Winter squeezed her arm. 'It's Valentine, isn't it?'
There was a long silence, then, from the harbour, three long blasts from an outbound ferry.
'Yes.' Misty's eyes were swimming. 'Trude belongs to Mike.'
'And that's why he never touched her.'
'Yes.'
'Because he knew?
'Because he thought he knew. We only did the test last week. Trude and I had had a set-to over Mike. She'd come in unexpected and caught us at it. In the end, there was no way I couldn't tell her. The test was her idea.'
'She's happy about it?'
'Over the fucking moon. Not just a mum and a dad but a mum and a dad who are still' she nodded towards the bedroom 'getting it on.'
'And Bazza?'
'Hasn't got a clue. Never had. You want to know how long I've been with Mike? Off and on?' She reached for the nearby box of tissues.
'Eighteen years.'
Trudy wanted to know why Jimmy Suttle wasn't drinking alcohol. The car in the nearby parking lot was a reasonable excuse but the rest of it made her laugh. Whoever played squash on a Friday night?
'Me, for starters.'
They were sitting in a busy waterside pub in Port Solent, a marina complex tucked into the north-east corner of Portsmouth Harbour. Trudy had taken a cab up from Gunwharf and was bitterly disappointed that their evening would go no further.
'What about afterwards?' she said again. 'I can watch you, go for a walk or something. Then we can go on some place. Like last night.'
'Can't do it, Trude.'
'You're meeting someone.'
'You're right. His name's Richard. I beat him last time so tonight we've got a tenner on it. We play. We go to the pub. We get pisssed.'
'I'll come, too.'
'You can't, love. It's a blokes' thing.'
'Oh yeah? So what does that make me? Some fucking slapper you shag when you're in the mood?'
'I never said that.'
'No, but that's what you think, ain't it? I had you down for someone half decent last night, I really did. That must make me fucking brain dead. How come you blokes are all the same?'
'We're not all the same. It's Friday night. We've had the game fixed all week. And that's all there is to it.'
'So where does that leave me?'
She stared at him a moment. Suttle leaned forward to kiss her but she turned her head away. Two lads at the next table exchanged grins.
'Listen, Trude '
'Fuck off. I hate you.'
'No, you don't.'
'I do. You come over all sincere, all nice, you get what you want and now look what happens.'
'Last night was your idea.'
'Oh yeah? Twist your arm did I? Or was that someone else fucking the arse off me?'
'Listen, maybe '
'Forget it.'
'What?'
'I said forget it.' Trudy was reaching down for her bag. She knew the cab number by heart. She began to stab the numbers in, then paused.
'You know what you're missing, don't you?'
'What?'
'I'm off next week. Going away.' She gave him a cold smile. 'Play your cards right, and we could have done it all night again.'
'When?'
'Tonight, dim lo Except squash with your little friend's more important. Maybe it's right what they say about the Filth. All fucking queens together. Still' she shrugged. 'see if I fucking care.'
Suttle reached across and snatched at the mobile.
'Tomorrow night,' he said. 'I promise.'
She looked at him, then laughed.
'Tomorrow night what?'
'Anything. Anything you like.'
She studied him a moment. 'Gunwharf? Forty Below? Somewhere nice afterwards?'
Forty Below was the happening nightclub. Kids Trude's age couldn't get enough of it. Neither could some of Bazza's chums.
Suttle gave the proposition a moment's thought, then nodded.
'Deal?' She grinned at him, retrieved the mobile, blew him a kiss, then started on the number again.
Faraday sat in the flickering darkness, understanding nothing. A woman in a burka was making some kind of journey. She needed to find her cousin in Kabul. En route across the parched landscape, she skirted a number of lives, stopped now and again for lengthy conversations, pondered the problems of contemporary Afghanistan. Kids were everywhere. Many of the men had lost limbs to land mines In a sequence that held Faraday spellbound, hundreds of Afghanis hopped madly across the desert as a tangle of prosthetic legs descended from the heavens on a parachute. It was a strange way, Faraday thought, to frame one of the world's undoubted tragedies crazy, surreal, funny but then he sank back into the puzzling chaos of his own life, and conceded that this young film- maker might have a point. Surreal was pretty close.
He awoke, some time later, to find the house lights on and Joyce bent over him.
'You OK, sheriff? Only I think they want us to go.'
Outside, it had started to rain. The film was showing at an art-house cinema in a marina development in Southampton. They'd driven across from Portsmouth, Faraday relieved to get out of the city. Beside his car he paused to fumble for his car keys. Joyce again, a hand on his arm this time. She nodded across the car park towards a distant restaurant. Rain had slicked the tousle of dark curls against her head.
'On me,' she said briefly.
'What do you think?' It was a sign that Eadie Sykes had come to know well. An outstretched hand, palm up, a tiny interrogative twist of the wrist.
She reached for the PC mouse over J-J's shoulder and took the sequence back to the start. A line of placards she recognised from last night's demo was swaying towards the camera. Late shoppers in the precinct were pausing to take a look. On the soundtrack, denied J-J, came the bellowed chant, lEsso, Mobil, BP, Shell, take your war and go to helW The head of the march broke like a wave around the camera, and as it did so, a slow mix dissolved the protesters into another scene. Eadie bent towards the screen, watching a crowd of Arabs gathered around the back of an ambulance. It was night-time. In the background, beyond the chaos of the street, a building appeared to be on fire.
Paramedics, desperate men fighting their way through the crowd, wrestled a small body into the back of the ambulance.
Then, without warning, the camera was panning across a bare, tiled interior. Dozens of men and women lay on the floor, jigsawed haphazardly together. One or two were unconscious. The rest gazed numbly into the middle distance, or stared up at the camera, uncomprehending. There was blood everywhere, open wounds, makeshift bandages, the stooping presence of a nurse with a bottle of fluid in one hand and an iv line in the other. Then came a stir of movement in a far corner, and the camera tilted up and probed the gloom, hunting for another image.
A young baby lay sprawled on its mother's bloodsoaked lap. As she became aware of the presence of the
