took a handful of her hair, rolling my fist around in it, taking up all slack. Her head tipped towards my hand. Her large, darkly amber eyes gazed down. ‘You are a very singular woman, Celia.’

‘Will we do this again?’

I raised my head and made a show of looking downwards. ‘In about five minutes, I’d guess.’

She smiled. ‘You will meet me again?’

‘Oh, I should think so.’

‘Good. We won’t be able to go out, to meet in public. It will have to be like this.’

‘This is okay. I can handle this.’

‘Handle me,’ she whispered, lowering herself into my arms.

So began my erratic, erotic tour of the luxury hotels of London. Every few weeks – apart from once when holidays got in the way – a courier would deliver a slim package holding only a hotel key or key card. The accompanying phone call got shorter and shorter each time until all I would hear was, ‘The Connaught, three one six,’ or ‘The Landmark, eight one eight,’ or ‘The Howard, five zero three.’

In a succession of tall-ceilinged, feverishly hot, darkened suites, on top of a series of King- or Emperor-size beds, Celia and I pursued our sporadic affair.

That first time, in the Dorchester, it turned out we had longer than she’d first said; not until six but until ten, when she really had to go. I’d nodded off at one point, into sharply sultry dreams of swimming in thick red perfume beneath a fiery lilac sun, then woke to find all the lights out but the room illuminated from outside and below and her standing by the windows, looking out between the drawn-back curtains, the silvery lustre of a full moon combining on her skin with the glow of the hotel’s floodlights reflecting from the ceiling and framing her slim, dark form with gold.

I padded up behind her, held her, and she put her hands on mine at her shoulder as I nuzzled her neck and hair. That was when I asked her about the long, swirling mark on her left flank, and she told me about the lightning strike.

The dark bodies of Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park lay strung with pinprick cords of light. Below us, cradled in the scoop of the building’s forecourt facing Park Lane, a great dark tree rustled in a freshening breeze, new growth all green and black and full of life and movement and promise.

‘Who are you, Celia? Tell me about yourself,’ I said into the darkness, later. ‘If you want.’

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Everything about you.’

‘Everything would be boring, Kenneth. Don’t you know that? Knowing everything about anybody would be boring.’

‘Not you, I suspect.’

‘I told you; I am a married woman, a housewife, a listener.’

‘Perhaps you could start a little closer to the beginning.’

‘I am from Martinique. You know where that is?’

‘I know.’

‘My father was a fisherman, my mother a waitress. I have four brothers, five sisters.’

‘My, your parents were busy. Sexual athleticism runs in the family, then.’

‘I studied languages, I became a model, I moved to Paris, then London. I met a man who I thought loved me.’ She hesitated. ‘Perhaps that’s not fair to him. He thought he did love me. We both did, then.’

‘What about you loving him?’

Her body tensed fractionally against mine, then relaxed again. ‘Love,’ she said, as if saying, tasting the word for the first time, getting the measure of its meaning in her mouth and mind. ‘I don’t know.’ I felt her turn her head to stare off into the shadowy heights of the room. Eyelashes flitted against the skin of my shoulder. ‘I felt fondness for him. He was kind to me. He helped me. Helped me considerably. I don’t mean to say that I married him out of gratitude, but I felt that I knew him and that he would be a good husband.’

‘And is he?’

She was silent for a while. ‘He treats me well. He has never struck me. He became cold towards me about the time when it was found I could not have children.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘The point is more that it does not matter that he is a good husband to me; what matters is that he is a bad man to others. He would say they always deserved it, but…’

‘Did you know he was like that when you married him?’

She was silent for a moment. ‘Yes and no. I knew a little. I did not want to know it all. I should have.’

‘Do you mean to stay with him?’

‘I would be afraid to tell him I was leaving him. Also, practically my whole family works for one of his businesses now, on the island.’

‘Ah.’

‘Ah, indeed. What about you, Kenneth?’

‘What don’t you know from my many exciting and unfailingly accurate profiles in top media outlets?’

‘Your marriage? Your wife?’

‘I married a nurse called Jude. Judith. Met in a club when I was between jobs, not long after I moved down to London. Great sex, similar interests, robust cross-platform political beliefs with only a few troublesome legacy systems – she believed in astrology – compatible groups of friends… and we certainly thought we were in love. She didn’t really want to get married but I insisted. I knew what I was like; I knew I was very likely to stray, or certainly to want to stray, to be unfaithful, and I came up with this bizarre concept that if I got married then the fact I’d made a solemn promise to her to forsake all others, made a legally binding commitment, would stop me.’ I paused. ‘Probably the single most barmy idea I’ve ever entertained in my entire adult life, and that when, by common assent, the field of other contenders is both wide and deep.’ I shrugged gently, so as not to jar her head where it lay against my shoulder and chest. ‘However. I cheated, she found out, confronted me with it, and I swore it wouldn’t happen again. I meant it, too. I always meant it. Repeat until no longer funny.’ I breathed deeply. ‘She’s okay now; in a stable relationship. I still see her now and again.’

‘Do you still love her?’

‘No, ma’am.’

‘You still sleep with her.’

I felt my body jerk. She must have felt it too. ‘You guessing, Celia?’ I asked. ‘Or are we in some creepy Play Misty For Me vibe here?’

‘Guessing, you would call it. I am good at it.’

‘Well, as you guessed.’ I shrugged again. ‘We never mean to, it just happens… Old times’ sake, I suppose. Lame, but true. But anyway not for a while.’

‘And you have a regular girlfriend?’

‘Yes. Nice girl. Bit mad. Works for a record company.’

‘She doesn’t know, I hope. About you and me. I hope nobody does.’

‘Nobody.’

‘You don’t mind? Some men like to boast.’

‘Not me. And no, I don’t mind.’

Usually we met on a Friday, but not every time. Never at the weekends. She said this was because she liked to listen to me on the radio beforehand. Soon, with every show I did, I’d start to wonder, was she listening? More to the point, was she listening in an eight-hundred-quid-a-night suite, slowly undressing in the darkness while a cranked-up heating system wound round to maximum gradually toasted every molecule of air in the place?

On several occasions, especially on Fridays, I had to stand people up. Jo, a couple of times. I claimed a commiserating, men-only drinking party with a just-dumped colleague on the first occasion, and plain alcohol-induced forgetfulness in a mobile-reception-free dive bar the second time. Jo shouted at me on both occasions, then wanted to have sex, which was awkward. I just about managed it the first time, though I felt a) sore, and b) guilty that I was still thinking about Ceel. The second time I faked incapability through drunkenness. I began to make Friday night engagements tentative rather than firm.

Wherever it was I met Ceel, she was always there, always waiting, almost always reading a book – usually something recent I’d heard of: White Teeth, Man and Boy, Bridget Jones’s Diary. Once it was The Prince, once Madame Bovary, and once the Kama Sutra, which she was reading for ideas we didn’t really need. Twice it was A Brief History of Time. The room – suite – was always dark, always hot. There would be something light to eat if we wanted, and vintage champagne. It was a while before I realised the glasses we drank from were always the same ones, and that there would always be a different, spare glass present. She brought the crystal flutes herself; they belonged to her. She seemed pleased that I’d noticed.

‘You were a model, you said?’

‘Yes.’

‘What, like, clothes?’

She gave a one-breath laugh into the warm dark. ‘Those are what one usually models, Kenneth.’

‘Swim-wear, lingerie?’

‘Sometimes. I began in swim-wear, when a magazine came to the island to shoot a feature and two of their models were hurt in a car crash. That’s how I got my break.’

‘What about them?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Did they break anything?’ I shook my head, already feeling foolish. ‘Sorry, I-’

‘The two models? Yes, one broke an arm and both had facial injuries. I don’t think either ever worked as a model again. It was very upsetting. Not how I’d have chosen to get into such a career.’

‘Sorry. I shouldn’t have said anything.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘Did you appear mostly in French magazines?’

‘Yes. I’m afraid I have no portfolio to show you.’

‘What was your modelling name?’

‘Celia McFadden.’

‘McFadden?’ I said, laughing. ‘What possessed you to take a Scottish name?’

‘It was my maiden name,’ she said, sounding surprised.

‘You’re a McFadden, from Martinique?’

‘My great-great-grandfather was a slave on Barbados. He was given the name of his slave master, who may have been his biological father. He escaped, and ended up in Martinique.’

‘Woh. Sorry.’

‘That’s all right,’ Celia said, shrugging. ‘You changed your name, didn’t you?’

‘Yeah. Not officially, just for the radio. It still says McNutt on my passport.’

‘McNutt?’ She smiled.

‘Yes, with two “t”s. So, this,’ I said, changing the subject and stroking the lightning scar, ‘has appeared in public, has it? It wasn’t a problem?’

‘Perhaps it was a small problem. I always had enough work but I’m sure I lost some jobs because of it. But no, I don’t think it ever appeared.’

‘What did they do, cover it with make-up?’

‘No. They shot from the other side.’

‘So all your model shots are from the right?’

‘Mostly. Though they don’t all appear so once they’re printed. You just reverse the neg.’

‘Oh, right. Of course.’

‘Sometimes, when the light or the background meant we had to, they would shoot from my left side and I would hold my arm in a certain way and if there was anything of the scar visible it would be air-brushed out later. It is not a problem.’ She shrugged. ‘Covering things up is easy.’

The latest she ever stayed was ten p.m. I was welcome to stay longer if I wanted, but I never did, and I knew she preferred me to leave first. She would arrive and depart with her hair tightly compressed under a wig – usually blond – and wore large dark glasses and baggy, undistinguished clothes.

In Claridge’s, she’d stripped the bed to its bottom sheet and covered the surface and a dozen extra pillows in red rose petals. The lights mostly stayed on for that one. This was where she finally explained her insane theory about having half died when the lightning struck her.

‘What?’

‘There are two mes. Two of me. In different, parallel worlds.’

‘Hold on. I think I know this theory. Simple idea but the complexities are hideous.’

‘Mine is quite simple.’

‘Yeah, but the real one is confusing to a bonkers degree; according to it there are an infinity of yous. A pleasing prospect, I might add, except there is also, are also… anyway, an infinity of mes, too, and your husband. Husbands. Whatever. See how confusing it is?’

‘Yes, well,’ she said, waving one dismissive hand. ‘But for me it is very simple. I half died then, when the lightning struck me. In that other world I am half dead, too.’

‘But also half alive.’

‘Just as in this one.’

‘So did you fall off this cliff in the other world, or not?’ I asked, deciding to humour this matter-of-fact madness of hers.

‘Yes and no. I did, but I also fell back onto the grass, just as I did here.’

‘So in this world, here, you fell off the cliff too?’

‘Yes.’

‘And yet you woke up on the grass.’

‘That part of me did. This part of me did.’

‘So in the other world? What? If you woke up on the grass in this one, she must have not woken up, because she was lying dead at the bottom of the cliff.’

‘No, she woke up too, on the grass.’

‘So who the hell fell off the bleedin cliff?’

‘I did.’

‘You did? But-’

‘Both of I.’

‘I and I? What, now you’re a Rastafarian?’

She laughed. ‘We both fell off the cliff. I remember it happening. I remember seeing myself fall, and the noise the air made, and how my legs made a useless running motion and how I could not scream because the air had been knocked out of my lungs and how the rocks looked as I fell towards them.’

‘So did the lightning kill… half kill you, or was it the fall?’

‘Does it matter?’

‘I don’t know. Does it?’

‘Perhaps both did. Or half did.’

‘I think we’ve gone on to quarters by this stage.’

‘Perhaps either would have been enough. All that matters is that it happened.’

‘It would be useless to suggest, I suppose, that this might all really only have happened in your head, the result of having ninety thousand volts zapped through your brain pan and down your body?’

‘But of course it is not useless to suggest it! If that is what you need to believe to make sense of what happened to me by your way of thinking, then of course that is what you must believe.’

‘That’s not quite what I meant.’

‘Yes, I know. But, you see, when it happened, I was there, and you, my dear, were not.’

I let out a long breath. ‘Right. So… so what are the symptoms of you being only half alive in this world… and the other one? You do seem wholly and, I would risk saying, even vibrantly alive in this world, to me. Especially about ten minutes ago. Oh, though there is that thing about the French calling it the little death, of course. Though that’s not what you’re talking about, is it? But back to the symptoms. What makes you feel this?’

‘That I feel it.’

‘Right. No, no, not right. I’m not getting it.’

‘It feels obvious to me. In a way I always knew it. Reading about parallel universes simply made sense of that feeling. I didn’t feel any more certain of what I felt, and it did not really alter what I felt, or what I believed, but it made it more possible for me to explain it to others.’

I laughed. ‘So all we’ve been talking about in the last five minutes is after it became easier to explain?’

‘Yes. Easier. Not easy. Perhaps “less difficult” would be a better formulation.’

‘Right.’

‘I think it might all change on my next birthday,’ she said, nodding seriously.

‘Why?’

‘Because the lightning hit me on the day of my fourteenth birthday, and on my next birthday I will be twenty-eight. You see?’

‘Yes, I do. My God, your aberrant personal belief system is actually contagious. I suppose they all are.’ I sat up in the bed. ‘You mean that on the day of your twenty-eighth birthday, in April next year…’

‘The fifth.’

‘… What?’

She shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps nothing. Perhaps I die. Perhaps the other one of me dies.’

‘And if the other one dies?’

‘I will become fully alive.’

‘Which will manifest itself…?’

She smiled. ‘Well, perhaps I will decide that I love you.’

I stared into those amber eyes. It seemed to me then that she had the most direct, clearly honest gaze of anybody I had ever met. No humour there just now, no irony. Not even doubt. Puzzlement, perhaps, but no doubt. She really believed all this.

‘There,’ I said, ‘is that big little word that neither of us have spoken until now.’

‘Why should we speak it?’

I wondered what that meant. I might have pursued the matter, but then she shrugged again, and her immaculate breasts moved in just such a way that in this world and surely any other all I could say was, ‘Oh, come here.’

In the Meridien Piccadilly, finding she had a suite with a kitchen attached, she had already been across to Fortnum and Mason and bought the ingredients to make an omelette, flavoured with saffron. She was trying out different types of underwear on that occasion, so that I came, bizarrely, to associate the smell of eggs cooking in olive oil with a basque and stockings.

I laughed as she presented the tray to me in bed.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘You spoil me,’ I said as she jumped up onto the bed, her stockinged legs folded neatly beneath her. She took up a fork. I gestured at the food, at her. ‘This is… pretty much most guys’ fantasy.’

‘Good,’ she said. She looked round the dark bedroom, then at me, and smiled. ‘No complaints here, either.’

‘Think you might let me pay for one of these conjugal visits one day? Or even take you away for a weekend?’

She shook her head quickly. ‘It’s better this way.’ She put the fork down. ‘This has to be outside of real life, Kenneth. That way we can get away with it. We expose ourselves less. Less of a risk is taken. And, because this happens outside of our normal lives, it feels less connected to what we might talk about to other people. It is like a dream, no? So we are both less likely to say something that might give us away. Do you understand?’

‘Yeah, sure. Just a residual scrap of old-school male pride, wishing to pay for something. But it’s all right; being an intermittently kept man rather appeals to me.’

‘I wish you could take me out,’ she said, smiling at the thought of it. ‘I would love to sit in a café with you, watching people go by. Go to lunch with you, sitting on a terrace by a river, in the sunlight. Be taken to a play or a film or to dance. Sit on a beach with you, under a palm tree, perhaps. Just the two of us crossing a street, holding hands. I find myself dreaming of these things sometimes, when I am low.’ She looked away, then back. ‘Then I think of this. The next time we shall meet. That makes everything well.’

I gazed into her eyes again, lost for a thing to say.

She smiled, winked. ‘It will get cold. Eat up.’

In the Lanesborough we spent hours in a cavernous bath, experimenting with various lotions and creams; she emptied a bottle of No. 5 into the oiled foam and I smelled of it for three days.

‘What do you do, Ceel?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘How do you pass your days? What is your life like?’

‘I’m not sure I should tell you. This is supposed to be separate, not attached to our real lives, don’t you remember?’

‘I remember, but telling me what a more normal day is like isn’t going to make that big a difference.’

‘I do what the women of rich men are supposed to do; I shop and lunch.’

‘Friends?’

‘Some. Different friends for different things. Some for shopping and lunching, some at my health club, some for ice skating-’

‘You skate?’

‘A little. Not well. There are a couple of friends I have from my modelling days who are also married now, or settled down, with rich men. Just two who live in London. I visit Paris to see friends there, and one of my brothers. It is so easy now, with the train.’

‘You go to Paris a lot?’

‘A few times a year. Sometimes I go there with John. Usually he travels alone. He’s away often; Europe, South America. I go to Paris more than anywhere else. John doesn’t like me to spend nights away unless he knows the people I stay with well. In Paris it’s all right because I stay with my brother, who works for John and lives in a company apartment.’

‘What does your brother do?’

She looked at me. It was one of the few occasions she’d ever looked even slightly angry. ‘Nothing bad,’ she said sharply.

‘Okay.’ I held up my hands. ‘Do you have any really close friends?’

She turned away. ‘Most of the women my age have children, and that separates us.’ She shrugged. ‘I spend time on the phone each day, calling my family back on the island. And they come to visit sometimes.’ She paused. ‘Not as often as I’d like.’

(Later, while she was in the bathroom, I noticed her Bridge shoulder bag lying on a chair, and her mobile phone inside its little brown leather cave, a green light blinking slowly. She usually switched her phone off while we were together. This must be the phone my mobile knew only as Anonymous. I watched the faint green light for a few more beats of its tiny silicon heart.

Looking straight at it, it almost disappeared. I could see it better from the corner of my eye.

I swallowed a little pride, not to mention some principles, and quickly rolled over and dug the dainty Nokia out. I’d had a similar, if chunkier, model to this, two mobiles back, and knew how to access the phone’s own number. I scribbled it on a piece of hotel paper and stuffed the note in a jacket pocket after I’d returned the phone to her bag, long before she reappeared. This was a safety precaution, I told myself. In case I ever needed to warn her of something; like a terrorist threat we’d heard about via the newsroom but couldn’t broadcast because it would cause mass panic… Yes, something like that, say.)

In the Berkeley she had brought drugs and we had time to have frenetic coked-up sex and make slow, stoned love.

‘I didn’t know you smoked.’

‘Mais non! But I don’t!’ she giggled, coughing.

A little later, lying there in a stunned haze of drugged satiation, limbs spread where they’d fallen on our uncoupling, I watched a small patch of sunlight – the product of a sunbeam penetrating the tall sweep of the drawn-over curtains from the very centre of their summit – move slowly across the white sheets towards her left arm. Half asleep, I kept staring at the molten coin of yellow as Ceel drifted into a quiet, smiling doze. The egg-sized blob of buttery light slid gently up her coffee skin, slow as the hour hand on a clock, and revealed the tiny, years-old scars spattered on the flesh above the veins on her upper arm and the inside of her elbow.

A flurry of them, like pale, minutely puckered tear-shaped freckles on that smooth surface of golden brown.

I gazed at her face, lying half averted on the pillow, her blissful smile directed into the darkness of the suite, and then I looked down again at her arm. I thought about her time in Paris, and about Merrial and the bad situation he’d helped her out of. I decided I would never say anything, if she didn’t.

Beneath the light, beneath the skin, her blood pulsed slow and strong, and I imagined it, minutely warmed by that small fall of light, coursing through her body while she stared, unconscious and blind, back to the memory of a poisoned chemical rapture.

A few times I tried to follow her, to see where she lived, or just what she did next after one of these trysts. There was a bar in the Landmark with a view of reception. I sat there pretending to read. I’d peeked in her bag earlier to check which wig she was wearing that day, and in the wardrobe to see what clothes she’d arrived in; it was a grey suit, hanging neatly above some Harvey Nics’ bags. I sat there and I watched really carefully but I still didn’t see her. I don’t know if she had more than one wig, or if I just glanced down at the wrong moment and she’d walked quickly through, the bill already paid, or what, but I sat there for an hour and a half, drinking whisky and nibbling rice crackers until my bladder drove me from my look-out post.

A month later I tried again, sitting in a café across from the Connaught. Again, I didn’t see her, but after about an hour I got a call on my mobile.

Anonymous, said the screen. Oh-oh.

‘Hello?’

‘I live in Belgravia. Usually I go straight home. Sometimes I do a little more shopping. Bookshops, often… Are you still there?’

‘Yup. Still here,’ I said. I took a deep breath. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘You would make a very poor spy.’

‘Yeah.’ I sighed. ‘It’s not…’

‘It’s not what?’

‘It’s not some weird, obsessive thing. I mean, it’s not something to worry about. It’s not like I’m stalking you or anything like that. I’m interested. You intrigue me. We’re so… intimate and yet, you know, so… strange to each other. Strangers, still.’

‘I’m sorry it has to be that way. But it does. You do accept that?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘You won’t do this again, will you? Please.’

‘No, I won’t. You’re not angry with me?’

‘More flattered than angry. But more alarmed than either. It’s not worth the risk.’

‘It won’t happen again. But…’

‘What?’

‘It was worth it for this phone call.’

She was silent for a moment. ‘You are very sweet,’ she said. ‘I have to go now.’

In the Ritz, I’d brought some E. We knocked the pills back with champagne, listened to some white-label chill-out sounds I’d been given by one of Ed’s DJ pals, and drifted into some sublimely blissful, loved-up fucking until my balls ached with the emptying.

‘You never ask me about John.’

‘That’s right.’

‘Do you hate him?’

‘No. I don’t know him. I don’t hate him just because he’s your husband. If he’s some sort of crime boss, I suppose I ought to hate him on principle for being what he is, but I can’t work up any enthusiasm for the subject. Maybe I’ve taken to heart your idea of keeping this compartmentalised from real life. Or maybe I just don’t want to think about your husband in the first place.’

‘Do you ever hate me?’

‘Hate you? Are you mad?’

‘I stay with him. I married him.’

‘I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt there, I think.’

That was the time I swallowed more pride and checked her purse. I think I was half expecting to find a fat roll of bank notes, but there was barely a hundred in there. It had occurred to me that she would not want to pay all these hotel bills by credit card, not if she was trying to keep all this as secret as possible. Finding no thick Swiss-roll of grubby twenties kind of stumped me. It was only later I thought that maybe she paid in cash all right, but before rather than after.

(That was the longest interval, after the Ritz. Her husband was taking her to Oz and New Zealand on a month-long holiday, and there was a week-long overlap while Jo and I spent a fortnight doing the tombs on the Nile and snorkelling in the Red Sea. While she was away I made the mistake of going to see a film called Intimacy about a couple who meet up every now and again in a filthy flat for sex, and remain strangers to each other. It was probably a good film in a British art-house kind of way but I hated it and walked out halfway through, something I’d never done in my life. Sometimes I’d take out my mobile and cursor through to Ceel’s number, and just sit and stare at it for a few moments, until the phone’s backlighting clicked off. Infected by Celia’s caution, I hadn’t even entered her name in the mobile’s own memory, or the SIM card’s, just put the number in by itself. As far as my phone was concerned, she was just Location 96.)

In the Savoy one night, amongst mirrors and acres of cream and gilt, in a suite looking out across the dark river to the floodlit bulk of the Festival Hall, she had turned off all the lights and drawn the curtains right back. She placed a small seat in front of the tall, open windows. She had me sit there, bollocks to the chintz, already licked sweetly, achingly erect, then she straddled me, facing the same way, both of us gazing out to the light-browned clouds and the few bright stars between, while the sounds and smells of the summer city rolled in through the opened doors of glass.

‘Like this,’ she said, placing my hands just so, so that I was, in effect, holding her in a head lock. ‘Ah, yes.’

‘Lordy fucking mama.’

‘So what’s the problem? Basically you’re having the perfect affair. Perfect sex.’

‘I don’t know. Well, the actual sex… fuck, yeah. But… I don’t know.’

Craig and I were sitting in his lounge, watching football on the telly. It was half-time; time for Men To Talk. After peeing, anyway. Nikki was in her room, two floors up, listening to music and reading. I’d told Craig the absolute minimum about my very occasional affair with Celia.

Normally I might have shared this sort of thing with Ed, who possessed the merit of pursuing – with extravagant success – a lifestyle that made mine look restrained to the point of celibacy in comparison, but the trouble was I’d asked him about Mr Merrial that day in the Hummer, and I wasn’t absolutely sure that I hadn’t mentioned seeing Mr M’s wife at the time, too, and – paranoid though I knew it was really – I felt it would be just possible that Ed would put two and two together and, well, faint, probably.

Maybe Celia guessing about the fact Jude and I still fell into bed together every now and again had spooked me a little.

‘Look at it objectively,’ Craig said. ‘You meet up with this mystery female whom you describe as the most beautiful woman you’ve ever slept with. You always meet in circumstances, surroundings, that you describe as somewhere between “very nice” and “sybaritic”, where you proceed to fuck the arse off her and…’

‘Yeah, but the fact remains I’m in a relationship where the best thing that can happen is that it just fizzles slowly, sadly out… What?’

‘Oh fuck.’

‘What?’

‘Just there.’

‘What?’

‘When I said “you fuck the arse off her”, right?’

‘… Yeah.’

‘You winced. Well, your cheek winced. Like a facial tic.’

‘Never… Did I? Really? Oh. Okay. Right. So?’

‘That means you’re falling in love with her. Now you have a problem.’

The big Breaking News thing was stuttering. It got all rather hyper and frenetic over the next day or two after our meeting with Debbie the Station Manager, the way sometimes these relatively trivial things tend to, with urgent, all-hours, weekend-long phone calls, texts and voice mails flying back and forth between Channel Four, Capital Live!, the production company, Winsome, assorted producers, assistants, secretaries, PAs, agents, lawyers and people whose job it seemed to be purely to ring up and say they needed to speak to somebody urgently, all tying up a significant proportion of the capital’s mobile and fixed-line telephony capacity trying to get this incredibly vital piece of exciting, epoch-making, edgy, challenging, confrontational television arranged for the Monday evening. Even Sir Jamie himself got involved, because according to my contract he needed to give personal permission for me to appear on another not pre-agreed media outlet. This turned out not to be a problem as he was a good friend of the owner of Winsome Productions, and even had shares in the company.

Then, of course, just as everybody concerned had whipped themselves up into a high, teetering, effervescent froth of wild-eyed expectation and teeth-chattering frenzy, it all fell apart.

Even I’d got myself all worked up, and I’m Joe Totally Cynical about these things after years of people telling me they have this great project for getting me on telly and how they’re really excited about bringing a new dimension to my work, and then nothing happening.

‘You’re telling me it’s not fucking going ahead.’

‘It’s being postponed,’ Phil said tiredly, putting his mobile down on the scratched wooden table. We were in the Capital Live! canteen on the floor beneath Debbie’s office, having an early breakfast. It was just after seven o’clock. We’d come in early to do a special recorded edition of the show so that I could get to the Channel Four studios in time for the recording of Breaking News (they’d backed off the original idea of doing it live).

My mobile vibrated on my belt. I checked the display. My agent. ‘Yes, Paul?’ I said. Then, ‘Yes, I just heard.’ Then, ‘Yeah, I know. Me too. Par for the fucking course. Yeah… yada and then yada, raised to the power of yada. Yeah, when I see it. In fact probably not until I see it when it’s number thirty-seven on TV’s One Hundred Most Embarrassing Moments. Yeah, we’ll see. Okay. You too. Bye.’

I sat back in the creaking flexibility of the brown plastic seat and drummed my fingers on the table top, looking at my toast and marmalade and my cup of milky tea.

‘Look on the bright side,’ Phil said. ‘They’d just have wanted you there about four hours early, and then they’d have wanted to do another of those pre-interview interviews where some breathless researcher with a famous name just out of chalet school asks you lots of questions so they can find out which ones are the good ones and you give really good, fresh answers and then they ask you those same questions in the actual programme and you sound all stale and talked out because you’ve already answered them once and got bored with them, and during the recording you’ll have to answer the same questions a third or a fourth time because somebody knocks over a bit of the set and they have to start again from the top, so you’ll sound even more stale and talked out, then they’ll record more than three hours and use less than two minutes and you’ll forget to take your make-up off and workmen will give you funny looks in the street and afterwards people whose opinion you respect will say they missed it, or go all cagey when you ask them what they thought, and people you don’t like will call up and tell you they loved it and the papers you hate will either dismiss it or say how you should stick to what you’re good at, not that you’re very good at that either, and you’ll be all depressed and grumpy for weeks.’

Probably Phil’s longest diatribe; it was too laid-back to be called a rant. I looked at him. ‘So, when did they tell you it might happen now?’

‘Oh, tomorrow,’ he grinned.

‘Fuck off.’

‘Na,’ he said, leaning back too and stretching and yawning. ‘Lucky to be this year, now, according to my new close friend at Winsome, Moselle. Major rethink on format after the events of September the eleventh.’ He scratched his head. ‘What a brilliant excuse that’s turned out to be, for so many things.’

‘Yeah,’ I breathed. I toyed with my toast and stirred my already well-stirred tea. Part of me was deeply relieved. I’d come up with this great idea for what I was going to do on the programme if they put me on with the Holocaust denier guy, and it still excited me and scared me in equally intense proportions. Now I wouldn’t have to either do it and let fuck knows what happen, or chicken out and not do it and curse myself for evermore for being a sad, pathetic, hypocritical, lily-livered crap-out merchant. In fact, just the sort of sad, pathetic (etc.) who would feel as relieved as I now did that I wouldn’t have to make that choice, at least not for a while and maybe, the way I knew these things tended to work, ever.

I threw the teaspoon down and stood up. ‘Ah, come on, let’s go and do the fucking show.’

Phil glanced at his watch. ‘We can’t. Judy T’s using the studio till half past.’

I sat back down again, heavily. ‘Fuck,’ I said eloquently, putting my head in my hands. ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.’