Dead Air

Six. LONDON EYE

‘Nah, mate. Sorry, no.’

‘Ed! Come on!’

‘Na. Now, that’s wrong, Ken. You shouldn’t even have asked me. Let’s forget you did. Look at the view instead.’

I sighed and leaned back against the curve of glass. We were on the London Eye, riding one of the big, bulbous cars on its grand forty-minute rotation through the air. We were about two-thirds of the way round now, slowly descending. It was a bright end-of-November day and the air was clear. Most of Ed’s extended family were here, laughing and pointing and generally having a fun time. Ed had reserved the car for us. The blazered attendant and I were the only white people on board.

I’d become quite worried on the way up; it had suddenly struck me that the Eye would be a perfect terrorist target. The supporting legs stretched out behind it – looking, I thought, a lot like the marching hammers in The Wall – splaying down to the ground by the side of the old GLC building… they and their supporting wires and cables suddenly appeared terribly vulnerable. Jesus, I’d thought; a big enough bomb there, blowing the whole structure forward to fall into the river just a bridge away from Westminster… but we were on the way down now, my atypical paranoia subsiding along with the gradually flattening view. Downriver, the tall white support towers of the new works on the Hungerford Bridge seemed to echo the architecture of the Eye itself.

Ed had just come back from DJing in Japan and this was the first chance I’d had to catch up with him. It had taken a good twenty-five minutes – and the passing of the best of the view at the top of the circle – for me to get him alone.

‘Would you get me a gun if I was black?’

‘Wot?’ Ed said loudly, incredulous. A few of his family turned and looked at us. I guess we’d made it obvious this was meant to be a private word. He lowered his voice. ‘Listen to youself, man. Ken! I mean, fuckin ell.’

I shook my head, patted his forearm and sat forward, my head in my hands. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, sighing. ‘I’m sorry, Ed. That was, that was truly, truly shit. I…’

‘Look, mate, I can see you’re really shaken up wif this. Don’t blame you.’ Ed leaned down so that he was level with me and he could say even more quietly, ‘But a shooter is not going to solve your problems. It’ll just add to them. Plob’ly.’

‘It’s only for self-defence,’ I said lamely. But I’d given up. I knew I wasn’t going to convince him. Worse, I knew he was probably right.

‘Yeah, that’s what they all say, chummy.’

‘You’re not denying you know people who could get me one though, are you?’

‘Course not. But come on, Ken,’ Ed said. He gestured at the mass of people in the car. ‘Look at this lot.’ I looked at them. They were a colourful, happy, mostly female bunch, all bright dresses and laughter and flashing smiles. You’d rarely see so many smiles in the one place these days. At least not without a bottle of pills. Ed’s mother saw me looking at her and waved, her smile as wide as the view of London. I returned the wave, and could not help but smile back at her. I was well in her good books because I’d remembered to tell her as we boarded the car that her hair looked wonderful. I mean, it did look good, but it wasn’t the sort of thing I’d usually comment on because, well, I’m a man… but Ed had given me the tip years ago that, with black women in particular, complimenting them on their hair was a bigger step into their affections than anything else he could think of, certainly than anything else he could think of that was free. At the time I’d told him this was appallingly cynical and accused him of belonging to that vast and mostly black movement: Sexists Against Racism, but of course I’d used it ruthlessly ever since.

‘I’m not some fuckin Yardie nutter,’ Ed told me, nodding at his family. ‘I got all them to fink of, an a career. I’m a bleedin businessman these days, know what I mean? I don’t need the sorta people who never leave the ouse wifout a Uzi. I’ve seen what that leads to, Ken, an it’s shit. It just does the job the cops an the racists want done for them. Fuckin ell; look at the States. Amount of black-on-black is fuckin heart-breakin, man. The amount of bruvvers in jail an on def row is fuckin obscene.’

‘I know.’ I sighed. ‘I’ve mentioned this on the show.’

‘Yeah, well a lot of that is down to fuckin ordnance, mate, an unless you got no uvver choices – which you ave – an you know zactly wot you’re doin – which you don’t – you just don’t want to get involved.’

‘I’m not asking you to hand me a piece, I just want a name, a number, a place to go. What was that pal of yours that did the time? Robe? Couldn’t he-?’

‘Na. Not Robe. Loss contact, aven’t I?’

‘Just a number, Ed.’

‘I can’t do that, Ken.’

‘You mean you won’t.’

‘I can’t wif a clear conscience. You know what I mean.’

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know what you mean.’

‘If you feel freatened in London, take a holiday; go back to Scotland maybe.’

‘I’ve got commitments, Ed, a show to do. I’ve got a contract.’

‘Yeah, well, but maybe somebody’s got one out on you.’

‘That’s why I thought a means to defend myself-’

‘Look, either they’re so crap you won’t need a gun to get one over on them – like you already ave – or they’re so good avin a Glock down the back of your 501s ain’t gonna make a blind bit a difference. You ever see Leon?’

I looked at him. ‘You know, I think you were right earlier; we should just admire the view.’

I didn’t want to leave London. I liked it here. Part of it was pride; not wanting to run. Part of it was fatalism; depending who might or might not be after me, maybe they could get me anywhere, so I was better off where I had the most friends (even if the bastards wouldn’t provide sanctuary or the means to defend myself). Part of it was I had a living to make and a job to do, which I happened to enjoy.

I bought a big, long Mag-Lite torch, a six-cell job even longer than the ones I’d seen security people carrying. A good, strong beam, but – at half a metre long – an even better club. It fitted neatly into the angle between the headboard of the bed and the mattress and sometimes if I woke up during the night, especially if Jo was away, I’d reach out and feel its smooth, massy, diamond-cut coldness, and be reassured, and fall asleep again.

One thing I hadn’t told Ed was that Capital Live! and Mouth Corp were in on it now. Phil had insisted, and when I checked with Paul, my agent, he’d confirmed that there was a clause in my contract that meant I had to report any material threat to my life, my well-being or my potential ability to fulfil my contract to present the show. I should have felt outraged but actually I felt relieved.

Sir Jamie himself had phoned me from LA, assuring me that I’d be looked after. Mouth Corp’s Head of Security, a grizzled, tough-looking ex-SAS geezer called Mick Beezley, had the alarm system on the Temple Belle replaced, a new CCTV monitor added on the quayside linked to Mouth Corp’s own 24/7 Security Monitoring Centre, and an X-ray machine installed in the post room (we were, these days, already looking out for anthrax). A satellite tracking system was added to the Land Rover, also feeding in to the Monitoring Centre. Something called a Category Four Thatcham alarm system apparently made the Landy virtually impossible to interfere with or nick except by stealth helicopter. I didn’t dare point out that adding all this electronic wizardry to something that was basically diesel, clockwork and string had probably increased its value – and presumably therefore its attraction to those of a thieving disposition – by about two thousand per cent.

I was told I could even have a bodyguard for times when I felt I might be especially vulnerable, though from past experience I suspected I was most vulnerable when I was being led by the dick by some flirtatious floozy and didn’t want anybody else around in the first place (with the possible exception of her twin sister).

I said I’d think about the bodyguard idea.

‘This is from the boss,’ Mick Beezley growled, handing me a chunky box. ‘The boss’ was how he referred to Sir Jamie.

It was a watch. A very chunky watch with dials within dials and a rotating bezel with lots of marks and notches and tiny figures on it for working out when you might dream of making your last payment on it and it finally becoming yours and a variety of buttons and knobs including one very big one that looked like you could attach Big Ben to it and have a fair stab at winding the bastard. It looked like the sort of watch small boys used to think looked really cool (not nowadays; now they covet the sort of smooth, highly post-modern Spoon I was wearing). The thing looked like it was probably waterproof to the bottom of the Marianas Trench, but it also looked like the sort of watch there would be no point waterproofing because it was so fucking heavy it would drag you straight to the bottom the instant you dived into the briny. I stared at it, then at the piece of simply elegant sculpture on my wrist and then at the scarcely-less-chunky-than-the-watch features of Mick Beezley. ‘What is this?’ I asked him. ‘Fucking James Bond?’

‘That is a Breitling Explorer, that is,’ Beezley rumbled. ‘Instructions included, but basically if you pull this big button here, hard, a wire comes out and a signal goes out to a satellite. Only for use in genuine emergencies, otherwise you’re left with a watch with a big long wire sticking out of it and no way of getting it back in again, and a very expensive repair bill. After a real emergency they repair it for free.’

‘Does it work indoors?’

‘Not so well.’

‘Right. How much does it cost?’

‘Three and a half grand. So don’t lose it.’

‘Bloody hell.’

‘And it’s not James Bond; you’ve been able to buy these over the counter for years.’

I studied it. ‘I’ve obviously been shopping in the wrong jewellers.’ I lifted it up. It wasn’t as heavy as I’d anticipated, but it was heavy enough. ‘Jesus. It does tell the time, too, I take it.’

Beezley looked at me. I looked at him. After a bit I scratched my head and said, ‘Do they teach you that look in the SAS?’

‘Okay, we’re back to that phone/vibrator thing. For those of you new to the show, this is our long-running project to get somebody to build a mobile phone of the correct dimensions and degree of, ah, proofness to be used, by ladies, as… an intimate comfort device – I think that was the euphemism we settled on, wasn’t it, Phil?’

‘I recall so,’ Phil agreed from the other side of the desk.

‘So we’re trying to get somebody to make it. Come on; there must be some enterprising manufacturer out there. They can make the damn things waterproof these days; what’s the problem? Not new technology. Okay, so there might have to be a thin sort of aerial thingy hanging down… again…’

‘There’s a precedent,’ Phil supplied.

‘It has to be safe, it has to be shaped, it has to be comfortable and it has to work. Phone sex will take on a new meaning. When a woman says, Call me, you’ll know she really means it, even though you also know you’ll probably never get an answer.’

‘Till home them cows does come.’

‘Thank you, Phil.’ I paused. ‘Phil; you’re looking smug. I realise you labour under the pathetic delusion that you deserve to look like that all the time because you’re just so intrinsically fabulous, but why do you look so particularly smug right at this point in time?’

‘That was a song lyric.’

‘What? “Till home them cows does come”?’

‘Yes.’

‘Fascinating.’

‘Joni Mitchell,’ he said quietly, smiling. ‘Or was it Melanie Safka?’ Then he frowned.

I couldn’t help it; I burst out laughing. ‘You don’t say? Again, not precisely on the button in terms of our target audience, Philip.’

‘Permit a middle-aged man his little foibles.’

‘Right. Foible away. Anyway. Come on,’ I said. ‘We’re talking to one of the most vibrant cities in the world out there.’ (Phil guffawed.) ‘It can’t be beyond the wit of human kind to invent a phone it’d be an utter pleasure for a woman to use.’

‘And men,’ Phil chipped in. I raised my eyebrows at him. ‘Some men,’ he said, shrugging. ‘Just a thought.’

‘Well, we do know you are of that persuasion yourself, Phil, but-’

‘Well,’ Phil said, taking off his glasses and starting to clean them with his hanky, ‘being gay doesn’t automatically mean you feel a desire, you might even say a burning desire, to put electronic vibratey type things anywhere near your sit-upon area.’

‘Give the words “ring tone” a new resonance though, wouldn’t it?’ I said, laughing despite myself.

Phil grinned. ‘Anyway…’ he said lazily. ‘Maybe this isn’t really perfect morning-show material.’

I glanced at the call-monitoring screen. ‘Phil, from the screen here I can see there are literally integers of people ringing in to disagree with you.’

‘Let’s hear what the people have to say, shall we?’

‘Let’s,’ I agreed. ‘But, listeners, be warned; any more calls consisting primarily of a buzzing noise and the sounds of human passion will be dealt with ruthlessly.’

‘Or recorded and used later on a premium-rate line,’ Phil added, up close.

‘Jimmy,’ I said. ‘First-time caller from Lambeth. Wants to make a point about the show. What would that be, James?’

I clicked the line open. A quiet, even, male voice with no real accent said, ‘They’re going to need a new presenter for it, dead man.’ Then the line went dead.

Phil could see the expression on my face. He bleeped the lot. I made a cut-off gesture and said, ‘Woh! Serious bleep-work there. Mother, I’ve told you not to call me at work. Hopefully we’ll find somebody with a civil tongue in their head on line five. Marissa, that’s you. What have you got for us?’

‘Ullo, Ken! Yeah! I’d like to place an order for one of them phones! But not too little a one!’

I clicked her off. ‘Now that is more like the calibre of call we need and want on this show! More, after – hey; some good music! How did that get in? – the Spooks.’

I hit Play and sat back, shaking.

Phil looked at me. ‘You all right?’

‘I’m fine,’ I said, though I didn’t feel it.

‘Want to take a break? We can go back-to-back with the next few tunes.’

I took a deep breath. ‘No. Fuck them. Proceed as normal.’ ‘Well, okay. But think we should maybe zoo it up a little?’ Phil suggested. ‘Get Kayla and Andi in too?’ I knew what he was thinking of; have all four of us chattering on air, just one big squabbling family, and no more risky phone calls.

I glanced into the control room, where both our assistants were sitting looking serious and nodding through the glass at us. ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘why not?’

‘I thought we weren’t taking any more anonymous calls,’ Debbie the Station Manager said. We were in a small meeting room in the middle of the building; her office was being redecorated. Phil and I were there, also Kayla and Andi, and Trish Eaton, station Human Resources manager (I was still trying to work out what Personnel had done to fall out of favour).

‘We never!’ Kayla protested. Andi, who’d also been taking caller details over the phones, nodded supportively.

‘The number came up on the auto 1471 screen as normal,’ Phil told Debbie. ‘It was a mobile. I’ve passed the number on to the police, but they think it’s almost certainly stolen. Or maybe a pay-as-you-go with no record of who bought it.’

Kayla sat back looking justified.

‘Well, then, maybe you just shouldn’t take any more phone calls at all, what do we think?’ Trish suggested. She was a plumpish, matronly type with youthfully smooth facial skin and finely drawn eyebrows.

‘Well, it’s not our unique selling point, certainly,’ I said. ‘But it’s an important part of the show. I’m loathe to lose it.’ I looked round them all. ‘So far these people haven’t repeated trying to kidnap me, so maybe they won’t repeat this, either. And we do still have the three-second delay.’

‘This is even assuming the two things are linked,’ Phil said, looking from me to Debbie. ‘The thing in the taxi and the call this morning.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Let’s look on the bright side; maybe this is just a normal death threat!’ I looked round them, trying to appear reassuring and reassured. They were all looking at me. ‘What?’

‘Do you need to take some leave?’ Debbie asked. Trish was nodding.

Oh shit, I’d misjudged it. ‘No!’ I said. I lowered my voice, both in volume and tone. ‘And I don’t believe in giving in to what is basically personal terrorism, either,’ I said firmly. ‘I say we carry on as normal. Otherwise the bad guys win. I don’t think any of us -’ I glanced meaningfully up at the portrait of the Dear Owner looking down at us from the wall. ‘- want to be a party to that, especially in the current climate. There is a war on, after all.’ I looked at Trish and Debbie. Now they were both nodding, and I knew I’d won. That was the sort of bullshit they understood.

‘Oh-kay,’ Debbie said slowly. ‘But any more calls like that and we pull the phone lines. Agreed?’

We all looked around, nodding.

‘Maybe you should get another job,’ Jo suggested.

‘Why? I love my job!’ I protested.

‘Do you?’ Jo stopped and turned to me. We were walking down Bond Street on the second Sunday in December. ‘Ken, you hate most of what you do and what you’re involved in.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘Think about it. Would you listen to Capital Live! if you didn’t have to?’

‘Are you mad? Of course not!’

‘The music you play; like that?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous! It’s almost all shite during the day. Fucking Westlife and Hear’say. Things have come to a pretty grisly pass when you play Jamiroquai and they sound like a breath of fresh air.’

‘What about the people who phone in?’

‘With a few honourable exceptions, they’re dullards, dead-beats, opinionated dingbats and bigoted fuckwits.’

‘The adverts?’

‘Don’t even get me started on the fucking ads.’

‘Fellow DJs?’

‘Vapid cretins. Offer them a straight choice between opening another supermarket for a fat fee and sucking Sir Jamie’s cock for nothing and their single brain cell would fuse.’

‘The Tories? New Labour? American Republicans? The CIA? The IMF? The WTO? Rupert Murdoch? Conrad Black? The Barclay Brothers? What-d’you-call-him Berlusconi? George Dubya Bush? Ariel Sharon? Saddam Hussein? Thingy Farrakhan? Osama Bin Laden? The entire Saudi royal family? Muslim fundamentalists? The Christian Right? Zionist settlers? The UVF? Continuity IRA? Exxon? Enron? Microsoft? Tobacco companies? Private Finance Initiatives? The War Against Drugs? The Cult of the Shareholder?’

She only stopped, I assumed, because she ran out of breath. I stared at her for a moment, then shook my head. ‘How could you leave out Thatcher?’

She spread her arms. ‘There is just so much you hate, Ken. Your life, your working life; it’s, like, full of stuff and people and things and organisations you just can’t stand.’

‘You’re trying to make some sort of point here, aren’t you?’

‘In fact, forget your working life; your leisure life, too. Can we go to the States on holiday?’

‘I’ve told you; not until-’

‘Democracy is restored. Okay. Venice? Rome?’

‘With that corrupt fuck in charge, surrounded by his fascist-’

‘Australia?’

‘With their racist immigration policy? No fucking-’

‘China?’

‘Not while the butchers of Tiananmen Square are still-’

‘I rest my case. Is there anywhere-?’

‘Iceland.’

‘Iceland?’

‘I’d love to go to Iceland, so long as they don’t start whaling, obviously. Plus we have been to Egypt, and then there’s France. I feel cool about going to France. I’ve finally more or less forgiven them for sinking the Rainbow Warrior. I’ve even started buying French wine again.’

‘You’ve always bought French wine.’

‘No, I haven’t. It was embargoed; I had personal sanctions against it until about six months ago.’

‘So what the hell is champagne?’

‘Ah. Champagne is different. Though admittedly I ought to despise it on principle as a sort of geographical closed-shop. I look forward to the day when a workers’ cooperative in New Zealand can produce the equivalent of a ’75 Krug.’

‘Jesus. Is there anything you really like, without qualification? ’

‘There’s loads of things I like!’

‘Like what?’

‘Apart from the usual suspects?’

‘I’m not talking about films.’

I laughed. ‘Me neither. I mean apart from friends and family and world peace and little babies and Nelson bleedin Mandela.’

‘Yeah. Exactly. What?’

‘Students.’

‘Students?’

‘Yeah, it seems to be fashionable to be horrible about the little fuckers, but I think they’re okay. If anything they’re a bit too studious these days, not rebellious enough, but basically they’re all right.’

‘What else?’

‘Cricket. I honestly believe cricket may well be the greatest game in the world. It is total heresy for a Scotsman to admit to this, and I entirely see the point of the American who said that only the English could invent a game that lasts for five days and can still end in a draw, but I just can’t help it; I love it. I don’t completely understand it and I still don’t know all the rules, but there’s something about its bizarrely erratic pace, its sheer complexity, its… psychology that just lifts it above any other sport. Even including golf, which is full of grotesquely over-paid reactionary bastards but is still a thing of skill and craft and beauty, and was, of course, invented in Scotland, like so much other truly neat stuff.’

‘That’s still only two things.’

I clicked my fingers. ‘Liberals. The chattering classes. Political correctness. Basically I’m for ’em. Again, they get a bad press from veracity-challenged moral midgets employed by greedy zillionaires to wank-off bigots, but not me; I stand right by them. They’re my kind of people. Liberals want niceness. What the hell is wrong with that? And, bless them, they do it in the teeth of such adversity! The world, people, are disappointing them all the time, constantly throwing up examples of what total shites human beings can be, but liberals just take it all, they hunker down, they grit their sandals and they keep on going; thinking well of people, reading the Guardian, sending cheques to good causes, turning up at marches, getting politely embarrassed by working-class oafism and just generally getting all hot under the collar when they see people being treated badly. That’s the great thing about liberals; they care for people, not institutions, not nations, not religions, not classes, just people. A good liberal doesn’t care whether it’s their own nation or their own religion or their own class or their own anything that’s being beastly to some other bunch of people; it’s still wrong and they’ll protest about it. I’m telling you, it’s a sick, sick nation that turned the word “liberal” into an expletive. But there you are; the Yanks think basketball is a sport and that there’s nothing cruel and unusual about taking four minutes to kill a man by putting thirty thousand volts through him.’

‘Did you say you liked political correctness? News to me.’

‘Political correctness is what right-wing bigots call what everybody else calls Being polite, or what everybody else calls Not being a right-wing bigot.’

Jo looked at me through narrowed eyes. ‘I bet I could find tapes of you banging on about how political correctness was something else to hate.’

‘Like everybody else, I have my own definitions of what is what, and I would never seek to deny that a few stupid people can take a perfectly good idea too far, but I stand by my contention that political correctness is more sinned against than sinning. Besides, a chap can change his mind. Oh, and journalists. I like them.’

‘What?’ Jo said, incredulous. ‘You hate journalists!’

‘No I don’t, I just hate the ones who make up quotes, subsidise criminals, hound the innocent, collude with the truly talentless and otherwise squander their undoubted gifts on tat. A disgrace they assuredly are. But a journalist determined to get to the truth of a story, expose lies and corruption, to tell people what’s really going on, to make one lot of humanity care for another lot, or even just start thinking about them? Weight-in-gold, they are. In fact, weight-in-microchips. Guardians of liberty. Mean more to democracy than most politicians. Fucking secular saints. Course, it helps if they’re liberal, too. Don’t shake your head at me, young lady. I’m being serious.’

‘Now I know you’re taking the piss.’

‘I swear, I’m not!’ I said, waving my arms. ‘And I just thought of something else I like.’

‘Yeah? What?’

I nodded. ‘This city.’

‘London?’

‘Yep.’

‘But you’re always going on about how the tube is dirty, smelly and dangerous, and the traffic is awful, and the air stinks, and the people aren’t as friendly as they are in Glasgow, and the drinks are too small and expensive, and it’s not as exciting as New York or as civilised as Paris or as clean as Stockholm or as cool as Amsterdam or as groovy as San Francisco or-’

‘Yeah yeah yeah, but just turn and look behind you. Look.’

Jo turned round and looked at the shop window she’d had her back to while we’d being going through all this stuff. We’d included Bond Street in our Sunday after-lunch stroll because I’d wanted to look in some posh jewellers and see if they had my excessive new watch. The shop we’d happened to stop outside was a jewellers. And its window was full of fish slices, suspended in the space behind the glass like a surreal hail of twinkling trowels. It was The Rabinovich Collection of Antique and Modern Silver Fish Slices, to quote the elegant sign in the window (we were a few doors down from a shop called Zilli, which seemed somehow appropriate). ‘How the fuck,’ I asked, ‘can you not love a city that throws up stuff like that?’

Jo was shaking her head. She was blond again, and had taken to teasing her short hair into little meringue-like spikes. She stuck her arm through mine. She was wearing a silver puffa jacket. I wore an old RAF greatcoat an uncle had given me when I was seventeen. ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘I’m getting cold.’ We started walking again, heading south, back towards the river.

‘And music, of course,’ I said. ‘I love music.’

‘But you just said you hated the stuff you have to play.’

‘Yeah, because it’s commercial effluent. It’s the sonic equivalent of a Coke or a McDonald’s; it fills you up but it’s just production-line shit and there’s precious little in there that’s really any good for you. The music I love is the music people make because they have to, because they need to, from their souls, not their wallets.’

‘You don’t believe in souls.’

‘I don’t believe in immortal souls. I just mean the kernel of who you are, not anything superstitious.’

‘Yeah, well, be thankful you just have to play the stuff and don’t need to get involved in the process of making it.’

‘You make it sound like pies.’

‘Pies?’

‘Yeah. You know; that thing about it being a good idea – if you like eating pies – never, ever to see how they were made and what goes into them.’

‘Yeah, well,’ Jo said, hoisting one steel-studded eyebrow, ‘believe me; there are a lot of pie bands out there.’

‘I believe the same applies to sausages.’

‘Ditto.’

I looked over to the far side of the street, at the DKNY shop. I remembered Ceel telling me about its five thousand red twin-towers T-shirts, nearly three months ago. In the December cold I shivered for the dark, baking heat of that hotel room. That had been another, solitary feature of today’s walk, one I couldn’t share with Jo. Our route had taken us past a few of the hotels I’d been in with Ceel. We had passed Claridge’s just ten minutes earlier, and I’d almost suggested that we went in for a drink, or a pot of tea, or just the chance to pretend we were guests and get to ride in a lift that actually had a uniformed lift-operator, but in the end some prophylactic instinct, some grudgingly acknowledged requirement to obey Celia’s stricture about keeping our affair as separate as possible from the rest of our lives, prevented me.

‘Is that your watch?’ Jo said, stopping at another jewellers’ window and nodding at a display of chunkily sparkling Breitlings on a background of piled yellow cloth.

I glanced at the arm-lengthening bracelet of heavy metalwork on my left wrist. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not nearly expensive or complicated enough.’

Jo looked at my new watch and shook her head as we walked on. ‘That thing makes you look ten years older, you know.’

‘Don’t diss my timepiece, ho.’

‘It makes you look like you should be driving a Roller and shopping for – fucking hell; those.’

We both stared at and then walked quickly past a window containing two large thrones – mere chairs they were not – made of cut crystal and red velour.

‘Holy shit.’

‘Did we really see those?’

‘I feel ill.’

We walked to the Embankment via St James’s Park, through similarly sauntering locals and clumps of tourists, amongst coots, storks, black swans and panhandling squirrels. Ahead, the top of the London Eye stood out against sky, revolving almost imperceptibly over the departmental buildings of Whitehall like an ironic, skeletal halo.

‘Hey! Skating. Cool.’

‘Almost by definition,’ I muttered. ‘Look, can we head back after this? My feet are sore.’

‘Yeah, okay.’

Jo guided me into the great courtyard of Somerset House, where a temporary ice rink had been set up for the winter holidays. Strings of lights articulated the wide quad. Tall windows, columns, arches and chimneys looked down upon the scene, where hundreds of people ambled about, sat swaddled in thick clothes outside little cafés, or stood watching the skaters, who circulated above the inscribed white ice like a slow, flat sweep of leaves caught in a stirring wind. I could smell coffee, fried onions and mulled wine.

Above us was a water-colour sky, hues bleeding and feeding and fading into each other as the light started to wane above the skeins of slowly drifting cloud.

On the ice, people laughed and shrieked, holding on to each other or the sides of the rink, doubled over, feet skidding. Squeals echoed off the courtyard’s imposing architecture as people fell thumping to the cold, scarred surface of the rink. A gap opened in the crowds on the ice, there was a blur of rising blue as somebody jumped, and that was when I saw it was Celia.

She was dressed in a powder-blue skating outfit: tights, a short, flared skirt and a sort of tight tunic with a high neck and long sleeves. She wore brown gloves and white skates. Her hair was gathered up. Rising to the top of the jump that had first caught my attention, she twisted sleekly in the air, spinning once, then landed square on her right blade, knee bent, her left leg held out straight behind her. The quiet smack of her blade landing sounded across the ice between the circulating bodies; she sliced away, arms out to balance herself, sizzing across the ice in a wide, slowly tightening spiral. She skilfully avoided a couple of other skaters and then, with an elegant little skip, turned to skate backwards into a clearing space near the centre of the rink, stooping and tensing her body for another jump.

People got in the way, and I lost sight of her. I moved to the metal fencing describing the edges of the rink, putting my hands on the cold tube of rail, trying to see her again. Lengths of blue plasticised canvas were tied to the fencing and I could feel one of the plastic ties under my left hand. My mouth felt cold and dry and a swirl of wind made me feel the tears in the corners of my eyes. I saw her once more as the crowds on the ice parted again and her skimming, sinuous course brought her gliding on a metal hiss towards me like a fabulously exotic alien creature fallen into our mundane world from a higher reality.

I suddenly realised two things. The first was that I had never really seen this woman in daylight before. The second was that she was the most beautiful thing I had ever beheld.

She swivelled, poised, jumped and landed, and then swung into a neat spin, perfectly centred, not ten metres away. She brought her arms in and raised them above her head. The spin speeded up and her slim body became a tall blurred pillar of light blue above a spray of white, reflected light strobing off the glittering blades of her boots. She came out of it and pushed away again, edges aslant across the rasping surface. A smattering of applause from people on and off the ice followed her, and she smiled but didn’t otherwise acknowledge the acclaim or look anybody in the eye. She passed only a couple of metres away from me and I swivelled to watch her. Her expression was diffident, almost embarrassed. A blush of rose glowed beneath the light-brown skin of her face.

A body leaned alongside me, rubbing against my side. ‘She’s good,’ Jo said, putting her arm through mine again.

‘Yes,’ was all I could find to say. Celia went with the circulating people for a while, serene and smooth and steady.

‘Huh. Got all the gear, too,’ Jo said. ‘Looks okay on her.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Fancy a glühwein?’

‘Hmm?’ I said. ‘Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good idea.’

‘My round. You going to stay here?’

‘Ah… yeah, okay.’

‘Back in a mo.’

When she came round the next time Celia was looking at the spectators, as if watching out for somebody. She saw me and did a brief double-take, but her expression barely wavered. She skated past me, not looking at me, scanning the crowds further round the boundary, then waved to somebody there and came to a stop at the edge of the ice about twenty metres away round the perimeter.

Mr Merrial was standing there.

The giant blond guy I’d assumed was his bodyguard when I’d seen them leaving Sir Jamie’s party back in April stood at his side. I was amazed I hadn’t noticed him.

Mr Merrial was talking to his wife. He looked right at me for a moment and nodded, though not in a way that meant Hello. I felt like an ice sculpture; frozen, fragile, ultimately doomed. Celia took the briefest of looks in my direction. My mouth had gone very dry, as if the saliva had frozen to my gums and teeth. The ground, the whole huge courtyard, seemed to tip beneath my feet. I gripped the metal rail tighter. In front of me a girl, almost doubled-over on the ice, felt her way past me, laughing, creasing the plastic canvas as she pulled herself along.

Mr Merrial was still looking at me, his pale, pinched face looking very white above the thick black coat he wore. His face was all there was to see; he wore gloves, a thick scarf and a Politburo hat. Celia was shaking her head. The big blond guy was looking at me too, now.

Oh shit. I looked away, trying to appear relaxed. I watched the other skaters. Some other people were quite good, too, doing jumps and spins where they could find the space. I brought my right elbow in, just reassuring myself that my mobile was still on my belt. Had I turned it on this morning? I didn’t always, on a Sunday. I couldn’t remember for sure. I suspected I hadn’t.

I shook my left wrist, feeling the suddenly reassuring weight of the big watch.

I risked a sideways glance. Celia was still shaking her head, looking, from her body language, as if she was arguing or pleading with her husband. He was nodding, then shaking his head. Celia spread her arms in what looked like a gesture of defeat, tipped her head to one side, was greeted with a nod, and then skated quickly away, pushing towards the far side of the rink.

I quickly looked back at the other skaters. Oh fuck, we hadn’t been discovered, had we? He didn’t know, did he? Oh fuck, why did we have to come here? Why couldn’t we have caught a bus or a taxi back home from the Embankment? Why hadn’t I thought that of course Celia skated, so she might be here, I might see her, and of course if she was here she would probably be with her husband? Why hadn’t I just slunk away the instant I’d noticed her? Why did I have to stand like a love-struck adolescent staring at her? Why did she have to see me and do that tiny, fatal double-take? Why did Merrial have to be so fucking observant? Oh shit, why the fuck wasn’t life a computer game where you could go back and re-live the last few minutes and make a different choice?

I looked back again. The big blond guy had disappeared. I looked round as frantically as anyone can without actually moving their head. I couldn’t see him anywhere. How the hell could I miss him? Jesus, they wouldn’t try anything here, would they? Too many people. And there were cops around; I’d seen two lots at least. Merrial had gone, too. He-

‘Mr Nott?’ said a voice at my back.

I froze, staring down at the ice. A pale flash of blue, somewhere out there. I turned.

‘John Merrial.’ The man put his hand out. I shook it.

His face was slim, almost delicate, close up. He looked slightly sad and infinitely wise. His eyebrows were thin and very black, lips thin and very pale. Eyes bright blue. Contained by the coat, the scarf and the fur hat, his face looked unreal somehow, like something two-dimensional seen upon a screen.

‘Hello,’ I said. My voice sounded very small.

‘That was my wife there; in blue,’ he said. His voice was quiet. Almost accentless. I saw a massive blond head over the crowds behind him.

‘Very good,’ I said, gulping the words. ‘Isn’t she?’

‘Thank you, yes, she is.’ He narrowed his eyes. ‘I think we were both at a party Jamie Werthamley threw, weren’t we? Back in the spring. Limehouse Tower. We were never introduced, but I think I saw you, now you’ve been pointed out to me.’

‘I believe we were,’ I said. I’m fucking your wife, I’m fucking your wife, I’m fucking your wife, I kept thinking, some suicidally insane bit of my brain wanting to blurt it out, to just say it, to get this over with, to make the worst that could happen actually happen and not have to keep imagining it.

‘How is Jamie?’ He smiled.

‘Fine. Last time I saw him.’ Which was at that same party, come to think of it; the party where I met your wife and snogged her and felt her up and agreed to this patently suicidal affair in the first place.

‘Good. Pass on my regards, will you?’

Oh, you mean you’re not going to kill me right now? ‘Ah, happily. Certainly. Yes.’

He looked past me, out to the ice. ‘My wife listens to you on the radio,’ he said.

Yes. And that hand you just shook has been inside her sweet cunt. See this tongue, these lips? Think of her ears, her nipples, her clitoris. ‘Really? I’m, I’m very flattered.’

He gave a thin smile. ‘She doesn’t want me to ask you this, but I know she’d be very happy if you played a request for her sometime.’

‘Well, we don’t really do requests,’ I heard some fuckwit part of my brain say.

What?

‘Oh,’ he said, looking down for a moment.

Was I fucking crazy?

His coat looked thick and very dark and glossy.

Did I really want to die that fucking much?

He wore narrow, black, highly polished brogues and very fine black leather gloves, though he’d taken off the right one to shake my hand.

‘But,’ I said, clapping my hands together and smiling. ‘For… for…’ For somebody I’m shagging the fucking arse off for hours on end whenever I get the opportunity. ‘For a friend of Sir Jamie’s, and… and for such a beautiful, ah, ice-skater… I think we can make an exception.’ I nodded. Merrial was smiling now. ‘In fact I’m certain we can,’ I told him. Because you see I have absolutely no principles whatsoever, when it comes right down to it, and I’ll do anything – anything at all – to save my miserable, lying, hypocritical hide.

‘That’s very kind, Mr Nott,’ he said evenly. ‘I appreciate it.’

‘Oh, ah, not at all.’ I love doing favours for people I hate.

He twisted from the waist about two degrees as he said, ‘Here’s my card.’ And the big blond guy with the metre-wide shoulders was suddenly there at Merrial’s side and presenting me with a plain white business card, which I took quickly so they wouldn’t see my trembling fingers. ‘Call me if I can ever do you a favour.’

‘Ah, right.’ Well, you could die conveniently. How about that? I put the card in a pocket. ‘Thank you.’

Mr Merrial nodded slowly. ‘Well, we have to go now. Good to meet you.’

‘And you.’ You fucking nasty murdering gangster bastard.

Mr Merrial turned to go, then stopped. ‘Oh,’ he said. He smiled his blade-thin smile again. Fucking hell, you crime lord cunt, I was just about getting my jangling nerves back into some sort of order and now you’re giving me a fucking Colombo moment? ‘I should tell you her name, shouldn’t I?’ Of course you shouldn’t, you dickhead, there’s no fucking need; it’s Celia. Ceel. Babe babe babe sometimes when I’m coming deep inside her.

‘Oh! Well, yes, it might help.’

‘It’s Celia Jane.’

‘Celia Jane?’ I blurted. Well done, Kenneth, put plenty of emphasis in there. Clearly you do still want to die.

He nodded. ‘Celia Jane.’ He reached out and patted my elbow once before turning away.

They moved off through the crowd, the blond dude leaving a spacious wake. Celia – sorry; Celia Jane – left the ice at one of the rink’s access points and they met her there. The blond guy produced a coat and a pair of shoes for her. She didn’t look at me and she held on to her husband’s arm while she changed from the skates to the shoes. I wiped my eyes with my hands. When I opened my eyes again, Mr and Mrs Merrial and their bulky minder had gone.

I was still shivering when Jo arrived back with two little polystyrene cups of steaming mulled wine.

‘Here. Look like you need it, too. You’re very pale. You okay?’

‘Just fine. Thanks.’

‘You fuckin spoke to the guy? He shook hands wif you?’

‘His wife’s a fan.’

‘What of? Knee-cappings?’

‘Of mine, you buffoon.’

‘You’re fuckin kiddin me, man!’ Ed’s voice went very high; the speaker in my mobile struggled to cope.

I filled in the details of meeting Mr M at Somerset House.

‘Aow yeah; they used to register stuff there, didn’t they? Burfs and marriages. An defs.’

‘Yeah, well, now it’s got an artificially cold heart and that’s where I bumped into him.’

‘An you’re goin to play his missus a record?’

‘Damn right I am.’

‘Sweet, man! An he says now he owes you a favour?’

‘Well, that’s what he implied, but-’

‘Ask him to find out who’s got it in for you, then. Fuckin ell, dedicate a whole show to his bitch an he’ll fuckin rub them out for you as well.’

‘I think that might be a little excessive.’

‘He’s an excessive geezer, mate.’

‘Yeah, well, I think I’ll keep him well away from whatever messes I’m already in.’

‘Wisdom, Kennif.’

I drummed the fingers of my left hand on my right arm. I was standing on the deck of the Temple Belle, looking out at the dark waters. Jo was below, opening some Korean take-away containers just delivered from a restaurant in Chelsea. I’d felt I just had to tell somebody at least something of what had happened that afternoon, and Ed had been the obvious choice. ‘Or do you think maybe I should ask him for help?’ I said. ‘I know he’s a villain but he did seem quite friendly; helpful, almost. I mean, maybe-’

‘Na, I don’t really fink you should. I was kiddin. Just you keep your skinny white ass away from people like that.’

‘You sure?’

‘I’m sure, man.’

‘Yeah, but he didn’t seem that bad, I mean-’

‘Listen. I’m gonna tell you sumfink about your Mr Merrial.’

‘What?’

‘It’s a bit orrible, but I fink you need tellin.’

‘What, then?’

‘Right.’ I heard Ed take a deep breath. Or possibly a toke. ‘He’s got this really big fucker works for him, right? Blond geezer built like a fuckin nuclear bunker.’

‘I’ve seen him. He handed me Mr M’s card this afternoon.’

‘Right. Well, this is wot I heard from somebody wot was there when this appened once. When Mr Merrial wants to find sumfink out from somebody wot does not want to tell him, or if he’s upset wif somebody, right, he has them tied to a chair wif their legs straight out an their feet tied to another chair, and then the big blond guy comes an sits on their legs an bounces up and down wif increasin force until either they talk or their knees bend the wrong way and their legs snap.’

‘Oh for fuck’s sake! Oh Jesus Christ, that’s fucking sick.’

‘An I eard this from a bruvver who is definitely wot you’d call a usually reliable source, too, mate, an not given to tellin milky whites. He was taken along to see wot would happen to him if he ever crossed Mr Merrial. Actually I fink the bruvver must have tried on sumfink very slightly dodgy himself an Mr M wanted to give him a ever so mild warning. So he got to see. And hear.’

‘I feel ill.’

‘This bruvver’s a big fucker, too. An he can handle himself, but I swear when he was tellin me all this he fuckin went grey. Grey, Kennif.’

‘Green,’ I gulped. ‘Me; now.’

‘Yeah, well, I juss fot you ought to know, before you go gettin any more involved wif people like that.’

‘Ken?’ Jo yelled from below.

‘That’s my tea out, Ed. Though I do seem to have lost my appetite, for some reason. Anyway, thanks for the warning.’

‘No probs.’

‘I’ll see you.’

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

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

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

‘Breaking News.’

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

‘It’s starting on Jan fourteenth.’

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

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

‘Of course it is, Philip.’

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

‘Not the world’s most reassuring phraseology.’

‘They’ve started doing publicity and everything.’

‘Everything. Well.’

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

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

‘Will you stop being so sodding cynical?’

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

‘I thought you’d want to know.’

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

‘If all you can do is be sarcastic-’

‘Then it should be a good show today.’

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

Phil said, ‘You on your way in?’

‘Better than being on the way out.’

‘Save it for the show. Safe journey.’

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

‘So we’ll see you soon. Take care.’

‘Yeah, bye.’

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

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

‘The ground.’

‘What?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You are a veritable stopcock, Philip.’

‘U-bend.’

‘Beg pardon?’

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

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

‘It’s a living.’

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

‘Oh no, not another Charity Announcement.’

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

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

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

‘Keep going.’

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

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

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

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

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

I hit Play and swept the faders.

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

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

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

‘Phil! I told you; she’s married.’

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

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

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

‘What’s wrong with playing a request?’

‘We never do it.’

‘So it’s a change.’

‘There has to be an ulterior motive somewhere.’

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

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

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

‘Ah-hah!’

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

‘Who is a looker, I bet,’ Phil said.

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

‘Well, this was unexpected.’

‘I wanted to say thank you.’

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

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

‘Ah well.’

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

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

‘You’re not in trouble, are you?’

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

‘Going home.’

‘To the island?’

‘Yes.’

‘Mr M too?’

‘Yes. And what about you?’

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

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

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

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

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

‘Yes. But I heard it.’

I looked around. ‘And decided on here.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘You would have made such a great spy.’

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

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

‘Did you really imagine that?’

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

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

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

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

‘Hey, you were listening.’

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

‘Doesn’t everybody?’

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

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

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

I got up on one elbow again. ‘And do I think reason should replace irrationality? Well, yes. Yes, I do. Guilty as charged. And, bless it, society really is to blame. Society and education and enquiry and doubt and argument and disputation and progress; all the schools and libraries and universities, all the scholars and monks and alchemists and teachers and scientists. Faith is fine for poetry, for images and metaphors and art and for telling us who we are, who we’ve been. But when faith tries to describe the world, describe the universe, it just plain gets it wrong. Which wouldn’t matter if it admitted it was wrong, but it can’t, because all it’s got is its unwavering certainty in its own infallibility; the rest is smoke and mirrors, and admitting imperfection brings the whole lot tumbling down. There are no crystal spheres, and the planets are not the result of some sky god’s wet-dream. If that is supposed to be taken literally, then it’s a lie, plain and simple. If it’s a metaphor, then it has bugger all to do with the way things really work. Reason works, the scientific method works. Technology works.

‘If people want to respect their environment by believing that the fish they eat might have been an ancestor, or learn to lower toilet seats because their chi is leaking out, I’m happy to accept and even honour the results even if I think the root of their behaviour is basically barmy. I can live with that, and with them. I hope they can live with me.’

She spread her hand flat against my chest. I could feel my heart beating hard. I shouldn’t let this sort of thing get to me like this, but I had no choice. This stuff was important to me; I couldn’t help it.

‘Sometimes,’ she said quietly, looking at her own hand, or perhaps at my skin. ‘Sometimes I think we are like different coloured bishops on a chess board, you and I.’

‘Bishops? After all I’ve just said?’

She smiled, still spreading her hand on my chest, as though trying to span the distance between my nipples. ‘Better to be a queen,’ she agreed.

‘You’ll just have to take my word for it that I’d rather be a pawn than a bishop. At least they can transcend their origins.’

‘I believe you.’

‘Or a knight. I’ve always liked the fact a knight has what is basically a three-dimensional move on a two-dimensional surface. And the castle; there’s something about the bluff, blunt power of the rook that attracts me as well. And it does do a potentially three-dimensional thing, too, just once, come to think of it, castling. Bishops are more devious, somehow, sliding in between pieces like a knife through ribs. The king, of course, is simply a liability.’

‘I was thinking,’ she said, ‘of bishops on opposing sides, and of different colours as well. Just the two of them there on the chess board, with no other pieces present.’

I nodded. I saw, now, what she meant.

‘They could never connect,’ I said. ‘They could slide past each other for ever, but never affect. They appear to inhabit the same board, but really they don’t. Not at all.’

She looked up at me with heavy-lidded eyes, her head tipped fractionally to one side. ‘Don’t you think?’

‘Perhaps. And is that us?’

‘Maybe. Maybe all men and women. Maybe all people.’

‘For ever? Without exception? Without hope?’ I tried to say it lightly.

She took my cock in her hand, then brought her other hand out from underneath her head and cupped her sex. ‘We connect here…’ She smiled. (A smile, it seemed to me just then, fit to light up the universe inside the skull; a smile, indeed, to light up two. A smile to illuminate infinities.) ‘… That will have to do for now.’