Dead Air Read Free

marching over to us. ‘Trouble?’ I asked.
    ‘Yeah,’ she said, almost spitting. ‘Those fucking Addicta wankers again.’ Addicta were Ice House’s latest hot band. Happening; their time was very definitely now. I kind of liked their music - melodic English grunge with oases of surprising wistfulness - but had come to hate them in a vicarious, solidarity-inspired way because they were, according to the usually reliable source that was Jo, such total and complete arseholes to deal with. ‘That fucking useless cunt needs me to go and hold their fucking hands while some fucking precious snapper drapes them across a fucking Bentley or something. Supposed to happen yesterday but the fucking dickhead forgot to let me know.’ She kicked the parapet with one Doc Marten. ‘Cunt.’
    ‘You’re upset,’ I said. ‘I can tell.’
    ‘Oh, fuck off, Ken,’ she breathed, heading for the flat’s interior.
    I watched her go. Chase after and try to smooth things, or let her go, not make a bad thing worse? I hesitated.
    Jo stopped briefly to talk to Faye, who was heading in the opposite direction with some people, then she was gone. In a moment Faye was smiling at me and introducing these people and the possibility of pursuit and attempted mollification had gone.
     
    ‘Ken. Thought you were avoiding me.’
    ‘Emma. As if,’ I said, sitting beside her on one of the main space’s two chrome and black-suede couches. I chinked glasses. ‘You look great,’ I told her. Just jeans and a soft silk shirt, an Alice band in her hair, but she did look good. It’s a few drinks later here, but it definitely wasn’t the drink talking or looking. She just raised her eyebrows.
    Emma was married to my best pal from school days in Glasgow, Craig Verrin; Craig and I were our own little two-guy gang for fifth and sixth year, before he left for University College London and within a year was settled down with Emma and a baby girl. Meanwhile I - viciously scapegoated by my teachers and examiners on some trumped-up charge of not having done the necessary work to pass my exams - left to make tea and score drugs for the more lazy and dissolute DJs on StrathClyde Sound.
    Emma was smart and funny and attractive in a delicately blond way and I’d always loved her to bits, but things had become a little spoiled between us because we shared the guilty secret that, just the once, we’d slept together. She and Craig had been going through a bad patch when it had happened after Craig had strayed and been found out, and they were split-up again now - had been for a couple of years - so it somehow seemed not quite as bad as it could have been … but still. My best pal’s girl; what the hell had I been thinking of? The next morning had been probably the most embarrassing of my life; Emma and I had both been so ashamed it had been pointless trying to pretend to the other that what had happened had been anything other than a colossal mistake.
    Well, it was just one of those things you wished you could delete from reality. I supposed we’d both done our best to forget about it, and just the passing of time made the guilt less sharp, but sometimes, when Emma and I looked each other in the eye, it was like it had been only yesterday, and we both just had to look away. I lived in intermittent terror that Craig would find out.
    I suppose it was sort of similar to but different from when Jude and I fell into bed. And it was another relationship I couldn’t talk to anyone about. Come to think of it I couldn’t talk about most of my relationships/liaisons/whatever you wanted to call them, for one reason or another. I certainly couldn’t talk about the other big one; the one with Celia - Celia the svelte, Celia the sexy, Celia the slinky as a seal - either. Jeez, a shallow person could come away from a review of my private life with some sort of idea that I liked a frisson of danger in my dalliances, but that particular one was not just dangerous, that one