Dead Air

Seven. SEXUAL PIQUE

‘^‘Nikki! Oh my God! What have you done?’

‘Verhoeven? Underrated?’ I thought about this. ‘How?’

‘Hendrie. Aston Villa. Separated at birth.’

‘Wanking; why the bad press?’

‘Knock-knock.’

‘You know; all mouth and no trousers.’

‘The hell with you, grounded on Mount Arafat.’

Craig was having a Hogmanay party at his place in Highgate.

‘Ken, hi! What? Oh, I cut my hair. Like it?’

‘No! It’s-’

‘Shorter. Easier to wash. Different.’

‘Yeah, and sort of browny-black. Are you mad?’

‘You sound like my dad.’

‘But you had beautiful hair!’

‘I still do, thanks.’

‘Fink about the endin of Total Recall.’

I sniggered.

‘Zactly.’

‘What d’you mean “Zactly”? You can’t just say “Zactly” and look all justified and smug like that. Explain yourself, man.’

‘Wot was that reaction of yours there then, what was that all about?’

‘It was about a totally preposterous ending featuring the Pyramid Mine – a biggish hill but still less than a pimple on a planetary scale – emplacing an entire Martian atmosphere at what appeared to be Standard Temperature and Pressure in about half a minute, complete with milky clouds and everything, in time to put Arnie and the ingenue’s eyes back into their sockets about a minute after they started haemorrhaging, all with no lasting ill effects whatsoever to bodies either planetary or human.’ I thought about what I’d just said. ‘Or Arnie’s, for that matter.’

Ed nodded. ‘Zactly.’

‘You’re doing it again! Will you stop with the fucking “Zactly” shit already?’

‘Hee hee hee.’

‘Yeah, and the “Hee hee hee” thing is no great improvement. ’ I took Ed by the shoulders and through gritted teeth said, ‘What the fuck do you mean?’

‘Wot I mean is,’ Ed said, giggling, ‘right, is that it is basically so fuckin preposterous a endin that it can only mean, right, that Arnie, is character that is, must still be in a virtual reality dream. None of the endin’s been real, azit?’

I opened my mouth. I took my hands off his shoulders. I wagged a finger at him. ‘Hmm,’ I said.

‘An that therefore, like, that Verhoeven geezer is a subversive genius.’

I stood there, nodding, trying to recall more of the earlier parts of the film.

‘Course,’ Ed said, ‘it’s only a feery.’

‘Hendrie who?’

‘Hendrie; plays for Villa. You must have seen him.’

‘No I mustn’t. Why?’

‘He looks like Robbie Williams.’

‘… Craig, you need to get out more.’

‘I was out. I went to the match. That’s where I saw him.’

‘Okay, you should stay in more.’

‘Phil, “Wanking; why the bad press?” is not funny. Now, “Button pushers; why the bad press?”; that has a modicum of comedic value. Only a modicum, not enough to actually use in the show or anything, but I employ it purely as an example.’

‘I was thinking of a new phone-in feature.’

‘Right. Well, there are ladies on the end of premium-rate phone lines dedicated to ensuring this sort of thing is already well catered for. I’m told.’

‘That wasn’t what I was thinking of.’

‘Well what, then? A sponsored wank-o-thon?’

‘No no no. Right; it’ll be called Get a Hold of Yourself.’

‘Uh-huh. You’ve always been jealous Chris Evans had that Breakfast Show feature where a girl got her boyfriend’s “lollipop” in her mouth and recited lyrics, haven’t you?’

‘Nooo; look-’

‘Phil; no. Just leave it.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t think-?’

‘I think you should go and talk to Craig.’

‘Who’s There?’

‘ Tijuana.’

‘ Tijuana who?’

‘Gary Glitter.’

‘… What?’

‘ Tijuana be in my gang, my gang, my gang?’

‘Oh, I understand the meaning it’s meant to have,’ I told Amy, leaning closer to her. We were on the decking in Craig’s garden, near midnight. I’d just tried to talk to Jo, in Barcelona with Addicta, but without success. ‘It’s just not the meaning I took from it the first time I heard it. That’s what I’m saying.’

‘What, “Fur coat and no knickers”?’

‘Yeah! I always thought, Damn, that sounds great! That sounds, like, really sexy!’

She laughed, putting her head back to show a long, winter-tanned neck and perfect teeth. Her blond hair glowed softly in the light falling from the lit windows of the house. ‘Yes, well, you would.’

‘Witty but unfair. Look, I-’

‘You don’t know what it feels like. You just have no idea. All you’ve got is your theory, just your precious one-man-party line, as usual. You have no concept what it’s like. You haven’t been there. You haven’t felt the atmosphere. We’re surrounded by people who hate us.’

‘Ah, excuse me? This is me you’re talking to here. I’m all too well acquainted with the tell-tale tingle on the temple that indicates the cross-hairs of antipathy have locked on to me once more. But just… just back up a bit, there; who’s this “we”? When the hell did you become a Daughter of the Zionist Revolution?’

‘When I realised it was them or us, Ken.’

‘Oh, fuck, you mean you really are? Jeez, I was just-’

‘They all hate us. Every nation on our borders would like to see us destroyed. Our only way out’s the sea, and that’s where they want us. Ken, just look at the map! We’re tiny! And then, inside our own nation, these people murder and bomb and shoot us, inside our own borders, on our own streets, in the shops, on the buses, in our homes! We’ve got to stop them; we have no choice. And you, you have the gall to claim that we’ve become the Nazis, and can’t see you’ve become just another bloody anti-Semite.’

‘Oh, fuck, Jude, look, I know you feel really deeply about this-’

‘No you don’t! That’s what I’m saying. You can’t!’

‘Well, I’m trying to! Look… please, please don’t put words into my mouth or beliefs into my mind that aren’t there.’

‘They are there, Ken, you just won’t accept it.’

‘I am not anti-Semitic. Look, I like the Jews, I admire the Jews, I’m positively pro-Semitic for fuck’s sake. I’ve told you this! Well, some of it! I’ve been this way since I was a kid, since I heard about the Holocaust and since I realised that the Scots and the Jews were so alike. The Scots are smart, but we get accused of being mean. Same with the Jews. It’s culture, not race, but we’ve both punched way above our weight for civilisation; the Jews are the only people I ever put ahead of the Scots in terms of their influence on the world given the size of their population pool.’

‘This is so bullshit.’

‘I’m serious. I loved you guys from when I was a kid! So much I was embarrassed to tell you how much!’

‘Don’t bullshit me.’

‘It’s true. You were just so fearsomely far to the left I never dared.’

‘Ken-’

‘I’m serious. I used to love Israel.’

(This was true. When I was thirteen I’d fallen deeply in love with a girl called Hannah Gold. Her parents lived in Giffnock, one of the more leafy parts of Glasgow ’s suburban southern hinterland. They took a dim view of our friendship and my obvious infatuation with their daughter. But I charmed them, plus I did my research. Within six months Mr G was expressing his pleased surprise at how much I knew about Israel and the Jews. The Golds moved to London shortly after Hannah’s fourteenth birthday and we were pen pals for a while, but then they moved again and we lost touch. I’d been heartbroken when they left, but I recovered and went on, going from desolation to something shamingly close to indifference in about three weeks.

My new interest in Israel proved rather longer lasting. And at the time I didn’t see how anybody could not love Israel. It was the world’s most charismatic, brave, buccaneering nation, defying all these bullies around it. The Six Day War, Dayan and his eye-patch, a woman prime minister, the kibbutzim; when I was a kid I was so proud it was British-built tanks that had gone sailing across the Sinai with the Star of David flying from the whip aerials. I used to get books out the library about Israel. Great Jewish Generals; can you believe Trotsky was in there? I even knew that the Israeli army had improved their Centurions by putting petrol engines in place of the British diesels; I knew all that adolescent, war-geek stuff, I loved it. Yom Kippur; triumphing against the odds, nicking their own boats from under the noses of the French, the raid on Entebbe; it was breath-taking, cinematic! How could anyone not admire all that?)

‘But that was before the invasion of Lebanon, before Sabra and Shatila-’

‘That was done by Christian militias,’ Jude protested.

‘Oh, come on! It was Ariel Sharon who let them off the leash, and you know it. But that was the start; I began to wake up to what had happened to the Palestinians, to all the UN resolutions that Israel had just ignored, that it was uniquely allowed to ignore, then to the history – “The bride is beautiful, but she is already wed” – and to the illegal settlements, and the secret nukes. I heard what Rabbi Kehane believed, what his followers still believe, I saw the bodies lying bleeding in the mosque, and I felt sick. And now civilians are just killed without any legal process whatsoever, and I’ve heard Israelis as good as talk about a final solution for the Palestinian problem. I’ve listened to a cabinet minister say without irony that if they can just round up all the terrorists and get rid of them, there won’t be any left, and I can’t believe I’m hearing an educated person suggest anything as monumentally stupid, as psychologically obtuse as that.

‘Look; I don’t want anyone hurt. I don’t believe in suicide bombings or attacking any civilians and of course you’ve every right to defend yourselves, but, oh, God, look, can we just agree on this? That the Holocaust wasn’t evil and horrific and the single most obscene and concentrated act of human barbarism ever recorded because it happened to the Jews, it was all that because it happened to anybody, to any group, to any people. Because it did happen to the Jews, and there had been nowhere for them to escape to, I thought, Yes, of course, they did deserve a homeland. It was the least that could be done. The world felt that. Partly guilt, but at least it was there.

‘But it wasn’t a moral blank cheque. For fuck’s sake, if any people should have known what it was to be demonised, victimised and oppressed and suffer under an arrogant, militaristic occupying regime, and possess the wit to see what was happening to them and what they were doing to others, they should have.

‘So when Palestinian youths use sling-shots against tanks and the tanks put high explosive into tents where mothers are nursing, when every Arab village has its orchards razed, its houses dynamited and roads dug up – I mean can’t you see what you’re doing there? Those are ghettos you’re creating! When the Israeli Army seriously claims that Mohammed Al-Durrah and his father were shot by Palestinian gunmen, as though this isn’t the same shit in microcosm as claiming the death camps were built by the Allies after the War… I’m, I’m, I’m tearing my fucking hair out here, Jude! And then letters appear in the papers talking about appeasing the Palestinians and comparing Israel to Czechoslovakia just before the Second World War, and that’s just absurd! Czechoslovakia was not the best-armed state in Europe at the time, it was one of the weakest; it was not the only regional superpower with a monopoly on weapons of mass destruction, it was not the tooled-up victor of three earlier wars sitting on the occupied territory of others.’

‘But they kill us! Step on a bus, go for a pizza, drive back from worship, walk down the wrong path in your own city-’

‘And you’ve both got to stop! I know that! But you have the most control in this! You’re the ones coming from a position of strength! It’s always the one with the most power who has to give up the most, who has to exercise the most restraint, who has to take the final few blows before all the blows stop!’

Jude was shaking her tear-stained face at me. ‘You are so full of shit. You’ll never understand. You’ll just never understand. So we’re not perfect. Who is? We’re fighting for our lives. All you do and all you say just gives succour to those who’d drive us into the waves. You’re with the enemy, you’re with the exterminators. We haven’t become the Nazis; you have.’

I buried my face in my hands and when I surfaced, looking at Jude’s angry, reddened face, all I could say was, ‘I never said you had. And there is an Israeli Peace Movement, Jude. There are people, Jews, in Israel who oppose Sharon and what’s been done, what’s being done to the Palestinians. Who want peace. Peace for land if that’s what it takes, but peace. Reservists who’re refusing to fight in the Occupied territories. That’s who I’m with. That’s who I respect these days. I’ve escaped my adolescent crush on Israel but I’ll never stop respecting, loving the Jewish people for all they’ve done… it’s just that I can’t stand to see what’s being perpetrated in their name now by that fat, white-haired, war-criminal bastard.’

‘Fuck you. Sharon was democratically elected. He’s said he will trade land for peace. So fuck you. Fuck you!’

‘Jude-’

‘No! Goodbye, Ken. I won’t bother to say I’ll see you, because I hope I don’t. And don’t bother to call. In fact, don’t ever bother again. Not ever.’

‘Jude-’

‘… I’m ashamed I ever let you so much as touch me.’

And with that, my ex-wife threw her drink over me, turned on her heel and walked off.

Happy New Year.

Bit later. Drunk and maudlin and time to go to bed. I was crashing at Craig’s place, in the second spare bedroom. Some people had been using it as an unofficial cloakroom, dumping their coats and jackets on the bed; I gathered them up and took them next door to the box room, which was the official cloakroom.

‘Oh, hi, Nikki.’

‘Ken,’ Nikki said, taking something from her jacket. She was dressed in a fluffy pink sweater and tight black jeans. ‘How are you doing?’

‘Tired,’ I said, dumping the coats and jackets onto the pile on the bed. Music sounded pumping from downstairs and I could hear people whooping. The box room was devoid of furniture apart from an old desk – also piled with coats and stuff – and the narrow, mounded bed. Lots of shelves with books and assorted junk; a collapsible wallpaper table and a stepladder against one wall. The room’s bulb was bare, unshielded. Nikki stood grinning at me. Even with the short hair she looked great.

She held up the slim silvery thing she’d taken from her jacket. Large orange lozenges. ‘Got a cold,’ she said through her smile, almost smugly. Under the direct light of the room’s single bulb, her hair showed spiky highlights of glossy red and deep ochre.

I narrowed my eyes and looked at her as though over some glasses. ‘What are you on?’

‘Oh. Is it obvious? Uh-oh.’ She giggled. She put her hands behind her back and stood there, staring up at the ceiling and swivelling back and forth. Her jaw was working from side to side, in time.

I shook my head. ‘You young whipper-snapper; you’re loved up, aren’t you?’

‘Fraid so, Uncle Ken.’

‘Well, have fun, but remember Leah Betts; don’t drink too much water.’

‘I love you, Uncle Ken,’ she said, leaning forward and smiling broadly.

I laughed. ‘Yeah, I love you too, Nikki.’

She brandished the throat lozenges in my face like some sort of treat. ‘Would you like a Strepsil?’

‘Thanks. I’m trying to give them up.’

‘Okay.’

I stepped to one side and grasped the handle of the door, which had swung shut. ‘After you, ma’am,’ I said, opening it.

‘Thenk-yuh!’ she said, stepping forward, then bumped into the edge of the door and thudded into my chest. ‘Happy New Year, Ken.’ She raised her face to mine, still grinning.

True enough, I thought, we’d managed to miss each other somehow in the hours since the bells. ‘Happy New Y-’ I said.

She pushed her mouth against mine and gave me a big wet sloppy kiss, then pulled away, smiling happily, then did a little side-to-side thing with her head, made a noise that might have been, mm-hmm, and came forward again and kissed me once more. With a certain amount of openness, it has to be said. Though no tongues.

Oh my God, oh shit, oh fuck, part of me was thinking. I mean, another part was thinking, Well, Yesss!, but most of me was thinking bad things of one sort or another. I put my arms around her and kissed back, tasting and smelling her, sucking in her sweet breath as though desperate for some transfusion of youth. She squirmed in my arms, pressing herself against me and slipping her arms round my sides and back.

Something dropped to the floor; the lozenges.

Then she pushed back, blinking, and I had to let her go. The smile was gone for a moment. Then she shook her head and started laughing gently. She wiped her mouth delicately with the back of one hand.

‘What am I doing?’ she breathed, still shaking her head. I thought of the way her hair would have moved when she did that, if it had still been long.

‘Well,’ I said, swallowing. ‘Making an old man very happy, obviously, but, um, I don’t think…’

‘No, I don’t think either…’ she said softly, then laughed loudly, then started coughing. She shook her head and looked down at the floor. I stooped and handed her the packet of throat lozenges.

Nikki’s hoarse laugh echoed in the room. ‘Oh, Uncle Ken, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to… I’m sorry.’

I held up one hand. ‘No problem. And please stop apologising. It was fine for me, believe me. But, ah…’

Nikki coughed. The harsh sound echoed in the bare-walled room. She made a visible effort to pull herself together. ‘Yes,’ she said, and cleared her throat noisily. ‘We probably better just pretend…’

‘… that none of this happened, yeah.’ I nodded.

She nodded too. ‘Just until, you know, we die,’ she suggested.

‘Agree completely,’ I said.

She shivered. ‘Sorry, Ken, but this is all just a bit…’

‘Weird?’ I suggested.

‘Yeah, weird.’

I’d opened the door again. ‘Oh. Hi, Emma.’

‘Mum! Hi!’ Nikki waved, her smile broad across her face.

‘What’s weird?’ Emma said, walking into the room and looking gloweringly suspicious. Little black number. Hair in pearled black Alice band like a soft tiara, black pearls round her throat. Already holding a dark coat over her arm.

I waved one hand dismissively and nodded at the pack of throat lozenges in Nikki’s hand. ‘I was trying to proposition your daughter by offering her drugs, but she wasn’t having it.’ I smiled sadly and let my shoulders sag while Emma glared into my eyes. ‘Just trying to get to bed, actually, Em; dog-tired. This you off too?’

Emma wavered, but then clearly decided I’d been just casual enough. Nothing going on. Nothing you’d want to think about, certainly. ‘Yes,’ she said, then looked at her daughter. ‘Nikki; you ready?’

Nikki popped a lozenge, flicked it into the air and stepped forward with her mouth open, teeth clacking shut. She stepped back again with the throat sweet displayed between her teeth. ‘Regy,’ she said. She turned and rummaged in the pile of coats until she found her jacket. ‘Night, Ken,’ she said, pulling on her jacket and kissing me lightly on the cheek.

‘Night, kid.’

‘I’ll be down in one minute,’ Emma told Nikki.

‘Okey-doke,’ Nikki said as the door started to swing closed again. ‘I’ll say bye to Dad…’

Emma looked at me.

Oh-oh, I thought. Now what?

‘Great kid,’ I said to Emma, nodding towards the closing door. ‘Love her to bits.’

‘You all right?’ Em said. She looked genuinely concerned. I relaxed.

‘Tired,’ I said, honestly.

‘I heard Jude gave you a hard time.’

‘It was mutual, but yes.’ I sighed, yawned. ‘Oh, dear. Sorry, sorry.’

‘It’s all right.’

‘Jude and I agreed to disagree,’ I said. ‘Although, come to think of it, I’m not sure we even agreed that.’

Emma nodded, looked down at my chest briefly. She put one hand out and touched my arm, patting it. ‘You get some sleep.’

‘Best idea I’ve heard all night.’ I held the door open for her.

‘Night, Ken. You take care.’ She kissed me lightly on the cheek, just like her daughter had. She turned at the top of the stairs as I was opening the door to my bedroom, and gave me a small, brave smile. She raised one hand hesitantly, then went quickly down the steps.

I stripped to my underpants and got into the bed. I went to sleep thinking about Celia, hoping she was well and safe with her family on Martinique. I did this quite often these days. Part of me hoped that by going to sleep thinking of her I’d see her in my dreams, but so far this hadn’t happened.

I slept well for about half an hour until some people piled into the room, turning on the light and looking for their coats. I told them where they were, then once they’d gone I got up, pulled on my trousers and went through to the official cloakroom and pulled all the coats and jackets off the bed and hung them over the banister rail outside. This didn’t stop another group of drunks coming into the room, turning on the light and looking for their coats.

I took the bulb out of the central light fixture and the next time somebody came in, muttering about coats and clicking the light switch about ten times, I snored very loudly until they went away.

When I wake up I’m dressed as an SS officer with my cock hanging out. I’m handcuffed to the bed and there’s gaffer tape over my mouth and Jo’s; they rape her, slit her throat and leave her lying on me. They’ve taken stuff to make it look like a robbery gone wrong and the boat’s been holed so when the tide rises I’ll drown.

‘Ah!’

‘Ken?’

‘Fuck! Shit! Fuck! Fucking hell!’

‘Ken! Come on! Just a dream. Whatever it was. Just a dream, a nightmare. Hey, come on…’

‘Dear fucking Jesus Christ almighty.’ I flopped back down onto the bed. My heart was hammering like an engine, I was breathing like I’d just run a marathon. ‘Oh, God.. ’

Jo took me in her arms and cradled me. ‘It’s okay. Everything’s all right. Calm down, calm down…’

‘Oh…’

‘That’s not like you.’

‘… Fuck…’

‘Okay now?’

‘Yeah. Okay. Okay now…’

Only I wasn’t okay at all.

Jo fell quickly asleep again but I spent a long, long time looking round the darkened, slightly tilted bedroom, swallowing hard, catching the occasional whiff of sewage and decay coming from the mud outside, listening for ominous gurgling noises from the bilges, searching for heavies hiding in the shadows and shivering as the sheen of sweat dried on my skin.

I lay waiting for the dawn to come up and the tide to come in, waiting for the waters to raise us again, bring the Temple Belle level once more, smother the faint smell of death and restore balance.

‘Hello?’

‘Hey, Mrs C.’

‘Ooh! Is that that man from the radio? Kennit, how are you doin, ma darlin?’

‘Got a bit of a cold, but apart from that, fine. And all the better for talking to you, Mrs C. And how are you? Beautiful and sexy as ever? Beautiful and sexy as the last time I saw you? On the big wheel, wasn’t it?’

‘Oh, hell, honey, I’m more so. More so! You a terrible man. I tell me son on you, you see if I don’t do juss that.’

‘Mrs C, you mustn’t. My unbridled passion for you has to stay a deep and terrible secret, otherwise Ed would be terribly hurt. I mean, suppose you seduced me and then fell pregnant?’

‘What? At my age? Oh, lissen to you, you rogue man! Ha!’

‘I’d have to marry you; I’d be Ed’s father. He’d never forgive me.’

‘Stop! I’ll bust meself. Where’s me hanky? Oh, you surely are a terrible man. I’d get the boy himself to give you a serious talkin to but he’s in France or Rome or some damn place like that, honey, so you’ll have to call his mobile.’

‘No problem, Mrs C. Actually I knew he was away; I just wanted an excuse to hear your voice.’

‘There see now, you bein terrible again.’

‘I just can’t help myself. It’s the power you have over me.’

‘Terrible man, terrible, terrible rogue of a man.’

‘Okay, Mrs C. I’ll try Ed’s mobile. It was good talking to you. Oh… I did want to have a word with a friend of his, too. Ah… Robe? Yeah; Robe. Would you have his number there at all?’

‘Robe? What you want to talk to him for, hon?’

‘… Sorry, just blowing my nose there, Mrs C. Excuse me.’

‘You excused, hon. So, what’s this you wantin to talk to Robe for?’

‘Ah, yeah; I was talking to somebody. In a record company. Ice House? They’re pretty big. Apparently the company, the record label, it’s looking for security people; bodyguards, that sort of thing. For artists, rap artists, when they come over from the States. I just thought Robe could do that, maybe. I mean, these are often pretty serious people themselves, ex-gangsta, a lot of them; they wouldn’t have any respect for the average white kid with broad shoulders who’s used to turning people away from clubs because they’ve got the wrong footwear. Robe, however, they’d relate to. But it’s straight work, and well paid. I know he could do it. Could lead to, well, who knows?’

‘Be a lot more respectable than what he usually gets up to, what I hear. Robe is Yardie, Kennit. He dangerous. Too many guns. He’s not welcome in this house no more. Ed don’t see him that I know of.’

‘I realise that. Ed and I were talking about him, not long ago. That’s why I thought maybe this could be a way to get him out of that sort of life. I thought maybe if I could have a word with him…’

‘Well, I don’t tink I got his number here, but I can get it, I suppose.’

‘It’d be great if you could, Mrs C. Of course, I’d understand if you didn’t want to say anything to Ed. Nothing might come of this, we have to accept that. But, you know; nothing ventured, and all that.’

‘Well, you probably on a wild goose chase here, honey, but bless you for tinkin of it. I call you back, that okay?’

‘You are a saint and sexy. I adore you.’

‘Ah! Stop it now!’

I’d decided I might be developing a crush on my dentist. Of course I wasn’t and I knew I wasn’t, but the idea seemed nice; there was something oddly relaxing and carefree about it. Maybe it was some very mixed up Freudian thing, given that my dad was a dentist, maybe it was because Mary Fairley, BDS, was Scottish, from Nairn, and had the most wonderfully soft, burring accent I’d heard since I’d moved to London, maybe it was the whole thing about lying almost flat with my mouth open, entirely at this woman’s mercy while some gentle music played and she and her almost as attractive assistant spoke quietly, professionally to each other, but whatever it was, I had almost convinced myself I felt something for her. Mary was chunky of build but delicate of movement and touch; she had sandy hair, grey-green eyes, a sprinkling of freckles across her nose, and breasts that got ever so slightly in her way sometimes, necessitating a quick, twisting movement – the bodily equivalent of a hair-flick – while she was leaning over me.

I gazed up into her eyes, wishing we didn’t have to put these safety visor things on these days. Although, given that I seemed to have picked up Nikki’s cold, that was probably no bad thing; I had to raise my hand and stop the dental work a couple of times to have a good sneeze.

Amazing how safe I felt in a dentist’s surgery; always a little on edge, waiting for a twinge, but very safe. Mary was polite but not chatty, despite our Caledonian connection. Very professional. Having a crush on a disinterested dentist might appear frustrating and sad, but it also struck me as being innocent and pure, and even healthy. Certainly a lot healthier than falling hopelessly in love with a gangster’s wife and planning to go tooled up into a telly studio.

Mary drilled through an old filling into decay, and the air in my mouth filled with a smell like death.

‘Our client maintains strongly that he was not using his mobile at the time of the accident.’

‘Then your client is lying.’

‘Mr, ah, McNutt, with respect, you could only have gained the most fleeting of glimpses of our client’s car when-’

‘Tell you what… excuse… ah-choo!’

‘Bless you.’

‘Thank you. Excuse me. Yes, as I was saying; the young lady I was taking home made a phone call to report the accident to the police. That was about five, ten seconds, max, after the crash happened. Why don’t we talk to her mobile network and your client’s and compare the times when his call ended and hers began? Because, now I think about it, he was still holding the phone when he got out of the car, and I suspect he hadn’t hung up. Let’s see if that call and Ms Verrin’s overlap, shall we?’

The lawyer and her articled clerk looked at each other.

‘You lucky, lucky people. Not only has my cold gone into my throat so that I sound even huskier and sexier than ever, but we just played you the Hives, the White Stripes and the Strokes; three in a row with nary a syllable of nonsense to dilute the fun. Damn, we spoil you! Now then, Phil.’

‘Yeah; you can’t just leave an accusation hanging like that.’

‘You mean my broad hint that a fully functioning brain might be a liability in a footballer?’

‘Yes. So what are you saying; all football club changing rooms should have a sign saying, You don’t have to be stupid to work here but it helps?’

‘And how witty that would be if they did, Philip. But no.’

‘But you’re saying that footballers have to be stupid.’

‘No, I’m just saying that it might help.’

‘Why?’

‘Think about it. You’re playing tennis; what’s the one shot that looks easy that people get wrong all the time? The one that even the professionals make an embarrassing mess of every now and again. Happened at least once that I saw this Wimbledon.’

‘We may,’ Phil said, ‘have located the source of the footballer’s seeming stupidity, if they think they’re playing football but you’ve apparently changed sports to tennis.’

‘You can see how having a single net in the middle instead of one at each end would be confusing, but that’s not what I mean. Just stick with me here, Phil. In tennis, what looks like the easiest shot there could be, but people still get hopelessly wrong? Come on. Think. The good people of radio listener-land are depending on you.’

‘Ah,’ Phil said. ‘The overhead smash when the ball’s gone way up in the sky and you seem to spend about half an hour at the net waiting for it to come down.’

‘Correct. Now why do people get that shot so wrong when it looks so easy?’

‘They’re crap?’

‘We’ve already established that even the best players in the world do this, so, no, not that.’

Phil shrugged. I was making a one-handed waving motion at him across the desk, as though trying to waft the aroma of a dish towards my nose. Sometimes we sort of half rehearsed these things, sometimes we didn’t and I just landed stuff like this on him and trusted to luck and the fact we knew each other pretty well by now. Phil nodded. ‘They have too much time to think.’

‘Pre-flipping-cisely, Phil. Like most sports, tennis is a game of rapid movement, fast reactions, skilful hand-eye coordination – well, foot-eye coordination in the case of football, but you get the idea – and people often play their best when they’ve got no time to think. Think service returns against somebody like Sampras or Rusedski. Same in cricket; scientists reckon it shouldn’t be possible for a batsman to hit the ball because there just isn’t enough time between the ball leaving the hand of a good fast bowler and it getting to the bat. Of course, a decent batsman will have read the bowler’s body language. Same applies to a tennis player who’s good at returning against a big hitter; they can tell where the ball’s going before the server hits it. The point is that it all happens too quick for the cerebral bit of the brain to get involved; there’s no time to think, there’s only time to react. Right?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Now, football.’

‘Oh good, we’re back.’

‘In football you often have quite a lot of time to think. Certainly often you don’t; a ball comes flying in, you raise your leg and first-time it and it’s away and you’re already running down the touchline doing the shirt-over-the-head bit with your arms outstretched. But, if you’re on a break-away, get the ball in midfield, there’s only one defender to beat and nobody up to support, you’ve got what will seem like a long, long time to run and think, and I’m certainly not accusing footballers of not being able to do both at the same time. So; you beat the defender, there’s only the goalie left, and now you’ve got time to think again. And this is where you see some guys, even at the very top, make a mess of it because they’ve had time to think. Their full frontal cortex or whatever it is has had time to go, Hmm, well, we could do it this way, or this way, or that way, or – but by that time it’s too late, because the goalie’s come out and you’ve hit it straight at him, or skied it to the ironic cheers of the opposing fans, or decided to go for a lob and hesitated and he’s had time to dive at your feet and grab the ball off you. This happens to perfectly good, highly paid professional footballers, and in a way it’s no disgrace, it’s just being human.

‘However. If you get a particularly thick footballer-’

‘You’re going to be horrible about that nice Gascoigne boy again, I can tell.’

‘Oh, come on; this is a man so daft he couldn’t even play air-flute without making a mess of it. But yes; Gazza is my best example. He is – well, was – a great, gifted footballer, but he was so intellectually challenged that even in all those seconds running in on the goalkeeper, he still hasn’t had time to think. Or if he is thinking, he’s thinking, Wuy-aye, that’s a fit-lookin bird behind the goal there, man. And that’s the difference; the longer you can go without really thinking, the better a footballer you’ll be.’

Phil opened his mouth to speak, but I added, ‘That’s also why golf and snooker are so profoundly different; they’re games of nerve and concentration, not reactive skill.’

Phil scratched his head. I hit the appropriate FX button. ‘Well, that was a compendium rant,’ he said. I’d already started the next track, playing the intro faded down. We had fifteen seconds to the vocals. ‘We started on football,’ Phil said, ‘diverted to tennis, then on to cricket and finally came back to the beautiful game… but then body-swerved into golf and snooker at the last minute there. All very confusing.’

‘Really?’ I glanced at the seconds ticking away.

‘Yes.’

‘You sound a bit stupid. Have you thought of becoming a professional footballer?’

‘So it’s definite?’ Debbie asked.

‘Yes,’ Phil said.

‘How definite?’

‘Well, definite,’ Phil said awkwardly.

‘Yes, but how definite is it? Is it fairly definite? Very definite? Totally one hundred per cent certainly definite?’

‘Well, no, it’s not that definite,’ Phil conceded.

‘Jesus Christ,’ I said, ‘I thought only films suffered from this on-off-stop-go-red-light/green-light/red-light bullshit. It’s only a fucking telly programme, not Lord of the Fucking Rings parts one to three.’

‘It’s delicate,’ Phil said.

‘So’s my head on a Saturday morning,’ I muttered. ‘I don’t make this fucking song and dance about it.’

Debbie’s new temporary office was almost as far down the light-well as ours. I gazed out at the white glazed bricks. It looked like it might be raining but it was hard to tell. This was Friday; the Breaking News thing was scheduled for Monday. Again. My great confrontation with the beastly Holocaust denier Larson Brogley, or whatever his name was, was back on again. In fact it had been on for over a month now without being cancelled, which was probably some sort of record. It might actually be going to happen. I felt nervous.

Of course I felt nervous, I thought, as Station Manager Debbie and Producer Phil argued the toss about how definite was definite like a pair of bishops trying to settle how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. It was okay for these guys; they thought the only danger was me making a fool of myself or bringing the station, or by extension Sir Jamie, into disrepute; they had no idea what I was planning to do (if they had, they would, of course, have been appalled and either tried to argue me out of it – and maybe warn the Breaking News production team – or just cancelled the whole deal and threatened me with the sack if I insisted on going ahead without their blessing. That’s what I’d do if I was ever in a situation like this… if, that is, the talent concerned had been daft enough to tell me what he was thinking of doing).

Fucking typical; usually these TV things came up and happened really quickly. If I’d had my brilliant but dangerous idea for any other appearance or even proposed appearance it would all have been over months ago and I’d long since have been dealing with the consequences, whatever they’d turned out to be. For various reasons, but especially 11 September, this one was running and running, and so I was being given plenty of time to stew.

‘… follow it up with a phone interview on the show?’

‘Hmm. I don’t think…’

Yeah, let the poor, deluded fools debate. They didn’t know how lucky they were, not knowing. Only I knew about my great idea, my great, risky, probably mad, certainly criminal idea. I hadn’t shared it with Jo, Craig, Ed; anybody. I’d started dreaming about it, though, and worried that I might say something in my sleep that Jo would hear. This was, certainly, better than dreaming about death squads raping Jo and leaving me dressed like a Nazi waiting to drown, but it still wasn’t much fun. I’d got used to having pretty mundane, even boring dreams over the years, and the last run of nightmares I’d suffered had been in the run-up to my last-year exams at school, so I wasn’t psychologically prepared for having bad dreams about Nazis in TV studios and being tied to a chair and people waving guns about.

On the other hand, I’d probably crap out at the last minute. I’d do the planning, take the equipment, but fail to follow through. Some Imperial Guard of good sense, still loyal to the idea of keeping me in a job and out of court and prison or whatever, would storm the gates of the occupied Palace of Reason and effect a counter-revolution, a coup for common sense and decent standards of behaviour. That was, if I was being totally honest with myself, the most likely outcome. Not by far the most likely outcome, but still the most likely one all the same.

‘Oh for God’s sake,’ I said, interrupting Debbie, who was faffing on about shared legal insurance against slander and who should pay what proportion. I almost wanted to tell her that me only saying something outrageous and criminal was the least of her worries, but I didn’t. ‘Let’s just do it, can’t we?’

‘Okay,’ Phil said. ‘But we’re holding out for an afternoon recording.’

‘Whatever. I don’t care. I just want it over and done with.’ They both looked at me, as though surprised at something like this getting to me. Whoops, possible security breach here. I spread my hands slowly. ‘Oh, I’m just getting fed up with the hanging around,’ I explained calmly.

‘Okay, then,’ Debbie said. ‘Monday it is.’

‘Halle-blinkin-lujah.’

‘Listen.’

And that’s enough. Here we go…

‘Jesus. Got enough wee funny lights in here?’

‘Rough, innit?’

‘Oh, totally rough.’

It was the Friday night. Ed and I were due to be limo’d to a gig in Bromley in an hour, but he’d wanted to show off his newly redecorated and refitted place, so I’d come to the family house; a much knocked-through and creatively mucked-about-with complex taking up two terraced houses in Brixton, one of them an end-terrace incorporating what had been a small supermarket on the ground floor. Ed could have afforded a mansion in Berkshire if he’d wanted, and I suspected he still kind of hankered after one, but I respected the fact he’d chosen to stay here with his mum and extended family, adapting the house he’d grown up in and buying the one next door too, plus the shop underneath, rather than get the hell out of his old ’hood the instant the money had started rolling in.

I’d been slightly worried that Ed had heard from his mum that I’d been trying to get hold of his Yardie pal Robe, guessed that I was still after a gun, and wanted to shout at me or something, but nothing like this had happened so far; we’d met up in the big main living-room on the ground floor and been suddenly surrounded by a chaotic, laughing crowd of Ed’s aunts, cousins and sisters (several of them pretty damn attractive), and a couple of male relations and boyfriends. His mum hadn’t been there because she was attending some night class, which had saved any potential embarrassment. Ed had made our apologies and we’d got away upstairs but he still hadn’t said anything about Robe.

Ed’s own place within the communal house ran the length of the two lofts. The big dormers just looked out onto other roofs but the views inside were more striking; a long, mostly open space in warm ochres and deep reds with splashes of yellow. Trust me; it was a lot more tasteful than it sounds. It all smelled very new. The only certifiable style-lapse was in Ed’s moderately vast, impressively uncluttered bedroom.

‘Mirrors, Edward?’

‘Yeah! Wicked, eh?’

‘Mirrors? I mean, on both sides-’

‘They’re wardrobes!’

‘But on the ceiling? Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.’

‘Wot? Just cos nobody’d want to watch your sorry white ass when you’re bangin some bird. Me, I’m a picture. If I wasn’t straight as a bleedin die, I’d fall in love wif meself.’

I’d folded my arms, taken a step back and looked at him. Eventually I’d just shaken my head.

‘Wot?’

‘No,’ I’d said, ‘you got me; I’m lost for words.’

‘Fuck me. Hold the showbiz page.’

‘Come on; I’m off duty.’

Now we were in Ed’s study/den/studio, and he’d turned on all his music gear. I gazed round the six stacked, angled keyboards, the three man-high, nineteen-inch racks and a mixing desk you’d struggle to touch both ends of even with your arms outstretched and your face jammed against the pots. There was a bunch of other bits and pieces too; much-be-buttoned units lying on desks, a set of drum pads, and at least three pieces the functions of which I could not even begin to guess at. Most of the gear was twinkling in the heavily curtained darkness; hundreds of little LEDs in broad constellations of red, green, yellow and blue, plus dozens of softly glowing pastel screens with dark, blocky writing on them. Two wide-screen monitors bigger than my TV flickered into life as Ed’s Mac powered quietly up. Ed’s monitors were giant Nautilus jobs, thirty grand’s worth of gleaming, shoulder-high, spiked blue ammonites with bright yellow cones sitting on the far side of the room and aimed at the big, black, leather chair poised in the epicentre of all this cool-tech gizmology.

‘What exactly does all this do, Ed?’

‘Makes music, man.’

‘I thought you just played the stuff.’

‘Yeah, well, I’m branching out, inn-I?’

‘You mean you’re actually going to start composing?’ I picked up a dark red A4-sized manual for something called a Virus and flicked through it, squinting in the low ambient light.

‘Yeah. I fot it’d be a laugh. An anyway; just look at this stuff.’

I looked at it again. ‘You know, you’re absolutely right, Ed. It doesn’t have to produce a fucking note to justify its total, glorious gorgeousness-hood-icity. Please don’t tell me all you’re going to produce on it will be N-chih N-chih music.’

‘N-chih N-chih music?’

‘Yeah, you know; the sort of music you hear from some brother’s blacked-out Astra passing you in the street. It always goes N-chih N-chih N-chih.’

‘Na, mate. Well, yeah, some, maybe. But, na; one day I’m gonna write a bleedin symphony.’

‘A symphony?’

‘Yeah. Why not?’

I looked him up and down again. ‘You don’t lack for ambition, do you, Edward?’

‘Certainly fucking not; life’s too short, mate.’

I leafed through the manual for the Virus thing. ‘I mean, do you actually understand all this?’

‘Course not. You don’t need to to get good sounds out of it. But the deep stuff’s there if you need it.’

‘“Extended Panic functionality”!’ I quoted. ‘Ha! How can you not love something with Extended Panic functionality?’

‘Uvverwise known as the All Notes Off command.’

‘Brilliant,’ I said, putting the manual back on its bookshelf with the others. My phone vibrated on my hip. I glanced at the screen. ‘Jo,’ I told Ed. ‘Better answer it; she’s in, I don’t know, Berlin or Budapest or somewhere.’

‘I’ll fire up the software, let you hear some N-chih N-chih tunes.’

‘Hello?’ I said.

And, distantly, I heard, ‘Yes, yes, yes, come on, fuck me, fuck me, do it, do it, there, yes there there there, fuck me, fuck me harder. Fuck me really hard. Right there, right there, yes, yes, yes!’ This was accompanied by what sounded like clothing rubbing on clothing, a series of slaps, and then a man’s voice saying, ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah…’

It didn’t stop, either. Went on for some time.

I stood there and listened for long enough to entirely convince myself that this was not a joke, not any sort of an attempt at humour at all, and also not in any way meant. This was about the time when Ed turned round from the bewilderingly complicated displays on his two giant monitors and looked at me; just a glance at first, then back again, frowning, eyebrows rising. I handed him the phone.

He listened for a while as well. The frown was replaced by a smile, even a leer for a moment or two, but then he must have read something from my face because the smile disappeared and he handed the phone back to me and looked down, clearing his throat and turning back to the screens. ‘Sorry, bruv,’ I heard him say.

I listened a little while longer, then Jo’s phone must have fallen, because there was a loud but soft-sounding thump, and the noises became very muffled, incoherent. I folded the phone off. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I think the choice phrases involve sauces for ganders and geese; and petards, whatever the hell one of those is.’ Ed knew well enough I wasn’t faithful to Jo; blimey, we’d been able to watch each other at it with those two Argentinian girls that night on the beach at Brighton during early May.

Ed looked round, chewing his bottom lip. ‘Fink that was a wind-up?’

‘No.’

‘Deliberate?’

I shook my head. ‘I doubt it; I’ve had Jo’s accidental calls jam my phone for hours at a time before. Usually her and her girlfriends in a bar or a club.’ I released a deep breath. ‘Plus, ah, that is the way she expresses herself, during the act. I don’t think she’s a good enough actress to fake that.’

‘Woh. Right then. So. You two have one of them open relationships then, do ya?’

‘Looks like it,’ I said. ‘Just neither of us ever bothered to tell the other.’

Ed looked concerned. ‘You still want to hear some tunes, man, or would you ravver ave a drink or a smoke or sumfing?’

‘Na, play some tunes, Ed. Bangin tunes, in fact; play some bangin tunes.’ I gave a small, not funny laugh.

Jo said: ‘Listen.’

And I said: ‘Oh-oh.’

‘What?’

‘These days, people our age – okay, my age and also your age – don’t say “listen” like that without it meaning something pretty fucking serious.’

Jo looked down. ‘Yeah, well…’

Here we go, I thought.

We were in the London Aquarium, housed in the old GLC building on the South Bank of the Thames, beside the London Eye. Mouth Corp Records were having a bash and I’d been invited. So had Jo. She’d pretty much just arrived, coming straight from Heathrow off the flight from Budapest.

The aquarium was a slightly spooky place for a party, I thought. Especially a music industry party. Sharks in abundance; as above, so below. The light was kind of freaky too; apparently the fish wouldn’t take kindly to lots of flashing disco-stylee lights, strobes and shit, so all you had was this bluey-green wash of underwater luminescence, making everybody look slightly sick. The light slid off Jo’s facial metalwork, visual echoes of the green and blue diodes on Ed’s music gear the night before.

I’d asked her how she was and been told, Okay. I’d thought the better of asking her if she’d made any accidental phone calls twenty-four hours earlier, but now, with virtually no preamble, I was getting a ‘listen’.

‘Look,’ Jo said. People passed on either side, somebody said, Hi, and great, sleek, grey bodies moved sinuously behind and above her.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Now it’s “look”? We’re covering the senses one by one, are we? What’ll your next exhortation be? “Sniff”?’

Jo sucked her lips in and looked at me. ‘You don’t want to make this easy on either of us, do you?’

‘Make what easy, Jo? Why don’t you tell me?’

‘Ken, I think we should, ah, you know; split up.’ She said this and drew herself straight, putting her shoulders back and her head up, as though defiant. I thought of the night we met, and the way her stance had shown off her nipples through her T-shirt. Now she wore a big, ribbed yellow jumper with a roll neck. Black jeans. Only the DMs were the same.

I stared at her. Of course I’d known that this was the most likely thing she was going to say after ‘listen’, but somehow it still came as a shock, and I was left temporarily speechless for the second time in two days, and this time not in a good way. I’d thought that maybe she was going to say she knew what had happened with the phone and she was sorry, or that she was pregnant (always a good stand-by, that one, if unlikely as we always, but always, used a condom) or maybe something else entirely, like she was taking a job in LA or Kuala Lumpur or had decided to become a nun or something, but I’d known, at least since last night, in Ed’s studio, that maybe whatever it was we had had going was near the end.

Still, I found myself feeling kind of crushed, and surprised. I opened my mouth. She was still sucking in her lips, making her nose look longer. She had taken a sort of half-step away from me, almost bumping into people standing talking behind her, in front of the thick, distorting glass of the aquarium windows. I wondered if she thought I was going to hit her. I never had. I’d never hit any woman; never would. Oh, well, apart from ‘Raine’, of course, but I reckoned I could claim massively extenuating circumstances there.

‘Oh, well,’ I said. I looked down at my bottle of Pils. I supposed I could throw that in her face, like Jude had thrown her G &T in my face at Craig’s during the first hour of the New Year, but then Jude had had the forethought to arm herself with a nice wide tumbler; I had a narrow-necked bottle. To achieve a satisfactory soaking of my intended victim I’d have to ask Jo to wait a second or two while I jammed my thumb in the bottle and shook it up before emptying it in her face. That would be inelegant, somehow. Anyway, I didn’t really want to do it.

So she’d cheated on me. Probably not the first time, but, well, so what to that, too; I’d done more than my own fair share of cheating.

‘Is that all you can say?’ she said. ‘“Oh, well”? Is that it?’

‘I heard you fucking somebody last night, Jo,’ I told her. ‘On the phone. Your mobile; it did that thing again.’

She stood, blinking. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said. She nodded. ‘Found it on the floor this morning; batteries flat.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Woh.’ She looked down at the floor, nodding, then up to me. She spread her arms. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t want you to find out that way.’

‘Well, I did.’

‘Were you going to say anything?’

‘Hadn’t decided. I thought in the meantime you might have realised what had happened and whose mobile yours had rung, and when, and you’d be all contrite, or come up with some embarrassingly unlikely explanation.’

‘Were you getting ready to dump me?’

‘Not particularly, Jo. It had occurred to me in the past that, well, all those foreign trips, the nights away, the rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, drugs and drink and stuff; I kind of suspected you might have had the occasional adventure and so-’

‘And what about you?’ she asked, raising her head again, the underwater lights glinting on the studs and bars barnacling her face.

‘You mean,’ I said, ‘have I been playing away, too?’

‘Yes. Well?’

‘Wait a minute,’ I said, starting to feel angry now. ‘I’m being far too fucking reasonable here. I heard you fucking somebody else last night; you didn’t hear me. And now you’re dumping me and you’re looking for some sort of justification after the fact? Well, no fucking way. You have no fucking right to start asking me questions. Yes; yes, I was going to dump you as a matter of fact. Actually, in my heart, in my head, I’d already dumped you, before you dumped me.’

‘Don’t be so childish.’

‘Fuck off, Jo.’

‘Don’t you even want to know why I want out of this relationship? ’

‘I don’t know and I don’t care. Maybe your new guy’s got a bigger cock than I have; who fucking gives a damn?’

‘Oh, Ken, for fuck’s sake.’

‘Look, I hope you’re both very fucking happy, okay? Now just get the hell away from me. And get your stuff off the Belle, as well.’ This was more like it, I thought. This was taking the initiative. I deserved to, after all, dammit; I was the injured party here. ‘I’ll give you till Monday morning to clear your shit off my boat then it all goes over the side. Goodbye.’ I turned and walked away, the effect barely spoiled by bumping into somebody and accidentally spilling a little Pils over their sleeve and having to mumble an apology as I stalked off.

I half expected Jo to follow me and remonstrate – and by golly this seemed to me to be a situation where a person could reasonably employ a word like ‘remonstrate’ or even ‘inveigh’ rather than just ‘object’ or ‘argue’ or something. But she didn’t.

I spent the remainder of the party getting profoundly hammered on an exciting variety of alcoholic beverages and I didn’t see Jo for the rest of the evening. This was probably because she’d taken me at my word about chucking her stuff in the drink and didn’t trust me to wait as long as Monday morning, because when I did eventually roll home in the wee hours and poured myself out of the taxi and into the Temple Belle, she’d already been and gone; her clothes and bits and pieces had been cleared out and on the mat under the letter box lay her key.

I stared at it for a while, picked it up after only four or five attempts, took it out onto the deck and threw it wildly into the dark receding waters.

‘It was always going to happen. You weren’t right for each other.’

‘Craig, Christ almighty, you sound like my mother.’ We were sitting on a bench near the top of Parliament Hill, Hampstead Heath, looking out over the city, submerged beneath the watery sun and drifting showers of a cool January afternoon. Craig had walked here. I’d taken the tube.

I was probably still too hungover/drunk to drive, but I couldn’t have even if I’d wanted to, at least not in the Landy; somebody had slashed a couple of its tyres and smashed both headlights last night. I’d reported it to the police and they said, Yes, they knew; they’d been round during the night after the trembler alarm in the Landy noticed the list to one side and informed the Mouth Corp security centre, which in turn had alerted the cops. They’d tried my door for ten minutes and my phone for half an hour before they gave up and left me to snore the sleep of the truly drunk. The CCTV tapes would be studied. Probably kids, that’s all.

Yeah, right, I thought. Just when I’d been hoping that maybe whatever bad shit had been going on, it wasn’t any more. Oh well.

‘Aye,’ Craig said, in response to my accusation of sounding like my mother. ‘And what do mothers know? Best.’

I shook my head. ‘People always give you this You weren’t right for each other stuff afterwards.’

‘Course they do; if anybody ever tells anybody before, when it could do some good, they get accused of being jealous or something, and then when the relationship does break up, they get accused of causing it. You can’t win. Best just keep quiet until it’s over.’

‘Did you not like Jo?’

‘I didn’t dislike Jo. I thought she was all right. This wasn’t one of those occasions where you’re waiting for it to end so you can tell your friend what you thought of his or her ex. I just meant in theory. Jo was all right, but she was nearly as daft as you, and she’s more ambitious. You need somebody who’ll steady you a bit, not a fellow nutter you can fuck.’

‘I don’t think Jo was as crazy as you seem to think she was.’

Craig tipped his head once. ‘Well, she was pretty off the rails at times. I’m amazed you lasted as long as you did.’

I sighed. ‘Yeah, Kulwinder said he was surprised we’d lasted as long as we had at the nine-eleven party.’ I watched the slow procession of big jets angling in around the distant scape of clouds, settling onto the gentle, invisible slope that would slide them west into Heathrow.

‘She tried to get off with me you know, once,’ Craig said.

I looked at him. ‘You’re kidding.’ Now this could be awkward.

‘Na; it was one time she’d lost you or something; during the summer. You’d had an argument and you’d stormed off and left your mobile behind and she assumed you’d come to mine, so she turned up on the doorstep. I invited the lass in; impolite to do anything else, specially as she was in tears. Offered her a drink, did the agony aunt thing…’

‘… Agreed what a bastard I was.’

‘Excuse me; I trod the fine line between masculine solidarity and lending a sympathetic ear to a distressed female.’

‘So one thing led to another,’ I said.

Oh shit, what if he had fucked her? Even if he wasn’t going to admit to it here, what if he had? Think, Ken. Was I bothered? Well, was I?

Not particularly. I mean, I had no right to be jealous or upset, not with Craig, anyway, given what had happened with Emma, but that sort of logical, quid-pro-quo consideration wasn’t the kind of argument that carried much weight with the set of instincts and part-programmed reactions that constitute the human heart.

‘Well, no, not one thing leading to another,’ Craig said. ‘She just grabbed me. Out of the blue.’

‘Jesus.’

‘We’d had about a half-bottle each-’

‘Wine?’

‘Yeah, of course wine; I wasn’t feeding the girl whisky.’

‘Sorry.’

‘I’d got up to uncork another-’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yes; I was still being polite and supportive. Fuck off with the suspicion and innuendo, will you?’

‘Sorry, sorry.’

‘Just wrapped herself around me. I turned round – surprised, you know – and she slapped her mouth over mine and grabbed my balls.’

‘Fucking hell.’ I looked up at the clouds, then back at Craig. ‘You did the decent thing, though.’

‘No, Kenneth,’ he said, stretching his long legs out. He was wearing grey trackie bottoms under a jacket last fashionable ten years ago. ‘The decent thing would have been to have shown her how wonderful the act of love can be when you do it with a real man, but I didn’t do that.’

‘Bet you snogged her for a while, you bastard. She was a good kisser.’

Craig considered this. ‘Hmm. I’d been putting that down to shock, but you’re right.’

‘You didn’t fuck her, did you?’

‘No. I did the self-sacrificing, You’re beautiful and I’m flattered but if we do we’ll both regret it in the morning thing. God help us, we even agreed it wouldn’t be right to betray you; it was worth depriving ourselves of some pleasure for your sake.’

‘Oh, fuck.’

‘Now what?’

‘Just had a terrible thought.’

‘What? Who are you calling?’

‘She went looking for me at Ed’s once.’

‘Wuh-oh.’

‘Yeah.’

Craig made as if to get up off the bench. ‘Want me to…?’

‘Na; if you’re going to see me humiliated we might as well get it over with now.’

‘You fucked her, didn’t you?’

‘No, I didn’t!’

‘Look, Ed, she told me she’d gone to yours, once. She went to Craig’s once, too, and she threw herself at him.’ (‘Hey!’ said Craig. ‘I resent the implication.’ I ignored him.) ‘You trying to tell me Jo didn’t try it on with you?’

‘Ah…’

‘Ah? Ah? Is that what you’re fucking giving me? Fucking “Ah”?’

‘Well…’

‘You did fuck her! You shite!’

‘She fuckin jumped me, man! It was practically rape!’

‘Fuck off, Ed.’

‘An anyway, she said she’d never done it wif a black guy; wot was I supposed to do? Deprive her?’

‘Don’t bring race into it, for fuck’s sake! And don’t give me this big black stud bullshit either!’

‘I didn’t bring race into it, man, she did!’

‘Aw, Ed, fuck off; how could you?’

‘I couldn’t help it, man.’

‘Well, fucking try learning, you overgrown adolescent!’

‘Look, man, I am sorry; I felt terrible the next day an it never appened again.’

‘Yeah, you’d had your fun, fucked your friend’s girl and added another notch to your fucking ceiling mirrors; why bother?’

‘Ken, listen; if I could go back in time an make it that it nevvir appened, believe me I would. I nevvir told you because I didn’t want to hurt you or do anyfin against you an Jo. I wish it just adn’t appened, I truly do. But it did, an I’m sorry, man. I really am sorry. I’m asking you to forgive me, right?’

‘Well – just – I’m not -’ I spluttered. ‘Just let me fucking be angry at you a bit longer!’ I said. ‘You bastard!’ I added, rather ineffectually.

‘Sorry, man.’

And I thought, Yeah. We’re all sorry. Everybody is so fucking sorry. It should be the fucking species’ middle name; Homo S. Sapiens. Maybe we could change it by misdeed poll.

‘… Listen,’ Ed said.

Something cold seemed to land in my guts. Oh, good grief. A ‘listen’ from Ed; now what?

‘What?’ I said.

‘You got this telly fing tomorrow, aven’t you?’

Oh fuck, he’d heard about Robe after all and worked out that I might want a gun to take into the studio. ‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Best of luck wif it, all right? Hope it goes well. You give this Nazi geezer wot-for, yeah?’

‘Yeah,’ I said.

‘You can go back to bein mad at me now if you want, or you can wait till we meet up next weekend an shout at me then. If we’re still meetin up. We still meetin up?’

‘I suppose.’

‘I’m sorry, man.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Still bruvvers?’

‘Yeah, I suppose so. Still bruvvaz.’

Craig invited me to supper. I suspected it was a sympathy thing; Nikki was staying and Emma was coming round and I think what they really wanted was a quiet evening meal with just the three of them.

What I really wanted was to see Nikki again, just to be sure that we were okay, and that nothing had changed, at least not for the worse, after the New Year party, because that kiss – those two kisses – had left me worried. I’d let her kiss me, and I’d kissed her back, and the more I’d thought about this over the intervening period, the more ashamed I’d become, and I felt a terrible urge to tell her that it had changed nothing, and of course it would never happen again, and that I was sorry, too, for the time in the Land Rover in the rain, on the day of the crash, when I’d tried – in what now felt like a deeply sad and desperate way – to persuade her to have lunch with me, and that I’d always, always be a good friend and a good uncle for her, for the rest of her life… Though at the same time I also wanted not to have to say anything at all, and to have everything be just the same as it had always been between us, with no awkwardness or distance.

The trouble was that Emma would be there, too, and if Craig mentioned what had happened with Jo – I’d asked him not to say anything to Nikki or Emma, and especially not to mention Jo and Ed, but still – then it might get awkward, given the history I had with Emma. It was a very slim sliver of history, I kept on telling myself, but it was no less potentially lethal for my relationship with Craig for that.

I was in danger of losing one girlfriend, two best friends and – tomorrow – maybe my job, and liberty, all in one insane forty-eight-hour period.

Screw the nut, I thought. Batten down. Supper would have been nice, and I had such a bad hangover I’d probably not want to drink very much and so it would actually constitute quite a sensible, measured preparation for the big day tomorrow, but I decided to say no. Other plans.

‘Ken, hi.’

‘Amy, kid; how are you?’

‘Brilliant. You?’

‘Ah… kinda, you know.’

‘Darling, no, I don’t. What? Is there a problem?’

‘Jo and I are… over.’

‘Oh! I’m sorry to hear that. You seemed so close.’

‘Well,’ I said. Did we? I thought. I wouldn’t have said so, but then maybe that was just the sort of thing you said when somebody told you something like this. ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘It’s… it’s, ah, very finished with. Kind of saw it coming, but… hit me a little harder than I’d expected, must confess.’

‘Gosh. You poor thing.’

‘Yeah. Nearly two years.’

‘Really.’

‘Yeah. Feels like longer.’

‘Right.’

‘Felt quite a lot for her, I have to say.’

‘Well, of course.’

‘… All gone now.’

‘Oh dear.’

‘… Anyway.’

‘Hmm. Are you going to be all right?’

‘Amy… I’ll live.’

‘Oh, dear; you sound so sad!’

‘Ah, I’ll get over it. One day.’

‘Oh! Is there anything I can do?’

‘Well, I suppose…You could let me take you out to dinner. Tonight, even. How does that sound?’

‘That sounds like a totally bloody marvellous idea, Ken. I was at a bit of a loose end myself, actually.’

I looked at the mobile, thinking, Well, you might have got on-message a bit earlier there, woman.

‘Amy, for goodness’ sake. There are two lies here: one is that private management is automatically better than public-’

‘But it is! Have you ever dealt with a local authority, Ken? Those useless bloody people wouldn’t last two minutes in the real world!’

‘Neither did Railtrack once the government subsidy was whipped away.’

‘Ha! I bet they got their people from local government.’

‘Oh, don’t be… look. The other great lie is that private can be cheaper; it brings in extra money. But that’s bullshit! Just Treasury accounting rules. Infrastructure costs no matter who builds it. You have to invest in it, so invest as cheaply as possible; pay the least you can in interest payments. And that’s even before you factor in the profits a private investor expects, too; that comes on top. So, ask yourself: who or what can borrow money cheaper than any commercial concern? Answer: the state.’

‘I think you’ll find that depends on which state, actually, Ken.’

‘Okay, the British state can borrow money cheaper, for a smaller interest rate, than any commercial concern.’

‘Yes, because it doesn’t go wasting it on things the private sector can do better.’

‘Amy, that’s ridiculous!’

‘No, it isn’t. And what about risk?’

‘What risk? If it all goes wrong the poor bloody taxpayer ends up paying.’

‘There’s always a risk, Ken,’ Amy said, smiling thinly at me. ‘Life is full of risk.’

I sat back in my seat. We were in La Eateria, an achingly trendy new restaurant in Islington. Wooden garden furniture for tables and chairs, and walls lined with that perforated orange plastic stuff builders use to create instant fences. Menu pretentious, food barely adequate, staff surly. I was amazed it wasn’t busier. Still, it was a Sunday night.

Amy looked great, with her fine, now straight blond hair glowing in the light of what looked like car headlights dangling from the ceiling. She was dressed in black tights and skirt, and a clingy black long-sleeved top with a gold chain lying on the tanned skin revealed by a square, low neck.

So she looked superb and she’d dressed up – if she’d appeared in paint-speckled jeans and an unironed T-shirt I’d have known there was no way anything was going to happen – and yet, suddenly, for the first time in all the times we’d met to eat, she’d turned into Little Miss Capitalist Lobby Girl.

Until now all our lunch and dinner dates-that-were-not-really-dates had consisted of eating, drinking and flirting. Dammit; they’d been great fun! Certainly no arguments about fucking PFI and PPPs. I mean, I knew that the lobbying firm she worked for was involved in promoting that sort of crap, but, Jeez, she’d never started pushing it at me. I’d made one off-hand remark about Railtrack and the forthcoming attractions of Postrack and Tubetrack, and she’d jumped down my throat feet first.

‘You know what really gets me?’ I said, putting my fork down. I hadn’t eaten much of my main course. The chef here seemed obsessed with height and apparently chose his ingredients and cooking methods to ensure the maximum altitude and stability of the towers of material the kitchen created, with edibility and taste coming way down the list of priorities. Probably somewhere between the grid of soggy rosti and the layer of glue-like mustard mash acting as a hold-fast.

‘No, I don’t know what really gets you, Ken,’ Amy said, levering a forkful of her lamb and figs towards her mouth, ‘but I have the awful feeling you’re just dying to tell me.’

Dying to. Shit, I hadn’t even told her about the whole ‘Raine’ thing, my inadvertent trip to the East End, the threatening phone call and the slashed tyres on the Landy yet. I’d told Craig, Ed and Jo, and sworn them all to secrecy, but with Amy I’d been holding it in reserve for later in the evening. Now I was starting to think there was no point.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘What I want to know is, why put what is basically greed above the urge to serve? What’s wrong with wanting to help people? Isn’t that what politicians say they want to do? They say they just want to serve society, they tell us that’s why they became politicians in the first fucking place, so why don’t they side with the nurses and the teachers and the fire brigade and the police and all the other people who really do serve?’

‘They do side with the police, Kenneth.’

‘Oh, so they do. But what about everybody else? So are they lying about wanting to serve, and just want power, or have they just not made the connection yet?’

Amy sat back too, breathing deeply and flexing her shoulders. I tried to keep eye contact and appreciate her breasts by peripheral vision only, but it was almost an insult to them. On the other hand, maybe I should make the most of the view, because it looked like what I was seeing now was all I was ever going to see. Amy shook her head and said, ‘You really are quite naïve, aren’t you, Ken?’

‘Am I?’

‘Yes. You seem so clued-up and clever but really you just scratch the surface of everything, don’t you?’

‘If you say so, Amy.’

She looked at me for a bit. Her eyes were greeny-blue and her irises had that over-defined look you get with contacts sometimes. She was still breathing fairly deeply and I just let my gaze fall to her chest, which was pleasant in a regretful sort of way. ‘You’re just Sir Jamie’s little performing monkey, but you think you’re some sort of cool radical type, isn’t that right, Ken?’

I thought about this. ‘On a good day,’ I conceded. ‘With a following.’

‘I suppose you think you’re Mouth Corp’s conscience or something, don’t you?’

‘Oh, no. Jester, maybe; bladder, bit of string, that sort of thing, you know.’

Amy sat forward. ‘Think about this, Ken,’ she said. I sat forward too, eager to be given something to think about. ‘You let Sir Jamie get away with more,’ Amy told me. ‘By employing you and allowing you to do your little rants and letting you criticise bits of the Mouth Corp empire and the people and the organisations it gets into bed with, Sir Jamie can give the impression of being even-handed and fair and able to tolerate criticism. What’s actually going on is that the bad corporate stuff, which Mouth Corp does as much as anybody, gets a lot less publicity than it deserves, thanks to you.’ She sat back. So did I. But she wasn’t finished. ‘You cost the radio station the occasional ad placement and Mouth Corp loses the odd contract, but Sir Jamie gets his money’s worth out of you, Ken, don’t think he doesn’t. You’re part of the system, too. You help make it work. We all do. It’s just that some of us know it and some of us don’t.’

She dabbed at the corner of her mouth with her napkin.

I looked at her for a moment. Her eyes were bright. She was smiling. I thought about Ceel and wondered suddenly what the hell I was doing here. ‘So,’ I said, ‘do I get to fuck you or not?’

She laughed and leaned forward again, which was a good thing in itself. Voice lower this time. ‘Have you got any drugs, Ken? Any E? Or Charlie?’

It actually occurred to me to lie and say no. Can you believe that? ‘Not on me.’

‘Get some.’

‘Okay.’

So we did, but it wasn’t very good. The drugs or the sex.