Dead Air (50 page)

‘I know.’

‘So.’

‘So. Well, wait.’

‘For what?’

‘For a package, and a phone call?’

‘So I’ll see you again.’

‘I can hear you are smiling as you say that. Yes.’

‘Ditto, kid. And will I see you again, after this next time?’

‘I would hope so. You know it will not be the same, though, don’t you? It can never be the same again.’

‘I know. But maybe it can be better.’

‘John has started divorce proceedings. He is in Amsterdam most of the time now.’

‘So can we meet up soon?’

‘I need to be very careful, still, but I hope so, soon. I must go.’

‘I’m sorry, Ceel. About getting us both into that mess.’

‘Good came of it. Never do its like again.’

‘I pro—’

‘I must go, my love.’

‘—mise. Hey, wait; did you say—?’

‘…’

There is this verdict, which is unique, as far as I know, to the Scottish legal system, and remained distinct from the English one even for the three centuries of the full Union with the rest of the UK. It’s called Not Proven.

It means that the jury isn’t going to go as far as pronouncing the defendant Not Guilty, but that the prosecuting authorities simply have not proved their case. It’s a funny verdict, because you still leave the court a free man or woman, with no criminal record (well, unless you had one before, of course), though people - friends and family, the community at large - may remember, and the implications of that neither-one-thing-nor-the-other verdict might well live with you for the rest of your life.

There have been moves to get rid of it, to adopt the binary choice of Guilty or Not Guilty, but I think that’s a mistake. If I was on a jury I would never agree to a Not Proven verdict for somebody I basically thought was Guilty, but I would go as far as Not Proven for somebody I would otherwise have found just plain Not Guilty and who I thought ought not to be punished beyond the implications of that debatable verdict itself. Because that’s what it is: a semi-punishment, a sort of warning, a conditional discharge that is, remarkably, in the gift of the jury, not the judge. I think it’s worth keeping for that alone.

I’ve wondered for many months now if that was the judgement John Merrial recorded in the personal courtroom he kept in his head, if he still suspected there was something more going on somewhere, just with me, or even between me and Celia.

I don’t know. I can’t decide.

Not Proven. It would do.

It’s one of those odd concepts that, the more you think about it, the more it seems applicable within all sorts of other contexts besides the one it originated in. My whole radio career, for example, feels like it has been Not Proven (actually it’s been Guilty loads of times, whenever I got fired again, but - overall - I’m still claiming the Not Proven thing). Scotland; the UK, devolution. More British? More European? Not Proven.

And Celia and me. Not Proven.

I never did get that package and that phone call. Instead she decided we ought to start meeting in public. She suggested the British Museum, the first time; the room that held the Pergamum Altar. This was in March. In front of that vast, white, towering edifice of Imperial plunder, we met, nodded, shook hands, then went for coffee in the museum’s café. She asked how I was and I said I was recovering. She apologised for her husband’s behaviour, hurting me as he had, and I apologised for mine, entering her home without permission. We talked as though playing parts, then parted with another handshake. I slipped the folded piece of paper she’d passed during the handshake into my pocket and met her in the Sanderson the next afternoon. The sex hurt. Me; not her, obviously. But it was still great.

We started to meet up more often, through the spring and into the summer, while Mr M set up his operating base in Amsterdam and the divorce proceedings slid smoothly along and his new fiancée blossomed.

We met in public as friends. In private, less often, as the lovers we had always been.

One day in June she kissed me on the cheek as she left the bar, and the following week brushed her lips with mine as she got out of the taxi, after dinner. A fortnight later we went to Clout, dancing, and kissed on the dance floor and later in a shady booth in the Retox bar. It was late July before she came to the
Temple Belle
and stayed overnight, so that I finally got to spend a whole night with her, and wake up with her. We never did discover if anybody had been watching. But the risk had not been worth taking.

I still worry that one day Merrial will wake up and just somehow know that of course Celia and I had been lovers back then, when it seemed he had suspected we might be, and still take his revenge, but Ceel seems quite sanguine about this.

‘John thinks I am too proper and too concerned with fairness, ’ she told me. ‘Paying off Maria and meeting you to apologise for all that happened appear like symptoms of an amusing obsession to him. He thinks that I am going out with you to spite him, that I am deliberately or subconsciously taking what he suspected wrongly and making it true, just to punish him. So he believes that what you and I have together is about him, not us, which pleases his ego, and he thinks that I am deceiving myself over my motives in seeing you in the first place, which he also finds a comfort.’

I frowned. ‘You sure about this?’

‘But of course. I can see what he thinks, and I know how to make him think certain things.’

I thought about this, and an appalling thought occurred to me. ‘You can’t do the same with me, can you?’

Celia laughed lightly, squeezed my hand and said, ‘What could possibly make you think that?’

I had no real answer.

So, anyway, I think we’re safe, but still; Not Proven.

Another of my worries was that what we had between us would all have changed too much, that we had only ever existed as the fervently coupled entity we had been as a sort of two-person sexual freak; exquisite and fine in the rarefied, hot-house atmosphere of those episodically connected, lily-scented hotel rooms, but utterly unsuited to the rest of life, to the day-to-dayness of mundane existence, where such a delicate bloom would shrivel and die in the light of the commonplace. Maybe we had nothing more to say to each other than what we had already said, with our minds and our bodies, in those intense darknesses. Perhaps we both had habits, idiosyncrasies, that the other had never experienced because until then - in the erratically dispersed and limited intervals we’d been able to claim, inside those tropically lush, reality-divorced suites - we’d been too busy having sex to exhibit any other behaviours.

So she discovered that I snored if I’d been drinking and then slept on my back (I’m sure there’s a
lot
more, but I trust her to tell me). What I found was that, try as she might, she could not resist slipping into rapid-fire Martinique-style French patois whenever she was with her relations or talked to them over the phone. Oh, and when she had a cold once, she was a
rotten
patient; she whined and over-dramatised like a man. She claims this is because she practically never gets ill and so has had no practice. That’s about it. Well, that and the craziness about being entangled. Her twenty-eighth birthday had come and gone without incident or appreciable change, and she had seemed vaguely, distractedly disappointed for a day or so, then had shrugged it off and got on with things.

‘How can you just give up on all that?’ I’d protested. ‘How can you just let it drop? I thought you really believed in all that crap!’

Ceel had shrugged. ‘I think perhaps that the cross-over point came earlier than it was meant to,’ she’d said, frowning. ‘In that underground car park. It was meant to happen on my birthday, but it happened then instead. That was a strong event. It pulled matters towards it, distorting things sufficiently.’ She’d nodded, as if coming to a decision, and smiled at me, radiantly. ‘Yes.’

I’d shaken my head.

The ironic thing was that now sometimes I had dreams and nightmares in which I was the entangled one, and caught terrifying glimpses into another reality where I hobbled round on crutches, a broken man, and never saw Celia again; or I’d wake panting from images of my own decaying body, a space of rotting flesh curled fetal within a concrete mould inside a water-logged packing case resting on the bottom of the Thames, downstream.

And in any case Celia still thought she was entangled, provisional. So: one of us? Both of us? Neither?

Me, I’d tick Option C there, but who the hell really knew?

Not Proven, if you liked.

I never went back to the house in Ascot Square. Celia slept aboard the
Temple Belle
maybe once a week. Craig and I became friends again, though we were kind of starting from scratch. Emma was probably the most okay about it. Nikki found out about me and her mum and gave me a glare I will remember to the end of my days. ‘Ken,’ she said, relenting and shaking her head ruefully. ‘What are you like?’

They all think Ceel’s wonderful. Ed does too. The first time he laid eyes on her he immediately said, ‘Leave im. Be mine. I’ll give up all the uvvers. An I mean for ever. Plob’ly.’

Celia smiled and said, ‘You must be Edward. How do you do?’

Later that evening, when she was out of earshot, I asked him, ‘You like her, then? Think I should stick with this one?’

I was trying to be funny but he looked at me pityingly and said, ‘Mate, I don’t fink it’s a question of
you
decidin to stick wif
er
.’ Even now sometimes he’ll just stare at the two of us and shake his head and look at me and say, ‘
Ow?
’

I suppose he’s right.

I don’t make a big thing of it, but I have told Ceel I love her, while she doesn’t so much tell me as let it slip, rarely. About the only time I ever see her get flustered or embarrassed is when she says something like she said that first time over the phone, and calls me ‘my love’, or something similar. I asked her about this one night when we were particularly relaxed and easy with things, and she just smiled and suggested that love was a word that had become cheapened. ‘Where love is concerned,’ she told me, ‘you must be a behaviourist.’ I thought about this and decided, Well, I feel loved.

So, Not Proven. Maybe no relationship that is not over is ever really proven, one way or the other. Perhaps that’s all we can ever hope for, in this fractured, fallen world we’ve constructed for ourselves, and our heirs.

Addicta became very big indeed and Jo’s face seemed to be everywhere, but thankfully then they or their management decided they had to crack the States, and they did the rising-without-trace thing and effectively disappeared off most people’s near-space radar screens.

I kept my job, amazingly.

The month before we were due to go to Martinique, we flew to Glasgow. All Celia had really seen of Scotland was this fucking bleak estate and draughty castle near Inverness and close-ups of the heads of stags and hinds through a telescope before some other bugger shot them, and I wanted to start showing her the rest of the place, in all its late-summer glory. We had a week, would hire a car, stay in B&Bs. We spent some time shopping and wandering around Glasgow during that first day, before we went back to my parents’ place for dinner, and - in a sudden shower, dodging traffic - we ran across Renfield Street, holding hands.